Gautam Ghosh is a social business consultant who has been engaging with virtual communities since 2000 through blogging, tweeting, and maintaining a website. Social technologies are bringing fundamental shifts by moving authority to users, focusing on niche relevance over broad topics, and allowing people to earn visibility through social trends rather than buying visibility. These changes impact how companies approach content, talent management, and the nature of work. Companies are using social tools internally for collaboration, learning, and crowdsourcing innovation from employees. HR can facilitate internal communities by connecting employees and acting as change agents.

1. Gautam Ghosh
Social Business Consultant
INNOVATION THROUGH SOCIAL
NETWORKING

2. About Gautam
 Engaging in virtual communities since 2000
 Blogging since 2002
http://www.gautamblogs.com
 Tweeting since 2007
http://twitter.com/GautamGhosh
 Website http://gautamghosh.net

3. When Media Changes
Everything Changes

4. Technology’s impact becomes
evident when it becomes
ubiquitous

5. 1
The future has already
arrived.
It’s just not evenly
distributed yet.
Source: William Gibson

6. 2
The tools are transient.
The values embedded in them
are persistent.

7. 3
To understand how social
technologies are changing
media and business,
begin by asking how they are
changing people and society.

8. Cognitive Surplus
 Author Clay Shirky
in his book “Here
Comes everybody”
talks about
Cognitive Surplus
 Making consumers
move to
Creator/Critics

9. Social technologies are not just
other tools

10. Fundamental shifts - content
 Authority  User Generated
 Influence (trust factor)
 Authenticity
 Broad/Generic  Niche Relevance
 Numerous Channels, Fragmentation
 Noise
 Buying Visibility  Earning Visibility
 Social Trending/Discovery

11. Fundamental shifts – talent
management
 Linear  Lattice Career Progression
 Flatter, Virtual, Collaborative, Project Based
 Accelerated Mobility
 Time in Tenure, Development Cycle
 Formal  Informal Learning
 Social Collaboration, Learning Networks
 Silo’d  Integrated Resourcing
 Full Time Alternatives
 Complexity

12. Fundamental shifts – nature of
work
Generalist Skills
1960 Oriented
Task Predictable Workload
Individual Contributor
Geographically Dependent
2012 Technical
Complex Knowledge Work
Collaborative
Team Based
Time Pressured
Mobile / Virtual

13. The Business Case

14. Benefits from Web 2.0: McKinsey Survey

15. Social Business
deconstructed
Social
Social Enterprise
Media
CRM 2.0
Marketing

16. Internal Collaboration
& Learning

17. Who Benefits?
Executive
Human Resources
Management
Improve employee
Turn the threats of
engagement, congenial
public social tools to
and flexible
the advantage of the
workplace, facilitate on-
organization
boarding new hires
Employee
Functional Manager
A forum to know the
Facilitate team
company, people and
communication, knowl
key information; Share
edge sharing and
and participate on
collaboration
range of topics
4 key stake holders © Qontext Inc. 2010 17

18. Examples
Microsoft calls it TownSquare.
Deloitte hosts D Street. What’s yours?
IBM has its Beehive, and
Best Buy its BlueShirt Nation.
© Qontext Inc. 2010 18

19. Impacting rewards and recognition
Chatter “turns the company into a meritocracy,” according to Marc
Benioff, who said SalesForce is “changing the compensation systems to
reflect the folks who are really making a difference.”

20. Crowdsourcing Innovation
 Dell Employee
Storm: Internal
ideation platform to
enable Dell’s
worldwide
community of more
than 80,000
employees to post
and discuss ideas on
topics ranging from
product innovation
to company HR
policies.
 Tools like
InnoCentive can do
the same for any
company
Source: http://thesocialworkplace.com/featured/1558/

21. Online Communities

22. What is an online community?
An online community is a group of people with
similar goals or interests that connect and
exchange information using web tools.
...
An online talent community is a group of people
that share an affinity for an
organization, profession or skill that connect
, share opinions, exchange information, and
collaborate using web tools.

23. Three distinguishing points
Connects Organization/Profession/Skill
with all Stakeholders Groups
COMMUNITY
Connects Members to Connects Members to
Other Members Non-Members (Discovery)

24. Dell’s Social Media and
Community University (aka SMaC
U) Course levels:
101: Principles
201: Dell’s Strategy
301: Brand Guidelines
401: Platform Specific
To date, 6,000 employees
trained and certified to
engage on behalf
of Dell
Photos provided by Dell. Dell Social Media and Community University.
24

25. HR as a Community
Facilitator?
 Natural Role
 Getting people to connect
 Change Agents
 Examples

26. THANK YOU
Gautam Ghosh
Cell: +91-73030-61713
http://www.linkedin.com/in/Gautam