How We Hire in a Social Media World

Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Recruiting

As soon as I know I am scheduled for a meeting I do a search on the people that I am meeting. I’ve been doing this for years. But these days, I am finding much more information – personal, professional and social. There are Facebook accounts and pages, blogs, Twitter accounts, articles, pictures, movies and even LinkedIn recommendations. It’s a jumble – but if you let it wash over you, it’s amazing the kind of image that can be built up relatively quickly. For example, here’s what I found when I did a vanity search on visual search engine Spezify.

gavinheatonspezify

But does this sort of thing impact the way that others see us? In particular, does it impact our careers in a positive or negative way? And would you take steps, as Jye Smith recently did, to erase the past?

Forbes writer, Kashmir Hill shares an interesting report from social profile management company Reppler. The results from interviewing 300 recruiters tell an interesting story – 91% of those surveyed use social networks to screen candidates – and 69% claim to have rejected a candidate based on what they found.

Why-employers-rejected-candidates

On the upside, 68% have hired a candidate because of what they found on social networking sites. So clearly, it’s a double edged sword.

Why-employers-decided-to-hire-candidates (1)

But like everything to do with “social media” – hiring processes show that we are really just doing the same thing in a different medium. As Kashmir explains, at the end of the day:

It boils down to demonstrated creativity, well-roundedness, and the ability not to tell lies about their educational and professional qualifications. Surprisingly, no one said “Because they looked really hot in their profile photos.”

Even in B2B You Have to Think Like a Rockstar

B2B Marketing, Branding, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

Business-to-business marketing can often appear dull and boring. The messaging is subdued, the social media is lacklustre and personality? What personality, right?

Now, there are always excuses here – government regulation, brand guidelines, tone of voice or particular assumed audience needs. But these are merely excuses – not reasons. We should instead see them as challenges – for to succeed in B2B marketing, I believe we need to think like rockstars.

How does this work? Mack Collier has put together a great deck on the subject of rockstar thinking. He calls out four key points – but let’s think about these in a B2B framework:

  1. Rockstars are fans too: remember, rockstars don’t necessarily love their own music. But they do have inspirations, musicians and artists they respect. Pay homage to your inspirations – learn from what they do and bring their work and focus into the work that you do.
  2. Rockstars shift control to fans: if you are a rockstar what do you like to do? Yep – hang out with other rockstars. Think about ways that you can elevate your advocates – and empower them in unexpected ways.
  3. Rockstars find the bigger idea: what mission are you on? How are you improving the lives of people. How are you changing the planet? What is the difference you are making. Sure you can throw money at a problem, but what can you DO to change the game. Think about it, then DO IT.
  4. Rockstars embrace their fans: in the B2B world there are many stakeholders. How do you celebrate them? What can you do to recognise their help and their efforts? How can you answer their questions faster? Think about stepping out from behind the shadow of your brand to provide unexpected value.

B2B can be exceptionally funky – and can prove a fertile opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. Do you have examples? I’d love to hear of them!

Think Like A Rockstar

Would You #OccupyBondStreet in Support of #OccupyWallStreet?

Politics, Pop Culture, Rant

With almost every breath we make decisions. About what to write and what to read. What to believe and what to discard. We follow our “hearts” but vote for political parties who work against our beliefs yet satisfy our materialistic aspirations.

The Occupy Wall Street protests continue to focus ever greater attention on inequality, corruption and greed.It’s a leaderless resistance movement that has spread slowly, but consistently from its base in New York across the US.

But I wonder.

It’s clear that We Are the 99% (after all, how many of the 1% read blogs, tweet or engage with the randomness of humanity that is Twitter?). But what does it take to shift from global recognition to local action? What would it take, from each of us, to go from affinity to sit-in? And more specifically, what are your personal boundaries and what happens when they meet your professional (or even moral) foundations?

I wonder would I (and could you):

Spend a night in the company of uncomfortable strangers under the lost stars
   of city streets
Or move beyond the words of a tweet, a post, an anxious tear?
Is there a place I would stand in, sit in, squat in in protest
    at the injustice of a world that validates me

Or does it all just seem too hard to bear?

Could I, would I, link arms with those battered by the inequities of time, place,
   education and happenstance
Or could I, would I, find my grain of truth
   that tastes like yours and smells so sweet?

Would I go so far as to find the words that change the course of time,
   that shake, endanger, explode our futures
Or do I fold my white knuckles in against themselves
Breathing stale air and broken promises?

How do we know the sound of history calling?
   And how is your call different to mine?
We answer only to the beats of our own hearts
   Counting. Changing. Stepping in time.

But in the cold, freshness of spring mornings
   it’s not a question of passion.

It’s knowing that your lone voice will be carried in the echoes
   of others. Dispossessed and connected. Dissatisfied yet free.

Or perhaps it’s none of these pungent vagaries.

Perhaps, at day’s end, it’s about doing what we must but also what we can.

So would you? Could you?

Or could you not?

—–

Images: Courtesy PaulS

Capturing the Mood of Your Content

Visualisation, Web Fun, Web/Tech

Face-Recognition-on-Guardians-images-640x408 The web is a highly visual medium. It is also very text heavy, especially in the social media domain. And while there is a great deal of effort spent on delivering text and stories that resonate with audiences and help drive search results, I often wonder how much attention is paid to the imagery placed into our blog posts, articles and so on.

The Emotional Breakdown experiments with the 24 Hours in Pictures feed from the Guardian, analysing the images that are posted for emotional resonance.

More interestingly, you can also run this analysis across your own websites. Simply enter your web address and Face.com’s facial recognition API will give you a sense of the audience impact all those pearly whites will have on your readers.

And given that this “social web” phenomenon is all about people and not technology, you’d think this is a no-brainer for your web design team, right? But I wonder, will we see A/B testing on images in the near future? Will this help the web be more friendly, or just add another layer of weirdness on top?

I guess it all depends on your mood.

What Happens When Coal Seam Gas Comes to Your Town?

Politics, Public Debate, Science

Depending on who you listen to, coal seam gas (CSG) is the greatest economic driver open to Australia or one of the greatest threats to our way of living.

This video – from the SBS Insight program – brings a range of viewpoints into the one room. There are farmers like Ruth Armstrong and Graham Clapham from the Darling Downs, Drew Hutton from Lock the Gate Alliance, Carl McCamish from Origin Energy, Monash University researcher and lecturer Gavin Mudd, Chris Moran from University of Queensland, Andrew Brier from the Queensland Government and Ray Brown, Regional Mayor of the Darling Downs (and many more). But this debate is not just about the environment – it’s also about economics, business, food security and social cohesion.

It’s a hot topic – and while it is clear that all participants have an agenda and with currently around 2000-3000 CSG wells active in Queensland and another 25,000 planned – this is a topic that is bound to continue to challenge us all.

 

Optimise Your Website with NLYZR.com

Social Media, Web/Tech

“You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than your slowest friend”

When I first started building websites, the web was a very loosely joined collection of sites, boards, pages and applications. It was hard work finding what was “out there” – and we all spent a great deal of time finding, collecting and curating lists of sites and bookmarks. And then along came Google and everything changed.

Suddenly you could search and find what you wanted.

Google’s search results were powered by a complex mathematical logarithm that calculated the number of other websites linking to each other, analysed the text on the page and the images that were shown – along with dozens of other criteria – and then sorted this list of websites into an easily navigable list. And in our impatient, time poor world, those websites that ranked highly – on the first couple of pages – received the bulk of search related traffic.

But just as the web became easier to search, it also became easier to create. With cheap or free blogging and content management systems, you can have a website up and running in minutes. Literally.

But having a website doesn’t guarantee traffic. Remember, there are millions of sites out there. The challenge is finding the time to not only update your website, but to optimise it so that it can be easily found by your customers.

The thing to remember about search rankings is that it’s like the quote above – you don’t have to rank #1, you just have to outrank your competitors.

The team at Newcastle digital agency, Sticky, have recently launched a tool – NLYZR – that helps you do just that.

This web based tool has been under development for over two years. I remember being excited to see a very early – and very manual – version some time ago. Back then, Sticky founder, Craig Wilson, knew he was onto something special, but has invested a great deal of intellectual and practical knowledge into the system. From the beginning the vision was to automate as much as possible – so that business owners and web masters could easily and quickly see improvements.

These days, you simply put your website address into the NLYZR site together with preferred search keywords and the system comes back with a ranking and some recommendations. From there you can change, tweak and update your site to improve your search results.

The thing I like is that it provides practical suggestions – like reducing the length of the titles in your blog posts or adding descriptions to the images on your website. And that’s just the free version. Those who want to dig deeper and optimise an entire website can subscribe to the service from as little as $149 per year. It may be just what your business needs.

What Happens in Retail Stays on Dropbox – #gaspfail

Social Media

When you live in a city you get used to poor retail service. You get used to attitude.

But what happens when your retail experience becomes big news in social media – for all the wrong reasons? Retailer GASP Jeans is finding out.

Shopping over the weekend with friends, Keara O’Neil experienced the style of “customer service” that is all too common in many of our retail spaces. She then emailed the GASP Jeans customer service team to describe her experience to which she received a response which has since “gone viral”.

Here is the “complaint” email:

Complaint

And here is the response: 

Response

Now – this is clearly not good customer or brand management from GASP Jeans. But these emails have been quickly transformed not just into links or stories, but “social objects”. So even if websites are modified or Facebook pages closed off, screen captures such as these can be taken shared and promoted via many other types of social media – for example, this copy of the email was passed on via Twitter with a link to dropbox.

And the “conversation” on Twitter is spurning a completely different style of brand engagement.

But while #GASPfail continues on its merry way, the question really is – where is the follow-on response from GASP Jeans? One small incident has been amplified across the web and the PR and management team are nowhere to be seen.

Could this happen to your brand? What would you do? Do you have some crisis planning in place? Maybe you should.

Social Media Around the World

Social Media

After surveying more than 9000 consumers in 35 countries, Insites Consulting have released their Social Media Around the World 2011 report. Coming in at a whopping 167 pages, the data and information is bound to find its way into many a pitch between now and the end of the year.

The results overall, tend to reinforce what we already know – and what we are, ourselves, experiencing:

  • Big social networks are winning and new entrants will find it hard to gain traction with consumers
  • Offline brand experiences are the main conversation starters online
  • There is significant interest in co-creation of products and advertising
  • Social network usage is set to grow even more
  • People connect with people, not brands

Some of the more interesting items include:

  • Twitter use does not impact Facebook (ie they are not mutually exclusive)
  • Twitter users are early adopters and tend to engage in multiple social networks
  • Consumers tend to react to brand content rather than initiating conversations
  • 33% of European businesses restrict access to social networks – yet employees remain the strongest brand ambassadors of all
  • Smartphone owners have strong social media profiles and levels of adoption – but location based services have a way to go
Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

While there is an obvious European skew in the data, the data seems to also bear out for other markets. And interestingly, for all the hype around social media, it appears that corporations have a way to go before they catch the socially-savvy consumer.

Who Makes Snow?

Branding, Creativity, Videos

Good copywriting is hard work – and hard to come by.

But this ad from National Australia Bank is a winner in my book. Some great visual storytelling – often in juxtaposition to the narrative – combined with sharp editing and a nice balance between landscape, industry and faces bring a warmth to the often bland branding associated with financial services.

What do you think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Meh?

Via @acatinatree

We are the 99% – #occupywallstreet

Politics, Social Justice, Social Media

When protesters across Tunisia and Egypt took to the streets to demand more transparency in government, democracy and equal rights, the West stood and cheered. Dubbed the Arab Spring, these people powered movements saw the disenfranchised 99% of the population rise up and protest the concentration of ownership and privilege controlled by the 1%.

But how do we respond to the same situation in our own backyards? The 400 richest Americans at the top of the economic pyramid have been able to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom – and I’d wager there is a similar disparity in Australia.

In an open letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation – The Revolution Begins at Home, Arun Gupta explains:

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At Liberty Park in New York, hundreds if not thousands of people are gathering each day to discuss, debate and protest the state of democracy in the United States. The campaign #occupywallstreet is spreading to other cities and countries – from San Diego and Omaha to Toronto and even Brisbane.

We Are The 99% from socially_awkwrd on Vimeo.

And while there is a lot of conversation on Twitter and on social media, the mainstream media outlets are yet to deeply engage on this subject. And it makes me wonder – where is the tipping point … what level of social movement or activism is required before traditional media can no longer ignore the unfolding situation? And at which point does it become “contagious” – shifting gears from a protest to a movement?

Perhaps financial traders like Alessio Rastani, shown here in interview on the BBC will help galvanise such a movement.

Or maybe not. We may be part of the 99%, but many aspire to the 1% – and while a culture of aspiration (and entitlement) dominates our thinking, non-traditional media will have to work harder to reach that tipping point. If Duncan Watts is right, then we need about 15% of a closely linked social network to act before contagion begins. And that means we have some way to go.