Here’s a quick re-cap of why social media is great for job search and personal brand building.

Social Recruitment is HUGE!

An astonishing 90% of employers either use, or plan to use, social media for recruiting – that’s a 10% rise over last year – and 63% claim to have successfully hired through social networks. Moreover, after referrals, internal transfers, and direct sourcing, recruiters claim that social networks bring in the highest quality candidates[1].

Despite the enormous potential and demonstrated success of social recruiting, only 48% of job seekers interact with employers on professional networks (e.g. LinkedIn and Xing), and 29% on social networks (e.g. Facebook or Orkut)[2].

Social Media is Your Canvas

A job application is no longer about an inflated description of past experiences and a laundry list of skills and abilities, it’s about you as a dynamic multidimensional person – your interests, your ambitions, and most importantly, your personal approach to career development and life in general.  Use social media as a canvas for painting the best picture of yourself, a picture recruiters can’t help but look at.

In fact, many recruiters are so adept at using social media for recruitment they can spend months, maybe even years, following passive candidates (i.e. those not looking for a job)  they believe would be a good fit with the company. By monitoring a candidate’s blog posts, tweets and profile changes, recruiters can customize their approach and come with a job offer so well matched to the candidate’s skills, abilities and personality, they won’t know if they’re being courted for a job or a date.

Tools for success

Whether you’re striving to be a social media content creator or a more skillful social media consumer, here’s a few tools and tricks to help get you started in your social media job hunt. Focusing on two types social media platforms: Professional Networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo), and Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook, Orkut).

Professional Networks

Research tells us that 66% of job seekers want to connect their professional profile with those of recruiters, and 74% of job seekers want to search for available jobs on professional networks like LinkedIn, Viadeo. and Xing[3]. While it’s clear most job seekers are aware of the benefits of professional networks for job search and personal brand building, how many know how to really leverage these networks to actually land a job? Here’s how:

• Keep your profile up to date: Apparently LinkedIn has predictive algorithms that can tell when someone is looking to move on from their current job – something to do with the way a user starts updating their profile. This is one more reason why you should always keep your profile up to date.
• Get recommendations/references: This can be a tedious task for a young job seeker but it is worth the effort. Recommendations bring you higher in search results, and portray you as a more credible candidate in the eyes of recruiters. If possible, try to get an old boss or colleague to write you a recommendation – often it’s easier to write them one first.  If you have no previous work experience, ask your professors or people you do extra curricular activities with – a soccer coach or volunteer group leader, for example. It’s always best to try and get quality recommendations from people more experienced than yourself.
• Use key words: Pay close attention to how you present and express yourself on your profile. Keep your professional summary, list of skills and work experience concise and to the point, using as many key search words as possible. Recruiters use key words to locate and narrow down the candidate pool for a specific position.
• Link to professional content: Improve your appeal by linking out to blogs or articles of professional relevance, as well as other relevant groups you belong to. This is a great way to highlight your interests. Moreover, integrate your other social media activities into your professional profile – Blog, Twitter, personal website, Slideshare, etc.
• Connect and build your online network: Import your email contacts and get connected to classmates, colleagues and professional acquaintances. Having common connections with a recruiter on a professional network will inevitably help validate you, and the more contacts you have in common with a recruiter, the higher you rise in their candidate search. The best way to keep building your professional network is to connect with people immediately after meeting them in real-life (i.e. try to collect as many business cards as possible and introduce yourself through the online network with a message like: “It was great meeting you at the ____ today, let’s keep in touch via LinkedIn”.  But remember, timing is critical, if you wait to long the person may not remember you, and therefore may not accept your connection request.

• Follow your target employers: Most professional networks allows users to follow companies. If you really want to work for a particular company, click “follow” and activate the alerts to get notified when someone changes positions, when 1^st level connections join the company, or when the company posts new jobs.  

