NealSchaffer: blogs

The 7 Most Common Social Recruiting Mistakes

Neal Schaffer — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:47:40 GMT

Social recruiting will work if you are very clear about what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it.

Whilst not yet being embraced by every recruiting team, social recruiting is increasingly accepted as a mainstream part of the modern recruiting strategy. The trouble is, many recruiters are embarking on social recruiting initiatives for the very first time – and so inevitably are learning the hard way some of the mistakes that can trip you up on the road to social recruiting success.

In the interests of making your journey less painful, I therefore thought I’d share with you the 7 most common social recruiting mistakes I see recruiters making today:

Failing to plan
Failing to secure adequate resources
Failing to make a consistent time commitment
Failing to leverage your team
Failing to add value
Failing to engage
Reverting to treating social media as an advertising channel

Let’s look at each in turn – and note how “failing to plan” commands more space than all the others. If you get this wrong at the outset, you’re doomed to social recruiting mediocrity!

Failing to plan

Once you start dabbling on social networks, you’ll very quickly get swept along by the waves of interaction and the endless possibilities to try new things. Yet social recruiting will only work for you if you are very clear about what you want to achieve and how you are going to go about achieving this. Before you start establishing your social presence, try to answer these questions:

What is our objective? You may think this is obvious – to make hires! But there are variants on the theme that completely transform the way you’ll then choose to roll out your social recruiting strategy. Maybe you’re an employer that simply wants to build its employer brand in a particular sector and geography? Maybe you want to drive relevant candidates to your corporate careers pages? Maybe you want to make candidates in your sector more receptive to receiving recruiting calls from you and your team? Maybe you’re looking to build awareness of your recruiting blog? Maybe you want to drive up the proportion of referral hires you make? Your answers here will determine which social recruiting activities it does and does not make sense for you to pursue.

Which social media can we use to reach our target audience? This may surprise you, but even with hundreds of millions of users the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn have huge blackspots of coverage – in terms of geographies and sectors where people are simply not using them enough to make them a credible recruiting tool. Too often the decision about which platforms to embrace is taken based on what the recruiter likes using (or worse still, is a historical accident that simply reflects which ones they tried out first). Do some research on the places your target audience can be reached before you get sucked into investing time in platforms that are likely to deliver a poor return.

What can we learn from those who are already successful in our market niche? Given that you’re unlikely to be first to market in your geography and sector, take some time to research the activities of those recruiters already active on the platforms you’ve identified you want to use. What are they doing that is generating strong results? What are people doing that seems to be falling flat? Then be sure to learn from these mistakes and insights and pass on this social recruiting advice to your team!

Failing to secure adequate resources

If I were to ask you why you aren’t posting your jobs on every free job board in your sector, I can guarantee that the answer I’d hear back is that it may be free to post your jobs… but using these free boards still comes at a price. The time it takes to put jobs on the sites, to deal with the resulting candidate interest – that’s a not insignificant cost in terms of the resourcing needed to leverage them.

The exact same argument holds true for social recruiting. It may well be true that lots of activities can be undertaken via social networking sites without the need to pay any upfront fees for subscriptions. But that doesn’t mean they are free to use. The time investment needed to build up and maintain a credible presence on social sites is significant – and if you can’t commit that resource then frankly you’re better off having no presence at all. If you’re embarking on a social recruiting strategy hoping people will find time in their days to cram it in, you’re probably setting yourself up to fail.

Failing to make a consistent time commitment

A lot of success in social recruiting comes down to being responsive. Being able to act upon opportunities, queries and interest as they arise. This can only be realised if the team members involved in your social recruiting strategy are able to carve out time each and every day to be able to react and respond to these opportunities and enquiries quickly. If you can’t make this commitment as a team, there’s a real danger that your social recruiting activities backfire on you and that the company reputation is actually tarnished rather than enhanced by your move into social recruiting.

Failing to leverage your team

Whether you’re looking to grow the readership of your recruiting blog, or increase the reach of your referral hiring scheme, your results can quickly be multiplied if employees are brought on board as willing participants. Find ways to alert your staff to the key messages you are putting out on social media and having them share these with their networks too. The impact you see will grow exponentially the more you can involve the wider staff base in these activities.

Failing to add value

Too many social recruiting initiatives are undermined by recruiters thinking about what they want to achieve with their presence on social media, rather than by putting your audience first. What insights, resources, links, downloads, interviews, tools and tips will help the people you want to engage with do their jobs more effectively? What burning questions can you answer for them that will help them to further their careers, irrespective of whether that ends up being by joining your company? You want your individual recruiter profiles and your corporate pages to be seen in the industry as things that professionals consider it essential they follow in order to accelerate their careers (irrespective of how appealing your own jobs may be in the industry in which you operate). If you can achieve that status, whatever else you want to achieve with your social recruiting strategy then becomes a whole lot easier.

Failing to engage

It’s the small things that make a tremendous difference on social media. A retweet may or may not get you noticed. A retweet where you’ve complimented the content or added your own thought to the RT will almost always produce a reaction. Similarly, interacting with people on Google+ or LinkedIn when they comment on your posts has a huge impact building your relationships. If failing to plan is the single biggest shortcoming I see amongst recruiters, failing to engage (and instead solely broadcasting) must come a close second. I would go so far as to say that you should try to act on every opportunity to engage that presents itself to you. Engage with someone just once or twice and they’re likely to be avid followers (and sharers) of your content for many months to come.

Reverting to treating social media as an advertising channel

This one seems so obvious to anyone who already “gets” social media and social recruiting. But actually huge swathes of recruiters still act this way, so I think it very much needs stating here. So often I see recruiters embark on social initiatives with good intentions and the right approach. Then they get disheartened by the lack of quick results to show for their work. Before long, they’ve reverted to filling their social streams with a monologue of job adverts. Worse still, they’re not even posted in a way that encourages any social interaction whatsoever. They’re a jobs-by-email alert transported onto your social media channels. Well guess what, only desperate candidates welcome yet another source of job alerts – and if you’re only interested in reaching desperate candidates with your social recruiting endeavours then I can think of far lower cost routes for you to achieve those aims!

So there you have it. A list of the 7 most common social recruiting mistakes I’ve been seeing in the market of late. Which of these have your team been guilty of? What other mistakes would you add to the list? Please do add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Tony Restell (8 Posts)

This monthly Social Recruiting column is contributed by Tony Restell. Tony is the Founder of Social-Hire.com and a respected commentator in the online recruitment and social media sectors. A published author and Cambridge graduate, Tony spent his early career in strategy consulting before going on to build and sell an online recruitment business to Jobsite. He is focused on helping candidates and recruiters use social media to find their next career or their next hire.

Using Twitter As A Social Recruiting Tool (windmillnetworking.com)
Top Twitter Tools To Aid Your Social Recruiting Efforts (windmillnetworking.com)
Social Media and #Recruiting: A Good Match? (socialmediatoday.com)

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

TOPIC: Social Recruiting

The 7 Most Common Social Recruiting Mistakes by Tony Restell - Windmill Networking - Windmill Networking - Social Media Marketing & Social Business Strategy . This copyrighted content was originally published on Windmill Networking and may not be republished on any other website or in any other format without explicit permission from the publisher.

Top Twitter Tools To Aid Your Social Recruiting Efforts

Neal Schaffer — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:39:50 GMT

To ensure you stay productive you must have the right tools to manage your follower activity, engagement and content sharing in an efficient manner.

You’ll know from my last post here that I’m a great fan of using twitter for social recruiting. However, there’s also the danger of twitter becoming a monumental time drain!

The key to ensuring you stay productive is having the right tools to manage your follower activity, engagement and content sharing in a time efficient manner. This article will share some insights for achieving just that outcome.

But First A Social Recruiting Warning!

This post should have been a breeze for me to write. Had I scheduled to publish it a couple of months back, it would have been! But within the last weeks and months, several of the tools I’ve come to use most prolifically have either been mothballed or retired.

Herein lies a social recruiting warning you should really stop and take on board: You don’t control the ownership of your social media accounts; and you don’t control whether the tools you use to stay on top of social media will continue to be available to you.

I could cite examples of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all having changed their service offerings or their API in ways that have really messed up social recruiting strategies that companies had invested heavily in developing. I could also cite prominent examples of people having lost access to their accounts, either through being hacked or through the social networks having restricted access to their accounts.

So whenever you decide on a course of action in terms of social recruiting, try to avoid over-reliance on any one platform or on any one tool, as you never know when access to them may just be taken away from you! Also try to plan your activities such that they result in actions being taken that build up an asset you control (eg. your mailing list, CV / Resume database), rather than one you don’t.

Top Twitter Tools To Aid Your Social Recruiting Efforts

So with that warning out of the way, what tools can you turn to to maximise your productivity and effectiveness on Twitter?

Tools To Manage Your Follower Activity

I’m broadly a fan of quality over quantity on Twitter – you need to be connecting with the right people, both in terms of their profile for your business AND in terms of them actually being active users of the platform. But it’s also true that your recruiting success on twitter will be amplified significantly if your following is substantial rather than meagre.

With that in mind, it’s important that you have tools that will help you to quickly follow potentially relevant candidates and influencers; and unfollow people who subsequently abandon their twitter accounts or cease to be useful connections.

