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How Social Media Can Make Us More Productive

November 22nd, 2010 By seb Filed Under: Everyone

T.A. McCann serves as founder and CEO of Gist. His past experience includes Vulcan Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to Polaris, he held senior positions at Microsoft.

To quote Eric Clapton: ‘It’s in the way that you use it!’

In the constant back-and-forth arguments about Millennials joining the workforce, we’ve heard countless times that managers think social media is a distraction and ultimately a productivity killer in the workplace.

In response, the social media community has fought back by saying that these tools actually help them get things done faster, or bring other value to the business. But there have been few substantive conversations about precisely how social media might help you get things done.

Beyond Millennials, the ‘new workforce’ is being defined by a work style that blurs personal and professional time. That development has spawned professionals that craftily use social media to get things done. Yes, the initial draw was networking, but as those relationships become more essential to your professional responsibilities, social media becomes an area where you can get a lot of work done too.

The trick is to realize that it’s not about the tool itself, but your ability to (more…)

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HOW TO: Score a job through Facebook

November 1st, 2010 By julian Filed Under: Everyone

If you’re looking for a job, ask yourself if you’ve tapped every possible resource. Have you scoured Craigslist and made Monster your homepage? Have you set Google Alerts for every possible word combination that could land you a job? Have you checked Facebook? And I’m not talking about Facebook’s rather useless Marketplace.

While Facebook is better known for helping people lose their jobs, it’s largely an untapped resource when it comes to job hunting. With 500 million users, it has the potential to be one of the largest. But finding a job through Facebook isn’t about pestering your friends and junking up their news feeds with status updates like ‘Unemployed and Looking For Work — Help A Dude Out.’ It’s about making the most of your network in a positive way, not by being a nuisance.

By joining groups, keeping track of your friends’ updates and just keeping in touch with your network, you can turn Facebook into a site that does so much more for you than just keep tabs on your exes. Here are five ways to turn Facebook into another resource that can help you land a job. If you’ve scored a job through Facebook, we want to hear your story, so leave us some tips in the comments below.

1. Read Your News Feed

Amanda Flahive is known as the Diva of the Details at Sevans Strategy, a Chicago-based public relations and new media consultancy. She wears many hats in her job working with social media maven Sarah Evans. But Flahive landed the gig just from reading her Facebook feed.

Both Flahive and Evans attended the same college but were in different programs — while they knew of each other, they didn’t know each other well. About a year and a half ago, they were brought back together by a mutual friend’s wedding. Evans threw an engagement party, and the two reconnected. ‘At that time Sevans wasn’t in existence,’ says Flahive. ‘[Sarah] was still at her old position as the director of communications at a community college. We talked about what we were both doing, but the conversation wasn’t too serious. Sevans might have been something in the back of her brain at the time, but it wasn’t something we discussed that night.’

Since they were both going to be in the same wedding, they decided to keep in touch on Facebook, the way many old acquaintances re-connect.

‘I’m a person who pretty regularly reads my Facebook news feed. If it’s not something regarding Farmville or Mafia Wars, then I most likely read it,’ she says. ‘So I was reading through updates on a random day, and had been in one sales and marketing position, and moved to another, and I was OK, but wasn’t loving it.’

Flahive was keeping an eye out — looking on Monster, looking on Career Builder, but wasn’t really hitting anything.’Those sites are quite often so flooded with people that are looking for jobs, that it was my experience that you don’t get very far on those sites. I would send a resume in and either not have it go anywhere or in a direction that wasn’t right for me,’ she says.

So on a random day, Flahive saw that Evans had posted that she was looking for a three-quarter time assistant. ‘From the exact Facebook post: Live in Chicago and love details? Looking for someone to work about 30 hours a week, checking e-mail, booking travel etc. E-mail Jen (her then assistant) for more details.’

Flahive didn’t respond right away, but figured she had nothing to lose since she knew Evans on both a personal and professional level. Evans called her for an interview, and they had a good laugh about it. ‘I said, I can’t believe we are having this phone call, but if it weren’t for Facebook, we wouldn’t be having it.’

In fact, Evans didn’t post the job anywhere else other than Facebook and Twitter (also the method that Sevans uses to hire its interns). The two had a conversation about the position and Evans ultimately offered Flahive the job through a direct message on Facebook.

‘It’s not what I expected to get out of Facebook,’ says Flahive who says it’s typically used to catch up with friends and look at baby photos. ‘I never thought I’d get a job out of it. But now that I have, it makes all the sense in the world. And what’s more, my job got a whole lot bigger after I accepted via Facebook. Now it’s full time, I’m doing development and marketing; it led to a much bigger job.’

2. Get Active in a Group

Web developer Enrico Bianco works at Post Rank but found his previous job creating web applications for the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, just by joining a Facebook group.

Bianco was in the middle of job search, looking to switch gears. At the time, he’d been doing mostly Java enterprise development and wanted to get into Ruby on Rails instead. ‘I started doing rather vigorous networking, and other job searching stuff. I used to answer posts on Craigslist, go to professional networking events for social media and Ruby on Rails.’ On a whim, he says, he found a Facebook group for the Toronto Ruby on Rails community and left a message in the discussion board saying that he had something to offer, if anyone was looking for someone to do some Ruby on Rails development.

Lo and behold, he got a message back from the systems manager at CSIC, who asked for his resume, which in turn lead to an interview, and Bianco landed the job. “So it was really, very much a fluke, but a fortunate one,” he says. “She ended up telling me later that one of the key reasons she hired me was that she saw I was active in the community, and that I was engaging with others on the Internet.”

But Bianco casts it off as a fluke, and he admits it cost him nothing to do. “I wouldn’t use it as a primary tool for job searching, but at the time I was willing to use any resource I could.”

3. “Like” or “Friend” Companies You Want to Work For

Sandra Aaron is a Toronto-based event planner who was looking to expand her knowledge of the destination wedding scene, but she found it a difficult prospect. “It’s really hard to properly plan destination weddings without full knowledge of the travel industry,” she writes via e-mail. “So I decided I wanted to find a side job with a travel agency.”

Aaron spoke with many companies in her search to break into the industry, but the one company she really wanted to align herself with was difficult to get into, as their average new hire had 20 years of experience in the travel industry — something Aaron didn’t have.

Aaron says she spent a few months trying to find her way in, asking everyone she knew if they knew anyone with the company. Then one day, she saw a status update from the company’s Facebook Page that they were seeking experienced travel advisers. “With nothing to lose I commented, asking if they ever hired destination wedding planners. A couple of weeks later their marketing guy sent me a note on Facebook, saying he would be happy to pass on my resume to the right person.” Aaron’s resume ended up in the hands of the general manager who was so impressed with it, that within a few weeks, Aaron scored an interview.

Today, she’s an independent contractor for the company. She works from their offices, and says it’s a great situation. “I have access to their resources, and their staff has access to my knowledge and resources within the wedding industry. I would have never gotten the meeting if it weren’t for Facebook.”

4. Participate in a Contest

Andrew Miller scored his internship at Fast Horse, a Minneapolis marketing firm through a contest on Facebook. The company announced that its newest intern would be the candidate who could gain the most “Likes” in a week. Miller was tipped off to the contest by a college professor and quickly went to work on his campaign.

“I tried to tap into every single social network I had ever been a part of,” he said. “And just send out messages that said, hey if you have a few minutes can you help me win this dream internship? All it takes is liking my Page.”

Miller says he didn’t even start out with the most Facebook friends, but he was able to mobilize people by giving them simple directions to vote. That strategy won him 725 “Likes” and the internship.

“Having to market myself in this process has helped me in thinking about how to market actual products. The mobilization that I was able to accomplish is something I do all the time now, contacting blogs and newspapers, trying to get them to run stories,” he said.

Miller, who moved 1,700 miles from Portland, has completed his three month internship and it was extended another three months, which he says is a typical track to full-employment.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that social media can be such a powerful tool for establishing those relationships. There is something so hollow about submitting your standard application, resume and cover letter. With this I was able to be in communication with the decision makers and be sure this was going to be a good fit for me. I would absolutely use social media again to engage with those decision makers.”

5. Start a Dialogue

Fast Horse, the company that hired Andrew Miller as an intern, is a big believer in the Facebook hiring process, according to its creative director and founder Jorg Pierach.

When Fast Horse launched its Facebook Page, it didn’t want the campaign to just be a megaphone for the work they were doing, but rather they wanted to use it as a place to interact with job candidates, sort of a digital informational interview, says Pierach. The company directs job seekers to its Facebook Page so its employees have a place to share information about the company, their culture and what they do.

“So instead of a resume disappearing into a file somewhere, we have a way to keep in touch, and the Fast Horse experience is the way to do that,” he said. “We started this about a year and half ago and we’ve hired about four or five people this way. They started a dialogue, and when a position opened up we already had a good idea of what that [person] was about.”

Pierach says that the intern search was about more than just finding candidates; it was a way to assess them as well, so the candidates could show off their marketing chops. The company asked for video introductions and interviewed 15 candidates before narrowing it down to three finalists who competed for the most “Likes.”

“In a sense it wasn’t about hiring one candidate, but seeing three strong people and their talents. As our needs continue to grow, we know that there are people out there that we liked. It’s about talent cultivation and about them showing us what they can do. But ultimately [it's] about keeping in touch with really talented people.”

Pierach looks at it as a different kind of interview — one that requires people to take the initiative to weigh in with their own thoughts. It’s also a method that saves the company a lot of time when looking to fill a spot. “We have a pre-qualified group of people we can turn to very quickly,” he said, noting that the company saves itself from having to post on job boards and slug through cover letters. They can bring in candidates they know are going to rise to the top, because they have been watching each other on Facebook.

“We recently had a new opportunity that was a very, very quick turn around. We needed a designer the next day. We turned to our Facebook Page and within a couple of hours we had six or seven people who raised their hands, all people we knew, to say they were available. We were able to get them in the next day and keep moving.”

In the future, you can expect to see more companies looking at the hiring process this way, and Pierach suggests that people coming out of college would do well to be aggressive in identifying the companies they want to work with and start the dialogue.

Source: Mashable.com

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Social Networking

April 6th, 2010 By julian Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Despite the increase in using social media by recruiters, the principles of hiring the right person and building relationships shouldn’t be ignored.

Wherever there is change, it is almost an immutable law there will be winners and losers. Recruiters are no stranger to the threat posed by change. In the past many so-called experts predicted that job boards would be the death knell of traditional agencies. Today, of course, staffing companies are massive job board users.

Few people now believe that job boards will be the death of agencies, but could the seemingly inexorable rise of social media sites be the next potential wrecking ball not just for agencies, but for job boards themselves? This was a key question discussed at a meeting of the Recruitment Society held in Birmingham last week.

On the face of it, easy access to millions of candidates makes it much easier for companies to identify and then to recruit staff themselves. LinkedIn, which already has 63m members worldwide and aims to have up to 500m, has become an essential tool of many in-house recruiters. Many companies now have their own Facebook page, while MySpace and Twitter also have their fair share of supporters.

As Jon Hull, resourcing manager at RS Components, one of the panel members at the Recruitment Society meeting said: “If you want to find an accountant in Liverpool with 10 years’ experience, you can. And what’s more,” added Hull, “you know that by talking to them directly you will probably get 15-20 others too.”

Geoff Newman, chief executive of Recruitment Genius, a company that posts vacancies on up to 60 job boards simultaneously, said that far from representing a threat to agencies, networking sites were an opportunity for them “to make an absolute fortune”. Agencies should revel in the social media age by adopting a consultancy type of role, he suggested. “Agencies can make a lot of money by helping clients who don’t understand social media,” said Newman, who is also managing director of Kent-based recruitment agency Acorn Recruitment.

For example, where agencies could potentially add value was in advising clients on the cultural nuances of social networking. Whereas it was acceptable for hirers to use Facebook to contact users about jobs in the US because the distinction between the social and the professional was blurred, this was unlikely to work in the UK where the distinction between the two was clearer.

“It is better to use Facebook to build communities and trust, so that potential jobseekers have the knowledge to make a positive decision, ” said Jon Porter, managing director UK and Ireland, TMP Worldwide.

However, Tom Marsden, director of professional services at Alexander Mann Solutions, said there was no point in fighting the trend towards social networking. Job boards and agencies have limited amount of space to manoeuvre. He suggested their only choice was to compete either on cost or by becoming more specialist.

“Specialisation is going to become increasingly important in the agency and job board market,” he said.

Porter argued that agencies still had a place, but again, only if they added value. “It’s about agencies who understand the market. We only want to engage people who understand the market and can add expertise,” he said.

Jerry Collier, an RPO expert who has worked at Kenexa and AMS, said that hiring mangers could be the losers. He said that hiring mangers often didn’t take a sufficiently “scientific approach” with very few evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of different channels.

He cited one example where a hirers had hired one candidates from 350 applicants at a cost of £70. On the face of it that was good, but it didn’t take account of “the phenomenal amount of time and effort” involved in dealing with that number of applications.

Chris O’Brien, from online recruitment communications agency Enhance Media’s social media division, suggested that job boards faced a significant threat from social media. He said that according to research, 55% of online jobseekers in the UK used social networking in the first week of their job search. “Job boards are going to have a big challenge,” he said.

While the rise and rise of social sites makes potential recruiters of us all, the jury is still out on whether this necessarily means the death knell of recruitment agencies or job boards. As Marsden said: “It’s about hiring the right people for the right job not the number of clicks or traffic. You have to follow the whole process through the whole recruitment life cycle and convert it not only into the number of people you hire but also their effectiveness.”

It’s about hiring the right people for the right job not the number of clicks or traffic.

Collier added: “Sometimes we forget that recruitment is all about relationships.”

While social media will undoubtedly play an increasing role in recruitment over the next few years, those who embrace change but adhere to these two fundamental principles are likely to continue to have a place at the table.

Key facts
LinkedIn 63m users worldwide, growing at 3m per month. Aims to have 350-500m users
Facebook More than 400m users worldwide
Twitter 50m people Tweet every day
According to Enhance Media, 55% of online jobseekers use social media in the first week of their job search

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Using Twitter to Enhance Experiential Campaigns

March 31st, 2010 By julian Filed Under: Everyone

If you haven’t already embraced digital to enhance and extend your brand’s offline experiential and promotional marketing campaigns, you may feel as if the world is passing you by.

However, it’s never too late to get started, and begin harnessing the added firepower that digital activation can deliver for your events happening in the real world, in real time.While there are a myriad of digital channels for you to consider, we believe Twitter is the single-most effective and dynamic social media engine for promoting events and generating consumer dialog around experiential marketing campaigns. One of our favorite examples of using Twitter for a consumer experiential program is the Taco Bell Truck (Link), which shares info on where it will be traveling to give out free tacos, fun trivia and news about all things tacos.

Here are some basic steps on how you can use Twitter to take your experiential marketing campaigns to the next level:

Drive the Conversation – Set up a Twitter account and commit to a regular stream of tweets (posts) about your program, and generate a simple hashtag (#) that you include on every post. Make sure to add value for your followers by providing them with interesting info about your brand and relevant offers, and encourage feedback. For larger experiential campaigns, we recommend setting up a Twitter stream that is specific to your program and separate from any general brand or company Twitter stream you may have in place. This allows followers to self-select to specifically follow updates on your events – and you can still promote this separate stream by selectively re-tweeting your posts within your other brand accounts.

We’re currently utilizing this tactic for our client Coca-Cola via the @WorldCupTrophy Twitter feed, which is being utilized to start conversations with soccer fans around the world and generate excitement about the Coca-Cola-sponsored World Cup Trophy Tour event in Houston in May.

