I got to spend a week in Pune and Mumbai on business a couple of months ago. It was such a refreshing change from America, where everyone is miserable because they can’t find a job. I talked to a couple of sharp young twenty-somethings who told me they change jobs (on purpose!) a couple of times a year just to meet new girls. It’s no problem finding new jobs – there are tons, and companies give out raises and bonuses every year just to try and keep workers from jumping ship too frequently.

So does this sound familiar to you?

Me neither.

It was fun thinking about how I’d deal with that novel situation – high attrition due to high demand for skilled workers and a relative shortage of those workers. If you’re going to outsource to India, how do you handle the HR/communications challenges?

Well, you could try to create a workplace that’s too cool to leave. My ideas:

1) Have the nicest office around. Plenty of American and European companies open offices in Mumbai or Hyderabad or Pune and, in an effort to make the most out of what’s probably a cost-saving effort in the first place, choose dank cinder block rooms and furnish them with crappy old furniture and computers. Wouldn’t you rather work someplace nice? The people I met who had been in their jobs for a year or more mostly worked in nice offices with windows, clean new desks and modern computers.

2) Offer a career path without a glass ceiling. If you shipped in a white guy from the States to be the local boss, and you don’t have a reasonable, visible plan in place to put a local in that job eventually, why should anyone ambitious stick around? Make sure there are advancement opportunities, including the training that’s needed to set Indians up for success in those higher-up jobs.

3) Make your workplace a community. It’s easy to leave a workplace behind when it’s a place that you go five times a week to earn your paycheck. It’s hard to leave a place where you know and like the people around you, and you are doing fun, important things with them that make your life better and richer. Set up get-togethers for everyone in the office and make sure they can bring their families to some events, and that there’s good food to eat. Coordinate community service efforts that are meaningful to your team – and ask them to define ‘meaningful’ and ‘service’.

4) Make your company a good place to work. I know, I’m coming back to Daniel Pink AGAIN but he makes such an important point: people aren’t only motivated by money. Your employees in India, like their colleagues in America or Europe, want to do interesting work with people who they like, and they want some ability to self-direct and choose what they do. It’s not all about the money for them, either (although money might be a bigger motivating factor than we’re used to in the States…see #5.)

5) Ask. What does an American consultant really know about any of this, anyway? You can find out what you need to know about how to get your Indian employees to stick around…by asking them. Don’t let your employee research stop at the ‘engagement survey.’ You might get some data that shows your Indian employees are less engaged than those at the home office, but was that a surprise? Do some qualitative research in India and take the time to find out about what really matters to your workforce, before they all leave for better dating opportunities elsewhere.

As social media grows and influences business, the distinctions between marketing and communications continue to erode.

Once upon a time, the way we broadcast our messages was very distinct: paid versus earned media. At that stage, marketing dealt with advertising and direct-to-customer, tradeshows and collaterals. Public relations dealt with the media, with executive communications, and sometimes covered investor relations, too, in public companies.

Social media, blogging, and viral communications have changed the landscape so radically that it’s clear the professions are converging. So do you just merge the two?

Maybe. I think that B-to-C companies are going to have a different answer to that question, in many cases, than B-to-B enterprises. That’s because there are other lines blurring out there, too. Internal communications and IT have developed a much deeper connection since the advent of social media – how else do you get all those cool enterprise-level social media tools set up and managed properly?

It’s not all due to social media, but I think the changes are largely due to the proliferation of channels available to us, and the decline of influence in a couple of channels that used to be the mainstay of marketing (television and newspapers.)

I hope it’s a happy marriage. They should have plenty to talk about.

What I like about this particular collection of tools: you can do all the really important stuff, and it’s a good basic list for a lot of different kinds of Twitter users, from corporate communications people to small business owners.

HootSuite is a great place to start.

and their logo is the cutest!

HootSuite comes with built-in analytics (basics are free, upgrades are low-cost.) It allows you to schedule and publish messages to multiple social networks (including Twitter), monitor results and efficiently participate in conversations. Their mobile app is unbeatable, and you can quickly check your direct messages and learn about your followers.

Buffer

Buffer – Sure, HootSuite lets you schedule your tweets, but…one at a time. Buffer helpfully sets up a schedule for you and sends your ‘buffered’ tweets out on that schedule. Perfect for someone who wants to set up a Tweet queue and then ignore it for the rest of the day. Plus, Twitter users are much more likely to unfollow someone with multiple tweets in an hour, so make yourself more effective and spread ‘em out.

TweetEffect – A neat tool that shows you exactly how loveable (or unloveable) each of your tweets were, based on the number of follows/unfollows you racked up right after sending them. Proof that your followers really ARE irritated by seeing you post a breathless comment and a link…to your own press release.

Tweepi – A big ball of Twitter-management goodness, all in one place. See who you’re following who isn’t following you, and ‘flush’ the non-followers. Use lists compiled by other relevant Twitter users to build a better following for your company.

PeerIndex – More than Twitter, but you can orient it toward Twitter-data. PeerIndex offers a pretty sophisticated look at how your overall web 2.0 influence stacks up by analyzing your impact across a number of channels, including Twitter, your blog(s), Facebook ,LinkedIn, and Quora. Choose your Twitter peers for comparison to focus this tool on Tw-impact. A little hiccupy – for example, it never reflects my Quora activity – but still good.

What are your ‘must-have’ Twitter tools?

If a company starts using an enterprise-level social business suite (think Jive or Chatter), what happens to the intranet? 5 answers on Quora

If a company starts using an enterprise-level social business suite (think Jive or Chatter), what happens to the intranet?

Often, the problem is that the company’s internal communications infrastructure is stuck in Media Age 1.0 and their workforce is happily living in Media Age 2.0. Employees get their daily news from blogs, digests and RSS feeds. They keep in touch with their friends via Facebook and Twitter. They’re getting information virally in the real world, and your company is still doing top-down communications?  No wonder there’s a disconnect. So how do you bring your company’s communications up to date?

Turn off the Waterfall. Let’s face it, ‘cascading’ communications is over and done with. We did it back in the day when we didn’t have many ways to get ideas spread throughout big, dispersed organizations. Cascading often didn’t work as intended. Managers adapted, ignored, and even ridiculed carefully crafted messages. So let’s lower the curtain on cascades. Big organizations have lots and lots of tribes you can work with, and plenty of tribal leaders with whom you should be collaborating to get the word out, instead of expecting managers to regurgitate something the CEO fed them. Start with the fundamentals – building and contacting your internal network. Which groups exist within your organization, and who are their leaders? Not ‘managers,’ leaders. Who organized the softball team? Who is the person everyone calls when they are getting a cross-functional team lined up? Who leads the Friday prayer breakfast? You need them. Get to know them.

Get back to tactics. My vote for the most over-used word in internal communications is ‘strategic.’ Yes, we all know it’s really important to be strategic and to have a strategy and to work at a strategic level. Frankly, strategy is usually not the hard part. Good internal comms pros can scribble out a strategy on the back of an envelope and get it mostly right. What’s changed hugely in our field is the range of tactics available to us as we execute those strategies. Now that we can use all the cool stuff in the social media playbook, I think it’s time to take a step back and look at tactics in general. The tendency is to use the shiniest, newest toy we’ve got. Sometimes, though, a flyer stuck to the inside of the bathroom door is still the best tactic. The most elegant strategy in the world is worth diddly-squat if you can’t pull it off. So, spend more time considering tactics and less on showing the executive suite what a high-level thinker you are. Who are your employees inclined to listen to? How do they prefer to learn new information? What can you learn from the people on the front line?

Research. Speaking of the people on the front line, the annual engagement survey is not the only place and time they have opinions. Most of your folks are asked for their opinion on everything under the sun daily in the real world.  Surveys are ubiquitous, but at the office most employees only get asked to offer their thoughts once a year, and often only in a ‘fill in the bubble’ format. How about doing some qualitative research? Or doing surveys on issues that are typically only considered formally by the executive suite? How about open-ended questions so that your people can tell you what they really care about?

If you can make your company’s internal communications infrastructure broader, stronger and multi-directional – a better mirror of the information networks that keep the real world humming – you have a much better chance of recapturing the attention of your employees.

So, ten years ago, what would I have done if a big weather disaster had kept me grounded in Europe? Called my travel agent – from a land line, most likely. Waited in a lot of long lines. Pleaded with the airline customer service people until they got me rescheduled on another flight. And, repeated the steps above over and over again until I finally got a flight that made it out.

When I found myself deplaning from a flight that had been canceled after hours of waiting for a takeoff slot that never materialized, I had plenty of time to post grouchy updates to Facebook, Twitter and the Skype chat room I use to connect with my teammates in my favorite MMOG, King of the World.

Over the next twenty hours a bunch of cool things happened, in between the long lines and dismal news briefings from the airline.

Since I had booked the tickets through Orbitz, I had no travel agent to call. But one of my teammates who lives near Milan sent me an instant message via our game’s Skype chat room to tell me that the airport there was a mess, too, so I knew not to bother trying to reroute that way. A client in Copenhagen (who’s also a long-time friend) saw my Facebook post and texted me asking how he could help. A friend in Amsterdam Tweeted me to offer a place to stay, should I be able to make it there from Copenhagen as per my original itinerary; another friend in London posted to my FB wall with the same offer if I could get to Heathrow. But, no dice – every European airport was apparently in dire trouble.

Finally, the next morning, a breakthrough: one of my MMOG teammates, a quantitative analyst who knows lots of useful stuff, sent me a link to a weather map of Europe. He’d been tracking it for me, and it looked like Brussels was one of the least snowy spots on the continent. So, when my number came up at the rebooking counter, I asked the agent: anything going to Brussels today, and can you get me a flight to anywhere in North America from there? The answers: yes, and yes. So I found myself headed home at last.

So you might think that the moral of this story is that social media saved the day. Actually, I think it’s that crowdsourcing saved the day. Social media let me reach the crowd, but the essence of what I did was simply ask my entire friend network for help. They came through beautifully and one of them even had the magic bullet, the bit of information I needed to get off the continent. Thanks, Ahmad!

Honestly, even if you don’t agree with Steve Johnson on where good ideas come from, it’s worth watching this just for the awesome use of animation.

Also, the company has a social mission. When I was tuning up our Sustainable Ventures Meetup site, I saw they were hiring, and since so many people would love a paying gig with a like-minded company, I took a peek, looking for matches in my network.  Here are three jobs available at Meetup.com right now:

• Software Engineer, Secret Projects to Spawn Vast Consumer Empowerment and Value for Mostly Local Businesses Across Earth
• UI Engineer, Secret Projects to Reinvent How Human Communities Meetup for Maximum Positive Atomic Interaction with Minimally Invasive Digital Burden
• Product Manager, Secret Projects to Imperialize the Internet with Earnest Intent to Spawn Mass Local Community Organizing

So, pass it along.  And while you’re at it, follow @heif on Twitter, and go find a killer Meetup in your town — or start one.  They’re our people, and we’re coming on strong.