Companies need to socialize with employees

With the recession coming towards the end, IT industry is gaining the momentum again. At the time when most of its competitor projected fall in revenue for next financial year, Cognizant has been the leader and showing the path for others. Cognizant has been known for its performance driven approach. It has rewarded the performers with the higher incentives and promotions in the past (once said that you can be manager within 5 years).

But that line is getting blurred these days and Cognizant seems to be following the path of its peers. By having cost cutting measures like not giving any Salary Hike, not giving Promotions, not giving Annual Gifts and not providing facilities/amenities to employees, I don’t think it is going to be beneficial in the long term. It will only harm to the reputation of the organization, which has taken almost 10 years to build upon. May be the management will be able to show the good numbers in the short term (like the Q2 results or increased revenue guidance for FY’09) but it is going to be difficult in the future.

Cognizant has grown over 50 percent annually for past six years. And the main reason for that was the satisfaction of the employees. But now days, it becomes to get recognition at higher level because of the hierarchy. When a $ 3 billion company, having $ 1 billion in cash and still it is promoting only 7.5% of the employees after one and half years and that only with strict work experience criteria, how the employees remain motivated to give their 100%. If someone misses the criteria by few months then he/she has to wait till the next cycle, which no one knows when it will occur. If someone has to wait for three years to get the promotion even after performing outstandingly well, then he/she shall decide to on. And it will be a loss on the part of organization to lose a talented resource.

Cognizant has been known for making a difference. But making these unnecessary cost cutting measures, it is coming at par with the other players in the industry and degrading in its own value. It has to separate itself from the others in terms of the values it had created earlier. I see the challenging path ahead for the organization.

Social media concept

In this social world internet has become an important place. Here are some facts about social media

Stats from social media:

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
13. 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser