Leader’s Talk with Social Media Evangelist – Gautam Ghosh

This time Your HR Buddy is honored to bring the voice of Leaders and today we have Gautam Ghosh, India Marketing Lead at BraveNewTalent, who shares his views on how to keep your employees engaged by using social Media tools.

Gautam Ghosh is social media evangelist and India Marketing Lead at BraveNewTalent and who is rated as the 3rd most Influential HR professional on Social Media by SHRM India in March 2012. He is an avid blogger at Gautamblogs.com and started blogging in early 2002. He specializes in the areas of HR, Organization Development and how businesses can leverage Social Media for Organizational Learning and Employee Engagement.

He is frequently quoted in the Indian press as an authority on business blogging and HR/career issues. He was named as one of the top 25 HR Digital Influencers of 2011, No. 2 in the list of top 25 Influencers in Talent Management by HRExaminer.com, Top 25 influencers in Enterprise Social Media and has been featured as one of the 100 influencers in HR.

Gautam has given talks on “Blogging for Business” at organizations. Gautam’s blog has been listed by HRWorld amongst the top 25 HR blogs worldwide the top 50 HR Blogs to watch in 2009 by EvenCarmichael.com and also amongst the Career 100 – a list of the top 100 career related blogs globally in the English language. His blog is also featured on the Alltop Careers and Alltop India categories. Earlier the blog has been featured as a case study in the book Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. You can follow him on twitter @GautamGhosh.

Here is a snippet of my conversation with him on working at BraveNew Talent and leveraging Social Media for Employee Engagement.

Q:	Share with us on how and why to work with Brave New Talent!!
	Hi Nisha, BraveNewTalent is a platform on which organization can engage with their talent ecosystem to build a relationship. They can then have relevant and specific conversation with them – and don’t need to always do “broadcast” communication, like other social media tools. A firm can also use BraveNewTalent as a social media hub – bringing in content from other outposts like their Twitter feeds, Blog feeds and YouTube videos. BraveNewTalent also has “skills communities” where talent can find like minded people and learn by sharing and engaging them in conversation
Q:	Strategy to HR professionals on how to use social Media for Employee Engagement in their Company
	First a company should have an open culture – without that, social initiatives would not work. People should feel empowered to have open conversations and if that is the case using enterprise social networking could help in connecting people to people and people to information, which they normally might not have come into contact with. Designing a purpose around why people should interact with each other is critical for success. Should also remember that engaged employees will participate more and it is crucial to discover the employees who are influential to attract other employees to the internal network
Q:	Do you see any probable difficulties in using social medias at work and if so how to deal with it?
	Social media should become a tool to help people do their work faster and better. So ideally it should blend into the flow of work. Slowly that’s happening. Traditional business applications are building a social layer to bake in conversations in the apps
Q:	Career Advice to job seekers on how to land a job using social media & what’s the best way a job search candidate can engage with HR during the hiring process?
	My career advice is quite simple. Try to become a thought leader. Share your expertise and demonstrate the value you can add and how remarkable you are. If you are known and people talk about you, everyone will try to get you to work with them.

Nisha Raghavan

Nisha Raghavan