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. 10 Ways to Attract Employees to Your Intranet | Article | Social Media
2. Insights from Insidedge: Intranet 2.0 Increases Employee Engagement
3. The Best Heuristic Intranet Review Toolkit for Any Intranet Manager

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. 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
2. IKEA’s New Intranet Model Enables Collaboration & Community
3. Tools for Showing Monetary Benefits to Social Media ROI

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. The Four Stages of a Typical Twitter User
2. Twitter Reverses Policy Change, For Now. Here’s How It Works
3. Six Tips for Using Twitter as a Recruitment Tool

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. Using Social Media to Deputize Employees as Brand Managers
3. Hi Corporate. It’s me, Social Media. Your Newest Employee.

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. Trends on Mobile Social Computing: Business Anytime, Anywhere
2. Getting Internal Communications to Work with Social Media
3. Communicate with Employees through Social Media

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

Original Post: Social Media and the Internal Brand

Here’s my take on why companies are using social media internally:

1. To inform employees. In its most straightforward way, social media can be just another medium to communicate and inform employees. Blogs in which departments inform their staff, a newsletter with options for employees to give comments, twitter as a micro instant communication channel to employees.

2. To create a shared vision. This takes internal communication to the next level. Using social media to engage with your employees with the objective to embed the company’s mission, vision and values. A CEO internal blog in which he discusses the vision, seeks feedback for improvement and explains how staff can become internal brand ambassadors.

3. To increase productivity. This is all about using social media as a collaboration tool. Social media helps bringing documents, people and planning together. in the form of sharing documents, sharing feedback and synchronising project tasks.

4. To engage employees. Engaging in open conversations is the essence of social media. Like companies are opening themselves to their clients, with using social media for internal communications, management are opening themselves for their employees. Which means that employees are enabled to talk about how they feel, what they like to do and how they like to work together. Management has to actively engage in these discussions.

5. To support the strategy. Bringing all of the above together, using social media for internal communications should ultimately drive the implementation of the company’s strategy. Which can be measured in terms of revenue, cost reduction, profit or market share. This means that implementation of an internal social media programme follows the same steps as an external programme. Who am I targeting, how can I group them, what content is relevant for them, what social media tools do I use, how do I engage with them and how do I measure the effectiveness.

By using social media internally, companies open up their brand as much as they use it externally. By engaging with their employees, management can make the mission, vision and brand values come to life. Which in turn transforms employees in brand ambassadors. A role which they will take when talking to stakeholders outside the company. That’s why it is important to bring all social media activity together in the company’s social media hub. An internal website, or network of web site, that employees can go to to share, publish and engage and giving them access to all the social media tools the company makes available.

Finally, by using social media internally, companies can start to learn the concepts of content creation, sharing and engagement, in a “protected” environment. And when they feel confident, they can then leverage their experiences externally and use social media to engage with their customers.

Related posts:

1. Why Including Employees in Brand Management is Important
2. Living the Brand: Developing an Internal Branding Campaign (Part 2)
3. Insights from Insidedge: Intranet 2.0 Increases Employee Engagement

If you are a social media strategist, below is social media strategy diagram that you will find extremely useful.  Posted by Marc Campman on the Marketing 2.0 network (but originally developed by David J. Carr), it groups the development and roll out of a social media strategy in four distinct phases.

click diagram to open high res version in new window.

Phase 1: LISTEN. In this phase you have to define your key stakeholders and listen to what they are doing on the web and social arena. Its just like real marketing. Who is your target market, and what do they need. The only difference now is that standard market research won’t do the trick. You now have to find the online places where they are and listen to what they are saying. About you, your product, your service, the market etc.

Phase 2: UNDERSTAND. Again, marketing 101. But with a slight difference. Now that you have identified them and grouped them in what David calls tribes, you have to give them something they belong to. Something they can join. In social media terms this is called joining a community. Just like the real tribes do. And once you’ve done that you then feed the tribes with relevant and interesting objects. This is the content. This can be tools, widgets, apps, videos, photos, ideas, assets or any other content. As long as it is relevant to them.

Phase 3: ENGAGE. This is probably the most important phase of the roll out. Mingle with the tribes. Play their games, have conversations and connected experiences. But make sure you use their preferred platforms, their personalised pages, or the video and photo sharing sites they use. Even simple email can be effective in this stage. Its about enable, encourage and optimise for sharing the social objects created in the previous stage. If this is done properly, the content will be shared on Blogs and niche sites, will be replicated on other social networks and will ultimately drive the creation of communities and forums. In this phase, paid for media (Online ads, promo links or Google Adwords) can be used to stimulate further distribution of the content.

Phase 4: MEASURE, REACT & RESPOND. This phase is critical. This is where you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Whether you achieve the anticipated results. In Webjam we do this in three levels of sophistication. REACH, ENGAGEMENT, BRAND. From very simple traffic analysis, to community engagement and ultimately to brand sentiment analysis. This data can then be used as input to finetune the strategy and this makes it a vicious circle.

Read More: Marketing 2.0 Update 6 – Social Media Campaign Diagram

Related posts:

1. Include Your Employees in Your Social Media Strategy
2. Rolling Out a Social Media Strategy
3. Kodak’s Convergence Ripcurl is a Winning Social Media Strategy

I love how social media has made our world just a little smaller — bringing people together across the globe who might not have met otherwise. For business, one of the biggest and most under-realized advantages to integrating social networking tools  is that it humanizes a corporate workforce beyond just the typical four walls of a cubicle or office, and brings global colleagues and peers together to collaborate and communicate with each other who might not have otherwise known to use each other as resources. Without social networking tools, companies risk problems not being resolved, ideas becoming stagnant and employees feeling underutilized or underappreciated. So, if you’re a global company with a freak ton of employees spanned across the globe, perk up now … social networks are your next step to building a more collaborative, productive and HUMAN workforce.

A “networked company”: everything working everywhere. everyone working together.

Questions You Should be Asking

• How networked are your employees?
• How engaged are your employees?
• How do you bring them together?
• How do you bring down the silos and walls?
• How do you tap into and foster employee ideas and collaboration to propel business results?

Where Companies Can See the Benefit of Social Networking

• Cross-functional projects
• HR matters
• Standardized forms used daily by sales/service employees
• Collaboration among geographically dispersed employees
• To get all employees up to speed on new information quickly
• Providing employees with common answers to their questions
• Ensuring things explained in person are also in writing
• Enhancing member or customer communications
• Market research
• PR, industry recognition

[ source: Ways to Engage Employees Using Technology That Deliver ROI ]

What Social Networking Can Do for Your Company

Community and Collaboration

Social networks enable community building which is an essential part of employee engagement. Communities on social network sites generally fall into one of the following categories: ad hoc groups (e.g., clubs), project teams, or communities that are more formal, such as those recognized by management (e.g., professional practice areas or forums for company-sponsored programs). For cross-functional projects that involve key stakeholders spanning multiple organizations as well as continents, group collaboration through social networks is a great platform for document management, project updates and management.

“Collaboration is a very human characteristic. Many groups have a natural preference for defining themselves by working together peer-to-peer, rather than acting solely on commands from a higher level in a hierarchy. It is hardly surprising that the tendency should be reflected in the commercial (or public good) enterprise, when a collaborative structure is feasible.” [ source: Collaboration through Web 2.0 ]

Conversation Streams

If you can’t have the physical watercooler, then having a social network provides a virtual one for your employees — connecting the workforce across the globe and providing a platform for realtime conversation and dialogue. Some companies, such as Oracle, have developed their own internal versions of Twitter.

“When employees update their status, they can also send tweets to their networks, groups. Each tweet that appears in the Activity Log includes a link to the tweet that opens in a new tab/window.  If you want to reply, you can click through to see the tweet and reply. Or you can share links to useful information, communicating info much more effectively (and less intrusively) than an email could.” [ source: Oracle’s Connect: Building Engagement with Internal Social Networks ]

Knowledge Share

Your company is full of in-house experts that are willing to share their expertise — in fact, I bet they’re dying to. Through social networking tools, you can allow each employee to create an “expertise profile” for themselves to identify their knowledge or skills on any number of topics. This should not be confused with your basic employee directory here… although, the two can, and probably should, leverage the same basic data. What we’re talking about is a place for employees to list bios, skills, interests and projects. These profiles would be searchable by other employees to find the matching “experts,” and allow them to reach out to that colleague and seek their guidance or recommendations.

User-Generated Tagging

To make knowledge sharing more effective, a good social network will allow employees to tag other individuals, links, documents or pages:

…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. 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. [ source: Who Knows What? ]

Idea Generation

Social networks are a great way to generate ideas from employees, make them feel valued and build a culture of innovation.

“By enabling communities to post, critique, collaborate on and refine ideas, companies are certain to reap the benefits of accelerated innovation. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.” [ source: What Enterprise Social Networks Do Well: Produce Higher Quality Ideas ]

Discussion Forum

Not only are discussion forums another great tool to drive participation, but they are also your next best thing to a corporate help desk. Having a place where employees can pose questions that can be answered in almost real-time by either other employees, or by moderators, is a fantastic way to make employees feel like their concerns or questions are being heard … and answered. When I think of my ideal discussion forum for business, I think along the lines of an internalized version of getsatisfaction.com.

Related posts:

1. IBM Makes Feeling Corporately-Networked an Achievable Challenge
2. Social Networking Goes to Work
3. Is Your Company Still Afraid of Adopting Social Media Internally?

It’ s really no longer a question of IF your company should establish social media guidelines  but rather WHEN will you create them. With the growing audience of social media users internally and externally, it would be to a company’s detriment to overlook community policies for their employees. If you haven’t realized the full impact of how social media can impact your company brand and marketing efforts, you should check out these 5 Social Media Disasters.

Some ideas on how to create a corporate social media policy:

1. Involve Stakeholders Throughout the Enterprise – Social media isn’t just for corporate communications. There are ample benefits for HR, sales, accounting, product development, executive and operations. Involve these people early so you craft a policy that encourages innovation and reflects the strengths and limitations of those departments.
2. Set Aside “You Can’t Do That” Thinking – You’ve heard the mantras about “If you always do what you’ve always done…,” right? Social media is a new-ish approach to business. It enables new forms of collaboration, new approaches to problem-solving, and new ways to increase efficiency. “You can’t do that!” is our default response, a knee-jerk posture we instinctively deploy as a defense against discomfort. Hear it, recognize it, accept it, and set it aside. Then, proceed.
3. Acknowledge Today’s Paradigms, But Plan for Tomorrow’s – Don’t draft a policy that reflects how you’ve done business for the last 100 years. Instead, think about the next 100 years. Technology, cultures, and human behaviors change. Is your policy flexible enough to adapt as the world around you evolves?
4. Err Toward Innovation – Since the dawn of commerce, more companies have failed for lack of innovation than because of legal liabilities. Yes, be compliant with the law. Yes, know your risks. But there’s a difference between knowing your risks and deferring to them. Err to flexibility, toward encouraging new ideas and new models, and your people will astound you with their talents.
5. Know the Technology but Don’t Legislate For It – Many corporate social media policies are crafted in a vacuum, of sorts — that is, they’re written with an incomplete awareness of social media’s scope. A good policy starts with an awareness of social media’s breadth, accommodates the rapid evolution of the technology, and stays technology- or platform-neutral.

Other considerations:

1. Design a corporate social policy that is an amendment to your existing communications policy and ties in with your Intellectual Property and Business Conduct guidelines.
2. Educate and address your employee’s in an understanding fashion — don’t push your employees into a virtual corner (read the discussions surrounding WaPo’s guidelines) by attempting to stifle the conversation that is already flowing. Instead request that employees participate responsibly to drive innovation and dialogue.
3. Your employees are going to say what they want about your company no matter what, so acknowledge your employees worth and value as a blogger, contributor to the community and distinguish the difference between corporate and individual opinion online.
4. Recognize that social media is an ever-evolving medium. Don’t create a policy specific to a particular platform, instead it should be broader and address social community behavior overall.

Below is an excerpt from a recent Mashable post on some good corporate policies and what aspects of them are good to adopt in your own social media policy. Original post:  3 Great Social Media Policies to Steal From, Jennifer Van Grove (Mashable)

It’s smart business to have a social media policy, and lucky for you some of the biggest brands have already paved the way and published policies that you can emulate.

1. Kodak on Transparency

With such a big brand name at risk, Kodak could easily fear the social web, and yet they’ve chosen to embrace it, as well as share their learning and policies with the world.

The Kodak Social Media Tips document is available for download as a PDF and is a good read, especially for businesses just getting their feet wet. Their actual corporate policies start on page 10 and provide an educational, instructional, and digestible utility that employees can reference when in tricky situations. It reads like a guide book, making it much more approachable than a standard policy agreement.

