In a great article from Advertising Age, Kunur Patel looks at the different social media models emerging in the corporate world:

1. Centralised - social media role functions at a senior level as used by Ford

2. Distributed - everyone in the organisation has a role in social media as seen at Best Buy

3. Combination - incorporates centralised best practices and distributed execution as Kodak does.

You can read the full article from the Advertising Age website here.

Carve was asked last year to contribute a chapter to the Social Media in Recruitment guide, following a well received presentation I made on Corporate Social Networking ( where ‘Social Media meets Business’ ) at the British Library.

Our chapter is focused on ‘Developing an Effective Corporate Social Networking Strategy‘ and draws on our experiences of doing just that with organisations inside and outside of the recruitment world.

The result is published by the REC Industry Research Unit and has some thought provoking contributions from the likes of Matt Alder and Bill Boorman

We’ve made the report accessible for free download via this link - socialmediainrecruitment

As always, we’re interested in your feedback / thoughts.

On Thursday and Friday this week I’ll be leading two tracks at TruLondon (http://thetruconferences.com/) that we hope will turn into something pretty special.

We’ve been operating LiveLABS for a while now as part of our active facilitation / corporate social networking programmes, where we use our tools and best practice frameworks to address real social media / social recruiting challenges. But we’re hoping that Tru London will take live problem solving to a new level with – we hope – a cast of 1000s.
Live LABS problem-solving was really borne out of the evident frustration that many people feel when approaching social media, and – specifically – when attending social media  / social recruiting events. There is a lot of theory and a number of well-known social media case studies that tend to be trotted out at these events but they often mean little if you’re not managing a brand that’s not already in possession of bags of money and /or residual awareness.  Live LABS is all about realising the value in social media for your organisation / brand.

When is Live LABS Tru London taking place?

• Thursday, 18th February:  13.00 – 14.00 GMT (Track 6)
• Friday, 19th February 2010: 13.30 – 14.30 ( Track 23)

How do I get involved?
Live LABS Tru London is going to be live in every sense of the word: participants to the Live LABS will be able to both SUBMIT  questions and challenges, or CONTRIBUTE with ideas and solutions.

• During the event, you can submit using “#TruLondon Q [and then your question]” ( you can also email your questions in advance to LiveLABS@CarveConsulting.com paul@carveconsulting.com)  In LiveLABS we attempt to solve problems in context, so please give as much detail as you can.

As the questions flood in (we hope) from you the twitterati and the individual tracks and participants at the event,  we will be showing the questions on the big TwitterJobSearch screen, and of course you can track them via your favorite Twitter tool ( we think http://twitterfall.com/trulondon is a good one, we’ll also be hosting a widget on the Carve Blog).

• And here’s where you come in. To contribute your ideas and solutions, just tweet using “#TruLondon A [and then your ideas ]”

We will be mashing the whole Twitter/Live participation thing up into something we hope that is great fun to participate in, but also:

•    …will provide some crowd-sourced insights to your social media / social recruiting problems and questions
•    ….and bring together – Live -  some of the planet’s leading recruitment thinkers
For more information, and tickets to TruLondon please visit http://thetruconferences.com/

Let’s make it trend on Twitter

For those of you who couldn’t make this, here’s the webcast from the excellent panel debate with Biz Stone,, Chief Executive of Twitter, Reid Hoffman Chief Executive of LinkedIn, and Stephen Fry…well you know who Stephen Fry is.
Focussing around Social Media: A Force for Good, the event was organised by NESTA as part of their superb Silicon Valley in the UK initiative.

Very much looking forward to speaking at the Capita breakfast event tomorrow this morning alongside Jon from  Google and Patricia from Capita Resourcing. The event is entitled: Deciphering social media:  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I am going to be taking a different perspective on social networks tomorrow, focusing specifically on the changing role of search (defined increasingly by social search and real-time search [think Twitter]) , UGC [user generated content] and the impact on brand / employer brand.

As you may know, our view is that a brand’s home page is not [companyname.com] but in fact the Google first page of results for a branded search.  Already social sites / reviews are highly placed in these results but - with the advent of Google Social Search , Side Wiki, Twitter and  so on, every site / brand will become “socialized” - and those brands, like it or not, will be defined by individuals external to the enterprise.  The path in travel (meta search > social search > branded search ) will / is unquestioningly happening beyond that space.