Following (with SocialBro) A tool I’ve found helpful for following people is SocialBro (an App for the Google Chrome browser). It’s capable of a great many tricks, but for following purposes it allows you to analyze competitors’ accounts, Twitter lists and Twitter searches and to quickly pick out accounts you want to follow. With the tick of a box you can easily select new followers / competitors’ followers / influential people – allowing you to follow lots of prospective candidates in a very short time window. The above link takes you to the Free Google Chrome App. There are paid service plans too, accessible on other browsers and with enhanced services on offer. But for the basic functionality described above, the free version should meet your needs just fine.

Unfollowing (with ManageFlitter) Up until a week ago, I would have been singing the praises of TheTwitCleaner. This free tool reviewed everyone you were following and created lists of all the people it considered could be inappropriate accounts for you to follow. You could see people who hadn’t been active in over a month, people who were only (auto) tweeting out blog content, people sending marketing junk… and a ton of other useful red flags. With a simple drag of the mouse you could mass select people to unfollow – and then it would unfollow them for you a few at a time over the following hours. Unfortunately the recent Twitter API changes have caused the founder to abandon the project rather than completely re-write the code to make it work again. This after several years of building up the service. I leave the recommendation and link here, in case a white knight should appear and rescue the service in the coming weeks…

Assuming TheTwitCleaner service isn’t working, the tool I’ve turned to instead is ManageFlitter. Like SocialBro, this service has lots of features to help you follow accounts, manage relationships, etc. but the free account plan allows you to mass unfollow up to 100 people each day (or several times that if you invite colleagues to use it / tweet out a promotional message for them). There are fewer categories of red flag accounts for you to review, hence I don’t find it quite as informative as TheTwitCleaner reports. But as a service to allow you to quickly unfollow accounts that appear fake, inactive or aren’t following you back it’s a good tool to have in your armoury.

Tools To Manage Your Engagement Activity

The Twitter interface itself I find a dreadful resource for engaging with your followers. You really want one screen where you can see all the important interactions at once – direct messages you’ve been sent, @mentions of your twitter handle, shares of weblinks from your company website or of blog posts you’ve written. You want to see all these things in real-time so that you have the opportunity to engage with people at the point at which they’re most likely to respond. There are so many platforms you could use to do this effectively, personally I’ve always favoured Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

Tweetdeck was acquired by Twitter a while back – and in the last weeks has announced that some of its platforms – including the desktop application – are no longer going to be supported and will cease to function. I’ve migrated to the Google Chrome version (which is not being retired) and have found this to be a good tool – giving you additional real-time visibility of actions like people choosing to follow you.

Hootsuite offers similar functionality and is also free for basic users. It offers the additional advantages of being able to manage other social media accounts too (so post to eg. LinkedIn or your Google+ Page from within the same application), being able to schedule tweets weeks in advance, offering team functionality for managing accounts (if you upgrade) and integration with other services you might need to use like IFTTT.

If you had to choose one, I’d therefore opt for Hootsuite – but personally I like not to be overly reliant on any one tool or platform so use both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite interchangeably. Now to be effective on twitter, you want to form and be part of niche communities – and to engage and form relationships with new people.

Commun.it is a fantastic platform for helping you to assess who in your Twitter network has been most engaged with you and who you should invest your time in engaging. It also helps you monitor mentions of brands or websites – and suggests people you may wish to start following based on your interests. In terms of individual candidates you may want to engage, this isn’t so useful; but in terms of cultivating relationships that help your brand reach to be significantly extended over time, it’s an invaluable resource.

Last but not least, if you get yourself onto SocialBro, there’s one very powerful tool for engaging with individual candidates you are looking to target. The platform has a tool that allows you to see which of your followers – or which of a target list of people – are active on the platform right now. For recruiters this is immensely powerful!

Imagine you’ve created a list of eg. Java Developers in Chicago and then a new requirement comes through that means you need to target these individuals. With the SocialBro application, you can see real-time which of the candidates you placed on the list have tweeted within the last minutes, giving you the maximum chance of reaching them with a message at the point at which they’ll be online and able to engage immediately in a dialogue. A truly wonderful social recruiting tool!

Tools To Share Content Effectively

In the interests of brevity, I’ll assume that you have lots of content that will be engaging and valuable for your target candidate audience to read. If that’s not the case, I point you to this Bullhorn Blog I wrote on the subject – or invite you to reach out to me on @tonyrestell for further ideas.

Assuming you have sources of good content that you’d like to share, the two tools I recommend for getting your message out there are Hootsuite and Buffer. One of Hootsuite’s many functions is to allow you to bulk import a spreadsheet of tweets you’d like to schedule to send out in the future.

Did you know a lot of candidate activity is actually prompted by things they’ve read in the evening or over a weekend? Or perhaps you’ve been tasked with spreading your reach to candidates on a totally different timezone. Well with the Hootsuite scheduling function it’s a breeze having your message reach people even at times you are not working or when you are otherwise engaged.

A variant of this is the Buffer service. You can’t bulk import into the service, but as you browse the web you can click a button in your browser and a tweet will be created to share that page (and your message) with your followers at some point in the future. You determine how many tweets you want to send out each day – and at what times. Buffer saves up the tweets you have “buffered” and then sends them on your behalf at the allocated time.

Concluding Remarks

So there you have it. A whirlwind tour of some of the most important twitter tools a social recruiter needs to have at their disposal. There are others of course – and new ones breaking onto the scene all the time. But if you master the use of the above tools you will find your effectiveness on Twitter rockets – and your stress levels and time lost to mundane tasks will be greatly reduced. I wish you every success and increased enjoyment in your use of twitter as a social recruiting tool!

Tony Restell (7 Posts)

Using Twitter As A Social Recruiting Tool (windmillnetworking.com)
Measuring Social Media for Recruitment (talentchatter.com)
3-Step Guide To Recruiting Social Influencers [Infographic] (socialtimes.com)

Image courtesy of Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

TOPIC: Twitter Tools

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Top Twitter Tools To Aid Your Social Recruiting Efforts by Tony Restell - Windmill Networking - Windmill Networking - Social Media Marketing & Social Business Strategy

10 Ways to Engage Your Audience with Social Media

Neal Schaffer — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:51:07 GMT

At the beginning of the year, I outlined 15 social media concepts to help make you a more marketable social media professional in 2013. This month we will focus on Concept 2, the logic behind utilizing social media for business marketing. Review of Concept 1 can be found here.

Concept 2: Do you know the logic behind utilizing social? Here’s a hint: Engagement. This is a broad answer, but if you have been following this blog, you should know that the common theme is “engagement” with external and internal stakeholders.

The traditional MBA offers students courses in all aspect of business from Finance, Human Resources, Leadership, and Marketing. The social MBA is no different. The courses offered are quite similar with the addition of three social media marketing courses. This is a least the case at my University. Within this curriculum, students are exposed to the various processes, theories, and principles of social business and marketing. To be quite honest, many of these topics mirror traditional marketing and business, the execution is just a little different. Consider the basic function of Marketing: to identify consumer needs and satisfy those needs. Social media provides us with a real time platform to do just that, via engagement.

Engagement. It is a word we hear multiple times a day within the social media world. It is descriptive of the relationship we are trying to build and nurture with (internal and external) stakeholders, one where we are not only sending marketing messages, but we are receiving messages back from the consumers/stakeholders as well. Traditional marketing platforms distributed marketing messages to audiences, where social media is a tool for two-way social engagement. No longer is the target audience passive, they are communicating with business at a B2B and B2C level. Employing methods of mass media was once acceptable (and the norm), but in today’s environment, it can be disastrous.

Businesses properly prepared for a social media endeavor are those who understand the goal is not getting ‘lots of fans and followers’. Fans and followers are important to a social media strategy, but it’s more important plan for social to be utilized as a long term branding tool. If simply increasing fans and followers is your objective, most likely you will not be successful with social.

I believe social media can be used as an inbound content marketing tool. A Facebook page, Google+ page, or Twitter profile are great places to share relevant and valuable content while connecting to various audiences (one of course should be your target audience). This sharing of content ultimately leads to trust, which leads to conversions in the future. This relationship building process both begins and flourishes with engagement.

My top ten ways to engage (in no particular order):

Find content that will resonate with your followers/fans. This is a basic skill but worth repeating. The more the viewer can identify with what you post, the more likely they will be to share or reply (thus engagement).
Be sure content is easy to consume and respond to via mobile devices. Mobile is quickly becoming a mainstream way for consumers to view and engage. However, many businesses are not ensuring content is adjusted for mobile.
Post photos and videos. Photos are shown to increase engagement tremendously. Consider posting behind the scenes photos of your business, recent functions, or even share photos of your customers using your product (with their permission of course). However, not all photos (or content for that matter) should be of your products, services, or offers. You may also want to ask your audience to share photos.
Offer contests or sweepstakes. I like the idea of contests, but be careful not to over use this tactic. Nothing says spam (in my opinion) like posting and re-posting about a contest on my Facebook or Twitter Feed. This will be a quick way for folks to un-follow you, remove you from their feeds, or opt out of email.
Post some clever questions. These types of posts will inevitably spark a discussion that could provide valuable insight on your target audience. You could also incorporate a poll on Facebook or your blog.
Show that you are listening by responding to each and every comment on your Social Profile (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
Post infographics that your target audience will appreciate. Again, this goes back to providing content that is relevant and resonates with your target. If it meets these criteria, it will likely be shared or commented on.
Be sure you have created multiple ways to share easily. This could be as simple as making sure your tweet is not too long so that when re-tweeted there is enough room for the link and a message, or by adding various sharing buttons to blog pages. We want to make sharing as easy as possible for the reader, follower, fan etc.
Include a little humor. Incorporate some fun into your Facebook posts, Tweets, Google+ etc. Pinterest can be a great source for fun quotes and photos to share.
Pay attention to the calendar. Content related to holidays and seasons will be very timely and most folks love holidays and everything that goes along with it. Consider posts in the coming weeks about Spring Break, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, topics related to vacation destinations, how to manage work and family when the kids are off from school.

