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Facebook is used by 150 million people and has over 50 million unique visitors each month. It’s in the top ten most populated countries in the world ( if you want to see it in that light). Twitter was growing at over 700% in 2008 and over 10% of on-line users use it. LinkedIn is gaining a new user every second.
Statistics are not hard to come by but they do contradict each other. However, we can, at least say that an awful lot of people use social networking sites – and spend a lot of time doing it ( four hours a month on average on MySpace alone – and I suspect there’s a huge spread here depending on the age of the user.)
It’s fairly clear how individuals use social networking and what they get out of it: friends without strings; dates; downloads; gossip; self-promotion; positive reinforcement that they’re important (to use a quasi psychological term). My LinkedIn and Facebook networks have doubled in size since the recession hit. This is partly a function of job insecurity: people realise the truth of that old business axiom A.B.N ( Always Be Networking) as the future looks darker.
But what’s in it for organisations? Quite apart from Facebook, Twitter and the like, some suppliers offer within-company social networking systems so that activity can be controlled and focused more effectively. You get the benefits of a closer culture without the downsides of endless, non-work chat.
I’d actually put it another way: you get a controlled simulation of social networking which has none of the benefits that caused this huge usage growth in the first place.
The fact is, I think we need to know a lot more about why people use the channel and how it works before we fully embrace it within organisations.
Sample the web and you’ll find any number of recommended uses. I’ve used some of them and they do have advantages:
• creating discussion groups for technical products;
• finding customers, partners, collaborators via networks;
• doing initial research for international business expansion;
• marketing which doesn’t look like marketing ( a Holy Grail of our times )
I’m a member of blogs and discussion groups which have increased my understanding of a topic and put me in contact with valuable people. It has to be said there are others I wish I could unsubscribe from as they bombard me with irrelevant e-mails. So, what’s my beef?
• There’s no longer any single thing called ‘social networking’. Like all sectors it started undifferentiated and has segmented. Different sites serve different functions. The movement started outside business: sites like LinkedIn were created to fill a market niche. Get the different sites confused and you’ll send a lot of time and effort trying to discuss your products with Lady GaGa fans.
• Most of the advantages are for individuals – getting jobs, advancing portmanteau careers. Putting these resources in front of your staff may increase their job opportunities and increase your churn.
• Younger people are very sensitive to marketing. They know when a blog or site is being used as disguised corporate communication…and they don’t like it.
• If your organisation has a cultural problem, the solution is the hard graft of creating a good culture, not introducing a piece of software and hoping it will do the job. Culture is created by action, not words. This are important issues here:
- You create relationships face to face. Without physical presence you miss a lot of information.
- Human beings can create real relationships with around 150 people. Past that it’s an acquaintance. Why have a network of 2000? You end up with the illusion of relationships.
- Social networking sites can, perhaps, cut through organisational hierarchies. The can improve information flow. You can set up social clubs through them and they serve the same purpose as the informal smoking think tank outside the back door. But I’m dubious. Leaders should be ‘managing by walking about’ not contributing to a blog.
• Social networking is about attitudes, opinions, and emotions. It’s rarely about facts. Yet material from blogs ( as from the rest of the Internet) seems to worm its way into reports, books and the received opinion of the business community when its little more than someone letting of steam. This is horribly dangerous.
• Despite the huge number of statistics you can get off the web I’m not convinced we’re yet in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques. With old style direct response mailing you could evaluate money spent against money received. PR is notorious for being unaccountable. If I know that 4000 people have exchanged information over a blog, how does that translate to business benefits? And if much social networking seems free it isn’t: it takes valuable time.
I haven’t even mentioned the obvious horrors of unregulated social networking usage which you can see walking round any office. Do you want to pay staff to organise their Saturday night on the town? On the other hand a complete ban on what is now more essential to some people’s lives than the phone or the pub looks Scrooge-like. So there’s a balance to be struck.
Am I being Luddite? I don’t think so. Social networking won’t go away. It needs to be integrated into business practice. My concern is that, as usual, a new idea has been seized up on as a cutting edge differentiator and used with little thought about basic business principles. So, as ever, having jumped into the deep end, organisations need to take swimming lessons.
We live in a Society where social networking sites have become such an integral part of our day, that it sometimes hard to imagine how we passed the time before Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (but to name a few).
I have an extensive web presence and really enjoy my time online. I like that I get a sneak preview into people’s lives that I barely know anymore! I love that I can communicate with my nearest and dearest so quickly and easily, even if it just to arrange Sunday lunch. Of course, there is no substitute for a good old fashioned chat or face to face get together – Facebook just makes it easier to arrange, especially if a group of friends are getting together.
Given that for many, social networking sites are a big part of a person’s personal life, how prevalent are they in business? Sites such as LinkedIn provide online networking opportunities and a place to display work history, skills, contacts and experience. Twitter, enables users to inform followers of bang up to date news and information which was particularly useful during the recent cold snap. The harsh economic times that we are experiencing are also enticing people to become more and more involved with social networking sites. In fact, a very good friend of mine was recently made redundant, and his first words were, “better update my LinkedIn page then!”
For me, the benefits of using social networking sites in business are huge. They do not replace the need for conversation or detract from the importance of face to face meetings. Instead, they provide a means of communicating (in addition to the more traditional methods such as letters and emails), and are also a good way to inform customers and clients of new initiatives. Again, like personal social networking, social networking in business is not a substitute for events and face to face meetings. It just enhances opportunities for communication and for many people, is becoming the norm. It is not just LinkedIn that is used either. Facebook pages for Businesses are growing on a daily basis and on a recent trip into my local town centre I discovered a fantastic retro clothes shop that had recently opened and uses Facebook to inform customers of promotions and events – and why not!
Some may argue that there is no place for social networking sites in business and to an extent they may have a point. However, I would suggest that if carefully used and in addition to all previous means of communication and marketing then one cannot really go wrong.
Predicting values with age and is it really the talent that gets spotted?
February 16th, 2010 Posted by: Dawn Easy
Last month I exhibited at the POP (Postgraduate Occupational Psychology) and DOP (Division of Occupational Psychology) conference in Brighton. The Conference was themed ‘Science and Practice: Developing our Profession for the Future’ and was attended by over 500 psychologists and psychology students. The Conference provided a great opportunity for us to get amongst these professionals and learn from them.
There were a number of interesting workshops over the four days but one really sticks out in my mind - the ability of personality psychometrics to predict values and how this correlates to age.
A topic of particular interest to us here at Consulting Tools is the predictability aspects of personality psychometrics, so for this reason I decided to go to this workshop. The bit I found really thought provoking however, was to learn about how age affects values.
They concluded that as people mature they are more likely to join organisations with values in line with their own personal ones. They propose that when people are over the age of 50 , they are more likely to work for an organisation with their own cultural preferences. As employee demographics shift, this finding may prove to be rather an important factor in recruitment and retaintion. There are already studies popping up showing the changes in social values and how they differ between generations. Could this be an indication of possible schisms within the workplace perhaps?
As a side note, I was chatting to a chap at my stand who was presenting a paper at the event. It was based on his longitudinal study looking at assessment centre scores and the likelihood for being spotted for talent management and succession programmes. The key finding was that scoring high on situational tests (for example role play tasks) shows a positive correlation with selection for internal promotion. The same could not be said for the candidates ability/ cognitive scores. When I think about it, this isn’t a surprising find - if a person is comfortable doing role-play, they’re more likely to be self-promoters – making sure they are seen and heard regardless of their cognitive ability. So this is highlighting a potential pitfall companies really need to keep in mind when selecting their key employees for development.
It’s that time of year again; the decorations have gone and the glass bottles have finaly made it to the recycling bin… we are now fully emersed in the Twenty Tens! So how many of us started this year having those obligatory News Year’s Resolutions? The tradition of which dates back to the early Babylonians whose most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment!
A new year is a great opportunity for us to make some positive personal changes, break a few bad habits and embrace a few new healthy ones. Yet, by the end of January we all know that for most of us, that initial spark of change has well and truly gone out… but it’s not too late! Here are a few handy motivational tips from our friend Liggy Web at the Learning Architect:
In order to be really successful with regards to keeping your New Year resolutions, understanding habits and how they form is very useful.
