Today, I have made some staffing changes and decided to create another website under the domain cleverwebtech.com. This new website will be up in a matter of months and will be more dynamic than my current site.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of Executive Recruiters about using social media in their industry. Despite how well the conversation went, there were two things I noticed:
1) Everyone wanted to know about Social Media
2) No one seemed to know how to use Social Media
In an effort to help with this matter, I have done some research to start answering some of those questions.
My first piece of research comes from Thomas Shaw, Craig Schuetrumpf and Jo Knox, specialists in Social Media and Executive Recruitment. They have put together a presentation on using Twitter for Recruiters, which I believe explains the process well:
Another great piece of information comes from Toni Bower of Techrepublic.com. In her May 25th post, she gives a list of six tips for using Twitter as a Recruitment Tool. As far as short lists are concerned, this is the best condensed information you’re going to find. Here’s her list:
- Create a branded company Twitter profile. Assign a key person — or automate tweets — to post jobs as they become available. This person should also be responsible for following professionals that could be potential candidates.
- Don’t be a Twitter wallflower. Engage in conversation with the people you are following — and your followers — whether you have job openings for them or not. Then, when you need to speak with someone about an opportunity, you’ve already established rapport.
- Create a protocol for your job tweets. Consider searchability by using hash marks (#) around key words. Include a trackable URL to your job posting so you can monitor the number of click-throughs a job posting receives.
- Help your search by using a third-party tool such as TweetBeep, which alerts you to tweets relevant to your search.
- Encourage your staff to retweet job openings by providing an incentive such as a referral bonus for candidates sourced through tweeting.
- Don’t be a one-track tweeter. Be varied and creative in your approach. To keep it real and not boring or spamlike, tweet on a variety of topics including industry-related items of interest, some personal tweets and, of course, your job postings.
As always, I’m Listening
Brian
Social Media, despite how new it is, is old news for some people. There are people who have been social media consultants since the birth of Friendster (believe it or not). People have studied social media like a fine art and have pushed the limits of what you are capable of doing online. They understand this medium of communication better then most in this world and they’re willing to share it to whoever will listen (after all, they put their information online).
But who listens to this information, or better, who has access to this information? You might say everyone, but what if you don’t know about these people, the information really isn’t accessible to you. It might as well not exist if you don’t know about it. Which is a problem I’m trying to solve. If you are interested in online companies, such as google or facebook, you may stumble upon these sources of information on social media, but what if you’re a doctor or a lawyer? They could use information on social media as much as anyone else, but they’ll never find it.
I’ve noticed that people who like twitter talk to other people who like twitter, creating something of a ’social media elite’. This is great for community building, but in order to get the most out of social media, these conversation need to be more wide-spread, with more people along more forms of media. And I believe you are the one to make it happen.
So today, I challenge everybody reading to get outside of the ‘twitter-sphere’. If you write a blog for a social media site, contact a law blog and see if you can write for them for a day. If you tweet about how social media, start tweeting about how florists can use twitter for their business. Everyone can use social media, but unless they have people assisting them, they won’t see the use in it.
Be the change,
Brian
If you thought that the internet was fast before, hop online and give the twitter search a whirl. If you take a look at the trending topics, you’ll notice some interesting news subjects, but nothing you’ll see in the news.
For at least a few minutes.
The internet has gone from fast to impossibly fast in less then a few months. With more people getting on twitter, every major news story can and will be reported via twitter before any major news story can break. This has been useful to report earthquakes, political scandals and whatever becomes extremely important.
But with speed comes another factor, critical volume and stories getting lost. We are able to see more and more online then ever before, but because there’s so much information, we are forced to discard information for the biggest, most important stories of the time.
I’ve heard some talk about how twitter may replace news media, but who else will catch the lesser known stories?
Twitter has it’s capabilities, but is completely in the present, with neither foresight or hindsight.
Brian
If we had to define the internet time line, most people would agree that web 1.0 was from roughly 1990 to 2000 and web 2.0 has gone from 2000 to today. If we are to assume that each web generation goes for about a decade, it means that new changes in the internet are on their way. But what changes? There are many theories on this, but one that has stood out among the others has been this idea of a ’semantic web’. The semantic web is essentially an internet system where not only people can communicate, but so can websites. What do I mean by websites ‘communicating’ with each other? I mean having two mutually exclusive sites that are able to transfer information without being set-up to do so (like having my facebook account being able to take data from my wordpress account without having to jump through some serious hoops). This currently isn’t easy to accomplish because the way the internet was set-up (If you have more questions on this, I would refer you to the semantic web wikipedia page).
We have seen a lot of progress connecting people to people (via social networks), but the dreams of the semantic web have not started to materialize themselves. That is until today, when wolframalpha.com was released. While this website isn’t the semantic web, it is the beginning of the transition (or, at the very least, the frame of thought). Wolframalpha.com works like a search engine in that you put in a query (say GDP of the United States) and produces a list of results. Where it’s different from a search engine is in the results it produces. While google gives you a list of websites you can go to in order to find your information, Wolfram Alpha gives you the data you need without transitioning to another website.
An explanation on how Wolfram Alpha works
This is taking the web to the next level, from searching to solving. While this system is by no means perfect (most of my queries got rejected by the system), it does lay down the framework the internet needs in order to evolve to the next level.
- Try out wolframalpha.com and see what you discover. What do you think needs to be improved?
Brian
Quick, give me two of the most popular actors in the United States?
