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007 Crowdsourcing | 3 Ways Sr. Leaders can Communicate with Social Networks

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In this episode Adam discusses crowdsourcing from different angles and three ways that senior level leaders can communicate clarity to their organization using a social network.

 

This episode is brought to you by Colliers Engineering, contact us if you need help finding a social network for your company or for your inbound social media management.

 

Organizational Health Segment:

 

Social enterprise networks can be used by Senior leaders to communicate to their organization in at least three different ways.  Senior leaders must gain clarity for the organizations that they lead, the must then constantly communicate that clarity to their teams so that employees are well aligned with the vision of the company.  Three ways a social network can help with this communication:

 

  1. Over communicating clarity, constant communication is important to the health of a company, social networks can help a leader to keep the vision before the employees even on their news feed.
  2. Using the social network to communicate send the message that leadership is serious about communication, about networking and about internal collaboration.
  3. Using the social network sends the message that it is ok to use a social network with fellow employees, peer-to-peer relationships are important for improving overall employee performance.

 

Crowdsourcing Segment:

 

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large online community.

 

The key to crowdsourcing is incentivizing participation.  Crowdsourcing concepts can be cross pollinated with and applied to a wide variety of industries and social problems.

 

Crowdsourcing can be used to generate ideas, innovation, funds, wisdom, knowledge, Adam goes deep and discusses government, communism and the early church.

 

What if we were to use crowdsourcing to replace our government with a voluntary system, no more elite Washington class, no more ever increasing governments and bureaucracies?

 

Adam also discusses cross-pollination, Tina Seelig (on Twitter @tseelig) from Stanford University teaches a free Creativity course, Adam mentioned her cross-pollination lesson from her Creativity course, check out her book here: inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity and her Creativity course here.

 

Please rate this podcast in iTunes, please reach out to Adam at adam@colliersengineering.com

 

 What are some great crowdsourcing websites?

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006 – Improve Your Company’s Culture w/ a Social Enterprise Network

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Feature Segment: Improve your Company’s Culture with a Social Enterprise Network

 

In this episode Adam discusses ways to improve your company’s culture

 

As was said last week, there are at least four types of employee reactions to the prospect of adding social enterprise network at work. There are advocates, users, agnostics and detractors.  Asking employees to teach is one management strategy for winning over detractors while stimulating collaboration in your culture.

 

Social Layer Segment: Three Pillars to Healthy Innovation

 

I think there are three pillars to healthy innovation, this content is taken from my May 13, 2013 blog post here:

  1. Teaching, spontaneous employee-to-employee teaching is one sign of a highly innovative company culture.  Knowledge silos can limit the growth and success of a company.  Breaking down knowledge silos can improve the speed and overall competitiveness of any company.
  2. Collaboration
  3. Organizational Health

 

I will cover the 2nd and 3rd pillars in later episodes but for today lets look at the concept of intentional teaching as a strategy to help your culture.

 

A great strategy for breaking down knowledge silos and converting some of your social business detractors into users is to ask employees to teach other employees using the company social network, such as blog posts or simply sharing files generated by the employee.  It is not too much to ask an employee to teach, most companies expect employees to teach already through other tools like: monthly reports, research reviews and patent filings.

 

Be patient and persistent because being social does not come naturally to everyone.

What are some other ways that social enterprise software can improve a company’s culture?

 

Next episode I discuss crowdsourcing, please send any crowdsourcing questions or content to adam@sociallayerpodcast.com

 

Please rate this podcast in iTunes here, please reach out with feedback via email or Twitter @Colliers2

 

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005 Seven Features of Good Social Business

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Announcements

This is now the social layer podcast, re-branded in episode 4 from the Science Layer podcast, to find out why I am re-branding listen to episode 4 for more information.

 

Coming Soon! : I am writing a quick guide (maybe e-book) to the various social business software options.

 

Feature Segment: Seven Features of Good Social Business

 

I think that there are 7 features of a good social business software:

  1. It is secure, this brings up the debate of in the cloud vs. on company servers security.
  2. It has a company-wide news feed, this is where a feed of every post is streamed and will bring many employees returning to the network.
  3. It gives the user the ability to post private messages, some communication should be kept private and a social network should not eliminate that feature of email.
  4. It should provide users with a profile page, such as a mini LinkedIn to showcase skills background and brag about expertise
  5. It should give the users the Ability to create communities and groups.
    1. Each company can decide to manage communities or just allow employees to create communities spontaneously.
  6. It should provide users with project management features such as:
    1. Creating communities around teams
    2. Assigning tasks
    3. Sharing files
    4. Creating a team calendar
    5. Enabling private/ team only/ invite only conversations
  7. It has the ability to track Analytics and Insights, Network managers need insight into the conversations happening on the network.. Analytics can tell you:
    1. what are people talking about,
    2. how people are using the network,
    3. how are problems getting resolved
    4. who is influential.

BONUS feature: A great social business network is customizable for specific organizations.

Large organizations in particular can benefit from the ability to customize a platform, a company may need to hire a programmer to customize to help with operations. Some software products have customizable features as an upsell option.  For example, a technology innovation or R&D focused company many choose a customizable innovation centered social network.

 

There are at least four types of employee reactions to the prospect of adding social enterprise network at work. There are advocates, users, agnostics and detractors.  Understanding the motivations of your detractors is an important key for successfully rolling out a social network.

 

Social Layer Segment: Cultural Requirements of an Impactful Social Layer

 

There are three cultural (company culture) requirements for enjoying an impactful social layer within a company:

  1. Collaborative and confident team members, on the contrary insecure and competitive team members cause destructive knowledge silos to increase.
  2. Freedom from hyper-political competitiveness, only good management can bring this about. Unfortunately some companies purposely pit employees against one another in hopes to improve performance with their promotion systems.

I find it ironic that a company must minimize internal competitiveness to maximize  external competitiveness in a capitalist economy.

 

  1. There are minimal detractors/ resistors to social, must understand the reason for the detractors before dealing
    1. Reasons people detract, anti social personality, baby (social business collaboration) out with bath water (Facebook narcissism)
    2. Lack of trust: Patrick Lencioni on trust: “there is predictive based trust (friends know/ predict how you will react) vs. vulnerability based trust” (humans can say, “I don’t know the answer”, “I think I made a mistake”, “I am sorry I was out of line”) this creates a powerful bond of trust on a team
        • “peer-to-peer accountability is the most powerful motivator” this requires a high level of trust and connectivity. Social business software in your organization can help with this!

What are some other features of a great social business software?

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