Employee Advocacy for #socbiz at @DachisGroup's #SBS2013

Yesterday at the Social Business Summit hosted by Dachis Group and Oracle in Mumbai, I presented (in a room full of Social Media Marketers!) the HR viewpoint of how employees are the key to success in social media and how organizations can leverage them. Also shared some things on what we are doing at Philips in India and our plan for the future.

You can view (and download) the presentation here:
Would also love your thoughts and comments

Employee Advocacy for Social Business Success - Presentation at Dachis Group's Social Business Summit from Gautam Ghosh

Interestingly Dachis Group's Michael Jones presented a very interesting employee portal that leverages gamification to get employees to spread the word on social networks about the organization.

Here are some of the conversations that I had during the course of the day :)

HR and its role in making a "social business"

The following is an article I wrote for the National HRD Network newsletter. Would love your feedback

How Human Resources can help craft social business from Gautam Ghosh

Social Media Marketing – India Trends Study 2013 by E&Y

So the folks at E&Y reached out to me for this report and it's come out with some interesting findings for social media and India.

You can read the report below. My quote is on page 38 :)

Ernst & Young - Social Media Marketing in India Trends Report

There are key findings across nine categories and seven popular practices that the study highlights: 

1.        Objective: Most social media-savvy organizations in India use the medium to build communities while others use it to highlight news 
2.        Platform: Facebook is the most important platform for marketers in India for engaging customers, followed by Twitter, YouTube and blogging 
3.        Integration: Social media-savvy organizations in India have conducted campaigns where social media is the leading component, they tend to speed up processes or show special favor for online fans 
4.        Ads: Majority of social media-savvy organizations use social media ads to promote online campaigns and brand awarenesss, and find them beneficial 
5.        Measurement: Majority of social media-savvy organizations in India measure social media efforts through platform-specific parameters but some are increasingly measuring through leads, sentiment, brand visibility and have seen increase in revenue from social media efforts 
6.        Budget: Almost half of social media-savvy organizations surveyed spend 1%–5% of their marketing budget on social media, most social media budgets are below INR10 million 
7.        Ownership: Majority of social media efforts in India are managed by marketing teams 
8.        Agency: Majority of social media-savvy organizations in India use standalone digital agencies as compared to PR or ad agencies 
9.        Future: Social media-savvy organizations in India are very optimistic about the future 

Some of the popular practices are: 

1. Generic updates instead of brand updates
2. Multiple updates day, reply to fan queries within 30 mins to a few hours
3. Pictures contests are the most popular contests, most contests organised monthly
4. Social media guidelines and monitoring programmes are common, though more need to create crisis manuals
5. Tools for online monitoring, response management, or managing social media platforms are popular
6. Social media research are done to get customer feedback and understand behaviour
7. Many have created mobile phone apps and more plan to create

Social is a skill not a "job"

Great to read this articulated by Amber Naslund :

The problem is that social within organizations is doing exactly what we’ve always wanted it to do: it’s maturing.

Which means we don’t need rockstars, we need performers. People that can further business goals within a system and build and implement strategies that fit as part of an entire organization, not just their personal agendas.

We talked in The Now Revolution about social becoming a skill rather than a job. A set of capabilities that every person will have, to some extent, and apply differently within an organization depending on their needs and responsibilities.

It’s already happening.

We need people who can understand social’s impact on an organization, but not just so they can be the ones to use the platforms and engage with customers online.

We need them so that they can socialize that knowledge, form key leadership teams within of centers of excellence and distribute what they know deeper and contextually inside a company so that everyone gets smarter and more immersed in social as a catalyst for better work (not necessarily the solution for it).

The social ‘superstars’ need to be the best enablers we’ve ever seen. Which means they might need to be behind the scenes, not right out in front.

These are people who are polymaths and understand the intersections of social with different corners of the company. People who are skilled in diplomacy and teaching and creating consensus, bringing lots of different people to a table to develop a unified vision and a plan to get from here to there. People who can and will do the hard work, slog through the inevitable trenches, work through the arduous process of resetting organizational memory, and sticking with the sometimes slow process of change.

Am glad because that's exactly what we are doing at Philips India. We want to build "social" as a skill to all the HR professionals and also to get the senior leadership to engage with social and do stuff, to understand the power of the medium and therefore implications for the organization.

In fact I had said this some time ago on Social Samosa too :) There are a bunch of us at Change Agents Worldwide who are trying to learn from each other as we do this. 

NS Rajan joins as the head of HR for the Tata Group and other HR consulting movements

English: Logo Tata Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The HR Consulting market in India is in a state of churn. NS Rajan (Blog, Twitter) who built the largest HR consulting practices in India, is joining the oldest and one of the most sprawling Indian conglomerates (which makes everything from salt to steel to software (with a revenue of $100 billion) the Tata Group as group chief Human Resources Officer and will be reporting to the new Chairman, Cyrus Mistry.

The HR Consulting industry in India is seeing a churn. Ganesh Shermon who was Rajan's counterpart in KPMG has also left, and the Mercer India head Nishchae Suri is replacing him.

Mercer's Rajiv Krishnan is joined E&Y as HR Advisory Partner in October and is seen to be Rajan's successor.

Eight months ago Smita Anand (ex-Hewitt HR Head) joined Korn/Ferry in India whereas Dhruv Prakash who was heading India Leadership Consulting at Korn/Ferry left in November to be self-employed.

Related articles

• Cyrus begins transition at Tata Group

The #PhilipsHRTalks videos on Personal Branding by @Anand__Pillai

So at Philips we launched #PhilipsHRTalks this week. What is it, you ask? Well here's Yashwant Mahadik explaining it

The first #PhilipsHRTalks was delivered by Anand Pillai, the Chief Learning Officer of Reliance Industries Ltd. You can listen to his whole talk on how you can leverage your uniqueness to build your personal brand.

Do share the videos with others if you find them useful :)

It's great that smart learning professionals are already leveraging it. See this tweet :)

Reverse Mentoring about Social and Digital

In my new role as a "digital and social" subject matter expert in HR, I was approached by two senior (non-HR) leaders of the firm to be a "reverse mentor" to them in the "social and digital" domain.

What is Reverse Mentoring?

As Krish Shankar of Bharti Airtel says in this article:

This concept, being increasingly adopted by savvy, new-age organisations, turns the old paradigm of mentorship into a higher and more effective collaborative effort. The clincher here is that the younger person becomes the mentor and the seasoned senior professional the mentee. Typically, the mentee has more overall experience (as a result of age) than the mentor (who is younger), but the mentor has more knowledge in a particular area and therefore reverses the conventional relationship.
Clearly, the modern-day notion of an exchange of ideas and knowledge has changed, especially after the phenomenal expansion of the social networks, and the digital and mobile marketing platforms, blurring the rigid and accepted norms of relationships between individuals, teams and organisations. Today, an exchange of ideas is no longer restricted to an inner circle of influence, the purview of designations and age.
Reverse mentoring can re-energise older employees, keep younger workers engaged and improve relationships between the different generations in the workplace. For example, junior mentors can help managers understand how to motivate and retain young workers. They can also share first-hand knowledge of a younger customer base — critical for companies aiming to tap the youth market.

So yes, it has been an interesting experience in my first few mentoring meetings. Will blog about more experiences soon :)