Social networking Archives - Leading Virtually

Social Media is a Matter of the Heart

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 15:48:18 +0000

Many in my generation question the value of social media — the kind in which people engage in social chit-chat. A father, whose 31 year old daughter married recently, was no different. It was at his daughter’s wedding that he learned about the usefulness of social media for staying connected on a human level and enriching one’s life. His earlier thinking was that social media took time away from one’s career, family, and deep relationships. Over the years, however, he lost touch with his friends because they had all moved away from each other and began to focus on their careers and families.

His daughter, unlike him, did not lose touch with her friends. He finds out during her wedding that people in her generation don’t choose between work and friendships. They choose both. With the help of seemingly mundane exchanges via social media, they maintain their friendships while also pursuing their ambitions. Inspired by what he saw in his daughter’s case, he begins using social media with greater vigor and posts pictures and videos from his daughter’s wedding. Soon, his old friends reconnected with him. Their comments and “likes” piled up. He sent friend requests to his daughter’s friends, which were quickly accepted. Though these were small gestures, he found them to be intimate and nourishing.

This whole experience affected the father deeply enough to prompt him to write about it in a touching article at NYTimes. I strongly suggest that you read it. His concluding paragraph, in which he refers to his daughter Kate, gives us a sense of the true meaning of social media.

I see now how much I’ve given up over the years by keeping my work focus so central and my circle so narrow. I understand more viscerally why Kate and her friends spend so much time keeping up on social media. It’s nearly a week since the wedding, the “likes” keep coming, and my heart still feels wide open.

Social media is a matter of the heart. If you’re not touching someone’s heart or if others are not touching yours, then you’re probably not using it right. Unlike most other things which lessen when used, our heart only gets bigger when we give place in it to others.

The post Social Media is a Matter of the Heart appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Can Using Facebook Within Your Organization Add Value?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:35:54 +0000

I often hear from business leaders that while they see some value in using Facebook for business-to-customer interactions, they see little value in using it internally. They argue that the use of Facebook to engage in social chit-chat will distract employees from their work and make them unproductive. I believe that these business leaders are not seeing the value of the social interaction that is facilitated by a tool such as Facebook. Research tells us that social interaction is very useful for facilitating knowledge transfer and innovation in organizations. It is, therefore, not surprising that some companies are reporting significant benefits from the internal use of Facebook or a similar tool.

The value of social interactions

W. Tsai and his colleagues have published findings that demonstrate the value of social interaction within a company. In one of their studies, the authors found that social interaction across business units led to the exchange and combination of resources (e.g., knowledge, service, products) by individuals within those business units. This effect occurred both directly and via the facilitation of trust among individuals. The exchange and combination of resources, in turn, was related to product innovation in the organization. In another study, Tsai and his colleagues found that when members of different business units interacted socially, they also transferred more knowledge. Additionally, this effect of social interaction on knowledge transfer became stronger the more the business units competed with each other for market share. The logic behind this effect is similar to that behind the adage ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ Essentially, when your unit is competing with another, there is greater incentive to learn what those units are up to so that you can benchmark yourself and compete more effectively. Since the competing unit shares the same resource constraints and market situation as your unit, there are also greater opportunities for synergistic activities.

Research from Gallup provides additional support for why social interactions might be useful. Using data from its employee engagement questionnaire, Gallup has found that people with best friends at work are also more engaged in their work. Greater employee engagement, in turn, has been found to lead to greater profitability, customer engagement, and employee retention. Where do social interactions figure in here? Gallup’s research did not focus on social interactions but I think it is reasonable to think that social interactions at workplace are an important precursor to having a best friend at work.

Companies using social networking tools internally

Perhaps it is due to the potential of social interaction to lead to favorable business outcomes that some companies have adopted Facebook or tools like it for internal use. Serena Software, a company of about 800 employees with average age close to 50, adopted Facebook to improve the quality of workplace interaction (see related article). According to the company, the Facebook initiative has yielded tactical and strategic benefits. With over 95% penetration of Facebook within the company, the company’s culture has changed. The social networking tool has led to relationships that would not have existed otherwise.

A Canadian manufacturer of construction goods, Canam Group, decided to use Facebook for various aspects of its 2008 leadership conference (see related article). About 200 attendees, who were 50 years old on average, were offered the use of Facebook to create and share their profiles, register for the conference, and take part in the opening ceremony, elections, quizzes, and photo contests. The use of Facebook was a huge success, with a 99% participation rate. After the conference, Canam Group decided to set up a Facebook group that is available to its employees and retirees to create a more collaborative culture within the company.

