Kaushik Ray, Senior Director, HRD, Dr Reddy’s Labs
Ray, an alumnus of Jamshedpur’s XLRI, got an invite to join the LinkedIn network of fellow XLRI alum Prabir Jha who happened to be the Senior VP and Global Chief of HR, Dr Reddy’s Labs. The two started exchanging messages over the site and five months after the two connected over LinkedIn, Ray found himself working with Jha. “My link with Dr Reddy’s started with LinkedIn,” says Ray. “On the verge of completing one year in the company, I look back at how it all happened, and all I can say is that it is pure serendipity.” Today, he spends at least an hour on the weekends on LinkedIn and is in the process of joining Facebook. He feels that apart from networking and building contacts, it is a good medium that allows professionals to share knowledge.
“We have got some profiles from LinkedIn and maybe we will formalise this as a channel (for hiring) now,” says Ray.
It’s what Lenovo calls an All In One, a desktop PC, gaming device, VOIP device and can also be turned into a TV.
It looks great too.
The only issue that we saw was that the touchpad was located to the right of the keyboard, and which would make it tough for any left handers who wanted to use the mouse touchpad.
The netbook range was also great, which you can see me handling in this pic (twilightfairy is on my left). The netbook was light, came in cute colors and has a battery backup of 6 hours!
Perfect for people who work a lot on the cloud and use the PC for basic computing only.
Check the tweets of the event with the hashtag #LBM
Got some interesting updates from the folks at Slideshare. Videos are now available on the Slideshare LinkedIn App.
Insert video into your presentation as normal and make sure your account is synched with LinkedIn. And with some SlideShare magic, your video shows up on both. Check the blog for instructions.
There are tons of documents and presentations being created on Google Docs, and many could use more love (we mean "sharing"). Now you canimport your Google Docs(documents, presentations, pdfs) to SlideShare and share them as you want. Under ‘Upload‘ there’s a new ‘Import from Google Docs’ option where you can import docs from your google account into your SlideShare account. The blog postwalkthroughhas the details.
Web2.0 is the collective name for a lot of technologies by which people can interact with other people (and organizations) on the web, publicly and in a transparent manner. It can include forums, blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, orkut etc.
So what can an organization do specially in the staffing area?
Here are some thoughts:
The staffing group of any company can use these tools to reach out to prospective candidates and create a ready talent pool – for example Sapient India has a lot of recruiters who actively look at growing their network on Linkedin. Recruiters can use Linkedin status updates and also Q&A to showcase opportunities that exist in their organizations.
Like Microsoft in the US has shown – blogging can be a great way to engage readers with what roles are happening and what positions are open – and how to prepare for an interview. Check post on employees are marketers in the age of social media
Twitter becomes a great medium to share news and information with people who choose to follow you – and making it relevant for their use.
On a different note advertising using Google Adwords is a great way for reaching out to people interested in their domain/industry – specially passive candidates.
Making a facebook page and Orkut community are other tools that businesses can do to engage talented candidates in conversation.
In fact in my view someone in the Marketing/Recruiting function needs to take a “Talent Community Manager” role to drive these initiatives – and to get others internally in the organization to get engaged with the candidate community
This community manager needs to have a mindset of open and honest collaboration and organizations must be clear about what objectives they expect from her/him and therefore what metrics to track to check his/her performance.
Research conducted by the blog UberCEO.com found that only two CEOs had Twitter accounts and 81 percent of CEOs did not have a personal Facebook page.
Only 13 CEOs had profiles on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Three CEOs stood out with more than 80 connections but they were all from technology companies — Michael Dell from computer maker Dell Inc., Gregory Spierkel from technology products distributor Ingram Micro Inc., and John Chambers from Cisco Systems Ltd.
Three quarters of the CEOs did have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those had limited or outdated information such as incorrect titles, or lacked sources.
Not one Fortune 100 CEO had a blog.
“It’s shocking that the top CEOs can appear to be so disconnected from the way their own customers are communicating. They’re giving the impression that they’re disconnected, disengaged and disinterested,” said Sharon Barclay, editor at UberCEO.com who runs executive PR firm Blue Trumpet Group.
“No doubt regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Reg-FD make CEOs cautious about communicating freely, but they’re missing a fabulous opportunity to connect with their target audience and raise their company’s visibility,” Barclay said, referring to financial reporting regulations aimed at protecting investors.
Interestingly according to Digital Inspiration a few Indian CEOs are blogging, but if you arrange companies by size I reckon the findings might be similar to the CEO study in the US – or worse.
Sometime ago I got a mail from the PR folks at Text1oo asking me if I’d like to participate in a global survey of what bloggers expect from Public Relations professionals.
Since I get a lot of poorly pitched PR press releases I volunteered.
Karthik from Text 100 emailed me to say that the results of the survey is now public and here are some of the findings, no surprises here
- More than 90 percent of the 449 bloggers surveyed welcome contact by PR people
-Most report a high level of regular contact from PR people, with more than 96% of bloggers in the US being contacted once a week or more (versus 36% in APAC and 65% in Europe)
-Email is the preferred form of contact, no matter which part of the globe bloggers reside; and SMS and IM universally are the least preferred forms
-Around half of all bloggers in APAC and Europe indicate their preferred form of contact on their blogs, and as a result of this survey, a number were planning to add their preferred form of contact if they weren’t already showing this. 88% of bloggers in APAC preferred an introduction before receiving information from PR people and corporations and many of these bloggers also wanted a face-to-face meeting
-Bloggers are united in their desire for distinctive content, particularly around new product developments and reviews, feedback on content posted on their blog, and interviews with key people
Continued bad Habits from PRs
-PR people continue to blindly send corporate press releases to bloggers
-PR professionals are failing to read the blogs and truly understand their target bloggers’ communities.
-They seem to expect bloggers to post corporate material, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the medium and the very reason why bloggers blog.
-They treat bloggers as they would journalists – not as influencers which is more appropriate.
Interesting communication from the folks at Xing who’re probably looking at the Linkedin growth and wondering how to get people to sample the premium membership Interesting communication from the folks at Xing who’re probably looking at the Linkedin growth and wondering how to get people to sample the premium membership J
spanspanRecommend XING to your business associates and friends and start earning free Premium months!
For a short time, you’ll get 1 Premium month free for every 3 successful invitations between now and July 29, 2009.
By the way, every contact you invite will also get one Premium month free as a welcome gift. What a perfect way to start networking together!
Got this email from the folks at Linkedin, looks like they are adding more functionality to groups.
Got this email from the folks at Linkedin, looks like they are adding more functionality to groups.
There are now over 300,000 groups on LinkedIn where professionals are discussing, sharing news and collaborating with each other. We sincerely appreciate your dedication to the LinkedIn group you manage. Your efforts are essential to the continued success of groups.
There are now over 300,000 groups on LinkedIn where professionals are discussing, sharing news and collaborating with each other. We sincerely appreciate your dedication to the LinkedIn group you manage. Your efforts are essential to the continued success of groups.
We’re happy to announce that later this week we are launching a long-requested feature for group managers: the ability to create subgroups. Subgroups are like a break-out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.
We’re happy to announce that later this week we are launching a long-requested feature for group managers: the ability to create subgroups. Subgroups are like a break-out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.
Also, by creating and inviting members into subgroups, you can now send additional weekly Announcement emails to focused audiences.
Also, by creating and inviting members into subgroups, you can now send additional weekly Announcement emails to focused audiences.
To create and invite other professionals into a subgroup, visit groups and go to the group’s "Manage" tab today. Once you’ve created the subgroup, here are four easy ways to get it going quickly:
To create and invite other professionals into a subgroup, visit groups and go to the group’s "Manage" tab today. Once you’ve created the subgroup, here are four easy ways to get it going quickly:
Set the aims for the subgroup by posting a featured discussion in the subgroup
Set the aims for the subgroup by posting a featured discussion in the subgroup
Kindle the conversation by posting a news article with a brief comment every day for the first month of the group
Kindle the conversation by posting a news article with a brief comment every day for the first month of the group
Provide an ongoing focus for members’ attention by adding 10 RSS feeds related to the focus of the subgroup
Provide an ongoing focus for members’ attention by adding 10 RSS feeds related to the focus of the subgroup
Drive attention to the subgroup through your comments in the main group and in other groups where you participate
Drive attention to the subgroup through your comments in the main group and in other groups where you participate
I wrote this a long time back (November 2002) focusing on email listservs/egroups, but thought it’s still relevant these days with more and more people online and Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin becoming more and more popular
Text matters like never before in the virtual world. Because when face to face richness is missing (Dr. Madhukar Shukla terms it the “reach vs richness debate”) you have to be very sure of what you write and what it could be interpreted as, as the person reading might not have the benefit of knowledge of your contexts.
Communities in the networked world perhaps need a lot of investment with regard to time and effort , in my view perhaps more than social “real” communities.
Virtual reputations might be different from ‘real’ ones, but they stick just as much.
Giving more than recieving is the golden rule but seldom gets followed, as most people are in a recipient mode in such communities and don’t have an iota of clue about their influence or power.
It takes a lot of guts to ’say’ something publicly… and most people are uncomfortable doing that as it means taking a stand, and not just verbally. Your point of view is going in text format to hundreds and thousands of mail boxes, being read by people you might never meet. It is also going to be cached and searchable by search engines for posterity.
Any lack of integrity on these listservs are sensed by people on these groups and even if they do not tell you on the face , the damage can be irrepairable.
When in doubt , the Golden Rule continues to be “Honesty is the Best Policy”…saying “I don’t know” is a valued comment , because it is so rare.
When you cannot help, redirect. On a lot of HR/OD/Trng egroups I come across a lot of “I need help regarding XYZ” kind of mails..it takes me a second to refer the person who queries to folks who are credible as well as prompt to reply.
Time is the essence. No point answering someone’s query after 3 days..the time you could have built your impact is passe…for making an impact it has to be immediate
The posts here are do not reflect the views of my parents, spouse, children, friends or employers :-)
Sometimes I think they don't even reflect my views. Only sometimes :-)
And sometimes I change my views. So check the date of the post before you leave a flaming comment.
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