Two Personal Branding Websites

You know, there's something called Synchronicity :-) In a span of about 48 hours I got approached by two websites - Brand Yourself and FirstDialog which are web apps that are meant to help you manage your brand

The email from FirstDialog stated:

FirstDialog is a Web 2.0 online personal branding and social recruitment platform that helps professionals and jobseekers create a memorable personal brand.
With FirstDialog, professionals and jobseekers can create an interactive, web based, multimedia rich resume with quantifiable and trusted information. FirstDialog will help jobseekers elevate their resume to a whole new level with the use of interactive multimedia, secure document showcase, verified credentials, smart follow-up, skill assessment and certification, professional networking, social sharing and more.

The big issue they need to work on is building the resume. Filling out a online wizard to build a resume online is a bit of pain for me. They did tell me that they are in talks with certain business networking platforms which would enable one to import an already ready profile from somewhere else. Hope that comes across soon.

One then connects with people like on Linkedin. However unlike Linkedin FD is focused on social recruitment - and lists jobs via indeed.com (which is US centric so far) on your dashboard.

This is how one's profile looks on FirstDialog

The Dashboard shows you jobs posted via your network (which you invite)

All in all it's an interesting website - however let's see if people are upto joining yet another networking website. If you want to give it a spin here's a code to check out the Alpha version - GG11FD

Brand-Yourself takes a different turn on personal branding. Knowing that Google, Twitter, Linkedin and other social networks can build your online brand, it makes it easy to build a website, take you through building a Linkedin site, Twitter id, and steps to make it visible and public.


The most interesting thing for me was organizing the Google results (see below) to say which is about you and which is not about you. It made me discover some old forgotten links like my Amazon reviews :)

For people who don't have a website - Brand-Yourself also enables you to open a site (using wordpress!) like this one. There is also step by step explanation on how to use free PR newswire sites to build your brand.

I loved BY's take on personal branding

It's about people connecting with people

It's not primarily about the software, says Luis and I totally agree with him. Enterprise 2.0 advocates should first look at how to connect with people's passion.

When people connect with others - and discover things they have in common, and converse about it - magical things happen.

Organizational researchers know that when people discover shared interests and passions with colleagues and co-workers they build bonds that are much more than what hierarchical organization systems build.

Clay Shirky says in "Here Comes Every Body" that when technology becomes ubiquitous that is when real social changes will start to happen.

We are still in the beginning of the this change... and while we are thinking about what such technologies will do - the reality of Organizations 2.0 will emerge only when such tools have become ubiquitous.

Trends Impacting Work Success

In this post I want to showcase two trends I see impacting how people work

Changing Nature of Role Models

Earlier the examples of success that were celebrated were the usual suspects, business leaders and political figures – however there is a growing realization by the popular media that successful people are from all spheres – and working not just for money or fame but other factors too – acts as a great motivator to people who are looking at different careers.
First of all they act as trigger for entrepreneurial ambitions, about how middle class salaried individuals can actually get ahead by creating their own enterprises. For example the Infosys and Mindtree founders have been an inspiration for lots of software engineers (and even others) to try and be the masters of their own destiny.
The examples of other people like SKS Microfinance founder Vikram Akula being featured in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world , or the example of Janaagraha co-founder Ramesh Ramanathan who left an MNC career to help co-found an institution that encourages citizenship has also triggered professionals to look at other careers.

Changing Support Systems

With the rise of virtual communities (social networks) – and the ability to find a group of enthusiasts about any obscure interest – people find appreciation and feedback and mentors across the world. Continuing the photography example – communities on Flickr – the photosharing site have helped the aforementioned amateur photographer to learn from better people and also to discover similar enthusiasts in their own locations.
Writing used to be a lonely activity – however a recent public novel writing contest on the microblogging site Twitter helped established and aspiring writers be motivated enough to be focused on completing their novels – with an explicit goal of getting it published soon.
Such support systems and the approval they provide are often more real than the perceived lack of enthusiasm of immediate family and friends who really can not understand the context of why someone is excited by photography or writing a novel and not their regular job.

What are the other big trends you see changing how people look at work?

Technorati Tags: work, future, role models, virtual communities

4% increase in Hiring in India in Jan, says Naukri

Interesting data shared by Naukri about increase in hiring level in India.

• Hiring in Mumbai at an all time high: The index for Mumbai at 748 in Jan '10 is noted as the highest index for the city in the last one year
• Uptrend witnessed in all sectors: Hiring activity increased across most sectors in Jan '10 after the holiday season lull in Dec '09
• Good news for IT and Sales professionals: Professionals in IT, BPO, Sales and Accounts saw increased demand, while the demand for professionals in production and maintenance retracted

 You can download the pdf report here

Interested to work with @2020Social ?

If you're interested in a cutting edge career advising clients on how to leverage social technologies and communities for business growth, then we at 2020 Social (website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter) are looking for Consultants and Interns.

Here's more about the openings

Consultant (1): Location- Ideally Mumbai, but also Delhi or Bangalore

Role: Develop the digital marketing strategy and define the business case for social applications and community platforms for consumer and media clients. Establish thought leadership in the domain of how Indian consumers engage with web, mobile and social technologies through blog posts, white papers and conference talks. Set up the Mumbai office for 2020 Social and establish and grow client relationships. Over a one year horizon, manage a team of 5-6 Associate Consultants and Analysts.

Skills: Consumer marketing, digital marketing, business consulting, business development.

Background: MBA from IIM or equivalent with 4-6 years of experience.

Reporting to: Gaurav

Consultant (1): Location: Ideally Delhi or Bangalore, but also Mumbai

Role: Define the functional requirements for social applications and community platforms for clients. Work with internal account managers/ project managers and external design firms/ development firms to ensure that projects are delivered in cost and on time. Simultaneously, find opportunities to productize these social applications and community platforms as proprietary white label solutions that can be re-used across multiple clients. Over a one year horizon, manage a team of 5-6 Associate Consultants, Analysts and Designers.

Skills: User experience design, product management, project management, familiarity with Drupal and Facebook/ LinkedIn/ Twitter/ OpenSocial APIs.

Background: IIT/ NID or equivalent with 6-8 years of experience.

Reporting to: Gaurav

To apply go to this site.

India's National HRD Network Goes Social

Yeah, the US body of HR professionals, SHRM is quite active on Social Media, led by China Gorman Tweeting a lot.

The UK's CIPD is also quite active on Twitter, and also hosts online communities.

So here's a hurrah for our desi National HRD Network which after its blogging initiative is now Tweeting too, and thankfully is quite conversational !

So with HR professional bodies going social, what is the excuse that HR practitioners have to keep away from becoming savvy regarding social media?

Start with connecting with more than 1000 other HR professionals here :) Or follow these 53 HR professionals I follow on Twitter

If you're a HR professional and have leveraged social media for your business objectives I'd like to hear your story, and maybe feature it here.

The Perfessional Employee Blog

Peter Kim at the Dachis Group blogs about something that every knowledge-based business is going to struggle with some time or the other.

Writing about Forrester's new blogging policies for their Analysts Peter talks about how blogging benefits both employers and employees brand themselves - and calls it "perfessional" - a mix of personal and professional. So this blog would be a "perfessional blog" as per him.

As he says:

Professionally-affiliated, personally-managed blogs – let’s call them “perfessional” – provide an additional engagement channel for employees to support business goals, on consumer-friendly terms. Social media policies must provide flexibility from an employee perspective that permit perfessional engagement – otherwise, companies risk missing a business opportunity. Here’s where Forrester’s decision appears to fall flat: in its quest for control of employee social media publishing, the company limits both risk AND reward.

As I blogged earlier, organizations are used to controlling the message they send out about themselves - and social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook) threatens that structure.

Soon, more and more people will start to express themselves on social (and also on business networks, like Linkedin). Unfortunately I think a lot of organizations will behave like Forrester, letting go the reward with the risk.

Progressive HR leaders should educate business leaders and organizations on the opportunities that social media offers their organizations. It's time to leverage the power of your people!

Designing Training for Organization 2.0

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb's Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist - Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What's new? I'm game for anything. Training approach - Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector - Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I'd like time to think about this. Training approach - Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist - Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach - Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist - Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach - Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

It is our belief at 2020 Social that social technologies can provide each employee with their learning content that suits their overall approach and help in better retention of learning. Hence the proposed solution will have elements that cater to all the above.

Part 1: Consists of static content that would help people to discover the “must know” aspects of what is to be learned

Basic Content focused on the Subject Matter that every new Executive/Manager would go through when they join the organization. It would cover the following

1. Basics of the subject expertise – Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge
2. Additional Reading Material – Documents that people can download
3. List of Resources – Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at one point.
4. List of People (yellow pages) – employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to contact them (email, Skype, IM)
   
5. FAQs – A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know
6. Best Practices – e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above can be edited by certain key people. Other employees can add comments below the content.
Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey tool – acting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt

Part 2: Dynamic Learning

What’s new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firm's products/services/ operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence

This would consist of a stream of constantly dynamic news and market/competitor intelligence that would get updated on an employee’s dashboard that he/she can click through and view the detailed content if he/she wants.Personalised Dashboard for each Employee which can be customized to follow information and news relevant for his/her own needs

1. RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market name.
2. RSS feeds of thought leaders' blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the employee’s desktop
3. Twitter updates of the who’s who of subject matter so that employees can track and even interact with them. Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/
4. Competitive Intelligence – A dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific regions.
5. New videos and Slideshows – Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like “Financial marketing” or "Consumer Behavior" or "HR Trends") would be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

Part 3: Collaboration

Enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with each other.

This part would focus on how employees can use social software to connect with each other and work together to create strategies, tactics, execution. This would consist of the following parts:

1. Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, product on initiatives
2. Status updates – would let other people know what the employee is working on so that if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.
3. Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and what worked and best practices learnt from them
4. Sharing project plans for campaigns and getting peers’ feedback on them.
5. Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants – which are archived – and after some time some which are basic can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part.
6. Discussion around events like conferences, trainings that some employees go to – can share learnings, videos, slides with the rest of the peer group – resulting in richer and more learning

Employees' Participation in the Organization 2.0

I can see whatever the issues that were there during Knowledge Management also getting repeated when it comes to sharing and collaboration in the Hyper-Linked Organization aka Enterprise 2.0

During the turn of the century - when KM - and the dream to let employees share what they know - was directed , the KM advocates (like me!) suggested that knowledge sharing should be given rewards. The thought was that if a person does not see a benefit for himself why would he share his knowledge with the behavior.

I have changed my belief - in part due to analysing my own behaviour on the social web.

Behaviours like sharing and collaboration are Organizational Citizenship Behaviors - and are a product of Employee's Engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one's work behavior - and needs to be rewarded not monetarily - but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay.

Highly engaged employees who would indulge in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors follows the Power Law - much like social networks' law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.

So what are the ways that such employees can be recognized?

1. Public Acknowledgement - A leaderboard style table of key frequent contributors is a dynamic public assertion of who is helping and creating content
2. Social Voting and Curation - Like the rating system it shows the people whose content has been deemed most useful by the users.
3. Collaboration - When a person shares content about a certain domain area it reveals his/her interest in that area. Involvement of the person in that domain would be a dream.

What are the other ways in which such contributors can be recognized?

Recovering from an Eye Surgery

In case you were wondering what's happening on this blog, here's the update if you're not connected on Twitter or on Facebook

I was diagnosed last week with a Retinal Detachment in my left eye- no idea how it happened - and had to undergo a surgery the very next day (last Wednesday) for Scleral Buckling of the retinal wall.

The doctor tells me that it will take 10-15 days for my vision to return to any sense of normalcy

Learning for the whole thing: Don't take anything for granted - specially your health... take care of yourself - you never know what can happen.

Hopefully the regular blogging will resume shortly.