Social Networks

Job hunting and personal brand building through social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, hi5) is just as useful, and often more fun, than through professional social networks. In fact, today, 20% of job seekers use social networks to find career-related information – that’s an 8% rise over last year. However, although 35% job seekers still feel social networks are an inappropriate platform for career networking, 42% are comfortable with employers contacting them through social networks if they met them in real-life[4].  Here are some quick tricks to help you land a job through social networks like Twitter, Blogger and Facebook:

• Interact with your future boss: don’t be afraid to connect, share, or tweet your potential future boss or colleagues in an effort to learn more about the company, industry and employment experience. Although it’s best to try and be specific with your interaction, something like: “ I read a great article on the ___ industry today that I’d like to share with you, I think it will have major implications for your firm, what do you think?”
• Comment, share and re-tweet the content of experts: showing you are interested and up-to- date on the latest ideas, concepts and discussions going on in your field is an indication of your commitment and desire to learn. Make sure to link up all your social networking activities with your professional profile – an insightful tweet or post on a company or industry you’re interested in will have a much more profound effect if it appears on multiple platforms simultaneously.
• Be seen on #HireFriday: Every Friday, tweet the hash-tag #HireFriday along with a short description of yourself and a link to your online resume or professional profile. The better your online profile is, the more often you will be “re-tweeted” by recruiters  following this feed.
• Join Groups, Follow Pages and Lists: most employers have created groups or pages on Facebook to engage with job seekers in a fun and interactive way. If you’re interested in a job with Cisco, PWC, Bayer or O2, etc., then you should certainly follow their respective Facebook career pages. Moreover, job boards like Entrypark.com have aggregated the Twitter feeds of some of the best employers. This is a simple way to receive an automated updated of available jobs and career information from some of the best employers. Check out: twitter.com/entrypark/internationalcareers

There are countless ways you can use social media to build your personal online brand and land a great job. Whether you use Xing, Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin is irrelevant, what matters is that you put yourself out there and are visible to recruiters searching for their next great candidate. Social media provides you with limitless opportunities to showcase your personality, skills and competencies. Moreover, it’s a great medium to find jobs and interact with recruiters. The best thing about social media is that it’s a long term investment – someone you engage with today may be the one to give you a job ten years down the road. Your career is boundless, and often its your most casual acquaintance that helps you realize your full potential.

You can watch this presentation for more information.

None of the points below should be new to anyone closely following the growth and development of mobile. Nonetheless, this list is just a simple reminder of why advertisers plan spend $13-14 billion in 2011 on mobile advertising, worldwide.

There are eight main reasons why the mobile medium is perfectly suited for marketing communications:

1. The growing penetration levels: in 2013 it’s expected that the total number of smartphone subscribers will reach 1.28 billion (Morgan Stanley Report, 2009)
2. It is possible to target an ad on the most precise level possible
3. Marketing messages can be sent/received/processed anytime and anywhere
4. Interactive communication and ‘calls to action’ are viable: campaign results, data and analytics can be gathered immediately and used to improve engagement)
5. The mobile channel is capable of viral marketing: the mobile device lends itself to enlarging the reach of a campaign through viral effects
6. The high response rate of correctly targeted campaigns: the response rate of mobile marketing campaigns was reported at 31%, while the same figure for permission-based email marketing is from 1% to 8%, and the response rate of printed advertising is reported to be 0.15% to 0.60%
7. Mobile marketing campaigns are relatively low-cost and cost-effective

** Updated - 8. Mobile seamlessly integrates with the physical world: the mobile channel can greatly improve the effectiveness of cross-media marketing campaigns. Right now QR codes and augmented reality are examples, in the future we will see more RFID tagging and NFC.

” …the special features of the mobile channel can be listed as: mobility and reachability, direct marketing, interactivity and two-way communication, branding, viral-marketing, time, and personalization.” – Heikki Karjaluoto et al. (2007), Insights into the implementation of mobile marketing campaigns.

What this looks like in real life. This picture was taken a few weeks ago on the Stockholm subway. Swedes are pretty much captivated by their smartphones.

In order to get some feedback on the progress of my paper, I thought it would be wise to blog a bit. I’ll attempt to adapt the style of writing to fit the medium and the audience, but for the most part I’ll simply cut and past a part of the paper into this blog. So blog lovers, please excuse the academic style writing.

Now let’s get started….

