Again, I admit… I love me some Awareness Inc. And they’ve recently put together a white paper and infographic on leveraging social influence for marketers. Please note: I do not receive incentive from Awareness Inc. for posting content or whitepapers that is produced by them. Nor have they asked me to post on their behalf. I simply believe in what they do.

As a marketer, your ultimate objective is to influence your audience to believe certain things, to behave in certain ways and ultimately to consume or buy your products and services. Sure, your performance may be judged by a very specific set of metrics, but at the end of the day your objective is to influence your audience.

Influence has many facets: It encompasses perceived status, reputation, authority and rank. It is the single most effective and most enduring marketing asset.

With 90 percent of purchases subject to social influence, it’s no surprise that savvy marketers are looking to leverage social influencers to grow a brand’s social capital – the breadth and depth of social relationships that can be used to increase brand preference, market share and sales. Growing a brand’s social capital is critical because it allows brands to gain market support and increase sales. Brands with larger social capital also have higher valuations, which ultimately delivers value to customers and partners, as well as shareholders.

Why You Should Care about Your Social Influence:

• 90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.
• 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
• 67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.
• Sharing and recommendation behavior is growing: 75 percent of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand, and 53 percent of Twitter users have recommended companies or products.
• Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.
• Sharing features can increase the spread of awareness by 246 percent with “Likes” and 98 percent with “Send to a friend.”

Best Practices for Leveraging Influence

• Identify and understand your external and internal influencers: Know their passions or pain points, their attraction to your industry, and how they use your product or service.
• Define influence by several factors not simply by the size of your network. Identify and measure influence based on the size of an influencer’s network, how often they share, and the reaction driven by their content (clicks on links, comments to posts, “Likes to posts, retweets, etc.) Their team then motivates influence by creating a relevant and authentic message.
• Know how your brand can add value to your influencer groups over time.
• Benchmark the state of your social capital: Be prepared to act on the feedback.
• Reward your top internal brand influencers. Recognize, reciprocate and reward the most loyal buyers and most faithful recommenders. Appropriately equip advocates with actions that will create activation. Once you’ve asked your influencers to participate, you need to tell them how to help. Clearly identify the right tool to motivate your audience to take an action, whether that’s a tangible item such as a coupon, or knowledge that’s worth sharing and communicating.
• Monitor, measure, analyze and evolve your influencer approach and campaigns.
• Avoid the popularity pitfall. Very often marketers pursue what they perceive as the highest visibility and widest reaching influencer.
• Marketers should be driven by relevance: Your influencers need to be relevant to the conversation brands are interested in having.

To help shed some light on the subject, Awareness Inc. put together a white paper, the 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital that gives marketers a framework for maximizing their social influence strategy by specifically, outlining steps to leverage both internal and external brand advocates. For even more fun, check out their social influence infographic.

The Three Keys to Influence

1. Tools and techniques for measuring your brand’s relationships in the social realm
2. The differences between internal and external influence and how to take advantage of each
3. Best practices for leveraging social capital

To download your copy of the full report, please visit Awareness, Inc.

Through their Employer Solutions Blog, Sage HRMS discusses and provides advice on various HR and payroll topics. Their latest post and infographic illustrates how employees are the most important component in the quest to improve business results.

Why are some companies thriving while others struggle to stay in business? What is the distinctive difference between a good company and a truly great company? The answers to these questions can only be found when looking at what defines the company: its people. The people that make up a company are that organization’s unique and biggest asset. For most businesses, the workforce is also its largest expense, or better put, its largest investment.

Employees are the most important component in the quest to improve business results. It makes sense to treat employee related expenses, like HR technology, as an investment in the workforce. Like any other investment, this critical company investment must yield a healthy return. Sage HRMS calls it the Return on Employee Investment™ or ROEI™.

Sage HRMS is a market leader in HR, payroll, recruiting, training, benefits, attendance, compliance, and employee self service solutions. To learn more visit Sage HRMS.

This post was originally published by CallMe! IQ, the online resource for Human Capital issues facing the Call Center and Business Process Outsourcing industries. The original post: High Cost of Employee Dis-engagement. While this particular post is geared towards call center employees, there’s great information, action plan and case studies that apply across all functional areas.

