Myth #1- Experienced hires aren’t using social channels

It is probably true that the 35-44 age bracket is the biggest audience on social channels, but statistics only tell part of the story… social recruitment for experienced hires requires a very different approach to hiring younger graduates.

Experienced professionals are indeed using social channels to keep up to date with their peers and industry, but they are attracted to content that delivers relevant information that is focused and easy to access. Well-designed apps with curation capabilities are one way to showcase content to potential candidates on the move. Building profiles of who you are targeting, their interests, and what differentiates your organisation is another part of the puzzle that can help you understand what existing content, if any, could be used as part of your strategy.

Know your channels

Just because you can use different social channels doesn’t mean you need to use them all for every campaign. LinkedIn tends to be the place to keep in touch with professional contacts and access content, and is therefore usually at the centre of an experienced hires recruitment strategy; but other channels also count. Company Facebook pages are an anonymous place to find thought leadership, and get an “inside scoop” on company culture and events. Some firms use YouTube as a part of a strategy to highlight the culture and the calibre of staff – for example, Cisco’s YouTube channel is a example of great content, easily searchable both by relevance and popularity. The key to a multi-channel approach for experienced hires is to understand which profile group you are targeting, and being present in places these people are known to congregate, including boring old industry forums and groups as well as more exciting social channels.

Myth #2- “Our brand combined with a social presence will attract the right people for the right job”

The larger the company, the harder it becomes for even the most eager candidates to not only find the right job within the right service line, but also to find someone in HR or the business to speak with.

Make it easy for the right people to find you

Companies are starting to use LinkedIn functionality to “deconstruct” what they do by explaining what each product line or service group does, and linking each group or service with local opportunities by geography; both Microsoft and IBM provide great examples of this approach. Increasingly, we are seeing companies link recruiters to jobs on LinkedIn, allowing experienced hired to skip the painful process of applying into a “faceless” organisation, only to hear months later whether they are successful or not.

Find and use your social objects

Whilst traditional online recruitment has focused on promoting the employer brand and providing practical information about the roles on offer and their benefits, online social engagement enables firms to expose more surface area that might be of interest to different candidates. For example, firms that utilise lots of data or mathematical models in their work might share examples of these to attract people who are passionate about data, or firms that employ scientists might share some of their work directly to attract other scientists. What are the social objects in your company that might stimulate engagement among potential experienced hires, and how can you use them?

Lead with real people- not glossy photo shoots

Seeing the “face” behind the brand, linked to a real person, is one of the major benefits of social: creating intimacy at scale. Using employee testimonials, videos and blogs to address expectations about the experience and calibre of a team and management, as well as practically what the role involves, is very effective. BP and L’Oreal employees share their experiences of working at an organization (company page and YouTube respectively), while others have developed “employee ambassadors”, where a select group of employees are active across Twitter and Facebook to answer questions and share experiences.

Maximise the power of social influence

If somebody comes across an interesting role, even if they themselves are not considering a career move, how can you make it easy and delightful for them to share this with their network? Using the power of social recommendation can be a powerful way to reach your target audience; in fact, the observation that more people find jobs through their weak ties in social networks than through strong ties (family, close friends, etc). How can firms facilitate this sharing and benefit from the social influence of recommenders? This should be a key element in building a strategy that goes beyond the existing online ecosystem of the firm and its recruiters.

The objectives of experienced hire social recruitment vs graduate hires could and should be different. Social recruitment for experienced hires is all about a longer-term campaign to engage and build relationships and cultivate potential hires. Without a social strategy which goes beyond likes and followers to focusing on what social recruitment can deliver that is additive, to who and why, the focus very quickly goes back to short term and tactical.

What does this mean for our team? It’s getting bigger, and can take advantage of a wider range of global expertise within the group.

What does this mean for our focus and values? They remain unchanged!

What does this mean for our clients? Seamless access to the full range of DG’s global services, including Social Business Intelligence and Performance Brand Marketing as well as the Connected Company work for which we are perhaps best known in Europe. There are very few companies with our experience that can offer an integrated social business vision across both internal and external realms.

We have shifted a lot of heads in the past nine years. Ideas are good but projects are better. But you know what’s really cool? Building a substantial global firm that can help dynamic companies become social businesses, internally and externally, by providing a unique combination of people, process and social technology expertise. Social Business seems to have gone mainstream in the past year, and we are seeing more companies move from small tactical actions with ‘social media gurus’ to a more serious, business-like approach to social business. That’s what we are here for, and if you want to join us as a client, partner or consultant then let us know.

