Reminiscing about my blogging journey at #SMWBangalore #socialmedia

So yesterday two old blogging buddies Karthik, Manu and I went down memory lanes to talk at the Social Media Week Bangalore on how, what and why we blog - our celeb moments and what makes us continue with blogging in this "real time" age of Twitter

Here are a few of the tweets about the session from the people present there :)

Tweetchat on Blogging with @SMWBangalore #SMWBangalore #socialmedia

So yesterday I was invited to be a guest at a Twitter chat hosted by the folks at Social Media Week where I would be speaking on 24th February

I thought I should share this with you, my blog readers :)

Free ebook on #recruiting trends in 2015 by @experteerworld - am quoted #HR #tchat

Here's an interesting resource for you. You can download the free ebook on recruiting trends by Experteer by entering your details here.

Yes yours truly was asked for a quote :)

And this is what I shared

Speaking at #SMWBangalore on Blogging along with @beastoftraal @manuscrypts :) @socialmediaweek #SMW15

Last year at Social Media Week Mumbai I was part of a panel discussion on Social HR.

On 24th Feb I would be speaking on a session at Social Media Week Bangalore on my blogging journey along with my blogging buddies Manu Prasad and Karthik Srinivasan.

So if you're in Bangalore, come over to The Big Pitcher on 24th and ask us :)

Social Media and the workplace - speaking at the @BT_India HR forum today #bthrforum

Today in about 5 hours I would be on a panel discussion hosted by Business Today at Vivanta by Taj, Bangalore on how social media is changing the workplace. My co-panelists are Shilpa Vaid of Bharti AXA, Elango R. of Mphasis, Kris Lakshmikanth of Headhunters India and Vijaya Raghavan of Stempeutics. The panel will be moderated by Shamni Pande, BT’s head of HR reporting.

The second panel starts at 7:30 pm, and it is on the subject of whether working from home increases productivity. The HR heads of PwC India, Intel, and CEOs of Paul Writer, Randstadt India and Portea will participate in that panel.

If you can't make it to the forum you can keep track of it on Twitter here. I would let you know when the videos are online.

Update: This is a pic from the panel 

Why FB@Work will not work #socbiz #ensw #facebookatwork

So the announcement is finally out, Facebook is out with its product for enterprises called FB@Work. According to techCrunch:

Facebook At Work features a News Feed of “what’s new and relevant at your company,” individual and group chat, Groups, and the ability to invite your whole company to events. Within Facebook At Work, you’ll be able to see content shared publicly on classic Facebook, but not anything shared more privately, like just with friends.

Privacy is not Facebook At Work’s strong suit. Anything you post to the feed can be seen by the whole company, meaning the product lacks granular privacy controls for now. And Facebook says that “The people who manage Facebook at Work at your company can access anything you share from your work account, just as they might access your work emails and other work files.” So bosses could snoop on your messages.
Companies can now apply for access to Facebook At Work with this sign-up page.
Rasmussen told Wired that in Facebook At Work, the News Feed will display posts from the colleagues you interact with most, and that posts that are endorsed by other teammates will spread further around the company.
Facebook has taken flack for its classic social network over-filtering of posts. Here it will have to be sure not to hide mission-critical information. Done right, it could save people’s sanity and allow them to stay concentrated.
The product will have to overcome the stigma against mixing work and pleasure, even though you can keep your Work profile totally separate from your personal one. Plus, Facebook’s shaky track record on confusing and shifting privacy controls could scare away CIOs. We’ll have to wait for more review-style reports to know how well the profile and News Feed serve these purposes, as Facebook At Work is still in private beta

For all it's pros, here is why I think FB@Work will "Not Work" - based on my experiences with helping and advising Indian companies over the last 5 years. These are similar to my thoughts about why Google+ wouldn't work for enterprise social networking that I posted in 2011.

• larger organizations already have a collaboration software like Yammer (owned by Microsoft), Chatter (owned by Salesforce), Jive in place. Don't expect them to pull out their investments from these platforms into Facebook@Work
• For smaller organizations FB@Work may work - if they can get their employees to use it in a regular basis - and that's a big "IF". I am not sure how businesses can encourage their employees to fill out an "at work" Facebook profile with data relevant to other colleagues who might need to reach out to you. I reckon businesses will need to give the role to a full-fledged "community manager" and am not sure if that will happen. 
• We all have seen when an enterprise social network launches there is excitement and everybody starts posting there - and unless these are meaningful and work related soon everybody tires of the novelty and goes back to communicating via email. 
• There's the privacy concern too - Facebook has visibility to all discussions about your work projects, your conversations with colleagues, managers, rewards - how comfortable will employees be if these are used for advertisement targeting as Sameer suggests?

I would love to be proved wrong, but I think it's not just a software play - and the dice is loaded against Facebook to make it work.

Oh and did you know that LinkedIn is entering the market with a product that will enable co-workers to connect with each other using InMail messages. I thought most organizations already had a tool that enabled that - it's called "email" :)

Here are more insights on FB@Work by my friends Sameer Patel and Alan Lepofsky.

Three great sites to discover Learning and #HRBlogs

The year started with the 6th annual list of elearning movers and shakers and some Indian friends  Sahana Chattopadhyay, Sunder Ramachandran,  Abhijit Bhaduri, Kavi Arasu,   Manish Gupta, Manish Mohan Sumeet Moghe, made the list! You can check out the list here

Then I chanced to discover - HR Blogger - an aggregator of HR blogs from all over. You get to know what the latest blog posts are being posted - specially if you don't use a feed reader like Feedly. Bookmark this site :)

Today I discovered some very interesting global HR blogs from countries I don't follow blogs from - you can check out the Top 15 International HR Blogs of 2015 here :)

Now go ahead, keep reading and learning :)