The Seven Types of Social Roles in Employee Communities

An employee community is a closed community within the firewall of the Organization 2.0 - where employees connect and build content along with each other to build relationships and knowledge.

At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. One of the key parts of the framework is the 7 types of social roles are lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.

Let's try and put together an understanding on what these roles can be in employee communities:

1. The Lurker is a new employee or a late adopter who arrives at the employee community as someone who has heard good things about it - but is uncertain about what to do. Lurkers may be held back due to either being intensely private people or being technophobes. A lurker needs to be coached by the community manager and exposed to content that evokes a response from him.
2. A Learner is a person on the community who is interested - but often finds it over-whelming to navigate the conversatoins or to jump into conversations. Learners need to be directed to "how to start" documents and supported when they start making small but significant contributions.
3. The Connector is a person on the community who is a curator of information either through bookmarking or off-line knowledge gathering. They add great value to networks by answering individual's questions with responses like "here's where you can find this information..." or "here's Vivek who has done stuff like this earlier, maybe you should ask him..." The connector uses people and document tags actively to curate content and point others to it.
4. The Moderator is usually a role given to the most passionate people in the community, and their roles can encompass guiding a new user to jump into discussions when they are getting into ad-hominem attacks to discontinuing or archiving inactive sections of the community. The moderator can have some subtle recognition systems in their control to make people into role models - to trigger more desired behaviors.
5. The Organizer is a critical role in the employee community - triggering occasions - both online as well as offline for the community members to connect with each other and discover common shared interests, lifestyles and passions.
6. The Teacher is the fulcrum of the community - the person who creates content and engages with the users/curators and commentators to create better content. Typically they are unafraid of putting their thoughts out in to open and having the community connect and comment around it. They're mostly looking for the content to be improved by the community and create more.
7. The Super-User is someone who plays multiple roles in the community - and is typically mostly a Connector, Moderator, Organizer and Teacher who takes on the other roles.

If you're interested in building employee communities - do you have people internally who would be natural fits and assume these roles? As we say, buying a software license for making basic to complicated employee communities using tools like SocialText, Yammer, SocialCast, Salesforce, Lotus Connections et al is the easy part - but being the lone warrior for "corporate social networking" is the surest way to failure

Cross Posted at the 2020 Social Blog

Handing Denial

HBS Working Knowledge has an interesting conversation with Richard S. Tedlow who has written a new book, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face-and What to Do About It.

As he says:

Sigmund Freud referred to denial as a combination of "knowing with not knowing," a phrase that has been defined as a "state of rational apprehension that does not result in appropriate action." In her brilliant study of the disastrous decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, sociologist Diane Vaughan used a similar phrase, "seeing but not seeing."

It is often middle managers who are best acquainted with new realities. As Andy Grove has noted, these are the people who are out on the front lines while top management is ensconced at the home office, cushioned from the daily reality of the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace. "Snow," he wrote in Only the Paranoid Survive, "melts first at the periphery." Problems, in other words, appear initially at the borders.

Unfortunately, when middle managers actually raise these problems—especially those that contradict the firm's prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom—they are often ignored, or worse. Henry Ford, for example, fired the executive who dared "speak truth to power" about Ford's Model T myopia—and this man, Ernest Kanzler, was his relative! (He was the brother-in-law of Ford's only child, Edsel.)

You don't necessarily need an outsider to provide an outside perspective, however. Occasionally a creative, clear-headed insider can break free of both his company's and his own preconceptions by adopting a novel point of view.

This was demonstrated by Andy Grove in 1985, when he and his boss, Gordon Moore, were fighting what appeared to be a losing battle against an impossible business dilemma. In the midst of their aimless wandering, Grove asked Moore, "If the board kicked us out and brought in new management, what do you think they would do?" Suddenly the answer to Intel's dilemma became clear to both men. Grove's deceptively simple question stripped the blinders of denial from their eyes.

The A&P was not destroyed by fire. It rusted. This is the same process, but less dramatic, slower, and therefore easier to deny. "This is the way the world ends," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Hollow Men." "Not with a bang but a whimper."

Lesson for Organizational leaders? It's not enough to invest in the KM and IT systems or even analytics. People who have invested energies in the past must be "ruthlessly realistic" and listen to different opinions from middle managers/ outsiders and act on the data.

Read the full interview here

Two Indians being on the Forbes list

There are two Indians in the top 5 ranks of the Forbes list of Billionaires in the world. They are Mukesh Ambani and Lakshmi Mittal. Many of us in India, including the media, react to such news with nationalistic fervor.

