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Category: Social Media

Is Social Media Overrated for Brands?

October 28, 2014
| 2 Comments
| Categories: Brands, Marketing, Online marketing, Social Media

A lot has been written about how social media is impacting brands. Eventually that would mean that what gets written on social media should start to impact the company’s financial performance. However I wonder if there is a critical size that once companies achieve, they will have less to worry about social media? For these brands, social media, or rather bad publicity in social media is perhaps overrated. Now it doesn’t mean that they should stop ignoring what’s written but it is unlikely to impact them significantly.I came across these…

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What is Social Media?

April 12, 2014
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| Categories: Collaboration, communities, conversation, customers, media, social, Social Media, ubiquitous

Two keywords of social media are "Social" and "Media".Social media is about being social. It is about connecting with your communities: customers, employees, partners, investors, service providers. It is about conversations and collaboration between these communities. You are not social if you are not having a dialog. Remember, monologues were never considered social.Social media is also about using media to be social. In the very near past (and even today), conventional channels of media were more unidirectional and slow for two way communication. Communities are now conversing using the new…

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Listening to Industry Leaders

February 17, 2013
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| Categories: Cross Border Leadership, FDI, Leadership, Managing cultural differences in business, Managing cultures, NASSCOM, R Gopalakrishnan, Social Media, Trade unions, Vineet Nayar

It was great listening to industry leaders in this year's NASSCOM India Leadership Forum. One of the sessions I enjoyed was listening to Vineet Nayar and R Gopalakrishnan. While the session was titled Cross Border Leadership, the discussion was not limited to that.Vineet Nayar is Vice Chairman and Joint Managing Director of HCL Technologies Ltd., a $4.3 billion global information technology services company and author of the highly acclaimed management book “Employees First, Customers Second". R Gopalakrishnan is an Executive Director with one of the largest Indian business groups - Tata Sons, a…

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My Interview in IDConnect

May 24, 2011
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| Categories: eLearning, Innovation, Innovation in India, Innovation in Indian Learning Industry, Instructional Design in India, Instructional Designers in India, Salary, Social Media, technical writing, Trends

Rupa Rajagopalan has been instrumental in running the Instructional Designers Community of India for the last few years along with some other enthusiastic members of the profession. As part of IDCI, Rupa edits a newsletter IDConnect. Rupa interviewed me for the second issue of the newsletter. You can view the complete newsletter on the IDCI community site. I am reproducing my interview here.The InterviewYou have been conducting salary surveys for the past 2 years. Have salary levels for Instructional Designers in India improved? What are the current trends in salary?It’s…

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Changing Context

September 26, 2010
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| Categories: Blogging, Context, Contextual learning, Leadership, Management, organizational development, people management, Recruitment, Social Media

During a recent organizational development workshop that I attended, the facilitator talked about changing context. It was an interesting discussion that got me thinking about my changed context. I could recognize a few that I have experienced in the last couple of years.About two years ago my context as a manager and leader changed about the way I was managing my teams. I moved from "I have to do everything and I have get everything done” to “I have to enable people to do their jobs"This significantly changed my approach to…

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11 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization

August 6, 2010
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| Categories: ban, Behaviour, Lists, Social Media, Social Networking, Work

Jane Hart seeks rebuttal to reasons commonly given by organizations for banning social media at work. I have heard some of these. Here’s why I believe organizations should NOT ban social media, rather find ways to leverage it. Some of these are in the Indian context of hiring and retaining workforce. I am adding an 11th reason that I have heard for why organizations ban social media that could perhaps make it to the list.11.          Social media takes up too much of company’s Internet bandwidth hampering other work.Given the advantages…

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Social Media is a Waste of Time

January 26, 2010
| 2 Comments
| Categories: Blogging, Facebook, Productivity, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

I am sure you’ve heard this before, what with 54% companies banning social media sites. Of course, Twitter and Facebook are complete waste of time. Reading and writing blogs is a complete waste of time too. I also hear some executives say email is a waste of time too. And phone? What does everyone talk about anyway? They should get off the phones and just work (and I have had managers complain that personal calls were affecting productivity of some people). I think books are a waste of time too.…

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Do you ‘Get’ Social Networking?

December 10, 2009
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| Categories: Social Media, Social Networking

What came first – chicken or egg? Most people don’t get benefit of social networking because they don’t have a large enough network. And then they don’t build their network because they don’t get the benefit. Have patience. After all if it takes 10,000 hrs to become an expert, how can you expect to get benefits from social networking by simply creating accounts on various social networking services but not actually using them?

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Convergence on Social Media – When Not to Use

November 30, 2009
| 2 Comments
| Categories: Convergence, Social Media, Social Networking, Tips

So LinkedIn now allows you to update your status with your Twitter updates. There are already applications that help you post your Twitter updates to Facebook. And then there’s FriendFeed that allows you to consolidate all your social activity and push that on Facebook and other social media sites. Not to mention other aggregation services, RSS feeds, email alerts, etc. etc.Seems like a cool thing, surely. Well almost. If your social network across different social media services looks like below, then posting the same update on different services makes sense.…

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