Follow Too – Brands that just broadcast one-way information fail in effectively deploying Twitter, so be sure to listen to your followers and take time to monitor what they are tweeting about. In addition, search on your brand and other relevant terms to find conversations from users who might be interested to attend your events and follow your info. Join their conversations, directly respond to those who ask you questions and thank those to re-tweet your content.

Cross-Promote – Promote your Twitter stream via all of your other communication channels, including email, website and other social media sites like Facebook. In addition, post your account address and hashtag at your events, and offer incentives for consumers to continue following after they have attended your experience such as trivia contests, Twitter-only discounts for your products, etc.

Follow Through – Don’t think of Twitter as just a way to promote your experiential programs before they happen, also be sure to tweet during your events. Tweet photos and video of the activities, and also tweet out thanks to followers who show up. This will encourage more interaction, and allow you to gain feedback about your events in real time. It also allows followers who are not physically present to still share in the experience (further enhancements of tweet photos and video can include posting longer video clips on YouTube or even live streaming the action on sites like Ustream).

Of course, this works both ways, as social media can be utilized to drive event participation as well. We recently executed an experiential campaign for PayPal in New York, Chicago and San Francisco called the PayPal Tweet Hunt (Click here to view photos). Consumers were encouraged to follow PayPal’s @PayPalShopping Twitter account, which made them eligible to participate in the Tweet Hunt and win prizes such as flights, jewelry, gadgets and gift cards.

Listen – After you have started the conversation on Twitter, be sure to follow where it goes. There are many listening tools that allow you to track followers, retweets of your posts and direct mentions of your Twitter account name or related hashtags. All of these metrics can be measured and tracked, and can be used to build a scorecard for how your Twitter activity drives additional connections with consumers around your events.

One of the advantages to Twitter is that it is extremely easy to get started. Plus, it’s free.

We’ve even given you a head start. Just follow these simple suggestions to begin extending your brand’s offline experiential and promotional marketing campaigns into social media.

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10 reasons why small businesses should blog

February 8th, 2010 By Ant Filed Under: Uncategorized

Blogging is almost the grandfather of social media. There are millions of blogs and bloggers worldwide, some read by millions, others by only a few.But, done properly, blogs can be a very important part of social media marketing for small businesses. Here’s why:

Convey your brand personality – even the best websites can be a bit dull. The best way to spice up your site is to include a blog. Here you can be more informal and get across your personality and the personality of your brand.

Demonstrate your knowledge, experience or expertise – blogging is a great way to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. By going into greater depth on a subject you will engage with your visitors and demonstrate your knowledge

Make your website feel alive and up to date – static business websites can often feel as though they are ignored and are rarely updated. A blog will give regular, dynamic content that is changing on a frequent basis.

Give your customers added value – by blogging regularly, you can give visitors yet another reason to come back and visit your site, especially if you are using RSS or Twitter to send out updates about your recent posts
Help with search engine optimisation – a blog is a great way to build extra visibility with the search engines. Make sure your content is relevant and includes plenty of your popular search keywords.

Give visitors a reason to buy – whilst your website will give visitors lots of information about your products or services, your blog will offer a way for you to demonstrate why they are important or valuable. This could be through tips, guidance or possibly even case studies.

Become a thought leader – by blogging on a regular basis, you will build up a following in your industry and this will improve your recognition and publicity far and beyond your traditional customer base.

Valuable content for other social media channels – with so many social media networks out there, the challenge is often knowing exactly what content to share. Having regular blog posts provides a vast array of new, fresh content that you can tweet or share to your heart’s content!

Show you care – the time and effort that you dedicate to blogging will show to your website visitors that you really care about this business and are happy to go that extra mile

Embrace the blogosphere – blogging isn’t the end of the matter. If you are really going to make a blogging strategy successful, you need to be out there in the blogosphere commenting on other blogs and joining in the conversation. If you do this, your blog will be better known and your traffic will really start to grow.
By Social Small Biz on November 29, 2009

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