IBM has set up a Facebook-like social networking tool, called Beehive, to facilitate personal and professional connections within the company. Like Facebook, Beehive provides an employee who is joining the network a profile page. On this page, employees can use the status message field and the ‘About Me’ section to update others about where they are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking. Users can also post photos, create lists to share their thoughts, and organize events. Beehive has been reported to facilitate connections at a social or human level between people working remotely. It has also led to opportunities for collaboration that would not have arisen in the absence of information about who else share’s one’s interest and expertise.

Summary

The use of social networking tools internally can add value by facilitating social interactions. Social networking tools can facilitate cultural change and friendships within your organization. They can help your employees discover who shares their interests and expertise and open up opportunities for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Distributed workers who have been assigned to a common project can use such tools to learn more about each other and break the ice. If you are not comfortable using Facebook internally because of its public nature, alternatives that can be deployed within your firewall (e.g., Lotus Connection, Socialtext) are available. A new tool, called as Convofy, will also be available as an alternative in the near future.

The post Can Using Facebook Within Your Organization Add Value? appeared first on Leading Virtually.

How to Put the “Social” Back into Social Media

Jonathan Guerrera — Mon, 17 May 2010 00:09:48 +0000

Social media isn’t what it used to be — there is a lot more content but the interaction is missing. As more and more companies are creating social media accounts and encouraging people to interact with them through these channels, it becomes increasingly more important to follow social media best practices to avoid unintentionally pushing away those who wish to interact with you. After all, it’s only a matter of clicks before your customer becomes interested in a competitor’s offerings on Facebook, Twitter, or other Web 2.0 channels.

Having had the opportunity to work with a local news station and construct a viable social media strategy for them, I have become very familiar with one of the more important concepts for proper social media usage: the signal-to-noise ratio. This ratio is a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise. But for social media purposes, the signal-to-noise ratio is a measure to quantify how much interesting, interaction-worthy content has been crowded out by excessive links, product pitches, and re-tweets that companies will oftentimes use to create the appearance of an “active social media presence.”

In optimizing your signal-to-noise ratio, your goal is to either increase your signal (aka – engaging content) and/or reduce your noise as much as possible. To do this properly, it is important to first go back to the basics of social media.

When distilled down to its simplest form, social media is about interacting with other people. Marketing strategy, customer relationship management, and other opportunities found within social media cannot flourish without this important bedrock of interaction with your customers and/or fan base. Businesses and thought leaders that do nothing but re-tweet other people’s content and advertise their sites/products are nothing more than information aggregators. Acting as an aggregator is not always a bad thing, but just realize that aggregation is not interaction, but rather pushing links and advertisements onto someone’s Twitter feed. Reducing the amount of advertising and re-tweets that aren’t directly relevant to your followers will reduce the noise. This is a step in the right direction.

However, working with a news station was an interesting challenge because people EXPECT news stations to act as news aggregators on social media. Therefore, all of the engaging content that could result in an interaction between the news staff and viewers, such as a “question of the day”, was drowned out by the constant tweeting of news articles throughout the day. People were accidentally skipping over the engaging content as they were skimming through the daily news on their feed.

In this type of situation, a good rule of thumb is: when you cannot remove the noise, separate it as much as possible. If people expect news aggregation or any sort of aggregation from your business, designate the company Twitter account as the dedicated news feed (example: Acme Co). People who are interested in this aggregation will now have an account to follow specifically for this purpose. Next, you need to make sure that customers are as comfortable as possible reaching out to your business. For customers on social media who are looking to discuss ideas, share comments, and express opinions, key employees within the company should create their own Twitter accounts (example: AcmeCo Jonathan). Dell, for instance, has more than 20 official Twitter accounts, each managed by an individual, not a faceless business unit. It is in such “individual” accounts where the interaction between followers and customers can take place, distinctly separate from the aggregation. Small amounts of re-tweeting can occur between the company Twitter account and the employee accounts if employees feel that a certain piece of aggregated content would be valuable for their followers. By allowing Twitter users to choose what they want showing up on their news feed, the result will be significantly less noise.

Now that the noise level has been reduced, it’s time to boost the signal. Boosting the signal is basically increasing the relevance and prevalence of your content. To increase relevance, it is necessary to experiment with different ideas to see what your followers respond most to. Sometimes a simple: “I’d love to hear your comments about X product or Y service” can be enough to get your followers interacting. Perhaps hypothetical questions about a future product or service may pique the attention of your followers. Personal news, especially good news, works too. Experimentation and taking note of response levels is very important. However, prevalence must be taken into account as well. If you’re posting extremely relevant content at 3 am, it’s very likely that your followers won’t see the content because it’s so far down on their feed by the time they check Twitter the following afternoon. Experimenting with posting at different times throughout the day is a good practice. It is also acceptable to re-post certain Tweets a few times throughout the day to target people who check Twitter at different points in the day. By playing around with relevance and prevalence, you will begin to increase the signal in your signal-to-noise ratio.

