Today Jason Corsello and I will be presenting a Webcast titled - Social Collaboration and Talent Management: Strategies and Practices for 2010 and Beyond', a review of the results from last fall's survey of more than 400 Human Resources and other professionals on questions on strategy, approaches and the use of talent-management applications, as well as how social-collaboration adoption is progressing as a business initiative.

There are a number of interesting and some surprising findings in the the 2009 survey results, and I encourage you to join the webcast to better understand some of the important trends in Talent Management and Social Collaboration.

Notably in the survey, when asked:

'Does your organization have a clear strategy to facilitate interactions, connections, and collaboration leveraging enterprise social software?'

almost 70% of respondents said No, with only about 20% indicating that they did have such a strategy in place, (the other 10% did not know).

This finding demonstrates that while enormous attention and media has been focused on collaboration, social networking, and the idea that organizations need to become more 'open', 'social', or 'non-hierarchical' in order to more effectively compete, attract and retain top talent, and to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing business world, most organizations have not endeavored to raise these issues to the level of a clearly articulated strategy.

I suspect that for many of the respondents, 2009's incredibly trying economic environment may have dampered the capability and/or enthusiasm for such projects, as survival mode thinking and only 'essential' likely were given resources and attention.  But for enterprises that do want to begin to formulate a collaboration and social software strategy on the webcast we will discuss some of the approaches organizations can take to begin this process.

Here are several points to consider when designing your strategy:

• Understand the key business issues that social technologies can help address
• Determine the expected outcomes of the application of social collaboration technology and how they will be measured
• Build a diverse team representing Business Leaders, HR, IT, Marketing, etc.
• Choose technology carefully, not all collaboration tools are the same, not all will produce the expected results
  
• Start small, and be flexible. Allow the employees freedom to explore, expand, and shape the solution
  
• Enlist senior leaders and organizational champions. Line managers are ofter the most important constituents
  
• Build ample time for change management, communication, and revision.  Often these tools require patience and coaching to achieve the desired adoption in the organization
  
• Celebrate successes, and strive to replicate them across the enterprise

We will be touching on these points in more detail on the webcast, and in future posts here on Talent Nation.

What do you think?  What are the keys for organizations that need to develop a social software strategy?