How do brands / employer brands manage this? Well (obviously) seeking to provide the best service / products is the first step, but the key is in building effective advocacy / influencer programmes, and encouraging reviews / feedback - using positive choice architecture- at every turn.  The pres I’ll be working from is below.  See you there (or not.)

Details of the event on Personnel Today

Anybody on Twitter will have noticed the huge #welovenhs debate over the last few days following the rather uncalled for attack by US Republicans, who were trying to bring down Obama’s healthcare reforms. If you want the whole story, the Guardian will tell you all you need to know in the article it published today.

As a French national, I certainly don’t think the NHS is in any way perfect (and nor is the French healthcare system by the way, for those of you who may think I’m partial!), but I must admit I am quite taken by how proudly the Brits on Twitter have responded to the attack. After all the United States have more than 45 million people with no health insurance at all: that’s nearly 16% of their whole population! Anyway, this isn’t what this post is about. I just wanted to draw attention to how social media is changing the way people are able to voice their reaction to an event. With the twittervese leading the charge, comments are flowing on news sites like the Guardian (see link above), and at least one Facebook group has been created so far. A proper demo of cyber-citizenship!

I recently spoke at the British Library on the subject of developing a social media strategy with a focus on social recruiting for the social media in recruitment event

Thanks to those of you who attended the event and participated in the debate afterward.

For those who didn’t I include a copy of the pres below, outlining our 10 x point plan.

It doesn’t mean a great deal without the accompanying commentary, so here is are the key points of nos 1-5.  The rest will follow next week….

1. Are you ready?

In his excellent blog, The CounterIntuitive CEO (a must read for anyone in management) Colony (Forrester CEO) equates social media to sex : i.e. you can read about it as much as you want, but it’s only when you start doing it that you actually get it.

This is sound advice.  Taking it one step further, for us, social media isn’t about having a Facebook fan page or a twitter account; there is way too much tokenism / box ticking right now in this space.  The organisations that are really benefiting from web 2.0/ social utilities are embracing the values that underpin them - transparency, openness, authenticity, conversation. If your organisation isn’t really ready to act in this way, then you’re not really ready.

2. Listening

We’ve written lots of post on this before, and indeed social media monitoring / online reputation management is a key part of the Carve proposition.  We basically used a slide showing 2 ears and 1 mouth as a reminder that it’s critical to listen first. Who is saying what (customers, employees, past employees, potential employees, partners, etc), Where are they saying it (Facebook, forums, blogs, niche communities, etc) and What are they saying? Typically we recommend a full social media audit (about which Jeremiah Owyang blogged recently) if you’re serious about understanding you and your competitors corporate social networking environment.

3. Identify objectives

What do you want to achieve? Get more customers? Get closer to your customers? Give them a better service [think crowd-sourced CRM. If you've no idea what that means look at http://twitter.com/comcastcares then get in contact] In corporate recruitment it might be to attract the top graduates, develop external talent communities for your pipeline;  for recruiters it might mean finding new ways of engaging passive talent,  offering new services to your clients, etc.
Sounds obvious, but without it you’re not building a strategy.

4. Choose your platforms; Decide what you’re going to say

Often your business might want to do everything:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing,  (Europe’s leading business network if you’re not in the know) YouTube,  a private Ning community… all, you know, like, yesterday.  We advise that (following points 2 and 3) you identify the key platforms for your audiences and make them fly first.

Equally important is - seriously - what the heck are you going to say? There must be a million blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups all set up - and all saying nothing. What is going to be your USP? What reason are people going to want to read you / retweet you / quote you / engage you in conversation?
Your organisations thing might be perhaps thought leadership… or the best insight into the market.. or using these tools to encourage peer to peer communities... or to give the deepest insight to the latest jobs… or to help your customers become prosumers and engage in your R&D process… or.. well you get the idea.

A good touch point is the 3C’s - community, content and conversation (as picked up by Recruiter in fact who covered our presentation )

5. Develop a Roadmap, build a team

Having chosen your platform, you need a roadmap for that platform, which a beginning, an end and attendant milestones / KPIs along the way. Here for nothing is a version we’ve developed for LinkedIn from the perspective of  a corporate recruiting environment.

Then build a team.
Do you know the first thing we strive to do when engaged to help an organisation or recruitment firm develop a social media /  corporate social networking strategy? Its to identify an internal champion - someone who really is passionate about dialogue, your customers.  They don’t need to be an expert on Facebook - but they do need to be able to enthuse their co-workers about the whys / wheres / hows of doing this. Secondly, you’ll need someone from your management team involved.   Get corporate comms on board, HR, legal.  And (perhaps) hire yourself a Twinten.

Points 6-10will follow next week. Please find the embedded presentation below.

The FT just published a good article on how brands market themselves on Twitter. The article notably compares how Twitter created a hugely successful viral campaign for KFC’s new grilled chicken, whilst Habitat is still suffering from the backlash to its “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card” campaign. To be fair though, the KFC campaign was to get Oprah Winfrey to direct viewers of her show to a web page with a coupon for a free KFC meal. And what happened then? People spread the news furiously on the Twitterverse, bumping KFC to the top trending topic at the time. More than demonstrating KFC’s proficiency in marketing itself on social networks, I think the story here is really about the potential that Twitter - amongst other social networks - shows for brands who utilise the site in the right way.

As Twitter continues its amazing growth, more and more brands are jumping on the ‘Twitter bandwagon’. And whilst it’s all good brands now realise they can’t ignore social networks and have to find a way to work with them, it’s all the more crucial they think long and hard how they’re going to do it. The top down approach: ‘let me evangelise you about my brand’ isn’t working in a web 2.0 environment. If brands don’t start by listening to their customers first and foremost, there is absolutely no way they are going to be able to engage in a conversation the way these customers want to nowadays. Make sense?

We hear more and more about companies hiring ‘twinterns’ - one of these elusive Gen Y that live and breathe social media like no one above the age of 25 can really pretend to. Great step I think, if only for the educational process for c-level managers, as demonstrated by the story of 15-year old Matthew Robson, the Morgan Stanley intern last week. Unfortunately, ‘twinterns’ not managed properly can lead to the Habitat disastrous story.  As Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang tweeted yesterday (@jowyang):

Spoke to a social media strategist at large tech company. Some brands give strategy to interns (native to social) but there are dangers

Interns, while creative, heavy in social, and not ’soiled’ from corporate culture are great at tactics –but may not know business side

I’ve heard from a few brands where energetic bright eyed interns are paired up with slower seasoned executives –to teach each other

Food for thought, surely?

This cartoon blogged on Social Media Today - originally from webcomic masters XKCD - made me laugh out loud, not least because it relates to a deeper truth about the social media. That is, it’s easy to create lots of noise - but it�s who you’re conversing with (not shouting at) that matters, whether you’re a brand - or a government.

Twitter and similar could and should be incredibly valuable tools in the time of (potential) global crises, like a swine flu pandemic. But as the same time, misinformation / rumour / panic could spread faster than the virus itself. As one of the bloggers on SMT puts it, “crowds are almost never wise”.

So its 01:28 UK time, and I was going to write a detailed blog tonight about a couple of things concerning the US presidential elections.

Firstly, probably like the vast majority of the rest of planet that doesn’t have a vote in the US presidential election (an election that arguably effects us as much our own choice of policy makers…), I am rooting for Obama. There is just something about that man which just seems to suggest greatness, a la JFK. That he will (hopefully) become the first black president of the USA is a momentous thing. Let’s just hope the Bradley effect doesn’t ruin the hopes and dreams of a country…and indeed the wider world.

Secondly, I was going to get very excited about how Obama’s use of the internet (and specifically, Web 2.0) in terms of reach, dialogue, reputation management and fundraising . From Obama on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and his websites including www.barackobama.com and www.voteforchange.com, to his mobilisation of bloggers and advocates, his use of the web and web based communications has been just, well, phenomenal. There is a rumour we’ll be launching SocialPolitix next year, offering social media and community engagement consultancy to politicians and political parties, so we’ll address that in another post when I am not so t-i-r-e-d ( Interested? Email SocialPolitix@CarveConsulting.com )

Thirdly, I wanted to look at how the first YouTube Election is being covered online. However, unfortunately many major sites don’t seem to be able to cope with the numbers. At the time of writing CNN.com, ABC, Politico.com are all down; so are bloggers like Andrew Sullivan. Even domain registrar GoDaddy is inaccessible (people going URL crazy with speculative domain names based on the outcome??)

So unfortunately until this all comes back online, our options are limited. Right now I am enjoying Oliver Burkeman Blog on the Guardian, and the faster-than-you-can-read-it stream-of-global-consciousness that is http://election.twitter.com Also am checking out Citizen Tube and The Huffington Post which is just about holding up

Am now going to find out what is happening. More later.. unless I fall asleep… or indeed the internet gives up for good.