Social Networking

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Can’t friend requests be a little more sociable?

I currently have 105 pending friend requests on Facebook and a similar number awaiting action on LinkedIn. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with these, since I have no idea who any of them are.

I’ve decided, reluctantly, to simply delete them all.

I’m happy to connect with people whose names I don’t instantly recognize as long as I know what the link is. Of course, I can follow the link to each individual’s profile and see if I can tease the connection out of the information they’ve offered. On Facebook, I can see the friends we have in common to see if I can figure out the connection from there.

But I don’t want to.

The folks with whom I have connected took one simple extra step that made the decision easy for me: They added a note telling me who they were and why they wanted to connect. “I was in your workshop in Chicago last week and wanted to connect,” is really all it takes.

But the default request to become friends on Facebook doesn’t cut it, nor does the default “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”—unless it’s accompanied by the connection you’re able to indicate (“Mary Smith has indicated you are a person they’ve done business with at Acme”).

So if you tried to friend me or connect on LinkedIn and never heard back, and you’re still interested in the connection, try again just a bit more socially. Thanks for understanding.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to contact each of the folks who’ve sent friend requests using the “Send a Message” feature. They’re all getting the same one, word-for-word, and I’m actually getting answers that are leading me to go ahead and connect with nearly all of them. Many have acknowledged that they should have included this information in the first place.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Open access is smart business, not an employee entitlement

At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.

The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:

isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.

I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.

I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.

The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.

But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.

On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora—not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies—but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”

The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:

On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.

Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.

And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.

Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.

Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.

It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition

For days, department members had ignored emails from a colleague asking for their input on a business matter. This was no overt act of rebellion against the sender of the email. In fact, she was well-liked. Instead, the request got lost in the avalanche of email employees received, or it represented yet another to-do added to an already-daunting list, or they did not spend their days at desks with computers, checking email at common workstations only infrequently.

None of which diminished the sender’s need to get replies. So at home that evening, she sent the same request again, but this time from her Facebook account to the Facebook accounts of those employees she was trying to reach. Remember, she was well-liked and had been friended by many of her colleagues, every one of whom responded, from home, to her work-related query.

This is not an isolated case. I’ve heard the story three times, from employees in three different companies. In one of those organizations, the employees in question belonged to a union; leadership had dismissed the ability to engage them after hours through social channels because their contract explicitly exempted them from off-hours work. They were flumoxed to learn that they had, in fact, taken non-work time to provide a work-related answer to a colleague. It was even more perplexing to grasp the idea that they would reply from home to a Facebook query when they hadn’t replied during work hours to a company email.

It’s a phenomenon of the networked age. It’s easy to prioritize emails that flood your inbox, but there’s a desire to respond when a friend reaches out to you on a network to which you both belong. It’s another example of the intermingling of employees’ work lives and their lives away from work. People used to keep these dimensions of their lives separate, mostly because you interacted with your work colleagues at work and your friends and family at home. Those distinctions are rapidly evaporating when you add your work friends to your social networks; they all become part of a single relationship pool.

Not that your colleagues were ever confined to a work role. The best boss I ever had—Ed Hahn, who directed Organization Development at Mattel—made it clear: You’re only work colleagues until you get to know each other. After that, you’re friends, acquaintances, or enemies. Work, Ed said, is social.

That’s why employees band together in Facebook groups like the UIHC emergency room staff, or the employees of Siemens Egypt. What Facebook, Twitter, and other social tools have changed is the ability to engage with the people you know outside the physical boundaries that used to restrict your ability to interact. As a result, companies are struggling with the notion of the eight-hour workday when employees are able—and willing—to work just about any time, any place.

If you’re familiar with Gallup’s employee engagement survey, you know that a key question has to do with whether you have any friends at work. Social networks support work-based friendships and thus contribute to building engagement. Companies with large populations of highly engaged employees produce stronger growth than those whose employees are not so engaged.

