I recently read this excellent article on crowdsourcing which explores ways in which the tool is expanding in different fields. Here are five of the best examples they came up with:

1. GrouperEye: This “survival of the fittest” project was started by and for college students looking for contract gigs. Businesses post a case on GrouperEye’s website and leave it open to students to solve. The company picks the best solution, and the student who came up with the idea is paid.
2. “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” Course: In the fall of 2009, Duke University professor Cathy Davidson started a new class called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” It introduces students to crowdsourcing by letting them accept some of the responsibility of running the class, including grading and teaching.
3. Crowdsourcing Help Desks: IT help desks are a necessary service on college campuses, as so many students depend on their computers and Internet access to complete their school work or even attend class online. At Indiana University at Bloomington, new IT help desks began implementing crowdsourcing to alleviate the cost and pressure of having to answer so many calls. Students and professors post their IT problems on an online forum, where other students and amateur IT experts answer them.
4. SOS Classroom: This program has helped sustain the Los Angeles Unified School District’s summer school system. USC students — along with teachers and parents — designed and collected online educational materials to teach K-8 language arts and math to summer school kids. Much of the program includes volunteers.
5. National IT database in the future: Notre Dame’s Chief Technology Officer Dewitt A. Latimer hopes to engineer a national IT database — powered by crowdsourcing — in the next few years. It would be based on the success of user-generated sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, and if the economy can get off the ground, the Hosted Integrated Knowledge Environment Project, or Hike, could become reality.

What ways can you think of to use crowdsourcing in human resources & corporate learning? Are you using crowdsourcing in your department? If yes, how? What implications can you see for it? Share your thoughts in the comments section!

Affinity groups have been around for some time in forward thinking companies. But now some of these companies are taking Affinity Groups to a new level: they are using them to crowdsource new products and services.

Consider Best Buy: While sales in 2009 accounted for roughly 22% of U.S. consumer electronics sales, its share of sales to women was just 16%.

Solution: Best Buy leveraged its Women’s Leadership Forum, composed of female Best Buy employees and female Best Buy customers plus a network of teenage girls to suggest new ways to sell to women.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:

The suggestions from these groups led to local businesswomen advising on retail strategy, and while others helped female Best Buy workers balance family and work demands. Most recently, the effort spawned a network of teenage female consultants who help the retailer sell phones and videogames to young people… Mr. Dunn and other top Best Buy executives are now behind the idea, seeing it as a crucial way to even the field against Target Corp. and Wal-Mart, where executives have long called their target shopper she.

Bottom line, this strategy of using networks formed in Human Resources to crowdsource new ideas for sales is one of the many innovative approaches detailed in The 2020 Workplace, recently published by Harper Collins: The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. Buy the book or visit our website for more info!

Share with us if your company is leveraging groups–especially female groups to source new ideas to grow the business. I want to hear from you.

There are many announcements this month. First and foremost, along with the publication of my book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (Harper Business, 2010), I am also joining partners Karie Willyerd and Rick Von Feldt in a new consulting firm, Future Workplace (www.futureworkplace.com) dedicated to innovations in attracting, developing and keeping talent. Please visit our site. I look forward to your comments!

Next, the April issue of CLO Magazine has an article authored by Karie Willyerd and myself called Social Learning Unleashed.

Social learning is becoming even more critical as studies continue to be released like the one at University of California, Berkeley by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian stating that knowledge is doubling every three years, and the interval for doubling appears to be getting even shorter. As if that weren’t enough, analyst firm IDC reported in a recent study that knowledge workers spend on average 2.3 hours per day — 25 percent of work time — searching for critical job information.

For a growing number of companies, the answer to all this change and to the shortening of the shelf life of knowledge is to formalize informal learning so that it is collaborative, immediate, relevant and presented in the context of an individual’s unique work environment. The heart of social learning is usually a social computing platform that includes many of the capabilities of social networking sites that employees use outside of work, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to tag, rate, comment, and network.

Our book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (Harper Business, 2010) has a number of case studies on how companies are developing social learning for the enterprise. Five lessons surface as critical success factors in how companies can plan, develop and launch social learning. These are excerpted from the article and include:

1. Get senior executives to lead by example. A good way is to have a wiki set up for the work group, and each time an executive sends out a message to the team, provide a link to the wiki.
2. Build enterprise 2.0 tools into the workflow. Rather than building a community supported by a social platform around extracurricular interests, ensure that the way people get work done relies on going to the platform. If the call center has a knowledge center, the social community and the knowledge center need to be combined. People need fewer places to go, not more.
3. Develop and seed new communities with content through community managers. Social learning communities are not a case of “if we build it, they will come.” Communities need to be kick-started by recruiting members, seeding the community with content, building performance incentives to contribute and introducing thought-provoking conversation starters.
4. Consider creating communities as a follow-on to formal training. Wherever there are cohorts, the ability to connect and support can be enabled by social learning platforms. There are many things to learn when starting with a new company or after promotion to a new management role. The ability to connect with others on the path to competence can accelerate performance while providing emotional support.
5. Err on the side of creating an open culture. Allow as much learner access to communities as possible so that knowledge can pass virally across the organization.

The article Social Learning Unleashed has five more critical success factors in planning designing and launching a social learning pilot. I hope you read the entire article and share your comments here.

What have your learned that is critical to the success of social learning? What should your peers avoid doing?

[tags]Social learning, CLO magazine Enterprise 2.0 The 2020 Workplace[/tags]

First, a refresher on the generations:
Traditionalists born prior to 1946
Baby Boomers (that’s me) born between 1946 and 1964
Generation Xer’s born between 1965 and 1976
Millennials born between 1977 and 1997

Pew Research says that on average, the higher your score, the “more Millennial” you are in your habits and mindset. One of the questions is “Have you ever created a profile on any social networking site—such as MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn?” See below for the breakdown on this question by generation:

Now it’s time to share my score. I scored 78 but Traditionalists on average score 4, Baby Boomers 11, Generation Xers 33 and Millennials 73.

So how is it that my score is so high? Without admitting to body piercings and tattoos, over the course of writing my new book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today, I have developed the mindset and social media habits of a Millennial—creating several profiles on social networks, getting most of my news from blogs and social networks, admitting to sending more than 50 text messages a day to work colleagues and family members. I am also liberal in my political views and have both a landline and a cell phone. And I might add, I love my new hyper-connected life.

Bottom line, if we want to stay employable in the 21st century, we need to experiment with using various forms of social media. Why? Because we need to understand how these media have the potential to improve our productivity at work and create fuller lives at home. As we engage in the workforce of the future, more of us will likely adapt a Millennial mindset. Millennials are simply leading the way and showing us the power of interacting and engaging with social media.

So take the quiz here: How Millennial Are You?

Now ask yourself:
1) What can we all learn by adapting a Millennial mindset?
2) Does your organization leverage the Millennial mindset in how you attract and develop all generations in the workforce?
3) Are you creating learning programs which meet the Millennial mindset where they live—engaged online?

Finally I am excited to share that the new book I have written with co-author Karie Willyerd is now available for pre-orders. You can learn more at www.the2020workplace.com
OR pre-order directly at Amazon.com.

And if you are interested in attending an author tour, send me a message and I will be sure to send you a notice.

[tags]Millennials, Pew Research Center, The 2020 Workplace[/tags]

ZoomInfo: What are some of the initial steps sales managers can take in developing a social-media strategy?

Meister: The first step is a change in mindset. It’s not going away and it’s the way people are communicating and connecting. For example, a person’s resume is no longer just an eight-and-a-half inch piece of paper but that person’s ability to engage on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Social media has become part of working life and that entails all sorts of guidelines for employees. The guidelines shouldn’t necessarily be what a person can or can’t say [on social media channels] but what the company considers fair play and what [information] is off limits. The initial strategy requires input from cross-functional teams, including HR, Legal, Internal Communications and IT. The sales departments must reach out to this cross-functional network and participate in brainstorming to create a strategy for using social media both inside and outside the enterprise.

ZoomInfo: What are the benefits of using social media to drive sales and cultivate prospects?

Meister: It’s a way of being more open and having a conversation with the client rather than pushing them to agree to a sale. It’s moving from push to pull in the sales interaction and in marketing from campaigning to conversation. And as more millennials (generally considered people born between the mid 1980s and early 2000s) enter client positions they’re going to want to communicate and partner with vendors the same way they communicate with everyone else – through social media.

ZoomInfo: What about the cost of using social media?

Meister: There’s a lot you can do in Open Source for zero budget. The sales team should collaborate with marketing, IT and communications departments to work out a pilot for experimenting with social media. What many companies are doing is taking one department like Sales, HR or Learning & Development, and testing out how social media can drive greater business impact with one or two business challenges. Remember, this is not a technology fad but needs to be driven by how it can improve the business. You can explore what’s possible that your company has already invested in (regarding social media) and explore how to leverage this for greater collaboration. For example, many companies already have Microsoft Sharepoint and this has a tremendous capability to share content and videos as well as participate on wiki’s. Some companies that are using Sharepoint as their social media platform include BT (British Telecommunications) and CA (Computer Associates).