"Oh, this is a signal to the world that we are no longer a developing nation. We are rich. See how two of us are on the richest list" goes the thought.

Let us go through the list in detail. In the top 25, ten of them are from the US. The richest man on the planet however is Carlos Slim, the cement magnate from Mexico. Apart from Europe and Hong Kong, countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia also find representation on the list.

Taking a look at the methodology, Forbes clarifies:

"Included in our tally are stakes in publicly traded and privately held companies, real estate, paintings, gems, yachts and planes, plus hoards of cash. Privately held companies are valued by coupling estimates of revenues or profits to valuation metrics for similar public companies. We look hard for debt but are not able to find all of it. "

Even looking at the two Indians on the list, Mukesh Ambani is the only one who is "really Indian" having helped build his father's empire and then inheriting and increasing its value. Lakshmi Nivas Mittal primarily grew his fortune in Europe and around the world and stays in London – retaining his Indian passport.

If anything the wealth of Mukesh Ambani is testimony to the growth of the core industries of petrochemicals, oil and gas. It also signals the growth of the Indian stock market – and the middle class Indians who invest in the stock market. However, to think of it as a signal of the larger growth of the Indian population would be grossly incorrect! The Indian economy is growing, but we still are a developing country and the Human Development Index figures are a far better source of India's place in this world than the number of billionaires we have on the Forbes list.

Culture's Impact on Technology

As an Organizational Behavior person, I believe that Culture trumps strategy. And of course, can derail tactics and events that go against the grain of the culture within no time.

Today, I was talking to a CEO of a professional services firm who was sharing how he had tried to champion a micro-blogging tool within his firm to share information across locations and silos and how the fact they were a hierarchical organization probably killed the tool's effectiveness.

Yes, technology, even when championed by the CEO can fail if it runs into culture.

Think of culture like the running river, and any initiative like a rock. The rock seems strong. With executive sponsorship, resources, and sometimes external consulting. Eventually the river wins. Not by strength but by persistence.

So this post by Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe) on the Enterprise Irregulars blog was quite interesting.

From 2004 on, people seized control of how they communicated 24/7. What devices they used, what tools they used, what channels they used, when they communicated, what they expected as a result of that communication, what kind of response they got, all shifted into the hands of the individual. In the world of business, communications about a company no longer needed some company venue to occur. For a communication or array of communications to affect a company, it didn’t have to occur with the company’s acquiescence. Even more telling, it could occur without the company’s knowledge. This meant that the company no longer controlled its own destiny in regard to its customers, though it, of course, continued to control its own operations. (the fact that the company still needs to run itself is one of the things at the core of the difference between Social CRM and almost anything else with the word “social” in it) The conversation passed into the hands of the customers – meaning they could damage, grow. or affect somewhere in between, a company without the company having much to say about it.

Culture can be grown - enabled - in the direction which employees want to take it.

The question is - will leaders' give up the control?

Employee Engagement Should Not be Your End Goal

Ok, I know I am going to face a lot of flak for this, but I am going to blurt it out anyway.

HR people who think their holy grail is increasing their employee engagement score are sorely mistaken.

Employee engagement is important, no doubt. However what it does is create energy for discretionary effort by the employees for the organization. What then? How should HR people leverage that enormous source of discretionary energy towards the really important things?

Unfortunately, not too many people think about that. Not HR people. Not business heads. In my opinion they all aim low.

As I have been exploring how people interact on social media - and engage with each other (something that you would find if you go through our presentations here) people are engaged by larger purposes - and you need to hire them towards a cause and then work towards that larger cause. Causes give purpose and meaning. Not everybody will identify with it - but those that do, will added more of their self and be more passionate.

So that brings us back to the question what should be your goal?

As HR people I believe that that our goal should be to guide people's development so that skills, mindsets evolve to keep organizational capability growing.

That means that engaged employees should be aware of and know which direction the firm is headed and make connections (with guidance, mentoring and support) to chart their own future development needs and make that aspired state a reality.

This does not mean an HR function that centralises and owns every person's development goals and tracking it on a Learning Management System. What I am looking at is that HR should create conditions so that from engagement people can move on their own towards their development.

Decentralised.

Think emergence.

Ideas? Doubts? Disagreements? Leave a comment below :)

Dr. Udai Pareek passes away

Dr. Udai Pareek, arguably the person who was the flag bearer of modern HR in India, and thought leader in the Organizational Behavior and Learning areas passed away.

I had first met him in 1997 when we had organized the first National HR Conference in XLRI.

Later I also attended an MDP which he co-facilitated on "Consulting Skills for OD Practitioners"

Earlier blog posts on Dr. Pareek are here here, his anecdote on happiness and jobs, and this was where I discovered his blog.

This book which Dr. Pareek co-authored with Rolf Lynton is a must read for all people in people development roles in organization. And this one is a must for all OD consultants and Trainers.

Thanks for being the lighthouse and guiding HR in India, Dr. Pareek.

May you rest in peace.

Workshops on Social Media for Organizations

My colleague Gaurav Mishra is doing a workshop for NASSCOM Foundation on how non-profits can utilize social media. As he details in his blog - the workshop would have the following sessions :

10:00 – 11:00 Introduction to social media for non-profits
11:00 -11:30 Tea/ coffee break
11:30 – 12:30 Strategy, tactics, measurement
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch
1:30 – 2:30 Social media tools
2:30 – 3:00 Tea/ coffee break
3:00 – 4:00 Tying it together, using social media for raising awareness, fundraising and driving advocacy

In the workshop, I’ll build upon these simple three steps and help the attendees build a step-by-step guide to igniting and scaling the passion of their supporters in their chosen domain.

If you are a non-profits, register for the workshop or ask for more information at +91 11 40755722/23/24/32 or komal@nasscomfoundation.org.

What we realize is that even corporations are looking at workshops on how businesses can leverage social media. So here's a draft workshop design that would focus on educating CXOs on how to leverage the social tools and technologies.

Take a look at our thoughts on Decoding Social

2020 Social Decoding Social Workshop March 2010

View more presentations from 2020 Social.

Workshop 1: Workshop for CXO’s


A. Social Media Basics (60 minutes)


1. What are Social Media and Social Technologies?

• Various forms and functionalities of Social technologies
• How ‘Social’ as a behavior is leveraged by these social technologies

2. Why is Social Media becoming so important?

• Impact of Social Media on people
• Impact of Social Media on society
• Impact of Social Media on Media
• Impact of Social Media on Businesses

B. Social Media for Business (60 Minutes)


1. Why do businesses need to become social?

• Connecting business needs to social business strategy solutions
• Social Media scope and benefits for B2C businesses
• Social Media scope and benefits for B2B businesses

2. How have other businesses become social?


Best Social Media practices and case studies
i. Business to Consumer businesses
ii. Business to Business businesses
iii. Enterprise collaboration


C. Social Media for CXOs (90 Minutes)


a. Why CXOs need to understand Social Media?


i. Underlying strategic dynamics CXOs need to know
ii. Linkage with business objectives


b. How can CXOs champion Social Media?


i. Governance implications
ii. Cross-department implications
iii. Cross-stakeholder implications


D. Social Media for [specific] businesses (90 Minutes)

• How can your business leverage social media?
• Best practices and case studies
• Opportunity for your company/business unit/group
•  How can a B2C businesses leverage social media?
• Best practices and case studies
• Opportunity for specific business
• How can B2B businesses leverage social media?
• Best practices and case studies
• Opportunity for specific groups

Workshop 2: Workshop for Marketing, Brand, HR Managers


A. Understanding social media (60 Minutes)

• 1. What are Social Media and Social Technologies?
• Various forms and functionalities of Social technologies
• How ‘Social’ as a behavior is leveraged by these social technologies
• 2. Why is Social Media becoming so important?
• Impact of Social Media on people
• Impact of Social Media on society
• Impact of Social Media on Media
• Impact of Social Media on Businesses

B. Understanding social media for businesses (90 Minutes)

• Establishing a presence on social web

• Social Media channels
• Why should the brand participate?

• Scope and benefits of Social Media

• Business objectives that can be achieved
• Best practices and case studies for B2C businesses
• Best practices and case studies for B2B businesses
• Best practices and case studies of internal collaboration and employee community

Scope for Specific Business

• Best practices in businesses related to organization/ group
• Role for marketing managers
• Role for HR managers

C. Social Media for marketing (90 Minutes)

• How should a brand market itself on social web:
• Understanding consumer behavior; the 5 Cs of social media

• Consumer Generated content
• Conversations
• Collaboration
• Community
• Collective intelligence

• Choosing the right behavior and the right channel

2. Social Media monitoring


D. Leveraging social media in your business (60 Minutes)

• Building a social media plan for Business
• Building Communities (of Employees, Customers, Partners)

Do share your thoughts on what else do you think a workshop like this should contain...

HR, Recruiting and Social Media

A friend asked me some questions on doing Recruiting through Social Media. Here's what I answered:

1. What is the web2.0 (pl explain in the simplest terms!) and which of these can be used by the Staffing team of the company?

Web2.0 is the collective name for a lot of technologies by which people can interact with other people (and organizations) on the web, publicly and in a transparent manner. It can include forums, blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, orkut etc.

We believe that Social technologies help people connect around some Core Dynamics - Content Generation, Conversations, Collaborating together, Community Formation and Collective Intelligence. Different functionalities enable users to connect differently

2. How widespread is the use of the web2.0 for finding top talent ? (can you give examples of companies who are doing this?) For instance, are there companies who are using Twitter to keep in touch with the campus crowd?)

The first question the recruiter needs to answer is - who is my top talent and what is he/she interested in? Primarily there are interested in the content and knowledge component of the job. Followed by organizational culture and the mechanics of the job. The recruiting firm needs to reach out to the community where top talent is likely to be present and present the above - by way of blog posts, youtube videos, pictures and discussion forums.

An example of a recruiter using Twitter is Christa Foley [@electra] of Zappos.com. She gives followers an inside look into her career at Zappos. She tweets out examples of negative recruiting interactions with potential clients, outreach she does with high school and college students, and ultimately looks for potential Zappos candidates.

A different example From HBR Blogs on how Best Buy tweeted an opening and then changed it based on feedback from the community:

Consider what happened at Best Buy when they posted a job description for a position as Senior er of Emerging Media Marketing. The qualifications included one year of active blogging experience, a preferred graduate degree, and 250+ followers on Twitter. Yes that's right: the number of followers you have on Twitter is now finding its way into a job description. This led to internal commentary, and spawned a number of blog posts and dozens of re-tweets and conversations.

What happened next is an indication of the future direction of recruiting: in listening to these conversations, Best Buy decided that the community had other ideas — and good ones — for how this job description should look, and what the qualifications should be. As a result, the job description was crowdsourced, and anyone with an interest was invited to post qualifications to the job role on Idea X, a forum for Best Buy customers and employees. The final job description spoke to the traits of the social media revolution we are all experiencing: humor, collaboration and authenticity.

3. What are the simple ways for companies to start using the web2.0 to connect with top talent?

Here's some things that EMC has done using social media
External employment branding - encourages bloggers to act as organic brand ambassadors
EMC Careers on YouTube - Twitter - Facebook - Wordpress - LinkedIn
Help Save Nick Glasgow – a social media campaign to save an employee suffering from cancer

Microsoft has Microspotting - An HR and recruitment focused community platform

-Twitter becomes a great medium to share news and information with people who choose to follow you – and making it relevant for their use. On a different note advertising using Google Adwords is a great way for reaching out to people interested.

- Making a Facebook page and Orkut community are other tools that businesses can do to engage talented candidates in conversation.

My view is that someone in the Marketing/Recruiting function needs to take a “Talent Community Manager” role to drive these initiatives – and to get others internally in the organization to get engaged with the candidate community. This community manager needs to have a mindset of open and honest collaboration and organizations must be clear about what objectives they expect from her/him and therefore what metrics to track to check his/her performance.

Social Media can be used as a channel to keeping candidates enagegd between the time they are handed the offer letters to the time they are on-boarded.

I think soon companies will collate all these efforts into a community that they will own - and which will have representation on social networks and blogs.

Why Businesses should embrace Communities by Luis Suarez

Luis (@elsua) recently left a comment on my blog post Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities - and I think it deserves to be given prominence as a blog post on its own :-)

I will surely be blogging plenty more about it on my blog, when things quiet down a bit after this week's business trip, but just wanted to venture a couple of thoughts on the relevance of this blog post:

- Communities are the major drivers of social software adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall, so every single social computing strategy should always be accompanied by a community building program to get the most out of it all.
- Communities have been there in existence for millions of years, and in the business world for several decades and if there is anything they have help companies with all along is talent retention and reduction of attrition rates. It's that sense of belonging, of ownership, of connecting with fellow peers that helps communities become so important and crucial in today's world and as such
- Social software tools are tremendously relevant in this context, because they help those relationships to flourish and nurture themselves much easier, faster and more meaningful than with traditional tools like email. If there is anything out there that social software is good for is social capital, and that's at the heart of what makes communities healthy and mature at the same time: that people have an opportunity to help build and sustain personal business relationships through those communities.

But like I said, I will be blogging more about this in its due time; perhaps some time next week, when I get back to the normal swing of things … Thanks again for the lovely blog post! Great read!

We'll be looking forward to more of Luis' thoughts on how businesses can leverage communities - to connect with current and future employees and also with customers, prospects and partners.

Personal Branding Using Social Media

What is a brand? The word actually came from using branding irons to detect ownership of cattle. Over time it came to signify the differences in quality between products of different manufacturers.

What does a personal brand mean? It certainly does not mean "personal" in the normal sense of the word. Normally brand is used in the context of organizations and products. Personal brand refers to the characteristics of a brand but focused on an individual.

Reputation was earlier a field with high-entry barriers. You had to slog over a long number of years to get to be known by a sufficient number of people to be recognized as an 'expert'. You still have to slog today - but the reach of the social technologies has amplified to a huge extent and crunched the time and entry barrier. However, one needs to be careful as these these tools can be double edged swords - and handled stupidly can amplify things you would rather hide.

Why should one bother with one's personal brand ? If you're a student or a professional, the digital footprints you leave would impact your career prospects in the future. What the web in general does is makes time irrelevant. Your actions six years ago and your views today are both visible at the click of a search engine.

So here are some tools and how you can leverage them to showcase your expertise

1. Blogging. It is my belief that if you have a skill that can be displayed – blogging is the best way to make it visual. You can articulates your thoughts in text, upload videos and pictures and have them crawled and indexed by search engines so that whenever someone searches for it , your blog turns up first. You can set up a blog in minutes on free sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com. If you want to make it a little more professional get a domain name, and hosting space and run your own blog there.
   
2. Social Networks: Many prospective recruiters and business partners might try to judge your online presence on social networks like Orkut and Facebook. If you have stuff posted there which is not fit for general consumption I suggest you check your privacy settings.
   
3. Business Networks. Led by Linkedin.com business networking sites are usually the first place people check for your name. The fact is that they also rank high on Google searches for names. So keep the information upto date. Get colleagues, ex-colleagues, business partners to recommend you. Also get a personalized URL. And update your ppts, pdfs and blog posts on the profile using Linkedin Apps.
   
4. Twitter. While it has been lately in the news for Bollywood celebrities using it – it can also help anyone in building connections and being a great channel to build your personal brand. The key is to follow relevant people in your function/industry and converse with them. Twitter is versatile as you can easily update it using a mobile phone.
   

Remember, the focus should never be on "selling" but on "sharing" information, expertise and advice with others. To paraphrase an old proverb – The best time for building a brand was some years ago. The second best time is today.

Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities

Over at the 2020 Social Blog we've been thinking hard about the various ways in which organizations can leverage different kinds of social tools and technologies to connect and build conversations.

One of the ways we've started to articulate it over the last few weeks is focusing on use cases.

So thinking about what organizations could do to build talent communities and employee communities we came up with this presentation

2020 Social Decoding Employee Communities Mar 2010

View more presentations from 2020 Social.

Today, I try and extend this framework to look at the various ways organizations and people communicate.


So if you look at the diagram above , communication can be from few to many, few to few, many to few and between many to many.

So the implications for Talent and Employee Communities are quite different

Take a look at the use cases given below

These can also be represented in the Employee Life Cycle - where an Alumni community also comes to the fore

What examples do you have to share on how your organization has utilized social technologies for cultivating Talent and Employee Communities?

The top 100 Influencers in HR by John Sumser

When I started blogging, I found out about John Sumser from the folks in the American Recruiting blogosphere. John was one of the voices that buyers of Recruiting and HR services listened to before they decided what tools to buy and deploy.

So I was kicked in 2005 when John chose out my blog for praise.

John is now on an ambitious venture, chronicling and understanding the 100 influencers in the HR domain. And I was again stunned and flattered when he said he wanted to profile me in the list :-)

So we had a conversation on HR and India and US - and John quizzed me about my career and where I am headed.

So here's John's article on me at the top 100 Influencers site.

As for me, I'll believe I am influential when traffic in Delhi stops to let me pass ;)

Connecting with you

Hi, you there :-)

You  - the person who reads and sometimes agrees, and sometimes disagrees. I want to hear from you.

Leave a comment. Just to say "Hi" :-) Either on this blog post or on Facebook. Or on Twitter. Or on Google Buzz. Or connect with me on Linkedin. Or mail me.

In addition to the "Hi" you could tell me what you like/dislike in this blog - I would love to hear from you.

How can HR Use Social Media

Our updated thoughts here

How Can HR use and leverage Social Media

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

Thoughts? Doubts? Questions?