This list is by no means exhaustive. It is merely a short list in hopes of inspiring you to engage with your internal and external consumers. While doing so, do not forget to include a call to action! A call-to-action invites your audience to immediately engage. It can be something simple like suggesting the viewer/reader to share their opinion or it can provide them with the power to change something about the brand. Encouraging your audience to share their thoughts and opinions makes them more invested in your brand.

What your company or brand is doing to encourage engagement on social platforms?

Jessica Rogers (14 Posts)

This monthly Social Media MBA column is contributed by Jessica Rogers. Jessica is a Dallas based Adjunct Marketing Instructor at Texas A&M University- Commerce and Southern New Hampshire University. She is currently working on her PhD in Business with an emphasis on Marketing; her dissertation research is focused on Social Media. Jessica teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses in Marketing, including Social Media, and has 16 years of field experience in business and marketing before starting her teaching career in 2009. Jessica holds a BS in Business Administration and an MS in Marketing.

Tip of the Week: engage your audience (bargainista.blogspot.com)
8 Things Every Social Media Marketer Should Know (socialsamosa.com)
Social Madness is back, and we want you (bizjournals.com)

TOPIC: Social Media

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10 Ways to Engage Your Audience on Social Media Today by Jessica Rogers - Windmill Networking - Windmill Networking - Social Media Marketing & Social Business Strategy

Using Twitter As A Social Recruiting Tool

Neal Schaffer — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:06:14 GMT

Are you using Twitter for your social recruiting?

Of all the platforms you might use for Social Recruiting, Twitter ranks as my favourite. If you’re just starting out in social recruiting, Twitter is also the platform I’d recommend checking out first. Why’s that?

1) It’s transparent
2) It fosters real-time discussion
3) It allows you to be responsive to candidates, without being a huge time drain
4) It’s fun

So why are these things important?

Twitter is Transparent

One of the biggest frustrations of social recruiting can be the platforms themselves getting in the way of what you’re trying to achieve. With Twitter’s rivals, the platforms are constantly evolving – or have hidden flaws and tricks that you have to know about to be a success. The implication is that you have to read a great deal – and be on top of the latest developments – to stand a chance of generating compelling candidate results. You also have to be ever-ready to cope with functions being discontinued or rules being changed in a way that negatively impacts on your strategy. With Twitter, things are quite different. The sheer simplicity of the platform means you can be up and running in no time – and can quickly start watching and learning from the behaviour of the more established and successful recruiters.

Of course there are some gems of advice on how to be more effective on Twitter, but by and large if you want to emulate the success of someone you can freely see who they are following, how they’re interacting, what language is working for them, etc.

Twitter Fosters Real-Time Discussion

Twitter has one awesome advantage over every other platform I can think of (Google+ comes a close second, but the other networks are nowhere to be seen in this respect). Twitter is something that people either have on throughout the working day on their PC – or it’s something they’ll at least check in on regularly. As such, real-time conversations flourish. For recruiting – where striking when the iron is hot is so very important – this is an element of the platform that is really compelling. It also means the time required to forge a good relationship with a new contact can be just hours or days, rather than weeks or months on more static networks.

Twitter Allows You To Be Responsive To Candidates

If you consider the single-biggest complaint candidates have had since the arrival of the internet and corporate careers sites, it’s that their job applications disappear into a black hole and leave them with no means of following up with recruiters. Indeed there’s been little means of interacting with recruiters or staff of a company at any stage in a candidate’s job search process. Until the arrival of social media that is.

The challenge for recruiters is balancing the need to be responsive to candidates with the constraints of the working week. No company wants to face a social media backlash from candidates disgruntled at their lack of responsiveness. But equally recruiters can’t get sucked into lengthy correspondence with each and every candidate who wants to engage. Twitter is the perfect compromise. With its 140 character limit, the medium is ideal for showing a caring side yet capping the time input required to do so.

Twitter Is Fun

There’s a great saying in sales that “enthusiasm sells”. This is so true of social media too! If someone is excited, enthusiastic, open, welcoming, engaging – these sentiments are transferred in your social media interactions too. The ‘chatty’ nature of Twitter – and the fact you can engage without a huge commitment of time – I have found means recruiters have more fun on Twitter than anywhere else. Your personality comes across more favourably – and that rubs off on the success you’ll have in engaging candidates.

Of course if you’re a committed Twitter user already, you’ll have experienced these upsides yourself. But maybe you’d not singled out the reasons why it’s such a powerful social recruiting tool. If you’re not yet a committed Twitter user, the above should have persuaded you that you’re missing out and that this is a network to prioritise (provided you can see your target candidate audience hang out here).

So given the potential to use Twitter as a social recruiting tool, what are some things that you should be focusing on doing? What can I advise you should do to emulate the success of the most established Twitter recruiters? I conclude the article with 7 tips you can implement right away to propel yourself to social recruiting success on Twitter:

7 Tips For Recruiters On Twitter

1) Cut right back on promoting your company or your jobs and focus on sharing valuable content / helping others. A highly engaged audience who are occasionally exposed to your promotional messages will yield far greater returns than a disinterested audience being exposed to them incessantly

2) Focus on following relevant accounts who are actually active on the platform (note: lots of profiles are zombie accounts, so you can lose tons of time here if you get this wrong)

3) Strike the right balance between scheduling tweets and being available online to respond to resulting enquiries

4) Use twitter tools to manage who you follow and to be alerted to those you should prioritise engaging with

5) Streamline your process for finding great content and resources to share, so that you can do so with the minimum of demand on your time

6) Comment on others’ tweets and ask open questions – stimulate conversations being sparked with your followers and potential followers

7) Have a strategy and a plan for twitter – and then stick to it. Like many social media platforms, Twitter can become a huge time drain if you allow it to be. Having a plan – and being disciplined in sticking to it – is the key to avoiding this.

Tony Restell (6 Posts)

Using LinkedIn as a Social Recruiting Tool (windmillnetworking.com)
LinkedIn Groups: Social Recruiting Success Principles (windmillnetworking.com)
Best Practices in Social Recruiting with Facebook Revealed (prweb.com)
Measuring Social Media for Recruitment (talentchatter.com)
Meet the rock-star brands of social recruiting (smartblogs.com)

TOPIC: Social Recruiting

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Using Twitter As A Social Recruiting Tool by Tony Restell - Windmill Networking - Windmill Networking - Social Media Marketing & Social Business Strategy

How You Can Find Security in an Insecure Social World

Neal Schaffer — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 12:29:04 GMT

Social Media and Online Security: Are your social media profiles and pages secure?

Last month I examined whether social media has dispensed with privacy. Since influencers in the social spaces suggest that success in new media increasingly will be enhanced by your willingness to extend your personality into the Great Wide Open, privacy probably has been disrupted – as the social thought leaders are wont to say – forever.

If there is a flip side to privacy, it’s security. Even the casual participant in social streams has probably experienced Twitter accounts that have been hacked, which often then send Direct Message (DM) spam with colorful messages or alarming warnings coupled with links that invariably lead to adult content or sites that install malware code on your computer ever-so-quietly in the background. Early on I tried to help by notifying hacked Twitter account owners to change their passwords. Some thanked me, some never replied. Today I just delete the DMs from my streams or delete the friend altogether if the account owner can’t take control. And attacks don’t have to come from DM spam. Legitimate blogs and websites get hacked, malware code is inserted and unsuspecting visitors are compromised.

Such cybercrime is more than an annoyance. It can be costly to your business, your clients or your entire organization, from a few thousand to millions of dollars in lost time, data and equipment. Time, money and reputation are at stake. Infonetics Research studies show that organizations lose from 0.5 percent to 2.5 percent of revenue due to security-related downtime. And you’re on the financial hook as well, especially if you fall prey to the insidious and very common “ransomeware” attack.

The exponential growth of social channels has created a lucrative business for network security solutions providers. But it’s more than about protecting individual devices such as computers, tablets and smartphones. Your social brand is now under constant attack. On the corporate side, businesses spend huge sums on hardware appliances and software designed to protect networks from DDoS and DoS attacks launched by tens of thousands of infected systems converted into “zombie bots.” They are ordered to attack businesses and organizations for any number of reasons, including political, criminal, financial, anti-competitive and state-sponsored assaults. The source can also be an unhappy current or former employee serving up a harsh dollop of digital revenge.

While network administrators protect businesses and ISPs from massive attacks via sophisticated technology fortifications, as a social media marketer it’s largely up to you to protect your social brand or the social accounts you manage for your company or your clients. The simple question to ask is can you afford to lose all the work and effort you’ve put into building a prosperous social business channel on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube or Pinterest because of a lax security?

For example, someone hacks into your well-established Facebook account, compromises your password and then goes after everyone in your list of friends. The fix is simple, right? Just pick up the phone, call Facebook and get things straightened out. After all, there’s surely plenty of Likable people to help amongst the thousands of Facebook employees at the Menlo Park, Calif. campus. Respected author, blogger and Internet influencer/veteran Shel Israel probably doesn’t think so. If you want to know what will probably happen if your Facebook account is hacked, you should immediately click this link and sober up to the thin social ice on which we all tread. Shel’s tale of woe should be a wake-up call for any company or organization: if your account turns into a zomboid on steroids, it’s more than The End of Business As Usual. It’s the end. In an earlier post this year, blog colleague and security expert Christopher Budd cited Facebook as “a high value target” for cyber hijackers, and offered advice on how to shore up your account defenses.

Few of us have the connections to get an audience with a Facebook security specialist. Even when Shel Israel did have a meeting of the minds, it’s not clear that Facebook did anything more than listen and shrug its shoulders. The fact of the matter is that unless Facebook or any social network is financially impacted (read: the board of directors or shareholders punch some buttons), the security and preservation of your social media accounts are totally up to you. As Shel noted in his Forbes post: “The keepers of global neighborhoods such as Facebook just aren’t eager to jump up and protect us. They don’t seem eager to use online forensic tools to track down the bad guys and throw them in the slammer.”

There’s a definite trend here, and it’s probably going to get worse. As you expand your social presence for business applications, cyberthugs will exploit the very qualities that are keys to social business success: your desire for openness, transparency and accessibility. Hackers ripped off 6 million LinkedIn passwords just because they could. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was commandeered because Facebook, the biggest kid on the block, didn’t employ security protocols that had been around long before the Zuck left Harvard.

So when it comes to security, you probably will not be able to turn to your social channel to help unravel an account mess. In other words, you are pretty much on your own. Christopher Budd outlined a variety of steps you can take to recover from a hijacked social media account. After personally experiencing a series of attacks from compromised blog sites and social channels, one of which resulted in a total system meltdown requiring a re-install, I created my own short list of protective steps to fight this growing trend:

1) It’s not enough to have an anti-virus program. You have to have a malware protection program as well. And, by the way, Macs are no longer immune. When Macs held a low percentage of market share, cybercriminals needing to infect tens of thousands of computers looked to Windows PCs. Now there are Macs everywhere, and the hackers know it. I have used ESET’s anti-virus program for years. Is it perfect? No. It has missed several malware attacks that occurred when I visited a hacked website that surreptitiously infected my computer. Looking for a free anti-virus alternative, try AVG Free. I also use the free Malwarebytes program, which focuses exclusively on malware rather than viruses. I recently opted to purchase the Pro version of Malwarebytes, which enables the software to operate in real-time like an anti-virus program. Not sure which program to use, try free online file checking utilities such as VirusTotal or VirSCAN, which will test a suspicious file against dozens of the most popular anti-virus and anti-malware programs.

2) The latest trend in account protection is two-factor authentication. If you have a Google account, you’ve probably been offered to convert your login security to its 2-step verification process. Though I agree using two-part authentication can be annoying at times, for the time being it is considered the best approach for protecting your social accounts from intruders. If a social platform or tool offers it, add the extra layer of protection.

3) Link-shortening systems revolutionized social engagement by reducing content curation text clutter in posts and status updates. The problem is any shortened link is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you are going to get. Why take chances? If you’re just not sure about a shortened link in a Tweet or an email, check it out with any number of handy link-revealing apps such as Unshorten.it (which features a site trustworthiness rating), Unshorten or UrlReveal. You’ll also find bookmarklets and URL revealer extensions for Firefox and Chrome.

4) Still not sure about a link or file sent to you in an email, or a URL in a DM. Want to open it without risk? Instead of recycling an old PC or notebook, set up your own testbed computer. Restore it to the factory default installation, load up on anti-virus and anti-malware software, and test away. If the file or link leads to unwanted results, just do another factory restore. Alternatively, you could use a program such as Acronis True Image to create a backup “mirror” copy of a testbed computer already loaded with apps, and restore from the mirror image when needed. For a wonkier approach, you can create a temporary virtual machine for testing, but I still prefer to assign the risk to a stand-alone, non-critical device that can implode with no worries.

5) Backup your crown jewels. By now you should have a backup strategy for your computing devices. Backup to a local server or USB hard drive is good, but double up with a backup to the cloud, via any number of services such as Carbonite, Dropbox, Google Drive, iDrive, Mozy and others. You’re not done yet. What about your blog, your website or sites you manage for a company or clients? There are plenty of free and paid backup plugins and options for WordPress and other platforms. I’ve used BackupBuddy from iThemes, restoring entire sites (including all data) with ease.

Do you feel more or less secure today than a few years ago? With increasing reports of hijacked Twitter, Facebook and other social accounts, do you think it’s time to beef up on your social business security?

Joel Don (10 Posts)

This monthly Social Business Trends column is contributed by Joel Don. Joel is principal of Comm Strategies, a consultancy that leverages public relations strategies, reputation enhancement and social media tools to maximize business success. Joel has worked for several PR and marketing agencies, and previously served as a public information officer at UCLA and UC Irvine. He also directed business and financial communications at a Fortune 500 computer manufacturer. Formally trained as a journalist, he has written for daily newspapers and national magazines throughout the country. In addition, Joel developed a digital solution for measuring the readership of company news prior to the advent of today’s link-tracking systems.

Brave New World: Understanding Security Risks Around Mobile Devices

Neal Schaffer — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 11:24:13 GMT

Social Media and Online Security: What are your mobile device security risks?

For this month’s Social Media and Online security column, we’re going to get a bit more techy and talk about hardware. Specifically, this month, I want to focus on the topic of security and devices. Or put another way: I want to cover some of the risks you face using something other than an old-fashioned PC or Mac.

While this topic isn’t social media per se, security issues with the tools you use to access social media have a direct impact on the security of your social media channels and sites. And while we all have a pretty good idea of the risks involved with desktop or laptop computers, we’re still learning about the brave new world of smartphones, tablets, and other devices. As I’ve said before, your ability to secure things is directly related to your understanding of them. By that measure, right now smartphone and tablets are inherently riskier than PCs and Macs because they’re not as well known and so harder for everyone to secure. Indeed, as I’ll talk about later, we’re now witnessing an explosion of security issues in the world of mobile devices now, as attackers capitalize on the advantages these new platforms confer on them.

And mobile device security is important for social media because the tie between social media and devices is such a strong one. I would argue that the answer to the question “What are you doing” really only becomes interesting when what you’re not always sitting as your desk as you’re answering the question. Twitter, Facebook and other social channels really took off only after people started using their smartphones with these applications.

One particular challenge with smartphones and tablets is since we use them to interact with apps and websites that are already familiar from our computer usage, it’s easy to assume that the security risks we face are the same and thus we know what we’re doing. And while there are definitely areas of overlap between devices and computers from a security point of view, it’s wrong to see them as identical. Devices introduce some new areas of risk which you have to account for that you would never think of when dealing with desktop computers in particular.

There are four major areas where you need to think about new or different security risks in regards to mobile devices.

Human Error
Device Portability and Loss
Co-mingled Data and Accounts
Viruses and Malware

Let’s go through and talk about how each of these, how they are different from what you may be familiar with on PCs and Macs, and things you can and should do to help protect yourself.

Human Error: As I said last month, human error represents the greatest ongoing threat to security. And as I’ve alluded earlier here, introducing something new and unfamiliar only exacerbates those risks. When looking at smartphones and tablets in particular, these risks are made even greater because we’re talking about physical devices that have more limited displays and capabilities than computers.

This means there’s less “real estate” for user interface developers to utilize and less storage for online help and tutorials. Taken together, those all mean that you’re using a new device and platform that has less robust visual cues and less guidance and help. In a phrase, as anyone who’s looked at a ringing smartphone and been unable to actually answer it knows: you’re on your own.

The most important thing you can do with this risk is to be aware of it. When you are lost and frustrated, be mindful from that of the fact that you are learning something new and that there are risks inherent there. Take your time, go slowly, be conservative, and most of all, plan for the possibility of failure. Don’t start posting to your official corporate Twitter account from your new iPhone the first day you get it. Figure out how to use your personal Twitter account safely and competently, then graduate to the higher profile and higher risk activities.

Device Portability and Loss: This is perhaps the most obvious difference between mobile devices and desktop computers. But its obviousness often blinds us to this risk and accounting for it. As Apple has learned not once, but twice, mobile devices can easily get lost. But where losing your cell phone a few years ago was just annoying and costly, now it qualifies as a security and privacy incident. It’s not just the information that’s on your device that you have to worry about (though sometimes that alone should be plenty to worry about).

All of the apps that you’ve downloaded and configured almost certainly gives the holder of that device immediate, direct access to everything you access with that device. No one in their right mind is going to enter their Twitter password every time they bring it up (especially not on a near-impossible to use keyboard on your phone): that information is saved in the device. That in turn means that the security barrier for those accounts is not the password, it’s possession of and access to the device itself.

The options for what you can do to help protect here are pretty limited. This is another area where the newness of the technology opens up risk areas. Most devices support some kind of screen lock with some kind of pin or password required to use the device. Those can definitely provide some protection but you shouldn’t view that as foolproof: four digit pins can be cracked with some effort. Particularly for a determined attacker, that PIN is little more than an annoyance. And too, screen locks can be so cumbersome to your usage of the devices that many people don’t use them.

