Gautam's Posts

 

Speaking at the 3rd Mega HR Conclave organized by Delhi Mgmt Association
Click here to download:
3rd Mega HR Conclave - Program Schedule.pdf (127 KB)
(download)

Here's the link 
For details send mail to megahrconclave@gmail.com 
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Kafila reports from the Arab Spring

My friend Shivam Vij let me know about these posts. Go read

The journalist Alia Allana is travelling in countries that are undergoing historical political change that has been described as the "Arab Spring". She has been sending despatches to Kafila, which I'd like to share with you.

Sidi Bou Said: Mickey wants to be the first one to vote:
http://kafila.org/2011/10/22/mickey-wants-to-be-the-first-one-to-vote-alia-allana-reports-from-tunisia/

Tunis: In the first of the Arab Spring elections, some Tunisians worry about Islamists
http://kafila.org/2011/10/24/%e2%80%9cwe-are-not-like-iran-here%e2%80%9d-alia-allana-reports-from-tunisia/

Damascus, Syria: The Minister for Information says there is no revolution
http://kafila.org/2011/10/22/the-minister-of-information-maintains-that-there-is-no-revolution-alia-allana-reports-from-damascus/

Homs: A day in Syria's rebel stronghold
http://kafila.org/2011/10/21/a-despatch-from-homs-alia-allana/


 

15th NHRD Network Conference 2011 at Bangalore

 This seems to be a very different HR conference.. shades of an unconference there too - and Large Scale Interactive Process



 

Hilarious: How the internet started...

 Got this story by way of a email forward! :-)

In ancient Israel , it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot. And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why dost thou travel so far from town to town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy tent?"

And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, "How, dear?"

And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."


Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent. To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures - Hebrew To The People (HTTP).

And the young men did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Sybarites, or NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land. And indeed did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates' drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others." And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel , or eBay as it came to be known. He said, "We need a name that reflects what we are."

And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators." "YAHOO," said Abraham. And because it was Dot's idea, they named it YAHOO Dot Com.

Abraham's cousin, Joshua, being the young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid (GEEK) that he was, soon started using Dot's drums to locate things around the countryside. It soon became known as God's Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (GOOGLE).

That is how it all began. And that's the truth.

 

National Convention at XLRI Jamshedpur, India. Nov 11-13, 2011
Click here to download:
convention letter and details.pdf (176 KB)
(download)

The Center for Global Management and Responsible Leadership along with the Ensemble team at XLRI, Jamshedpur

is pleased to announce a "National Convention for Sharing Case Studies of Responsible Leadership" at XLRI, Jamshedpur

between November 11-13, 2011. The detailed write up is attached.


 

Announcing-Workshop on Improving Employee Engagement using Social Media Tools @ Delhi

 Hey folks, Am delivering this program along with the National HRD Network next month. Do come and nominate members of your team :-) 
 


 
Dear Colleague,

National HRD Network and NHRD Delhi NCR Chapter are pleased to announce its Learning Centre one day workshop on "Improving Employee Engagement using Social Media Tools" on Friday June 24,2011 at Maple Hall, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.
As more and more people share and connect with each other on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, many organizations are wondering if they can replicate such technologies internally within their corporations and what benefit would that be.
This program by National HRD Network would focus on HR Heads, Middle Managers to demystify the social tools and look at the following areas

Program Content :

  • Importance of social media and its impact on society and businesses
( Looking at how the larger trends of how social technologies are impacting society, media, politics and businesses. Focusing on how businesses are using social networks to market, support and co-create with customers)
  • The Millenial generation and their expectations from organizations
(The new generation which is entering the workplace is the first which has exposure to social applications before they join organizations. How does that impact their expectations about sharing and connecting in organizations?)
  • The imperatives for Organizations to embrace Open Collaborative nature
(We shape our tools, and then our tools also shape us. It was true in the prehistoric age and it is true in today’s age. How does the new workplace and social tools impact organizational culture)
  • Use of Social Technologies by HR
(How social technologies can be used by HR to : increase employee communication, better employee communication , build innovation and learning)


The Facilitator:
 
Date and Venue:
Friday, 24 June 2011

Maple Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.
Timings:

  • Registration: 0900-0930hrs
  • Session: 09:30-1730hrs
   
Who should attend:

The program is open to HR Practitioners with any level of work experience. Managers from any other function would also benefit from this workshop.

Methodology
Interactive session which would include Case Studies, Discussions, Role Plays, Q&A
To register details kindly confirm to:

Syed Quasim Ali : quasim.ali@nationalhrd.org or call +91 9560989534
 

Gautam Ghosh

Gautam is Product Evangelist at Qontext Inc, and Blogger at Gautamblogs.com. He specializes in the areas of HR, Organization Development and how businesses can leverage Social Media for Organizational Learning and Employee Engagement.
Earlier he was a Consultant with Social Business firm 2020 Social where he led the Talent practice, looking at how organizations can build talent pipelines and internal employee engagement and development using such tools.

Gautam has worked as a HR Generalist and a Learning and Development Executive in firms like Deloitte, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Satyam Computer Services. He’s done his MBA from one of India’s leading business schools, XLRI in 1999.
Gautam loves teaching and mentoring young HR professionals and has been a visiting faculty at an Indian B School also.He also manages a HR community of 1400 professionals at www.humanresourcespeople.com

One of India’s earliest bloggers (since 2002) – he’s blogged about HR, Work, Career issues consistently for the last 8 years and is seen as a thought leader in these areas. Gautam has given talks on Social Media at Conferences andOrganizations. He’s frequently quoted in the Indian press as an authority on business blogging and HR / career issues. He was named as one of the top 25 HR Digital Influencers of 2010, No. 2 in the list of top 25 Influencers in Talent Managementby HRExaminer.com, Top 25 influencers in Enterprise Social Mediaand has been featured as one of the 100 Influencers in HR.


Category Fee (Per Participant)  
NHRDN Member Rs. 3000
10% discount on 3 or more nominations from the same organization.
Fee includes, tea/ coffee, snacks, lunch and other organizational expenses
Payment can be made by cash or by cheque favoring National HRD Network Learning Centre
Non Member Rs. 3500

 

We look forward to receive your nominations at the earliest.

Kind Regards,

Suresh Tripathi
President, National HRD Network-Delhi NCR Chapter

  

Mohit Gandhi
Executive Director - National HRD Network
 

Academic Partner
  Annual Sponsor
 

My views on Social Recruiting in India - quoted in ET
"Up to 2% of hiring takes place using social networking platforms but this figure will jump to 10-20% in a few years," says Gautam Ghosh , product evangelist at Qontext , a technology product firm. FMCG, MBA-driven industries such as marketing and finance have latched on to social networking for recruitment but the picture is set to change as more industries join in.

"The opportunities are there for you to explore and it goes both ways for the employer and employee. I prefer using social networking to posting my CV on a zillion job sites and getting job alerts for jobs I didn't even apply for," says Harsh Natekar, who got his big break in an IT firm through Facebook. He had put up a status message saying he had quit and was looking for a change.

A leading IT company messaged him on Facebook to forward his CV, and there was no looking back. Natekar says he gave first preference to traditional hiring methods, like applying through job sites and newspaper classifieds, but after securing a job via Facebook he does recommend it to others. "You just have to be tactful how you proceed after you have got a response. In my case, I wasn't casual about the need for a new job. My friend posted my status message on the Facebook wall of the IT firm and tagged me. I got a response from them in a day," he says.

E Balaji, MD & CEO, Ma Foi Randstad says a job seeker can secure employment through multiple channels such as job fairs, online job sites, campus recruitments and so on. Not everyone is on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. The wider you spread your search, the better your chances are of getting hired. The trend of recruitment through social networking is mainly for junior and mid-management levels, observes Balaji.

Not all industries go online to look for potential employees. Industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and so on prefer traditional methods of hiring because they require different skill sets.

For jobs in the realm of media, technology, writing, producing and the like, the talent pool is online, says Gautam Ghosh, product evangelist at Qontext, a technology product firm. "Though traditional ways of hiring will exist for a long time to come, third party recruiters are hopping onto the social networking bandwagon to get the best of talent there exists," he adds. Nirja Ghosh, got her job as an India correspondent for mactrast.com, a Mac-based website, through Twitter.

The editor, Cormac Moylan, posted a vacancy, and Nirja followed up with an email and Skype conversations. She got the job, a website password and an appointment letter. The whole recruitment process was done online. Not once did they meet in person. Moylan is Irish and most of the writers are American; Ghosh is the lone Indian.

Social networking soon will be an indispensable part of the hiring process. It is cheap, does not require setting up of an office, saves on finances and is prompt and efficient, says Qontext's Ghosh. "Many start-ups are using social networking tools to hire. For them money is dear and going viral online with job vacancies helps them utilise the finances in building the company," says Pradeep Chopra, CEO of digital marketing training company Digital Vidya.

via economictimes.indiatimes.com

So I was asked by the ET journalist on how much people are hiring via facebook and Twitter

 

Social Media for Small Businesses

A journalist sent me these questions ... and here are my answers


  1. Please explain the importance of social media for a startup/small business and the different its different benefits.
  • Social media can help startups engage with customers for sales/marketing, providing support, even marketing research as well as co-creation.
  • When it comes to advertising/marketing, how can the social media help a company cut down on marketing budgets? Can we assign a cost matrix to this and establish how much a business can save on marketing costs by using the social media?
    • It would depend on the product/service, but for social media marketing and operations have to work together. Having a great product which people would like to talk about is critical for businesses to be cool on social media. If that is the case then influencers of the target audience can be reached out via social media – and asking for reviews (on blogs etc) would help in creating visibility that would have more credibility than traditional advertising
  • Can social media marketing be a substitute for traditional or online marketing?  Or is it just an option when a business does not have a substantial marketing budget?
    • Well, I’d say traditional marketing focuses on “reach” whereas social media marketing if done well can result in “richness of conversations”. A business needs both. However for a startup which wants to build a passionate user base who in turn would generate positive word of mouth marketing, this is the way to go
  • How does startup or a small business build its social media strategy from scratch? Please mention the starting steps.
    • First thing it needs to decide on the social object it wants to have conversations around. A social object can be a “feature” of the product or a “benefit” or something totally unrelated like a “cause”. Then it needs a content strategy around that social object. The focus should be to engage potential advocates with the content and then to become a platform for that community. Then it needs to hire or designate a person who will act as a community engagement manager – focusing on both content and community.
  • When it comes to social media sites, which are the ones that are must for a startup to be on? Please list down a few strategies once a business has made a start. ( we would like to use them as a graphic) 
    • For B2C businesses, Facebook and Twitter are the places they need to be. For B2B, Linkedin and Twitter makes more sense. Some to-dos are:

    1.      Use Facebook Ads to target and recruit community members

    2.      Facebook Pages are a tough place to build engagement unless a constant stream of content is not being posted

    3.      Encourage fans to connect with each other on your blogs/community site/Facebook

    4.      Use Linkedin groups to build conversations – for B2B firms

    5.      Use search feature on Twitter to track who’s talking about your industry/ product/ competition. If appropriate reply to them without being seen as a spammer

    1. With everybody latching on to the social media bandwagon, there are chances that businesses might either do it just for the sake of doing it or overdo it. How does a business ensure that they do not fall into such traps?
    • A business should always focus on its goals (more sales, more buzz, lower support costs) and then leverage social media for that. It could also use tools like Qontext to engage employees internally. It needs a cross functional team to make it a success, and to ensure that most people in the organization see it and own it. Otherwise it might face the danger as you have stated – it becomes one person’s job and an organizational ghetto
     

    Joining Qontext as Product Evangelist

     This week, I joined Qontext- a Social Business Collaboration product as Product Evangelist.

    If you're wondering what a social business software it - think of it as a "Facebook for the Organization" - a tool for employees to connect and collaborate with each other - and a tool to capture the knowledge of employees 

    Here's more at my blog  

    Qontext is a subsidiary of Pramati Technologies - which is based out of Hyderabad, but I would be working out of home in Delhi 

    To know more about the product see these 

    If you need to know more, feel free to reach out to me at gautam.ghosh@qontext.com
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