Are you LinkedIn®? Do you Spoke®, Ryze®, Jigsaw® or ZoomInfo®? In 2008, will you get a Second Life®?
If these social networking concepts are not in your radar, you are ignoring a dynamic trend that could have a profound impact on key areas of your enterprise such as profitable revenue growth, talent acquisition and development, and operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Wikipedia defines a social network service as 1 that focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of individuals who share interests and activities. The concept of Social Network Analysis (SNA) – the intersection of a number of key disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology, organizational design and graph theory – has existed in academic circles because the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the fact that fascinating, the study of patterns in human interaction has sadly been confined to academia with little visibility or application to corporate leaders and their efforts in not only technique formulation, but strategy execution as well.
In several leadership circles and boardrooms, there is seldom a shortage of organizational mission, vision, technique, values or beliefs. (What I frequently refer to as “wall art.”) But where it consistently breaks down is when dealing with concepts such as the strategic relationship dashboard, strategic relationship initiatives, and personal relationship development action plans – all of which lead to strategic relationship outcomes.
Strategic Relationship Planning is driven by a core set of questions around critical company business goals such as the identification of the most relevant and strategic relationships we want, critical relationships we already posses within and external to our corporation today, and a plan as to how to systematically, intentionally, and strategically add value to the social network we currently have to create leverage with the relationships we want.
This dynamic Favor Economy is the core motivator of the 17 million users in over 150 industries that have converged on a single on the web platform that didn’t exist until only a few years ago.
Though a lot of leaders have heard of LinkedIn, there are still a lot of who are either under the impression that it is a fad that will merely go away or that it has small bearing on them personally or professionally. What they neglect to understand is that 499 of the Fortune 500 businesses have director-level profiles and higher on LinkedIn. Even Barack Obama recently teamed up with LinkedIn to reach entrepreneurs, tiny enterprise owners and executives, asking them quite pointed questions regarding their needs from the next U.S. president.
So, what can an executive find out from LinkedIn? Here are the Top 5 Lessons:
1.The exponential value of a extremely decentralized organization. Though your corporate organizational chart might control chaos and illustrate command and control, a lot of organizations are attempting to control a dynamic 21st century workforce with a WWII model. By extending the organization’s reach beyond the traditional four walls, you exponentially extend and expand the organization’s studying and growth elasticity.
2.Corporate Relationship Deficit Disorder. By design, conventional organizational charts tend to develop geographic, functional, and project-based silos that are not conducive to collaboration, communication and shared greatest practices. 1 factor that SNA has consistently proven is that understanding management is not a system but a method. abc964joy
three.Adaptive Innovation. An organization’s most valuable talent merely cannot be creative in isolation. The ability to leverage extremely communal experiences such as Second Life, especially with geographically dispersed teams, nurtures the essential DNA for a team or organization to adapt its organization model to a constantly evolving marketplace.
4.Flight Risk. Stifle the creativity of the 20, 30 and now even the 40-year olds, and your most valuable talent will leave in the next 12 months. As reciprocal loyalty continues to decline, leaders must locate approaches to align the personal objectives of key people with those of the organization to get things performed.
5.Social networks as accelerants of your brand equity. Beyond the measurement analysis of your challenging assets, the next evolution is one of leveraging the corporation’s soft assets. Social networks, by definition, encompass the 3 most critical examples of such soft assets: 1) Folks, continuously proving to be any organization’s sustainable differentiator, 2) Relationships, as an individual, team or organization’s most valuable asset across an ongoing trust continuum, and three) Brand, that which time after time creates sustainable loyalty and continued investment in any organization from employees, suppliers, consumers and shareholders.
As a leader, you can pretend that MySpace and Facebook are for “kids,” LinkedIn and Second Life are basically “fads,” and that the status quo will suffice, or you can embrace social networking as a strategic, intentional, and thus quantifiable asset in driving profitable revenue growth, winning the global war on talent, and the constant evolution and integration of extremely optimized global processes.
So I ask you once more – what is your social networking strategy?