Social media and HR strategy
Time for formal HR policies on social media
I have been meaning to sketch out the bones of an social media policy for HR and the time seems to be right to get on with it!
- LoudMouthMan has started to beat a drum calling for some input.
- I found a good post on strategic developments in new media.
- And I started off a post-grad class on Strategic HRM this week.
First, the HR strategy
The real issue when we talk about social media and employees is that many HR departments don’t really have a strategy. Not to be too unkind but they haven’t the foggiest clue what it takes to make money in their industry or to out compete the competition. I saw a report today from India that about 90% of HR managers are left speechless if you ask them about the business model of their company. From that platform of ignorance, well everything that follows is random.
What should already be in place and why
That said, firms “should” have a clear idea of what they are “buying in” when they hire some one, and what precautions should be taken for the sake of the business.
I once ran a policy that all stationery was free, whatever purpose you wanted it for. My reasoning was that we dealt with confidential material and I didn’t want people taking paper home for their kids to draw on. The rule was that all paper was shredded and the quid pro quo was we will buy you whatever scrap pads and pens you want - no questions asked.
I’ve seen really slack security, questioned it and been laughed at. And I have seen the same people all over the newspapers as journalists added 2+2=5 on the basis of what was found in the rubbish bins. I have seen worse too. Security merges into safety.
Extending my current policy to include social media
So I am not concerned about employees chattering on line. My HR Strategy and the downstream policies of training, induction, and things like stationery use have taken care of all that. An in-house chat channel should be sufficient for people to discuss what they want to post on line, what is wise to post, etc. etc.
I would make computers available to staff at work BTW, as a matter of course. It is much more sensible to help your staff keep on top of their personal business than presume they can take care of it between 9pm and 6am, which is what they would be doing with British commute times.
Then think about social media and the potential for a punchier HR strategy
With social media, the interest for me is more on the value it may add. When we look at the interconnectivity, geographical scope and ability to shift our business model from service to platform (which applies to non-internet business’ too), then HR strategists need to go back to basics.
- Where do we get our money from, and what is the pattern (trend, seasonal, ad hoc, random)?
- How does sales demand relate to labor demand?
- When do we need people and what do we need them for?
Social media can change the answer to all these questions, if not for us, then for our competitors. New technologies disrupt business models and first movers have a huge advantage. Second movers often go broke as they are left hanging on to lemon.
If our competitors are deriving value from the initiative and energy of their employees, can we afford not to?
It’s The Brand Not The Personality Stupid
I’ve just gotten out of a Ustream.tv chat hosted by Hot Dog Media.
The chat was refreshing and the conversation flowed onto the subject of brands using social media (So.Me), and how and why.
At some point the ugly notion (in my humble opinion) was raised that social media is about personalities, in that if company x employs a community manager they should drive their communication from a personality stance.
WRONG
What brands need in this tribal infested Web 2.0 play-ground are in fact “moderators“, or “facilitators” of dialogue, operating much in the same way a good anchor man/woman on a television news programme would, or a Chair at a convention board.
The fact is that people (social media) will amplify your brand’s negative or positive aspects quicker than you can get your wages paid. Clearly this mean you need two vital things.
- a good product
- conversation moderators - to promote the positive conversation aspects, and to address the negative aspects, with promises of change (disaster management)
- if you have a crap product people will talk about it being so
To give you a very clear example of why the BRAND should be the talking point and not the personality read this forum thread.
It is a first hand experience, a concrete example, of how I moderated (I am Audiocourses), and facilitated the positive aspects of the BRAND. I wasn’t asking to be loved, the conversation was zero to do with my personality, I was moderating the conversation with objectivity, because I knew full well the BRAND was solid and more importantly that customers thought so too.
What would I have done if the BRAND was not good, or if I didn’t have happy customers? Then I would have facilitated conversation which put forward processes for change.. “yes, we have looked at this, and we are very aware of it, we are organising a steering committee to address this issue” - you get the point.
Think brand, not personalities.
Twactic
Another day and another definition.
Twactic - the art of tactically using twitter to drive traffic to your posts.
Classic examples include liberal use of WOW, capitalised in conjunction with mentioning a “friend” and pointing to a url.
e.g.
“audio #So.Me Twactic watch: > “WOW - Great Comments @badgergravling” >> http://tinyurl.com/6p8p6k
If you have some prized Twactics please comment.
In addition, raise your glass to Danie Ware of Forbidden Planet.
“@audio interesting twittertactic (twactic?) there. Worked too 
See how I also gave you another example of tactic, in this case #So.Me Blogactic, to mean using your Blog to praise a fellow disciple, thus fuelling the ideological amplification.
I will now go and use a Twactic in Twitter, to prove my point and bring you here, play fair and let me know if it worked.
Google: your supplier, your utility or your one and only customer?
While you have been having fun thinking up SoMe, I’ve thinking about something much more dry or serious.
We all know that Microsoft landed in the court facing charges of monopoly. Google will be there eventually too, not because they are bad or evil, but because our economic system requires us to keep an eagle eye on the “big boys”.
While monopoly is illegal in our system, hegemony is not. At the NLabNetworks meeting in Leicester a few weeks ago, CJ asked a good question. If you could only have three social media tools, which ones would you choose? I was amused that no one listed Google. We are so accustomed to Google that we forget it is there. Go out onto the streets and ask people where Google gets its money from. People will be puzzled, not because they don’t know, but because they never thought to ask. That’s hegemony. Not only are we big and successful, but everyone assumes our way is the right way of doing things.
So how has this affected your business?
We all use Google, to be sure. Its a great way to brainstorm and make up a short list. What I mean is how has Google changed your business model and are those changes good for you in the long term?
- SEO, if I have got my head around it correctly, means, in brief, Get Found by Google, Get Found by Google, Get Found by Google!
- ROI means proving you can do what Google does - predict hits.
It seems to me that Google is no longer supplier or even utility. It has become a customer. The one and only customer. Everything we do is geared up to pleasing Google, getting Google’s attention, and looking like Google.
Is Google even a utility? Or is it just a service on the utility of internet? Will Google come and go like other great firms, but a little faster, because on the internet firms come and go more quickly?
So what is the alternative? I’ll point you to a post which prompted this thinking and try to put my money where my mouth is on Thursday.
SoMe
Improbulus is correct, perhaps we all need an abbreviation which is better than SM.
I had a few tweets with her today which went as follows:
@audio you might start with thinking up an alternative abbreviation for Social Media - or is it too late?
@improbulus I’d say Communications Technology.. because that’s all it is.. but that’s not sexy.. nothing new here really…
@audio actually, I meant maybe something like SocMed instead of SM??! (referring to your earlier tweet now)
@improbulus Oh I see.. SM is too close to S&M? SocMed works.
improbulus @audio yes, otherwise some people might get confused! Anything else, really - SocMed was just a suggestion.
So there you go, that is that we have now officially declared Social Media to be abbreviated to SocMed.
You may go forthwith and use SocMed, hereby defined by The Social Media Mafia.
+++++++++++++++
Breaking News:
UPDATE: the abbreviation has now been officially reduced to the rather simple, and refreshingly more related SoMe pronounced So Me thanks to:
vanmaanen @audio SocMed is SoMe
Emerging Technologies Managers
We do know this stuff, or at least we did
Chris is deeply concerned that social media might encourage people to segment into antagonist tribes and that have-nots will be increasingly disenfranchised. Coming in from an organizational design background, both in profits and not-for-profits, I am less concerned. Polarization and marginalization are risks, but not inevitable outcomes. We know the risks; they are old questions; and they are covered in basic training of “organizational scholars” as basics are in every profession.
‘Group think’, made famous by Kennedy’s failed invasion of Cuba, is 101 material - as are the trajectory to reach the point where groupthink is possible, and the manager’s role (as opposed to team leader’s role) when the group reaches that level. The protection of journalists as the fourth estate is critical to the management of group think, etc. etc. Pol Science 101.
What is a mystery, at least to me, is the apparent collapse of public administration in the UK. Missing computer disks, 20% tax on the minimum wage, crowds of people milling around a train station trying to find out about delayed trains - all beg the question “Where do people learn to manage in the UK? What do the learn? Who do they learn it from? What are the gradations in experience that a young person might expect?”
What I find more of an unknown, and therefore compelling, is the increasing split between consumers and producers.
In the media world, consumers have become producers, and producers have retreated, by-and-large, to making platforms. This is a complex issue that has taken place in other sectors too.
- The classic example is the contrast an old-fashioned hotel and self-service apartments.
- I understand that no one person understands the design of a new jet engine, but some how it comes together.
- I believe sales of bottled water go up when we don’t “trust” the community we live in (Got nothing necessarily to do with the water!)
The hotel example is relatively easy to draw out into rules-of-thumb. If fine dining is to be replaced by a microwave, a hotplate, preprepared meals and packaged soup, the demand for skills changes. The call for what you and I think of as real skill, diminishes. The demand for chefs bifurcates. Top chefs need to be in restaurants where it is very clear we will pay for their skills in the price of our meal. Indifferent chefs are likely to be replaced with a management system such as we find at McDonalds. Now the skills are estimating the demand for chips, contracting for potatoes with farmers, persuading a lot of young people to do work where they learn little, etc.
From hotels to knowledge
The same pattern is being seen in the knowledge economy. We simply do not have a role if our consumers can “cook” better than us.
What becomes interesting from an HR point of view are these questions?
- How do we make sure that we have sufficient chefs coming through, how do they get experience, what competition do we need to provide the impetus to get better, etc?
- What do we do with the people who are adequate chefs but not good enough to work in premium establishments?
- How do we train people in the skills needed to run mass outfits like McDonalds?
- How do we train people in skills to see what comes after McDonalds?
I listened to Brad Smith of Intuit, the accounting software people, talking about the challenge of moving from providing accounting advice to a platform where consumers advise each other. As he put it, we have to move from
- finding problems that we are good at solving to
- enabling people to solve their own problems.
Note, McDonalds doesn’t go this far. You get what you get. There are some services in the States though that do all your shopping for you, and sometimes your chopping and slicing. You get to cook. This is a different space where people don’t do as they are told!
I might be carrying forward basic organization theory inappropriately and I’d be happy to know I am wrong. In current thought, we distinguish between
- doing work
- supervising work
- managing systems
- managing change
- managing organizations.
I’ve done a lot of assessment center work and we watch out for adequate transitions between levels 1 and 2 and 2 and 3 (and thereafter but this is a pyramid!)
When a highly skilled person is transitioning between 1 and 2, they often make 1 of 2 mistakes.
- They specify instructions in minute detail.
- They abdicate and send a note saying something like - see me about this please.
The psychologists will be looking for the ability to say this is the situation, this is my goal, this is your goal, these are your resources and authority, this is how we will coordinate. Within the context of their sector, military guys are taught this stuff and the agile can carry it over to other sectors.
Between 2 and 3, a highly trained junior manager or supervisor, has to make another transition. They need to remember that they are talking to people who will go out to manage another team (as above). Again we see some ‘cuffing it’ but more often we see micro-management where they start quizzing the subordinate about what they did or did not do.
The psychologists want to see the task positioned “at the right level”. A clever trick, for anyone interested, is to delegate to the whole team of managers on one piece of paper. What is the situation, what is your goal, what is the goal for each subordinate manager (one line each only!), what resources and authority vary from normal, and how will the team coordinate. That keeps you focused on coordinating managers and and understanding the nature of the management task, how much it varies from day-to-day, etc.
Going back to the bifurcation of skills, a run-of-the-mill chef who joins McDonalds has to learn a new swathe of management skills, beginning but not ending with some “man management”. They cannot approach the day as if they are going to do the work themselves. Other people have to figure out what they are on about, deal with their own demons, adjust to small details, etc.
If the customers persist in talking to each other, and deciding what recipes should be used, running that restaurant takes on a massively new dimension. The manager cannot do everything. Customer Mary talks to Waiter Johnny who liaises with Chef Sam who might be buying in food from Farmer Lucy. To manage this business, even as a manager at the bottom of the pecking order, we need a a capacity to anticipate and conceptualize what needs to be done, what may need to be done, etc. This level of know-how used to be the province of people who gained experience in a leisurely fashion, often spending years in jobs such as Assistant GM of a hotel.
Conceptualizing the complicated decisions made by other people is our business now. Fantasizing here, the hotel business becomes the art of allowing an owner to manage the business. You won’t manage the business directly. And you will survive if they survive and continue to buy your services and pay your bill! Franchising takes us part of the way, but not all of the way because our clients own their own businesses.
Yes we can!
I am not catastrophizing here. This is not beyond our knowledge set. Everything we need to know about managing in these situations has already been written down - quite often 50 to 100 years ago. And while some education is certainly dumbed down, in my experience, Gen Y picks up information very very fast.
But we do need experience. We do need to practice doing things at speed in real-time. My question is this: where are the universities who are systematically championing the skills we need to run the transition of social media from service to platform? Where is the process where we pass on the skills to design massive role play games such as Jane McGonigal designs?
And as I always keep my eye on the business ball, which businesses are ripe for taking over by people who understand the way things are going and the skills that are needed to run them?
So my two questions are:
- Where does a young person of today acquire the skills to conceptualize and support managers?
- Which businesses are about to make this shift from service to platform and are a good place to be if you are in to emerging technologies?
Preferences Versus Strategies as Explanations for Culture-Specific Behavior
I wish to extent my gratitude to Toshio Yamagishi, Hirofumi Hashimoto, and Joanna Schug from Hokkaido University for allowing us to publish their paper here on our Family Blog.
ABSTRACT—In this article, we present a new framework for interpreting cultural differences in behavior—what we call the institutional approach. In this framework, individuals’ behaviors are conceptualized as strategies adapted to various incentive structures. Cultural differences in behavior
are thus viewed as differences in the default adaptive strategies that individuals come to rely on in unclear situations. Through two studies, we demonstrate that the East Asian ‘‘preference’’ for conformity is actually a default strategy to avoid accrual of negative reputation. When the possibility for negative evaluations in a given situation was clearly defined, cultural differences in the tendency for uniqueness disappeared. This approach carries important implications to psychologists who interpret cultural differences in behavior in terms of preferences, and can serve as a common framework branching out toward other disciplines in the social sciences.
Social Media Club: Represent
I was put forward for the Interim Board of Directors over at Social Media Club.
As Godfather of our Family here I would gladly accept this position and indeed take forward the mission we have here, namely: Facilitating critical thinking, amiably.
I’d need considerable votes to succeed, yet it is “doable”.
As you know, my belief is that social media (even the term grates) needs balance, there must be a counter-argument to the evangelists in order to ensure the community is not constantly crawling up its own arse, where the members simply pat each other on the back.
My recent article on Ideological Amplification on my personal Blog will give you an insight into my fears, and they are serious concerns.
SO, I urge you to VOTE for Chris Hambly to extend our reach as a Family, a growing community of exceptional talent, and yes, I do mean exceptional talent we have here.
Thanks in advance
The Godfather
The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
For anyone interested in social media and the analytics of it, download the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 by Philip Sheldrake. More about it here. It’s essential reading for novices and experts alike and introduces you to all the familiar organisations and sites in social media today. Did you know what Twingly is, for example?
I particularly liked the bits about the difference between research and engagement, and the importance of semantics analysis. It’s being called ‘essential reading’ - you wouldn’t want to miss out!
Think that SM Marketing is electronic? Use the post!
Ta da! Look at this marketing campaign by Unilever in Thailand.
Want to convince people that your washing powder works? Wrap a sample in a white t-shirt and post it to a carefully selected “alpha” woman in each village.
Being a sensible woman, she’ll wash the now-dirty shirt in your washing powder, and tell everyone about it.
Because she is an influential person, her friends will copy her.
Five rules apply for this to work, of course:
- The product must work and work every time!
- The product must be launched in the shops the same day that the shirts arrive (two days later and you will miss the peak of the interest curve)
- Other marketing aspects must be correct (price, quantity, credit conditions, etc.)
- The postal service must work!
- You must have identified the influential women - you need to know the communities!
We often present marketing as cute or cunning or even underhand. This is solid and elegant.
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