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    Entries in socal networking (42)

    Monday
    Oct242011

    Networking and Numbers - Does Size Really Matter?

    Over the weekend I tipped a milestone of sorts - 1,000 first-level connections on LinkedIn -   . I know connection numbers and social network graphs are relative; 1,000 connections may seem paltry to some of the folks reading this post, (particularly the well-connected recruiters out there). To other folks, even ones that are really successful and accomplished, one thousand so-called 'professional' contacts may seem like a huge amount. We all know from personal experience executives that might not even have a LinkedIn profile, much less a large, cultvated online network spanning organizations, industries, and backgrounds. The last VP of Human Resources that I worked for reached her position, (at a Fortune 1000 company), without ever having a LinkedIn profile.

    It seems clear that while 'networking' has always mattered, for some, at least up until very recently, online professional networking has not necessarily been a pre-requisite for career advancement and success. But most of us 'professionals' these days are on LinkedIn, might be doing at least some work or career related connecting on Facebook, (check my piece on BranchOut from last week), and many have even dived into the Twittersphere, (where at least for me, a tremendous amount of 'work' is going on). It is kind of hard to imagine a young professional today that would rise to the most senior level of a large organization in the next 20 years without having developed an effective online network and presence to supplement or complement their close, personal, and real-world connections.

    But as to the idea about whether sheer size of one's professional network is really important or not, while many would reflexively respond that it doesn't matter that much, that quality, diversity, engagement, etc. is what matters; no one I know has completely stopped accepting connection requests on LinkedIn, or decided they have 'enough' online contacts. If you are someone that actually has done this, please drop a comment and let us know.

    I was thinking about these ideas around importance of social network size in my incredibly shallow self-absorbed run-up to 1,000 LinkedIn connections because I knew I wanted to write about the topic. In doing some research, I found a recent piece in the July/August 2011 Harvard Business Review, titled 'A Smarter Way to Network', by Rob Cross and Robert Thomas. 

    In the piece the authors recommend some practical network-building and cultivating strategies that they feel lead to the development of the most effective networks. Several of the recommendations, (culling redundancies, eliminating energy-sapping contacts), have at least the short-term effect of reducing absolute network size in favor of building a more balanced, strategic, and opportunistic kind of collection of 'trusted advisors', rather that a massive throng of online connections. In the entire piece, Cross and Thomas do not mention LinkedIn, (or any other online networking site), at all, and only very casually refer to online networking in a general sense. In fact, the article's focus on the 'network' as really consisting of those dozen or so close, personal, and trusted confidants, allies, and mentors makes one sense that for true benefit, chasing the next thousand LinkedIn connections at the expense of assessing and developing these personal relationships would be a colossal waste of time.

    So I will end by simply asking the question. Or really a few questions.

    Does 'size' of network really matter?

    Is growing your online set of connections important to you? What benefits have you personally accrued?

    How do you personally balance the need for rich, deep connections with trusted advisors with maintaining your thousands of friends in your social graph?

    One last comment - that VP of HR I worked for? She is now on LinkedIn as well.

    Wednesday
    Sep282011

    Talking Social at The HR Technology Conference

    Next week at the 14th Annual HR Technology Conference at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas I will have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion titled 'HR Technology's Second Annual Social Media Panel: Deploying Deep Social Strategies Without Destroying Your Career.'

    The panel will be moderated by the HR Capitalist himself Kris Dunn who will be joined by Laurie Ruettimann, Mike Krupa, Oliver Marks, and myself.

    It is no secret to anyone in Human Resources or in the enterprise technology space that 'social' needs to move past marketing buzzword and into demonstrable business value for most organizational leaders to take notice, to support social evangelists inside the organization, and to see the real benefits of deploying either social and collaborative technologies in-house, while opening up more fully and systematically to the use of outward facing social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in support of enterprise objectives. I'll bet 90% of the vendors you will see exhibiting at the HR Technology Conference will have some kind of 'social' angle in their solutions, (or at least in their marketing copy), but which ones make sense for you and your organization, and which ones look and feel like they simply bolted on some 'like' buttons and badges as an afterthought. It's not always easy to tell.

    And then there is the 'personal' side of social for the HR professional - how can someone that has a day job with real responsibilities, deadlines, and managers to answer to still use social tools in a way that won't compromise their ability to perform, as well as act in concert with company-wide messaging and postioning that quite frankly, most HR people are not always so well-informed about.  What happens when one of your employees, say a star engineer starts to gain popularity on his or her blog, has about 20,000 followers on Twitter, and starts getting asked to speak at events and do vendor webcasts?

    Do you allow and support them in their 'micro-celebrity', or do you worry about tasks not getting completed while the young (or maybe not so young), emerging star is building his or her name. Can you accrue value from this activity back to the organization? Do you even know how?

    Just because every vendor is talking about social, and just about every person at the Conference and who might be reading this blog is participating in social, (check the graph below for more color on this), hasn't made determining where and how social technologies and processes fit in a given organization's business model and processes any easier. And just because you finally convinced your VP of HR to join LinkedIn or get a Twitter account doesn't mean determining the right balance and relationship of your talent's personal brands and online presence any simpler.

    So at the HR Technology Conference (our session is Tuesday October 4 at 11:00AM),  our panel on social will certainly try to explore many of these topics, I am sure in 75 minutes we can't solve them all, (or any of them), but I think we will provide some good food for thought and give attendees some ideas they can begin to explore in their organizations.

    Oh, and here is the chart I mentioned I'd share - just one data point among millions you have to consider when talking 'social'.

    Source - Business Insider

    Wow - 16% of all time spent online is now on Facebook.  Hmm. Better quit reading this now and get back over there - I might have just tagged you in a picture!

    Hope to see you at the Conference next week!

    Monday
    Jul182011

    Don't quite 'get' Google+ yet? Fear not, you'll be ok

    I am almost certain that if you are reading this blog that you have at least some passing awareness of Google+, the search behemoth's latest foray into the social networking space. By most accounts G+ is starting strong, coming out of a short but limited private beta period to grow to over 10 million users in just a couple of weeks. Plus seems to fit nicely into a gap that many users of more established social networks feel exists, making it easier and simpler to share status updates, contents, images, etc. with discrete 'circles' of friends and contacts, positioning Plus less of a broadcast medium like Twitter, while offering better (at least ostensibly), control over data privacy, and possessing more potential for meaningful engagement than on Facebook.

    G+ is still very new, and while most folks (at least the majority of ones in my 'Circles') have not done much more on the network other than start re-building the social connections they had previously formed on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, that has not led to a myriad of chatter and blog posts attempting to decipher, explain, and help you, the neophyte G+ user make sense of it all. We have seen this before with other Google products like Wave and Buzz. The products launch to a (relatively) small set of users, and almost instantly a flood of content gets created (with a shockingly limited data set and experiences to draw from), that compete for some knid of position or authority in the space.

    For more casual users of social networking services, (like your Grandma on Facebook), the hype and bluster surrounding G+ is likely lost, as they happily continue to to post pictures, check in on family members, and tend to their virtual crops on Farmville. By early reports, G+ is mostly male, and very geeky. Sort of like the old High School A/V clubs back in the day. 

    And for more hard core social networking aficionados, G+ while intriguing and capable, will need to offer just enough reason to get people to divert at least some of their social networking energy away from the value networks they have spent the last few years building up on the liked of LinkedIn and Twitter. No doubt we will soon see a rapid uptake on 'productivity' tools that will automate bi-directional feeds and updates to and from G+ from the older social networks. And then soon after brands and organizations will begin to adopt G+, the game makers like Zynga and others will get on board, and finally the Google advertising engine will kick in - developments that will certainly change G+ from what it looks and feels like today. 

    It can be pretty hard to keep up with all these developments in the social space, and one might feel frustrated or even behind the times if they are not one of the early adopters. But I know of at least one other pretty well-known and successful guy that also has only a passing understanding of G+, legendary investor Warren Buffett. Check out the (paraphrased) comments from Buffett about the technology and social networking space taken from a recent interview on Bloomberg TV:

    Interviewer: Did you ever feel you missed the boat on these four companies? (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook)

    Buffett:  ‘Well I missed the boat on them, but I don’t mind missing boats that I don’t know enough to captain’. ‘I don’t have to understand everything. I am smart in spots and I stay around those spots', (emphasis mine).

    Nice one. Now of course Buffett must have staff that stay informed about the latest and greatest in technology, social, mobile, and whatever other new things are coming. But he made it clear in the interview that he personally did not really deeply understand these newer technologies and developments, and consequently did not feel compelled to chase them, or to change his strategy or direction to compensate for that fact. Buffett stressed the importance (at least for him), of sticking to what he knew and felt like he could excel at, rather than being constantly on the make to re-invent himself.

    I think the lesson here might be an important one, as new technologies and networks continue to multiple and proliferate, it can be really easy and dangerous to get caught up in the chase ourselves. Some new network gets hot, a new tech gadget hits the market, a major service starts offering a new solution - whatever, and we almost immediately change course, divert some of our time and attention to this new shiny thing, and feel compelled to figure it all out. And exploit it for some personal gain, I mean isn't that at least part of the game?

    While some experimentation is great, and even fun at times, I also think it can put us in a situation where we never stop chasing, and spend enough time really focusing on that thing we are really good at, that we understand deeply, and that we can comfortably and reliably add whatever value it is we are trying to create. Warren Buffett might be one of the greatest investors that has ever lived, but he knows what he knows, and it seems that realization has served him pretty well. 

    I kind of like Google Plus, but I also really don't know what if anything I'll ever do with it, and that any time I spend there is time I'm not doing something else. We make these kinds of tradeoffs all the time I know, but when the trade involves something so new and exciting as G+, I think we perhaps make them too easily.

    What's your take - are we too caught up in the hype and the chase and not spending enough time at what we are really good at?

     

    Friday
    Jun032011

    In the Jungle or on Twitter - Dunbar Still Has You Beat

    You might be familiar with Dunbar's number - the theoretical limit on the number of meaningful and stable social relationships that one can successfully maintain. First proposed by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it asserts that the actual number of social relationships one can maintain ranges from 100 to about 230, with 150 as the commonly accepted value.Should I 'unfriend' Steve?

    Dunbar's original studies that led to the development of the concept of the 'number', were conducted on studies of the social activity of non-human primates, that as far as we can tell, did not have many Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Why do I toss in the social networking bit? Well, in this modern age of social networking, hyper-connectivity, and the ability to make some kind of connection, (meaningful or otherwise), with thousands upon thousands of people is now quite possible and fairly simple.

    Naturally the technological and social revolutions have led many to question or even claim that modern social networking technology can indeed finally enable individuals to effectively expand the actual number of social relationships they can successfully maintain, that in the age of Facebook and Twitter and the ease with which these tools allow essentially limitless connections to be made, that Dunbar's number might no longer apply.

    Recently Bruno Goncalves and a team of researchers from Indiana University set out to determine if indeed this was the case. They studies the actions and interactions and the networks of connections of over 3 million Twitter users over a period of 4 years, examining a grand total of over 380 million tweets. The researchers wanted to see if indeed among these 3 million users, they could discern patterns and evidence, (replies, conversations, sustained connections, etc.), that could prove that the long-accepted Dunbar limitation of 150 would indeed be more easily overcame, aided by the ease and speed and facilitated connection engine that is Twitter.

    Their findings? (below quote lifted directly from their paper's conclusion)

    Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals. In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities. We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving millions of individuals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's number. We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar's theory limiting users social activities.

    I follow about 6,000 people on Twitter. I probably interact regularly with maybe 100 or 150 of them. Which is altogether normal and expected and not at all unexpected according to our friend Dunbar, the primates he studied, and the results seen from the recent research from Indiana University.

    The larger point in all this?

    I suppose keeping in mind that no matter how large and diverse and important seeming these giant networks of contacts, connections, followers, and friends we build online are to us, to our businesses and our personal lives, the technology itself has yet to do much to overcome some of the apparent laws of nature and biology.

    What do you think? Can you really have more than 150 'friends'?

    Have a Great Weekend!

     

    Thursday
    Apr142011

    Do Bad Reviews Really Drive Away Candidates?

    Some background from the Digital Marketing blog Econsultancy.com:

    Between one and three bad online reviews would be enough to deter the majority (67%) of shoppers from purchasing a product or service, according to a Lightspeed Research study.

    Here is the chart from the research report that reflects this conclusion:

    In the consumer and retail world these days pretty much no matter what the purchase situation - big ticket items like cars or consumer electronics, or even less costly and more ethereal kinds of buying decisions like, 'Where should we have dinner in St. Louis?'; it seems like the majority of folks spend some time online,either on commercial websites, crowdsourced review or rating communities, or on social networks before making the decision on where to spend their time and money.

    And we see from the results of surveys like the one referenced in the Econsultancy piece, from anecdotal evidence and observations, and from just examining our own behaviors we know this to be true. When was the last time you tried a new restaurant without checking out the website, or seeing if there were any reviews on Yelp?

    In the consumer space the potential detrimental effects of a negative review on sales, market share, and reputation are increasingly seen by marketers and brand managers as very real and relevant. Sure, there remains and will continue to be differing opinions as the correct strategy that consumer brands should adopt in response to these negative reviews, but there no longer is much serious discussion that they do have an impact at some level on the brand. The Lightspeed survey that is the subject of the Econsultancy piece takes this realization a step further by quantifying the impact of these negative reviews on purchase decisions. Which is pretty neat.

    Let's spin this forward to the workplace, and specifically to the recruiting/employer branding space. It has become pretty much accepted that similar to the consumer market, that organizations not only need to carefully monitor their employer brand, and be mindful and aware of negative mentions and reviews of things like the application experience, the work environment, and the organization's reputation as a good or bad place to work on sites like Glassdoor and on social networks, that they may also need to take positive steps to ensure their messages about the unique employer value proposition are being clearly communicated.

    What seems to be missing though, in the organizational employer branding space, is a better understanding of the specific impact that both negative and positive reviews or mentions have on the potential candidates attitudes towards the organization, and ultimately their willingness to apply for positions.

    At the recent HR Executive Forum in New York City, several senior Human Resources leaders from some of the largest companies in the country talked about their companies and their CEO's reviews on Glassdoor.com. Quite frankly I was surprised how much this rating and information site had caught the attention of these HR executives. But while they were all aware of the content that had been posted on the site about their organizations, none seemed to offer any real understanding of just what, if any, real impact the information on Glassdoor had on things like applicant numbers, quality of applicants, and lasting impact to their ability to attract the talent they are seeking.

    It is obvious that bad reviews of the organization as a place to work are, well, bad. But just how bad? When and how should HR and recruiting organizations respond?

    How many bad reviews on Glassdoor or digs on Twitter add up to a meaningful and harmful impact?

    Is there any way to know? I'd be curious to hear if anyone is aware of any data on the recruiting side similar to the consumer data referenced in the Econsultancy piece.

     

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