Managers Should Nurture Not Just Subordindates But Networks

In his blog post futurist Ross Dawson writes that many of us have made choices to be content creators. And that there are two kinds of professionals now, those who create content - and those who don't.

Those who are content creators - are given a leadership role by their audience. But as Ross notes, it is a slippery slope.

Which got me thinking, what next? And I knew I had an answer - in the 7 social roles - that I had blogged earlier.

A content creator (or curator) adds value to the audience by connecting them with new ideas - to trigger fresh perspectives.

However, I would argue that a higher value is provided by a community creator, a person who helps connect people with people who have similar interests.

As Gaurav says, the calling of the community creator is to scale passion - and content creation is the first step.

So if you are a content creator, my question to you is - what community are you nurturing? What passion are you scaling?

I have chosen to nurture a community of HR professionals (via this blog and this community) without being aware of what I was doing then. But now I can connect the dots :-)

Create a B2B Social Media Marketing Plan

In association with NASSCOM, 2020 Social is presenting a one day workshop on How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan on April 23rd 2010.

Take a look :-)

Here's what it would cover:

• What is social media
• What are the specific social media channels
• How social media impacts marketing and business
• How certain case studies will help in understanding the use of social media in marketing
• The importance of social media listening and measurement
• How to create your own framework for a social media based marketing program by focusing on:

• Understanding your business objectives
• Understanding your audience
• Defining your strategy and selecting specific social channels
• Creating your tactical plan
• Setting up a listening program
• Successfully presenting your plan and implementing it.

So go here and apply to register.

Analysis of a company's Employment Brand on Social Media

We at 2020 Social (http://2020social.com) recently compared the employment brand related conversations of two large IT firms on the social web by bloggers and on social networks.

The analysis looks at trends, themes and sentiments associated with these two IT firms over the period of one month (March 2010) It also has a representative recommendation section on how one of the firms can leverage the social web to build its employment brand.

Please note for confidentiality's sake all identifiable data has been masked.

We would be happy to share this analysis with people who'd like to explore such a study for their own organization. Do send me a mail to gautam@2020social.com with the subject: Request for Employment Brand Analysis

Do also go through our corporate blog at http://2020social.com/category/blog to understand what we do :-)

The Social Business and The Acquisition of Hinchcliffe & Co by Dachis Group

Yesterday the news spread on Twitter - and came to know of it via Lee Provoost (@leeprovoost)- that the Dachis Group had acquired Hinchcliffe & Co. headed by Enterprise 2.0 thought leader Dion Hinchcliffe.

As Dion wrote on the Dachis Group blog:

When Web 2.0 arrived on the scene in the middle of the decade, it was clear that something momentous was happening in our personal lives, but it was almost too large a change for most of us to easily digest. Now, much the same transformation has begun in our businesses. Back then I decided to immediately create a company to bring these ideas — and changes that accompany them — in the most positive possible way to enterprises around the world and I haven’t looked back.

The outcome was something most of you are now quite familiar with in the subject matter we explore in depth in our blogs, workshops, books, articles, speeches, and consulting practice: social software, cloud computing, open APIs, innovation, crowdsourcing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM, and more. It is now increasingly clear that these ideas are all part of a macro set of trends and concepts that are changing the way we structure and operate our organizations today. Thus, as I stated in the press release, I believe that Social Business Design captures these ideas in a comprehensive approach that will be an essential foundation of next-generation enterprises.

The coming half-decade is going to be a tremendously important and exciting one in the business world as organizations look to fundamentally retool for the 21st century, an era that has quite different expectations and requirements around business and how it gets done.

Enterprise 2.0 Council member Susan Scrupski posted what this means to the new industry:

This is a terrific development in our sector as the consultants who’ve been independent are recognizing there is a tremendous amount of demand to understand and adapt to the technology-driven disruption and innovation that is exploding around the globe as a result of the socially interconnected web. Where the majority of our members in the Council are inventing wheels for the first time, the extension of their hard work will require a bench of professional talent. In order for consultants to meet that demand, consolidation is the only way to deliver by taking advantage of economies of scale. Whether the opportunity is strategy, technical integration, education, or assistance with deployment, the days for external evangelism are probably coming to an end. The idealism that led the first era of this sector has now been replaced with pragmatism and will help businesses of all size move to the next level.