Habits are at first cobwebs, and then they become cables —Spanish Proverb
Have you ever arrived at home or work with no memory of how you got there? When you started on your journey, you thought about the first few steps on that familiar path, but somewhere along the way, your brain moved onto more interesting topics, and the next thing you knew, you’d arrived. This is the essence of habits: once you start on a familiar series of actions, you stop thinking about them and you are able to complete them without conscious thought or attention. This can work in both a positive and negative way as it can free up our minds from dull or repetitive tasks, although it also makes it difficult to stop once we’ve started.
Over 90% of our daily routine is comprised of various habits that create our behaviours. What separates the positive and negative people is that the positive people have habits and behaviours that are conducive to success, while the negative people have ones that facilitate failure in their lives. Remember: you control your habits - they do not control you.
Your life is the culmination of all the daily behaviours that you have. You are where you are right now because of the behaviours that you have adopted in the past. It is important to identify which habits in your life lead to negative consequences and which lead to positive rewards. The difficulty in this sometimes has to do with instant gratification. If you change your habits, on occasions you’re not going to see an immediate effect. It is for this reason that people struggle with diets or can’t stop drinking, smoking, or spending money because they can’t control the instant gratification that is delivered.
Experts in hypnosis and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming – which is the art and science of personal excellence) believe that it takes around 21 to 28 days to form the basis of a new habit or behaviour. The time it takes to replace an old one is inconclusive because it depends entirely on the person and how long they have owned the habit. Think of behaviour as a tree. One that is fairly new is like a young tree with short roots that you can pull straight from the ground. A behaviour that you have owned for many years is like an adult tree that has long roots that extend far underground.
Human beings tend to take actions to either move them closer to pleasure or away from pain. With that in mind, analyse your bad habits and dig for the underlying factors involved with them. Why do you eat so much? Why do you drink so much? Our behaviour lies in reason. Changing a harmful behaviour without addressing the root cause of the problem will only lead to a regression.
As with any newly learned behaviour, you may well experience some internal resistance for the first week or more. This is natural and it’s not going to be easy, so you have to mentally prepare for this challenge ahead of time. After you survive this first week, you will find that your new habit and behaviour becomes easier and easier to do and soon you don’t even have to think about doing it at all.
Stress is the primary cause of people reverting back to their old patterns of behaviour, so be wary of the level of stress in your life and know that a high amount can wipe away a new habit and make you revert back to your old ones.
How to Develop Good Habits
✓Challenge yourself and believe that you can do it.
✓ Identify exactly the specific habit that you would like to change.
✓ Make a list of all the benefits of breaking or adopting the habit.
✓Set yourself up for success by taking immediate action to change.
✓Tell people around you what you are trying to do.
✓Don’t give up. Failure is only a reality when you stop trying.
✓Keep a record of your progress and results.
✓Make sure you keep it up even when you have succeeded.
✓Be positive and open minded about change.
Make that Change for 2010
Remember ………..
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change —Charles Darwin
Personality and the January blues
January 5th, 2010 Posted by: Julie MrowickiI am not entirely sure where the last decade has gone! I can’t quite believe that we are now in the year 2010 and faced with the prospect of yet another cold, dark and somewhat depressing January. As you can probably tell, I am not a huge fan of this month. I love autumn and the start of the winter nights drawing in and I am also particularly partial to the run up to Christmas, but once the bells chime at midnight on New Year’s Eve I start to feel quite melancholy.
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I don’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), or at least I don’t think I do. I just struggle to get enthusiastic about New Year’s resolutions in a month where the sun only shines for a few hours, if we are lucky! For me, October is a time for resolutions new beginnings. Why on earth would I want to get in my car at 7pm to drive to the gym to run like a hamster on a wheel for 45 minutes when I can light the fire, pour myself a nice glass of wine and have an early night?
I do sometimes wonder why I seem to suffer with the January blues though, as on the whole I am generally a pretty positive and upbeat person. I have high Energy and pride myself on my “get up and go” approach to life yet January is the one thing that can knock me off my perch – or at least wobble me! I asked some friends recently about how they felt in the New Year and responses were mixed, ranging from “It’s no different to any other time of the year” to, “I can’t stand it, and I get really miserable”. In an ideal world I would hibernate for the whole of January and probably most of February as well!
Anyway, I would love to hear your views on the January blues. Do they exist? Do you feel different in January to the rest of the year? Do personality traits have anything to do with whether people suffer with SAD or the January blues?
Wishing you all a Happy New Year and particularly, a happy January!
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