The business case for employee engagement is often couched in terms of effort and performance.  Highly engaged employees are willing to invest more of themselves in their jobs, give more discretionary effort, and go that extra mile when needed.  The costs associated with disengagement stem from two factors:  turnover, and lost productivity.  The disengaged are between 3-5 times more likely to leave the company than your average employee.  The Corporate Leadership Council found that disengaged employees have a 23% probability of turnover within 12 months, compared to less than a 1% probability among highly engaged employees.  Think about what that means in the context of a 1,000-seat call center.  Assuming an average 15% population of disengaged employees, 35 are likely to leave in the next year simply as a factor of disengagement.  That amounts to roughly $158,000 in turnover costs alone.

But much more disturbing are the costs associated with disengaged employees that stay with our companies.  Their effect on lost productivity can be a silent killer.  Intuitively, we might feel that disengaged employees just aren’t as productive:  less innovation, less follow-up, higher absenteeism, etc.  However, the data is clear.  Disengaged employees cost their employers on average 46% of their salaries in lost productivity.

If you care about sales or customer service levels, then you should care about how your agents feel about their job.  For this reason, many call centers are turning their attention to employee engagement.  In our most recent study of nearly 120 call center and BPO firms, we found that 76% of call centers conduct an employee survey to measure and improve engagement. Unfortunately, most managers then focus on the wrong group of employees for action.  The tendency is to try to maximize the number of highly-engaged in a call center.  But managing employees out of disengagement can be just as important to a company’s performance – sometimes even moreso.

If you imagine a distribution of employees by their engagement levels, you’d see a bell curve in almost every call center.  There are few highly engaged (around 15%), a few highly disengaged (also about 15%), and a whole lot more or less in the middle.  Most managers spend their time maintaining the percentage of highly engaged, and trying to migrate the middle (those “on the fence” about committing to the company) into that engaged category. They overlook the disengaged…and at their peril, because there is a real and heavy cost associated with this group.

In a recent study, Gallup found that 15% of US workers were disengaged and estimated that the lower productivity of disengaged workers cost the US economy approximately $328 billion. If you divide the lost productivity ($328 billion) by the number of disengaged employees (20.6 million), you get a per employee cost of $16,000.  That dollar figure is an average of all positions and levels, so convert it into a salary percentage by dividing it by the average median salary that same year according to the BLS (16,000/34,892 = 46%).

Let’s go back to that 1,000-seat call center.  Assuming the same 15% disengaged population and an average annual agent salary of $30k, disengagement costs that same call center $2.07 million on lost productivity in just one year.

The total costs of disengagement for that call center – including turnover and lost productivity – amount to $2.23 million.

So, given the high cost of disengagement, what can we do about it?  Here are 5 Tips for eliminating disengagement in your call center:

1. Create a Connection Between Work & Company Success – Employees’ commitment and effort increases when they feel their work is a part of something bigger than themselves.  Show agents how their daily work contributes to the vision and financial success of your company.
   Case Study:  Stryker Corporation uses business metrics as a vehicle to show the importance of employees’ jobs.  Team leaders explain business metrics, show employees hands-on how their work affects those metrics, and hold team meetings to discuss metrics and how they can be improved.  Employees own a monthly presentation to executives where they are responsible for reviewing metric performance.  As a result, Stryker consistently measured in the top percentiles on Gallup’s Q12 engagement questions.⁵
2. Show a Commitment to Employee Development – Engagement is a two-way street.  If you want employees to commit to the organization, show that the organization is committed to its employees through a visible (and actionable) career development program.  The Corporate Leadership Council found that effective career advisors increased engagement levels by over 35%.
   Case Study:  First USA created a culture of development by increasing the awareness of potential career opportunities, facilitating new roles, and balancing development with business needs.  Call centers held career development workshops each month to identify capability gaps and begin development planning.  Employees had to meet eligibility criteria to participate, and sessions were scheduled around times with low call volumes.  Each call center also facilitated onsite developmental rotations, and built a “Career Resource Center” on the floor that was always open with resources, tools, and space for workshops.  As a result, employee satisfaction scores increased 25% and staff retention increased by 39% (leading to replacement cost savings of $1.5 million).
3. Ask for Employee Feedback and Ideas – Call center teams want to do more than work, they want to contribute.  Employees have intimate knowledge about the business – especially about sales pipelines, customers, and internal processes.  Their honest feedback can revolutionize performance and lead to innovation.  You just have to ask.  Go beyond the “comment box” and have a genuine and honest conversation with your team.  You both deserve that level of respect.
4. Set Expectations about Performance – Employee engagement increases substantially when employees have a clear understanding of their job and how they will be measured.  Clearly define job expectations, establish clear and measurable performance criteria, break down any projects into manageable components, and ensure employees understand the purpose of their work.  Teams just want to know the rules of the game and have clarity about how to succeed.  If you provide that, their commitment will rise (by over 36%!)
5. Establish a Clear Value Proposition – Employee engagement is built on a level of respect between the employee and employer.  Without that respect, the employee can never fully commit to the company.  Build a foundation of respect by establishing a clear value proposition that details the job environment that you will and won’t provide as an employer.
   Case Study:  Wendy’s uses employee feedback to create a series of guidelines (employment “promises”) that engages and retains both frontline employees and managers.  Wendy’s conducted focus groups with employees and managers to identify factors affecting job satisfaction (quality of interview, quality of onboarding, quality of scheduling, etc.).  They consolidated the feedback into a series of “employment promises” to its hourly employees, and provide managers with training and support to ensure these promises are delivered every day.  As a result, hourly employee turnover decreased by 25% and manager turnover decreased by 45%.

IBM’s goal is to promote the vision of social business by embedding it into the digital activities and everyday thinking of employees. The challenge is to inspire already technically savvy and digitally motivated employees to become ‘digital citizens’, enthuse them about the value social media can add and motivate them to start exploring the online world.

With this objective in mind, IBM BeNeLux enlisted the aid of global marketing agency, Ketchum Pleon, to help them transition from not just doing social media, but to transform  their daily business through social technologies. A pool of best technical minds and leading innovators – who believe in building a smarter planet – decided to move IBM and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration they call Social Business.

IBM BeNeLux’s Social Business is based on three leading principles that challenge existing conventions in communications and Social Media:

1. They don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID, because they wanted ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID.
2. They represent their brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first.
3. Their brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.

Objectives

1. Support change program that radically transforms how IBMers sell their expertise and solutions – going beyond social media towards social business
2. Bridge communications and sales enablement
3. Transform IBMers into ‘Social Business Ambassadors’
4. Motivate IBMers to become responsible for their own digital reputation

Strategy

Imagine an IBM room full of technical minds, sales specialists and leading innovators. All 300 of them. A room full of energy, where drive and motivation go hand in hand with deep rooted thinking and a common belief what the brand experience for IBM stands for – an experience with an IBMer. But can 300+ of technically savvy and motivated IBMers go even further and be challenged and inspired to become true ‘Social Business Ambassadors’ for IBM?

PR activity involved hand-picking 300+ employees from various business lines across IBM, enrolling them in the ‘From Social Media to Social Business’ program, which included communications and personal branding trainings. We positioned them as ambassadors for the IBM social business giving them different roles of i.e. expert locator, social aggregator, or social business manager. Their progress as ‘Social Business Ambassadors’ was charted on their personal dashboards during training and individual coaching. To help them see the impact of their various interactions, we followed up the trainings with one-to-one sessions, co-creating stories on various topics that we pitched after to several online media and generate wide online coverage.

Campaign

‘From Social Media to Social Business’ campaign challenged IBMers to become more enthused about their social and digital interactions. Ketchum Pleon’s mission was to transform them into ‘Social Ambassadors’, by:

• Handpicking and training a pool of inspired and motivated IBMers – the social business brand ambassadors, who are skilled in their personal branding, own messaging, and personal roadmap to engage on social media, and to reach out to traditional media, and who are able to combine these elements in their sales / client contacts
• Creating and implementing a suite of communications and sales enablement training programs that combined sales enablement, social media, presentation skills, and personal branding
• Organizing a crisis communication training for the ‘advanced ambassadors’ (real life situation) involving social media (one tweet about the situation leads to a trending topic on Twitter – the message spreads across several (online) media, press is waiting for a statement from IBM – a TV- and a radio interview with IBM’s communication team are simulated)
• Co-developing Social Media Strategies for different business lines
• Co-creating campaigns highly integrated with the Social Media culture;
• Co-managing IBM’s online communities;
• Deploying Social Media for reaching their Internal Publics.
• Charting the results of progress of ‘Social Business Ambassadors’ on their personal dashboard charts and helping them see the impact of their various interactions online
• Giving rise to an active pool of more than Benelux IBMers who are active on at least one of the Social Business platforms, and who share their expertise and experience with peers and clients via Digital Labs on daily basis
• Making sure that all programs are dedicated to the success of every IBM client, communicating about innovation, topic at the heart of IBM, and by helping to build trust and personal responsibility in all relationships online and offline