Some devices support what’s called “remote wiping”: this is the ability to send a command to a lost device to delete all the information on that. There are also apps available that can do this for devices that don’t have that capability. This is something that you should look into for all your devices.

Further, one of the best things you can do is to be aware of this risk and plan for failure. Treating your smartphone like it has valuable data on it (it does) rather than like a cheap piece of consumer electronics (it isn’t) is a big step in the right direction. Exercising caution and being aware of where you devices are at all times can go a long way to help.

Finally, be ready to quickly change your passwords and regain control of your social media channel if you lose your device. My column “Recovering from the Worst: What to Do When Your Social Media Channel is Hijacked” can provide good tips in this regard.

Co-mingled Data and Accounts: One particular challenge that smartphones and tablets present is an unprecedented co-mingling of personal and professional data and accounts. Many of us have a work computer and a home computer which makes it easy to keep personal and professional data and accounts separate from one another by being on separate machines.

Very few of us have a work smartphone or tablet and a personal smartphone or tablet. From an apps point of view too, you very likely have a single Twitter app on your device, for instance, and have to mingle your personal and professional handles in that one app. The risks this situation poses is a risk of personal and professional data or actions getting mixed up leading to inappropriate disclosure of information or other problems.

For example, the instances we hear of personal tweets going out to professional handles could well be a result of co-mingled accounts in apps like this. Another example of what could happen is the steamy, flirty email to you girl/boyfriend goes to your manager thanks to the autofill on your phone which has your personal and professional address books on it.

The solution here is to be aware of this risk and take steps to keep personal and professional data and accounts as separate as possible. Frankly, this is not easy right now (though the new Microsoft Surface does provide different user accounts which could be used to create a personal and a professional account on your device). Consider using different apps for different accounts (e.g. use the Twitter app for your personal accounts and HootSuite for your professional ones). Most of all, check and double check that you’re actually speaking from the right account.

Viruses and Malware: This category differs from the others insofar as this IS a risk that we are familiar with from computers. The challenge here is that most people think of this risk as ONLY being a risk that computers face. The fact is that viruses and malware on devices is exploding. Trend Micro recently announced that they’ve identified over 175,000 different pieces of malware and aggressive adware on Android devices. The word in the security space is that in terms of viruses and malware, Android is starting to look like Microsoft Windows did about 10 years ago with lots of danger and not a lot of protection.

This problem is the easiest of our issues to address. Where possible you should run security software on your devices. At this time, there are no antivirus/antimalware solutions for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad): Apple won’t allow them. But there are a number of products available for Android and you should definitely protect Android devices with security software.

As time passes and we all understand mobile devices better, we can expect security to improve and threats to lessen. But the future of mobile devices is one that will include security software and security best practices, just like the world of PCs and Macs have today. It’s just going to take time for this all to grow and develop. In the meantime, the most important thing you can do is understand that the world of mobile devices is less mature, rougher, more dangerous and different from what you’re used to with PCs and Macs. Understanding that is a big step forward in better protecting yourself.

Christopher Budd (9 Posts)

This monthly Social Media & Online Security column is contributed by Christopher Budd. Christopher is one of the foremost experts on managing crisis communications for online security and privacy incidents. Christopher combines his prior career as an engineer with his public relations experience as a ten-year veteran of the Microsoft Corporation, where he oversaw and managed worldwide internal and external communications around security and privacy incidents. As an independent consultant he merges these skills to help customers bridge the gap between the technical and communications realms and “make awful news just bad”.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

TOPIC: Social Media and Online security

Facebook: Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?

Neal Schaffer — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, we perhaps had a watershed moment in the ongoing maturation of Facebook as a business. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, posited that Facebook was “blowing it” by offering the Mavs an “opportunity” to make posts visible to its fans for $3,000.

As one of the most successful business people of our generation, I’m sure Mark originally looked at this dispassionately. The Mavs make investments in social marketing software and FTEs to make their social assets among the best in the world. Additionally, they probably allocate some costs of content production and other shared responsibilities to social media to get an idea of what it all takes (direct costs, resources, % budget, etc.) to maintain. Social investments are not free — Mr. Cuban is spending real dollars just to keep social sites up to snuff. And now, here comes Facebook wanting to charge money for access to Fans — something that was free as little as say six months ago. All you had to do in the past is master Edgerank, Facebook’s cryptic yet somewhat easy to understand formula about optimizing everyone’s News Feed experience.

So in addition to the current costs of maintaining Facebook, now Mr. Cuban is being asked to spend even more just to get people to see his team’s content. And he’s questioning aloud whether or not it is worth the additional expense. After all, the Mavs brand is strong. And Myspace and Tumblr are free.

But I’m sure Mr. Cuban went one step further, and tried to get a sense of what this recent change would mean for the Mavericks — a team that is pretty active on Facebook. Multiply $3,000/post by the 1,516 times the Mavericks posted content to Facebook over the past year, and you come up with a stunning $4.5 million investment that would be required in just content advertising for Mark Cuban to get all his fans to see Mavericks posts on Facebook!!

And thus, Facebook goes from being a really nice, relatively inexpensive addition to the marketing mix to an ongoing annuity payment — and a big one at that. Anytime the Page needs guaranteed visibility in the future, it will need to pay real dollars for the privilege. So a commitment to Facebook goes from being something that fits nicely into the marketing mix to an ongoing liability. Compare that to Tumblr or Myspace, which would involve switching and migration costs, but would (at least for the moment) allow the Mavs to maintain a vibrant social presence that doesn’t involve a massive advertising investment.

And then I’m sure Mark Cuban’s dispassionate approach to this swung violently to evangelical outrage at Facebook.

Mark Cuban is not the only person to complain about declining reach numbers. In June, George Takei lamented that Facebook was rolling back features that were designed to make it easy for people to read his entertaining posts and commentary. Last Saturday, he resorted to coaching his Fans on how to make his content more visible.

The negative feedback is not limited to celebrities — people who manage smaller pages are starting to express concerns as Reach numbers show decline. My favorite quote:

It’s no conspiracy, Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on the average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

As anecdotes and concerns roll in from Facebook community managers and executives around the world, I have to ask,

Is Facebook rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell?

And is Facebook “jumping the shark” for marketers?

I’d argue that there are really three market forces taking place at the same time that are changing reality as we know it very rapidly:

1) Investor expectations – Remember when Mark Zuckerberg told us that he was trying to build the best product he could… and that investor expectations were not his primary concern? Well, that is easier said as a privately held company than a publicly traded one. There are real pressures associated with being a publicly traded company, much less one that has endured a big drop in its market capitalization since its IPO (from approx $80 billion to $47+ billion today). The company is looking for ways to aggressively monetize its over 1 billion users — and that is and was always an inevitable reality for the company.

2) Convergence of paid, owned, and earned media — For a long time, we’ve been enjoying free earned media from our owned media assets. Write a great blog post or share some interesting content on Facebook or Twitter, and get response from customers in return. But now, more than five years into social marketing, Facebook and other social media platforms know quite a bit about how those things result in likes, comments, shares, and retweets. As social platforms get smarter about end user behavior, it stands to reason that Paid Media would become more influential in determining what shows up in our Feeds and when. Altimeter refers to this as the Convergence of Paid, Owned, and Earned Media. I like to think of it as the investment thesis for Facebook, the cashtag ($FB).

3) Smart people attacking tough problems — Facebook still attracts some of the smartest, most talented people on the planet. All the things you know and love about Facebook are there because they were invented or improved upon by these sharp people. But as any platform matures, its feature set also becomes much more stable. The invention phase winds down, and is gradually replaced by a less intriguing optimization phase. And optimization moves from technical discoveries to business & business model discoveries. So in a nutshell, some of tech’s smartest people are trying to figure out how to make the most money possible from this fascinating, but now maturing social network.

Additionally, lore is developing inside the hallowed walls of Facebook — stories about how the business advanced by sticking steadfast to its core business principles. What are some of those principles? Mark Zuckerberg has told us himself:

Be bold
Keep shipping
We can always correct a mistake
People can’t get away from Facebook

Simply put, the experimentation phase of Facebook has moved squarely from product innovation to News Feed Optimization. Mark Zuckerberg knows from experiences with Beacon, cookie tracking, the Open Graph, and personal data that the company can take things in a controversial direction, manage any resulting PR problem, and resume innovation at a slower, but more customer-friendly pace. In that sense, it is low risk, high potential return for investors.

But for marketers, the good times as we knew it may be ending. It’s going to cost us more to do the things that we’ve gotten for low cost so far — whether that cost comes in the form of additional expertise, direct advertising spend, or other future expenses we don’t even know about yet. Social as a channel will get more and more complex for marketers, but we won’t go anywhere. The allure is too great. Facebook will come to a tough realization, however, that value is a two way street. We’ll want to know more about what it is that we actually get for our time and money. And in the end, that’s not a bad thing.

Chris Treadaway (3 Posts)

This bi-monthly Facebook column is contributed by Chris Treadaway. Chris is co-author of Facebook Marketing An Hour a Day with Mari Smith and Founder & CEO of Polygraph Media, a Facebook data mining & analytics company.

TOPIC: Facebook

7 Useful Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

Neal Schaffer — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:12:00 GMT

Recently I presented on the topic of Social Media and Your Job Search in front of a large group of executives, many of whom were in transition. As with any professional crowd, nearly everyone was already comfortable with LinkedIn, but less than half of the attendees had ventured out onto Twitter yet. I sensed some confusion about Twitter, so today instead of blogging about Twitter and Personal Branding or Twitter and the Job Search, I felt it was time to write a blog post to help hand-hold those that are still confused by Twitter but really want to give it a shot without any risk. With that in mind, this is your Twitter 101 Getting Started on Twitter Guide based on 7 tips that I hope you’ll find useful.

I am not going to go through all of the screenshots you will see when you sign up with Twitter, but I will point out 7 useful tips that I recommend you follow upon signing up to Twitter to get you started risk-free:

1) Use your personal e-mail address for your Twitter account. Yesterday I tweeted a story about someone who lost access to their Twitter account after they left their job. You may never be able to retrieve your password if you use your company email address and leave that company. This also should remind you of a post I did several months ago on the lurking issue of who owns your LinkedIn profile, as the same problem can and will happen with Twitter.

2) Use your real name for your Twitter account. Claim it before someone else does. You will be thankful in the future that you did this now. It also makes it easier for everyone to find you after you become famous.

You will be asked for more information as you create your Twitter account, but everything can be changed after the fact by going to your “Settings” tab at the top of your Twitter page. Every privacy option or profile customization setting will be here. Within this tab there are a few things you should check:

3) Complete your “More Info URL” and your branded “One Line Bio.” In “Account” you have the option to include a “More Info URL”, a “One Line Bio”, and a Location. Fill these out with relevant information. Your Profile URL, if you don’t have a blog or a company website, should probably be your LinkedIn Profile URL. As for location, this is a privacy issue. However, should you include the city in which you live, it will make it easier for those who live nearby to find you. I recommend you do so, but only do what you feel comfortable with, or use a broader geographic area like a county name or even a state name if you don’t want to expose your city to the Twitterati.

4) No need to go mobile yet. There is a “Mobile” tab which is to the right of the “Password” and ”Settings” tabs. For some reason, people associate Twitter with the cell phone, even though LinkedIn and Facebook also have cell phone applications (at least on my iPhone they do!). There is no need to enable Twitter on your cell phone at this point, so avoid the temptation until you’re hooked.

5) Ditch the notices. The “Notices” tab is a very important tab when you start out. You have the option to receive an email whenever someone sends you a Direct Message as well as when you get a new follower. I recommend that you turn these Notices OFF. Remember, you are just starting on Twitter, so who is going to send you a Direct Message that wouldn’t be able to send you an email? And you will get random people that will somehow find you and start following you…do you really want to clutter your email with this information? I didn’t think so.

6) Professionally branded picture, please. I recommend that you use the same “Picture” that you use on LinkedIn. Why would you use anything different? Avoid the temptation and keep professional here.

7) Standard design will do for now. You can set your background image of your profile using the ”Design” tab. Just use a default image with a color scheme that you like. There is no need to do anything fancy here. Should you be a Photoshop pro and really want to customize things off the bat, here is how to create your own custom Twitter background.

This is all you need to do to set-up your account. Your “Home” screen should show nothing in your “Timeline” and your Tweets, Followers, and Following should all display a big fat “zero.” Well done! You are now officially on Twitter! But before you start adding people to follow by selecting “Find People”, I highly recommend that you avoid the temptation and wait. Next week I will cover taking your first baby steps on Twitter, so make sure you get your account ready before then!

Twitter 101 – How to use Twitter for business (socialwebschool.com)
7 Reasons Why I’d Rather Use Twitter Over Other Social Networks (shegeeks.net)
19% of Internet users use Twitter or update status site : Up nearly 100% since April (kevin.lexblog.com)

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StumbleUpon Marketing: 5 Ways to Get More StumbleUpon Traffic to Your Website

Neal Schaffer — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:00:43 GMT

Social bookmarking websites always confuse my social media strategy customers. There seems to be an aura that somehow just posting all of your own content to these sites will somehow magically drive massive traffic to your website. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. And unless you have a certain objective or niche demographic that tends to find a large population of your targeted users using sites like Digg, Reddit, or Delicious, my advice is simply to concentrate efforts on other more popular sites. I will make one exception, though: StumbleUpon.

First of all, StumbleUpon is not a niche site. With more than 11 million members, it has almost twice the number of registered users that Digg has, which Kevin Rose was recently quoted on Quora saying that Digg membership was almost at 6 million users. So while considerably fewer users are stumbling when compared to the user base of LinkedIn or Twitter, membership of over 10 million users is not something to ignore in terms of social media marketing. What is amazing is how a site with so few members can drive traffic that can compete with these larger sites.

Whenever I check my stats, StumbleUpon never ceases to surprise me in the traffic that it generates to my website. I already told you that StumbleUpon was not about the SEO and why you should become a heavy user. If you had followed my recommendations, you would probably be seeing similar results that I have found: For social media-driven traffic over the last 6 months to my website, StumbleUpon is second only to LinkedIn. That’s right, when all is said and done, StumbleUpon is driving more traffic to my website than Twitter or Facebook. And I’m not alone.

In this chart from earlier this year, it is clear that StumbleUpon is the 2nd largest source of social media traffic to global website hits:

What excites me even more about the potential for increased website traffic is the recent release of the StumbleUpon for the iPhone application.

How does one best go about generating more traffic from StumbleUpon to your website? Here are 5 potential ways that can help your StumbleUpon marketing be successful:

1) Advertise

While I usually tell my social media clients to move their Google Pay Per Click ads marketing budget over to social media, StumbleUpon advertisements do provide a way to “seed” their unique recommendations algorithm with content from your website. For a very inexpensive $0.05 per stumble, you can literally buy traffic to your website. And instead of having to experiment with categories like in the past, StumbleUpon recently announced a new auto-targeting system for advertisements. There are over 40,000 brands running advertisements here, so there is nothing to be shy about. There is a catch, though. You are trying to get more users to “thumb up” your website so that it will push through the recommendations engine and reach more stumblers. If you create an advertisement that is simply an ad, those that use SU may not be kind to you and instead give you a “thumbs down,” ensuring that your content will be buried. What to do? Consider creating a marketing campaign for a resourceful blog post that can lead the targeted users to both thumbing up your content and checking out your website. After all, no one is fond of self-promoting in social media.

2) Stumble & Contribute

Anyone who uses StumbleUpon can tell you that the beauty of the platform is in its recommendation engine. The more you use it to stumble and thumb up or down content, the more it introduces you to amazingly interesting content that you may not find on your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter feeds. What’s missing when you stumble? Your own content, of course! Obviously there is a need to submit your blog posts to SU just like you tweet them or post them to Facebook. But this in itself will not help get you a lot of traffic. It is only after you stumble and thumb up other content as well as contribute new content that traffic begins to be generated. Why this is the case is simple: The more you thumb up content, the more content that goes out to other stumblers that your content is aligned with. The more you stumble content and contribute in that niche where your target demographic is, the more of a chance you will be found and followed by them. And the more you are followed, the higher a chance that your content will appear in your friends stumbles. The whole ecosystem begins when you start to be a true contributor.

3) Follow

StumbleUpon is a social platform. While you can stumble on your own, StumbleUpon clearly says that it allows for recommendations from your SU friends to work into the recommendation engine equation as well:

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.

By following those that you feel you should be aligned with, you now have the potential of aligning your content with them should you be thumbing up the same content or if that person also decides to follow you back. StumbleUpon conveniently lets you know when you have new visitors to your profile, so always be on the lookout to follow back those who may be relevant to your target audience through looking at:

those who thumbed up your content
those who thumbed up content that you felt was extremely relevant to you and your target audience
those that visit your profile
those that appear in Suggestions
those that follow you

4) Use the Su.Pr Shortener

I was confused when the Su.Pr shortener was first released. With all of the competition out there, why would I want to use Su.Pr? There’s a very good reason to use it: To Pay it Forward and help out StumbleUpon. That’s right, when use the Su.Pr shortener to share content on Facebook or Twitter, which is most easily done automatically through the Firefox Add-on for SU, you are not only driving traffic to your website: You are also helping promote StumbleUpon because your website will now appear in the SU frame. Because you are doing SU a favor in giving them, in essence, free advertising, it is only natural that they pay you back by giving the content that you are sharing some extra “juice” in the number of times the content is sent out to other stumblers. While everyone’s mileage might vary, I believe that within a few minutes of sharing content with the Su.Pr shortener, you should see stumbler views on your content equivalent to roughly 1/2 of the number of your followers. When someone thumbs up that same link, you seem to get another batch of the same number of views. Don’t quote me on this, of course, but this is the type of behavior I have seen after utilizing the Su.Pr shortener. Hopefully you will see the same!

5) Display the SU Badge on Your Website

When compared to a ReTweet or a Facebook Share, the count from a StumbleUpon badge on your blog page can be a little misleading. Whereas a ReTweet or Facebook Share/Like are created by active human interaction, the number of stumbler views that appear on an SU badge count the number of times that the content has been passively introduced to other stumblers through the recommendations engine. On most of my blog posts, the number of SU views is greater than the number of ReTweets or Facebook Shares. Why is this important? It actually isn’t, but by giving a dedicated StumbleUpon “Submit” button to your blog posts right next to Twitter and Facebook, you are giving your audience the ability to directly “thumb up” your post. Furthermore, with those larger numbers showing, it will hopefully have the affect of influencing more people to join in the numbers and thumb up your post.

I’m sure there are many other creative ways of driving traffic from StumbleUpon, but these are some starters to help you get started. How has your experience been? Do you recommend any other ways of utilizing the social bookmarking site to get more traffic to your website?

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How to Use the LinkedIn Follow Feature? Think Outside of the Box.

Neal Schaffer — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:25:41 GMT

I recently got asked a great question in my Windmill Networking LinkedIn Group:

Neal, what is one of the most recent insights you have learned about LinkedIn that can help us?

Since I wrote the book on LinkedIn, although 90% of the functionality of the site is still the same, I am finding the “Follow” features that LinkedIn have introduced to be of value for some. While this “feature” may still be a mystery to many, here is my advice on how you can strategically use it by thinking outside of the box. For instance:

1) FOLLOW COMPANIES

When I wrote my book, I said that the only thing I disliked about LinkedIn Jobs was that they didn’t have an email alert system for informing you of new jobs like those that are available at Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs. That now exists, on a company-by-company basis, if you follow your Target Companies AND they post on Jobs. And following companies is not just for jobseekers: Read more in my blog post on the 6 people who should be following companies.

What about following other people and not companies? This is a little tricky because when LinkedIn introduced the new follow feature, they automatically started following all of your connections on your behalf. The idea was that when you went to a LinkedIn Group, you could keep tabs on a “group within the group.” I suppose this would be appropriate if several members of an organization were all part of the same group to ensure that your discussions did not overlap.

If you want to do as I advise below, I would almost suggest that you start unfollowing everyone and start with a clean slate. This will make it easier to find the information that you can glean from doing the following:

2) FOLLOW THOUGHT LEADERS

What if you are keen to try to create a relationship with someone that you consider a thought leader in hopes that you can someday get to know them better? Start following them on LinkedIn! The beauty of this feature is that you can follow anyone regardless of your connections status, there is no restriction that I know about in terms of maximum numbers of people that you can follow, and you just may see them engaging in a LinkedIn Group discussion that gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with them. One note of caution here: You cannot follow someone just by finding them in the search results. You need to be a member of the same group that they are. But once you’re both members of the same group you can follow them after finding them in the “Members” section of your common group.

3) FOLLOW YOUR COMPETITION

There is no one way to find a job, perform sales, or do anything else in life. Aren’t there some professionals on LinkedIn that you would consider your competition or people that you think are ahead of their game that you’d like to learn from? Follow them, check their activity, and see if you might be missing out on something by looking at the way they engage with others on LinkedIn. It’s almost like following those that you believe you can learn from will give you access to a “virtual mentor” on LinkedIn.

By “Following” the activities of others as well as Companies, you can learn a great deal that can help you initiate conversations, grow professionally and potentially accelerate your job search.

Are you using the Follow feature? Do you use it differently? Please chime in!

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Why Your Company Needs a Social Media Policy and 14 Corporate Social Media Policy Examples

Neal Schaffer — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:43:57 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about how to sell social media to your marketing department, and as a follow-up to that question, I received another email from the same person indicating a big reason why internally their marketing department still doesn’t want to move forward:

“After more in-depth discussions it became apparent that the real concern of our marketing department is protecting our “brand name” while employee’s use social media to, essentially further their own careers and successes. I hadn’t looked at it from that perspective but it does present some challenges.”

The fear of how one’s employees will use sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook is a knee-jerk reaction by those who, once again, might not be new adopters to these tools. But upon analysis, it is clear that there is a natural progression of understanding that needs to take place here:

Why not being active in social media can hurt your brand;
Why your company was never in control of their brand (or the conversations of its employees) ;
Why there is a need for a corporate-wide education program; and
Why corporate social media policy creation is the only way to set proper usage guidelines and “protect” the company.

Using Social Media Helps Protect Your Brand Name

If all of these online conversations are taking place and you’re not active in social media, how can you be “protecting” your brand name from what may already be taking place in the outside world? Rather than a narrow approach looking internally at one’s own employees, what are your customers, competitors, and industry insiders potentially saying about your company? The only way to find out is by monitoring social media conversations, and the only way to truly “protect” your brand name is by being in active on those social media websites wherever your target audience is to proactively manage how others will perceive your brand name.

Companies Were Never in Control of Their Brand (or Their Employees)

What have your employees been saying about your company on the phone or through emails? Do you monitor all of the conversations they have with others at trade shows? Companies were never in control of the conversations that their employees have about their business, so the “brand name” has never been protected. At least with social media, when compared with other types of conversation, the information is public in a good way: Companies can now often see what their employees are saying on the various social media websites which can actually help to “protect” their brand name. Remember: New Tools, Old Rules. This challenge is nothing new.

On the other hand, since a “brand name” is only something that is perceived by others, companies were never in full control of it to begin with, right?

Social Media Use Inside the Company Needs Education

Even if you’ve bought into the argument so far, there is still a missing piece here: How can you be sure that your employees will responsibly use these websites as official representatives of your company? There is a learning curve associated with social media like there is with any other new tool. Posting to a corporate Facebook Page is not the same as sharing your favorite photos on your own personal profile. The only way to overcome this challenge is education. Pick the person inside your company who seems to have the most understanding of social media and could be a role model as a responsible user. One approach some of my customers use is to divide the educational responsibilities up amongst several people: 1 is in charge of learning and then educating others on LinkedIn, another on Twitter, and so on. Find a system that works and educate your employees.

Social Media Policy Creation is the Only Way to Both Set Guidelines and Protect the Company

Now that you have the education piece down, it is time to create internal guidelines for all present and future employees. This will provide the basis to train all of your employees on how to responsibly use social media. But don’t stop there: If an employee sends a public message through one of these social websites that in someway violates an existing contract (for instance, exposing company secrets or NDA-protected content), in some cases the company, not the employee, may be the responsible party. That is why these guidelines, if properly established under supervision by legal professionals, can also help protect your company. These corporate social media policy policy guidelines, combined with education, should go a long way into standardizing the responsible use of these websites inside your company.

14 Corporate Social Media Policy Examples to Help You Create Your Own Policy

Your company is not alone. Every other company, big and small, needs to have a policy in place for practical and legal reasons. While one survey pointed out that only 29% of companies have social media policies back in February of 2010, there is no doubt that this number will increase to near 100% over the next year or two. While a top notch employment law firm should be considered to supervise the creation and confirm the legality of any social media policy, there are plenty of resources out there to help you get started in learning about what to put in your own policy. Here are 14 great examples as well as some links to some famous guidelines that have been released for public consumption by large corporations. After all, if they can control usage of these websites within their own company, any small or medium-sized business should feel confident that they can do the same.

And if the above isn’t enough, here are some people that are putting together more comprehensive social media policy databases that are being regularly updated:

You’ll notice that in this blog post I did not even dwell on the issue of employees using social media to “further their own careers and successes.” After proper education and looking at how other corporations utilize social media through their guidelines, it is only natural that your marketing department will realize that there are plenty of authentic professional uses of social websites whether it be for Human Resources, Recruiting, Sales, Business Development, and, of course, Marketing! Enough said.

Any other points that I missed, additional reasons for the creation of a corporate social media policy, or other excellent corporate social media policy examples that I might have missed? Please comment!

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How Your Business Can Twitter Better with Hootsuite

Neal Schaffer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:35:52 GMT

Today’s blog post was contributed by my guest, Ann Smarty, who I have gotten to know through her managing the LinkedIn Subgroup “The Guest Blogger.” Her post is about my preferred Twitter tool which I am also passionate about and use in my own social media consulting and implementation, Hootsuite, which just today released new Social CRM features allowing you to filter tweets by Klout score or keyword. Ann is also currently Director of Media for BlueGlass.

Business power Tweeters can rejoice – the tool you need is finally here. Any business who has a social media policy and uses Twitter or Facebook extensively to reach out to customers now can fully manage their social activities through this site.

Hootsuite is an evolution of Twitter management that started out as “Brightkit” in 2008. While Brightkit began with potential, the creators found that the name was not in line with their services. Subsequently, the company updated their service features, changed the name to Hootsuite, and developed a winning product that is more than suitable for business and personal social media activities.

Hootsuite offers numerous features that result in maximum benefits to business mini-bloggers. Here is a look at a few of the best ones:

Manage Multiple Social Networks

Hootsuite allows a user to integrate multiple social networking sites into one manageable location. The first and main network is Twitter, giving you the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts. And alongside Twitter, Hootsuite helps you manage accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn, and the ability to update a host of other social networks through Ping.fm.

Create and Manage Team Workflow

Hootsuite allows accounts to add as many users as they want. New users can be added from around the country and be given editorial permissions to update certain feeds and share tweeting responsibilities.

Create Twitter Lists

If you follow any number of Twitter accounts, managing and reading all the feeds can be nearly impossible. Hootsuite allows you to create lists of Twitter followers so you can more easily read their updates.

Customize URLs and Upload Files

Your tweets or other updates with links or files are a breeze with Hootsuite tools. It uses its own URL shortening function that allows you to customize URL parameters. If you want to share a file with your tweets or other updates like a photo, Hootsuite instantly converts the file into a shortened ow.ly link embedded into your update.

Schedule Tweets

Scheduling tweets is a feature that many businesses have demanded, but few have provided. Hootsuite allows a business to pre-write a number of tweet updates and schedule them for later posting onto Twitter. This allows you to provide new and fresh Twitter content any time of day.

New iPhone and Droid App

Hootsuite works with the iPhone and Droid mobile devices. Now your Hootsuite team can perform their social media duties anywhere.

Tracking Statistics

Hootsuite tracking provides you with comprehensive data about how many clicks your tweets are getting, where they are located geographically,

So what does all this mean for your business? The Hootsuite social management tool gives you many benefits:

Manage your brand

Increased Productivity

Better Social Policy Communication

Indeed, HootSuite makes tweeting for businesses more productive, intuitive, and effective.

Read more: How Your Business Can Twitter Better with Hootsuite http://windmillnetworking.com/2010/07/13/how-your-business-can-twitter-better-with-hootsuite/#ixzz0tcHPavIY
Buy the award-winning book on LinkedIn! Windmill Networking

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5 Great Ways to Prospect for New Business on LinkedIn

Neal Schaffer — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:00:00 GMT

: Image by wordjunky via Flickr

While many social media marketers concentrate on Twitter and Facebook, a lot of Business-to-Business (B2B) Business Development professionals already know that LinkedIn is the preferred place to prospect for new business in social media. With an executive from every Fortune 500 company represented and an average household income of over $100,000, LinkedIn is a perfect place to prospect for decision makers in the industries you want to sell into as well as a prime destination to make alliances with other businesses and professionals that can help grow your business.

I recently had a conversation with a good friend who was having some challenges prospecting in social media, and this is the advice I gave him in using LinkedIn to prospect for new business. Note: LinkedIn is a social networking platform of trusted relationships that can work against you if you just use it to look up people and simply cold-call them. Engaging with the community as I suggest below will give you better mileage and start the cycle of inbound marketing bringing leads to you.1) Grow Your LinkedIn Connections

LinkedIn is a database and you need to makes sure that your connections are sufficient enough to keep you to be able to find and be found by others. Watch my video for advice on how many LinkedIn connections you should have if you are not sure you have enough.

As a professional, your network is your greatest asset and just through the art of connecting you may find new business. This success story video eloquently illustrates the potential of finding $1 million of new business in 15 minutes on LinkedIn:

The more connections you have, the easier it will be for you to not only directly message others but also reach out for referrals. Don’t be shy…connect!

2) Communicate and Network with Your Connections

Your network is built into your LinkedIn connectivity. Are you utilizing your pre-existing network to help you with your prospecting? Are you following Network Updates of your connections looking for data points to keep in touch with your network and see if they might be able to help you with your prospecting? You have a network and LinkedIn provides you with the infrastructure. There is no reason why you should not be reaching out to your network to both help them and ask for help from them. Social networking 101 LinkedIn style.

3) Engage in Groups

Sure, Groups allow you the potential to directly message someone in the same group regardless of your connection status. But it’s not about being a member of Groups: It is about actually engaging with others in Discussions, posting News that show off your expertise, and reading industry-specific News that you find that add to your business intelligence. Posting News helps your inbound marketing, Discussions may help you find prospecting opportunities as well as help you get found by others looking for your products or services.

4) Provide Expertise in Answers

You are able to field any question that your customer asks you about your product, company, technology, or industry. Are you listening to what your business prospects are asking on Answers? Tune in, or you’re missing out on potential opportunities. And should you start contributing answers, it will only help establish your company’s and your brand as an expert, which should naturally bring more leads your way. Who wouldn’t want to contact an industry expert for a consultation?

5) Events for Business Intelligence & Prospecting Opportunities

I continue to evangelize Events as a prime source for business intelligence. If you are going away on a business trip, you should not miss the chance to prospect by creating a LinkedIn Event. But if you are looking for local networking opportunities or events in which your business prospects may be attending, all of that information is potentially within the Events database. All you need to do is search and discover.

There are many other creative things you can do to find and grow your business on LinkedIn, but the above represents 5 ways to get started prospecting for new business. Any others that you would add to the list? Please share!

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LinkedIn Referral Requests: 3 Bits of Advice for Handling a LinkedIn Introduction Request from Someone You Don’t Know Well

Neal Schaffer — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:31:01 GMT

: Image via Wikipedia

As you get more comfortable with using LinkedIn, the day may come when you start connecting with other professionals that you may not know very well. I am not referring to becoming a LinkedIn LION or open networker, but connecting with people that you may have had a chance to meet at a networking event and added to your LinkedIn network yet do not personally know very well. Soon after connecting with this new acquaintance on LinkedIn, you may all of the sudden receive the following type of request:

It was a pleasure meeting you recently at the [Insert Event Name] event! Hope you’ve been doing well since then.

Today I came across an interesting job opening for a [insert Title] at [insert Company] and noticed that an employee at the company, [Insert Name], is one of your 1st degree connections. I would love to have the chance to chat with this person about working at the company as well as seeing if they have any advice for the open position. Would you be comfortable in reaching out to [Insert Name] about my interest in [Company Name]. Thank you so much for your help!

What do you do if you don’t feel comfortable providing a referral for someone you don’t know to a close friend?

My advice would go something like this:

1) First of all, do you want to develop a deeper relationship with this person? If he or she asks for a referral, why not meet again for a face-to-face meeting to get to know this person, and their requests, better? They may be a good person with good intentions, and having a chance to meet them may shed some light and bring your relationship to a new level. This may also make you feel more comfortable at referring this person to your friends.

On the other hand, if you still want to keep at arms length, for whatever reason, or you meet this person and still don’t feel comfortable referring them to your friends, I believe you have two choices:

2) Tell them flat out that you do not give referrals to close friends unless you know the person really well. Period.

3) Pass on the Introduction request to your friend (without cc:ing the person who asked for the referral) and let your friend decide. Tell your friend that a LinkedIn contact that you still don’t know very well would like to be introduced, and let your friend decide what they want to do. If they want to pass on it, at least you have done your job. And, who knows, maybe they may want to meet this person themselves for whatever their reason may be, you never know. You may not think that this person has value to them, but they may think differently.

Not that I would recommend the 3) approach in every instance, but one of the key concepts behind Windmill Networking is that sometimes something very trivial to you could be a godsend to someone else in your network.

Obviously, there is no standard golden rule for giving LinkedIn referrals other than never do anything that you are not comfortable with. If you were in this same situation what would you do? Please share your thoughts with the world!

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Looking for a Job? Only Twitter Applicants Need Apply.

Neal Schaffer — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

As social media begins to envelop every part of a corporate organization, it becomes important that every employee begins to have a certain level of literacy in using social media tools. This becomes even more important in outward-facing rules where “social business” is changing the way companies engage with present and potential customers over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs. At some point, just as companies emerged that used the Internet as their platform (Amazon, Netflix, etc.), we will see new companies arise that purely use social media as their platform. And when that happens, it is a natural that they will only be finding and recruiting people over social media, because they only want social media savvy users to work for them.

You think this is way off in the future? Think again: this is already starting. Here’s a case study to chew on for thought.

As you know I like to blog about events going on in social media in Japan. As Twitter is still relatively new there, it is fascinating to see how a different culture starts adopting new technologies in their own way. And because I speak and read Japanese fluently, I can add value in providing you with information that you may not be able to find anywhere else in English on the Internet. Enough said.

This blog post is about EC Navi, a Japanese company whose product and platform is the Internet: They run a price comparison site with links to E-commerce sites similar to PriceGrabber.com. Think about it: their customers are solely on the Internet and using the Internet to make their purchases. If everyone on the Internet is starting to spend most of their time on social media, doesn’t it make sense that E-Commerce sites like EC Navi (and PriceGrabber.com as well) will need a social media presence and need employees who understand how to utilize sites like Twitter? Of course.

So it came as no surprise to me when EC Navi announced that they were only taking college graduate applicants who 1) applied over Twitter and 2) had at least 10 followers. Only having 10 followers shows that it is not a popularity contest, but proof that you are actually utilizing Twitter and interacting with others. And applying over Twitter was merely sending an @Reply to the CEO saying that you were interested. You were then invited to a seminar to learn more about the company, and after that process 10 applicants became future employees of EC Navi.

The CEO of EC Navi, Shinsuke Usami (follow him on Twitter: @usapon), was quoted as saying that he did this as part of an experiment but was extremely pleased by the number and high quality of the candidates. He mentioned that he thought of doing this for two reasons:

He recently held an event for college seniors to educate them on the exciting world of the Internet and advertised it only through Twitter. He was pleased with the number and calibre of candidates who attended this seminar and immediately thought he could take it one step further.
He thought it would be a great social media marketing experiment.

In our United States, we may have discriminatory laws that prevent employers from only accepting candidates from a specific Internet site. But the fact that social media becomes more important to companies is not going to fade away. And as we all become better and more proficient in our uses of social media, it is only a matter of time before those that use social media have an advantage over those that don’t when looking for a job.

There is also a message here to companies: experimentation is an important component of social media marketing. Obviously, you need to have some literacy as to the etiquette and best practices of each platform so that you don’t spam social media users like in my recent case study of UCC Coffee. But if you have an in-house social media strategist or engage with a social media consultant like myself, think up a way of experimenting with an idea and implementing it to see what the outcome is. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Have you heard of any companies exclusively hiring people over various social media channels? Has your company attempted a social media marketing experiment that had unexpected results? Please share!

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NealSchaffer: blogs

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