Tag: social business design

  • #In Business

    In spite of being the gold standard in business networking, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn has been a bit slow in adapting to the needs of its audience. Quite some time back, I’d written about the ‘news’ and ‘groups’ features, and had asked for an RSS feature for groups. That feature was incorporated earlier this year, but I thought there were several other possibilities which could’ve been incorporated, specifically in company web pages – multimedia support, aggregation etc. My benchmark of comparison was Social Median (acquired by Xing, a competitor to LinkedIn). I’d also wondered if it’d make sense for LinkedIn to perhaps acquire or at least have an association with Yammer.

    Just when I was ready to give up on LinkedIn’s possibilities (completely agreed with this), they seem to have caught a new wind. First came the redesign, with significantly better navigation, a cleaner look and lesser scrolling!! And then came the sync that everyone had been waiting for. Twitter was Linked #in (or#li) with an option to selectively share tweets on LinkedIn. Good timing, I’d say, judging by a few studies. A Palo Alto Networks study stated that enterprise usage of twitter was up by 250% in 6 months. (FB at 192%) Another report (can be classified as dipstick from the number of responses) , by the 2.0 Adoption council, seemed to indicate that social computing was making its presence felt in the enterprise.

    Most importantly, LinkedIn finally opened up its platform to developers. Bring on the apps!! (no, not Link farm ville 😐 ) RWW has a good post on the good and bad news and a few possibilities. Tweetdeck, Posterous, Ribbit, JobDASH, Box.net, all have integrations happening. The wishlists have started too. As RWW mentions, a ‘people you might know from other networks’ and filtered status updates would be great. Sandeep Gautam has a ‘Follow Friday’ like mechanism and @mentions in status updates in his list.

    On that note, I wonder whether the sync would mean that the twitter system of hashtags would become popular on LinkedIn, and a status search would find a place among the current crop of searches available on LinkedIn. An open platform would indicate that LinkedIn updates could appear on outside search. Also (like FB Connect) people would be able to interact with a site using their LinkedIn account, and the content could be taken to LinkedIn.

    A few twitter tools whose LinkedIn version I’d like to see –

    • Mr.Tweet (recommendation to connect) basis current network, interests etc
    • Alerts – not just recruiter, people and events that currently exist, but more options
    • Twitturly – to track the URLs that are being talked about
    • Trends (which might initially be a subset of Twitter trends?)
    • Twitter lists + Groups – It would require identification of Twitter list members on LinkedIn and then an option to add list members – create new groups/ add to existing groups

    The two places where I hope for a lot of action are groups and Company Pages. With an open platform, an integration of delicious and friendfeed can’t be ruled out. Company (and UGC 😀 ) videos and photos via YouTube and Flickr? And while we’re at it I’d like to have LinkedIn in the Google Reader ‘Send to’ (officially) and in future the option to choose a group/page with which a particular  link can be shared.

    With the integration of twitter and an open platform, LinkedIn has the content and context to provide better interaction between the various stakeholders of the enterprise – employees, vendors, business partners and even consumers. I see a lot of potential for LinkedIn to become a key player in the social business design (a Dachis Group concept) we keep talking about these days. Let’s hope to see more updates soon. 🙂

    until next time, business tweets 🙂

  • Social Inside

    There’s quite a funny video that has got almost 50,000 views by now on YouTube. It is titled ‘The Social Media Guru’, and in case you haven’t seen it by now, you should take a look, though you might want to keep the audio levels down thanks to the language

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

    While the video does generalise and could cause some heartburn among some who work on social media and do good work, the reason I found it funny was because I see around me, a lot of what is shown in there – a preoccupation with the tools/platforms in vogue, and the lack of something as basic as an objective. As always, the tools are less important than the philosophy of sharing, collaborating, and 2 way communication that’s happening not just on social media sites, but across the web, though the former, because of their inherent nature, have taken it to a different level altogether. The combination of a client who has decided his brand needs to be on twitter, thanks to some article he read somewhere (or an even more vague reason) and the social media guru whose answer to any client is a templated Facebook page + twitter account + you tube, is quite lethal – to two sets of people – the agencies/individuals who are doing/interested in some genuinely useful work on the social media platforms and the brands who decide not to take the plunge basis the results of the poorly thought through/executed programs of other brands. It doesn’t help that the medium is still in its nascent stages and everyone is still learning.

    While social media practices and practitioners might be fewer in India, as compared to the US, the challenges faced show very little such skew. I read two posts recently on the subject. Karthik wrote about ‘selling social media engagement in India‘, where, with the experience of working in a PR firm and pitching social media, he looks at the changes he’s seen in the acceptance of social media among clients over the last couple of years, and the key attributes for making the sale. He mentions how an existing communications partner has a ‘door opener’ advantage as compared to say, an exclusive social media agency, which helps them get the right  people from the client side involved in the pitch, and the need for proper articulation and simple guides which could be used by the client team to sell to their bosses.

    In another extremely interesting post, Sanjay writes about “Advertising Agencies and Social Media: The Challenges“. He notes fundamental differences in the way an advertising agency looks at communication, and how communication actually happens in social media. The observations on ‘campaign’ focus, the obsession with perfection (copy), the mechanics of how communication is rolled out, are all spot on, and something that I too have experienced several times while dealing with creative agencies. He ends by mentioning that in the current scenario, agencies keep treating these platforms as broadcast media. That last thought is something I keep deploring regularly here, so I completely agree.

    Now the thing is, while these are all perfectly valid points, I was looking at it from a different perspective. I wonder if, in the entire spiel, social media’s proximity to marketing/communication/brand as a function completely overshadows the cultural transition required by the client organisation. Does it get discussed at all? Even in my post rant some time back, I had only emphasised the usage of social media in the PR, research, advertising disciplines and the different stages of the product life cycle – including sales, customer care etc, and barely mentioned the culture change.

    The subject of a shift in culture is something I have written about in several contexts – from basic thoughts on transparency in organisations and controlling employee communication internally and with the outside world, to the need for organisations to understand themselves and the value they provide before going overboard with listening and acting on consumer feedback, to whether the size and scale of the organisation dictates its culture and its internal and external communication processes,  and the necessity to tackle business problems and look at it as something that needs to be addressed at an enterprise level too and not just at a brand level. The Dachis Group presentation – ‘Social Business by Design‘ illustrates this extremely well.

    I examined it further in the framework of the Awesomeness manifesto, which i regard as an excellent set of fundamentals for organisations, if they want to operate profitably in the evolving business scenario, and in all four of its pillars, I could see the need for a more holistic approach to social media. Its obviously easier said than done. It involves a vision, the zeal and guts to translate that into internal and external business practices- from environment to employee friendliness, training of personnel, readjustment of business goals, hiring people who understand this new design – like say, P&G’s technopologist, who can operate across functions to evangelise it and help apply it in different contexts. And that’s just a few things. Look at an application of this across your organisation, and you’ll see how massive an endeavor it is. Maybe only a few organisations are thinking about it now, but I think it might become an imperative very soon, decided by external forces beyond the organisation’s control. Whether this is spearheaded by the organisations themselves or an external agency would be a decision based on several subjective parameters. Maybe then, organisations will be able to figure out the ‘gurus’ better. 🙂

    So while, it is good to see great social media efforts from brands, I wonder whether more needs to be done to integrate it more fundamentally within the organisation.

    until next time, social nirvana 🙂

    Bonus Reads:

    Customer Twervice by Social Media Explorer (10 examples of companies using social media for customer service)

    Social Media Policy Database (Via Six Pixels of Separation)

    Why its time to do away with the Brand Manager 🙂