Because the use of social networks at work is not a simple black-and-white concept—they’re not either exclusively working or exclusively screwing around—companies need to rethink their bans on employee use of social networks at work. It’s simply wrong to assume that employees connecting with friends on Facebook aren’t producing any value for the organization, since their interactions can produce direct work-related results (like the employees who got answers from colleagues they couldn’t get through official channels), insights, and even high-quality candidates for open positions in the company.

Companies that embrace the idea of a networked workforce will recognize that employees connect with one another whenever it makes sense, not just from 9 to 5, using the tools they use to connect to everyone else. These companies will adopt policies that address the biggest risks associated with employees using social channels while giving the company the best chance to be more innovative, more productive, and more profitable.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Recruiters shouldn’t care about that Facebook picture of your beer pong game in college

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

Today, we’re living through one of the most remarkable transitions in history. We’re moving from an era during which people were secretive and kept things close to the vest to an era where everyone is networked and everyone shares everything. And those who grew up in the soon-to-be bygone era are making hiring decisions about people who grew up in the era that is hurtling toward us like an out-of-control freight train.

It has become conventional wisdom for people of my generation to wag their fingers at millenials, warning them of the dangers that await if they’re too open with their extracurricular activities. Even Dan Tapscott, whose “Grown Up Digital” does an admirable job of explaining the Net Generation, insists that the one thing they don’t get is that sharing outrageous behavior today will come back to bite them in the ass a few years down the road when they’re trying to get hired.

That’s true today, with people who kept their late-night fraternity-house drinking binges on the QT. It won’t be so long, though, before the hiring managers have shared just as much of their social lives online as the recruits they’re looking to hire. The fact that people got drunk and engagred in questionable behavior in school just won’t matter.

Consequently, that Animal House behavior really shouldn’t matter to hiring managers today. Like I say, the hiring manager probably engaged in some pretty stupid behavior of his own when he was in college, too. The fact that he did shots off a co-ed’s belly when he was 19 didn’t make him a bad hire when he was 23.

Back in 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg didn’t make it onto the U.S. Supreme Court because he’d smoked a little pot when he was in college. Today, denying a job to anybody who ever tried marijuana in college carves a huge slice out of the pool of prospective candidates. A prospect’s social behavior in college is simply not a predictor of their value as an employee.

Recruiters and HR people can even eek out a competitive edge by overlooking a four-year-old picture on a Facebook page and focusing on their qualifications today. After all, that’s what today’s candidates will be doing in five years when they’re the ones making the hiring decisions.

Friday, October 09, 2009

The irony of investing in social marketing while blocking your own employees

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009. Twenty-one percent were set to boost their budgets by more than 25%. And worldwide social media advertising was expected to grow 17.3% this year to $2.35 billion.
• A study from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that 66% of marketers have used social media in some capacity this year, with Facebook being tapped by 74% of them, YouTube by 65%, and Twitter by 63%.
• Twitter is the social media channel of choice among Fortune 100 companies, according to a Burson-Marsteller study, which found 54% of these organizations active on Twitter, compared with 32% using blogs and 29% with active Facebook fan pages.
• There is a correlation between financial performance and engagement in social media among the world’s top brands, according to a study conducted by Altimeter Group and WetPaint. Simply stated, socially engaged companies are more financially successful.
• And most recently, a study from SNCR, Deloitte, and Beeline Labs released just the other day reports that 94% of respondents said that they plan to maintain or increase investment in their online communities. The investment pays off, they said, in word of mouth, customer loyalty, brand awareness, idea generation, and improved quality of customer support.

The fact that businesses are seeing tangible benefits from social media explains why investment continues to rise among most companies, even when budget belts are being tightened. Driving these results is the competitive advantage that comes from real people connecting with each another in spaces where they share mutual interests. Companies are smart enough to know that (according to research) customers want the companies with which they do business should be present in these spaces.

So it is all the more confounding that these very same companies won’t let their own employees engage on these sites.

As reported here and elsewhere, a survey of CIOs found that 54% of companies block all employees from visiting any social sites. It’s deliciously ironic that 54% is exactly the same percentage of Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter.

If companies block their employees from engaging, who do they think their fan pages and Twitter accounts are attracting? Think about it. If every company prohibited employees from visiting Facebook, then the only time anybody could visit the company Facebook fan page would be when they’re not at work. Given the hours most companies require of their employees, that’s not a heck of a lot of time to interact with customers.

What’s more, if the fan pages of those 54% of companies are being viewed by employees from the 46% of companies that still allow some kind of access, none of the companies’ employees are able to interact with those visitors. They can’t. They’ve been blocked.

American Airlines announced just the other day that it’s launching BlackAtlas.com, a travel-focused social network for African Americans. According to one report, “The site will feature discussion boards and blogs on which users can share pictures, video and travel stories and tips, along with rating and recommending businesses and travel destinations.”

I don’t know whether American Airlines allows its own employees to visit social sites, but with more than half of companies in the blocking camp, odds are American’s own black employees will be barred from a site where they could interact with BlackAtlas.com members and personify the airline’s culture.

Gartner, in fact, projects that 60% of the Fortune 1000 will host online communities by 2010 so they can gain information from their customer base “which can be used for short-and long-term customer relationships,” according to Garner researcher Adam Sarner.

Employees at more than half of them, though, are not allowed.

Organizations need to think more like Dell, which realized its roadblock to Facebook made no sense when it launched a green initiative on the social networking site so employees could engage and participate.

The presumption of most companies blocking access is that employees are being unproductive, wasting time. In fact, the lines have blurred so much that even an employee spending a few minutes online to take a break from work could wind up having an interaction that benefits the company.

How have your non-work social interactions wound up serving your organization?

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

More thoughts on work-life integration

Yesterday I shared my thoughts about the shift from work-life balance to work-life integration. My definition (but certainly not the process) is simple: Work-life balance presumes a clear boundary between work and the rest of your life while integration assumes you’ll be doing both all the time.

Some of the comments that resulted from the post challenged the idea of work-life integration, which led me to conclude that I didn’t explain its roots.

I had an engaging exchange on Twitter with Jim Ryan, a staff writer for the Central Pennsylvania Business Journal, who objected to what he saw as my insistence that people in the workforce adopt the various technologies that have found their way into the world of work. “If you want to plug your head into a machine 24/7, be my guest,” he tweeted. “But don’t insist that be the norm for all others.”

I’m certainly not insisting anything. Rather, I am observing that this has become the norm. The completely unscientific poll I introduced in the earlier post is running 70-30—70% of respondents check work-related email first thing upon getting up in the morning, before anything else.

This trend is not about technology any more than the habit of gathering around a radio, and then a TV set, was about technology. Technology enables cultural change, but the family huddling around the TV was the result of the popularization of a new entertainment form.

The network technologies that allow us to stay connected and communicate with anyone from anywhere are fusing with our culture just as radio and TV did. While those of us working in this space may focus on, obsess over and debate the technologies, the average person out there couldn’t care less.

My 20-year-old daughter—and her entire social circle—serves as an example. Her mobile phone is always with her. It’s always buzzing or launching into any among dozens of ringtones. She doesn’t care all that much about the manufacturer of the phone, the operating system, or the next great thing on the product horizon. She’s barely aware of Android.

In fact, Rachel is baffled by my obsession with emerging technologies. But if I told her she had to go on vacation without her phone, she’d look at me like I had just landed here from somewhere in the Adromeda system. For Rachel, it’s not a question of whether she’s plugged into a machine 24/7. It’s a question of being in or out of touch with her network of friends and colleagues. In her paradigm, 24/7 connectivity is just the way things are. And the connectivity is with people, not with platforms, algorithms or systems configurations.

Work connections are just part of the mix. Work and social contacts get mooshed together. Sprint and Palm recognized this phenomenon and incorporated it into the design of the Palm Pre. When I got my Pre, I identified my various email accounts and calendars, and the Pre aggregates them into a single view. Is it work or personal? Color codes differentiate it, but all activities are combined into a single calendar and emails into a single email stream. The Pre recognizes the shift from a clear boundary between work and life into a world where it’s all the same.

Compounding the phenomenon is the fact that it has permeated all demographics, not just Rachel’s segment and younger. Certainly there are fewer people embracing the integration as the demographic line trends older, but there are people in every group for whom the difference between work connections and others have blurred beyond distinction.

You’ll rarely, if ever, hear anyone of Rachel’s generation suggest you should “unplug.” Being plugged-in is a tactical, mechanical concept that has nothing to do with the conversation and information mediated by devices. To suggest to Rachel that she unplug is like telling suggesting she enclose herself in an isolation tank. The technology is just the means to the end of connection with real people. That’s all that matters. It’s not about being plugged in; it’s about being in touch, with everyone, all the time.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Online Americans are redefining what it means to be entertained

If you’re going to capture anybody’s attention, you need to do it where they’re spending their time. Increasingly, that’s social networking sites. According to a study from research company NetPop, time spent social networking has exploded 93% since 2006. That means around a third of the time U.S. Internet users spend online is devoted to communicating, not consuming.

Dig deeper into these social networking activities and you find out that people communicate online each week with, on average, 18 people one-to-one and with 110 people through group interaction. And this isn’t just kids, the usual justification for dismissing the importance of social media. Of active social networkers (those who have estalbished profiles on more than one site) 25.6% are between 18 and 24, 23% are 25 to 35, but nearly half are 35 to 64.

The study, “Online Activities among U.S. Broadband Users, 2006 and 2007 (U.S. $295),” reported that 76% of American broadband users are “joiners,” to use the parlance of Forrester’s technographic ladder. That translates into 105 million people in the U.S. communicating through social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, not to mention niche networks and social networks (like CarSpace and MyRagan) and social networks integrated into broadere sites (like FastCompany).

More time on social networks means less time spent elsewhere, and Netpop’s research suggests that reallocation of time comes at the expense of more traditional online entertainment. Passive consumption of entertainment online droped 29% over the last two years, to just 19% of the time people spend online. Another way to look at this: Peoples’ idea of what constitutes entertainment is shifting from passive consumption of online media to a more active engagement with other people, mostly people they already know. Sharing with others is more fun than kicking back and watching a video.

According to Netpop, the study suggests that companies need to do more to engage consumers and commit more of their online efforts to user-generated content and social media through which people can talk with the company and with each other. If companies don’t provide these opportunities, they will find it harder to track and engage consumers because, Netpop believes, they’ll find other channels through which they can participate in such conversations, even if it means building those communities themselves.

It’s easy to dismiss the notion that cmpanies must build community around their brands, but trying to caputre attention by hitting people with messages in places they’re not spending time is like shoving wads of money into a garbage disposal. I’m currently reading Martin Lindstrom’s excellent book, “Buyology,” in which he provides compelling evidence that people don’t pay attention to brand messages in video games, for example, yet companies are pouring exorbidant sums into in-game marketing. Business needs to understand that consumer habits across a loarge demographic swath are changing, and thus the means by which to reach them have to change as well.

The blog Bohan Style offers a good example with Victoria’s Secret Pink, a Facebook group into which more than 1.1 million people have opted. The post quotes Brad ABettese, executive VP and managing director of a Sanfrancisco marketing agency: “The community is a self-selecting loyalty program. Pink has been careful to provide tools that not only help to manage the brand’s identity, but communicate with loyal ‘friends’ and strengthen the brand’s relevance.”

The decision to deliver value through authentic engagement seems less and less optional in the face of ia growing body of evidence. I’ll be including Netpop’s numbers into my upcoming presentations.