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Joseph Franklyn McElroy

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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Corporate Alumni Social Networking Groups

Recently I was invited to join an alumni networking group - but this time it wasn’t an invitation from my alma mater, Duke University. It was from my ex-employer, IBM. IBM’s venture into employee alumni networking got its start in Europe, and is now making its way across the Big Pond to America. IBM is one of a small, but growing, group of corporations who are beginning to look at resources beyond their current employees in a deliberate and structured way.

I’ve been very intrigued with this new group ever since I joined several weeks ago. It started me thinking about some core issues: For instance, what is the value of an employee alumni networking group to the corporation that creates it? And, what is the network’s value to the ex-employees who join it?

For a corporation, the value is
  1. Tap into a larger creative pool of talent for ideas.
  2. Larger test audience for proposed initiatives before they go generally public.
  3. Given that the average employement time is shrinking, IBM can keep close to a pool of trained people for staffing up during times of need.
  4. Make it more likely that current employees can find mentors without an internal agenda.

From an ex-employee standpoint, I can think of several potentially big benefits of being a member:
  1. Access to the significant corporate resources that were once available to me as an employee
  2. Connections to other ex-employees with whom I feel a real camaraderie
  3. Endless opportunities for doing business with other ex-employees regionally, nationally, or globally.
  4. Involvement in initiatives of mutual interest such as community projects with other ex-employees, non-profits, and socially responsible people
  5. Knowledge of IBM’s open contracts for vendors
As a Search Engine Marketing specialist on the cutting edge of a burgeoning industry, I also realize that I will be able to easily connect with fellow ex-IBMers who need help and guidance to develop a Search Engine Marketing strategy for their own companies.

In the short time I’ve been a member, I have already been approached with two business offerings - an investment opportunity and a European partnership offer. It doesn’t take long to see how these networking groups can be a dynamic conduit for successful business dealings that would seldom have happened outside of the group.

If you are a member of a corporate alumni network, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences, too. In future blogs, I will come back to this subject and talk about the "Social Networking Aspects of Corporate Alumni Groups."



posted by joseph mcelroy @ 11:10 AM

1 Comments:

At 2:50 PM, Blogger jobsearchpro said...

Job-Hunt.org links to a substantial list of corporate (also military and government) alumni groups. See - http://www.job-hunt.org/employer_alumni_networking.shtml

Job-Hunt lists them in order by employer name.

 


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