These strategies aren’t difficult to implement. It just requires that someone care about the interaction that occurs on social media. Rather than seeing it as another marketing platform that can achieve a certain ROI, social media should be viewed as a valuable opportunity to directly connect and engage with your potential and current customers. When viewed in this light, it can be noted that there are a lot of similarities between a face-to-face interaction and social media interaction. When talking to someone in person or over the phone, it is usually wise to avoid babbling on and on about topics that person probably doesn’t care about (reduce your noise). Instead, identify what this person is interested in and leverage that as much as possible (increase your signal). And if someone ever reached out to you by walking over to you and extending their hand, choosing to ignore them would be considered incredibly rude. So why do so many companies feel that this is appropriate conduct on social media? It’s as if quantity is mistaken as more important than the quality of your social media presence. By keeping the fundamentals of social media in mind at all times, you be in the right place to develop a powerful social media presence that consumers will appreciate, recognize, and want to be a part of.

Have you had a notable experience with a business through social media lately? If so, share your experience in the comments below.

The post How to Put the “Social” Back into Social Media appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Recent News on Social Media

Rebecca Jestice — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:05:10 +0000

This week I have run across some very interesting articles on social media and how their use is evolving. These two articles struck me as interesting because they discuss requiring people to use Facebook or Second Life in order to perform in classes or on the job. I think these use-cases highlight that we desire to use social tools available to us, and use them in ways that are beneficial to clients, colleagues, and students. But they also highlight that, as with any new system we adopt, there should be measures of their effectiveness, a case made for why they are our top choices, and clear guidelines for requiring people to join and provide personal information to third party applications.

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Penn State’s online campus is now requiring student advisers to offer meeting hours in Second Life for students. Advisers are required to offer at least 2 hours a week of availability in Second Life for meeting with students in addition to the other regular methods of communication. This will be an interesting case to watch, as it is requiring advisers to join a third party application to do their jobs. It is also curious because it is bringing something personal–student advising–into an open forum where privacy could potentially be an issue. Quotes from the social-networks adviser at Penn State indicate that, once trained in the basics of Second Life, the advisers are enjoying their time there. So far, I have seen no mention of success such as the students finding it beneficial, or finding it beneficial in ways beyond what other communication channels offer them. Perhaps the program is too new for analysis of its success at this stage.

A blog post, also from The Chronicle, discussed a teacher who has his students friend him on Facebook as a requirement for his business course. The Illinois State University professor uses Facebook as his course management system and requires students to friend him on the first day of class. The professor will work with students to adjust privacy settings on Facebook if they have some reservations about the set up. Assignments are submitted through students’ profile pages and questions can be asked by posting to the professor’s wall. At the end of the semester the professor de-friends all of his students and claims that he does not peruse their profiles. Again, currently I don’t see any discussion of whether or not the students find this as or more beneficial than a school supplied course management system, which operates behind a firewall, out of the public space.

In this case, the professor states that part of his point in using Facebook is teaching students that their online presence becomes part of their digital resume and that the World Wide Web doesn’t forget what you’ve posted or put into the public forum online. In this case students are required to belong to a third party application (one that has been criticized for its privacy measures in the past) in order to successfully complete their course.

The post Recent News on Social Media appeared first on Leading Virtually.

How Harmful is Facebook to Reputations and Relationships?

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:38:00 +0000

I recently deactivated my Facebook account. Although it had been a handy tool for reconnecting with old friends, keeping up with some colleagues, and socializing with family & other loved ones, in the past few months, I began to experience a downside to the social networking site. This eventually led to the deactivation of my account. Although social networking can be a useful tool, I came to the conclusion that, for me, Facebook took things too far, to the point that it became too much work to maintain my account appropriately, I began to worry about my online reputation, and I began to feel that I lived in a self-created, all-too-public bubble with serious negative consequences on some important relationships.

