Here is a preview of what you will read about in the article. This is just a quick synopsis so don’t forget to check out the entire piece here.

Like many companies New York Life has created a corporate social presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But now they are underway of their roll-out to agents, recruiters and other employees. Partnering with Socialware, New York Life can now “automate and manage social network policies and usage for New York Life’s more than 11,000 agents and field managers.” And by year-end “New York Life expects to open up use of social-media sites to all of its employees.”

The value of social media is always a top question. When asked about their motivations Tom Shea, the First VP and CTO had this to say: “Agents can use them as a way to connect with customers. Our recruiters see these sites as effective tools to communicate with potential agents. And this is also a great way to get our branding messages out there, to highlight the strengths of our company.”

Given the regulatory challenges of this industry, New York Life like many others had a very simple social media policy: “No.” The need to comply with the SEC and FINRA guidelines simply created too much overhead and risk. That all changed after clarifications from FINRA through Notice 10-06 and the adoption of Socialware’s Compass solution to help automate the compliance and supervisory risk.

Shea pointed out “if customers have a question on a social media site, you can’t tell them ‘I’ll have an answer for you after my compliance department reviews it.’ But you still need to have all correspondence available for review after the fact. So that’s where the need to capture, store and archive comes in.”

We congratulate New York Life on their progress in adopting social media. Their efforts set a great example for the financial industry and we look forward to helping them reach their goals.

Read the full article here

The good news is that this is the right first step. And if you are FINRA regulated, 10-06 explicitly points out that having a policy in place is required if you are going to adopt social media for business. By not employing a policy, businesses are leaving themselves open to unnecessary risk. Research shows that firms are behind here. 43% of respondents from a recent survey said their firms either did not have a social media policy in place or were unclear if one existed.

To help kick-start this process Socialware has extended our Insights offering by creating a Social Media Policy Accelerator Kit (read the press release here). The kit provides in-depth analysis and guidance on the key areas your policy should address. In addition to the sample policy language, the kit provides an overview of the corresponding procedures your firm should address. Also included is a policy checklist to help guide you through the process and ensure all steps are addressed before activating your employees on social networks.

Every firm still needs to work through the process of defining their business needs, possible risks and the appropriate ways to leverage social media. What you no longer have to do is repeat the hundreds or hours of research required to pull together best practices and answers around creating a formal policy.

Wade Wilkinson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Securities Service Network, Inc. (SSN) summed it up well. “The guiding principle for our early adoption of social media is to support the growth of our affiliated registered representatives and obviously, we have to use social media in a manner that complies with the rules of our industry. The Social Media Policy Accelerator Kit from Socialware helped us write policies that ensure compliance and afford SSN registered representatives the best opportunity to succeed in their social media endeavors. This guidance has been key to our progress and will continue to provide direction moving forward.”

In addition to the Social Media Policy Accelerator Kit please join Steve Selby (LIMRA, Director of Regulatory Services) and I this Thursday at noon CST for a webinar where we will discuss moving through the Policy Stage of the Social Media Adoption Lifecycle. If you miss the live session you can register and view the recording at any time. In addition, head over to SocialTurns to continue the discussion on this topic.

If you are in the financial industry and are not able to leverage social networks, like LinkedIn, for recruiting you are put at a distinct disadvantage. The competition for great talent goes on as companies as doing more with less so finding a way to reach your next great producer is more valuable than ever.

Getting access to social networks is just the beginning. This story also illustrates how companies can get from social networking tools if they activate their entire employee base. For recruiting – as well as for client acquisition and retention – increasing your reach by tapping the collective networks of your employees helps exponentially grow your enterprise social graph.

For example, many recruiters use LinkedIn extensively to find candidates for open positions. They search for specific job titles, by geography, or for types of industries, which gives them a list of potential candidates. After narrowing this list down, they then look for possible connections they may have with these candidates.

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, users must request “connections” with other users, creating a direct connection. Once a recruiter finds a prospective candidate on LinkedIn, she can see if they have any connections in common – called second-degree connections.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how having more employees connected within your organization can exponentially increase these second-degree connections. If a candidate is linked to someone at the recruiter’s company, the recruiter can get first-hand information about the candidate, then ask to be introduced or connected to the potential candidate.

And it doesn’t end there. Once a candidate submits his or her resume, the recruiter can cross-reference the resume with their LinkedIn profile and find other connections they share to get more information about the candidate. In addition, your employees connected to the candidate can help “sell” them on the idea of moving to your firm.

In short, the more connected your employees are, the more connections your firm has beyond its four walls. And this will impact the growth of your firm – measured by clients as well as recruits.

If I’m an advisor with a choice of firms, I’m looking for a place that is going to help me achieve not just success, but overwhelming success – for my clients, the firm, and myself. Sure… reputation of the firm will be important, cultural fit, and the portfolio of products available. However, at the end of the day, the advisory business is about building relationships, acquiring clients, and delivering value. What is step one?  Networking.  And you can argue that steps two through five are the same: Networking.

