Original Post: 10 Social Media Commandments for Employers, By Gene Connors, Workforce Managment

Employers must implement social networking policies, obtain employee consent for monitoring and conduct their monitoring legally and responsibly. By following these 10 guidelines, employers ensure that their employees can enjoy social media without employer static and interference.

With apologies to Shakespeare, who was quite the networker himself in Elizabethan times, to network or not to network is not the question. Social media is a fact of life for millions of people, so the real question is not whether we connect, but where and in what ways we should connect to benefit from online networking’s pluses and avoid its minuses. Because many, if not most, networkers are employees, the question is also how far employers can and should go to guide employees’ social networking activities to prevent or reduce employment-related problems.

Here are 10 social networking commandments for employers. If followed, they will enable employees to enjoy social media without employer static and interference:

1. Influence appropriate work-connected behavior and use by employees with a social media or networking policy. Privacy rights are gaining ground each day, particularly in employee-friendly states such as California and New Jersey. But rest easier, because employers have rights too. These include an employer’s ability to create and enforce reasonable policies to protect its employees, its property and its reputation from false or reckless actions by its employees. Reasonable and responsible employee use of social media starts with clear, work-connected policies, including a social media/networking policy, to frame acceptable and unacceptable e-behavior.

2. Use your social media policy to set employee boundaries. Every employer needs a simply worded social media policy to provide employees with practical guidelines to help prevent unthinking, harmful employee actions. Having no such policy is like having no curfew for teenagers. Few things are worse for employers or parents than hearing “You never told me that!” Tell your employees, nicely but firmly, what you expect from them.

3. Echo important employment considerations in your social media policy. Minimize accusations of being Big Brother. Assure employees that social networking can be wonderfully fulfilling. Like household appliances and tools that can cause death or serious harm, however, thoughtlessly using the Internet for social networking can cause serious harm to the company and our jobs. While socially networking, we must avoid:

• Illegal activity.
• Disclosing trade secrets or other confidential or sensitive information.
• “Watering down” patented or copyright-protected information.
• Harassing or otherwise being mean-spirited by spreading gossip—or even the truth—about others.
• Wasting our work time or that of others.

4. Consent for monitoring is crucial, but “sell” it to employees. Whether employers need to monitor should be a non-issue. “Playing ostrich” by failing to monitor invites a host of legal and public relations issues, because ignorance is not bliss and it’s certainly no legal defense. The only actual question is how an employer can monitor with the least legal exposure. The answer is obtaining employee consent to monitoring.

Obtaining signed or implied employee consent regarding the workplace use of social media is crucial to an employer’s ability to monitor employee use of social media and take action for unacceptable employee behavior. Monitoring employee use of social media without clear consent is like walking into a New York City bar with an unregistered handgun in the waistband of your sweatpants with the safety off. Things can happen, but nothing good.

Employees have options, as do employers. Among their options is to work for you or leave. They also have privacy rights that courts continue to recognize, refine and sometimes create. At work and beyond the workplace, however, employees can agree to and accept as reasonable the privacy standards that employers offer at the time of hire, or as a requirement for continued employment. Those most likely to agree to such standards—because they want employment—are job applicants. But when jobs are scarce, as they are now, existing employees can be equally “accepting.”

It’s not necessary for employees to consent in writing to privacy expectations. But written consent is easier to prove in case of a dispute or lawsuit. It’s also difficult, if not impossible, to deny. Obtaining written consent is easier from each applicant than all employees at one time.

Because obtaining signatures from a group is hard, implied consent for existing employees is the norm. It typically starts with an electronically and physically posted message to employees, announcing a change on a specific date for all employees. Employees who continue working after the effective date of the change have implied their consent. This form of consent works fine in most cases, unless, for instance, the change is forbidden in the work state. One example, from another employment-law arena, is a noncompete pledge that states such as California generally abhor.

Imagine the relative ease in defending your viewing of an employee’s Facebook page if you have this consent in hand:

If hired, I will comply with all Employer X policies, including, for example only, its non-disparagement policy and its social media policy. I encourage Employer X to monitor my compliance as it sees fit. I understand that monitoring can extend beyond Employer X-provided equipment and my at-work time to off-site social electronic sites such as MySpace, and to any Twitter or other social media account I maintain or visit. I agree, in advance, to provide Employer X with any needed password or other access to conduct employment-related monitoring.

To keep good and motivated employees, avoid force-feeding policies and coercing consent. That would only persuade more employable workers to defect to less draconian competitors. Note that even with consent, overbroad or intrusive monitoring will still spell trouble. To sell employees on a social media policy and obtain their consent:

• Provide examples of valuable, acceptable use of social media to encourage that kind of behavior.
• Alert employees to stories of how new Internet “friends” are not always who they say they are.
• Specify, with concrete examples, acceptable and unacceptable social networking.
• Minimize negative reactions by asking employees to reverse roles: “Imagine if an employee said this about you.”
• Specify easy-to-understand guidelines and require employees to meet them. Only then should you seek consent.

5. Always use the least intrusive search available. Once you have consent and before monitoring, decide how to monitor in the least intrusive way to seek needed information. In cases involving privacy issues, expect courts and juries to be offended and then punish employers that choose and use a more intrusive method over a less intrusive alternative.

6. Seek only necessary work-related information. An employer’s right to monitor and search extends only to information needed to protect its business and its people. Never seek other information.

7. Be yourself. Never pretend to be someone or something else to access and get information from a site. Violate this commandment, and you can brace for a lawsuit, and prepared to be called a predator—invoking the vision of a sexual predator to a jury—that is acting in violation of site-entry rules and federal and state electronic communication and other laws.

In 2009, for example, a federal court in New Jersey found that an employer, Hillstone Restaurant Group, had violated federal and New Jersey laws by accessing an invitation-only site by pretending to be an employee and using the password of an employee who had permission to be there. Read that decision here.

8. Know and obey applicable law. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is Latin for, roughly, “Ignorance of the law does not excuse its violation.” It was smart advice in ancient Rome and it still applies. Laws that specifically or arguably apply to social media searches and monitoring include:

• The Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
• The National Labor Relations Act.
• State statutes that outlaw adverse employment action for engaging in off-work activities that are not unlawful.
• Constitutional and court-created privacy and similar personal rights.

Keep abreast of the reach and depth of all possible laws that apply to monitoring and avoid inviting a lawsuit by stretching the envelope.

9. Act to protect. Discovery of dangerous or damaging information on a site demands immediate and effective action tailored to the particular facts. That typically means requesting that the site remove the offensive information. This is often done simply by learning and using the particular site’s terms-of-use policy to your advantage. This can result in not only persuading the site to remove the posting but also to block future messages from the poster. Disclosing confidential information, “trashing” your products or services and significant accusations of wrongful behavior by other employees are examples of circumstances that often trigger removal.

If that effort fails, however, depending upon your policy and employee consent, approach the offending employee, if that person can be identified, and persuade him or her to remove the posting by offering lesser discipline for cooperation.

It may become necessary, however, to seek court relief. One example is when the sender is anonymous and the site manager or Internet service provider is unwilling to divulge the poster’s identity. Another situation that might require court action is when the site refuses to remove the posting.

It is also important, but less time-sensitive, to investigate who is at fault and, if it was an employee, what employment action is appropriate.

10. Be a bit paranoid. There is a fine line between being sensitive and just a little paranoid. You should cross it often to remain diligent, aware and—it is hoped—safe and secure in protecting your business, your fine reputation, your employees and their morale.

Maintaining and enforcing an effective social media policy, monitoring sites that your employees frequent and enforcing your policy when necessary are musts for survival in an electronic arena where a thoughtless, reckless or vicious electronic rumor can doom a business.

Gene Connors practices employment law at Reed Smith and is based in the firm’s Pittsburgh office. He is listed in such publications as The Best Lawyers in America and The US Legal 500. Philadelphia Magazine each year has named him a “Pennsylvania Super Lawyer.” The views expressed here are his alone.

Related posts:

1. Include Your Employees in Your Social Media Strategy
2. Why Including Employees in Brand Management is Important
3. Setting Social Media Guidelines, not Policies in the Workplace

Original post: Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?, Semantic Universe, Stephanie Lemieux

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. The enterprise context is different however, and many of the elements that make social tagging work on the Web make it a challenge behind the firewall.

These include a smaller and more defined corpus of content, a much smaller user population with less available time, and stricter information retrieval requirements. Other challenges include the quality of tags (misspellings, compound words, personal tags) and of tag search engines (no spell-check, no stemming), both issues which impact the performance of social tagging. These problems aside, social tagging is still a valuable tool for the enterprise, as long as these challenges are considered. A hybrid solution that employs social tagging and formal taxonomy as complementary information access approaches is emerging as a winning solution.

Introduction

You can tag just about anything these days: vacation photos, products, blog posts, friends on Facebook… But what about that travel approval form you can never find on the intranet? Or the latest company annual report? While the popularity and application of social tagging has been on a continuous climb on the Web since the launch of Del.ici.ous in 2003, the enterprise has been slower to adopt the trend. In the past few years, vendors – from niche companies like Connectbeam to large providers like IBM Lotus – have launched social tagging products aimed at the enterprise, hoping to capitalize on the growing curiosity around how this Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. But just what is social tagging in the enterprise: a cheap solution to information organization in difficult economic times, giving people the tools they love at home to use at work, or just a faddish attempt to incorporate “cool web 2.0 stuff” into the enterprise context?

Social Tagging on the Web – Popularity Explained

Before we can determine whether social tagging works in the enterprise, we have to understand why it works so well on the web. Social tagging originally emerged as a solution for offering individual users control over findability. It allowed individuals to use their own language – tags with personal meaning – to organize and retrieve content important to them. No need to sift through unwieldy directory structures or guess at a good search term. When made visible to others, the value of tags expanded from the individual to the group: you could not only re-find your content but also explore content tagged similarly by others. So tagging moved from being a personal use tool to enabling serendipitous discovery of content, ideas, and peers.

The ability to support a multiplicity of views is an important aspect of this approach. Whereas taxonomies and thesauri force convergence around a preferred term (e.g. use Cinema, not Movies), folksonomies (“structures” that emerge from social tags) allow users to choose whatever term they find meaningful and there is no funnelling into a single point of view. Essentially, people tag the same content differently, and not only is this ok, but it’s the whole point: people who tag content as “cinema” probably think differently than those who tag using the term “movies”¹. This allows users to get around the “problem” of semantics, that is, having to figure out what terms others have chosen.

Why Introduce Social tagging in the Enterprise?

So why does the enterprise want to bring social tagging behind the firewall? There are a couple of simple answers to this: it’s a quick, cheap and easy way to enable lightweight social collaboration and augment findability.  Social tagging software solutions are typically inexpensive niche products or modules you can add on to your existing software suite. They don’t represent a big investment, and are relatively simple to implement. Additionally, the technology is usually relatively easy to use (compared to an ERP or CMS, for example), so there is no need to spend heavily on training or special staff.

Fig 1: Sample tool view: Dogear from Lotus Connections

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/images/Dogear_screenshot.jpg

Organizations are interested in using social tagging technology both within workgroups and across the enterprise. Tagging can supplement information retrieval options in intranets and document management systems, allowing employees to use tags to enhance the findability of internal and external content without waiting for an information professional to categorize it. Many tools allow you to subscribe to what is called a “tag stream” and monitor content being tagged. This is an excellent way to provide trend monitoring, news/blog aggregation, and other external company-related information. Social tagging can also be used to help share documents, research, and more, both within formal workgroups and informal communities of practice. This increases not only collaboration, but also expertise location, as viewing a tagger’s profile can tell you a lot about their interests and expertise. Essentially, social tagging creates a richer set of options for users within the enterprise for locating content and colleagues.

The Difference Between the Web and the Enterprise

These all sound like great benefits, so why doesn’t every company implement social tagging? The problem with transposing approaches that work great on the web into a corporate setting is that we don’t often take into account the contextual differences that affect success. The first major difference between the Web and the enterprise is nature of the content. The Web is a seemingly infinite collection with no clear edges, no authority, and no structure. Outsourcing the organization of information on the Web to users makes sense in this context: people can be free to make up their own definitions and categories, and structure will emerge from the chaos simply through volume.  Corporate content is different: it is a more defined corpus of information that is meant to support specific tasks and users, entities are structured and there is authority to be respected. Finding information is mission-critical in this context, so employees have a higher need for precise and reliable access to information.

People are also different on the Web vs. the enterprise. One of the big success factors in many Web 2.0 approaches is population size. A Forrester study showed that 16-18% of users between 18-40 have tagged Web content. 16-18% is a lot when you consider the millions and millions of people who surf the Web, but not a lot in the context of a 30 person work team or a 500 employee company. Recent case studies published from MITRE and BUPA indicate that the level of participation in the enterprise tends to be more around 10% of users. People at work also have less time and motivation to participate in social software: they are focused on deliverables and deadlines and do not often have the spare time or incentive to focus on sharing and tagging information. They also have more concerns about privacy and security, given that their tags and tagging profile may be made visible to other employees.

Other issues that must be considered pertain to the quality of tags and tagging systems. Unfortunately, people are not especially good at tagging: they tag inconsistently over time and are usually more concerned about personal findability than the “greater good” (which is arguably the original point of social tagging). This translates itself into tags of dubious quality: misspelled tags (e.g. Sharepiont), inconsistent tags (e.g. dog vs. dogs), compound words (e.g. SocialTagging), personal use tags (e.g. toread), etc.² For example, the top 75 tags from LibraryThing.com (book tagging) shows such issues.

Fig. 2: Top 75 tags from LibraryThing.com

This is compounded by the fact that tag search engines are not yet very sophisticated. Most do not have spell-check or stemming (expanding a search for “ski” to include “skis”, “skiing”, etc.), nor do they have the ability to search for synonyms (e.g. Ursa Major vs. Big Dipper). Some tagging sites, such as LibraryThing, are experimenting with an approach called “tag equivalency”, where a user can make two tags synonymous, but this is not widespread.

These issues lead to a problem of precision and recall in tag-based searching. Precision is the ability of a search engine to return items from the collection that are truly relevant to your search (exactness), while recall is the ability to return all the relevant results in a collection (completeness). In the world of the Web, precision and recall tend to be less critical, as you are dealing with collections with millions of items and less of a : does it really matter if you don’t find every single picture of cats on Flickr? It does matter however if you don’t find all the relevant cases in your law firm’s case history database.

The Content Continuum

This is not to say that social tagging is an irreparably flawed approach that should be avoided in the enterprise. Quite the contrary: as stated earlier, there are many situations and contexts in which social tagging is not only interesting but practical. What it boils down to is the nature of the content being tagged and whether its consumers can afford the drawbacks of social tagging. Some enterprise content is more mission-critical than others, such as policies and approved methods, and organizations should invest the time and effort required to ensure that this content is findable. Other content, such as blogs, external links and discussion postings can afford to be more serendipitous.

Fig. 3: The content continuum

The Hybrid Approach

However, the best approach to enterprise findability is a savvy combination of both approaches. That is, don’t fire your libraries and throw out your corporate taxonomy just yet: keep them for tagging your high value content and ensuring that you have consistency of categorization and terminology. But do supplement your intranet search and other less formal sources with social tagging, show tags alongside official categories and result sets.  Finally, social tags can be a great source of terms to augment your corporate taxonomy, as they tend to represent the most current and natural user terminology. Some tools are also exploring taxonomy-directed tagging, where type-ahead tries to match user-generated tags to a controlled vocabulary (e.g. ZigTag).

Essentially, organizations should not be afraid to get involved in social tagging: it is a simple and inexpensive way to inject a little Web 2.0 into your employees’ lives and supplement more formal approaches to findability. Given that the technology is relatively mature, there are also some good case studies available to guide your effort³. To get you started, here are some basic do’s and don’ts around social tagging implementation and governance.

Don’t assume social tagging will replace other corporate metadata. View it as a way to enrich existing content organization and add life to your taxonomy.
Do investigate which tool is right for you: most enterprise software suites have add-ons, there are new specialized products, or you can custom build on based on open source tools.
Don’t skimp on marketing the use and benefits of social tagging to target users.
Do allow users to import their tags from online sources (e.g. Del.ici.ous) if possible, this will prepopulate the system and make the tool seem valuable faster.
Do evaluate whether your corporate culture can support open tagger profiles or would be better suited to anonymous tagging. Either can work, but an open system results in more social connections.
Do consider some minimal effort around tag clean-up and vetting to weed out inappropriate tags and basic misspellings/inconsistencies.

As long as you are aware of how enterprise tagging differs from its web counterpart, you will be ready to hit the ground running and make your tagging project a success.

1. See “Ontology is Overrated” by Clay Shirky for a more in depth discussion: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
2. See “Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags” by Guy & Tonkin (2006) for more on tag quality: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
3.   MITRE case study: presented at Taxonomy Community of Practice Series, September 2007, http://www.earley.com/_September_2007.asp.
BUPA case study: http://www.socialtext.net/cases2/index.cgi?bupa_social_bookmarking

Related posts:

1. Social Networking Goes to Work
2. 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
3. VentureBeat: A brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools

Original Post: Nick ONeill, Social Media Today

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals.  Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like  Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure  application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

Are there other metrics you measure that you feel are more important for your company? What tools do you use to measure social metrics? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. The Community Manager’s Toolbox
2. Ignite Social Media: Monitor Social Media Initiatives with the Social Media Marketing Funnel
3. The Four I’s of Social Media Measurement

The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies
Conducted By: Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Eric Mattson CEO, Financial Insite

Due to the hugely influential role of Fortune Magazine’s list of America’s largest corporations (“Fortune 500″) play in the business world, studying their usage of new technological tools like social media offers important insights into the future of commerce.

In 2009, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth released one of the first studies of the Fortune 500’s adoption of one of the best-known forms of social media – blogging.

This new study revisits and refreshes that prior in-depth study and expands to look at the Fortune 500’s usage of the most dramatically growing new social media site – the microblogging service Twitter.

Methodology

For purposes of this research, the following definition was used to locate 2009 Fortune 500 companies with blogs. A company was counted as having a blog if they had a public facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months. This is the same definition used in the 2008 study.

Summary

1. Blogs in the 2009 Fortune 500 – One hundred-eight (22%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months versus 16% in 2008.
2. Blogs by Industry – As might be expected, companies in the industry of computer software, peripherals and office equipment have the most blogs while specialty retail saw a significant increase in blog usage.
3. Blogs by Rank – Numbers show that rank continues to influence the adoption of blogging by the Fortune 500.
4. Level of Interaction – All the corporations make good use of blogging through frequent posting, on-going discussion and the ability to follow the conversation easily through RSS or subscriptions.
5. Comparison with the Inc. 500 – Although blogging increased by 6% from 2008 for both Inc. 500 and Fortune 500 the later is still blogging at a much lower rate.
6. Corporate Twitter Accounts – One hundred and seventy-three (35%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2009
   Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days. Of these companies, four of the top five corporations consistently post on their Twitter accounts.
7. Use of Podcasting and Video – Nineteen percent of the 2009 Fortune 500 is podcasting and 31% are using video on their blog sites.

Conclusion

The continued steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies demonstrate the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Surely a willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is a good thing. Where it leads will be fascinating to watch!

Related posts:

1. Study: Retailers Shift Marketing Dollars Towards Social Media
2. Study Shows that Higher Social Media Engagement Correlates with Financial Performance
3. Nonprofits Still Setting the Pace in Social Media Adoption

Original Post: Who Knows What?, by DORIT NEVO, IZAK BENBASAT And YAIR WAND, The Wall Street Journal

Every big company has in-house experts. So why don’t they use them more?

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that’s a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts’ knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts’ “softer” qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn’t easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.

Harry Campbell

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. And social networks can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also trust them more than they would complete strangers.

In what follows, we explain in more detail why social computing can help companies manage their in-house expertise more effectively.

Blogs and Wikis

The most basic task of any expertise-locator system is to help the users make informed choices. Especially in big companies, there can be many experts to choose from.

To learn how such choices are made, we surveyed users of current expertise-locator systems about what they looked for most in an expert. The results, ranked in order of importance: the extent of the expert’s knowledge; trustworthiness; communications skills; willingness to help; years of experience; currency of the expert’s knowledge; and awareness of other resources.

Blogs deliver on all counts. Employees can keep blogs to document and organize their work and to communicate directly with others inside and outside the organization. Messages and dialogues on any subject can be posted, providing another way to help establish not just reputations but communication skills. Instead of reading someone else’s assessment of an expert, as happens in most current systems, users can judge for themselves who is an expert.

Blogs can help searchers go beyond identifying the “usual suspects”—the people they would expect to have expertise on a specific topic. Let’s say a recently hired engineering graduate who is also a Web 2.0 enthusiast writes a blog about it. Soon he or she becomes the company’s expert on the topic. The blog draws comments from other interested employees, and a community develops. The blogger’s ability to convey ideas, depth of knowledge and interactions with blog readers are all fully visible to the community, offering further indications of his or her expertise that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Wikis, or Web pages that allow multiple users to add, remove and edit content, have become useful for knowledge sharing, documentation and collaborative creation in many areas, including software development and training. As such, they serve as an excellent source of expertise identification. They also can be very revealing in the way they put exchanges among the authors and editors on display. When wikis are used as project-management tools, for example, as they are in the software industry, they do more than provide valuable documentation of the project. They identify emergent roles and expertise within the team, provide an account of team members’ history of responses to queries and requests, and enable team members to evaluate their colleagues expertise, helpfulness, and communications skills first hand. The frequency of exchanges, adequacy of explanations and the general openness of each person’s communication through the wiki all provide cues.

Social Skills

The Problem: Workers in search of expertise within their own corporation often don’t know where to turn.

Insight: While IT has made inroads into identifying in-house experts and making them easier to contact, few systems currently offer any clues about an expert’s trustworthiness, communication skills or willingness to help.

Solution: Search systems that apply social-computing tools such as internal blogs, wikis and social networks can fill in these critical gaps in various ways. Posted comments and communication between users help reveal not only who knows what, but who is approachable.

To the extent that blogs and wikis are all about helping and being cooperative, the mere identification of someone as a blogger or a wiki contributor can be a strong signal of their willingness to help. Feedback and commenting mechanisms, meanwhile, allow people looking for expertise to investigate in detail an author’s breadth of knowledge and willingness to engage.

Social Networks and Tagging

Social-networking sites give members a way to link with one another based on professional relations, shared interests, friendships or other criteria. For business purposes, such networks increase employees’ ability to find expertise outside their immediate group or department, and the broader they are, the more organizational barriers they knock down.

They don’t have to be complicated. Even a simple social-network application can keep track of things like who worked on projects together in the past. This can provide bridges to remote experts and help searchers trust those experts more. It enhances traditional expertise-locator systems by telling a searcher not only “Here is the expert on this topic,” but also “Here is how you two are connected: You know X, who knows Y, who knows the expert, Z.” Knowing how you are linked inspires more trust, and potentially more willingness in the expert to cooperate. Similarly, having little in common with an expert can be seen as a plus, when you are looking for help from an entirely new point of view or discipline.

Another social tool that can help in locating experts is tagging, or the attaching of label-like keywords to a person’s name in a company directory, documents, images or pages on the Web. In the context of expertise-locator systems, employees can have tags that describe the work they do, information on their division or group, external affiliations, hobbies, memberships, location and names of projects. International Business Machines Corp. research centers in Cambridge, Mass., and San Jose, Calif., have experimented in this area.

Employees can also use tags for evaluation purposes, such as noting whether an expert has been helpful in the past, and for tagging their own areas of expertise as they evolve.

What is particularly useful about tags is they are generated by the expertise seekers and experts themselves, not by a team assigned to maintain a database. This relieves the company of any need to dedicate resources or training to the practice, and makes the tags more likely to be relevant and properly maintained over time.

Employees also can assign tags to resources on the Web or Intranet that are of interest to themselves and others in their field, making that information more accessible to anyone searching for expertise on that topic. Experts who provide links in this way also build their reputations by showing their awareness of other resources and helping people find them.

Related posts:

1. 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
2. A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce
3. Trends on Mobile Social Computing: Business Anytime, Anywhere

This post is a continuation of my series on “How to Make Employees Social Media Ambassadors“. See further down for related links on using employees as social media ambassadors and employee engagement.

The other day, I was sitting at a restaurant bar (as I’m prone to do) and started a conversation with someone — yes, I know, I make for a captivating dinner companion — on how employees are a company’s most under-utilized asset for communicating its brand. However, as my fellow bar person pointed out, how do you have employees represent your brand if they don’t even know what it is … if they even care? So yes, before you can use your employees as brand ambassadors, you might want to not only make sure that they understand your brand, but that they actually embrace and support it — the values for which your brand stands and the services and solutions you provide.

So how do you launch a social media brand ambassador program if your ambassadors don’t know the brand?

Obviously, you don’t.

Whether or not you’re looking to launch a social media ambassador program, the key to success for any company who wants employees represent its brand is that they MUST not only appreciate and understand its value, but be able to also communicate it. And in order for them to understand it, you must effectively internalize it to them. Seems kind of logical, doesn’t it? Of course it is, but it seems to be a one of those things that are either: 1) assumed or 2) not executed effectively. So how do you educate, so that your employees can effectively communicate?

Align with Go-to-Market Messaging

Marketing and internal communications can sometimes have a tenuous relationship. But this is the time for these two organizations to become BFFs to ensure that the internal Employment Brand doesn’t conflict with external Marketing messages. Work with the marketing team to determine the key external messages, and internalize those key messages into a primary message that is broad enough to resonate with employees, and structure that message into easy-to-understand formats, so that they can in turn spread the word about the company’s offerings as well as being an employer of choice.

Determine what your employees already know, and, more importantly, if what they know is what you WANT them to know. Focus groups and surveys are essential for establishing a baseline. In this same vein, your collected data can segment which functional areas of your organization know what. That is, you might assume that your IT organization knows more about your networking services; whereas they might not have extensive knowledge regarding your collaboration solutions.

Training and Guidelines

Surprisingly, most customer-facing employees do not receive training on how to represent the brand. If you’re launching a social media ambassador program…. this is VITAL to the success of your program. Employees need to understand the different marketing messages as well as the various products and solutions provided by your business. And since social networking sites are becoming an extremely important resource for recruiters, it is important to  establish and promote certain branding ideas that will make the company attractive and appealing to employment recruits — that is, if trained properly, your employees are your best opportunity to “humanize” your organization to external audiences as an employer of choice.

Lead by Example

Your senior leaders should be the loudest spokespeople for your internal brand through all established communication channels. In organizations where senior leadership are seen as “living the brand,” the “engagement gap” becomes a little more narrow between the overall goals of the organization and building a culture that effectively channels employee effort to enhance performance.

When you have senior leadership involved in social media, it gives your organization a level of authenticity that will better resonate with not only your employees, but also external audiences. If you are an organization that has come across rogue “groups” or “pages” for your company, then you know what I mean. Help your employees, and ultimately your external audience, to distinguish between ones that are company-driven and which ones are “grassroots.”

Integrate Communications

Make your internal brand resonate with your employees, by using your internal channels to reinforce and explain the values and behaviors that reflect your brand promise. Create secondary, targeted messages for your functional groups, so that each area understands how their slice of the pie contributes to the company as a whole.

Integrate your internal brand through all employee touchpoints so that new and current employees can become familiar with the internal brand to the point that it becomes second nature. Include the internal brand into your talent acquisition processes by including it in new employee orientation. For current employees, develop training sessions that are informational, yet fun,  and tie the training to the employee’s performance plan.

If you think that your employees are NOT a reflection of your business, don’t forget the story of the employee who, while working for one wireless provider, was observed to be using the wireless solutions provided by the competitor. While it seems small, the silent statement behind this lack of endorsement speaks volumes… if employees don’t understand or don’t believe in their company’s products and solutions, why should anyone else? Give your employees a reason to live the brand.

Related posts:

1. Living the Brand: How to Help Employees Become Brand Ambassadors (Part 1)
2. Why Including Employees in Brand Management is Important
3. Living the Brand: Developing an Internal Branding Campaign (Part 2)

I’m someone who lives what they work, and works what they live. I can’t help it. I’ve always been that way.

But I know a lot of people who successfully separate their professional lives from their personal ones. As companies strive to bring more “work / life” balance  into corporate culture (and I think this is a good thing) is these lines are becoming less defined. As we, as companies, organizations and individuals, use social technologies to share and post information related to our interests or business, we inadvertently blur these lines even more.

Most recently, one of the projects that I’m involved in [and quite enthusiastically I might add] is asking a select group of employees to use their own social profiles to communicate company information and brand voice to their networks as it relates to their personal interests and ideas. Personally, I think this is a wonderfully innovative method for a company to use employees, who are already active in social media, to not only provide public relations but to also help direct customer service questions / issues to appropriate channels,  enforce go-to-market-messaging, and humanize the company overall. But this also means that traditional separation of business from personal lives no longer exist.

And this begs the question: Are we creating a culture of social invention or one that will ultimately need a social intervention? I’m not making this stuff up, folks. Trust me, as I’m writing this, I’m sitting here thinking “Yep, I qualify for a social intervention.”

Here are my personal top ten signs you might need a social intervention:

1. You know more about what’s going on in the lives of your Facebook family than you do your real life family.
2. Instead of counting sheep at night, you’re counting tweeps.
3. Your cellphone sleeps with you more than anybody else does.
4. The first thing and last things you do in the day are to check your Facebook or Twitter updates.
5. You have a complete multi-enterprise social networking system where you post in one place and it automatically populates to all of your social network profiles.
6. You take a picture of your kids and the first thing they ask is if you’re going to post it to Facebook.
7. All of your friends know that the fastest way they can reach you is by sending you a message or tweet.
8. You no longer carry a business card or curriculum vitae because you just direct people to your LinkedIn profile.
9. You hold your family, high school or college reunions via Facebook.
10. Your therapist is one of your Facebook friends.

Just food for thought here…reflective thoughts from a self-professed social media addict. If you’re a social media addict, feel free to profess it here too! And add your own “sign” of social media addiction.

Now, I have to go write on my therapist’s Facebook wall.   See you in the tweeties!

No related posts.

Historically, brand owners were able to determine the relationship that consumers had with their brand. Now, thanks to social media, consumers are the ones who increasingly define how the brand is perceived.

The law firm of Reed Smith, LLP has published, “Network Interference—A Legal Guide to the Commercial Risks and Rewards of the Social Media Phenomenon.” This guide highlights the benefits of social media, while giving you tips on protecting yourself against the inherent legal risks surrounding this phenomenon. These tips will help you:

1. Understand the sensitive nature of information that flows through social media.
2. Recognize the serious compliance and litigation risks that the collection and distribution of such information entails.
3. Know your obligations under all applicable data privacy and security laws and have a plan to meet those obligations.

Visit the AAAA’s web site for more information and to download the guide in its entirety.

Related posts:

1. Get Social Media Guide: Grow Your Business Using Social Media
2. Get Your Comprehensive, How-To Guide for Corporate HR Blogging
3. Yes, It’s Time to Create that Social Media Policy for Your Company

In driving social technologies within an organization, the number one question that I hear from top level executives is “what problem would this be solving for us?” And trust me, it’s hard for me to contain myself when posed with this question and not stand up on my soapbox about how social media can drive engagement and collaboration. But, the bottom line is that the successful integration of social technologies within a corporate enterprise isn’t just about innovation or enablement, but it is also the ability to fill a business need. And, from an internal communications perspective, finding the right balance between social technologies and existing communication channels is especially important. When you’ve identified this, that’s when you see the biggest executive support, employee adoption and measurable results.

For just a moment, separate out the business strategist within you from the social media geek. And, take a look at some of the following issues that often need to be addressed in order for social technologies to gain a foothold within your organization:

Business Priorities versus Enablement Enthusiasm

I have never been able to see a social media strategy get executive support without it being directly tied to a business priority or strategic imperative. I repeat… NEVER. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the social media whirlwind, but it’s essential to make it relevant not only to the employee, but also to the business.

In my day-to-day, it’s easy for me to align social media strategies to the business objective of driving employee enablement to increase productivity.  In HR speak, that means using social technologies to bring as many HR transactions forward as much as possible to drive self service (e.g, time management, payroll, benefits, manager tools, etc.). What are the goals for your company and how can social media technologies drive the company to meet them?

Innovation versus Invasiveness

When working with a large enterprise, you inevitably have varied adoption levels towards new technology. One of the coolest trends I’ve seen lately, is the demo of a collaboration site that contains Facebook-like notifications not just for activity on employees’ social profiles, but for alerting employees to task-based actions that are tied to HR transactional systems: filling out a time sheet, creating performance objectives, approving expense reports, etc. It’s an innovative way to push information to employees that require a timely response; however, for each employee that doesn’t mind a company pushing desktop alerts, you will find another employee who finds it invasive. So the challenge, then, is to balance the use of innovative tools against the comfort level of your employee base — otherwise you risk an extremely low adoption rate and very little ROI.

Take a pulse of your employee base and see how THEY would like to receive information. And, once you’ve determined this, don’t send the same information to your employees using all of your internal communication channels. Instead, make content delivery relevant to them by prioritizing and segementing what information you will be making available to employees via these social technologies and ensure that this information is unqiue from other communication sources.

Information Delivery versus Your Corporate Intranet

The past couple of years have proven that we are in an ever-evolving world of information delivery. This change applies to the corporate world as well. Where once the only means to deliver “corporate speak” to an employee base was through corporate e-mail, we now have a plethora of other methods at our disposal through collaboration sites, RSS feeds, Twitter-esque notifications, etc. In terms of internal communications, social media is a powerful tool in delivering information to employees beyond the traditional walls of existing communication channels such as corporate e-mail and your intranet. The key is to balance the synergies of the two. If your organization has been investing significant capital into a completely enhanced corporate intranet to drive more employee traffic TO it, then it might not be as keen to implement a social technology that delivers content in lieu of the intranet and takes users AWAY. So, if not taken into consideration appropriately, your social media and  internal communications strategies could end up working against one another.

Engage your internal communications and HR teams to make sure your enthusiasm for social technologies doesn’t override any goals and objectives they might have. Work together to figure out the best delivery method for various communications — news stories that are pushed via RSS feeds don’t necessarily need to be duplicated by a dedicated e-mail. Or, see social technologies as a means to deliver abbreviated messaging to employees, while still directing employees back to the corporate intranet for full-length information.

Do you have thoughts on this topic? By all means… share them here!

Related posts:

1. Include Your Employees in Your Social Media Strategy
2. Living the Brand: Developing an Internal Branding Campaign (Part 2)
3. Insights from Insidedge: Intranet 2.0 Increases Employee Engagement

This cartoon and the commentary from its illustrator were pulled from Sonja Thompson’s editorial on Tech Republic. I just love the thoughts that are illustrated here by fellow Ohioan and Tech Republic member dcolbert. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m an early adopter of ALL things geeky / gadgety and I’m continually running the “I am not the target audience of the Apple iPad” mantra through my head! Keep in mind too, that this cartoon was released prior to the iPad launch.

Date: January 25th, 2010

At the time of this writing, the Apple Tablet has yet to be released. There continues to be quite a bit of buzz over the actual name of the new device (see Selena Frye’s lighthearted post “Apple Tablet: The name game“), but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here’s a comical peek at the iSlate, compliments of TechRepublic member dcolbert.

And DColbert’s thoughts on his illustration:

3.3. Jumping the Shark:

dcolbert@… – 01/26/10 So, let’s explore that. I could write 1500 words that come to the same conclusion as I’ve scribbled here. Heck, ask anyone here, I could probably write 5000 worlds that come to the same conclusion as I’ve sketched here – but in this case, instead of words, an image popped into my head, and I felt it was an effective way to convey a point I would otherwise write about.

So to clarify, in case the message eludes anyone – I’m suggesting that the over-sensationalized hype about the Apple Tablet may be the point where Apple Corporation “Jumps the Shark” – in that I don’t think this device has a clear target, purpose, or place. It is bigger than an iPhone, smaller than a notebook, but lacking a lof of the convenience built into Netbooks (and it looks to be a lot more expensive). I’m not certain it will be as good of an e-reader as a Kindle, or as good of a iPod as, well… an iPod. It is going to cost more than a game console, so it better deliver some pretty impressive portable gaming to compete there.

Apple has gotten out too far in front of what technology could deliver in the past. A relatively famous example is the Newton – which was a flop itself but delivered Palm, the PDA reveolution, and arguably, the eventual arrival of the SmartPhone.

That is really the discussion I want to see this picture spawn. Is Apple jumping the shark with their Tablet PC? Is it so overhyped that it is bound to be a let down? Could this be the point where Jobs and the rest of the lads in Cuppertino have exhausted all of their good ideas and start relying on gimmicks and good will to try and push second rate products off on the public? Jason Hiener mentions in his article at:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=1890

that Steve Jobs feels that he has released several visionary products that have changed entire industries. The Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone – and that he predicts that this product will have the same impact. I’m not sure Jobs can work his magic on the print media industry with the same skill and success that he has enjoyed with the music industry. There are huge differences between the challenges in releasing digital music devices and releasing digital print devices.

I was ahead of the curve on the MP3 revolution. I had one of the first Kenwood in-dash MP3 players (it played MP3s off of CDs and was around $2000 in 2001, and had an unheard of Aux-In). I also had one of the earliest Creative Zen Jukebox 30mb players. I had been wanting solutions like these for several years when they were released commercially, and remember when people were rigging up 12v laptops hooked up to their speaker systems in the trunks of their cars when that was the only solution available.

I generally have my finger on the pulse of what “underground technology trends” have momentum, direction and demand – and ePublishing isn’t as hot as the industry thinks it is. The Kindle and like products are a *niche*, themselves. An oversaturated niche, at that – and one which most consumers aren’t that excited about. So I don’t see how that is going to be the killer app that drives the Apple Tablet success.

So, what place is there in the gadget ecosystem for a HUGE phone, a tiny, keyboard-less netbook that costs far more than other netbooks? A portable gaming system that costs more than dedicated consoles?

The cartoon is just a suggestion. I don’t know – but I think the cartoon is a strong possibility. I think what we’ll get is a MacBook Air with no keyboard and an enhanced iPhone OS… and the Air hasn’t exactly revolutionized Apple’s product line or had the significant impact that Jobs suggested it would at release. It has actually been looked at by the industry, by tech journalists, and by consumers as an expensive “concept” PC for gadget freaks with lots of disposable income – as a product that compares unfavorably to similar, less expensive, and better equipped alternatives from competitors.

Maybe you’re right, Steven, maybe Apple actually jumped the Shark with the Air, and the Tablet is more like the endless sit-com spin offs that seem to happen once a series has jumped the shark. This isn’t the Fonz Shark Jumping episode, that already happened. This is Joni Loves Chachi.

Time will tell.

Related posts:

1. Cartoon: This is the Story of my Life!
2. Cartoon: Social Media Marketing Madness
3. Cartoon: Flitterin = Facebook + Twitter + LinkedIn

Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants.

Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found.

Review the results of the survey to see how online reputations impact people’s lives. The research comes from interviews with over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers and 1,200 consumers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.

The results of the research reveal what you post on the Internet and what people post about you can affect your professional life.

Monitor your online reputation

Protect your online reputation

Learn what action you can take to manage your online reputation.

Related posts:

1. 10 Ways to Stay Out of Trouble When You Post to Social Networking Sites (techrepublic)
2. Great Ideas for Improving the Candidate Experience on Your Careers Site
3. Deloitte’s 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey Examines the Reputational Risk Implications of Social Networks

Original Post: Toby, Ward, Prescient Digital Media

Employees shouldn’t waste too much time on the intranet; social media wastes time; the Internet is a productivity drain. These are common refrains and concerns expressed by many executives, albeit the less educated ones, generally of an older generation, nearing or past retirement.

The exact same concerns were made about employee bathroom breaks, mealtimes, telephone use, etc. General Motors, that great stalwart of financial prudence, used to hire people to time employees when they used the bathroom (source: Negotiate This, Herb Cohen).

“When speaking to clients the issue of productivity is often a concern,” says Jonas Lood, senior consultant with Prescient Digital Media (intranet consultants / specialists). “I frequently get asked “how do we leverage our intranet to improve information sharing, protect intellectual property while at the same time reducing the cost per employee?”

Every organization wants to maximize profit (cash flow) and ultimately, productivity drives profit; and so does innovation.

“When productivity rates leap, so do enterprise profits. In the past century, we have automated blue-collar work, wringing more products out of every worker hour,” says Susan Feldman, IDC analyst and author of the report, Hidden Costs of Information Work: A Progress Report. “But in an economy that is now more information based than industrial, increasing the productivity of the information worker has become imperative.”

Concerns about productivity, therefore, are real and valid. Although often these concerns are misplaced: if employee compensation and rewards models are all that they should be, and employees are accountable for objectives and goals, then concerns over productivity drain from activities such as using the Internet, or intranet, should abate (if the intranet is in fact a sound system, and not the dog’s breakfast that many still are). In short, the corporate intranet (and use of the Internet for activities such as research) can be a tremendous productivity gain, not a drain.

“As organizations downsize in this year’s financial crisis, they will need to streamline and automate information tasks and processes if they are to survive with fewer workers,” adds Feldman (keep in mind, real estate may be rebounding, and the stock markets may be unusually high, but there is still a massive credit crunch, and there are many industries still in recession). “They will need to ferret out instances of duplicated effort, and they will need to invest in software that can speed up processes like ediscovery, categorization, call center support, publishing, and collaboration while reducing manual labor.”

IDC conducted a survey of 706 knowledge workers. IDC asked respondents about:

•    various information tasks performed by knowledge workers; and
•    repetitive tasks that might be prime targets for automation or improvement.

On average, IDC estimates the average information worker salary of $75,000 per year. They then took the data that we had gathered on the average number of hours spent on each task and discovered the following about the average information worker respondent:

•    13 hours per week spent on email (cost: $21,000 per year)
•    9 hours per week spent searching for information (cost: $14,000 per year)
•    8 hours per week analyzing information (cost: $13,000 per year)
•    6.5 hours per week communicating / collaborating with team members
(cost: $10,000 per year)
•    6 hours per week creating content (cost: $10,000 per year)
•    Nearly 4 hours per week publishing information (cost: $6,000 per year)

The survey and the data are imperfect, but the general picture is well painted and the conclusion very clear: information workers spend a lot of time finding and processing information, at a very high cost. If we can make it easier to find information, employee productivity will rise, and profits will soar.

Fortunately, technology is a productivity driver. And the technology platform that powers this productivity is the corporate intranet.

“Even well tuned intranets can suffer from information fatigue,” says Prescient’s Lood. “A well planned intranet, with a strategy in place that supports the business requirements will take you well on your way in identifying the optimum information and communications channels for your organization.”

Moreover, IDC finds that new Intranet 2.0 tools are also a preferred, and powerful technology of choice for driving productivity.

“With Web 2.0 applications creeping into the enterprise — with or without IT approval — it’s obvious that ingenious information workers will find tools to help them accomplish their work no matter where those tools come from,” says IDC. “This year’s survey on the use and preferences for information worker productivity tools shows that newer tools, particularly instant messaging (but also social networking and blogs), were preferred over more traditional ones like email or team workspaces.”

The most preferred / valued tool according to respondents is instant messaging; followed by the phone, desktop authoring tools (e.g. MS-Word), email, web conferencing, social networking, and blogs. In fact, email is rated only a shade higher than social networking. Many, myself included, often look at email as a frequent productivity drain.

“Information work is costly, but it’s also valuable, as long as the time spent working is productive,” says IDC. “Any dent that an organization can make in the hours information workers toil unproductively will have an immediate payoff.”

If your organization is not embracing and investing in technology such as the intranet and the new 2.0 tools then it in fact is threatened by productivity drains (as compared to the competition). The classic concern about productivity drains is well-founded, but misunderstood to the extent that technology is often a gain, not a drain.

Related posts:

1. Insights from Insidedge: Intranet 2.0 Increases Employee Engagement
2. The Best Heuristic Intranet Review Toolkit for Any Intranet Manager
3. IKEA’s New Intranet Model Enables Collaboration & Community

Original post: A brief history of social network enterprise collaboration tools, VentureBeat

Social networking has become an integral part of office life. These commercial tools – Facebook, Twitter, etc. – are being used by more than half of employees, according to one study. But some companies have taken a reactive stance against these tools due to privacy or transparency concerns, and the number of companies selling tools specifically for enterprise continues to increase.

On top of this, the downward shift in the economy has forced companies to make do with less. Employees have had to learn to maximize their time and productivity and social networking collaboration tools for enterprise have allowed for the streamlining of information within a company. “Social networks make it easy for participants to share unstructured and ad hoc information that can decrease the time it takes to find information to solve problems. Social networks also encourage employees to help each other,” wrote Caroline Dangson, a research analyst at IDC. These enterprise collaboration tools continue to gain traction, with Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior recently predicting that the collaboration market could swell to be a $34 billion business.

“These products have to be more than a Facebook for business,” said Dangson. “So, we’ve seen some of the smaller players try and differentiate themselves.” Dangson sees a bright future for these tools, and an IDC report from August of this year sees large growth potential despite an entrenched reluctance from corporate culture to adopt to the rapidly-changing need for a more transparent environment.

“Corporate culture has everything to do with the current state of adoption of online community software. Online community software requires a community management model where leadership is distributed, all participants have voice, and employees feel they can initiate change. This model challenges, if not disrupts, the hierarchical management model of so many organizations today,” said the report, “U.S. Online Community Software Forecast 2009-2013.” The report predicts a $1.5-billion market by 2013.

“The return on investment is a big question,” said Dangson. “The phrase that kept coming up in my interviews with vendors was ‘connecting the dots.’ There’s a strong physical network within a company, and the social network extends this to weak ties within the company or externally. There’s still a lot of skepticism, as they need to know exactly the ROI.”

With this in mind, we thought it would be good to provide an overview of a few of the key players in the social networking enterprise collaboration market.

Socialcast
Socialcast bills its product as “enterprise microblogging” and it’s hard to be more concise than that. True Ventures funded $1-million for the company to further develop the tool that helps employees communicate in real time, using a Facebook-derivative interface to share new information, organize people and contacts, view questions from other employees, create a Socialbast e-mail, and find experts. The company has also tradmarked something called “Social Business Intelligence,” analytics used to track information flow, usage trends, community growth and participation patterns within a Socialcast community.

Jive
Jive Software is quickly establishing itself as a market leader, having recently received $12-million in Series B funding from Sequoia and moved its expanding employee base to Palo Alto. Jive’s SBS 4.0 includes blogs, tags, videos, social bookmarks, collaborative documents, an MS Office document previewer, polls, rich profiles, and status updates. Gartner Research, in its October 2009 report “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workforce,” placed Jive inside of its “leaders” quadrant alongside Microsoft and IBM.

Mzinga
Mzinga’s OmniSocial faces both internally and externally, with products specifically for the workforce (OmniSocial HR), customers (OmniSocial Marketing), and customer support (OmniSocial Support). The product has many features, including networking, idea sharing, ratings and polls, HR functions, team-based content offering, and a simplified administration environment.

Yammer
Yammer is a limited-use microblogging service that provides short answers within and between employees to one question: “What are you working on?” The feed that results from this question contains answers, news, ideas, and links to other information. The company directory within Yammer also allows for looking at the expertise of other employees, but the information is shared on a strictly private network.

Dekks
Launched just a few months ago, Dekks, the first product from I.ndigo, is a way of building a knowledge network within a company. It does this by creating an automated way to find the proper source for information once an employee has entered a query. Employees are given what Dekks calls a ‘pulse’ (aka, a feed) where updates, messages, polls and tasks indicate the hot topics within a company. The product is also useful for management, allowing them to map a knowledge network within a company, where knowlege and people are interconnected.

Salesforce Chatter
Billed as a way to “completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company,” Salesforce Chatter features real-time updates on people, groups, documents and application data. It does this by using a cloud computing interface, enabling a private and secure collaboration environment using a real-time feed. Judging by the demo, Chatter looks remarkably like Facebook and Twitter, despite the fact that company chief exec Marc Benioff has downplayed the “social” nature of the product in favor of the “collaboration” angle, most likely so as to be taken more seriously by a sales team. For the sales force, Chatter allows people to drill down into sale figures and sales opportunities and to follow the movement of an account in real time. Chatter also allows for widget embeds, such as Twitter, into its pages, and the product is also available for mobile devices. Chatter will be available to the general public in mid-2010.

MindTouch Enterprise – This is a cloud product. MindTouch Enterprise is an ‘enterprise wiki’ where docs can be shared and co-edited with update notifications. It also includes things called “CRM connectors” and “CRM and database dashboards” as well as microblogging, chat, task lists, and user profile pages within an environment that uses a variety of security levels. Its video notes that social tools “are not for business collaboration and decision-making” and touts MindTouch as a decent alternative to this. According to its site, MindTouch counts Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Mozilla, Palm, and NASA among its client list.

WebEx Meetings/Connect/E-mail
Cisco offers three collaboration products which can be easily confused. We’ll discuss them separately, although there have been suggestions that they will eventually become one application. Connect allows for online collaboration, messaging, audio/video/VoiP connecting, and the ability to create project teams in a secure environment. Meetings is a robust real-time collaboration space that offers real-time desktop sharing with teleconferencing, where you can not only share documents but presentations and applications. It is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, Unix and 3G-enabled smart phones and is the only Web conferencing solution offered over a proprietary network, optimized for security and performance. With Meetings, not everyone needs to subscribe to WebEx to be part of a meeting. WebEx Mail, meanwhile, is the third collaboration product. It allows for larger storage space and ease-of-use for mobile devices. In the future, it promises an easy way to integrate WebEx Mail into Web conferencing, social networking, unified communications, and instant messaging. All of these products are delivered through the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud.

Sharepoint
Microsoft’s SharePoint has been a huge growth product for the firm, and a 2010 beta was released in the last few weeks. Of course, SharePoint benefits from being part of the Microsoft lineup of software, but it has still had to prove itself in the marketplace, and it seems to be doing so. On each SharePoint site, users can search for content, information, and experts, build communities, and build ‘composites,’ which the company defines as “no-code solutions on the premises or in the cloud, a rich set of building blocks, tools and self-service capabilities.” For its latest version, all of the collaboration solutions have been integrated into SharePoint, allowing for a more agile way of scaling “up and out quickly,” according to company lit.

Lotus Sametime
IBM’s Lotus Sametime Standard is a space where IM, e-mail, Webconferencing, and optional audio/video are all part of one package.  Lotus Sametime Advanced one-ups Standard by creating a knowledge-sharing paradigm, wherein finding experts in a particular field – even people you don’t know and who aren’t in a preexisting contact list – can be accomplished. Users can also subscribe to chat rooms and follow topic discussions, using ‘persistent group chat.’ Advanced also lets you share your desktop using a screen share function and allows for some curious ‘geographic location services’ where users can track the physical location of others.

Wave
This is a new offering from Google and as with any Google product, it made quite a splash. Currently in beta, Wave creates a “wave” – a shared space – that allows users to share and collaborate on rich data, including documents photos, gadgets, feeds from other sources on the Web, and others, but many of which are currently not functional. It looks like a dressed-up Gmail program, and some in the blogosphere have noted that Wave may be good for short-term collaborative needs, but not for anything particularly robust. But Google docs have become a defacto collaborative tool for many low-level users, so expectations for Wave are pretty high.

Related posts:

1. Tools for Showing Monetary Benefits to Social Media ROI
2. 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
3. Making a Business Case for Social Network Recruiting

Original Posts: Multiple Generations @ Work: What Should You Do Differently?, Are You Ready to Manage Five Generations of Workers?

Does retirement look a little further off now than it did just a few years ago? If you are over 62, odds are you’re putting off retirement at least two to three years, and you may even be planning on working beyond 70. If you’re over 50, and lost 40% or more of your nest egg, you are about twice as likely to delay retirement as those who lost less. According to the World Health Organization, men and women who are healthy at 60 will, on average, be physically capable of working until they are 74 and 77, respectively. Combine these statistics and the newest employees entering the workforce might not be joining their parents or grandparents, they might be joining their great-grandparents.

This translates into a social phenomenon not yet witnessed: five generations are about to be working side by side. They include:

• Traditionalists, born prior to 1946
• Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964
• Gen X, born between 1965 and 1976
• Millennials, born between 1977 and 1997
• Gen 2020, born after 1997

The chart below shows that Baby Boomers will cede the majority of the workforce by 2015 to the Millennials. (Due to their smaller size, Gen X will never have the majority spot in the workplace — and so in essence, we will have skipped an entire generation by 2015.) When you consider the changes in the amount of knowledge available at our fingertips, the advent of social technologies, and the expansion of the global economy over those two generations, a workplace chasm could be emerging. What will this mean for how employers attract, develop and engage employees across multiple generations?

Consider how the way we work has changed in the last two decades. In 1986, when the youngest Baby Boomers entered the workforce, the percentage of knowledge necessary to retain in your mind to perform well on the job was about 75 percent (according to research by Robert Kelley). For the other 25 percent, you accessed documentation, usually by looking something up in a manual. In 2009, only about 10 percent of knowledge necessary to perform well on the job is retained — meaning a myriad of other sources must be relied upon. It’s no wonder that those who enter the workforce now have devised new tools and ways of working with each other to deal with the complexity, such as a query through Facebook to their trusted friends. (Even if it’s blocked on the company network, Millennials will connect via mobile devices when they are stuck on projects.)

For over thirty years, the sheer size of the Baby Boomer generation defined the organization’s social landscape, in a majority-rules cultural takeover. The new kids in town — what we call the hyper-connected — will overtake that majority. They are constantly connected to multiple devices in order to know what and whom they need to know. The next two generations entering the workforce may not be technologically smarter, but they are more comfortable with technology, and their culture will soon dominate organizations. Many of them will have never sent an email when they get to the workplace, because who needs e-mail when you can text, instant message, tweet, or Facebook? If ur/18 (text speak for “you are over 18″), and your diminishing nest egg mandates that you work a few more years, get ready for this coming cultural shift.

How will having multiple generations in the workplace affect you and your learning or HR department?

Some thoughts to consider:

Recruiting New Talent: Are you sourcing the next generation of talent where they live? Rather than career fairs and job boards, does your company have a social networking strategy with a presence on Facebook a YouTube channel and a presence on Twitter?

Social Networking With Alumni: Once mainly used by professional service firms and law firms, now JP Morgan and Lockheed Martin are developing elaborate alumni social networks as a way to attract the “boomerang” employees who already know the firm and can make an instant contribution.

Mentoring: Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen 2020s will increasingly want to develop their careers in the same social and personal ways they live their lives. Expect an increased demand for mentoring and coaching as we head into 2020.

Learning & Development: Look for learning & development to become “social, personal, immediate and highly relevant to an individual’s job.” This will translate into leveraging new technologies such as corporate social networks, alternate reality games and greater use of mobile devices.

These are just a few of the many ways in which the world of work will change over the next five years. What are you doing to get ready?

Related posts:

1. Social Networking Goes to Work
2. Hi Corporate. It’s me, Social Media. Your Newest Employee.
3. A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce

Original Post: Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics

Klout is a wonderful little tool that measures Klout Score, a proxy for “influence”:

It is easy to understand the market demand to boil things down to one number, but this is perhaps the least useful thing in Klout.

