|
|
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.
 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. Continue reading Why Google+ Should Be on Executives’ Radar
 Shannon Clark, on his Slow Brand blog, presents the idea of a LinkedIn Connect, which would enable users to authenticate and share certain approved information from their LinkedIn presence on third-party sites. He writes, “Why isn’t LinkedIn looking to be the Identity layer for not just a few applications running inside of LinkedIn or a very small handful of LinkedIn Partners, but instead to offer a strong, business focused identity layer for 1000′s of business applications across the Internet?” Great question that merited some cycles.
Here’s the post, with my thoughts below. A good thread with some technical discussion, but understandable for non-techies, too.
Continue reading You Know Facebook Connect, but why not LinkedIn Connect?
Executives need to get on Twitter so they can understand the potential and the threat to their communications with stakeholders. The problem is, the value proposition isn’t clear, and executives perceive it takes too much time to learn. These free online courses fill that gap. [...]
Why Twitter was one of the Web 2.0 innovations of the decade.. analysis and conclusions about Twitter’s value proposition for changing the economics of the Relationship Life Cycle [...]
Personally and professionally, I find posts that “compare” Twitter and Facebook as if they were competitors largely off-base and useless, but I weighed in on this one on Techcrunch. My thesis is that these venues only “compete” if you care about fickle mass adoption and don’t care about each site’s underlying value proposition. Facebook and Twitter are very different, so comparing them doesn’t make much sense in most cases. In 2009, however, mass media in the United States especially was having a field day talking about Twitter “knocking Facebook off its pedestal,” which was silly. Here’s Techcrunch’s take on it. My response and thoughts are below.
Continue reading Facebook vs. Twitter Influence on Techcrunch
Reflections on how enterprises will adopt microblogging, Twitter, and how this compares to executives’ adoption of “social” networks like LinkedIn and Facebook [...]
Executive summary and guide to Twitter.. microblog, guide, definition, executive, Web 2.0, social, presence, b2b, efficiency, breakthrough [...]
|
Executive’s Guide on Twitter
|
