This is a good question, especially given Google’s “social” fumbles, which lead the unwary to believe that “Google doesn’t get social, it’s a search company.” Executives, and I’m no different in this regard, don’t like to be shaken up and disrupted. But we will be, whether we like it or not.

Many places in the world have experienced a prolonged period of economic uncertainly to which organizations have responded by laying off workers. In many cases, this trend has been increasing demand for skills. However, think about how inflexible organization is. To create a job, one part of the organization must perceive a persistent need, design the role, design how it fits within the organization, account for interdependencies (solid and dotted lines), budget the role [...]]]> Many employment or career-related discussions contain a feeling of gloom and doom, but I have noticed a paradoxical market development: that the unpredictable and volatile economy that affects all businesses and careers is actually driving more demand for expertise, but the demand doesn’t look the same to companies or workers. Here I’ll explain how this works, but even more important, I’ll give you some practical tips on using the market to your advantage (featuring social technologies).

The Economy and Demand for Workers

Many places in the world have experienced a prolonged period of economic uncertainly to which organizations have responded by laying off workers. In many cases, this trend has been increasing demand for skills. However, think about how inflexible organization is. To create a job, one part of the organization must perceive a persistent need, design the role, design how it fits within the organization, account for interdependencies (solid and dotted lines), budget the role and decide how to fill it. This process often involves collaborating with Human Resources and other departments. It is long and ponderous. Meanwhile, the need continues to increase.

How to Use Organizational Slowness to Create Opportunity

Begin by recognizing that a “job” is a recognized bundle of skills and experience that the company buys. “Consulting” and “interim placements” are alternative bundles through which companies acquire expertise. Most executives I know consult to bring in income between jobs, but they perceive a conflict between “consulting” and “job search.” If you change your approach, you can mitigate the conflict and create more opportunity.

1. Realize that “employment,” “consulting” and “interim” are only packaging on your expertise, which you bring to bear on organizational problems or opportunities.
2. Focus on the organizational need for your expertise rather than on its packaging.
3. Write 2 or 3 scenarios that describe the challenges you want to deal with in your next assignment (whether job, consulting…). Include the market drivers (what creates the problem), business impact, the role you want to have and the outcomes you want to achieve. Also include the organizational context (i.e., post-merger integration, new division/product, market entry). Get excited about it. Your scenario should be about two paragraphs.
4. Now pick out some of the more unusual words you’ve used in your scenario. Search LinkedIn Answers using various combinations of keywords. Keep playing with the keywords until you notice which combinations produce the most relevant discussions.
5. Expand your search beyond LinkedIn by using the keyword combinations in Google. Explode “Tools” in the left sidebar and select “Blogs.” Notice which blogs write about your scenarios most consistently and relevantly. Bookmark them.
6. Enter the discussions on LinkedIn, in blogs and in mainstream media titles, which increasingly enable readers to leave comments. Show your expertise by offering relevant advice to the most relevant discussions. Make sure to use the more relevant scenario keywords in your responses. Only enter discussions that relate to your goals in some way. Make sure to bookmark the LinkedIn Answers or blog posts to which you respond, using Pinboard, Delicious or your browser.
7. Start blogging, and talk about your scenarios weekly. Via email, ask your friends, ex-colleagues, fellow alumni and others to add their thoughts to your posts in LinkedIn or on blogs.

The Social Business Annuity

By engaging people online, you will significantly increase your visibility and increase your insight into the context around your job search or hunt for new clients. Even better, when people look for those keywords, they will find you if you use the most specific and unusual keyword combinations in your responses. This builds up over time, so every quality response you share keeps working for you. Not only that, you can refer people to the discussions in which you’ve helped people deal with situations relevant to your scenarios. Imagine how impressive that would be to prospective clients or employers. Especially since very few people do this.

Parting Shots

• You can make yourself easier to buy as a consultant and as an employee by entering relevant conversations online. This will also educate you real-time because you will have more quality interactions than your competitors. You can have more interactions online, and they work for you by attracting Google.
• Even more important, by treating “job vs. consulting” as packaging, you can focus on the organizational need instead. This is more important anyway.
• Here is a longer treatment as a slide deck, “Drive Job and Consulting Opportunities with Social Technologies.”
• I also presented “Drive Job and Consulting Opportunities with Social Technologies“ at Kellogg Graduate School, which you can watch; it includes Q&A from Kellogg alums around the world.

Social networks can help organizations, whether commercial, nonprofit or government, to significantly improve their efficiency in business processes like recruiting, sales and service. This is what we call “Enterprise Process Innovation” because, by using social networks to create and nurture relationships with alumni, your employees can diminish the time required to accomplish tasks within these processes. It’s well known that most alumni, former employees, move to firms that are related to your business (adjacent in the value chain) or complementary in some way. Yes, some move to competitors, but they are usually in the minority. Social networks, by significantly reducing the cost of having relevant, quality conversations, make robust employee-alumni networks actionable as never before.

All organizations (I’ll use “firm” to denote for profit, government and nonprofit) have business processes that benefit from relevant insight and introductions from other people: [...]]]> How firms can increase quality of recruits and sales leads while cutting costs

Social networks can help organizations, whether commercial, nonprofit or government, to significantly improve their efficiency in business processes like recruiting, sales and service. This is what we call “Enterprise Process Innovation” because, by using social networks to create and nurture relationships with alumni, your employees can diminish the time required to accomplish tasks within these processes. It’s well known that most alumni, former employees, move to firms that are related to your business (adjacent in the value chain) or complementary in some way. Yes, some move to competitors, but they are usually in the minority. Social networks, by significantly reducing the cost of having relevant, quality conversations, make robust employee-alumni networks actionable as never before.

All organizations (I’ll use “firm” to denote for profit, government and nonprofit) have business processes that benefit from relevant insight and introductions from other people: insight about the situation of the prospect, where the best sources of new recruits, etc. Alumni 2.0 is an evolutionary approach to transforming firms’ relationships with employees. The legacy employment model is utilitarian: firms hire when they need skills and fire when business drops. End of story. Some firms make half-hearted attempts with sub-par email newsletters, but these don’t even begin to tap the potential of vibrant employee-alumni networks.

Here I will lay out an incremental, three-stage model that starts simply, pays dividends quickly and evolves to support more complex business processes over time.

Stage1: Recruiting

When your firm does business across large distances that require significant travel costs during your recruiting process, you have the opportunity to use social networks, social apps and video to significantly reduce these monetary and time costs. You do this by developing a public network by using microblogging (i.e. Twitter) and/or social network messaging (i.e. LinkedIn/Facebook) to share thoughts, challenges and job opportunities, so they get to know your firm behind the curtain, they come to know the culture and increase their comfort level with you. And those who don’t fit will lose interest, reducing attrition rates. Then you can use video for first stage interviewing. This can lower your recruiting costs considerably. Here’s how to do it.

• Let’s assume that Recruiting is in Human Resources, which supports many parts of the firm. For the pilot, select a department or group that tries to recruit people who have a high comfort level with social networks and video. Further, select champions carefully, pick people who feel comfortable with innovation and uncertainty.
• Put together an engagement strategy. Work with the sponsor organization to develop specific profiles of people they usually try to attract, and rank their priority.
• Take your candidate definitions and create keyword families and complex searches that you use to find candidates talking online. Rank social venues based on the quality and quantity of conversations you find.
• Select a small group of employees in the sponsor organization; develop voluntary guidelines for their profiles and interactions in the venues (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, blogs). It’s important that they share exciting projects, challenges and job opportunities that are active or emerging, as well as appropriate “behind the curtain” tidbits about why it’s fun to work there. To minimize gaffes, you need to be clear about what’s okay to share and not. It’s also important that you select potential recruits’ future work colleagues to participate in the pilot, not HR. If you are a volunteer nonprofit, have volunteers and management share this information; if you are a software firm, enlist engineers. The point is, you provide a stream of information that is interesting and relevant to the type of candidates and their influencers you want to attract.
• Conduct first interviews using video instead of phone using Skype or an enterprise solution. Most people have video on their laptops now. Make sure this interview is conducted in accordance with your culture.
• If the sponsor organization does a lot of recruiting, consider making 3-5 videos of key people talking about what they’re working on and why it’s important, how they work with other people. You can point prospects and candidates to these. When possible, let people share some more personal information, too.

Recommended Goals

• Experiment with sharing certain types of things, and track what resonates best with high-priority prospects. Use the high quality conversations that were found by your keyword families/searches as a starting point.
• Don’t overlook social aspects of work and what people like to do in their spare time. This can be huge. Let’s say that a large portion of your engineers like a certain video game; let them mention it if they want.
• When opportunities open, ask people to suggest candidates. Ask them what they think about the job description; based on their feedback, tweak it to make sure it’s clear to candidates. Thank them when you use their advice, and even when you don’t.
• Celebrate wins online.
• Two great examples I just discovered today Social Media, Virtual Meetings Help Firms Enter Markets and Save Capital.
• Financial metrics: the main goal here is building and maintaining a stream of quality leads and hires. Put these numbers against your legacy process (travel, recruiters, job ads).

Stage2: Alumni

We are all very familiar with schools’ strategies of “creating durable relationships” among schoolmates that transcend time. True, most schools talk more than they act, but the concept of creating “alumni” relationships can be very useful to most firms. Have you ever thought that, unless you are a new startup, you have vastly more alumni (people who have worked with you and moved on) than employees? Depending on your firm culture and trust level with employees, a certain portion of “alumni,” if they have accomplished something meaningful while they worked with you and/or if they created valuable professional relationships, retain a certain amount of goodwill toward you—and vice versa. In Stage2, you want to nurture this base of goodwill to benefit alumni and your firm. Stage2 works as long as a large portion of your employees does not leave harboring bitterness due to their employment experience. However, the experiences of alumni of most organizations fit the bell curve, which holds that most have a reasonably positive memory of their experience with you, while some love you and others hate you. Secondly, the beauty of social networks is that employees aren’t only relating to your firm; they have the opportunity to relate to other individuals, whether other alumni or current employees. So even if they aren’t favorably disposed toward your firm, Stage2 can work when they feel goodwill toward former colleagues.

For you to tap Stage2′s full potential, you need to adopt a new way of thinking about your relationships with employees because your firm needs to take the lead in serving alumni in their goals. This isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, but you need to show through your actions that you care about alumni, and you will help them accomplish things that are important to them now. When your help takes place in a transparent digital social venue like LinkedIn or Google+, you can affect a large group of alumni relatively quickly. Think about yourself: how would you feel if you asked for and received some very helpful information from a former colleague that helped you land a new job or contract? Even better, other alumni see these things happening, which can build goodwill quite quickly. Here’s how to do it.

• Since, unlike Stage1, Stage2 creates a digital private space, you need to get a social business/media policy in place that vets and defines what can and can’t be shared. Most glitches occur when there are misunderstandings. This is usually a short engagement with a firm that’s experienced with it (CSRA does it in 1-3 weeks).
• When the policy is underway, you need to create an alumni engagement strategy. In many cases, since Human Resources has led Stage1, they can provide continuity and lead Stage2 as well, but any area of the firm can lead. Selfishly, the sponsor organization needs to define and rank the importance of alumni. Who’s most important to your business goals? Getting this right lays the foundation of your authenticity and ability to commit to alumni long-term. In addition, it’s important to scope the pilot small, so don’t pursue large complex initiatives that involve multiple areas.
• Take your alumni definitions and create keyword families and complex searches that you use to find alumni talking online. Note, whether they are your alumni or those of a competitor doesn’t matter; you want to prove out your definitions and find people online talking about issues/challenges/topics that are relevant to your business and are related to the conversations you would like to have with alumni.
• Based on these conversations, rank social venues. This will tell you in which venues you need to invest (i.e. LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google+, Xing, Viadeo..). Create a private, password-protected LinkedIn Group, Facebook Group or Google+ Circle.
• Select a small group of employees for your pilot; develop voluntary guidelines for their profiles and interactions. You can coach and mentor them on how to look their best on LinkedIn and how to search for and help fellow alumni using LinkedIn Answers and Groups. They will need guidance and mentoring for what to share and how to spark and maintain conversations online. As they interact in LinkedIn, their networks with alumni will grow naturally. When you do Stage2 right and build trust with employees, the fact that their networks are growing will create alignment between the firm, employees and alumni.
• For example, if you are a U.S.-based B2B, LinkedIn will probably rank highly for your alumni. You have to be clear that your employees are masters of their own destiny and their profiles and interactions are their own. You need to be comfortable with the realization that these relationships might lead to some employees discovering opportunities outside your firm. If they feel that you want what’s best for them and this is truly your attitude, you will win their trust and commitment. You can’t fake this and don’t even need to because you will get much more than you lose (see goals).
• Once alumni see that you sincerely want to help them reach their goals outside their formal relationship with you, their goodwill toward your firm, employees and other alumni will increase significantly.
• Think about the impact: what if you could significantly improve the attitudes of the hundreds or thousands of alumni you have toward your firm? That’s the end-game here.

Recommended goals

• Talk excitedly about challenges and emerging job opportunities you have, and ask alumni to recommend people. During the pilot, you want to establish alumni as a reliable source for recruits.
• Ask alumni in certain geos about their favorite local networking events, meet them there and exchange introductions with people onsite.
• Define and track how many meaningful introductions your team makes on behalf of alumni. This is most important because it shows how you care. These actions have to be meaningful to alumni.
• Toward the end of the pilot, use private LinkedIn Answers or a Group to ask alumni how they would like you to help them. Don’t do this at the beginning, only after you have begun to develop trust in-venue (i.e. in LinkedIn).
• When you end up hiring people recommended by alumni, celebrate in-venue.
• Encourage alumni to reach out to employees to help them online with their current challenges. Encourage alumni to connect with employees and to use their LinkedIn networks for support in their current roles. You can coach the pilot employee group on how to be proactive with this. Remember, when alumni in LinkedIn see your employees helping alumni with current challenges, it will transform their attitude towards you. It will also transform employees’ attitudes because you will show that you care about the relationship past employment. This will activate a strong network that transcends employment. And many established firms have thousands of alumni who are increasingly online.
• During the pilot, mentor employees in training and mentoring other contributors to create a scalable team.
• Scale the program by repeating the pilot process in other organizations.
• Scale the program by asking for referrals for consultants and contract workers (same idea, but not recruiting employees).
• Think about using the program to help employees find other jobs when their jobs get eliminated and there’s no role they want internally. Although most organizations will find this challenging, consider what it will mean to current employees and alumni: by actively helping them to find opportunities, you are sending a powerful message that you care about them.
• Financial metrics: similar to Stage1, but here you can address a wider range of recruits, where Stage1 is limited to people who are comfortable with public Twitter and Facebook interactions. So you want to build and maintain quality leads and hires. Compare these numbers against your legacy process (travel, recruiters, job ads).

Stage3: Revenue/Business Development/Sales

At this point, you have experimented with using social networks for two stages of recruiting. You have learned about what motivates employee and alumni contributors. In Stage3, you turn similar attention to producing revenue opportunities for you and alumni within allowable parameters. Stage3 has employees collaborating with alumni to give and receive information and relationships to accomplish their and your revenue-related business goals. Obviously, how you proceed with Stage3 will depend on your business, so here we can only present some general guidelines. However, the constant is your employees and alumni are giving and receiving help within the context of business and revenue production. This help usually takes the form of leads, introductions to people and insights into prospects’ businesses. The goal could mean sourcing new partnerships, entering new geographies, asking for introductions for new prospects, getting insights for a new product or service, etc. Here is a general outline.

• The context of Stage1 and Stage2 was employment: helping alumni pursue their career goals and you with recruiting. Sponsor organizations had people talking online about their current challenges and opportunities. Similarly, here the sponsor organization needs to start having interesting, meaningful and relevant conversations online to develop and audience of alumni that has similar interests. If you’re a B2B, alumni are often in adjacent parts of the value chain. These conversations have to be relevant to alumni and your employees for complementary reasons. These conversations will build awareness.
• Similarly, when pilot contributors are trying to develop relationships with alums who can help them, they can refer to in-Group conversations (on LinkedIn) in which they have discussed certain aspects of the challenge or the value proposition, how they like to serve certain types of clients. These become private reference points that they can reuse repeatedly.
• They can make requests like, “We’re looking at an opportunity with XYZ, can anyone give us some general insight into their shrinkage situation in malls?” Note that contributors need guidance about what kind of requests they make. They never ask for privileged information, for example.
• Similarly, they encourage alumni to ask for their help.
• They need coaching about being transparent about conflicts of interest that will occasionally arise (i.e. when an alum works for a direct competitor). As long as they are up-front and matter of fact, people will understand.
• During Stage3 pilots, track assists your team(s) gives and gets, and define them according to some value scale. For example, an introduction to someone who makes a buying decision is different from someone giving general information about business conditions.
• Make sure you focus on supporting alumni and that their requests are met. This is more important than the help you get from them because it will maintain their interest in you and keep your relevance to them high (hence engagement).
• For more context on how social networks can shrink the business development/sales cycle by 30-50%, see How Social Networks Change the Rules of Business Development and Profit.
• Financial metrics: compare the types of help you get and how quickly they shrink the sales cycle. For most B2B organizations, sales processes are long and costly, so there is much room for improving velocity. Also track the quality of help you give and celebrate wins online. This is important for building and maintaining momentum.