Whatever you’re answer is, it’s probably not Vin Diesel or Ashton Kutcher, but you wouldn’t think that if you were online. A few weeks ago, Ashton happened to break 1,000,000 followers on twitter. Even more interesting, Vin Diesel has found himself as the second most popular man on facebook (thank God the first is Barack Obama).
So how exactly has this happened? Mashable.com writer Adam Ostrow seems to have a pretty good idea. In his May 12th article, he states that everything seemed to be on the up and up for Vin Diesel when he actually started interacting with the followers. This included everything from long, in-depth message updates to personal photos of himself. Almost the same thing can be said about Ashton and his twitter account.
The interesting thing about these accounts is the way they go about making their social media fame. It has nothing to do with how important the content it, only that it’s personal to the user. While Ashton and Vin Diesel have a leg up on most ‘normal people’ by being famous, they do have to abide by the same rules as you and me. This may seem simple, but other celebrities just don’t seem to get the message.
- What other factors do you think are influencing these celebrities status online?
As always, I’m listening,
Brian
There seems to be one factor that defines whether or not a social network will ‘work’, the total number of users. Of the millions of social networks available, many of them have not reached the ‘critical mass’ that will keep people interested and engaged with other people. Over the last few years, though, it seems like the most popular social networks have run into a larger problem, being too large.
Why is being too big a problem for social networks? The same reason it’s a problem to try to market your breakfast cereal to teenagers and the elderly at the same time, you try to sell your product to everyone and end up attracting no one.
A profile page on a social network is supposed to be a second identity, but like your real identity, you’re going to emphasize certain characteristics and omit others based on the other people in your network. If the network is made up of your closet friends, you’ll probably be more personal then you would be with your co-workers. This all makes sense, but where we start to run into problems is when your social network becomes ‘a network for everyone’. Facebook started out as a network for close friends, but as it started to open itself up, it started including family members, co-workers, teachers… everyone. Once this happened, some of the information became inappropriate, and even got some people fired from their jobs.
From the "Don't Do this" Files of Facebook. Man gets fired because of this pic.
You could restrict your network to people you want seeing your information or simply stop putting up all your information, but there’s an easier solution, go to a social network with only the people you want.
Friendster and Myspace have already begun to feel the sting of overexposure in the form of negative growth. Facebook, while still growing, has turned off many college students from facebook and has significantly less activity from this group. It’s only a matter of time before another college social network takes over and Facebook is sent to the graveyard.
Brian
Hey Readers,
I will be away from my blog until Tuesday, May 12th. I will be responding to Twitter messages in the meantime @cleverwebtech.
Brian
As a self-marketer, you’ve probably wanted to talk to someone who didn’t necessarily want to talk to you back. If you’ve been in sales, you’re probably been faced with this situation on a daily basis. For me, I’ve always been fascinated with how to get the person on the the other end of the phone to buy what you want, a little thing the dictionary likes to call power.
But before you can use power, you have to have a line of communication. But what’s the best line of communication? Traditionally, you could use the normal lines of communication (phone, personal visit, etc) to try to get to someone, but this has varying results (usually not great). The method I’ve really latched onto is finding an ‘in’ through some sort of social media communication. An ‘in’ as I define it is a line of communication that accelerates results. If you have a brother who knows the CEO of a fortune 500 company, that’s an ‘in’. Email can also be an ‘in’ if the CEO trusts it over phone messages. With the dawn of social media, anybody who’s online already has potential for an ‘in’.
I’ll give you a real world example:
Let’s say you’re trying to sell your services to a client and they’re hard to reach: you can’t find their email and the receptionist won’t give you a direct line to his/her office. But, you’ve decided that if you can talk to this person, you can sell them your services, easy. You just need to find your ‘in’. After doing some research, you look online and find that they have a LinkedIn account. After writing them a short message for a connection, you open a dialogue. This is your ‘in’.
Another example of an ‘in’ is through blogs. While somebody has a large Twitter or LinkedIn presence, there’s always the chance that they have a blog. By sending them a Twitter message, you may or may not get a response, but if you comment on one of their blogs, your chances of getting noticed is significantly increased, allowing you to influence however you choose.
Finding the small bit of communication with your potential client is as important as knowing the right thing to say. Do your research and make sure you’re using the best approach.
- Got someone you want to talk to? What’s your ‘in’?
Keeping Listening, My Friends,
Brian
How do you find interesting people on twitter? One trend that has tried to solve this problem is #followfriday, a hashtag used to promote interesting people to other networkers on twitter. But no matter how well intentioned, #followfriday has a problem; it simply doesn’t create good twitter connections because you’re promoting one person to everybody. Why is this a problem?
Here’s an illustration:
Imagine you’re about to go to a party with a large group of friends and you decide to bring an old college buddy along. When you get to the party, what’s going to be more effective: Telling everybody to say hi to your buddy when you walk in and leaving him to his own accord or personally introducing him to a couple of your friends you think he’ll hit it off with?
If you’ve ever been in the position of the old college buddy, you know you’d want a personal introduction. If you’re on twitter, why would you want things to be any different? Being introduced by a mutual friend will always lead to significantly better conversation then if you’re introduced to a group. More importantly, if you introduce someone in your network to a friend, what do you the chances are that they’ll introduce you to one of their friends? If you understand networking, you understand that’s a type of return you want.
Thus, #gettoknow was created.
#gettoknow essentially works the same way that #followfriday does, but instead of recommending many people to your entire network, introduce two people you think can benefit from each other and explain why they would benefit from each others feeds.
Today, I encourage you to go onto your twitter account, find people you’ve enjoyed reading and introducing them to one another. Do it for as many followers as you can. And see the results spread.
Brian
