My new gig at 20:20 Social :-)

[tweetmeme source=”gautamghosh”]

Ok, here’s an announcement that I want to make.

I have joined 20:20 Social, India’s first social business strategy consulting firm

I guess, what you’re asking is – what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders – that’s right folks, bringing the social web into the organization.

As I have believed – such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness  and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice – or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career – when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Managementand then e-learning.

However as much as I love tools – I know that culture always trumps tactics, tools and even strategy. So I am looking at leveraging my HR and OD learnings to help client organizations deploy these social tools.

And I am super-excited to be working along with the amazing 20:20 social team that includes an old blogging acquaintance Gaurav Mishra who blogs at gauravonomics.com. What makes Gaurav a kindred spirit is his openness and transparency as CEO – he blogs about the organization as he manages it 🙂 Check out Gaurav’s posts on how to build an Open and Collaborative Professional Services Firm, and Top 10 FAQs on Building a Social Business Strategy Firm in India.

Am also looking forward to working with a true blue Thought Leader Dave Evans (not the AC/DC guy 😉 author of a book on Social Media Marketing who blogs at http://readthis.com

You can download 20:20 Social’s position paper on Social Business Strategy as a pdf, or read it on scribd.

Who are the other folks who are doing something similar?

Well there are two that I know of – the Altimeter Group and Dachis Group.

20:20 Social has just started its journey and I am very excited to be part of something so new and emergent.

(cross posted from my other blog)

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On professional Blogging

I got quoted in the article “Taking forward the Business of Blogs” at exchange4media:

A simple Net search will give out all the answers to what is professional blogging, but the question is, why is there an overall ignorance about professional blogging and when will it catch up big time in our country?

Blogger and HR consultant Gautam Ghosh pointed out, “People have realised that having a free-for-all kind of blog is not really helpful if one is trying to build a readership in any sense of the term. I see a lot of professional blogs in India, but a lot of them are abandoned after some time. The big issue in my opinion is that people blogging professionally have high expectations without knowing what competencies are required to succeed as a blogger.”

Celebrity blogs draw in the moolah, but do ordinary bloggers writing or talking about extraordinary stuff rake in the moolah too? It is assumed that people who are widely read or heard on blogs dedicate a lot of time on it. That puts them to the league of professional bloggers, where they need to monetise their space. But how do they monetise and where is the revenue?

Blogger Ghosh said, “In India, bloggers are not able to monetise as much as bloggers in the US, because the readership in India is quite niche and they are savvy in not clicking on the ads. Cost per impression advertising for social media publishers is not so well known. If one is able to build an audience that is a global audience (other English speaking parts of the world), then monetisation becomes easier.”

Ads have and will eventually make it to the blog space, but there definitely is a dearth of ad aggregators and blog ad networks to make the connect between the blogger and advertisers.

The Carnival of HR on All Fool’s Day

Here’s a shout out to the Fistful of Talent blog for hosting the 1st April Carnival of HR.

Read about foolish behavior and fools and HR 😉 there!

How little can you blog for business?

An interesting question came up yesterday on an email discussion forum:

how LITTLE can I blog before being considered ‘not serious’. Right now I try to blog on Tuesdays and Fridays about a variety of my subjects (some humorous, some thought-provoking, some serious). I am getting followers in dribs and drabs, and good comments on the blogs, but not many of either. I try to put in good effort on the posts and provide value; but would love to make a wider impact than I am able to do now.

This is my view:

You always don’t need to blog, sometimes just leaving insightful comments on other similar blogs would result in good traffic – having a co-blogger to post also might help – so that it becomes a shared responsibility and not a burden.

The other question you’d like to answer is – what is the objective of blogging for you?

• Is it finding clients?
• or freelance consultants?
• or building a community of like minded professionals?
• or being considered an ’eminent expert’?
• or for Search Engine Optimization?

Depending on what your objective is you’d need to approach blogging in that way.

Siddharth Rao’s leadership secrets

….are up on the Webchutney Blog 🙂

I specially like the 6 guiding principles.

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