At Knowledge Infusion we continually hear that rolling out software and processes through email blasts is a waste of time.  The deployment portion of any HR, Human Capital Management and Talent Management technology initiative must be tied directly to the overall HR strategy of an organization.

Principal Consultant, Andy Gebavi has contributed a though provoking piece on social networking today and its impact on talent management.   I see that Microsoft will be taking a 1.6 percent stake in FaceBook at the whopping price of 246 million dollars.  This transaction values FaceBook at 15 billion dollars in today’s market.  Not bad for a company that has yet to earn a profit.  The value ascribed to FaceBook is based mostly on its use as a potential vehicle to push advertising to its 50 million (and growing) users.

This got me thinking about enterprise social networks in Talent Management.*One of the latest trends in talent management is vendors offering functionality *that will allow the creation of FaceBook style profiles for their employees.  Our customers are using this functionality to make data-rich processes like succession planning, workforce planning, and internal talent searches much easier.  New products are also emerging to capitalize on the social networking aspect of having employee profiles – Lotus Connections comes to mind.  I worked with one customer recently who wants to use this functionality as part of their career development strategy by allowing employees to opt-in to mentoring and coaching networks.

There is still one missing piece in the enterprise social networking space though.  The one aspect that drives the value of all consumer-focused social networking sites is advertising.  I’m not talking about spam here folks.  Many people  often don’t realize they’re seeing advertising when they surf the web.  They’ve either grown immune to it, or it’s presented in subtle ways (i.e. sponsored links in Google search results). One of advertising’s key goals is to influence consumer behavior.  Why not use a similar concept to influence employee behavior?  How far off can we be from having internal “advertising” pushed to employees based on the demographic data in their employee profiles or their internal surfing activities?  

We already filter content on corporate intranets and portals based on the user’s roles and demographics.  But think of the possibilities of pushing corporate “banner ads” - focused on specific employees based on business ctivities they perform; knowledge they have; or internal networks to which they belong.  These “banner ads” could advertise almost anything such as the need for a specific skill set, services offered by a specific department, new training/development opportunities being offered, business process changes taking effect, or news about internal social networks.  Folks, the days of the “email blast” as the main communication channel might nearing their end – for some things. 

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