What to steal: Transparency guidelines
Why? They’re simple, straightforward, and very clear on boundaries.
Text: Even when you are talking as an individual, people may perceive you to be talking on behalf of Kodak.  If you blog or discuss photography, printing or other topics related to a Kodak business, be upfront and explain that you work for Kodak; however, if you aren’t an official company spokesperson, add a disclaimer to the effect: “The opinions and positions expressed are my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Eastman Kodak Company.”

2. Intel on Moderation

Intel, a very active and social brand, has their social media guidelines published online. These policies apply to employees and contractors of Intel who use social media in any capacity.

They acknowledge their guidelines are dynamic in nature and will evolve as new trends and technologies are made available. They also clearly spell out what to think about when engaging in social forums and how to handle the sometimes sticky situation of content moderation.

What to steal: Moderation guidelines
Why? Intel does a good job at breaking down why bad or negative content should not be moderated unless it’s offensive .
Text: “The Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly. If the content is positive or negative and in context to the conversation, then we approve the content, regardless of whether it’s favorable or unfavorable to Intel. However if the content is ugly, offensive, denigrating and completely out of context, then we reject the content.”

3. IBM on Social Media Value

Considered innovators in the social media guidelines space, IBM was one of the first big companies to publish a social policy document and make it available to the public online.

The brand has tried and true social experiences, which makes their policies for IMBers read like best practices learned from real experience in the field.

What to steal: Add Value section
Why? They inspire IBMers to be thoughtful content creators on the web.
Text: “If it helps you, your coworkers, our clients or our partners to do their jobs and solve problems; if it helps to improve knowledge or skills; if it contributes directly or indirectly to the improvement of IBM’s products, processes and policies; if it builds a sense of community; or if it helps to promote IBM’s Values, then it is adding value. Though not directly business-related, background information you choose to share about yourself, such as information about your family or personal interests, may be useful in helping establish a relationship between you and your readers, but it is entirely your choice whether to share this information.”

Related posts:

1. Opposites Attract: Corporate Social Media Policy Guidelines
2. Using Social Media to Deputize Employees as Brand Managers
3. Is Your Company Still Afraid of Adopting Social Media Internally?

Original Post: How To: Establish A Social Media Culture In Your Company, Willis Wee

A strong social media culture is beneficial for any company. But for those who still need reasons:

(1) An aggregated effort by the entire company can greatly increase your company’s online presence. This essentially translates to free publicity.

(2) Being social media-ish, consumers tend to associate your company with words like ‘cool’, ‘fun’, ‘approachable’, ‘lighthearted’ and ‘friendly’. Now who doesn’t like to do business with someone like that?

(3) If implemented successfully, it keeps your company committed and better bonded as a team.

Below are 5 ideas to help you achieve these benefits.

1. The Basics: Official Blog, Twitter and Facebook

To be social media-ish, your company has to lead its people by example! The basic ingredients must be there: Blog + Twitter + Facebook Page. They will act as your social media “headquarters” and plant your company’s flag in the social media world.

Blog: Keep this open to all staff and allow them to write with few restrictions. Submission of original posts should be done by a blog team to keep the style consistent and have inappropriate material filtered. Keeping the blog post short and sweet is key.

Twitter & Facebook Page: Either the CEO or a dedicated social media person should take charge of the official accounts. This will avoid communication breakdown and help maintain consistency.

2. Create videos if possible

Try capturing random happenings in your company. A video tells us a lot about how staff feels about the company. Obviously, the focus should not be on your product. Catch this funny example by Zappos:

Does Zappos look funky and friendly to you? This should attract some potential employees and keep existing staff committed.

Oh and don’t forget to share your videos through your blog, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook page.

3. Get them to use Twitter

Getting your employees to use Twitter with (or without) a company designed background is a good strategy to establish your presence on social media. Also, the company naturally becomes a community where staff is comfortable to share and connect in.

This idea came from Zappos, which has a leader board to rank its employees according to the number of  followers they have.

With that said, don’t force your employees to be on Twitter. Let such activities be voluntary.

4. Let them tweet peacefully

It wouldn’t be called a social media culture if employees are banned from using it. Allow your employees to Facebook or Twitter at certain periods of time.

Even if you don’t, your employees are likely to use them secretly. So why not just give them the authority to do so openly? If they are not going to act like mature and responsible adults, why hire them in the first place?

5. Use social media business cards

Bring social media offline! Let your employees introduce themselves in a cool way by using social media business cards to connect with potential clients. If that doesn’t get them following you on Twitter or adding you as a friend on Facebook, I don’t know what will!

Related posts:

1. Tips for Establishing a Rock-Solid Corporate Culture on Twitter
2. Is Your Company Still Afraid of Adopting Social Media Internally?
3. Hi Corporate. It’s me, Social Media. Your Newest Employee.

I recently came across this post by Lawrence Liu called, Social Media and New Roles For Employees. It is a wonderful post regarding employee roles in social media, the importance of aligning with marketing so that employees understand go-to-market messaging, as well as some thoughts on being translucent as opposed to transparent. This post also ties very nicely in with Jeremiah Owang’s discussion on the five ways companies let employees participate in social media.

Dan Schawbel recently posted a blog entry with the same title and suggested the following social media oriented roles for employees to take on:

• Messenger: As an employee, you can hold our own viral campaign by tapping your fellow employees for support, enabling them with a sharable message and link, and then empower them to promote. Just like you, they have their own personal brand, with a following of friends that can carry your message to an even larger audience.
• Spokesperson: Social media has given rise to a world where anyone can become a spokesperson for their company, whether endorsed or not. There may be corporate policies in place that prevent you from being aggressive online, but as long as you are transparent and use common sense, your company should sanction your participation. Typically, employee bloggers have to cite a disclaimer on their blog, stating that “The views expressed on this site are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or its clients.” Even though you have a disclaimer, you still have to be a good corporate citizen!
• Supporter: You don’t have to be in customer service to aid your company. You’re already using social media tools to communicate, so why not respond when you come across a customer or potential customer who is looking for answers? It’s a great opportunity to foster a stronger relationship between you, them and your company.
• Salesperson: Employees, especially at companies that have reduced salaries due to the poor economy, should strive to find another revenue stream. One way this can be achieved is to actually bring in new business to your company, even if your current role has nothing to do with business development. Employees should describe what they do for their companies on their social networks and blogs, and then reach out to their network of potential buyers. People purchase based on trust and relationships, and since your employees have established this rapport for years, it only makes sense that they can help you close deals.
• Guardian: Brands, whether corporate, product or personal, are being mentioned online, whether you like it or not. Fortunately for companies, employees are already using these social networks for professional and personal motives. Employees can assist their companies by setting a comprehensive Google alert (google.com/alert) for their company’s name, in addition to their own. They can also perform Twitter searches to view any and all commentary that is taking place about their company.

While I agree with the characterization of these roles, I’d like to emphasize the important roles that Marketing (in particular, Product Management) and HR must play as critical success factors for a company’s social media strategy. Marketing must ensure that employees understand the key messages and positioning for a product or service before the employees start blogging or tweeting about it. Marketing also must provide a clear and consistent escalation path for employees to funnel or redirect questions that they cannot or should not answer directly. HR must provide employees with the appropriate level of social media training and update the Employee Handbook accordingly to reflect the dynamic and widespread nature of online communications in the Web 2.0 era. In the past, only official spokespeople needed communications training, but now, many more employees need similar training because their online presence and activities may be viewed as being representative of the company, regardless of their job titles or disclaimers, or what other (more official) employees might have stated. The ultimate objective for any corporate communication, via social media or other more traditional channels whether internal or external though especially the latter, should be clarity and consistency.

To that end, I strongly advocate the “Translucent” approach to social media over the “Transparent” mindset as described in a leaked internal blog entry from late 2006 by Steven Sinofsky, who is now the President of Microsoft’s Windows Division. In his blog entry, Steven uses the following rationale for being smartly translucent rather than being completely transparent:

The most important thing I believe we owe our shareholders and customers relative to how and what we communicate is that whatever communicate to people be accurate and truthful relative to the work we have going on. This does not mean free from ability to change down the road. It does not mean silence until the very last minute. What it does mean is that we should recognize the potential impact our communications can have on customers, partners, and our industry and we should treat folks with great respect because when we do disclose what we’re working on people pay attention-and they do more than listen as they make plans, spend money, or otherwise want to count on what we have to say. When we have to change our plans, modify what has been said, or retract/restate things we not only look like we don’t have our act together, but we cause real (tangible) pain to customers and partners.

And he goes on to describe what is essentially a Product Management driven communication process:

So our goal as an organization is to be much more thoughtful and considerate with what we disclose. Premature disclosure might make us feel like we were helping. Heck it might even make some customers and partners feel good, and some partners might even understand of the challenges we face in managing our projects. But on the whole it did not make Microsoft a good citizen of the ecosystem and it certainly did not make us good enterprise partners. Being thoughtful and considerate means we will be just as open and just as transparent about roadmaps and plans as we ever were (meaning the contents we disclose) but we are going to work to eliminate the premature disclosure that has low reliability and high error rates—we will have the right materials for enterprise customers, brief industry analysts, and work with partners all with valuable and timely information. Notice that these audiences are our customers and partners and that a non-goal is allowing the news cycle or needs of the press to drive disclosure timing and contents.

Just as we plan the software we will plan to disclose our work. It means that we will develop the messages (so expectations are correctly set), the supporting information (so all the details are there), and the overall communication plan (so we don’t leave anyone out). Product Management owns and drives this. In many ways this is their product deliverable. Just like we don’t want people running to demo a feature hot off a build machine, we don’t want to rush to disclose until we have these plans in place. Our PMG team is dedicated 100% of the time to communicating in a planful way this information to the Microsoft field, customers, partners, and the press. They are not perfect, but like all of us their strive to do their best, learn, and improve each turn of the crank. This is a key point which is that we are trying to be new and improved with respect to disclosure, and one thing we need to do is go out and make sure we set expectations on what new and improved means and how we will be working.

I know many folks think that this type of corporate “clamp down” on disclosure is “old school” and that in the age of corporate transparency we should be open all the time. Corporations are not really transparent. Corporations are translucent. All organizations have things that are visible and things that are not. Saying we want to be transparent overstates what we should or can do practically—we will share our plans in a thoughtful and constructive manner.

Related posts:

1. Insights from Insidedge: Intranet 2.0 Increases Employee Engagement
2. Leveraging Social Media in Employee Engagement
3. Dell Uses Social Media to Foster Employee Ideas and Engagement

Original Post: The Many Benefits of Social Network Recruiting: Making a Compelling Business Case

How do you convince cynical executives to fund a social network recruiting effort?

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Related posts:

1. Great Ideas for Improving the Candidate Experience on Your Careers Site
2. Cloud Recruiting: Phonecasting Becoming a Rising Trend
3. Shape Up The Nation (Case Study): How Social Networking works for a Corporate Wellness Program

Original Post: Teaching an Old Brand New Tricks, Marketing Sherpa

Good news: You don’t have to lose sight of your brand’s tried-and-true persona to participate in the quest for deeper engagement at the new social sites. Just think of the social-media generation as a silver-dish serving of people who already want to talk to you; you just need to make them feel comfortable doing it. Easier said than done? Not necessarily. Here are a couple of older brands that are getting it right:

Sharpie, well past pushin’ 40, managed to tap into an enthusiastic user culture in a way we’re pretty sure no other pen brand has. Its Sharpie Uncapped gallery enables fans far and wide to express, in vivid (and permanent!) color, how they incorporate the inky wonders into their creative undertakings.

Think about the number of years kids have been using Sharpies to scribble on jeans, decorate casts and prettify their Converse tennies. Now there’s a fun place to show all that off? Score!

Little Debbie, who first made the scene in the 1960s, is using flickr, Twitter, Facebook and blog outreach to promote a cupcake Share-a-Thon this fall. A series of Smart cars demonstrate Little Debbie’s commitment to the eco-cause, and are also outfitted like the cupcakes themselves. Thus far, the aging mark has done a tasty job of reminding fresh generations of its relevance.

Now, not all instances of successful social-media outreach are even intentional. Case in point: When gay couples were finally permitted to wed in Vermont, 31-year-old ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s celebrated by renaming its Chubby Hubby ice cream Hubby Hubby within the state. Thousands of blog posts and twitter updates later, they realized they had a winner.

How’d these old-timers manage to wow a fresh-faced crowd? At ad:tech Chicago this year, reps from Ben & Jerry’s and Sharpie said they felt social media was just in their DNA. That is to say, the key to winning hearts hasn’t changed with time or tech: It’s still about communicating a message in a relatable way.

The Po!nt: Don’t be social-shy. Let your target demo appropriate your product in ways you couldn’t have imagined—then help them spread the glee! Sure, it’s a scary proposition, but the payoff can be priceless.

Related posts:

1. Most Valuable Retail Brands of 2009