Conclusions

• This approach will have a dramatic impact on professional services firms, which have high recruiting costs; similarly, a large portion of their employees are directly responsible for business development, and they are global. This goes for most firms that have high per-employee recruiting costs and that do business in many geos.
• The way in which you pursue this incremental approach will vary tremendously based on your culture and current relationships with employees. I hope you can appreciate that most of these things are relative. There is no absolute way to do it.
• You start small in public venues (Stage1) and begin proving out the concepts. When you do this right, it builds excitement and momentum.
• Trust is the bedrock of the program; as long as you have a reasonable level of trust with a representative portion of alumni, you can build from there.
• You have to lead by showing you mean what you say: you want to serve alumni by helping them. Address this in Stage2. Under-promise and over-deliver. You have to be honest with yourselves here about cultural limits you may face. If some senior management, who may be steeped in legacy attitudes towards employment, take that into account by keeping pilots small and producing results before asking to scale the program, which will eventually require transformation of employment attitudes and (undoubtedly) policies.
• Keep in mind that you can duplicate Stage1 in several areas of the firm before going to Stage2. This can be useful if you need to convince upper management of the value of social networks. Nothing sells like success.
• Also see Alumni 2.0: Employer-Employee Realignment to learn more about the value proposition and business drivers of Alumni 2.0.
• Although presented in 2009, Using LinkedIn for International Business might give you some additional context for Stage3.

What are your experiences with using social networks for recruiting and business development support?

I am not predicting the rate or scale of Google+ adoption as many pundits did early on, but I encourage you to operate as if it will soon rival existing players Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. This prospect is far more useful; moreover, it is inevitable that existing players will have to make way for new entrants as Web 3.0 evolves. Just as our galaxy and universe evolve through the [...]]]> The launch of Google’s new social network has poignant significance for executives—in predictable and surprising ways. Google+ is exceptionally significant because it is an exciting new social venue with the potential to disrupt, but even more important, it can teach us about how the ecosystem works and how organizations can learn to use it to garner support for things they care about. Here I’ll outline my first impressions and give general guidance for executives to take advantage of Google+’s potential.

A Star Is Born

I am not predicting the rate or scale of Google+ adoption as many pundits did early on, but I encourage you to operate as if it will soon rival existing players Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. This prospect is far more useful; moreover, it is inevitable that existing players will have to make way for new entrants as Web 3.0 evolves. Just as our galaxy and universe evolve through the birth of new stars and the death of others, the Web-as-ecosystem gets reconfigured when supernovas explode on the scene. All the current leaders were unknowns when they first appeared. Time will tell whether Google+ is a supernova as many claim, but you can use abrupt changes to the ecosystem your advantage when you know how/where to look and how to act.

The other key principle here is that ecosystems are, well, systems that are composed of bodies (here, social venues) that interoperate. The venues that survive and prevail succeed in creating USPs for defined stakeholders and engaging them to try their venues until they get critical mass. To profit from the ecosystem, CMOs need to create and leverage a strategy that understands and focuses on the unique attributes of each venue in which they invest and how their interactions in various venues work together to add value across the ecosystem. This is how leaders of brand and enterprise initiatives create the most value by connecting with and serving people.

So, executives should be asking, “What can we do on Google+ that we can’t do (or, as easily) elsewhere?” As platforms compete, you need to ask and answer this question continuously, so you can evolve your investments.

Platforms Don’t Matter

It is easy to get wrapped up in the latest tech development, but I have learned repeatedly that platforms matter far less than people. Platforms are merely spaces in which we can create, develop and maintain relationships with people. This fact has a deeply practical application that can help you manage the risk of investing in the wrong space that subsequently flames out (i.e. MySpace), or missing an important new entrant like Google+. Having built several digital ecosystems for my business and clients during the past fifteen years, I have taken my networks en masse from one venue to another, and it is actually quite simple to migrate people when you give them a studied, valid and relevant value proposition. Think of platforms as bars or restaurants: there’s always another one, but your friends (connections, contacts) are your friends; most of them will follow you to new spaces if they see a reason. The market has platforms vying for our attention by calibrating the wonder of digital tools to let us do more of what we want. We will constantly have new choices. We need to be ready to reconfigure—and to avoid certain new entrants.

Google+ Key Features

In case you haven’t been swept up in the Google Plus launch so far as an individual, I’ll describe a few of its key features that I feel are significant.

• Circles are brilliant. When you invite people on Google+, you put them into one or more of your circles. The circle metaphor is far more easy to use than Facebook’s Friend Lists, a feature for which I’ve lauded them for years. LinkedIn is very limited because you are connected or not; there aren’t easily distinguishable ways to connect with people for different reasons. Ditto for Twitter, you can follow someone or not; true, you can put them on a list, but that’s only two speeds. We need more. What’s easier than graphically putting someone into a circle that you have named and defined?
• Circles have their own Walls. Facebook’s Friend Lists failed one huge test: there was only one Wall. Yes, certain lists could see your Wall and others couldn’t, but why have only one? Therefore, you can post an update in Google+ that goes to the Web (“Public,” like Twitter), “Extended Circles” (friends of friends), “Your Circles,” (all of them), or one or more circles individually. You select these with simple clicks.
• Walls analogous to Facebook. Thumbs up, in-post commenting and threading.
• Example1. Let’s say you define circles for your triathlon buddies, work colleagues, grad school classmates, your French friends, and family. Maybe you did an awesome workout that you want to share with your tri buds but no one else, so, one click. You just got drafted to go give a conference presentation in Paris, so you share with all circles. Two clicks. Hit the buttons.
• Example2. You have a brand that’s engaging people around grilling in all seasons. You could create circles with specific use cases, like football tailgates, family picnics, bachelor/ette parties and formal entertaining. It would be super easy to share things with one or more circles. Click, click.
• Net net, Circles and Google+’s ease of use have the potential to be breakthrough. Circles is a tipping point feature because it more closely resembles how we act socially in the real world. Moreover, I don’t think it will be easy for existing players to bolt on a multiple Wall feature, so Google+ will have the lead in this area for a while.
• Twitter comparison. This is beyond the scope here, but you can think broadly about Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as giving you similar ways to share and interact “very naturally” in a (tweet)stream or Wall interface. Twitter has a huge stable of tools that makes it very compelling, but Google+ will have developers mobilizing very fast to provide analogous tools.
• Facebook comparison. Unknown so far is how Google+ will develop as a social space. Facebook has a very defined social aspect to it, which will prove durable as will Twitter. I encourage you to remember that we live in an “and world,” not an “or world.” Digital has not eliminated paper, we use both. So I don’t predict the death of any platform right away. More likely is people will migrate, and you need to know your stakeholders.

Your team needs to discover how Google+’s unique attributes might add value to your stakeholders.

Google+ Next Steps

• “Experts” and pundits are glibly talking about how Google+ will destroy Facebook, Twitter, whatever, but these arguments have minimal value in themselves. I urge you to consider the most studied analyses for general trends, but your team needs to discover how Google+’s unique attributes might add value to your stakeholders. You can bring serious value to your stakeholders by discovering this and introducing it to them.
• I urge you to join Google+ as an individual and/or have a few people on your team to vet it as soon as possible. You undoubtedly have colleagues who are on it, but you should ask them to evaluate it and compare it to other platforms you are using, in a serious, structured way.
• Right now, Google+’s most compelling feature is the elegance of Circles, so think about initiatives where that would be useful, and start a pilot.
• Facebook has tried to proclaim the “end of search” because people would ask their social graph instead of searching. These comments have always been overblown. People will do both.
• I speculate that Google will incorporate our search histories and integrate them into our social interactions in useful ways. Example: you are talking about Nike’s popularity in Shanghai with one of your Circles. What if Google gave you a setting that would let you share your Nike/Shanghai Google search results with that circle? I already do that with Delicious and Twitterfeed, but it requires several steps and most people don’t have the patience to configure that little ecosystem ;^). Similarly, it’s obvious that Google wants us to improve search metadata by giving thumbs up. This functionality will probably arrive next year at the earliest. That would be the killer app and how Google+ could be a supernova.

What is your take on Google+ so far?

More Resources

• Techcrunch on Google+ launch
• Jim Worth: Seven Days with Google Plus
• In-depth review of Google+ features
• Even more ;^)
• My Google+ Profile (shortcode http://gplus.to/csrollyson)

Although it isn’t obvious (no one tells you this), Facebook has a natural hierarchy of social actions that makes it easier to build engagement over time—provided you’re looking for it. We are all familiar with most [...]]]> Most of us are familiar with Forrester’s Ladder of Participation, but using it to build engagement and community still escapes most individuals and organizations, so here I’ll offer a short treatment within the context of Facebook. The profound insight is that 90% of people in a social venue observe without interacting. 9% are the creators, they tweet, blog and make themselves known. 1% are curators, they sort and categorize content. Whether you are on LinkedIn, Facebook or authoring a blog, you only hear 10% of the people, but you are affecting 100% of the people. If you don’t know that, you might think your online activities were going unnoticed. Now I’ll turn to how this works in Facebook.

