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:

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

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 Jason had to say about Kipp: “Kipp is super smart and has a real grasp of social media. He’s got a year or two of experience under his belt working with real brands and real clients, too, unlike a lot of folks in that younger age group who set up a Twitter account for their dad’s car lot and call themselves ‘experts.’ He has an interest and a passion for B2B social media which automatically sets him a part from a lot of people. Kipp brings a pure enthusiasm coupled with a traditional PR agency/firm training to the table. He’ll be working with major brands for a long time and will cultivate quite a following as a result.”

Kipp earned a B.S. in Journalism with an emphasis in Public Relations from Marshall University. He recently (like last week!) took a marketing position with HubSpot in the Boston area to assist in making the HubSpot Blog the best Internet marketing blog on the web. Prior to that, he was Social Media Marketing Manager at Howard Merrell & Partners, a full service marketing and advertising firm in Raleigh, NC. During his career Kipp has successfully developed and implemented social media campaigns and plans for clients in business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries. In addition to his work at the agency, he is the publisher of SocialMediaB2B.com, a multi-author blog dedicated to providing examples and thought leadership for B2B companies planning to incorporate social media into their marketing strategy. Kipp also blogs on technology and social media at his personal blog DigitalCapitalism.com. As if he doesn’t already have enough on his plate with these things, until recently Kipp helped organize local Raleigh-area events including Triangle Social Media Club, tweetups, barcamps, Ignite Raleigh, and other events that focus on technology and social media.

What Kipp loves about social media: He went to college to learn PR and took a job out of school working in public relations. Three to four years ago, he began noticing the beginnings of the social web influence on public relations. This opened his eyes to the bigger opportunity, and he started to spend a lot of time learning how it would tie into everything. Overall, Kipp believes this is the best time ever to be a communicator. He says there is so much opportunity and possibility, and there is no excuse to not be well-informed. It’s our responsibility and obligation to create systems for ourselves to keep informed. More people will continue to do this into 2010.

Where Kipp sees social media going in the future: As a guy who has spent a significant part of his career working with B2B clients, Kipp feels that B2B is going to continue to be a hot topic in the future of social media; he thinks there will be a big rise in B2B adoption. 2009 was when everyone talked about ROI, and 2010 will be the year will people will figure it out. Kipp also thinks that mobile is going to get bigger and that there will be many more opportunities for location-based social media technologies. Real-time & implications on search are really going to play out in 2010, and Kipp believes there will be hardcore battling amongst search engines for the most up-to-date information.

Connect with Kipp on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• 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:

What David had to say about Kaitlyn: “…she’s making a great deal of headway at Ogilvy with clients and also training their global employee base.”

When Kaityn was in college, ‘social media’ as we know it didn’t exist.  Social networking was all about Friendster, YouTube didn’t exist, and Napster was the latest craze. Kaitlyn graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in International Relations – not exactly what you’d expect for someone who would eventually enter the social media world. But like many others, she accidentally stumbled into it.  Kaitlyn had moved from Boston to DC, and her boss connected her with a few of his local contacts.  One was a boutique word-of-mouth marketing shop – and after a few months there she was totally hooked.  After a few years, major agencies were starting their own in-house social media teams and so she took a great opportunity with Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Group.  She says that her default work mode is a pace that many find frenetic – so social media really suits her well.  It’s constantly changing, and you have to keep up to stay competitive.  Kaitlyn says that she really digs being on the bleeding edge – and social media is something she loves both professionally and personally because of the way it’s redefined communication between people.

Why Kaitlyn believes David recommended her: Kaitlyn jokes that it was probably because of her rock star social media karaoke skills that have been on display at bars from Austin to Chicago to multiple ports on the Eastern seaboard. (Kaitlyn, I love karaoke too, and should we ever find ourselves at the same event, I’d love to challenge you to a sing-off… hehe) Yet in all seriousness, the tweet ups/meet ups that she frequents have allowed her to take her professional passion offline and geek out with people who have similar interests as she.  At the end of the day it’s always about who you really know – and she feels fortunate to become true friends with a great group of people whom she respects, and it would appear they respect her back.

What Kaitlyn loves about social media: During the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Kaitlyn got to work with Lenovo, an Ogilvy client, on the Voices of the Olympic Games campaign.  She says one of the few things she loves more than social media is the Olympics and working on this project, where 100 athletes from 25 countries were given laptops and their blogs and multimedia content were aggregated throughout the Games, allowed her to blend the two. When reflecting on the experience, she said it was a real thrill to travel to Beijing and be one of the first people to execute an Olympic social media effort. This campaign really let her cut her teeth on executing a successful global campaign.

Where Kaitlyn sees social media going in the future: Kaitlyn specifically noted that she believes Facebook will become a ‘social web outpost’. Facebook functionality has gotten to a place where brands can skillfully use the platform as a hub for all their social activities. Look for brands to really start knocking their Facebook presences out of the park in 2010. She also believes we will see enterprise change – many major corporations are ready to to adopt a social brand framework and re-think the way they approach marketing, communications, CRM and more.  She says we are starting to get beyond the pilot programs and social media ‘experiments’, though there are of course still a huge number of companies still looking for these types of programs to unlock budgets and prove effectiveness.

Connect with Kaitlyn on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

These days, everything is a mashup – our gadgets and gizmos aren’t worth purchasing unless they perform a million different functions. So no big surprise that our jobs are becoming mashups as well, and I think that as recruiting professionals, our roles within our companies are about as complex as they get. I wrote a post earlier this year discussing the various roles that recruiters play in our daily duties. There are certain aspects of this job however that are becoming more and more important, but I don’t think a lot of recruiting professionals really understand the impact and the value of these components of our jobs.

Our jobs are all about building relationships. Such is the case with marketers, advertisers, and PR professionals. Our desired end result of building the relationship is really what separates us. Here are some very simple definitions:

• Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
• Advertising is a paid communication in which the message is controlled by the sponsor, and is designed to gain attention and motivate action.
• Public Relations is planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its public by telling an organization’s story to its public.

Subtle differences between the three, but the basic premise with all of these functions is to establish a line of communication between two or more entities.

Recruiting professionals would do themselves a favor to understand some of the job responsibilities that come with being in marketing, advertising, and public relations. For example: there is much more to candidate advertising (aka job posting) than simply plopping a boring job description into a post template and slapping it up on some job board. There is more to recruitment marketing than bulk emailing a spammy message with an e-newsletter attachment to your entire prospective client database in the hopes of gaining one or two additional job orders. And there is certainly more to creating good PR for your company than simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page.

What I would like to do with this post is invite professionals who perform these unique functions to leave a piece of advice for recruiters to incorporate into their job function. Yes, I did work at a PR agency for a little bit, but that doesn’t make me a good source for PR strategy by any stretch of the imagination. I learned a lot while I was there, and I use that knowledge in my daily function now with AT&T, but I’m looking forward to hearing from the marketers, the advertisers, and the PR pros who are out there in the trenches on a daily basis. How do we, as recruiting professionals, utilize the strategies you exercise daily in our own efforts in finding, attracting, and hiring talent for our companies?

When leaving a comment, please let us know what job function you perform, and the industry in which you work. I look forward to an interactive discussion!

Last month I was invited to do a guest lecture for Dr. Kaye Sweetser‘s PR Writing class at the University of Georgia. Dr. Sweetser, better known on Twitter as @kaye, and I became acquainted because of our common interests in PR and the Florida Gators. (we are both alums!) She asked me if I’d be interested in doing a virtual guest lecture on writing a good resume, utilizing Skype, and I jumped at the opportunity. The students were engaging and they spent some time following the presentation asking great questions about online presence, resume writing, and PR in general. Here are some of the highlights that Dr. Sweetser pulled together.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMQWHR1AkPA]