Results

• IBMers have in-dept platform knowledge and know how to collaborate with and use every type of media.
• IBMers are able to create hands-on messaging and know how to use media to bring their message across their target groups.
• IBMers know their tone of voice and how to control their body language so it can strengthen their message when talking to media.
• IBMers are aware of the role they should take in several situations (e.g. crisis) and know they are always seen as the spokesperson.
• Benelux IBMers now have an in-dept platform knowledge and know how to collaborate with and use every type of media; they are able to create hands-on messaging and know how to use media to bring their message across their target groups; they know their tone of voice and how to control their body language so it can strengthen their message when talking to media.

So, did IBM BeNeLux succeed in turning its sales and technical staff into true social ambassadors for IBM’s social business? Yes, they did…and not only that. The newly appointed ‘Social Business Ambassadors’ also passed their knowledge and enthusiasm along, training their peers. Out of 7,000 IBM BeNeLux employees, 200 are engaged and connected to clients and partners through mobile experience and the new IBM way of collaboration – through social business.

Original source: Social Business at IBM, The Holmes Report

Original source: The Daily Infographic

Communication is the process of conveying information. Almost all species have some sort of communication system. However, successful communication is the trait that has made humans the most successful species.

This infographic shows a timescale of how communication has evolved over time. It’s hard to imagine communication long before the hustle and bustle of email and text messaging. Technological communication has grown exponentially, leaving snail mail to be a thing of the past.

Facebook and Twitter is the most popular form of communication right now. These social giants are changing the game of communication. Today’s communication seems to only be in the form of short spurts with hashtags or tagging. Social media has taken the complexity out of communication, it is no longer organic, but short and to the point.

Today’s style of communication represents the direction society and technology are headed — towards a more efficient form of communication.

Note: We’re excited to have this guest post by Brad Shorr, Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North. See Brad’s bio at the end of the article.

We tend to think of social media as a set of marketing tools. But a social strategy focused on employees is an option well worth considering.  The human resources approach is particularly applicable in these four corporate environments.

1. When employees are scattered across multiple geographic locations and have few opportunities to interact.
2. When employees attend conventions, seminars, and other corporate events on a regular basis.
3. When employees already use social media and are eager to use it for business purposes as well.
4. When management is interested in using social media for marketing purposes but is unsure about how to proceed.

Using External Social Media Platforms for Engagement

Information Sharing, Knowledge Building, Relationship Building

In the first situation, when employees are scattered geographically, networks such as Facebook and Google+ are extremely useful for sharing photos and managing and archiving discussions. Both networks are also effective for scheduled or impromptu meetings: Google+ “Hangouts,” designed for video chat for groups up to 10 people, seems especially well suited for this type of engagement, since access is private. Types of information that are often shared by employees through social media include –

• Photos from and commentary on company outings
• Discussion of industry news and trends
• Announcements of awards and honors earned by employees

There are advantages of using public networks for these activities. First, access is easy and available to any employee with an Internet connection. Second, if employees are participating in social media or curious about it, they will be more apt to use it over company Internet portals intended for similar purposes. Third, social networks have an inherent “fun factor” that encourages experimentation and engagement. Many companies struggle to keep employees off social sites, when they could instead channel their activity productively.

Event Communication Hubs

In the second situation, when employees attend multiple events, social networks offer efficiency and a host of practical, tactical benefits. Twitter is widely used by seminar attendees to share presentation highlights with the outside world in short, 140-character bursts. Using hashtags, seminar tweets are easy to find either in real time or after the event.

Facebook makes a convenient, all-purpose communication hub for conventions. Where should we meet for dinner? What booths should we visit? Where is the ABC Co. reception being held? What were the highlights from today’s session? Can I see a picture of that new XYZ gizmo? Questions like these can be answered and shared with a great deal of efficiency.

