Social Media in Management

2008-09-01 | Filed Under blogging, careers, life, my career, social media |

CIO Magazine’s Sue Bushell has written an interesting article, called ‘Management 2.0? That’ll Be The Day‘, on the challenges that CIOs — and companies, in general — are facing with the advent of social media technologies in the workplace.

In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0

The name Gary Hamel will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has done any MBA and has studied the (frequently incorrectly-used) Core Competency concept.

The article is long but useful as it gives managers a lot to think about and hopefully look into:

Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.

This, by the way, is where someone like me would come in: I know both management (theory and practice) and technology (uses and implementations) and can help senior management come up with an implementation of social media that enhances project management, decision making, and internal communication and collaboration.

The trick is that social media integration in an enterprise needs to be a long-term project and not something you hire a consulting firm to do for you in a few weeks. It needs to grow experimentally, possibly slowly, and from the ground-up. And while it will probably change a number of times as it develops — which means it’s not something you can really plan for in advance — you can start with a few basic governance rules (who does what and what everyone is in responsible for), some content guidelines (that cover privacy, security, and intellectual property), and a simple usage policy (like the two-word “be careful” policy that is often a good start).

Speaking of governance…

Challenges of the Multi-Generational Workforce

The discussion on how to manage a multi-generational workforce — which is an issue for many managers these days — reminds me of a blog post on banning Facebook that Toby Ward wrote on the Intranet Blog about a month ago:

Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!

[…]

Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing “productive work.”

Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:

  • 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
  • A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
  • The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

Of course “consider leaving” doesn’t mean they actually will leave but it does mean that they probably won’t join your company in the first place. Especially if they announce your blanket banning policy on the Facebook group about your company that you didn’t know existed.

I know that I, for one, wouldn’t want to join a company that bans sites like Facebook or doesn’t let you blog, read blogs, pay your bills, read the news, check your e-mail, or basically have a life outside work while you’re at work. Limiting YouTube usage makes a little more sense since there’s a bandwidth cost associated with online video but, even then, it shouldn’t be banned outright.

As Ward said in his article, companies shouldn’t be taking the Taylorist approach to management. Of course you’ll get employees who’ll take 30 minutes to make themselves a cup of coffee or spend an hour on Facebook every now and then — but that’s okay as long as they (a) get their jobs done, (b) don’t stop others from getting their jobs done, and (c) don’t use-up too many freely-provided company resources (like bandwidth or, for that matter, coffee).

I guess all I can conclude with is that, with the advent of social media and the existence of a multi-generational workforce…well, the next five years are going to be really interesting

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

My Elevator Pitch & Unique Selling Proposition

2008-08-27 | Filed Under careers, my career |

As I wrote in my previous blog post, I met with another recruitment consultant from Hudson this morning.  In order to introduce myself to her, I did some work on my elevator pitch and further developed my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In fact, I typed all this up and and gave her a printout of it. And, since I’m applying for an Internet-related position and the best place to learn more about me is indeed online, I added a section on that too.

Here’s what I came up with:

(Extended) Elevator Pitch

Experience: Six years of experience in IT consulting and management, over five of which were spent in the strategic planning, technical development, business integration, and marketing of websites, web portals, intranets, and social media sites. Overall, eight years of work experience.

Training: MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (see list of courses in this blog post, which I also included in the printout).

Immediate career goals: A management or consulting role that involves the alignment of business and marketing strategy with online strategy. This could include the formulation (i.e. research and analysis), implementation (i.e. administration and management), or further development (i.e. testing and advancement) of such a strategy. An online strategy includes internal and external marketing and communications and the use of social media to communicate with stakeholders internally and across the value chain.

Unique Selling Proposition

Online

Comments?

So what do you think? Does that sum things up nicely?

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

Career Update

2008-08-27 | Filed Under careers, my career |

My contract job at Linfox finished recently (I’ll write more about that when I continue my MBA-at-work blog post series) so I spent the last week watching the Olympics (which was awesome). Now that I’ve had a nice break, I’m back to looking for jobs.

An Unsuccessful Job Application

Actually, I did interview for a job during my last week at Linfox — the recruitment consultants at Hudson are very efficient — but, after three rounds of interviews and reaching the final stage of the process (with just two candidates in the running) I didn’t get end up getting it.

This was unfortunate because it was a good job, at a good company, and I really liked the people I would have been working with. Oh well. Such is life.

The Silver Lining

It’s not all bad, though: this was only my second serious job application since completing the MBA — i.e. an application to a permanent position that I really wanted to get and could then see myself growing with over the following year or two — and, in both cases, I reached the final stage before being dropped. [More on my job application philosophy here]

What this means is that I have what it takes to do these kinds of jobs — that is, I have the ‘can do’, ‘will do’, and ‘fit’, as my interviewers from both companies told me — it’s just that one of the other applicants was more appropriate for that particular role at that particular time. In other words, that applicant’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was more suited to that role than mine was. In the job I just applied to, for example, the winning applicant had the marketing agency experience that the company wanted.

This is good: this means the company is paying very close attention to the people it is hiring and, when it happens that my USP is the most suitable for that role, that company, and that team, I’ll win out over the other applicants and will know that the company did it for all the right reasons.

Next Steps

So, what next? Well, the people at Hudson have me on their radar — in fact I met with another recruitment consultant of theirs this morning — so I expect to get a good lead from them (they’re very good at what they do). Hopefully that lead will come sooner rather than later.

Otherwise, I continue to look for jobs online and continue to network for openings in the hidden job market. Let’s see how things go. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know. Thanks.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

Online Community Compensation Study

2008-08-27 | Filed Under careers, my career, social media |

The Online Community Report just released its Online Community Compensation Study.

Most of the study’s key findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to people working in this space: the community team employs more women than men, most team members are between 31 and 50 years old, and most have over five years of work experience. However the compensation figures are a little higher than I expected at an average of US$81k (approximately AU$95k).

I also wasn’t expecting women to be earning 91% (on average) of what men are earning. Assuming that factors like experience, industry, average company salary, position in corporate hierarchy, department within the company, importance of community role for company, etc. have all been statistically removed from this analysis — and they probably haven’t all been removed — then the lower salary for women is most disappointing.

Meanwhile, the most heartening result from the study is, of course, the job satisfaction rating which is an average of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5 :)

FYI: OCR’s Key Resources blog post category is a great place to look if you want to start or further develop your online community.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

Social Media in the Enterprise

2008-08-20 | Filed Under social media |

Toby Ward writes on the Intranet Blog about a survey conducted by Robert Half Technology that found that over 70% of US CIOs don’t plan to use social media tools — such as blogs and wikis — in the next five years.

That number might sound a little daunting but, really, it isn’t.

Issues with the Survey Itself

Because these are aggregate numbers, they’re too generalized and don’t give us much information. In fact, they’re pretty useless: so what if 70% of US CIOs don’t plan to use social media in the next five years? What does that “70%” actually mean to you and me and to our company and its social media adoption decision? Not much.

A breakdown of the results by industry and company size would have been better…but even that wouldn’t have been enough. Had each social media tool included a follow-up question that asked “Why will you not be using this particular tool?” the survey may have been somewhat useful.

Also, “next five years” in technology or Internet time is ages! How can CIOs realistically predict whether or not they will be using a particular tool or technology five years from now? The question should have asked for a one-year prediction and the survey should then be conducted annually. Which is why Forrester’s surveys, or the annual Enterprise 2.0 survey conducted by McKinsey (which I wrote about earlier), are much more useful.

Issues with the Conclusion

That said, even the implicit conclusion — that most CIOs don’t see the benefits of social media in the enterprise — isn’t all that worrisome because true social media adoption rarely starts at the CIO level. More often that not, it’s bottom-up instead of top-down.

That is, employees first start to use social media on their own and among each other. Over time, the business begins to benefit from this. Once usage crosses a particular threshold — and the benefits become more obvious and more measurable — management (finally) realizes what’s going on and has social media (or just the particular tool in question) implemented across the entire organization.

This is pretty much the conclusion that Toby Ward reached as well. Read his complete post (with conclusion) on the Content Matters blog.

So What’s My Point?

Surveys like this provide neat sound bytes and are used as justification by senior management for not looking into social media.

So be careful when you talk to senior managers about social media usage and adoption in the enterprise: they usually don’t have a clue but, sometimes, they do have a little bit of knowledge (such as this survey) but turns out to be dangerous.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

Chris Brogan on Social Media

2008-08-16 | Filed Under blogging, social media |

Over the last couple of weeks, Chris Brogan has been writing a series of fantastic primer/best-advice blog posts about social media on his blog. Make sure you read them:

Oh, and here are a couple of more of his posts that are really good:

Awesome work, Chris! Thanks.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

CIO: Common IT Project Management Mistakes

2008-08-12 | Filed Under life |

CIO Magazine just published a really good article by Meridith Levinson called ‘Project Management: The 14 Most Common Mistakes IT Departments Make‘. It’s a good checklist to keep in mind no matter how good a project manager you are because there’s always the opportunity to do better. 

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | 3 Comments

McKinsey’s 2008 Social Media in the Enterprise Survey

2008-08-02 | Filed Under social media |

McKinsey recently published the results of its second annual survey of social media [1] usage in the enterprise: ‘Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results‘. (You need to register with the McKinsey Quarterly website to read the article, though).

The results, in one sentence, are encouraging: “Companies have adopted more Web 2.0 tools this year than in 2007 and are using them for higher-value purposes”. For a good overview of and commentary on the results, read Hadley Reynold’s article on this topic on the FASTForward blog.

[1] The term ‘Web 2.0′ is just plain silly. It’s like saying: “We now ship frozen food in refrigerated trucks via our road network so we should start calling it ‘Road 2.0′ because that’s an extension of what the network was originally created for. Regular warehouses are ‘Roads 1.0′ while refrigerated warehouses are ‘Roads 2.0′.” And so on.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | 1 Comment

Standard Format for Online CVs in Australia

2008-08-01 | Filed Under careers, social media |

ITWire’s Stan Beer reports that a number of Australian technology recruitment companies have signed on to make the iProfile their preferred CV template for candidates applying through them.

This sounds like an interesting idea and will probably make life easier for recruiters. I don’t know how it’ll work out for candidates, though. If candidates can retain their individuality despite the standard format — as the ‘The CV is Dead - Long Live the iProfile‘ video seems to indicate — then it should be okay. If not, it’ll commoditize them and that’s not good.

Since I haven’t actually seen the iProfile template — you can’t unless you sign up and they don’t have any samples you can view — I guess I’ll just have to wait and see (or, of course, sign up and take a look).

That said, the good thing about the iProfile standard is that a whole bunch of recruitment companies have signed up to work with it. Without that, it’d be no better than your standard Seek, LinkMe, or SixFigures online profile: good but maybe not as widely available as you’d want it to be. Also, the privacy and viewing controls that this system seems to have are really nice too.

More generally, I like the fact that this announcement evangelises the use of online CVs to the Australian recruitment industry. So while all recruitment agencies won’t be using the iProfile, maybe they’ll start to pay more attention to things like LinkedIn profiles and other social media attributes of their candidate pool. Here’s hoping.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | Leave a Comment

2008 List of Forms of Web Marketing by Jeremiah Owyang

2008-08-01 | Filed Under social media |

I meant to post this…well, months ago but I completely forgot. I found it in my Windows Live Writer’s draft posts lists this afternoon and figured that, even though I’m late, its’ still well worth posting.

Jeremiah Owyang maintains ‘A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing‘ which he updated for 2008:

This document catalogs the many tools and tactics available for corporate web strategy in 2008. Even if your strategy or resource limitations restrict you from entering all spaces, awareness of the changes in our digital landscape are critical. This document is intended for decision makers roles such as CMO/VP/Director of Web and Marketing.

It’s an awesome and hugely important list of, well, everything you need (or could possible want) to think about for web marketing. You must take a look at it.

Post Linx
Permalink | Trackback | | Print This Page | 2 Comments

« Previous Entries