While on the surface they might seem useful, I am always suspicious of compound metrics. They can be subjective, inapplicable to many and efficiently hide the insights you need to understand what actions to take. [See more here for Compound Metrics: Four Not Useful KPI Measurement Techniques]

Mercifully there is so much more to Klout than that.

Klout measures a bunch of lovely metrics, specifically applicable to Twitter, that are grouped into four buckets: Reach, Demand, Engagement (!!) , Velocity.

There are two lovely things about these computations.

1. Joe and team have wonderfully avoided the temptation make these compound metrics (as in Reach = Followers / Total Retweets * Friends + Pixie Dust). The factors used are laid out as individual metrics making it easy for you understand the data and pick metrics that work for you.

2. (My favorite) The metric definitions are not “crap”. This seems like such a low bar to meet, sadly far too often metrics out there (not just for twitter) are just plain shoddy.

For example here are some clean definitions from Klout:

# Engagement

* How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
* Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?

# Velocity

* How likely are you to be retweeted?
* Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

# Reach

* Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
* How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
* Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?

When I use Klout I simply pick the metrics that are most important to my own twitter strategy.

I would suggest that this is very very very very important, pick what is right for you rather then following a lemmings like strategy of “I am going to use metrics Y & Z that someone recommends”.

Here’s an example: I don’t care about Follower/Follow Ratio. I think it is disingenuous to follow everyone who follows you just for appearances sake when you have no intention of reading what they all say. Why be fake?

As you might have read in the new book I like “Message Amplification” in Social Media, and hence I do care a lot about Total Retweets.

[Sidebar: my favorite twitter metric is: # Of Retweets Per Thousand Followers, it's a measure of efficiency and value provided and people voting with their clicks, all rolled into one!]

I care a lot about Follower Retweet % (”Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?”) because I want to appeal to more people than my mom, dad, and best friend!

One of the biggest mistake companies and brands make about Twitter is that they think it is one more “shout channel” like TV and Radio and Magazine ads or Press Releases. Twitter is not that. Twitter is a “conversation channel”, a place where you can find the audience relevant to you (and your company and products and services and jihad) and engage in a conversation with them. It is not pitching, it is enriching the value of the ecosystem by participating.

Hence I like the metric Messages Per Outbound Message , as a primitive measure of the fact that you are participating in a conversation and not just yelling.

With Klout I can choose the metrics that best reflect my personal twitter strategy, I can easily find them and I can monitor my progress (using a handy dandy graph) and ensure my strategy is a success.

Your strategy might be different. Walk up to the buffet and pick the metrics that will help you best measure your own success.

At the bottom of the Stats tab Klout also includes a handy dandy Analysis table with trend indicators. . . .

As an Analyst it might be of some value to look at the trend pointers at the bottom (clearly I am doomed!), it might be cute to put this into a PowerPoint slide for the HiPPO’s who might like the Chinese fortune cookie messages for each metric group.

Related posts:

1. Six Tips for Using Twitter as a Recruitment Tool
2. Tips for Establishing a Rock-Solid Corporate Culture on Twitter
3. Tools for Showing Monetary Benefits to Social Media ROI

As a member of the Social Media Marketing group, I get the occasional e-mail from the group’s owner, Mike Crosson. Yesterday’s e-mail was so timely for the occasion, I thought I would repost here:

I wish everyone a very happy, safe and special Holiday with your loved ones.

Consider this: just for the day, don’t go on Facebook… instead, show your face to someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Don’t Twitter, unless it’s at a joke one of your friends makes at a party. And the only Flickr you should be looking at is a cozy fireplace or maybe a good movie on TV with your family and a big bowl of popcorn. Can you Digg it?

Make the day special and may your REAL social life be rich and rewarding!

Cheers,
Mike Crosson
www.SocialMediopolis.com

No related posts.

Over the next three to five years, the continuing spread of mobile technology will have a dramatic impact on the way companies do business. Companies that embrace mobile technology will see improvements in productivity and operational efficiency that were unimaginable only a few years ago. In fact, mobile technology can’t be seen as a luxury anymore; it’s a necessity.

Some companies are already using mobile applications to deliver increased customer satisfaction and productivity; for them the future is already here. In many organizations, though, there’s a disconnect between the changing nature of work and the way business is transacted. Processes, tools and infrastructure are falling out of alignment with the new demographics of a workforce that’s informed by the “consumerization” of IT. Mobile email was the groundbreaking application here, but instant messaging, wikis and collaborative workspaces are also playing a role.

Some of mobility’s impacts will likely directly affect people, changing the way individuals and teams work together, and the ways customers receive service and support. Others will likely affect how companies manage their internal process flows and their alliance relationships, changing the nature of business processes and opening the door for new,
transformational business models. Mobile technology will likely also require changes in the systems and infrastructure that support the business, with implications for networks, devices, databases and applications.

from: The Mobile Enterprise: Moving to the Next Generation

Mobility Trends: What’s Headed to Your Company BlackBerry?

1. Business intelligence. Now that many C-level executives carry BlackBerry smartphones for email and voice, the next step is to provide access to business intelligence, such as daily sales reports and quarterly financials.
2. Context awareness. Look for leading-edge enterprises to begin incorporating contextual data into their mobile applications with a goal of streamlining business processes and increasing business agility. This includes location and presence, often available through a calendar application.
3. Desktop view. Various third-party solutions for BlackBerry smartphones, including PCNow from Cisco’s WebEx unit, enable BlackBerry users to access files and folders stored on PC hard drives, and search their PCs with desktop search products.
4. Social networking. As employees seek new ways of always being available to customers and business partners, enterprises will have to support social networking applications on smartphones. These will range from chatting to multimedia sharing.

Great Reports on Mobile Social Networking from Blackberry

The Promise of Mobile Unified Communications

Mobile unified communications allows organizations to provide employees with the ability to collaborate and communicate efficiently, as well as access information on-demand. An exclusive Computerworld online survey offers insight into how companies can develop cost-effective strategies for implementing or improving mobile applications and foster an efficient workplace.

The Promise of Mobile Unified Communications (PDF) – Computerworld

Mobile Social Networking: The New Ecosystem

Social networking and the next generation of handheld devices will improve business decision-making through efficient, unified communications and location awareness.

Mobile Social Networking: The New Ecosystem (PDF) – Computerworld

Related posts:

1. Five Challenges Social Media Will Bring to Business
2. Survey Reveals 86 Percent of Organizations Use Social Technologies for Business Purposes
3. McKinsey Report: Executives Recognize that Web 2.0 has Measurable Benefits for Business

So, as a company, you now recognize that a socially networked company makes for a more human workforce. So, what are the next steps to making employees social media ambassadors?

There really are two different approaches to empowering your employees as social media ambassadors. You can either give open access to your entire employee base or start with a “pilot group” of officially recognized ambassadors. I don’t know that either approach has more proven benefits over the other, but if you’re a conservative company like mine, you’ll go for the latter…. and here’s why:

1. Allows you to embrace social media while still being cautious about how to fully deploy or manage it;
2. Gives you time to further refine your social media guidelines with a small group of individuals who will eventually become leading examples to the rest of your employees; and,
3. Provides the opportunity to measure your social media impact using the initial pilot as a control group.

Building a Social Media Ambassador Pilot Group

1. Survey employees on social networking habits and interests. Determine what social networks your employees are using and ask them if they would be willing to use their personal brand / social networking profiles to serve as the company’s social media ambassadors.
2. Lots of employees will say they are passionate about social media. But you will need to weed out those individuals who are just consumers of social media information versus the ones who are conversationalists in social media — those who create content and dialogue within their existing social networks.
3. Identify senior level executives who are already participating in social networks or who are willing to participate, and use them to set an example of how employees can create their own branded content within company guidelines.
4. Choose individuals who are already considered experts in their area, such as: customer service, products, public policy, recruiting, IT, Sales & Engineering, Diversity, and Community.

Putting the A.R.E. in “We A.R.E. Social Media Ambassadors”

So the next step in the process is establishing the Attributes, Responsibilities, and Expectations for your initial pilot group. Creating a social media ambassador “job description” is beneficial not only to give you an outline of the attributes of the employee you want to use as an example to others, but the responsibilities and expectations can easily transition into your official social media guidelines.  Thanks to Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Job Description for giving me a great headstart.

Attributes

• Actively participates in a wide variety of social media activities such as blogging, community development and management, social bookmarking, commenting, etc. and is well-connected with the broader social media world
• Has an understanding of building influence as individual employee as well as for the company by association
• Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams
• Ability to synthesize large amounts of data into actionable information
• Excellent writing skills and a willingness to use them
• Excellent verbal communication skills
• Ability to create great working relationships with all levels within the company and across multiple disciplines
• Sense of humor and creativity, not required, but a definite nice to have

Responsibilities

1. Strategizes with and educates the management team and others across the company on incorporating relevant social media techniques into the corporate culture and into all of the company’s products and services.
2. Participates and listens to the conversations occurring within the social media community, and responsibly and smartly responds or defers as appropriate.
3. Uses defined company brand and marketing key words / terms in social networking sites to communicate with customers, partners and industry peers consistently.
4. Monitors trends in social media tools and applications and appropriately apply that knowledge to increasing the use of social media.
5. Provides input and insight into how to penetrate the company’s messages deeper into social networking communities.
6. Leads by example on social media rules of engagement and representing the company within social media networks.

