Give Your Social Business a Purpose
Featured this month in the Social Business Hub
Social Business
Featured this month in the Social Business Hub:
Use purpose and not fear to drive social media
How are organizations moving from a “provide and pray” approach to social business to a strategic one? In a new Q&A, Mark McDonald and Anthony Bradley, both of Gartner and authors of The Social Organization, tell MIT SMR executive editor David Kiron that the best way to move companies along the social business path is to build communities around well-defined purposes, around which a community will rally, engage and participate. It’s participation anchored by purpose that delivers value to the business. Read more »
Delivering open innovation through employee networks
R&D leaders must comb their in-house brainpower for new and potentially applicable ideas, and that means figuring out ways to ensure that promising ideas reach the the right people. Enter the “idea scout” and the “idea connector.” Smart companies are investing in these two types of innovation brokers to ensure that ideas get through to the people best equipped to exploit them and help produce successful open innovation outcomes. Read more »
Is the mobile web changing your purchasing behavior?
As smartphones and tablets have increased access to the Web while on the go, buying behavior has started to shift in a greater number of markets, says MIT’s Duncan Simester. Read more »
Should information have a sell-by date?
An expiration date on information is exactly what our society needs, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. Our new ability to remember things perfectly, and in perpetuity, is having profound effects on us individually and as a society, he says. Read more »
Harnessing the power of social media
Research on 100+ companies shows that embracing the “groundswell of customer power” has critical advantages. But opening up to customers is not always easy. In an article from the MIT SMR‘s social business archive, authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li describe a strategic framework that helps businesses implement social applications in a number of departments and weave two-way customer communications into the fabric of an organization. Read the article, free for a limited time »
From Our Network
Comment “I think to start answering the questions you’ve posed we need to stop using the term ‘human capital management.’
The main point of ‘social business’ is that people and their connections move to the forefront (of software, organizational structures, planning, etc). As a term, “human capital management” really takes the “human” out of people.
‘HCM’ represents a detached, mechanistic way of talking about people and leadership. Let’s do away with it.”
ephraim commenting on “Why Social Business?.” | October 13, 2011
Response from Executive Editor David Kiron “Using terms like “human capital management” is, to a certain extent, just calling it like it is. Terms like human resources and headcount have become useful as well as popular because they reflect the way things are done. I am afraid that a detached, mechanistic approach to labor is, and has been, at the “heart” of much economic activity and theory.”
Fast Company “Parcels out the [employee evaluation] process in bite-size chunks, democratizes it, and anonymizes it … send out questions on a schedule you choose for your organization … Employees then answer the questions, either evaluating colleagues on their team (“How actively does Betty support recruiting?”), or weighing in on the company as a whole (“Rate your manager’s ability to recognize excellence”).
Everyone on a team evaluates each other, regardless of status — the paralegal gives feedback to the senior partner, and vice versa — though the person giving the feedback is anonymous unless she waives that right.”
David Zax‘s on a new use for social tools in managing people in “Why You Should (And Shouldn’t) Throw Your Employees Into Swimming Pools” | October 26, 2011
Adam Ginsburg When Consumers Tweet Complaints, Should Brands Respond? http://zite.to/sSoGfn #socialbiz
@aginsburg on research showing the customer expectations of responses to Twitter engagement | October 28, 2011