Advisors and agents now have an unprecedented ability to access, grow, and build networks. Social Networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter provide innovative and revolutionary capabilities for enabling success.

Why are social networks important?
There are many, many ways that social networking can help an advisor be more productive – with greater efficiency. Here are four key elements: Visibility, Speed, Assistance, and Information.

Visibility
Never before have financial advisors had the capability to connect actively with their “first degree” network that social networks allow. Have you noticed the “People You May Know” recommendations that LinkedIn provides on your homepage? How do they know that I could be connected with Leslie, a person that I met ten years ago when we were working on a critical project – but we were working at different companies? And, who knew that through 203 contacts on LinkedIn, a person can have 70,400+ friends of friends connections?

Speed
It’s one thing to try and list out on a spreadsheet all the people you have ever met, and then try to find their phone numbers or their email addresses. How long will it take to contact even half of that list? How about this? Start by connecting with ten contacts on LinkedIn or Facebook and see how quickly your ten connections turn into 20, into 50, into 100. You get the picture. Unprecedented. Tip: LinkedIn also makes it easy to download contact information should you have misplaced that business card from 5 years ago.

Assistance
I’m going to attend a week-long conference in San Francisco. Who do I know in San Francisco? That works in high-tech? I can find that with a few clicks. Who have I always wanted to meet? A few more clicks and I am getting introduced by a friend. The value of my trip has just multiplied.

Information
When I make a new connection or research a prospect, I now have more background than ever before. Not only do I know that my new contact, Joe, used to play poker with the friend that introduced us, but now I can see that he belongs to a local triathlon club – and I now have an instant opportunity for a personal connection.

Back to the recruiting pitch… what is your message? Are you demonstrating the firm’s willingness to invest and support advisor success? Or, are you going to wait and see what shakes out with these “personal” tools? The first movers will have an advantage. Don’t be surprised to start hearing stories about losing reps to a firm that has embraced and supported social networking.

Join us on June 22 for a complimentary webinar where we will be sharing Best Practices on how advisors and agents can leverage LinkedIn to drive productivity.

Online users want to get information on their own terms. In the past, that meant email – consumers set their email preferences and institutions respected those preferences. Today’s social network users, however, create their own experiences via their networks, many preferring to communicate over Facebook or Twitter rather than email.

The stats are mind-boggling. Social network users surpassed the number of email users in July 2009 – 820 million social network users compared to 800 million email users. This massive growth, combined with changes in how people connect and interact will move the communication hub from your inbox to your “wall”.

Even more important, time spent on social networks began to surpass time spent with email almost three years ago. While time spent on email has remained fairly constant, time spent on social networks continues to grow, doubling between 2007 and 2009.

It’s no accident that more and more companies now use social networks to reach out to people where they spend most of their time. Communicating with consumers on Facebook is similar to the shift we saw with AdWords for Google. Once Google hit a critical mass of users, businesses flocked to advertise here, and the same is happening in social networks. However, there are some key difference between advertising on Google – or anywhere online – versus communicating through a social network:

• Social networks let you start a two-way conversation with people, not just deliver ads.
• Consumers are actively seeking out brands & individuals on these sites (when did you ever seek out an ad?)
• Starting a conversation with one person on these sites can quickly spread from person to person. It’s the old “network effect” in action again.

So where do most social network users spend their time? Facebook and YouTube have gained the most share of users. With the continued proliferation of Facebook – into all age ranges – there’s no indication that time spent will decrease.

It’s critical for institutions to pay attention to how consumers prefer to get their information – and adapt quickly. Consumers want information on their own terms – my Facebook experience is completely different from your Facebook experience. Institutions can be a part of these social conversations as long as they are timely, relevant, and deliver real value.

Our recommendation, stop thinking about how you want to communicate and start asking “how do my customers and future customers want to communicate with me?” That will start you on the path to success.

You can download and read the entire trend report here.

We’ve already shared some stats around companies that choose to  block access to these sites. For example, Robert Half Technology found that 54% of CIOs said their firms do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while at work.

The naysayers will point out that giving employees access will hurt productivity,  expose sensitive information,  hurt the brand’s reputation or  cause compliance issues. The reality is that these are all just excuses. There are always risks with any decision and in this case businesses have to make their own assessment and then take steps to mitigate that risk.

My request is that you keep an open mind before jumping to a conclusion. To help you along let’s review reasons you WOULD want to open access to social networking sites:

1. They offer a great channel to recruit new talent
2. It is a unique way to build your brand in the eyes of customers and prospects
3. Go where customers are – let them communicate with you on their terms
4. Drive new sales and upgrades
5. Find new prospects
6. Drive traffic to your site
7. Reduce your customer service costs
8. Improve productivity (yes you read this right – look for proof below)
9. Collaborate with partners, customers and employees
10. Increase your reach by tapping the collective networks of your employees. In other words grow your enterprise social graph

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at some other research that points to the benefits of opening access.

