ResearchGoddess

Many of you may be coming here for the first time having just watched the #VegasRG live tweet-stream from my Fordyce Forum presentation! I just wrapped up the presentation here in Las Vegas, and wanted to provide a landing place for you to share your thoughts on the hashtag conversation from the last three hours…

As you may have observed from the beginning of this week, I have been tracking my activities here in Vegas using the #VegasRG hashtag. This was a result of observing my boss, Chris Hoyt, do the same thing when he visited DC recently. But the main reason I wanted to do this was to help the folks in the workshop to see firsthand how powerful conversation really is when you use social media appropriately, in this case through a guided discussion. I think I can say “Mission Accomplished!”

As throughout the whole presentation, I encourage your completely honest feedback with your thoughts on this little experiment. If you think it rocked, please let me know by leaving a comment. If you think it totally sucked, I encourage you to leave a comment with some constructive criticism as to how it could have been better.

So, now it’s up to you! Share your thoughts in the comments below; depending on the general consensus, I may make this a regular thing when I give presentations. Thanks once again for participating, and keep watching #VegasRG for the rest of the week for Fordyce Forum updates!

This week, I am working from Las Vegas, as I will be attending the Fordyce Forum on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday from 2-5pm PDT on how social media can play a part in your recruitment plan. In an effort to practice what I will be preaching, I am going to have a live Twitter stream from my session using the hashtag #VegasRG through a site called TweetChat. You may have seen me using this hashtag over the last couple of weeks – I am keeping a sort of “Twitter journal” of my Las Vegas experience via the hashtag. My boss, Chris Hoyt, did this earlier in the year on his trip to DC with the #rgdc hashtag. I would encourage you to follow #VegasRG live between 2-5pm PDT and interact with those who will be attending the pre-conference workshop. My goal is to show them just how useful social media is from a conversational and information-sharing standpoint. Please feel free to respond to anything from the #VegasRG hashtag and present questions to the workshop attendees as well. I welcome any and all conversation!

I’ve done a lot of prep work for this presentation, because I realize that not everyone is as excited about social media’s place in recruiting as I am. Social media goes way beyond the popular LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter tools. There are also social bookmarking tools, cloud computing resources, podcasting/video/photo sharing tools, and so much more. In an effort to be transparent with my own use of these resources, I have decided that I will be going paperless for this conference and instead will be using some of the tools available through social media. I have loaded all of my presentation notes into my EverNote account and will be accessing them through EverNote’s iPhone app. So for anyone attending live, I promise I’m not checking email or text messages on my phone during my own presentation – I’m just following my notes

In addition, I’m not going to be handing out any business cards this year. That’s right – no paper cards from me! If you want my contact information, you will need to send a text message with ‘researchgoddess’ to 50500. I am using a resource called Contxts to provide my information via SMS. It makes for a good conversation starter, and it also helps you to be more ‘green’

My hope is that those of you in attendance of the workshop will come away with some better thought process about how you plan to reach your audiences with social media. We’ll go over some tools of course, but my main goal is going to be to help you better understand the ‘why’ – because if you don’t understand why you are doing something, then how you do it isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Please pass the word about #VegasRG – I would love to see not only those of you who work in recruiting, but also my friends and colleagues in social media, marketing, and PR communities interacting during the presentation. There is so much we can all learn from each other. See you on Wednesday!

Please make note: the presentation is this Wednesday, June 10th, from 2-5pm Pacific time. So for Eastern time zone folks, that’s 5-8pm, and for Central, it’s 4-7pm.

A disturbing new trend has been popping up in Twitter. The onset of these so-called auto-follow opt-in Twitter follower increase services. They’re everywhere it seems – helping you increase your followers so you can have big numbers.

For what?

Ever since Twitter has become popular due to celebrity use and mention on TV, it seems like there’s this mad rush for lots and lots of followers. Everyone wants to know how to get more people to follow them. As a result, these services such as TweepMe and Twit Pro Quo have surfaced, offering to “build a diverse and well rounded group of followers” for you and help you get a  ”good jumpstart on a new Twitter account with a nice set of followers”.

But step back for a minute and ask yourself this: what are you trying to accomplish on Twitter? And what is having 4,000 completely random people, with whom you’ve never built any kind of relationship, following you going to accomplish? Or is this simply becoming some sort of ridiculous high school popularity contest. “Look at me, I have 8,000 followers!” So what? Do they even care what you have to say? It seems about as silly as a meatball salesman giving a presentation at a vegan conference. Wrong audience.

The whole idea of quid pro quo when it comes to gaining followers kind of defeats the purpose of the conversational networking concept around which social network functions optimally. Seth Godin says, “What I really don’t like online is this superficial networking…all the thousands of people who show up friend-ing everybody else. Why? Right. It doesn’t count for anything it’s just a waste of time.”

Isn’t a large part of networking taking an interest in others and helping them reach goals? Why do we have to turn this into a “mine’s bigger than yours” competition, that is, number of followers. How many of those people do you think actually care about what you say…

Want to make your Twitter network rich and diverse? Don’t artificially pad your following with people who most likely don’t care and won’t listen. Communicate. Participate. Engage.

My Cool Tool Alert this week is 140it (pronounced ‘One-Forty-it’). Having been around since early 2009, this tool will help you condense your tweets into the necessary 140 characters to be sent. No longer will you have to sit there and try to figure out TweetSpeak on your own, or fumble around with going to another site, copy/paste your message, shrink it down, and then go back to Twitter. This neat little bookmarklet can be clicked and dragged right to your browser toolbar!

140it shrinks your twitter messages down to 140 characters by:

• Reducing words, removing extra spaces
• Shrinking URLs with unhub
• Exchanging company names with their StockTwits symbol

Check out their easy instructional video and see how to grab the bookmarklet. It’s as simple as a click and drag to your toolbar:

What you’re lifting from the site is a javascript bookmarklet that will sit in your toolbar. When you go to Twitter and type a message that’s greater than 140 characters, simply click on your 140it link in the toolbar and it will automatically shrink your message for you. Twitter will only shrink your URLs, and that’s only if your entire message, link included, is under 140 characters. Take a look at before the message is shrunk:

…and after clicking 140it in my toolbar:

This tool works with Safari, Firefox, and IE7 and above. Sorry – it doesn’t appear to work with IE6. Take a look and try it out for yourself!