Tag: Shine

  • Corporate Talk

    I’ve always maintained that social media has this uncanny way of stripping the veneer of most entities – be it people, products or organisations.

    At one point of time, Mouthshut used to be my preferred destination for user reviews. All the ads, all the DMs, and all the brand ambassadors would be collectively shown the door, if the user reviews declared the product a failure. Although, niche portals have taken away quite a bit of my dependence, I am still a user and so, was pleasantly surprised to know about the new section called Employers. (via AlooTechie) Yep, Mouthshut now allows users to review organisations that they’ve worked in, something like what Jobsnetwork.in has been doing, though that’s more a discussion board. Criticat seems to be doing this very well, though.

    But they’re not the only guys with this agenda. I also came across a site called Jobeehive, whose proposition is “Before making your next decision, see company reviews, salary and advice given directly by employee”.I wonder why a service like LinkedIn (hey, they got more funding recently) hasn’t gotten into this, though. It could be the social angle to the networking relationships that are the problem. The typical user would be connected with his ex-boss on the network, and would hesitate before giving a negative review of work conditions/ salaries/ experiences etc. Everyone loves un-burnt bridges, social media be damned!! 😉 Shine, the career portal from HT, also limited itself to salary tools, and hasn’t built a review feature. I guess there are somethings people don’t want to share, for everything else there’s social media. 🙂

    However, I live on the hope that transparency – in employees, and employers, will eventually become a reality. I read about a new service called BeenVerified, which helps employers verify candidate backgrounds. (via CenterNetworks) Meanwhile, in the last couple of months, the enterprise tools based on popular social media tools like Twitter have also been seen in the market. I’d written about Yammer earlier, the winner at TC50, and its premise of ‘Twitter for business’, and about a similar service, Present.ly. Later, Yammer also introduced Yammermail, you can read about it here. I also read about Co-op recently, which adds time tracking and project management to the ‘what are you working on’ feature. Smibsnet, seems to be on the same premise.

    But the most interesting service I came across has to be SocialText 3.0, which “applies next-generation Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses”. It seems to be a mashup of several web 2.0 entities like wikis, microblogging, Facebook, Friendfeed..and Twitter (as SocialText Signals) So it allows people to describe themselves, subscribe to others’ activity streams, edit information streams, and all of these get updated on a dashboard, which would help users in organising and using data better. By using the collaborative properties of all these tools, SocialText does seem to have gained an edge over other enterprise services in this genre.

    The tools are definitely being built. It remains to be seen though, whether/how much organisations are willing to use them. Such tools would also dispel concerns about social media being just a productivity reducing mechanism.

    until next time, organisational chats

  • Pro Social

    No, this is not about me being gung ho about social networks, this is more about job search portals and social networks for business, specifically LinkedIn.

    The context is that i saw a huge ad of Shine (HT’s new jobsite) in the paper today, and my inbox had a mail that asked me to check out ‘Where is my boss’. Shine has a contest running promising the winner a month’s salary. They’re also doing a salary survey, whose results are promised soon – finally, scientific proof that i am underpaid 😉

    I’m not sure where exactly WIMB is being pitched. The site says “Get instant interview calls from Bosses all over the world! Set your online status as Available for live interviews.” Wonder if it’ll actually happen. Otherwise, the features seem to be the same as what a naukri/monster gives.

    Like this post mentioned, I also wondered why HT would seek to create a new brand, especially when it has something running in the same genre. One possibility is that they want this to be seen beyond a normal job classifieds poral. This is perhaps validated by what they say on the page “We recognize that your job is an integral part of your career, but we believe that your career is far bigger than the job itself! It is more about gaining the right perspective, building your skills and enhancing competency. And that’s what Shine is all about! ” Hmm, that makes it a wannabe LinkedIn, but stopping short of networking.

    So, what works? I still think all of them serve their purpose. When one is looking for a job, any job in their category (and there are tonnes of people who do just that) the portals like naukri/monster would work fine. However, if one is pretty clear about the specifics of the job he’s looking for, then a site like LinkedIn will help him connect with the right people. LinkedIn’s ‘questions’ and discussions also helps air one’s views on topics of interest, thereby adding flavor to a normal resume.

    I’m not quite sure if the normal social networks can be a serious threat to a job networking site. To me, its a problem of context. I’m on FB to play scrabble, poke friends, join the Bollywood group etc. Yes, it does tell a person a lot about me, but is that the kind of info a person would be looking for while hiring? Doesn’t a LinkedIn fit the bill much better?

    Until next time, or is it social pro 🙂

    PS. If Yahoo decided to launch Shine in India, wouldn’t the existing shine take its shine off?