• According to Dr Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at University of Melbourne in Australia, workers who engage in “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing” are 9% more productive than those who don’t.
• An Accenture survey of Millennial preferences found that they prefer to communicate via instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook and RSS feeds. One Millennial MBA, points out that, “I need to access my Facebook in order to do my job.”
• The Cerner Corporation has found tremendous benefits from opening access to social networks. Here is how one Cerner associate puts it “Cerner supports the notion that “work time” and “personal time” have blurred in the uber-connected world. We used Twitter to gather real-time feedback during our corporate town hall in October. It was amazing to see a meeting of 5,000 associates be steered by the crowd, channeled via social media.”

Is there a social media silver bullet? No. But are you missing out on a great opportunity if you don’t engage and don’t enable your employees? Absolutely.

Social networking offers an efficient, cost effective, and viral solution for recruiting top-talent. Traditionally, recruiting costs add up fast with associated advertising, agency search firm fees, recruiters…just to name a few.

The Jobvite study offered some great insight into the effectiveness of Social Recruiting:

• 72 percent plan to invest more in recruiting through social networks
• 80 percent of companies are planning to use social networks to find or attract candidates
• 66 percent have successfully hired a candidate identified or introduced through an online social network

The study went on to say, “Among those using or planning to use social network sites for recruiting, LinkedIn use grew from 80 percent in 2008 to 95 percent of respondents in 2009, Facebook use grew from 36 percent in 2008 to 59 percent in 2009 and Twitter, ranked third with 42 percent of recruiters using the tool to source candidates.”

Investing in social networking has enormous benefits and recruiting is just one of them. So tell us, are you using social networks for your recruiting efforts today?

Technology has been evolving at lighting speed in recent years and sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have changed the way we connect forever. Everyone has experienced the benefit in their personal lives and now businesses are recognizing the opportunity as well.

In the next decade the companies that have the largest employee networks, or said another way that have the highest connection coefficient will be the ones that win. Metcalfe’s Law applies for enterprises just as it applies for technology, “the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users.” In other words the more connected employees are (to other employees, partners, customers, prospects, etc) the more value the employees and therefore the enterprise will experience.

Here is an example to illustrate the point. Say you have 10,000 employees. You can influence employee connectivity in one of two ways. First you need to encourage all of your employees to participate in these social networks. This is critical because this number is not going to change significantly in the short term. Second you need to help employees grow their number of connections – this is the connection coefficient. The higher the coefficient, the greater the reach. While you won’t double the number of employees you have in a year you can double the connection coefficient and if you do the results will be tremendous.

In the networked economy knowledge grows as it is shared. Most importantly companies get stronger through their connections and those connections have to be driven by your employees. Check out my last post to see an example how these connections can be used to help drive recruiting.

Stay tuned for future posts on how these connections change the game in sales, marketing and customer service.

If you are in recruiting there is no doubt you understand the value of LinkedIn, and other social networks, as a recruiting tool. Unfortunately, there are still companies that aren’t convinced the value outweighs the risk of using these tools, especially if you are in a regulated industry.

Let’s start with some math. While LinkedIn doesn’t publish the actual number, it is estimated that the average user on LinkedIn has 40 connections (the average Facebook user has over 120). Now assume your company has 1,500 employees using LinkedIn. Doing some quick math that means your company’s 1^st level network is 60,000 people strong. Counting the connections of their connections your network just grew to 2.4 million people!

Companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, Goldman and Deloitte are seeing great results using social networks for recruiting. Starbucks staffing manager, Carmen Hudson, swears by LinkedIn saying “It’s one of the best things for finding mid-level executives”. Keep in mind the best candidates are often the ones not looking for a job so you have to find them.

These are also invaluable tools for doing background checks. Every recruit will give you their standard references but the good information will come from digging deeper. Using social networks you can find connections that the recruit may not have listed and quickly get a full picture of the candidate. While CEO at Encover Chip Overstreet had a VP of Sales candidate he was looking to hire and did his own check on LinkedIn, “I did 11 back-door checks on this guy and found people he had worked with at five of his last six companies”. How important is it to do these checks and make great hires? Estimates vary but it is safe to assume that hiring the wrong person costs you 2-3X their annual salary. That’s an expensive mistake!

The other area to plan for is boomerang hires, those people that worked for you once before and have found their way back. Karen Palvisak, a leader of alumni relations for Deloitte said “Last year, 20% of our experienced hires were boomerangs”. The hires cost less to train and they hit the ground running. If you haven’t started one already, create an Employee/Alumni network. This will serve as a breeding ground for future hires. If you do a quick search on LinkedIn Groups you will see a lot of examples. Citi has close to 15,000 members, Deloitte has over 25,000 and P&G has over 10,000.

So get started today. If your company doesn’t allow access to these tools forward them this post. If they do make sure you have an Employee/Alumni group setup. Also be sure to encourage your employees to actively grow their own network. This will not only benefit them but will also benefit the company.