Presentation delivered at South Africa Business Schools Expo, Sandton Convention Centre, August 2012. Covers social tools and opportunities for individuals and organisations.

2. Going ‘social’: what does this mean for
business and for individuals?
Gaylin Jee
http://za.linkedin.com/in/gaylinjee
Sandton Convention Centre
Boardroom 6
14h15 – 15h00
August 2012

3. The day has come.
Retail giant Amazon now sells more Kindle ebooks
than ‘real’ printed books in the United Kingdom.
This session:
- social opportunity from personal and business perspective
- journey Management Today Magazine has begun in terms of
going ‘social’

4. Changes in the global economy
• shift of economic activity from developed to
developing countries
• increasing awareness of potential in growing and
untapped markets
• increasingly global labour markets
McKinsey Survey 1418 Exec’s around the world, Mar 2010

5. New normal
McKinsey calls the ‘new normal’:
 a global world with fewer geographical boundaries
 less predictable economic context
 fierce competition for market, resources, skills and
talent
 rapid technological advancement and innovation
with free flow of information
Our global connected economy is changing the
drivers of individual and collective success
5

6. Explore changing work context
• Individuals, organisations and societies are
experiencing more interconnections and
interdependencies
• We have more access to information than we have
ever had - supply chains more transparent. We live in
the ‘age of the customer’.
• How to survive and thrive? Sustainable competitive
advantage:
 Deeper and more meaningful engagement with
knowledge empowered stakeholders/customers
 ‘purple cow’ ideas (Seth Godin)
 Excellence – service, product

7. How are organisations changing?
Organisations performing well over time are mastering
the ability to navigate the ‘new normal’.
 They make sense of complexity and act on the
insight they generate
 They acknowledge that technological development
will continue to push business and social change.
Social business is becoming a core part of who
they are and how they engage.
Leveraging people and new technologies for
value.
7

8. Where people add value
Can be automated –
machine
working in routines
and within ‘process’
curious sensing
discovering
connecting
collaborating
What is human – not
easily automated? purple cow
Unique?

9. Organisation structures
• Flexible: to cope with ‘tighter belts’ and changeable
business demands
• Value can be coalesced from disparate participants
• Clarity around role requirements, space for autonomy
and scope for development to nurture psychological
contract, attract and retain engaged and high
performing individuals and teams
• Connected: so that the people who work in them are
connected with each other, the people they serve, the
context they operate in, the economy, the
unpredictable

10. ‘Gone are the work practices that remain the same for long
periods, and going are the formal learning activities to support
them, involving hours, if not days, away from the workplace.
Change is now happening over months not years and according
to management guru Professor Gary Hamel of London Business
School, businesses must seek to be nimble, quickly learning and
innovating to ensure they are competitive. This means staff
connectivity to current and relevant information is becoming all
the more important.’
Dr Naomi Norman, EPIC

11. Conversations between people are nothing new. In fact,
they help define what it means to be human.
It’s no surprise then that we’re spending less of our time
consuming broadcast media and more of it having
conversations in communities within social media.
People are talking about brands at all hours of every day,
in countless forms of social media. We increasingly seek
out opinions online about products and services before
making purchase decisions.
www.wearesocial.com

12. Social media
o Allows connection in the age of the customer: engagement
o Profiles: ‘offer’ + brand
 purchasing decisions are often made based on the
opinion/word of mouth that a potential customer has of the
owner/employees
Show yourself as credible, tapped in, trustworthy and helpful on
social networks, it will reflect very positively on your
business.

13. Why social media?
BYOD
‘What we are seeing now is that workers who have used
social media in their personal lives now recognise how
valuable it can be in their professional lives, as well as
within their organisations for working and learning.
‘They realise they now have the tools to more quickly and
more easily solve their own learning and performance
problems ... the solution is just one-click away in their
browser.’
http://c4lpt.co.uk/library/janes-articles-and-presentations/the-social-learning-revolution
The time is right for weaving technologies that support quick, informal,
anytime/ anywhere learning into the learning landscape – people and
organisations are adapting

14. Social media objectives
o a contact strategy which nurtures customer / client
relationships ‘fish where the fish are’
o the creation of an on-going conversation with
stakeholders to generate insight that shapes and
enhances the sustainability of the business
o synergistic alliances and partnerships to fuel
growth
o innovation around improving business processes,
performance and success.

15. Leveraging
o for knowledge sharing
o for collaborative working and innovation
o for productivity and performance improvement
o for continuous personal and professional
learning/development
o for professional networking

16. Phenomenal social media growth
Along any axis you measure us, we’re growing
faster than we’ve ever grown before.
Twitter users are sending one billion tweets
every five days and the service now has more
than 200 million registered users.
Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo
Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, July 2011

18. www.digitlab.co.za

19. Social media
for customer engagement
for continuous personal and professional
learning/development
for professional networking
for knowledge sharing
for collaborative working
for productivity and performance improvement
• Select what is relevant for you
• Start innovating around working and learning more smartly: social
media can help us to find the latest trends, to connect and share latest
thinking and tap into that sharing of thinking, to learn.
• Feed with great content, and think about the guiding principles
19
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/communications/internet-minute-infographic.html

20. 20

21. 21

22. Social media business card
What does a Google search return
about you?
What is your online foot print?
Your brand? Credible, helpful,
informed, involved?
Are you on LinkedIn?
Are you on Twitter?
What does your Facebook account say about you?
22

23. Social media business card
• It allows CONNECTION, SHARING, LEARNING,
CREATING, COLLABORATING
• Business
– Profiling products and service offers, brand
– We are in the age of the customer: connection is
key, learning is key
• Personally
– Age of customer as applied to you: the world of work
is changing
23

24. Social media business card
Boards for different business topics
Boards for issues of the magazine
How about a boards for your personal
profile and career?
How about a SlideShare presentation?
24

25. The cure for the common resume
Modern technology makes it possible to design a
dynamic, interactive, and visual resume that is
significantly more effective at representing the
whole person than a common resume alone.
 Don't send a resume. Share your story.
 Communicate in a visually compelling manner.
 Instantly create a profile using LinkedIn.
 Quantify your professional achievements.
 Examine your traffic with detailed analytics.
http://re.vu/

28. We have powerful new tools at our
disposal
Management Today Magazine is asking...
• What tools are available to us?
• How can we use them?
• Who can we learn from?

29. Management Today Magazine SA:
journey to date
 produce a digital edition of the magazine
 produce the magazine for iPad. This has been our
fastest growing subscription base over the past 6
months.
 just launched a magazine for Android. In Google Play
store.
29

30. • Run an informed, topical and up to the minute commentary on
a range of business topics.
• Profile events and signpost content in the magazine.
• Connect with those similar interests / focus.
• Circa 740 loyal followers, doubled in the past 6 months.
• Keep our finger on the pulse, we follow others who share
insightful commentary with us.
• www.Twitter.com/ManagmentToday
30

31. • Connect with people we meet
• Profile who we are – let people find us
• Keep track of who is who and where they work through network
updates.
• LinkedIn Discussion Group on topical business issues.
• Belong to other groups where we comment raise profile
• Listen to what is being said, who is saying it
• Recruitment
www.linkedin.com/company/management-today-magazine-sa
31

32. We’ve launched a survey on the look, feel and
content of our magazine using the basic, free option.
It is use friendly & easy to share to other social
platforms. Good tool for small samples.
We use this platform to
open up the face of the
brand and to increase our
exposure. Our latest
presentation is on our
social journey.
The newest kid on the block – and
we’re experimenting with this one!
Are you using it? How?
32

33. Learning process
 Social media is a Journey and a Change Process
 Must be aligned to larger business goals – not an end in
itself
 Metrics: Numbers not everything: who are you engaging
and with what purpose?
 Feed with great content, and think about the guiding
principles –open up a face for your brand
 How can we leverage social media? Innovate around
working and learning more smartly: find the latest trends,
to connect and share latest thinking and tap into that
sharing of thinking, learn.
33

34. Social media - a journey
Social media has been a journey for Management
Today Magazine SA.
Goals are to connect, listen, learn, co-create, share.
Platforms:
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/management-today-magazine-sa
Discussion Forum http://linkd.in/Jzo8DC
Twitter www.Twitter.com/ManagmentToday
Pinterest http://pinterest.com/mtmagsa/
Website http://management-today.org/
34

35. Thank you
Gaylin Jee
http://za.linkedin.com/in/gaylinjee
http://twitter.com/#!/GaylinJee
http://pinterest.com/gaylinjee/