Interviewed by Aniisu Verghese on Personal Branding

 Some months ago I was interviewed by Communications specialist Aniisu Verghese on my approach to personal branding 

You can find the transcript of the interview here.

As I share in the interview I have mixed feelings about the term. Since I studied organizational behavior and HR, I am aware of the term of branding and not very comfortable with it. According to marketing literature, a person is hugely complex and there are also group dynamics involved when it comes to branding.  

You all can also find the video of the interview

Using #SocialMedia for your professional growth

So the good folks at +SocialSamosa invited me to a "Twangout" - where people could ask me questions via Twitter and I had to reply via a Google Hangout. It was moderated by the co-founder +Ankita Gaba

You can watch the video here - more about the Twangout here

Top 10 e-learning folks in the world and in three regions

I was extremely surprised yesterday that this site mentioned that I had been listed in the Asia Pacific section of e-learning movers and shakers!

I have no idea how they made that list. Yes, I sometimes tweet about e-learning but this shows how such lists can be very subjective!

But do go through the lists and you'll find some amazing people to follow and learn from including Charles Jennings, Donald Taylor, Elliot Masie, Harold Jarche, Jay Cross and several true e-learning thinkers! I feel like an impostor in this company :)

On a different note, I am doing a "twangout" (Google Hangout+Twitter chat) hosted by Social Samosa. So if you'd like to know how you can use social media for professional purposes, then register here. It's on 7th from 3-4 pm IST.

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"

Facebook Subscribe Button and its Use for Employment Branding

Yesterday I posted about why employers should encourage transparency between who its employees are and what they do to external talent

So when I was reading about Facebook's new feature - the subscribe button - I started thinking "Why can't employers use this?"

The Facebook subscribe button enables a person to "follow" (like twitter or Google+) a person's public updates. You can subscribe to my public posts here.

This feature is a great way for external talent to get to know who are the kind of people working in your organization and what is on their minds.

This is not a brand new idea. It's something similar to how Zappos lists all the employees who tweet on their site and also their updates.

We all know that there are a lot more people on Facebook (btw, employers in India did you know that India has the 3rd most people on Facebook at 35 million) than Twitter (which is around 10% of Facebook's users)

Of course, employees would have privacy concerns - and many use Facebook only for personal networking. Therefore the choice must be made entirely by the employee whether he/she would like to be the "employment brand ambassador" on the website/career site/social networking sites for the employer.

The issue with automated influence lists like Public Relations 2.0

Image via WikipediaLots of people keep talking about how "influence" cannot be reduced to mere numbers. How algorithms cannot capture the essence of why people are influenced and by whom.

Here's again how it was brought home to me. The folks at traackr who track the conversations on the social web around various topics, have listed me number 19 in the Public Relations 2.0 list. To be fair the break up of the score shows my "relevance" score to be a measly 10 - and the only reason it is there is because I tweet sometimes on the areas of intersection of Public Relations and Social Media. But still, me being on that list puts the system of such lists in question.

I mean, the list doesn't have heavy hitters in the PR domain from India, like Palin, Karthik S or Surekha Pillai, two of whom have much larger number of followers on Twitter than me, and one who blogs and tweets more about Public Relations than I do.

Ultimately, my advice to businesses who might be relying on such tools (others being Klout, Twitalyzer and Peerindex) to make decisions about online influencers - they are a good starting point to point to influencers, but even they can't be the top of the funnel. Human intervention is still needed to understand who the influencers are - and while its early days for the tools yet, the only way they can go is up.