At the beginning of my paper I attempt to introduce the idea of recruitment marketing by defining recruiting (i.e. the first step in the employment relationship) as a form of market exchange akin to a high-involvement consumer market exchange (e.g. like buying a car). In this sense, the goal of recruitment marketing for the employer is to facilitate the exchange in order to maximize human capital returns (i.e. the skills, abilities, experiences the applicant can bring to the organization).

Defining employment as a market exchange forces recruitment marketers to consider job seekers as employment consumers free to choose another supplier of employment – just as a consumer may choose another product/brand. So in order to be successful in recruiting target talent, the employing company (i.e. the seller) is required to recognize potential applicants (i.e. the buyers) as valued customers of the organization, rather than simply “assets” to be owned. In this context:

-the product is the job offer
-price of the product is the salary and benefits offered (i.e. functional and symbolic)
-the place is the place of employment
-the promotion is the communication that the organization has with its prospective applicants

Adopting this perspective, recruitment marketers should focus on understanding the desires, needs and expectation of job seekers, and work towards meeting those needs by adapting and shaping the marketing mix (i.e. product, place, price, and promotion).

If the employment relationship is analogous to a market exchange, all actors party to the exchange will attempt to maximize their utility (i.e. extract the greatest value for least expenditure). In a labor market, hiring firms will attempt to attract and employ the highest quantity and quality talent for the lowest expenditure of time, money, and effort possible. In a similar fashion, job seekers attempt to obtain the greatest amout of monetary and non-monetary value possible for their respective level of human capital (i.e. skills, abilities and experience).

How can top talent negotiate this type of market exchange in order to maximize their returns?

This is where the whole analogy gets complicated. If your a top tier graduate looking for work, the market information you’re receiving can seem contradictory and confusing. As a top job seeker coming out of the best university with the best profile, you’re simultaneously told that unemployment is on the rise and companies are reducing hires, AND that there is a full on ‘war for talent’ and employers are struggling to find qualified talent. So which is it? Are top graduate supposed to be desperate buyers, taking anything they can get? Or should they use their position to leverage a better deal?

If you’re a candidate from the best University, involved in exclusive extra curricular activities, completed some of the most sought after summer internships, and a member of exclusive top talent type networks, how exactly are you supped to navigate this type of marketplace? If you really know your worth as an employment consumer, how do you negotiate this exchange in order to not only land the job, but also receive those extra benefits most ‘regular’ job seekers wouldn’t even dream of asking for?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but a few weeks ago some of my “top tier” classmates – the type of candidates employers dream of – debated this question. We came to the conclusion that, if top talent have that much value and truly posses the type of human capital employers are going to “war” over, then they should be able to enter this market exchange with at least a little bit of confidence that they hold on to something the employer wouldn’t be so flippant to loose.

We went on to joke that the next time one of us went into the negotiation round of the recruitment process, we would attempt to do what Jack Donaghy does in an episode of 30 Rock.

In this episode Jack has to negotiate licensing fees with the company that now owns NBC. While he struggles to figure out his tactics for this negotiation, he gets worked over in the salary negotiations with his trinidadian baby nurse; which teaches him that when you own or care for something of great value to the other party you can use it as leverage to get what you want. At the end of the episode he realizes he has leverage with his new employer (i.e. the life and success of NBC) and uses the same tactics as his baby nurse to get what he wants from the negotiation.

Basically, he enters the room, makes his demands, then sits back and peals open an orange while saying “so, whatcha’ wanna do?” Exactly what his baby nurse did. And he gets what he wants.

– I Can’t find a video clip, but will add one when I find it. Its 30 Rock, Season 5, Episode 15. Here’s a picture of it to give you an idea of what I mean—

Now imagine yourself, as a really top job seeker, going into the negotiation round of a job interview with the same confidence as Jack does. Wouldn’t that be amazing?! Sitting back and saying: “here are my skills, values, experiences, qualifications, etc., and these are my demands.” And then pealing open an orange while saying… “So whatcha’ wanna do…”.

I challenge any super top job seeker out there who has the confidence to do this, to do it and tell me how it went.

Image via Wikipedia

Haha, what an absolutely great name for a time-management method! Amidst thesis-writing fever and finalization of final versions of final reports, I give to the people of Handels a great tool AND a super cool example of a Thesis topic. (Why didn’t I think of that before?)

The Pomodoro technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo, while he was studying in Rome (in an extensive academic thesis, please). The steps are easy:

1. Choose one task you have to do.

2. Set your cooking timer – or whatever these things are called – to 25 minutes.

3. Work uninterrupted and finish task during this time.

4. After done, you take a little break (you’ve earned it!) and cross the task off the list.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 as necessary.  - P.S. Take a longer break every 4 Pomodoros.

The funny name, well.. is easy to explain. His cooking timer was in the shape of a tomato. Hence, Pomodoro ala Italiano! Now you have no excuses for not delivering your thesis on time/finished/of top quality. Buona Sera!

//e

I think you all should comment on her post and leave your views on the subject. My opinion is that it certainly could have a negative impact since interaction on social networks does take time, time that could have been used to study instead. On the other hand, how much do we watch television nowadays? I never (or seldom) spend time watching TV and my guess is that the average student did spend more time watching TV a few years ago. Media habits have for sure changed, but the question is if it has any impact on how much time (or effort) we spend on studying? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.

I think it’s relevant, and interesting to look into the usage of social media in a broader sense, beyond grades. (My opinion is that grades aren’t very useful anyway). What impact have one’s activities on social media on the job seeking process? How important is it that you have built an online personal presence when applying for a job? Do you learn other (relevant for your studies) things by using social media, that you wouldn’t have learned without spending time in front of your screen?

I am interested, too, to hear your thoughts and ideas regarding this subject. Is there a ‘Facebook effect’ on our studies? If so, is it mainly positive or negative?

I think it is very hard to compare and say how the grades would have been if I was not active on social media, but I do not think that my grades would have been better without it. It’s hard for me to see any negative aspects, rather I have done a lot of things because of my activities on social media, organized two TEDx events, made presentations, got the opportunity to write my thesis for a company, built my professional network, to mention some of them. But, yes, it is easier to interact on social media than to start reading an academic text and yes, I do spend a lot of time on those networks. Overall, my personal opinion is that the ‘Facebook effect’ on my studies are more positive than negative. What’syour opinion?

G’day everybody!

I thought I would post here the podcast I made for my entrepreneurship course at the University of Sydney, during the Fall semester 2010 (on CEMS exchange). The quality is not good, the editing is poor but hopefully the content is interesting.

I am looking into the topic of marketing for small start-ups and how they manage to promote their business with a low budget. I interviewed two entrepreneurs; Ivo Vasilev and Beau Leese. I found it interesting to hear the opinion of people who are actually on the field..

Take a listen!

The people who determine the outcome of the Oscar ceremony taking place on the 27^th of February are the 5,700 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscar ballots, which they use to vote on various films in different categories, are sent out on the 27^th of December and need to be sent back on the 14^th of January, otherwise they will be disqualified.

Does this voting process in anyway affect how movies are released? Of course it does! A year is a long time, and many movies are released throughout the year, and thus it is the Oscar voters responsibility to remember all the movies released that year. However, it easy to forget and once the ballots are sent in they can’t be recalled. That is why if a studio has a movie which they believe has the potential of winning the Oscars they will deliberately delay until Christmas period, in the case the Oscar voters might actually forget the movie.

Think about it, which movies have been released this period. I know it’s slightly different in Sweden because we get everything later than in the U.S. But the movies that have come out recently before new years have been: King’s Speech (November 26 ^nd), Black Swan (December 3^rd), The Fighter (December 10^th) and True Grit (December 22^nd). Not surprisingly these movies are among the favorites to be nominated. So why now? They release them now to ensure that Oscar voters remember the movie when voting and not actually forgetting them if they were released earlier in the year. Not to appear insensitive but the average age of the Oscar voter is estimated to be around mid to late 50’s.

There is also prestige involved with a studio having their movie nominated, and much more when winning. Also there is something called ‘Oscar boost’ that happens to movies when they become nominated or are clear favorites when speculating. It involves generating sales to movies that wouldn’t normally have attracted an audience unless it wasn’t for the Oscar Buzz it was getting. Take Slumdog Millionaire for example. It was released in earlier November and up until the end of December it had generated around $23 million. However, thanks to the Oscar buzz and eventually winning the Oscars, it managed to generate over $140 million.

But if the period leading up to the new years is considered the period when prestige movies come out, then January is considered the period when all the crap movies come out. Recent movies that have come out in January are Season of the Witch, No Strings Attached, The Dilemma and of course Yogi Bear. If you look at the grades of the movies released prior to new years and the ones after, you will find a big differential.

Finally, looking at statistics we find that movies released in the later part of the year are more likely to win the Oscars: Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed etc. The exception to this rule is last year’s winner the Hurt Locker which was released during the summer.

An ecosystem built on Windows is sure to affect millions of users and has the potential to become an integral part of their usage instantly. As I outlined in my, in terms of words, overly-ambitious post about the future of the digital consumer, I’m a firm believer in seamless integration between devices through the cloud. This ties well in with Elop’s discussion about how ecosystems are competing in the mobile market today and what implications this has going forward. The ecosystems will only expand until they entail all kinds of devices; to start with computers and tablets.

Although I believe Google and  Apple are aiming toward a similar approach, Microsoft offers two powerful factors: Windows and MS Office. Windows is by far the most commonly used operating system, especially among professionals, as is the case with its productivity suite Office. Business people will be delighted to pick up where they left off in a document as they sit down on an airplane. This might prove to be a quite powerful segment to persuade, pushing Apple back into being something for “creative, young people” once again. Blackberry will of course fight this and a merger with/acquisition by Dell might be close. However, Microsoft offers enormous resources and can be a dangerous competitor. It might be enough to counter Apple’s brilliant innovation on the phone market to make  the phone purchase a consequence of your chosen PC platform.

What further supports my argument of an increased convergence between phones and computers is the recent acquisition of Palm by HP. Later this year, smartphones and tablets will hit the market carrying the Palm-developed WebOS operating system. Not only does this provide more competition and innovation, but it also indicates a development where (smart)phones, tablets and computers move closer together.

I promise to get back to you when I’ve decided about my next phone. Or if so, what my future employer’s choice was.

Gowalla- CEO, Josh Williams

Where are we going –the story of Gowalla and the social future?

Having the idea of connecting places online, Josh proposed on the web to his distance relationship girlfriend. Influenced by a previous scrapbook and a  scavanger hunt game he and his girlfriend used to play, he wanted to connect  the places this moment occurred in in real-time. What he did was to share the locations of him and his girlfriend (in real life) through a link to friends and family, enabling all of them to take part of the special moment. The idea of Gowalla was born: sharing personal stories with friends from favorite places and, thus, taking personal life to a new level but keeping integrity.  Let’s rewind the tape even further though to look at contributing factors to Gowallas success. Through previous projects such as the iconfactory – selling icons to websites he had begun his entrepreneurial career as a designer/developer. When he noticed an interest in people starting to share icons, he became interested in why people were fond of sharing them? Case study showed just for socializing purposes. Together with Sean Parker a co-founder of Facebook he started the Causes Company in where he designed charity-games inspiring social awareness and also co-created in building a game on Facebook called Pac-Rat. Seeing how people spent their time sharing icons and social activities such as favorite places, and inspired by colleagues success with Farmville he decided to launch a locations-app on iPhone. Gowalla was launched and took on rapidly.  Josh says: “You now it was as simple as I wish I could capture the moment and share it with my friends”…..”and with the boom in iPhones and Andriods” …”You know a sort of a digital footprint on your phone”.

So how do we use these services to get people to integrate in the real world?

It’s a totem-idea, charms relating to different memories from all over the world cued by icons and peoples memories. It provides people with a modern digital type of passport stamps but takes it further to incl. landmarks, arenas etc. of peoples choices where they can share their memories, stories, shopping etc. Gowalla is really created for people to relate to their memories of different places, people like to share memories and socialize around these memories and activities, then we explore something that is bigger than ourselves together with other people.

The hype out on the web right now makes growth impossible to control, to succeed you need to stay with vision and benchmark competition closely!

What are the fads vs. the future of social platforms and communities?

Fads include:

Checking in – status update for places we go, overload is coming…how to drive value from the experience after you have checked in is key!

Game mechanics – point systems, badges – reward system and recognition will transform itself from today, e.g. twitter- how many followers do you have…new models coming to improve the incentives for individuals to add as many friends as possible. Companies need to learn how to drive traffic, SEO is no longer enough because the developers have outnumbered the platform identity for gaining competitive advantages this way!

Social validation – important, how can people get validation for their social shares online, re-tweets is an example, but we miss the deepening of this meaning…

Technique and platforms of geo-location – blah blah, this misses the point, key is to make it user friendly,  who cares if it’s built up around GPS or WiFi as long as it works…

Everything will be mobile – get off your ass and get moving, knowledge becomes mobile and this is shown to just increase. Memory is defeated by microships. And as devices are becoming more powerful all the time….whooya!

Passive applications are another important area, apps should not interrupt our daily living to the extent that we consciously need to make a choice of what function to use.

Communities are always going to grow  – people sharing their views on the same place, information sharing and gathering, network building, creating content as a social Wikipedia and layers e.g. what is the Gowalla community of Sweden, your village, town, favorite restaurant, hockey arena etc. opportunities, opportunities, opportunities…

Activism and cases – how can social media be used to better the world, Obama presidential campaign, Iran election on twitter, red-cross campaign, OLPC etc.

From Gowalla’s perspective of a double rainbow – don’t just see it, share it and experience it with other people….

/ Mikael

SIME

After having spent two awesome days @ SIME with some of the world’s most creative minds within online media and business development, I thought I would share some of the contents that was presented. It will be a selective process and come in different parts, beginning with an appetizer in part 1.

Intro SIME: Storytelling and brands, how do social phenomena’s connect?

Facebook is defining the social graph and atmosphere being the world’s fastest growing online social platform. Apple is the social spheres universal hard currency. Google wants to create a ubiquitous media realm, involving creation of features and software for us to drive traffic to our sites and diminishing cultural aspects such as language barriers. Microsoft – makes us move and actively communicate by providing platforms of interaction. Many are the visionary companies that compete for the next big thing, buzzing their networks with elements like augmented reality – moving digital contents across boundaries and implementing them to real life, cloud computing – sharing development across user interfaces and distance to allow for low cost content.

As connectedness is increasingly becoming integrated with our behavior and our tools e.g. cars are more computers than vehicles these days, what does the future hold?

Lee Sheldon’s Grading Procedure might show signs of future education strategy and grading, something previously debated on SSE4M’s blog. For entrepreneurs and start-ups corporations will be the new venture capitalists as the shift of power switches from institutions to the consumer and, thus, to the conglomerates with the largest customer bases.

A new media landscape is already a fact in where the lines between marketing and journalism is becoming more blurry and where the visitor and consumer is becoming empowered to drive traffic to sites and not the other way around. Criteo – is a cool company that has built this into their business model by turning web site visitors into customer networkers based on personalized retargeting banners directing traffic from and to users websites.

We also see a new bread of companies being born in where social and behavioral content is mixed and creates new business opportunities/models, one being the irrational affinity marketing agreement between Chat-roulette and Hustler, redirecting people showing genitals to their website, click-rate funded =)

Social media clubs are being implemented by conventional production companies such as Scania – Scania-kings-club media site- providing for truckers a communication center on the web and along the roads.

Shopping experiences are taken one step further than regular online retail. Vente-privee.com offers platforms and systems for designer brands to sell their collections off and on season to rebated prices in customer created networks.

One could note signs of hyper growth online and this also means a more complicated and fragmented landscape for developers and business to interpret and use… and yet the journey has only begun!

Don’t forget to connect to #sime10 – Hashtag for SIME on Twitter, spread your ideas on screens over sthlm, and ask questions for future speakers and the crew! Write a digital, “cloud computed” book by emailing social media fragmented thoughts to storytelling@sime.nu – and use the new smartphone media apps at
http://m.sime.nu to enjoy digital matchmaking with people of similar interests.

See what the companies has to say for themselves in part 2…

/Micke