Although it isn’t obvious (no one tells you this), Facebook has a natural hierarchy of social actions that makes it easier to build engagement over time—provided you’re looking for it. We are all familiar with most of these things but maybe not with how to use them together. Facebook popularized the concept of “social actions,” which are digital transactions within social contexts. They indicate social connections. Facebook itself is designed to initiate, track and learn about social actions. Here are some examples with which you are familiar.

Facebook Hierarchy of Social Actions

1. The Zero ;^) is not a social action, but 90% of viewers of any Facebook Page are lurkers, they don’t do anything except observe, so you really don’t know they are there, but they are watching and being affected by your actions
2. The Like is the most primitive type of social action that requires the least commitment; it’s the “thumbs up”
3. The Comment is one step up from the Like because the person gives more of him/herself
4. The Organic Post shows even more commitment because the person introduces content to a Page by sharing a link, a photo, a video and usually a comment as well
5. The Discussion participant reacts to Facebook discussions on a Facebook Page; since discussions are usually more in-depth or serious than Wall banter, this usually signifies more commitment
6. The discussion initiator shows the highest commitment and engagement because somebody starts a focused discussion on a Facebook Page; this shows that they want to have a more detailed discussion, and they trust the Page to have the discussion there

Trusting the Hierarchy

Now that we have identified the hierarchy, we can trust it and activate it by recognizing the value in each level. All new Facebook Pages start with little interaction, a few comments or organic posts or likes, because people don’t know what the space is like. The first people who visit your Page are the first guests who arrive at your party. There’s no vibe, no feeling, it’s uncomfortable and uncertain. Therefore, the host of the party is critical, s/he introduces guests to each other, gets them talking. When people like posts on a Facebook Page, thank them and ask them questions, “What did you like the most about the picture?” or “Did you go to that event? How was it?”

Do this at every level of social action. And mean it. You have to be really interested in what other people think, you can’t pay for this or fake it. People will feel it. After a while, everyone will understand that you really want to hear from them, and people will start liking, commenting and posting in greater numbers. But don’t expect them to do it on their own.

Results

The result is very predictable when you are consistent and sincere. Remember the ladder of participation. When people see other people offering pictures and links and being honored by the host, they will be more likely to come out of their shells and interact. The 10% affects the 100%.

In addition, realize that all social networks add “digital grease” to interactions. All have their algos, which automatically broadcast users’ interactions to their networks according to their secret rulesets. Therefore, when someone shares a picture on your Page, it’s broadcast to their networks. When they Like or Comment, same thing. It’s naturally viral. But, when hosts are empathic and ask meaningful questions, they model behavior that reflects, “We are real here” and significantly increases the chance that other people will be real. Which boosts the likelihood of their friends liking the page when they see their friend’s comment on your Page.

The Facebook Page owner is the host of the party, when s/he or they realize their role and fulfill it, traffic and degree of engagement increases steadily.

What are your experiences with this?

CSRA, the Creator of the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn, the Executive’s Guide to Twitter & Blogging and the Executive’s Guide to Facebook, beta-launched the Executive’s Guide to Social Networks today to provide social media managers and individual executives a powerful new resource for practical insights into social business, which uses social technologies to transform business processes.

From its inception in 2008, the Executive’s Guide offered leaders a value proposition that is still unique in the market today. The guides help executives boost their individual competitiveness using social networks while they also address how to use social networking platforms to change business.

The Executive’s Guide to Social Networks contains the complete works of the LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter guides, and CSRA is preparing to release guides on Blogging and Geosocial. The Internet is replete with tips that focus on using social media [...]]]> Executive’s Guide to Social Networks Consolidates Several Top10 Blogs, Prepares Expansion

CSRA, the Creator of the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn, the Executive’s Guide to Twitter & Blogging and the Executive’s Guide to Facebook, beta-launched the Executive’s Guide to Social Networks today to provide social media managers and individual executives a powerful new resource for practical insights into social business, which uses social technologies to transform business processes.

From its inception in 2008, the Executive’s Guide offered leaders a value proposition that is still unique in the market today. The guides help executives boost their individual competitiveness using social networks while they also address how to use social networking platforms to change business.

New Features

The Executive’s Guide to Social Networks contains the complete works of the LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter guides, and CSRA is preparing to release guides on Blogging and Geosocial. The Internet is replete with tips that focus on using social media and social networks for marketing, promotion and career applications, but this advice rarely addresses social business, which requires in-depth knowledge of platforms and enterprise business processes. The Executive’s Guide to Social Networks (EGSN) aims to fill this gap:

• News, a hallmark of all Executive’s Guides, are CSRA’s curated items relevant to social business and enterprise innovation; EGSN offers LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
• CaseStudies highlights applying platforms to business processes with some discussion of outcomes; they exist for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
• Ask the Guide is a message board for each platform where readers can post questions and receive responses from CSRA and other readers
• EGSN posts offer social business-focused practical insights for executives and organization leaders
• All EGSN features apply CSRA’s consulting experience with client experiences using platforms to increase competitiveness; written by consultants, not journalists or marketers, the EGSN appreciates risk mitigation and innovation, with an eye to transforming business processes to create unusual value from platforms
• Consolidated subscriptions; very few applications exist to use platforms in isolation, so subscribers will be able to take what they want from all platforms without managing separate subscriptions
• Interoperates with two other legs of CSRA’s blog triumvirate through relevant cross posts:
  • The Global Human Capital Journal addresses global business drivers that underlie what Rollyson has identified as a prolonged period of disruption; as in physics, if you appreciate the forces, you can predict conditions more easily
  • The Social Network Roadmap is a practitioner’s guide to social business strategy and “execution”; success with “social” technologies and venues requires understanding the nuances, so CSRA climbs into the trenches with clients and mentors them through launching and building social initiatives
• Planned feature releases in Q2 and Q3 are more curated content from the best sources, which will make the EGSN a destination for executives to source CSRA and third party content curated by The Guide; the Guide to Blogging and Guide to Geosocial are imminent

Pardon Our Dust

We ask for your patience while we modernize and tweak. Most in-post links, for example, point to the original guides, and there will be a period of transition while they are fixed. The EGSN will also use a more planned taxonomy of categories and tags, which will take some time to fine-tune.

Please kindly share any glitches you may experience below in comments. Thank you.

John2, thanks for very solid advice all around. However, I totally agree with @cole, to be most productive as an individual or an enterprise, you must have an explicit strategy. An enterprise is an orchestra, so defining key goals and techniques, without dictating, is critical for success. This includes giving guidance and space for employees to pursue their personal branding, by resonating with the enterprise.

One simple concept I use when working with clients involves a 2×2: a trust vector intersects an interest vector, dividing your network into 4 quadrants. [...]]]> In Five Tips for Smarter Social Networking in their Big Shift Harvard Business Review blog, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown offer solid advice for executives who want to get traction with social networks, some of which might surprise you. It’s valuable for executives from individual and company perspectives. Here’s the post, and here’s my response, which builds and extends some of their points:

John2, thanks for very solid advice all around. However, I totally agree with @cole, to be most productive as an individual or an enterprise, you must have an explicit strategy. An enterprise is an orchestra, so defining key goals and techniques, without dictating, is critical for success. This includes giving guidance and space for employees to pursue their personal branding, by resonating with the enterprise.

One simple concept I use when working with clients involves a 2×2: a trust vector intersects an interest vector, dividing your network into 4 quadrants. It helps people make actionable the advice you give, especially #5. For the people in your high-interest/low-trust quadrant (HI/LT), you want to increase your interactions with them. Through interaction, you increase or decrease trust with people. You are less concerned with people in the LI/LT quadrant. People in the LI/HT quadrant you touch with more personal things. As you interact with HI/LT, you want to move a portion of them to the HI/HT quadrant, which is your gold. More detail on this here: http://bit.ly/weedingLI

However, I think the most valuable part of your post is the piece on being vulnerable; this is the part that executives have the hardest time with. But as you say, it inspires some and turns off others. In a crass way, though, the fact is, there are infinitely many people. In pervasive networks, the “specialist,” i.e. being yourself, becomes a better strategy; as you imply, generalists become invisible, have no taste, like processed meats. Eviscerated of character. Of course, as you say, all of this must take into account “the specific circumstances of their work and employers” – but, not only now, but forever.

Thanks again for a great post!

What are your thoughts or experiences on being vulnerable online?

According to BusinessInsider’s interpretation, neither Google nor Facebook emphasized revenue in the early years and hockey-sticked later. Here’s the article, and here are my thoughts on all three players:

Nick, thanks for bringing up a very interesting idea. My instinct, though, tells me that Facebook will bury all of them because: