I use a social network aggregation tool to track several keyword searches, both for personal and professional use. One of the search columns I have, naturally, is for the keyword “sourcecon“. I want to know who’s talking about it and referring to it so I can respond when it’s appropriate.
A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing some tweets showing up in my search columns that didn’t contain the search terms I set in place. They weren’t “retweets” from people whom I follow, so I was curious what was going on. Continue reading “Why Using Keywords In Your URLs Is Important” »
These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I 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.
What Steve had to say about Amanda:“Amanda is an astute trendwatcher and uses these insights to advise some of the biggest companies in the world, all at a very young age.”
Amanda is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. She earned her degree in Integrated Marketing and has worked in roles utilizing social technologies from the very start of her professional career. She joined Edelman in 2008 and has quickly made a name for herself there. Currently she works as a Senior Social Media Strategist supporting account teams in digital practice. She consults with clients about what people are saying about their brand and helps keep them culturally relevant. Amanda also blogs at We Are The Digital Kids.
How college impacted her interest in social media: Emerson did a great job of making social media part of the curriculum from the start. During her sophomore year, Amanda went to a PRSSA conference where Richard Edelman was speaking on digital and how it is changing business in general, let alone PR. For next two years she immersed herself in learning about digital and how it could change a company’s daily activities. During this time, she continued to hear about social media from professors and business speakers at school. She learned that getting involved in this world would give her the opportunity to be at forefront of a company and still grow and learn on a daily basis.
How making personal connections impacted Amanda’s career: When Amanda first started blogging, Rick Murray, President of Edelman Digital, reached out to her via Twitter. He proved that he is a digital native in the sense that he plays and lives in the space and it is as much a part of his life as it is his work. Rick gave Amanda encouragement to speak up in meetings and do the same things online. As well, Amanda reached out to Richard Edelman right before she went to the PRSSA conference and he responded and stayed in touch while she completed school. He has continued to be supportive of her whole career with Edelman.
Some of Amanda’s thoughts on social media and GenY: Amanda believes there is a misconception that young ‘’digital kids” should be advising companies and digital experts from the start. She says that digital kids come in all age ranges – not just GenY. Digital native status is more dependent on how one lives their life as opposed to when one was born.
Where Amanda sees social media going in the future: One of the most exciting things for Amanda is seeing how what’s happening in digital is not just a skin companies can put on their current activity – it has to be engrained in traditional business operations. Companies will have to adjust many processes to adapt to how social media and digital have changed how business is done. She gives an example of Dell and how they have gotten into social media from a campaign standpoint, but more importantly that they are changing customer service in a radical way by making customers feel they are truly collaborating with the company. She says that 800 numbers are not as important any more for younger generations; they want to be able to reach customer service on Twitter , Facebook, and so forth. Amanda believes that companies need to pay attention to these desires in order to stay relevant and that we will see many more companies embracing this method of outreach in the coming months.
These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I 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.
What Aliza had to say about Laura:“Laura is excellent at branding and marketing herself…this gal is a powerhouse, incredibly smart and seeing her moderate a panel recently made me realize how insightful she is.”
A week has passed and I haven’t even uploaded all my photos from Minneapolis. Call me a slacker, but I’m still trying to absorb my experience at the Social Recruiting Summit that was held at Best Buy’s HQ. Being a presenter at an event always gives me a different perspective than if I just get to attend and learn. I get nervous before I present, which is silly because usually I am WAY over-prepared, and I settle right into a comfortable place within about 2 minutes. But it’s how I roll. This having been my very first Social Recruiting Summit, I had no prior experience with which to compare – and looking back now, I think this was probably the most emotion I’ve felt in a 24 hour period coming into a conference at which I was to present. A couple of reasons for this:
The last time I presented to a sizable crowd was at last June’s Fordyce Forum in Las Vegas. I presented on how to Incorporate Social Media Into Your Recruiting Plan in a 3-hour pre-conference workshop. I felt rusty.
I was presenting in front of several people whom I hold in high regard and who’ve never seen me present live before, including but not limited to Chris Hoyt, Jessica Lee, Eric Winegardner, Jennifer McClure, Jeremy Langhans, Marvin Smith, Anthony Knierim, and my colleagues from Waggener Edstrom. Some, like Jennifer McClure, I’ve known for years and consider to be close friends. The pressure was on!
I sat at the ‘blogging tables’ throughout the day, writing down my thoughts on the various presentations and stewing over my own. Being the wrap-up speaker comes with its own challenges – you’re the only thing standing between your audience and a frosty beverage, so whatever you have to say needs to be extra memorable. However, having a week now to digest and critique, I feel I did a good job with my presentation, and the feedback I’ve received from it has confirmed this feeling. For those who were unable to tune in, during my presentation we did about a 15 minute exercise on developing our own personal marketing plans. We used the POST method, derived from Groundswell, written by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li. Feedback from this activity has been wonderful – I have had several people proactively reach out to me to let me know that they were adding details to the framework they came up with in my presentation and are eager to really get more focused in their online efforts. Hearing this warms my heart, and I look forward to seeing how they develop.
Having Minneapolis host a national recruiting event was long overdue. Minneapolis has put itself on the map over the last several years with its many heavily attended locally-based recruiting events, including the Minnesota Recruiters events and the Minnesota Technical Recruiters Network. However, Minneapolis also has a rich social media community that I’ve grown to know and love, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet many people who I knew online through Twitter but had never met in person before. As a former Cincinnati gal myself, it pains me to say this (not really…) but if the 513 wants to host a Social Recruiting Summit in the future, they’ve got some big shoes to fill.