Expectations

1. Re-familiarizes self and abides by all Intellectual Property and Code of Conduct policies, Compliance training and Social Media Policy
2. Completes a course on brand voice, marketing and messaging
3. Suggests new social media tools as they become available and ability to demonstrate the benefits of these new tools
4. Tracks own social media participation and influence through a TBD standardized tool, and provides measurement data back to the Social Media Council
5. Willing and able to participate as a social media ambassador / representative of the company without risk to core duties and responsibilities.

Do you have other attributes, responsibilities, or expectations to contribute? Use the comments area below to provide your insight!

Related posts:

1. Living the Brand: How to Help Employees Become Brand Ambassadors (Part 1)
2. Why Including Employees in Brand Management is Important
3. Defining Employee Roles for Social Media Participation

Fleishman-Hillard recently conducted a webinar on Seven Social Media Trends for Engaging the Workforce. The material covered emerging trends in the use of social media for internal communications and used examples from best-in-class brands to show how social media is being used behind the firewall to improve employee communication and drive business results.

TREND 1: Mobile Tools

Mobile Messaging

AT&T ExecTxt

• Short-code system sends text messages to employees’ mobile phones
• Opt-in, voluntary
• Employees subscribe to executives/lists of their choice
• Alerts employees to urgent, time-sensitive news and big announcements
• Reaches the distributed workforce

Mobile Videos and Podcasts

Glidden

• Product line and branding training for mobile sales force
• Gliddent paint reps review  handheld videos with Home Depot reps

Kraft

• Kraft Casts from CEO/executives
• Keeps workfroce connected and aligned on the go

Specialized Apps

Trek Apps for Training and Sales

• Trains sales associates on latest products
• Sales floor selling tool

AT&T 2009 Officers Conference App

• App supports conference content
• Agendas, calendar, maps, videos and messaging

TREND 2: Townhalls

Interactive Town Hall

• Used to hold company-wide town halls
• Avatar-based, interactive meeting system
• Employee-generated profile pages and avatars
• Live, moderated, real-time
• Submitter’s questions and answers are converted to a computerized voice that reads them out loud

Advanced Virtual Meetings

Skype

• More companies are using Skype and other custom solutions to collaborate across offices
• File-sharing and instant messaging optimizes collaboration

Telepresence

• Advanced telepresence technologies simulate in-person meetings with high interactivity and richness

TREND 3: Social Learning

Digital Self-Development

The Starbucks Partner Café

• Unites more than 136,000 partners to training resources ad each other
• Encourages easy exchange of knowledge and collaboration
• Dialogue is tied to business unit objectives
• Offers a more private, yet collaborative, solution for teams to knowledge-share

Social, Collaborative Training Platforms

Best Buy’s Learning Lounge

• Rank/rate training modules and can recommend to others
• Supports multiple learning-styles
• Employees submit content for training
• Quick adoption – 100 employees submitted ideas for training in first 60 days
• Creates a “results-only learning environment”

TREND 4: Social Portals

Internal Social Networking

AT&T Social Collaboration Portal

• Serves 300K employees
• More than 120,000 unique users hit the site daily
• Social media elements: page customization, commenting, ranking, polls
• Newest features: tReader, RSS and Twitter news feed

Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hello.bah.com

• Allows employees to self-manage their employee directory information in a LinkedIn-like environment
• Creates more robust employee data – interests, experience
• Strengthens “weak” connections to aid networking and collaboration

IBM’s beehive

• Internal, secure, customized community looks and feels like Facebook
• Allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share lists, post photos and schedule events
• Gives communicators constant pulse on what employees are talking about
• High employee adoption rate: 35K+ registered users, 280K+ employee connections

External Communities (via Ning)

Coca-Cola’s Employee Community

• Community managers verify membership
• Customizable platform for building your own employee social network
• Provides chat, blogging, forums, groups and photo/video sharing
• Ning has over 1.2 million unique social networks and 27 million users

TREND 5: Digitizing the Frontline

Crew Communities for Employees in the Field

McDonald’s StationM

• Connects geographically dispersed franchise crew employees
• Integrates video/photo sharing with Flickr, YouTube
• Features blogs by nominated employees
• Builds employee connections and shared cultural understanding
• Multilingual, serving over 1 million crew members in the U.S. and Canada

Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation Remixed

• 2.0 version of its touted Blue Shirt Nation
• Blends social community and micro-blogging functionality
• Employees interact and share business-related content
• Accessible via SMS, Web or e-mail
• Allows senior management to “mix” with retail employees

TREND 6: Crowdsourced Innovation

Innovation and Idea Generation

3M InnovationLive

• Live, virtual sessions solicit ideas, comments and ratings
• Fosters global product and service collaboration
• Post-session review necessary to identify viable ideas

Dell EmployeeStorm

• 10,000 ideas submitted
• 45,000 site users
• 48,000 votes in first 60 days
• 200 ideas implemented

My Starbucks Idea / Ideas in Action Blog

• 70,000 ideas submitted
• 160,000 site users
• 658,000 votes
• 25 ideas implemented

Collaborative Games and Simulations

Boehringer Ingelheim’s “BI Collaboratory”

• Month-long virtual, team-based collaboration
• 144 teams developed a concept to bring value to BI’s customers and patients in new ways
• Teams post presentations of their concepts to the site for peer voting
• Winning ideas earn reward and recognition
• 98 percent participation

TREND 7: Employees as Digital Ambassadors

Employee Word of Mouth Blogs

• AT&T’s Calm, cool & Connected Parent Blog

Employee-Generated Videos

Deloitte Employee Film Festival: What’s Your Deloitte?

• 2,000 employees participated
• 400 submissions received
• Posted internally for peer voting
• Winning videos shared on YouTube

Best Buy’s Twelpforce

• Employees respond to customer questions and offer tech advice

Related posts:

1. Communicate with Employees through Social Media
2. Dell Uses Social Media to Foster Employee Ideas and Engagement
3. A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce

As companies start to dip their toes into the social media waters, we have seen them implement a couple of different approaches. Some companies start with a small group of employees who are identified as brand ambassadors or official representatives of the company in social media networks. Other companies, such as Zappos and Best Buy, have given their entire employee base access to platforms for participating in social media, thereby making all the employees spokespeople of the company.

The Creative Underground has an excellent blog post on using your employees as brand ambassadors… and while it was written more from the perspective of empowering all your employees to be brand ambassadors, I think it rings true for either approach to social media.

That’s right. Instead of just one or two people being social media representatives of the company in the Twitterverse and elsewhere, what if all of them were? I know. Your first thought probably is: “Ha. Good one. We’d never get anything done.” Hear me out. There are rules to this concept working in practice, not just in theory.

1)    Cover your you-know-what.
Namely, adopt a Social Media Policy. I’m talking about a formalized document that establishes some guidelines on ethics and privacy. While you may already have a corporate communications policy of this sort, it’s very smart to be clear that social media is part of that policy too. I could write a blog post on this very subject alone but Sharlyn Lauby, president of Internal Talent Management, already wrote an insightful post that covers it: http://mashable.com/2009/04/27/social-media-policy/

2)    Train them.
This is a step that can separate the purely compliance-minded from the folks who see this as an opportunity to turn employees into communicators. This isn’t a stage made up purely of “Here’s what you can say, here’s what you can’t say” dialogue. While you may speak to that, training also describes being able to show employees how you’re opening up the doors to them as representatives of the company and letting their voices be heard in a very centralized area (more on this in the next step).

3)    Give them a centralized area all their own.
Now that you’ve set some parameters – and your employees understand those parameters – put a dedicated page on your site that allows them to post, share links, communicate with themselves and the outside world, etc. Want an excellent example of how this is done effectively? Zappos has 198 employees Twittering from one area of their site, including the CEO, who has more followers on Twitter than anyone else in the company. That’s an important point in itself – it’s easier to reinforce a culture of openness and transparency if management is actively participating in the same social media tactics as its employees and not just monitoring their posts.

4)    Sure, you need to monitor – but reward influencers too.
Let’s say you’ve got people Twittering aboard a main area of your site and while some of it isn’t offensive (you know what to do if it is), it may not be the most useful stuff in the world to know either. Yet maybe there are other employees tweeting about useful company products, taking a position on an industry development, sharing useful article links and more. As those people are doing that, they’re building influence for themselves and for the company by association. How do you know they’re influential? In the case of Twitter, take a look at a nifty tool called Twitalyzer and you’ll get a clear picture of how it encompasses the total package of an employee’s tweeting influence, including how many links they post, how many Retweets they make, how often they tweet and how many times that person has been referenced on Twitter.

I’m not a big fan of trying to force people to blog, post and chat about nothing but the company because that just isn’t natural. People need to be allowed to wander off the ranch and post some fun, non-offensive things that give the company personality. But do set up a reward system that shows you appreciate the quality of their communication. That doesn’t even have to be monetary but can be a seat at a newly formed and exclusive Social Media Committee, for example (one that encourages creative ways of communicating in the social media universe, not merely about compliance). Want to show you’re not all business? Reward the funniest Tweet of the Month too.

I didn’t say this is for everybody. Many companies are only comfortable with 1 or 2 individuals being their official representatives, which is fine. But if you want to open the door up much wider for turn more employees into company ambassadors of your brand in the social media universe, it can work. And when it does work, you don’t just have talk among your own walls but interaction that can be meaningful with the people who may buy your product or service. Those people can build upon a positive conversation that revolves around your brand.

Related posts:

1. Living the Brand: How to Help Employees Become Brand Ambassadors (Part 1)
2. Why Including Employees in Brand Management is Important
3. Using Social Media to Deputize Employees as Brand Managers