ResearchGoddess

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight: Jennifer Leggio
Role: Social Business Blogger
Company: ZDNet
Who paid it forward: Jeremiah Owyang

Side-note: Jennifer is the only person who was both asked to provide a recommendation and recommended by someone else for the project. This speaks highly to the impression she is making in the social media world.

Jennifer is a social business blogger with ZDNet. She writes about how companies use social media and enterprise 2.0 technologies. She has an affinity for privacy, reputation, and security issues as it pertains to social media. Jennifer has been a communications professional for more than 15 years and has led or supported interactive social networking efforts for industry conferences including SOURCE Boston, RSA Conference and Black Hat USA, and founded the Security Twits, a community for network security professionals. She also co-hosts the Quick’n’Dirty Social Media Podcast with Aaron Strout and is a founding member of Technically Women, a communal blog project.

How Jennifer got into blogging: Jennifer has always been a writer and is really interested in technology. She was a journalist for two different newspapers before she moved into a public relations role about ten years ago. She moved to the San Francisco area and started working for a boutique PR firm specializing in security clients. On the side, she used to co-own an underground Bay area ‘metal scene’ website for music fans where she had a community management role. After the website was sold, she did straight PR for awhile and currently works in the network security industry in a strategic communications role. Seeing a need to connect her fellow security industry colleagues a few years ago, she established a “Security Twits” list, and through doing this she got to know a lot of people. What they ended up with were hundreds of people on the list and more connections via Twitter being made amongst security industry professionals. ZDNet reached out to her to write because of her efforts with this, so she sort of ‘accidentally’ stumbled into blogging due to her curiosity.

What Jennifer hopes for social media in the future: What Jennifer would like to see is for social media to become more integrated. She says that she would like to see it stop getting talked about as this ‘shiny new thing’ that people have to get good at for business. She says, “Social media doesn’t have to be its own department – it should be a cross-functional collaborative effort. It should be a value-add offered to clients without charging for it. There are a lot of specialties – if you position yourself as a ‘specialist’ you’re doing a disservice if you’re only offering one slice of the pie. Social media is one slice, and not the whole pie.”

A few thoughts from Jennifer on being an influencer: There are lots of posts on how to be an influencer, get more followers, network better, and so forth. Jennifer asks, “Who are the people you see doing the best work at this?” She says that it’s the people who have their heads down doing the work and not making spectacles of themselves. Jennifer says, “Do your job and share your knowledge; it doesn’t matter if you help ten people or 10,000 people. Know that the people who are reading you read because they want to, not because they have to.”

Connect with Jennifer on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog (and ZDNet blog)

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

Sarah attended Millikin University near Chicago where she started off as a Musical Theater major. Within the first month, she decided that major was more of a hobby for her and she switched to Communications based on recommendations from some of her advisors. Early on in her PR career, she discovered a deep love for non-profits and last year she decided to venture out on her own to create Sevans Strategy, where she works with non-profits and “social good” companies to help them craft their communications campaigns. Sarah also blogs at www.prsarahevans.com and was recently listed in Forbes’ 14 Power Women to Follow on Twitter, invesp’s Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2009 and ereleases’ 30 PR Experts to Follow on Twitter.

How Sarah started learning about social media: Online communications is what she loves. Sarah wrote her first computer program in 6th grade and won a state award for it. Her mother is a librarian, and she had Sarah and her siblings using computers at a young age. She was constantly looking for ways to stay in touch online with people. Back then, Sarah says these resources weren’t even called social media – they were called ‘emerging technologies’.

Who has influenced Sarah: Peter Shankman has been a big influence on Sarah. She says that he has been very generous with his time and advice, particularly in support of her venturing out on her own last year. Sarah also appreciates the guidance she received from Jackie Mitchell, her first boss, who was a MarComm Director for the Red Cross in Chicago at the time. She says that Jackie challenged her to never be afraid to share her ideas, and to work like you’re not afraid to be fired. (great advice that all of us could take!)

Where Sarah sees social media going in the future: From a PR standpoint, Sarah believes it’s going to become more integrated – social media itself will be less of a separate entity unto itself and more integrated into marketing practices. She also feels there will be even more interest generated in location based applications, and wider acceptance and embracing of these tools. People will be checking for a company’s presence online as well as looking for its community involvement and participation in activities, and we will see more companies ‘crowdsourcing’ for ideas from customers. Sarah feels we will see more practical uses for social media, not necessarily innovation-wise, but more day-to-day uses for them.

Connect with Sarah on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

Last week at the ERE Expo, I had dinner at a very swanky restaurant called Suite and Tender. Upon arriving at the restaurant, I checked in via Foursquare. The following morning, I received this message on Twitter:

I was surprised to see this, and then I thought “What a great way to let your customers know you noticed them!” Obviously this interaction stayed with me, and I think there should be more companies taking advantage of these geotagging services in many different ways. For example, Starbucks recently partnered with Foursquare to create a new Barista badge and the chance to offer customers who check in special offers like invitations to events and other alternatives to just giving out coupons.

So, how can other companies really take advantage of this whole geotagging craze? Well – what about letting people who check in know that you’re hiring at that location? Or offer a special discount to the 100th person to check in? Or, like above, simply acknowledging that you noticed they had been to your business and thanking them? Catching your target audience off guard with your attentiveness to their interest in or patronage to your business will leave them remembering the interaction.

You can run a very simple search to monitor the geotagging of individuals to your location. Let’s say you’re Macy’s and you want to say hello to the customers checking in via Foursquare at a Chicago location: simply plug ‘4sq.com/* Chicago “Macy’s”‘ into search.twitter.com and see the latest customers to check in. Perhaps send them an @ with a request to DM so you can send them a promo code for their next check-in. Or, if you’re Seattle-Tacoma Airport – search ‘4sq.com/* (“Seattle Tacoma Airport” OR “Seatac Airport”)‘ and find all the people flying in and out of Seattle, and offer up some helpful information on ground transportation or perhaps some weather info if there are delays. The possibilities are endless.

I think as recruiting professionals there is so much more we can learn about prospective candidates from geotagging. I encourage all of you to check out Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Foursquare because I truly believe these services are going to be huge in the future of our job functions. Part of successfully engaging our target audience is understanding patterns, likes, and dislikes. When an individual uses a geotagging service, they are publicly providing us with that information about themselves. I’m surprised more companies haven’t jumped at the opportunity to use these services to reach out yet. Keep an eye out for more leverage of geotagging by companies over the next several months. I believe there will be a big increase in engagement thanks to them.

This will be a short post, because I don’t want to pay too much attention to this. Marketers, social media professionals, and PR types have already written about this topic ad nauseam, so there’s no sense in beating a dead horse.

An echo chamber in this sense is defined as any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space. Typically, this might seem to be reserved for media professionals but I see a lot of this seeping into our little recruiting community. We all chirp in (pun intended) to add no value to an article, just wanting to say “Me too!” Or we hawk for follows/clicks/reads/validation and try to pass it off as authentic attention.

Hey – I do it too. From time to time, I jump up and down and say “Look at me! I want attention!” just like all of you do. We all want others to read our stuff, so we pimp it to our networks.

Just a couple of things to consider when operating in the echo chamber:

• When was the last time you checked your blogroll? I’ll bet there are blogs on there that haven’t been updated in quite some time, and other blogs that you never read but you put on there because you think it makes you look educated and well-read.
• Are you a quid pro quo blogger? That is, do you only link to another blog if they link to yours in return?
• Do you write original content, or do you simply regurgitate what others are writing and say “Yeah, me too”?
• Do you have ‘deals’ with certain people to pimp their stuff if they’ll agree to pimp yours, and never stray far from this band of brothers?

The whole purpose of a network SHOULD BE to enrich its members and add new viewpoints to allow for new perspective. If the network is closed, the same stale ideas will keep getting thrown around and new ideas will rarely be introduced. In my opinion, this is not a network but rather a good old boy’s club, where members hang around patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome they are.

I challenge you to think about who you promote and why, and consider reading and learning outside of your comfort zone. There are so many little-known authors, industry professionals, and resources to learn from outside of our recruiting community. Work on broadening your scope of learning and you’ll start to discover how much you actually don’t know. Only then can the true learning begin.

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What Jennifer had to say about Ken: “Ken is a stellar blogger, though he still flies slightly under the radar and he shouldn’t. He is a master in the practical application of social media and is also a growing thought leader, as evidenced by his blog posts and tweets. He’s definitely a rising star.”

Ken works at Ernst & Young and  heads up social media practice  as their Director of Social Media. They provide advisory services to brands globally in a variety of areas. He helps his clients better understand the digital space and use web analytics to better strategize. He was originally approached by Ernst & Young recruiters about this position via LinkedIn.

Ken attended college at Central Michigan University where he studied Psychology. He ended up spending more time in the computer lab where he taught himself programming and started doing this as a freelancer. This ‘sidetrack’ turned into twelve years of working with agencies doing ditigal marketing and advertising. Ultimately, Ken began running digital operations and analytics projects and found himself moving away from the nuts and bolts of the tech side. Of his formal education, he says that his time studying psychology has helped him be a good communicator. It helps him with management – when you’re working with many different people all day long you need to understand different personalities.

Why Ken believes Jennifer recommended him: Jennifer is a very “pay it forward” kind of person. Ken does alot of this through sharing posts and links – he reaches out to people to learn about others and find ways he can help out. He tries to positively promote data and analytics professionals and help people understand and champion the analytics of social media. Not a lot of people spend time in this area, and Ken believes that’s what caught Jennifer’s eye.

What Ken loves about social media: Ken got involved in social media primarily to focus on brands and clients with regards to strategy and analytics. He hopes to help blaze some new trails with thought leadership for analytics, namely how to standardize and formalize it, and how to use this data to make good business decisions. Ken also believes in developing the use of social media for internal purposes. While working with a consumer healthcare company at one point, he helped them develop an internal social network for the company’s employees. This particular company primarily had an older demographic of employees who were not very comfortable with the tools, but had a lot of knowledge and wisdom to share. They wanted to create a culture of innovation, and Ken worked with the company’s leadership to help them understand the audience. Ultimately, he assisted them with selecting the appropriate technology to reach the audience, actively engage them, and develop community.

Where Ken sees social media going in the future: Ken says that we’re past the “what is social media” question now, and over the next year, companies big and small will start getting serious about this in ways that make sense to them. Companies will begin exploring the right social media ‘prescription’ for them based on industry, culture, customer base, and so forth. The ‘Why’ and the ‘What’ will be replaced with the ‘How’, best practices will be brought forth, and we will see niche uses evolve.

Connect with Ken on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog