The number of CEO’s joining social media platforms is on the rise. However, a new study indicates that many are still unconvinced. While there is no question that an online presence has it’s benefits–such as engaging customers and employees–not all are convinced that it will increase their bottom line or benefit their brand.

As Forbes.com reports:

For every aspirational leadership rationale for signing up ─ to present an authentic face, get closer to customers, engage employees ─ there are pragmatic reasons still keeping the majority away.

Some simply don’t see the cost-benefit of the personal commitment. Others turn away due to the risk of well-documented personal attacks, disclosure issues or media scrutiny from off-the-cuff commentary.

For the full article, click here.

The infographic below, entitled “How Do We Spend Our Live Online,” was created with data from comScore, Pew Internet, The Digital Life and Nielsen.  Some interesting top line data points include:

We spend a typical hour in the following way:

• 22% on social networking sites
• 21% on searching for information
• 20% on reading content
• 19% on emails
• 13% on multi media sites
• 5% on online shopping

Social networking activities win a clear lion’s share of people’s attention, with this set of data suggesting that Facebook captures an average of more than 465 minutes of people’s time each month.

Highest growing trends of online usage:

• 27% Location based services
• 27% Time shift TV
• 19% Internet Banking

Least growing trends of online usage include:

• 12% User created videos
• 12% Live internet videos
• 12% Professionally created videos

So here are three of my surprises after viewing the Infographic:

• With growth of internal social networks in companies, more employees will be encouraged and see value in creating user-generated videos. Is this really on the downward shift?
• Forrester predicts the social enterprise software industry will become a $6.4 billion market by 2016. What happens to email? How long will it be taking up almost 20% of our typical hour during the day? Will this go down to 5% and how fast? If you listen to what companies like Jive, Moxie say, the death of email is right around the corner.
• The Global online population is exploding with 30% of world’s population. If Chinese users spend five hours a week shopping online, what does this mean for emerging markets in Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia, will they follow suit?

Here is the How We Spend Our Time Online Infographic.
Share your surprises with me here on the blog.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE) — Future Workplace will present its Social Learning Boot Camp, an exclusive, two-day event that provides senior executives in corporate learning, human resources and talent management the tools to design and launch collaborative learning platforms. The boot camp is March 19 and 20, 2012, at the IESE Business School (165 West 57th Street) in New York City.

“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation”“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation,” said Jeanne Meister, Future Workplace partner and co-author of the best-selling book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (HarperCollins, 2010). “This is our fourth Social Learning Boot Camp, which attracts chief learning and talent officers and their teams. As we head toward 2020, we will see more organizations using social media to attract, retain and develop their employees, as well as to collaborate with their customers and suppliers.”

Talent development and training is evolving from the classroom-based model to a more-collaborative one that leverages a range of social media tools. During the Social Learning Boot Camp, participants gain a deeper understanding of best practices, benefits and barriers in designing and implementing social learning in their organizations. Participants receive an iPad 2 and use this during the boot camp to experience the power of social learning, tweet insights and questions to #slbootcamp during presentations, as well as develop a business case for social learning in their organization.

The boot camp features the following sessions, among several others:

• Learn how Cerner Corporation created UCern, a collaborative platform to connect all members of the Cerner network (employees and customers) to better innovate and quickly adopt new ideas throughout the enterprise.
• Examine how companies such as AT&T, AXA Equitable, Marsh and Jarden Consumer Solutions are re-imagining corporate learning to be social, collaborative and peer driven.
• Explore why corporate learning needs to adapt to the digital needs and expectations of Millennials (born between 1977 and 1997).

Meister and the Future Workplace team will offer continual recaps and debriefs to help participants build a plan they can take away from the boot camp to implement in their own organizations.

Partner companies who are working with Future Workplace to produce the Social Learning Boot Camp include Jive, GP, Kaplan University, DeVry University’s Keller Center for Corporate Learning, Ashford University and Badgeville. In addition, IESE Business School will share original research on the use of iPads in executive education programs.

For more information about the boot camp and to view the full agenda, visit www.sociallearningbootcamp.com.