The beginning of my concern over Facebook came when Facebook began making default settings on accounts so that everyone could have access to your postings. I was spending too much time making sure that what I wanted to stay private was in fact private or shared with only certain people, and that I didn’t see all the extraneous junk that I didn’t want to see from my friends. I admit that I enjoyed interaction with some of my friends over games like Mafia Wars, but I didn’t want my business colleagues to know that I was becoming increasingly respected in my online “crime family” — it’s not appropriate — and I didn’t think that anyone else truly cared. The privacy settings were time consuming and not always as easy to use as I thought they should be. Canada has even brought serious concerns to the social networking site—citing that Facebook does not comply with their national privacy laws because of the company’s policy of keeping your account information indefinitely (notice in the beginning I said I ‘deactivated’ and not ‘deleted’ my Facebook account).

The ACLU has also recently brought attention to Facebook and the lack of measures in place to protect users’ privacy. The organization has recently created a Facebook quiz with the sole intention of showing you the access that quiz creators have to your information when you or a friend takes part in one of the numerous, often silly, Facebook quizzes. The quiz emphasizes that Facebook has inadequate safeguards to ensure that any information collected is legitimately for and used only for the operation of the Facebook application. In other words, quiz developers can potentially take whatever information they want and do whatever they want with it. Perhaps most startling is that there is no kind of screening in place to even know or verify who the developers are. You can see the quiz questions and answers.

Setting your security settings to maximum and keeping a bare minimum profile may not be enough to protect your privacy on sites like Facebook. MIT students were recently able to create pretty accurate software that could guess whether or not a man was gay based on basic profile information and friends lists—even if the man did not identify himself as gay on his Facebook page. Another group was able to accurately guess social security numbers based on publicly available data and information such as birth date and birth place—both things which many people have on their Facebook profiles in the form of birthday and hometown. That’s enough to begin identity theft. This raises questions about what else can be gleaned from even basic social networking pages.

Beyond privacy issues, there are real potential relationship consequences from using Facebook—for both professional and personal relationships. A recent article on PC World warned of the digital tattoo that one leaves behind on social networking sites that could potentially be seen by the wrong person. Even if you think your social networking pages are totally private, remnants of this digital tattoo could potentially be found through search engine sites such as Google or Yahoo by potential employers, colleagues, family members or those without good intentions. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how things you may have posted 10 years ago on the Internet or talked about some time ago on a social networking site could come back to haunt you in work or personal relationships now. If you’d like a bit of insight into your digital tattoo, go to Yasni.com and search for your name. It will give a tag cloud of terms and people associated to you as well as a list of links related to you—all just a click away from more information. My tag cloud included my colleagues on Leading Virtually as well as things related to Japan, where I lived 10 years ago, a bookstore I managed more than 5 years ago, a conference I attended earlier this year, and a few acquaintances that I haven’t been in contact with for almost a decade.

Another recent article in the Wall Street Journal accurately described perhaps the biggest potential problem with the extent that Facebook is being used in our lives today—the ruining of friendships and relationships. Some pitfalls contributed to the use of the medium in our important relationships include the feelings of jealousy or resentment when friends or colleagues tell us that they are too busy to write or call, yet they are updating their Facebook status every hour and obviously spending a lot of time on the site taking quizzes or “conversing” with others online. Other issues that can cause rifts in relationships is the posting of boring or inane information that one would never really announce in face-to-face interactions, seeing previously unknown sides of someone’s personality, and the boldness that comes from interacting online that might encourage someone to say something that they might not say face-to-face—all of which is taking place in a completely public forum and can lead to embarrassment, and of course, more of a digital tattoo.

Ultimately, I decided two things: 1) I need to invest time and care into the relationships – personal and professional – that are important to me. I cannot rely on Facebook to be the basis of our communication if the relationship is to be a healthy, growing one. 2) It’s not necessarily wise to mingle personal and professional relationships. Before social networking sites, our circles of friends and colleagues were often very separate. Before I deactivated my account, I had a list of almost 200 “friends” from every facet of my life—my family, students, my advisor, friends from high school, former professors, former employers, my college roommate, and friends from other towns I had lived in. Each group serves a different purpose in my life and they aren’t necessarily meant to mingle. It lead to the feeling that suddenly all aspects of my life were colliding and open to people that maybe the door should be closed to sometimes for my protection and theirs.

I am not suggesting that the answer to protecting yourself and your relationships is to deactivate your Facebook or all your social networking accounts. That’s not really reasonable. However, as leaders, professionals, and friends, I advocate spending some time thinking about how we use social networking tools and to what end, as well as what the future consequences of our actions in the online social world could be. I’m sure I’ll return to Facebook eventually but with a strict set of personal guidelines for how I use the account.

The post How Harmful is Facebook to Reputations and Relationships? appeared first on Leading Virtually.