ResearchGoddess

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:

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. My presentation topic was a potentially controversial one – How To Market Yourself With Social Media… Without Being Annoying!

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!

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending GasPedal‘s BlogWell conference which was hosted at Microsoft in the Seattle area. I was really looking forward to this event, as I usually attend recruiting events where social media is certainly a hot topic but we never really get beyond skimming the surface of it or really dig deep into the potential of how social technologies fit in with recruiting strategies today. I certainly was not disappointed where content was concerned. Of the 8 big brands which shared some of their companies’ best practices I was able to catch Boeing (Todd Blecher, Communications Director presenting), Pemco Insurance (Rod Brooks, VP, Chief Marketing Officer presenting), Nokia (Molly Schonthal, Social Media Communications presenting) and Intel (Bryan Rhoads, Digital Strategist presenting). Also presenting were Microsoft, ExOfficio, Starbucks, and Xerox. I loved how Boeing is running feature stories on their website of the people who work for the company, and how Nokia has used creative partnerships with people like the @IceCreamMan to embrace the pure ‘fun’ of social media while still driving a business agenda.

For me, attending BlogWell was a dream come true. I finally got the meat and potatoes I’ve been desperately looking for with regards to learning about how other big companies are really getting themselves out there with social media. There should be more recruiting professionals attending events like this to learn important things about marketing and communication via social channels. After all, we are similar creatures. Our jobs involve much more marketing and PR than most of us realize. And knowing this, there is something that plagues me…

With all of the effort that many companies are putting into their social media presences, it surprises me that the recruiting organizations at so many companies aren’t proactively partnering with the marketing, communications, and/or PR organizations to leverage their work for filling job openings. I had some sidebar conversations with a few people over the course of the day, just out of sheer curiosity for what their recruiters are doing with social media, and most of the folks I spoke with either said their recruiting is just starting to dabble in social media, or that they have no clue what it is or how to use it in the first place. This is surprising to me!

It’s great to hear about the way other companies are getting their marketing message out via social channels, but shouldn’t recruiting also be participating in this practice? Why not capitalize on the communication that’s already happening, recruiters? These are the places where your target audience spends its leisure time… go to them and get involved. Get to know your marketing team and learn what message they are putting out, and use it to your advantage when you recruit. According to what I’m seeing, you’ll stand out from the crowd by embracing this.

If you want to get started in learning about some of these things, I’d recommend getting yourself to Minneapolis on May 17th for the Social Recruiting Summit. Let me know if you’re going to be there, because I will be!

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!

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 Dave: “Dave’s star is already on the rise. As a P&G brand manager he’s helped evangelize social media within the organization and become sort of an unofficial spokesperson. His writing on related topics is insightful and he balances personal with corporate brand effectively (no easy task).”

Dave Knox is a Brand Manager, Digital Innovation for P&G Productions, a new role for him in the past few months. Prior to that, he was a brand manager for digital business strategy with P&G Corporate Marketing. Dave attended college at Miami University of Ohio in Oxford, OH where he studied marketing and entrepreneurship. He joined P&G right out of college and has worked his way up in the company ever since. Dave writes a blog called Hard Knox Life where he discusses a brand manager’s point of view at the crossroads of marketing, media and technology. In addition, he has been been named by AdAge as “1 of 25 Media People You Should Follow on Twitter” and a “2010 Social Media Superstar” by Media Industry News.   Dave is also active in the marketing industry, serving on the National Council of Pi Sigma Epsilon, the Advisory Board for Brandweek’s “Cincinnati’s Agenda 360 Consumer Marketing Steering Committee”, and as a speaker at conferences such as the Web 2.0 Summit, SXSW Interactive and IEG Sponsorship.

How Dave got interested in blogging: Dave said that social media gives him the opportunity to to remain connected within the marketing communication world. When he worked with P&G’s WalMart customer team several years ago, he was yearning for connection with the marketing community and feeling part of the discussion with the team. He started blogging to fill this void and found that he was able to connect with great minds in Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and New York without actually having to go to these places.

Some of Dave’s thoughts on how social media is changing things: Dave looks forward to continuing to establish himself at forefront of how the world of marketing is changing because of social media. He enjoys driving change for the industry and leveraging technology in the right ways that benefit both brands and consumers. He says that what is going on right now is similar to what occurred in the early 90s with internet revolution, and that this revolution is not just beneficial for brands, but for people as well. When asked what the coolest project was that he’s worked on, he said it’s where he’s at right now. Dave says that P&G gives him the opportunity to think about a company that’s been around for a long time and how it can migrate its business strategies to digital environments. However, he says that social media was not meant to be a “career path” – but that digital is an enabler. He believes that the world is going to be digital within the next ten years, and that social media will be a driver for this to occur.

Tomorrow, Blogwell will be in Cincinnati, and as per Dave’s blog post, there will be a tweetup this evening on Wednesday following the conference hosted by Cincinnati Social Media. In addition, Cincinnati Social Media members who wish to attend the conference will receive a special discount for Blogwell.

Connect with Dave 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: 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)