Highlights from the conference, from my experience, included:
The pre-conference Tweetup, hosted and sponsored graciously by LinkUp. Lots of the local Minneapolis social media community members attended this in addition to all the recruiters who were in town for the event. It was a great ‘sandbox’ evening – everyone played quite nicely and great new friendships were begun.
Best Buy – truly a wonderful company, not only for hosting the event (and I hear they also hosted at least 2 more events over the remainder of the week – wow!) but for giving us a glimpse into what they do with their social presence, not just from a recruiting standpoint but also from a marketing, financial, and customer service perspective. Those guys and gals are cutting edge.
Josh Ingalls and Andy Drish of Principal Financial Group – a campus relations guy (Josh) and a marketing guy (Andy). AWESOME… I believe our jobs are more marketing-based than many really understand, and it was great to hear an actual marketing person speaking at a recruiting event. And the part of me that has been doing work with campus relations jumped for joy at Josh. Thanks, guys!
My roommate (for the 3rd time now I think!), Jennifer McClure – many of you know the saga of my 2600 mile move from Cincinnati to Washington state last summer, and Jennifer accompanied me on most of this journey. Any chance I can get to spend with her is special, since we no longer live near each other (we seriously used to live down the road from one another!)
Meeting some Minneapolis friends – something I honestly didn’t think I would ever get to do. Just through 6 degrees of separation, I think outside of my Cincinnati and Washington state connections, I have more connections with people in Minneapolis than anywhere else. Specifically, Keith Privette, Steve Lewis, Kate-Madonna Hindes, Erica Mayer, Nicole Bodem, and Lisa Grimm, it was nice to meet you in person along with everyone else!
Things I’d like to see at the next Social Recruiting Summit (which incidentally is being held 80 miles from my current residence, in Seattle WA!):
More metrics – now, for those who know me, you know that it hurts for me to say I want to see MORE numbers (I loathe metrics) but these are needed in order to make a business case for the continued use of social media for our recruitment efforts.
More small business examples - Paul DeBettignies gave us a glimpse into what he does as a one-man shop when it comes to social media presence. I think we need more examples of this, as employment trends will continue to move more and more toward companies hiring for contract as opposed to FTE. We need to know more about the how-to from an individual contributor standpoint.
More marketing and more PR – once again, I think there is more marketing and PR in our current job duties than we’d like to admit. I would like to see pure marketing and/or PR professionals do presentations at these events. These are the people whose bread and butter is based on the things that we really are just skimming the surface of.
BIG thanks:
ERE – David Manaster and his team always put on a good event. I appreciate being given the opportunity to present here and I am looking forward to being able to help out with the next one – just let me know what I can do!
Best Buy – gracious hosts and wonderful examples of how to really do things right and be thought leaders. Thank you for giving to all of us in so many ways!
Kris Dunn – for being a fun and engaging emcee – I’ve been a fan of Fistful Of Talent and HR Capitalist for awhile, and it was great to finally have the chance to meet and chat with you!
Paul DeBettignies – you are the poster child for going above and beyond the call of duty. You lobbied hard to bring ERE to your city and brought all of your worlds together for one big awesome party. Thanks for being a gracious host. I hope you’ll come to Seattle and allow us out here to return the favor to you!
I’ll post the link to the video from my presentation as soon as (or IF) it can be recovered (technical difficulties). In the meantime, here’s the Prezi version of it. As well, here’s a neat transcript of the #socialrecruiting hashtag from the day of the Summit as well as the day before and the day after, created at www.wthashtag.com. I look forward to seeing many of you again in Seattle!
With the availability of so much information these days via social media, I feel that if you’re not constantly putting yourself in front of your audiences, you take a chance on them forgetting about you. In about three weeks, I am doing a presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis on how recruiting professionals can do this without being annoying to their audiences.
Since I tend to be a bit of an over-sharer on Twitter, last week I decided to take the entire week off from tweeting via @researchgoddess, just to see what would happen. I also didn’t write any new blog posts.
My guess is that most of you did not notice, which is what I expected to happen. However, even though I wasn’t actively posting new content, I still gained a couple new Twitter followers, and my blog continued to be visited. The volume to my blog went down only slightly, and the search terms with which people found my blog were a little different:
2 weeks ago
last week
Twitter was a different story. I stopped tweeting on Sunday the 18th. Over the course of the week I had a total of only 13 tweets to me…a significant change. The first tweet to me wasn’t even until 3 days after I stopped. There were no tweets for previous blog posts or links that I had shared in the past. Only one person, @mosy311, made an observation that I hadn’t tweeted in awhile. I had 5,141 followers last Saturday, and as of Sunday evening, I had 5,143 followers. Over the course of the week I gained and lost quite a bit but I netted only 1 new follower. Basically – I was forgotten. I used Twitalyzer to check out some metrics over the course of the week:
My conclusion? The search-ability of my blog and the keywords I use on it kept it active and visited. The terms with which people found my blog changed, some for the better. (I love the fact that search for “AT&T sourcing” brought traffic to my blog!) Twitter however, appears to require more updating and attentive interaction in order to stay relevant. Even though search engines like Bing and Google now pick up tweets and other social traffic, it’s still important to be in front of your audience’s eyes and continue to update. I suspect that if I went another 1-2 weeks without blogging, these numbers would change and get lower. But it would seem that occasional neglect of a blog is less impactful to one’s online identity than neglect of your Twitter account – if you’ve got an established audience as I do.
One thing I did discover while being silent this week is that life DOES go on when you’re not twittering, and I enjoyed the break. But don’t be too sad – I am going to start tweeting again now!
Spotlight: 
Spotlight: 
My roommate (for the 3rd time now I think!), Jennifer McClure – many of you know the saga of my 
