For those of you who missed our event last week, “The Application of Enterprise Social Networking to Talent Management and Talent Acquisition” you can take a look at the slide presentation below. There is a lot of great information inside.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at info@conenza.com.
By Meighan Berberich, Director of Sales & Marketing, Conenza
Over the last six months at Conenza, we have been feeling the corporate social networking market heat up. The Enterprise 2.0 event recently published some preliminary results from their Enterprise 2.0 adoption survey that support what we have been seeing with our Fortune 1000 customers and prospects.
We wanted to share a few of the key findings from the survey with you:
• 98% of those surveyed are using Enterprise 2.0 technologies for internal communication and collaboration within their company. The most popular technologies used are instant messaging (74%), wikis and team workspaces (67%), and blogs (51%).
• Despite, or perhaps because of, the economic downturn, the majority of respondents say their spending on Enterprise 2.0 will increase (58%) in 2009.
• Most respondents (64%) say that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is company-wide. Although this trend is stronger at smaller companies, it seems large scale implementations are taking place.
Conenza has an exciting and informative webinar coming up next month in partnership with the Human Capital Institute and we would like to invite you to attend.
The event is on Tuesday, June 2, 2009, at 10:00am PT and is titled:
The Application of Enterprise Social Networking to Talent Acquisition and Management.
In this webinar, we will discuss how enterprise social networking can be applied to your talent acquisition and management efforts to enhance collaboration and communication, increase recruiting and talent management efficiency, and retain access to valuable intellectual capital. We will walk through some real world examples of the different types of social networking initiatives that are being successfully adopted within leading global organizations:
>Internal Collaboration and Communication Networks
>Corporate Alumni Programs
>Recruiting and Referral Programs
>Employee Onboarding and Mentoring Programs
>Extended Talent Networks
>Learning and Development Communities
You can learn more about this webinar and register to attend here.
Conenza has just announced a new pilot program for Global 2000 companies looking to cost-effectively and quickly prove the business value of a corporate social network.
With an enterprise-class corporate social networking platform and expert community support, Conenza’s “Quick-Start” Program makes it easy to get up and running with a pilot for a selected group or division with minimal impact on an organization’s internal resources.
What’s Included:
* A private, branded, hosted social network powered by the Conenza Community Core, including: Directories, Profiles, Connections, Groups, Blogs, News, Document and Photo-Sharing, and Basic Reporting
* Conenza’s expert support services to help you quickly drive value for those in the pilot
* Access to community best practices that make getting started easy
And, Conenza will work with its clients each step of the way to ensure the pilot’s success.
LAUNCH A PILOT PROGRAM TODAY!
No implementation cost. $500 per month. Register by April 30, 2009 to participate.
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
In part one of Corporate Alumni Programs: Seven Steps to Success, we talked about the first three steps a company needs to take when building a corporate alumni initiative. These steps focused on defining business objectives, establishing goals and metrics, and building a community infrastructure. In this week’s post, we will cover steps four through seven, which focus on growing and engaging your community and then expanding the impact of your efforts over time.
4) Establish a formal marketing strategy and plan to grow your alumni community
As much as we would like to say “if you build it, they will come,” it is important to put a marketing plan in place to ensure the growth and success of your community. At Conenza, we partner with our Fortune 1000 clients to build and execute on an integrated community marketing plan. We like to break down the marketing strategy into three areas: Pre-Launch, Launch and Ongoing Marketing.
5) Build an engagement strategy to keep your corporate alumni community vibrant and active
There are three critical components to ensuring your corporate alumni community is engaged and active: marketing, content, and technology. From a marketing perspective, as we mentioned in step number 4, it is important to have a plan in place not only drive growth, but engagement. Successful engagement marketing efforts are focused largely around reminding members of the benefits of the community and bringing members back to the site.
Compelling content can be a key driver to repeat visits to your community site. In a recent Conenza Webinar (6 Ways to Drive Online Community Member Engagement and Maximize ROI), we covered some guidance on what makes for compelling content within an alumni community. Compelling content is:
Relevant: Offer a selection of both personal and professional, global and local news and enable alumni to opt-in to the news they find most interesting
Privileged: (I am among the “First to Know”): Give alumni a competitive advantage—a “peek inside” your organization at non-confidential knowledge, developments, and people news
Timely and Fresh: Refresh content weekly (at least) so members will see new content each time they visit.
Concise: People reading online scan articles quickly—be concise.
Actionable: Make sure your content helps members do or achieve something that is important to them.
Another important factor behind driving member engagement is dependent on the community technology that you select. An effective community platform will help you attract, engage and reward your alumni and employees.
