As organizations continue to search for ways to attain and sustain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, many have begun looking more closely at how to best attract, manage and leverage one of their most precious resources, people (Sayers and Wilson, 1997).  Studies of competitiveness throughout the world have found that societies that underutilize their educated minority groups by preventing them (directly or indirectly) from working in professional and managerial positions lose billions to reduced productivity and efficiency each year (Sayers and Wilson, 1997). Many organizations are becoming aware of the growing diversity in the communities they do business and are responding by developing strategies for hiring and retention in which diversity is linked to the organization’s mission and business objectives (Miller & Katz, 2002). Typically, the evolving mission is to increase market share with a diverse client base, enhance relationships with the diverse community, increase diversity within the employee ...

read more

 

As organizations continue to search for new ways to engage consumers in more interactive ways, many, if not all have begun to examine the opportunities presented by the growing popularity of social media.  As Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) point out, the popularity of social media tools such as Facebook have resulted in user registration counts exceeding the populations of entire countries in South America and Europe. Nail (2009) cites a 33% increase between 2007 and 2008 in the use of social media by consumers and suggests that organizations turn their focus to discovering which tools consumers are using the most and to create social media plans that focus on building strong mutual relationships.

Nail (2009) reveals that more and more organizations are creating social media marketing departments and positions such as “director of community” in an attempt to better understand the most effective methods in which to open lines of ...

read more

 

The emergence of social media as a tool for generating and sharing information has implications for how organizations communicate with their employees, stakeholders and customers.  Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) suggest that until the rise of social media, organizations were in a powerful position to control the information that was publicly available about them.  As Kaplan and Haenlin (2010) point out, the usual model in the 1990s involved the use of corporate homepages in which content was pushed in one direction from the organization to the recipient. However, Kaplan and Haenlin (2010) reveal that the Internet evolved into (or they might suggest returned to its roots as) a platform for the free-flow of information in which new tools facilitated a more social experience where content is pushed and pulled through two-way interaction.

In their study of the traditional systems and concepts of Knowledge Management (KM), Alavi and Leidner (2001) suggest that ...

read more

 

The ubiquity of computers, the Internet and Information Technology (IT) has created new opportunities and challenges for organizations to capture, store and deliver institutional knowledge to employees, partners and stakeholders on demand.  Jones (2010) labels the approach that organizations take to harness their informational assets as knowledge management and defines it as “a type of IT-enabled organizational relationship that has important implications for both organizational learning and decision making” (p. 346).  Hansen, Nohria and Tierney (1999) studied diverse organizations that had implemented knowledge management approaches and found that most used one or both of two strategies: codification and personalization.

The codification strategy as defined by Hansen et al. (1999) is achieved when “knowledge is carefully codified and stored in databases, where it can be easily accessed and used by anyone in the company” (p. 107). Hansen, Nohria and Tierney (1999) cite an example of the codification strategy through what they ...

read more

Only a day later and I can't remember how I was drawn to download Storm8's iPhone game, Vampires Live, but I am hooked as all hooked can be. 

This game reminds me of the fun of MUDs from my BBS sysop days (that dates me ;) ) but the incentive system is sticky as hell and got me to download their entire library of games (and play each to at least level 5). How did they seduce me? Loyalty Points. You can earn them, you can buy them but they come in handy to extend gameplay when you've spent all your energy, health and frenzy. In my case, they gave me between 10 and 20 Loyalty Points for downloading each of their games onto my phone...smart. I have resisted buying so far...but I can see how those with short attention spans (and a willingness to spend ...

read more