Thank mobile technology for making these on-the-go applications of social media easier and more powerful than ever. I can’t speak for all devices and apps, but I do know that the iPhone/iPad Facebook app and the HootSuite Twitter app are child’s play.

Tapping Hidden Human Resources

In the third situation, where employees are eager to use social media, companies enjoy an immediate boost in morale simply by facilitating the effort. But this immediate gratification is only the beginning. As with just about any other aspect of corporate activity, employees bring great new ideas and energy to the table if they’re encouraged to do so. This fact of business life becomes critically important when …

Laying the Groundwork for Marketing Success

In the fourth situation, when companies are doubtful about social media marketing, starting with an employee focus is a fabulous way to test the waters and lay the groundwork for future, outward-oriented efforts, an approach that is both bold and conservative: bold, because it empowers employees to create, execute and refine their own program within the organization; conservative, because it eliminates the need of hiring outside resources or staffing a new department.

For the most part, the activities I’ve been describing can be easily transitioned from inward focus to outward focus. A scheduled Facebook discussion can be extended to customers without changing the way it is handled. Twitter commentary on a seminar can be promoted among customers as well as employees. And certainly, logistics management and information sharing at an industry convention will be just as useful to customers and suppliers as attendees.

However, since the methods of executing these activities have been tested and refined internally, customers, vendors and external stakeholders are only engaged in a firm’s social media presence after it has been refined to a great extent. This alone makes it a reliable process for developing a winning social marketing program.

Examples: Don’t Forget to Have Fun

Social media can and should mix a little pleasure with a lot of business. From a morale-building standpoint, this is a good thing to remember and something that distinguishes social from most other communication media. Here are a couple of examples that illustrate the point.

Simple, Spontaneous Contests

Our agency recently had a run on shaved heads, so we decided to have a little fun with it and post a little blurb on Facebook and Google+:

This took all of about 15 minutes to set up, write and publish, and we did it mainly for the benefit of our staff, since it had become something of a running joke. That said, nothing here would be offensive to clients who visit our Facebook or Google+ page, and we did manage to tie in a business theme.

Getting to Know People

A better example is something I noticed the Content Marketing Institute doing on Google+. They are running a series of mini-profiles of employees, done in a lighthearted, social media-friendly style:

This profile would be interesting to any of Robert’s coworkers, whether or not they already know him well. And I think it conveys a positive and probably very accurate impression of the character of the organization. Again, a little fun and a lot of business serve morale and the bottom line.

I know I’m dating myself, but I still get a little faint when I think of the scene in Dirty Dancing where Patrick Swayze comes into the room, finds Baby and says “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” Although often overshadowed and overlooked, she was integral in executing the talent show, where she brought together the entertainment staff and the resort guests.

I can’t help but think that HR is often placed in the same role as Baby. Human Resources, the ambiguous partner to marketing and communications,  has always been a point of some confusion, as companies struggle to discover the best ways in which to utilize such a vague, although invaluable, function. I came across a post by compareHRIS.com which illustrates the need for HR to take action in not only conceiving but in actually implementing strategy, and offers a fantastic guide to help HR professionals in doing so.

In recent years, HR has proven itself especially useful in the innovative development of organizational strategy. The time has come, however, for Human Resource professionals to push past the strategy-development phase and put their plans into action. The implementation of strategy is a key element of business success, and HR authorities are uniquely positioned to pioneer the realization of such strategies.

Strategy, in order to be effective, must naturally be implemented. If a business is to change, people must drive the wheels of that change, and that is where HR’s true role comes into play. Regardless of an organization’s size, function, or ambition, there are certain steps to be taken which are all but essential to the implementation process.

Leaping the Hurdles of Change

Before HR professionals can work to implement strategy, they must first ascertain what obstacles presently exist to prevent the desired changes from occurring in their organization. HR can preempt many of their potential battles by anticipating and addressing some of the problems that will likely arise. As a general rule of thumb, there are five basic causes for strategy implementation failure, and from these causes stem ten or so foreseeable hurdles that HR management must endeavor to overcome. The core causes and their related issues are as follows:

Cause #1: Poor Coordination Within Management
1. Incongruous goals, opinions, and policies among upper-level executives can obstruct the cross-system cooperation required by the strategy.

Cause #2: Employees Aren’t Buying In
2. Employees within the company do not understand the strategy.
3. Employees feel no personal responsibility to fulfill the strategy. It’s possible they may feel that their efforts will be inconsequential in actually bringing about a change, or perhaps they are contemptuous of management.
4. Employees are impassive towards the execution of the strategy, and exert no enthusiasm in taking part.
5. Employees are uninspired by the overarching goals of the strategy.

Cause #3: Inadequate Change Within the Work Unit
6. Managers fail to direct the efforts of their work units towards conforming with the new strategy.
7. Managers’ styles and tactics undermine employee enthusiasm about the strategy.
8. Work proceeds as usual even within those units which the strategy requires to exhibit swift and considerable change.

Cause #4: Weak Inter-Departmental Collaboration
 9. There are insufficient processes employed to advance the collaboration between different operating and functional areas.

Cause #5: There Exists No Measurement of Progress
10. A method of measuring progress towards the desired goals is either deficient or else entirely absent. It is difficult, if not impossible, to tell what exactly is changing.

In order to establish which of these barriers to change will pose the most difficulty within a given organization, consider the following questions:

- “Which of these problems will most directly affect the achievement of our goals?”
- “If these problems persist, what kinds of challenges could result?”
- “If these problems are removed or reduced, what quantifiable business benefits will be yielded?”
- “Which of these problems comprises the most immediate, pressing issue?”
- “How can HR work to address these problems?”

In order to effectively implement strategy, HR leaders must take a proactive role in seeking out and carefully eradicating these various obstacles to change.

Strategy Implementation as a Social Issue

The art of strategy implementation is a symphony in three parts: the technical system, the business system, and the social system. The majority of management teams do a swell job of dovetailing their business processes with the newly-established strategy, and the benefits of cutting-edge technology typically fall into place – but the marriage of social system and strategy is far too often a rocky one. The human resource is fickle and complex, difficult to understand and, as a consequence, difficult to successfully manage. By working to improve human interactions, HR will, by extension, be working to improve the actual execution and use of the more straightforward technology and business processes.

The Four Key Jobs of HR

From a big-picture perspective, there are four vital tasks that all businesses must accomplish. These four jobs, when properly fulfilled, add up to the bare-bones work of strategy implementation, and they are:

1. Helping employees to understand the strategy.
Not only must employees understand the strategic direction itself, they must also comprehend the reason for the strategy, as well as the driving forces behind it. Employees are the cogs around which the gears of business turn. If the employees don’t understand where the strategy is headed, they will be incapable of realizing their full potential in aiding the strategy implementation.

2. Augmenting employee commitment to the strategy.
Changes in strategy mean changes for people on an individual level, and individual change tends to mean frustration, disappointment, and challenge. If an employee is going to put in any extra effort towards propelling a conceived strategy to fruition, he must genuinely be given to believe that, in the long run, the end product will be worth the difficult sacrifices made in order to implement the strategy.

3. Streamlining local effort with the strategy.
Though invariably all employees must be on board for understanding and committing to the strategy, this in and of itself is not enough. Implementing a strategy means legitimately changing work production. In order to achieve the business strategy, all off-strategy work must terminate and all on-strategy work must proceed with renewed urgency and dedication.

4. Inducing cross-system cooperation.
The final and most important step in strategy implementation is that of realigning departmental relationships within the system. Implementing strategy means carving deeper relationships between inter-dependent organizational units, such as sales and manufacturing, or customer service and distribution. This last job is as challenging as it is critical, because it demands that employees within discrete work units learn to share and interact across the traditional boundaries of their job descriptions.

This system of change as organized into four jobs is rather unique among most designs for strategic HR. Where many plans focus in on how HR can appeal to, motivate, and enrich the contribution of the individual, the Four Jobs system recognizes the work that must be done on all three tiers of organization, from the individual to the work unit to the department as a whole. Implementation of strategy is an all-encompassing procedure, demanding change at all levels of the business’s social system.

Having established that these four jobs form the core work of strategy implementation, the question now remains: exactly whose work is it? Certainly HR has a necessary role in helping the business to address each of these jobs, but it is not the place of HR to carry them all out. HR should follow its own initiative to complete those tasks it can, and a solid partnership with the executive line will see to the rest. Put simply, HR must establish itself as the driving force behind the strategy implementation effort.

Just think of Baby. She didn’t belong in the corner and neither does HR!

Original article: Human Resources Strategy Implementation, compareHRIS.com

When I present social business as my passion, the typical listener assumes I’m talking about Yammer, Facebook or Sharepoint. It’s interesting to see how they can easily confuse social platforms as the same as being a social business. But it’s not.

It’s easy to become distracted by shiny, new tools and platforms, but these are just delivery channels. As I’ve learned, and I’m sure as you have as well (if you’re reading this post), being a social business is so much more than that. Social within a business may have began with Marketing and IT, but let’s face it… we’ve reached a point where it’s clear that Human Resources is the GLUE in creating social programs that are not only relevant and adoptable to employees, but ones that transform your organization and its culture. If you’re truly looking to transform your organization through social tools, then your purpose should be based on the human ingredients necessary to drive that change: employees.

I emphatically believe that a social workplace considers employee behavior in order to create a truly collaborative and  integrated social experience. HR is critical in understanding the needs of your employees so that social tools enable them to be productive, communicative, and engaged in their daily work life.

Your roadmap to accomplishing this is through the employee life cycle.

Whether your employees are onboarding, developing or growing their talent, maintaining status quo, or separating, they are all somewhere within that employee life cycle and have unique needs. What involving HR and basing social programs on the employee life cycle provides:

- Connect with real work goals and processes
- Focus on improving performance
- Involve people who have the power to take action regarding these goals
- Balance employee actions with business context
- Increase employee capacity, productivity and recognition
- Focus on learning about learning, in settings that are collaborative and relevant

Ways Social Can Be Infused into the Employee Lifecycle

The base camps for the employee lifecycle can vary based on your organization’s needs and objectives. What I’ve outlined below are  based on the base camps I’ve developed for organizations. Oh, and to help illustrate the points below, I’ve also created this shiny infographic for you. Feel free to download, share and use.

Attraction

• Reputation and Brand – Somewhere a conversation is taking place that will effect your reputation as an employer. At a minimum, you should be listening to the social conversation to mitigate brand risk but ideally you would be contributing value to the conversation stream as well.
• Talent Communities – Create talent communities to connect and develop job seekers and at the same as you share insight into your corporate culture. When implemented thoughtfully, these can become real communities rather than just socially sourced lists of names.

Recruitment

• Peer to Peer Recruitment – A key area that social really enables. Allows companies to use their own employees as brand advocates and give potential hires a unique perspective into the culture of the area of the company they are thinking of joining.
• LinkedIn overwhelmingly trumps Facebook, even though more candidates are looking to use it, and Twitter as the social network recruiters use to search for job candidates, but it’s on Twitter where a recruiter finds the most success as Twitter followers are three times more likely to apply to a job posting than a LinkedIn connection.
• Referral Schemes – Recruitment is dependent on referrals as a source for qualified candidates. Further develop and expand your current employee referral programs by tapping into the digital social and professional graphs of your employees and leverage their social connections.

Onboarding

• Role Specific Wikis – Maintain knowledge about particular business functions as living, breathing documents and enable employees to provide feedback to enhance subsequent user’s experiences.
• Experience Forums – New hires often have similar questions and concerns. Establish a  forum where they can reply to a question from another new hire with a solution.
• Knowledge Connection - Allow new hires and long time employees to contribute and share tacit knowledge around the ins and outs of being successful in a new role.
• Track Search Terms and  Refine – Save and analyze search terms. This will help to illustrate any large gaps in material that new hires are attempting to locate as they get started within the company.

Learning

• Promote Relationships — Extend virtual classrooms beyond the course time by allowing employees to connect before and after the course, creating a stronger social support system.
• Motivation through autonomy — Encourage autonomous, self-directed workers and learners by enabling just-in-time, fast, and targeted learning opportunities.
• Social learning creates a positive attitude toward learning, which leads to learning more efficiently.

Growth

• Goal Development – Permit  employees to solicit feedback from each other so they can set specific development goals that is collected via peer review.
• Idea Generation – Foster  innovation that have acknowledged results. Create a portal where employees can submit ideas, where peers vote on the submissions, and, most importantly, have your executive leadership review the ones that have been voted to the top. Moreover, seek to IMPLEMENT the ideas that are most viable. Employees will stop submitting ideas if they feel that they will never come to fruition.
• Peer Development Groups -  Connect employees on similar development plans so they can encourage and support one another. In doing so, you will promote leadership.

Retention

• Social Recognition –  Remove isolated recognition experiences by allowing employees to be recognized by their managers and peers on platforms where such recognition can be shared among other portals and social collaboration platforms.
• Social Performance — Give employees a way to track how their actions impact overall company performance and help them meet their (and their team’s) shared objectives.

Separation

• Exit Interviews and Feedback – Establish a dignified exit process by soliciting genuine feedback.
• Known Talent Pool – Use retired employees as an excellent project-based, flexible source of experience.
• Employee Referrals – Candidates referred by former employees are pre-screened candidates and tend to fit the companies needs.
• Alumni Community – Keep in touch with employees who already know your business. As they increase their skill sets, they become a talent pool worth tracking.

I’m not going deny it… I’m quite fond of the folks at Awareness Inc. Not just because they afforded me the awesome opportunity of personally visiting and meeting the folks running the  Super Bowl Social Media Command Center, but because they also put together some phenomenal reports (see the State of Social Media Marketing).

In their most recent whitepaper, they explore something nearer and dearer to my own passion: engagement.

“Engagement” is a hot word these days but what does it really mean? Why is it important? How do you drive it? How do choices such as the day and time of a post affect interaction with content, engagement and loyalty? This paper explores those questions, citing research and comments by social media marketing thought leaders, and drawing on a recently completed analysis of aggregate data collected across all Awareness, Inc. clients, including more than 250,000 posts published to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and WordPress, and the 31+ million interactions on those posts over the course of 2011.

The result is an insightful whitepaper, Social Engagement: How to Crack the Code of Social Interaction, which shows how content performs in the social sphere and how marketers can get the most from each post.

But I love this report not just because it’s applicable to external engagement, but to how we engage with internal audiences as well.

What Social Engagement Provides

AMPLIFICATION: Engaged fans help spread your message within their social network.As they do, posts gain credibility and expand reach. A May 2009 study by Knowledge Networks found that between 10 and 24 percent of U.S. social media users turned to social networks when making purchase decisions. A survey report by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research, “Why Social Media Matters to Your Business,” found that fans and followers of a brand or company were more likely to recommend that brand or company (60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers).

BRAND LOYALTY: Engagement also affects existing customers by improving the chances they will become repeat customers.

Nearly half (49 percent) of the Facebook fans studied by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research in the study previously mentioned reported that they had become fans because they were already customers. Further, more than half of people who had engaged with a brand or company in social channels said they were more likely to buy (51 percent of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers) than they were before they became a fan/follower.

CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS: Customers now expect to engage via social channels to ask product questions, give positive and negative feedback, get customer service and to simply share enthusiasm. This expectation is evident in comments by respondents to the Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research survey report. The report asked what it says about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter; survey respondents indicated companies and brands are now conspicuous if they have no presence on social channels. “You doubt their relevance in today’s marketplace,” said one consumer.

Similarly, brands that do not have a social presence risk alienating certain demographics. “Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure,” said another consumer.

AMPLIFICATION: Engaged fans help spread your message within their social network.As they do, posts gain credibility and expand reach.

A May 2009 study by Knowledge Networks found that between 10 and 24 percent of U.S. social media users turned to social networks when making purchase decisions.

A survey report by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research, “Why Social Media Matters to Your Business,” found that fans and followers of a brand or company were more likely to recommend that brand or company (60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers).

EDGERANK: “Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm … is the key to effectively managing content on Facebook for deeper and more meaningful engagement,” Taulbee Jackson, president and chief executive officer at digital media agency Raidious, told Awareness in an interview for our “2012 Social Marketing & New Media Predictions” white paper. EdgeRank strongly favors content with engagement.

As a marketer, or as someone who seeks to engage any audience, you need to know which publishing variables drive meaningful engagement. And  should be able to answer:

• What day of the week has the highest post volume?
• What day of the week has the highest interaction rate?
• What day of the week has the highest number of interactions per post?

Engagement is the enduring effect of content to motivate an audience to do something; motivate your audience with data proven best practices. Visit Awareness Inc to download Social Engagement: How to Crack the Code of Social Interaction.