Infographic - the story of Monster.com

Interesting graphic via  PCRecruiter




Infographic by PC Recruiter – Original

Social CEOs will be critical for organizational success

Interesting research by IBM via Forbes:

CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore. The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies. That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.

• Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization. 
•  More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration. 

Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organization’s strategy. There is a lot at stake here. And if CEOs continue to hide in their Ivory Towers under the guise of some old command and control mentality, the next chapter in their career might be written somewhere else.

Related articles

• Study Shows Social Media Slowly Replacing Face-to-Face Customer Interaction

  ---

• ASTD Study Shows Social Media has High Value for Learning and Development

  ---

• Why Social Learning Benefits Your Business

  ---

• Six@Six: Tips for Creating an Organizational Social Media Policy

  ---

In the age of Pull what's your Gravitational Quotient?

Gravitational field lines and equipotentials (red) around the Earth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is shifting. It is shifting slowly in some areas and disconcertingly fast in other areas. Information which used to get pushed is now being rejected. We have stopped paying attention to messages that interrupt us.

And yet, as people, managers, organizations we still need to communicate, to facilitate, to drive change. I have touched upon storytelling in the past as the vehicle. However, how do you get someone to even listen to your story, much before they even pay attention to you?

John Seely Brown and John Hagel have talked about The Power of Pull to make sense of much of today's world and how this shift is happening.

My hypothesis is to generate the power of pull, we've got to grow our own Gravitational field, or as I choose to call it - our Gravitational Quotient.

How does one build a Gravitational Quotient that pulls relevant information and people to reach out?

Read. Choose. Curate. Publish. Repeat.

Choose a space in which you want to create your gravity. Read content about it. Follow experts about it. Choose the best content and share it. Write your own take on it. Discover new fields that are developing at the edge of this area. Go there before the mainstream practitioners notice it. Find hybrid spaces, where spaces overlap and explore them.

You know your Gravitational Quotient is working when you start attracting like minded people who also start sharing relevant content with you and you move from content, to conversations to discovering a community. Relevance and context determine whether you attract the right kind of content or not, as automatic tools (like this and this) start tracking your pull and labeling it as "influence"

Interviewed by @Forbes' @shelisrael for a profile as a #SocialMedia Thought Leader

Image via CrunchBase

I know Shel from the time he started his blog to crowdsource his book on business blogging that he wrote with Robert Scoble - called Naked Conversations. I had left a few comments on his blog and was kicked to find out that my blog url was listed in the acknowledgements section.

Last year, I finally had a chance to meet Shel after knowing him online for 7 years, when he was invited by NASSCOM for the Product Conclave at Bangalore. I was a panelist in one of the sessions and finally met what is called IRL ("in real life")

Shel writes a column on Forbes called the "Social Beat" covering all the news in the social technology world, and in doing so he started a series called the Social Media Thought Leaders, where he covered practitioners like Scott Monty of Ford, Ekaterina Walter of Intel and Frank Eliason of Citi. So when he emailed me saying he would like to feature me in this column I was very surprised. But Shel was persistent and the result was this article he posted on 11th May. I'd like to highlight this bit:

Looking at the next three-to-five years, Ghosh sees the new professional classification of social recruiting, emerging in the enterprise by following the same migrations that marketing and communications professionals are following today. That means they will “move away from transactions to engage and build relationships and trust and engage with external talent to showcase the culture of the organization."

Ghosh believes that in the next 3-5 years, forward-thinking organizations will start becoming more open in engaging talent communities and giving to the community before they think of getting returns.

Stories and Branding and what it means for Employers

The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every marketing campaign is built around a story. Often advertising professionals are actually only storytellers. Which is why examples of creative heads in advertising like Balki and Prasoon Joshi turn scriptwriters, lyricists and directors of movies.

Every statement you believe of yourself adds up to a story. And stories are power enough to become self fulfilling prophecies. Stories like "I am a fighter" or "I am a rebel" or "I am the follower of rules" are often derived from personal experiences and form patterns of behavior. So when you look at the hindsight they look similar.

Your stories are also shaped by what people tell you "You are a caring person" or "You are intellectual" are statements about your strengths that define how others see yourself and how you see yourself.

But the truest stories about you is what people tell others when you are not around. They are the ones that are trusted and passed around the most. "He's a creative guy but quite temperamental" or "He's very hard working but can't really think of options"

The same way there are stories being told about your organization's culture, processes, salaries, leadership vis-a-vis the competition. Some of it is online, and if you use online tools you can listen to what others are saying about you.

How do you negate a bad story? What the talented ex-employee tells his/her friends and peers?

Think how you can enable people who have positive stories about you as an employer to be able to share their stories.

Do remember, stories are powerful. Every story of being is also a statement about how you are not.
"This company has a free and open culture" will attract a certain kind of talent and put off others. "This company provides structured career growth with a mid-range salary" would similarly attract some and push away others.

So if you are thinking about employment branding think "What is the story about my company I want employees, alumni, candidates, partners, vendors to tell their friends and peers?"