About Future Workplace
Future Workplace is an executive-development company that works with human resources executives in Fortune 1,000 organizations to provide continuing education, peer networks and leadership development. Future Workplace runs the 2020 Workplace Network, an ecosystem of innovative chief learning officers, chief talent officers, and directors of global human resources who are rethinking, reinventing, and re-imagining the role of human resources, corporate learning and talent management to drive business results. For more about Future Workplace or the 2020 Workplace Network, visit www.futureworkplace.com.

About IESE Business School
IESE is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world by publications, such as The Economist and the Financial Times. In 2007, IESE became the first European business school to establish a permanent presence in the United States. Its state-of-the-art New York Center, located in Midtown Manhattan, offers diverse programs for executives. For more about IESE, visit iese.edu.

Contacts
Amy Briskin, 212-794-6644
amy@futureworkplace.com
www.sociallearningbootcamp.com

According to Ambient Insight, the top 5 dynamics leading to this “perfect storm” in the adoption of mobile learning include:

The Buyer Demographic is Growing

There is a large and growing buyer demographic using a variety of Internet-connected handheld computing devices. In terms of revenue, consumers, healthcare, and federal government agencies (particularly military agencies) will dominate the market over the forecast period, followed by corporate buyers.

The Content Distribution Channel is Expanding Rapidly

Applications are now sold in a growing number of commercial “app stores. “As of February 2011, there were over a hundred app stores and the number is growing by 1-2 stores a month. There are now global mass-ˇmarket stores operated by GetJar, Amazon, and Opera.

There are over 650 telecom operators and there are now ”white-label” app store platforms that allow them to launch branded pre-stocked app stores quickly. The new carrier and device maker initiative called the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) launched a commercial development platform in February 2011. IBM, Oracle, Accenture, Ericsson, and Telefonica launched white label services based on WAC at the same time. China Mobile, MTS, Orange, Smart, Telefonica, Telenor, Verizon, and Vodafone launched their own WAC stores in February 2011 with over 12,000 apps.

The Networks are Getting Faster and the Devices are Getting Smarter

There was a spike in the sales of smartphones, ebook readers, and tablets in 2010.  In 2011 alone, the estimate is for more than 60  million media tablets to be sold and an increasingly number will be corporate users.

So-called 4G (fourth generation) wireless networks started rolling out in the US in late 2010. Once considered a laggard in wireless broadband, the US is now taking the lead in 4G network deployment.

The Time To Re-Think Corporate Learning Is Here…  It Will Be More Social, Collaborative and Engaging

At Future Workplace we recently completed a comprehensive report on the adoption of mobile learning. But the bigger issue is how will our Mobile lives” impact the way we work, learn and communicate with each other. Here are 10 predictions for the way the workplace will be impacted by mobile learning:

1. Mobile will be part of the way we do business- – Learning & working will be increasingly mobile and companies will need to evaluate how they are leveraging this trend in sourcing and recruiting talent,  corporate learning, and performance management.
2. LMS’s need to become re-imagined – Shouldn’t LMS’s be more than an experience on Amazon? One where you can easily rate, tag and add comments?  And do this all from your mobile device?
3. Media tablets will become a dominant device – Because of their ideal form factor for video and display of text and graphics, media tablets will increase dramatically as a tool for immediate access to corporate learning and performance support.
4. Performance review can be and should be immediate – The annual performance review may soon be a thing of the past as companies embrace mobile devices for relevant, quick and easy micro feedback.
5. Augmented reality apps and search will deliver JIT – Because mobile devices have a built-in ability to know a user’s location, including orientation, augmented reality apps will deliver location relevant information when needed.
6. Design and development of learning will be crowdsourced- – Instead of instructional design where an expert creates  a curriculum in isolation, learner will be involved in both the creation and consumption of learning programs and solutions.
7. Social Games for recruiting- Given the success of Farmville, more companies will create social games for recruiting and sourcing employees.
8. Choice and continuity across multiple mobile devices – Employees will come to work with a BYOT mindset (Bring Your Own Technology) The combination of “cloud-based” computing with mobile devices will create opportunities for learners to seamlessly move from one device to another.
9. New skills and competencies needed – With all this change in the way work will get done,  new skills and competencies will be needed for both human resources as well as learning professionals in the areas of social technologies,  social facilitation and social gaming.
10. The revolution in the workplace and corporate learning is just beginning…We are at the beginning of a major shift in the workplace–one where employees are increasingly  empowered to contribute, share ideas and comment on new ways of working and learning. Employees across all industries will have a bigger voice in how, where and when they work and learn. Human Resources departments must adapt or be left behind.

How is your organization re-thinking and preparing   for the workplace in 2020? What are you doing today that was not even on your agenda  last month or last year?  Share your thoughts with us here!

“What are the key attributes of a leader in the 2020 workplace?”

Our answer posits five attributes leaders will need to navigate the workplace in 2020. These are shown below, in a chart taken directly from The 2020 Workplace book:

So it was interesting to read the latest book by Adam Bryant, who writes the “Corner Office” column for the New York Times and whose book The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed has just been published.

Bryant proposes that successful leaders share five qualities, as well as look for these in people they hire. Here are the five qualities along with a view toward leveraging these qualities in the 2020 workplace .

Bryant’s Five Qualities Of A Successful Leader

1. Passionate curiosity

Bryant: “Passionate curiosity is an infectious sense of fascination that some people have with everything around them.  Leaders who have a passionate curiosity ask the “big inspiring questions,” in an attempt to always want to know more. The most effective leaders wonder why things work the way they do and whether those things can be improved upon. They want to know people’s stories, and what they do.”

2020 Leader: As Peter Drucker was fond of saying: “The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask questions.” And the bigger and more inspiring the questions the better.

2. Battle-hardened confidence

Bryant: Great leaders display “a concept known as ‘locus of control.’ . . . People who have it will take on, and own, any assignment thrown their way. They say those words that are music to a manager’s ears: ‘Got it. I’m on it.’”

2020 Leader: Leaders who have “battle-hardened confidence have a positive attitude mixed with a sense of purpose and determination. As Bryant says in his book, “People who have it will take on, and own any assignment thrown their way. Or as Gary Hamel argues in his book, The Future of Management, leaders build accountability into everything they do.

3. Team smarts

Bryant: “The most effective executives are more than team players. They understand how teams work and how to get the most out of the group both in the current assignment and with a view toward future assignments. Just as some people have street smarts, others have team smarts.”

2020 Leader: In the 2020 workplace, team smarts is also about having good “peripheral vision” for sensing how people react to one another, not just how they act. Leaders must be on the lookout for individuals who can be part of a high performing team and know how to bring the team members together around a common goal. Innovative methods of developing these teams will be leveraged in the 2020 workplace and they include: leadership development programs leveraging social networking tools, group mentoring, reverse mentoring, as well as providing coaching at lower levels of the organization.

4. A simple mind-set

Bryant: “Most senior executives want  a crisp vision and communication style. This means:  Be concise, Get to the point, Keep it simple.” Bryant proposes more leaders need to be able to summarize their ideas in a 10-word summary, which sounds easier than it is.

2020 Leader: Leaders will need to be concise and crisp in the face of ever increasingly complexities in running their businesses. But how? One possibility is to pilot microblogging inside your company so your team begins to use tools that require brevity while encouraging  collaboration .   The new job of leaders in the 2020 workplace is to be digitally confident while “being concise, getting to the point and keeping it simple.”

5. Fearlessness

Bryant: “Fearlessness refers to calculated and informed risk-taking by executives who have a vision for the future. When chief executives talk about executives on their staffs who are fearless, there is a reverence in their voices. They wish they could bottle it and pass it out to all their employees.”

2020 Leader: As we approach the workplace in 2020, we cannot imagine the future by simply extrapolating from the past. As Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox says, “one of the attributes of being fearless is seeing an opportunity even though things are not broken.” Leaders need to see changes coming in their businesses and prepare for these by “future proofing” the enterprise, meaning understanding the implications of revolutionary change and taking action to position the company in the coming decade.

Which of these five qualities do you think is the most important in a leader as we head into the 2020 workplace? As social technologies are added to the workplace, how will the job of a leader change?   Can you share your suggestions to me at: jeanne@futureworkplace.com