Here are some ways the right social networking platform can help you deepen community engagement:
• Community modules are designed to provide value to members
• An intuitive and easy to use interface allows members to quickly discover and create value within the community
• There are multiple ways for members to connect, collaborate, and contribute
• A streamlined content management systems enables an organization to quickly and easily update content
• Automated features help draw members deeper and bring members back
• Built-in reporting allows for real-time refinement of your engagement strategy
6) Actively measure your community’s success and maximize performance on an ongoing basis
In steps one and two of this series, we gave some helpful advice on establishing community goals and metrics. Step six is all about monitoring and measuring against your key success metrics. It is critical that you identify and define systems that you will use to measure the success of your program early on in your community planning. For example, if you have launched your community to increase alumni-driven business referrals, how are you going to measure and track the deals that come in through the community? This will often mean making some minor adjustments to your internal systems. (Salesforce, ATSs, etc.) Conenza’s Community Solution provides organizations with robust reporting on community growth, engagement, and community marketing efforts.
Having a view of how you are performing against predetermined goals is essential to refining and maximizing the value of your community.
7) Expanding the impact of your community
A corporate alumni network can provide a low risk, high reward way to begin to experiment with corporate social networking. At Conenza, we have adopted a very successful “crawl, walk, run” approach to corporate social networking. We work with our Fortune 1000 clients to launch a corporate community around well-defined business goals and then expand its participation and value over time.
If you are looking for additional information on building a successful Corporate Alumni Program, we have covered each of these seven steps in Conenza’s Executive Playbook for Corporate Alumni Communities. To receive a copy of this presentation, click here.
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
We had some very exciting news at Conenza this week. Gartner recently published the “Cool Vendors in Social Software, 2009” (1) report and Conenza was one of the four vendors featured.
Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.
You can check out today’s press announcement here.
(1) Gartner, Inc. “Cool Vendors in Social Software, 2009” by Jeffrey Mann, Carol Rozwell, Nikos Drakos, Thomas Otter, March 13, 2009
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
We have been getting a lot of questions lately regarding key things to consider and plan for when launching a new corporate alumni program. Over the last decade, while working with some of the world’s leading companies to build and manage private, branded online alumni communities, Conenza has identified seven significant keys to success. We will be sharing these steps with you as part of this two part series. In this post we will be digging into steps one through three, and next week we will tackle four through seven.
1) Clearly outline your business objectives
Corporate Alumni Programs can deliver compelling business benefits across the enterprise:
• increased recruiting efficiency,
• retained access to valuable knowledge and know-how,
• new and highly-effective channels for business development, marketing and research.
When launching a new initiative it is important to focus on and clearly define the primary business drivers for your community. Doing this at the start will help you build a program that is designed to quickly maximize the impact. As most of our clients have found, the benefits that you realize from your community will evolve and expand over time, and we recommend that when you are getting started you should: focus, prove success quickly, and then expand the impact and value.
2) Establish measurable goals for your alumni community
Once you have outlined what you want to achieve through your corporate alumni initiative, it is critical to define how you are going to measure and report on your community success. In a recent Human Capital Institute webinar, Excelling at Corporate Alumni Relations, Dr. John Sullivan gave some great examples of metrics to consider:
Example of Recruiting and HR Metrics
1. Percentage rate of boomerang rehires (alumni who come back to the business)
2. Average performance rating of boomerangs
3. Diversity rate of boomerangs
4. Time to productivity of boomerangs
5. # of successful hires from alumni referrals
Example of Business Impact Metrics
1. Sales referrals attributed to alumni
2. $ of sales attributed to alumni
3. # of beta products tested
4. Ideas captured
Example of General Program Metrics
1. Program ROI
2. % of targeted alumni that actively participate
3. Manager satisfaction with the program
4. Alumni satisfaction with the program
5. Alumni perception of the firm
At Conenza, we have also found that defining goals and metrics around the health of your online community are equally as important. Metrics like # of active members, # of connections made, and volume of member-contributed content, can help you measure how your community is growing, how engaged are its members, and marketing effectiveness.
3) Build an alumni community infrastructure that helps you quickly and cost-effectively achieve your goals
When building the infrastructure to support and grow a corporate alumni program, there are two critical questions an organization will need to answer and plan for:
1) What technology will we use to help us achieve the goals of the program?
2) How can we effectively integrate the program into our current business processes?
When it comes to technology, there are several different approaches and solutions for building an online corporate alumni community, so many choices in fact that it may be overwhelming. To simplify things it’s helpful to think in terms of whether the technology makes it easier to achieve your community goals. For example, if re-recruitment is a primary goal, does the community solution you are looking at provide an easy way to display open opportunities, target qualified candidates, and track the success of your efforts? Does it allow your community members to effectively display their unique skill sets and experience?
Another leading requirement for our enterprise clients is often around the privacy and security of their community and their data. They want to create a trusted environment where people feel comfortable connecting and collaborating and where they know the privacy of their data will be respected. The recent controversy around the Facebook Terms of Use really put a spotlight on how important it is for people to trust that their data privacy will be respected as they interact within an online social network.
Driving adoption of your community internally is critical to your community’s success. Some of the most successful programs we have seen have put a strong focus on integrating their alumni program with the existing internal business processes. Sales people are programmed to do an alumni search when targeting a new prospect or expand existing business to identify “friendly” contacts. The on-boarding process highlights the lifetime relationships that the company hopes to build with its people as demonstrated by the alumni community. Research efforts tap into alumni resources.
Some of the ways we have seen clients gain rapid internal adoption for their programs are to:
• Enlist and promote C-level support from the program’s onset
• Establish an “Alumni Community Taskforce” with stakeholders from across the enterprise and focused on key impact areas: recruitment, business development, marketing
• Create an internal program information portal and make this highly visible on company Intranet
• Integrate the community platform with internal systems: HR systems, sales & marketing systems
• Add alumni community metrics to standard business reporting
In next week’s post we will take a look at steps 4-7. In the mean time if you would like to take a look at a detailed presentation on the seven steps we are highlighting as part of this series you can register and download it here.
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
Workforce reductions are one of the hardest decisions a leader has to make. Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, it is a decision from which few of us are immune.
Leaders want to ease the transition and communicate that they still value their people, including those who are leaving. Creating a secure, private, branded online community where your former employees can stay connected to your company and each other can:
• Send a powerful message about the value you place on your company’s people, current and former
• Provide exiting employees with valuable connections, benefits, resources, and peer support
• Deliver real value back to your business and ensure you don’t lose touch as they are walking out the door
The Microsoft Alumni Network (MSA) recently announced a program that provides a great example about how an alumni community can help support exiting and former employees. In an effort to connect former Microsoft employees with companies looking for top talent, MSA is currently offering free job postings to companies interested in targeting this qualified pool of more than 10,000 validated Microsoft alumni around the globe. Companies with open positions can post their jobs in the Opportunity Center online at: https://www.msanet.org/default.asp?pageID=car_postjob
For over a decade, the Microsoft Alumni Network has been the official organization for Microsoft Alumni worldwide. MSA helps support its members with a wide variety of benefits, including access to the Microsoft Company Store, job opportunities at Microsoft and other leading companies, competitive pricing on individual and small business health insurance and benefits, annual events, and other special privileges. Membership is open to authenticated former FTEs of Microsoft.
Conenza is sponsoring a Human Capital Institute Webinar on March 3, 2009, that is focused on this emerging talent management discipline, Corporate Alumni Relations.
You can find the details below, we hope you will join us:
Excelling at Corporate Alumni Relations
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 / 10:00 AM PT
Featured Speaker: Dr. John Sullivan, CEO, Dr. John Sullivan & Associates
Register Now
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
Gartner recently presented its 10 ‘CIO resolutions for 2009’. There are some great recommendations on this list for CIO’s looking to maintain a competitive edge in a challenging economic environment. I encourage you to check it out.
#1 on the list this year was the advice to build a corporate alumni community to retain access to valuable knowledge and hard to find skills and to help bolster recruiting efforts.
Below are a few highlights that we have pulled from Gartner’s recent announcement that relate to corporate social networking:
“1. Start Building an Alumni Network: To maintain legacy skills and complex experienced pools of labour, Gartner recommends CIOs establish alumni networks. This could include a semi-official company IT alumni association with its own web page, use of web social networking tools and re-establishing bounty schemes, where staff are paid for recruits they bring in.
#5. Start using social systems yourself, visibly: Gartner said that CIOs need to start visibly using social networks themselves to kick-start their participation from other staff - lurking in quiet observation is not enough. Gartner advised CIOs to also encourage the leadership team into using social media more openly to communicate internally and externally to rebuild brand confidence, energise the company culture, develop ideas and refine solutions.”
This Gartner report entitled “CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2009″ is available at: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=849815&subref=advsearch
By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza
We have an exciting and informative webinar coming up next month as part of the Conenza Executive Event Series and we would like to invite you to attend.
The featured event for January is:
Executive Playbook for Corporate Alumni Communities: A Step by Step Guide for Building and Maintaining High-Value Connections with Exiting, Retiring, and Former Employees
You will find all the event details below. We hope you will be able to join us.
Event Details:
Executive Playbook for Corporate Alumni Communities
When: January 13, 2009
Time: 10:00am PT/ 1:00pm ET
Register Now
The business case for a private corporate alumni and employee community in normal economic times is one that is extremely compelling; in an economic downturn it becomes a strategic imperative.
Your exiting, retiring and former employees are powerful connections that can make a significant and long term contribution to your company. A corporate alumni and employee social network enables you to harness these connections and provides a lasting source of competitive advantage in recruiting/re-recruiting, strategic outplacement, business development, retained access to domain expertise, and high-value marketing.
In this Webinar, we will provide you with a step by step guide for creating a highly-rewarding corporate alumni and employee community that will deliver millions of dollars in benefits to your business. We will also highlight the latest features and functionality of our recently released Conenza Community Core 3.0. The modular Conenza Community Platform, featuring the Conenza Community Core, can provide you with an easy and cost-effective way to get started and quickly create value from a privately-branded extended enterprise community.