It reminds me of the boutique firms that cropped up in other eras that helped large companies manage the transition from before to after. Over time, the large consultancies will enter the market. That’s when we’ll know we’ve arrived. I’ve already seen some interesting arrangements with off-shore firms who have some unique capabilities to bring to the party. As this business turns its attention to growing up, I applaud the pioneering efforts of these early bloggers and teachers who’ve brought us to this point.

As the only Indian firm who is looking at advising clients on leveraging emerging social technologies both internally and externally to transform themselves into social businesses, we at 2020 Social applaud this development. As Susan says, it means the market is maturing and thought leadership will now transform to business results for clients.

Personally, I feel HR people are well equipped in their organizations to drive this change - and a great post by Volker Seubert on what is the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 to HR should be a must read.

Check this presentation Volker made:

HR Relevance of E20

View more presentations from Volker Seubert.

Interested? Contact me :)

How Organizations Can Build Talent Communities using Social Media

HR and Organizational leaders face two big challenges in the context of two ever-changing realities - as the talent market booms and as job seekers turn from immediate peers to their connections and the collective wisdom of the social web. The two big challenges organizations face in this new reality are:

1. How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of their talent pool and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
2. Understand where the super talent prospective are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

It is our belief that organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool - moving away from the existing debate about "passive candidates" or "active job-seekers"

When a person joins a talent community owned/ stewarded by an organization - he or she gives permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her - and it is up to the organization to either mess it up by "pushing" its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.

As this becomes more and more common - recruiters and hiring managers will move more and more into "community manager" roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories, but encouraging participants to tell their stories.

Here's our suggested approach on how organizations can build their talent communities:

The 2020 Social approach to building Talent Communities

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

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.

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.

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

How can Small Medium Businesses utilize Social Media

I was at the 4th Indian Marketing Summit today on a panel discussion with luminaries like Mahendra Swarup who founded Indiatimes.com, Bikky Khosla of Tradeindia.com, Prof. Govind Hariharan from the Michael J Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University and Rajeev Karwal, Founder and CEO of Milagrow.

The presentation I made is here:

How can Small and Medium Business Enterprises Leverage Social Media and the power of Online Communities - Thoughts by 2020 Social

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

The other panelists chose to speak rather than present, so I can't share the presentations here :)

There was a lively Q&A session where some students asked me interesting questions on cloud computing, ranking users on Twitter and how Social Media could help small enterprises recruit employees.

Overall a great learning experience for me!

Making Organizations Social - am joining 20:20 Social

 

Ok, here's an announcement that I want to make. Tomorrow, 20th October, I am joining 20:20 Social, India's first social business strategy consulting firm

I guess, what you're asking is - what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders - that's right folks, bringing the social web into the organization.

As I have believed - such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness  and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice - or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career - when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Management and then e-learning.

However as much as I love tools - I know that culture always trumps tactics, tools and even strategy. So I am looking at leveraging my HR and OD learnings to help client organizations deploy these social tools.

And I am super-excited to be working along with the amazing 20:20 social team that includes an old blogging acquaintance Gaurav Mishra who blogs at gauravonomics.com. What makes Gaurav a kindred spirit is his openness and transparency as CEO - he blogs about the organization as he manages it :-) Check out Gaurav's posts on how to build an Open and Collaborative Professional Services Firm, and Top 10 FAQs on Building a Social Business Strategy Firm in India.

Am also looking forward to working with a true blue Thought Leader Dave Evans (not the AC/DC guy ;-) author of a book on Social Media Marketing who blogs at http://readthis.com

You can download 20:20 Social's position paper on Social Business Strategy as a pdf, or read it on scribd.

Who are the other folks who are doing something similar?

Well there are two that I know of - the Altimeter Group and Dachis Group.

20:20 Social has just started its journey and I am very excited to be part of something so new and emergent.

Whee! Wish me luck!