So, whilst you can expect the Headshift name and our trusty old blog to fade away over the coming months, you will find us sharing our thoughts and ideas just as enthusiastically as ever within the shiny new Dachis Group web site and on all the usual social channels.

We have big plans for expanding Dachis Group’s European operations in 2012, and you can expect to see us deliver a more integrated offering across both the internal and external sides of Social Business.

We welcome friendly competition from social media agencies, consultancies entering this space and other companies, but as my friend Robin at We Are Social predicts, “Social intelligence and insight will start to be baked into all marketing activity” and this is where I think we will really stand out with our Social Business Intelligence as a Platform play driving a more data-driven approach to brand marketing and business improvement. We will also be growing our consulting practice, taking on more long-term business change programmes.

My colleague Dion has written up some more detailed predictions for what we can expect in 2012, and despite prevailing economic uncertainty, I am even more optimistic that we will see businesses shift more of their investment into social, where it can make a difference.

Until then, Happy Holidays

One of Mary’s concerns as a legal KM professional is to ensure this function acts as a force multiplier, rather than wasting time with low level housekeeping tasks such as arguing with IT, managing Intranets and manually classifying documents, which are all tasks that 40 of her colleagues in the field told her they spend time on.

But this is not just an issue for KM professionals. More and more firms are now exploring how they can become more efficient and at the same time leverage their intellectual assets to create value for clients. Often, this is driven by client pressure to reduce costs, but it also reflects wider challenges to the legal sector that pose the question: what value does the firm add above and beyond the work of individual fee earners? Nor is it a debate about technology as much as it is about the future shape and scope of law firms. Mid-tier and large firms are concerned with how to better orchestrate the talent of their people in a way that adds value for the client and justifies their choice of a larger firm rather than a cheaper, perhaps offshore operation. Smaller firms want to know how they can use social tools to punch above their weight and develop greater client intimacy.

We believe that social business thinking and technology is the most important development in organisational design for legal and professional services firms since the advent of email. But right now, many firms continue to invest more in storage than they do in knowledge production and sharing, and indeed after 40 years, email remains the default collaboration tool in most cases (See this piece from BBC Online today about why I think this is a problem). But this picture is changing rapidly, as a recent McKinsey report illustrates, with 77% of business and professional services firms now using social technology in one form or another.

In many firms, processes such as new matter intake, conflict checking, bid development, client research and matter or project co-ordination continue to rely on Word documents and spreadsheets being passed around by email. Sometimes, the pendulum has swung the other way in the direction of highly process-centric software tools that force fee earners to enter data and information in a series of tick box operations. The right answer, in our view, is to use lightweight technology to enable people to work together more easily and efficiently, perhaps with some workflow support, but without putting the process horse ahead of the legal cart.

We have been working with pioneering law firms to explore the role of social technology for over seven years, and researching how firms are using these tools; but this year, we have noticed more firms than ever starting to understand that this is not just an IT issue, but central to organisational development.

It is important to work with partners who understand the sector and the firm’s business issues as well as the technology, as the disconnect between business needs and IT thinking is one factor that has historically held back technology evolution in law firms. We offer a number of services in this area that are designed to help both the legal, business and technology stakeholders play a key role in shaping social technology solutions within law firms, such as:

• Social Strategy. We help firms shape their social strategy for both internal employee engagement and external client engagement, looking at how to leverage intellectual assets to create operational improvements by harnessing collective intelligence and greater client intimacy.

• Social Platforms. We have expert knowledge of leading social platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Connections and other best-of-breed systems such as Jive, Socialtext and Confluence. In addition to advising on the best platform to use, installation and integration, we can also help overcome some of the common usability issues that might impede adoption through user experience design.

• The Box. Based on our experience of specific law firm needs in social technology, we have assembled our own integration framework that provides all the key features of a social platform at a much lower price point, and this is being used succesfully in several professional services firms, winning awards for early adopter Reynolds Porter Chamberlain. For mid-tier firms, this framework can provide an ideal combination of flexibility and functionality at a reasonable price.

• Social Experience Design and Consulting. Our user adoption model is based on identifying common ground between organisational needs and individual priorities, and then working to ensure that each user touchpoint delivers enough individual value to create incentives for use. We also help design social experience triggers that can address a range of individual motivations for trying out new tools and new ways of working.

If you are keen to explore how social business could help improve your firm, whether magic circle, mid-tier or small and specialised, why not get in touch and have a chat. 2012 looks set to become a year of transformation for the legal sector, and firms that make best use of their talent and intellectual assets will be among the winners.

Even if I was speaking mostly about design, I added some elements of business, strategy and change management as well, because I thought they were relevant.

I admit, this is a quite dense presentation, I would have probably taken out some topics in hindsight at least for UX Conference, trying to be more focused. However, on the plus side, from the feedback I got it was really successful and lots of people asked more. I probably need to do more workshop and less speeches in the future.

One method, two tools, three business tips. This is how I organized the presentation, in order to be not too unbalanced toward design, even if that was the focus, but also not being too high for more hands-on people.

One method

The most important part of Social Experience Design is that it can’t be done without a shift from traditional, deterministic thinking to the different Theory of Complexity thinking. This shift is critical because it’s the only way to deal with complex systems, such as people and social dynamics.

That’s why I talked again of the Dot Loop, because it contains all the factors that needs to be built-in in any design – well, in any company – to be really effective. The Dot Loop is an effective abstraction to deal with complex systems without a banalizing approach to them. Every successful company work that way – even, of course, probably they don’t call it Dot Loop, even if I’m starting hearing about it more often.

Two tools

The first tool is the Motivational Diamond, a very simple comparative visualizations that helps anyone working with social dynamics to focus on the four Relational Motivations (Competition, Excellence, Curiosity, Affection) and compare different services or parts of the service.

The second tool is the Social Usability and its Checklist, prepared to simplify the approach to it and provides an easy mnemonic. Social Usability works on four factors, that are Relations (the other), Identity (you), Communication (the channel between you and the other) and Emergence of Groups (all the emergent dynamics, again a complex system behavior).

Three business tips

These are very simple, but are also a very important part of a real change management process:

1. Be in-the-flow. This is critical in any good design tied to any change management process, but also for startups that are launching a new product: you have to understand that the day of your user is already
2. Be a double-pyramid business. This is a very important aspect, and might be an article by itself. Luckily it is: I wrote about the double-pyramid some time ago. This means that social businesses needs to engage in a different structure and find a balance between hierarchy and socialization, because the solution is in that balance and not in building a full hierarchic company or a full flat company.
3. Be a double double-pyramid business. Plus, you can’t be really a social business externally if you aren’t internally. You might have a unit that does customer service or social media operations, but if the whole company isn’t aligned, the users will get that, and the rewards are going to be lower (not zero, but lower).

The workshop

The extra part I prepared for Digital Accademia’s workshop regarded a couple of exercises to allow people focus a little more on how to use actively Relational Motivations and Social Usability.

I prepared two exercises to stimulate thinking and discussions:

• In pairs, draw a Motivational Diamond
  This is very interesting because it helps clarifying the four Relational Motivations by discussing it with a peer, and then the public discussions allow to clarify even more. As often happens in workshop, I learned something also this time: I have to clarify better that we are talking about traits that trigger relational aspects. For example, when we talk about “excellence” we aren’t talking about an excellent content, but about how we are promoting people’s excellence… and narcissism.
• In isolation, pick an item from the Social Usability Checklist and design an interface for it. Then, merge it with your partner to create a new UI with the two you prepared.
  I liked this one a lot because it shows how very simple solutions and interface can trigger more complex behaviours. One of the participants was worried because her solutions looked “too simple” but actually… that was the value of it!

A small joke

At UX Conference I was the last one of the day, so I had to think of something. That’s why I started with a small design practical joke… but I won’t tell what it was, and I removed it also from the presentation above. You’ll see the next time, maybe.

We’re quite excited about next week Tuesday’s Social Workplace Conference (#SWCONF) here in London. Lee Bryant will share some thoughts on “Humanising Social Technologies & Enterprise 2.0 Platforms”. He will talk about how Social Technologies & Enterprise 2.0 Platforms can continue to enhance people-to-people conversations and ensure ‘human’ collaboration is greatly enabled.

Lee is sharing the floor with some other great presenters like David Christopher and Jon Mell, see the conference agenda here.

My colleague Dominika Tomek and I will be attending several sessions throughout the day, please do say hi if you have some questions or want to exchange some thoughts on for instance global SharePoint rollout projects or technology adoption challenges.

See you there!

Lee – @leeprovoost

Before we went into the examples I wanted to get across what we at Headshift | Dachis Group think Social Business Design is, the kind of challenges organisations face when becoming social and the kind of things they need to think about.  So I started with the definition we use and simply riffed off that to cover those points.

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process and culture.  The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.

INTENTIONAL CREATION
There has to be some intent behind the drive to become social. It won’t just happen spontaneously, you need to put in some effort to get to where you want to be. The days of build it and they will come never really existed and in the competitive environment of social media and the time constrained environment of the Enterprise won’t ever exist. Like any change management process you need to have a vision for the future, a plan to drive that change, measures to make sure you stay on track and a reason for doing it in the first place.

DYNAMIC
Things change. Everything about social business, from the macro to the micro level, is changing. Technology is changing, user needs are changing, the content running through your activity stream is changing. You need to get used to it and you need to be able to use it to your advantage. Adopting Agile development methodologies help with the technologies, learning that you don’t need to read everything and that you can rely on ambient awareness helps with the content.

SOCIALLY CALIBRATED
Everything you do will be checked, referenced and gauged by people and groups against a set of standards that are constantly shifting. Release a platform that people like and they’ll flock to it (Facebook). Release one they don’t and it’s a different story (Google Wave/Buzz). Put content out that is useful, informative and has value and it will be rated, ranked and liked as it is pushed in front of more eyes. Put content out that isn’t so great and watch it get calibrated on the lower end of the scale.

SYSTEMS, PROCESS AND CULTURE
You can put a great system in place to support collaboration and networking but if no-one wants to collaborate or network then you’ve probably wasted your time. Any transformation into a social business will require a balance approach to all three. Implement systems that are a delight to use. Consider people before process. Work with people’s intrinsic motivations.

IMPROVING VALUE EXCHANGE AMONG CONSTITUENTS
Don’t be selfish but make sure you’re selfish. A reliance on people being selfish is the quickest route to collective benefit. You need to understand what you want from becoming a social business and make sure you get it. You also need to understand that people aren’t going to do anything for free, people are selfish. You need to provide them with value, be it free product, be it information, be it directions. You need to understand what is of value to you, what is of value to the rest of the ecosystem and then make it meet in the middle.

These points may seem very basic, even obvious, to those of us who do this every day; but you would be surprised how many organisations or consultants do not consider these points before they begin.

What did I miss? Any other key elements you think organisations should consider?

Sid.

This is a real shame, in our view, since intranet projects tend to fall down on the very issues of engagement, relevance and collaboration for which social intranets are such a good solution.

At the recent Interact Intranet conference in London, I spoke about the importance of social intranets for workforce engagement, and highlighted some of the key features and benefits of social intranets for knowledge-based firms such as legal and professional services firms. Here are my slides:

Recognising the limitations of Sharepoint, which we have discussed here before, many firms are now asking how they can use SharePoint as a base layer for their intranet, taking advantage of its Office integration, identity and security management and other good features, whilst adding a social layer on top to drive engagement and collaboration. We are doing several projects in this area, and the solution usually involves some combination of good user experience and workflow design, to get the best out of existing SP2010 social features, and/or the use of additional products such as tibbr or Newsgator.

But something we have not covered before is the possibility of using IBM Connections as a complete social business layer on top of Sharepoint. This has some clear advantages such as the simplicity of managing two distinct platforms, rather than over-customising SharePoint, and taking advantage of the far more advanced social features of a dedicated social business platform.

To explore this option further, we are jointly hosting a breakfast briefing with IBM on November 15th for top tier UK law firms, where we can learn more about their experiences of or opinions on SharePoint and social intranets, and discuss the possible benefits of SharePoint + Connections. If you are interested to attend, please contact my colleague Christoph Schmaltz.

If you answered yes to at least one of the questions above (two or three gives extra points), you may be interested in coming for an impromptu meetup to Restaurant Reithalle in Zurich on October 5 starting from 7 PM. If you are passionate about or involved in social business, social media, enterprise 2.0 topics or are wondering about how new technology can address work challenges, we would love you to join us. Simply ping @leeprovoost or me @christoph or via email ( christoph (at) headshift.com ) so we know who is coming and we can make sure we have each other’s phone numbers in case you can’t find us.

We will have our own Nabaztag Bunny with us. He loves to travel and meet new friends. So don’t be shy and do say hello!