Networking, Farming, and You

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Not too long ago, we posted this quote on our Facebook page: “Networking is not about hunting. It is about farming. It’s about cultivating relationships.” Quote courtesy of Ivan Misner. Hunter/gatherer tropes aside, farming is an excellent metaphor about networking the right way. It’s about a mindset—and not just the actions a company needs to take to succeed at networking. A hunter is primal, focused, and infuriated every time his spear misses the wild boar—meaning, of course, no tasty dinner for his family tonight. On the flip-side, the farmer is patient. He plant his seeds months in advance, cultivates the seedlings as they arise, and harvests on the plants’ own schedule.

As any good farmer will tell you, it’s important to choose your fields wisely. You’ve going to want to plant on fertile grounds where your business potential is maximized. In the online world, this translates into sites like Facebook, Twitter, and your own company blog. But the modern farmer can’t neglect his tool shed. Sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon bolster your efforts and catalyze the growth of a customer and fan base. Seek out forums and exchange links to stay relevant and visible.

A good farmer also knows when to weed the garden. In social networking circles, weeds translate into spam messages and negative feedback. Whether you pull out the green invaders by hand (managing content on a per-post basis) or use a pesticide (IP filtering, content management tools for your blog) every garden needs to some attention paid to upkeep in order to thrive. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on your networking investment. Be genuine. Be real. Offer value. The customers will come.

3 Commandments for LinkedIn

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It’s a great resource for job seekers. It’s also an invaluable tool for job recruiters. Since its inception, LinkedIn has been the go-to hub for everything career related. And why not? Not only can this sensation site allow prospective candidates to share recruitment leads and help build their own career-boosting community, employers can view credentials of potential employees with only a few clicks of the mouse. But how can employers promote themselves the most effectively? Read on for some quick fixes and important tips.

Fill out EVERYTHING. Every piece of information you transcribe into LinkedIn—no matter how small—is fodder for helping your SEO rankings and providing critical data for employees-to-be. It may seem tedious, but list every piece of information you can as an employer as LinkedIn requests. Even if that includes size and location of your organization and hours of operation.

Lend a helping hand. Get proactive about your presence. Offer recommendations to former employees and send messages to like-minded companies. The more you grow your circle of contacts, the more attention you’ll gather.

Plug it in. Connect your LinkedIn site to your existing assets—think blog, Facebook, Twitter, and webpage. Not only will you provide a resource to those candidates casually learning more about you, you’ll also provide at-a-glance information that helps you disseminate critical information—information that helps a candidate base make better, more informed decisions.

Your Two Brands: Part 2

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Last week, we had the chance to discuss your two brands: your company and your employer brand. This week, we’d like to unpack it all and offer some practical advice for moving forward developing your reputation as an employer.

After reading our last entry (you did read it, didn’t you?), you understand the importance of developing your employer brand. Let the information you gathered from your research step help direct your advertising and marketing recruitment efforts. If you have dissatisfied workers in your ranks, launch employee rewards programs, incentive programs, and specialized internal advertising to bolster the sagging morale. Likewise, if people just don’t know much about you as an employer, that’s an indication to hit the magazines with some advertising, start a social media presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and use other media to get the word out about why working at your organization is a great idea.

In any case, take the time to develop tangible assets like your Employee Value Proposition. And plan, plan, plan. That’s why experts like us at Buyer Advertising exist—to maximize the effectiveness of your employer brand and deliver the talent needed to make your business succeed.

Until next time,
www.buyerads.com

Your Two Brands: Part 1

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As a successful organization, you know the value of your brand. It connects customers with your services, instills a sense of confidence in buyers, and finds a home in the brains of your target audience. It’s the buzz surrounding your business. But, as you’ve probably deduced from this title, we’re talking about two brands. The second being, of course, your employer brand.

How you represent yourselves to employees-to-be is very relevant to the success of your business. That’s because as you recruit talented people, your overall expertise and capabilities grow along with your employee pool. Your two brands don’t exist in a vacuum. There is always cross-contamination—for the better or worse. One example is Google—a fun, ultra-modern, Internet-savvy brand has since paved the way to an exceptional employee brand.

Even still, building an effective employee brand takes special attention. When it comes to your employer brand, take the time to get to know yourself. Conduct polls both inside your organization and outside to accurately gauge where you stand. From there, you can build a campaign that’s specific to hiring top talent—maximizing your advertising dollars spent. At Buyer Advertising, we recognize the critical importance of an employer brand, and in many cases, work specifically towards redefining that aspect of your company.

Tune in next week for more tips on building your employer brand!

4 Tips for Tweets

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You’re turning to Twitter to update your customers and let them know what’s going on behind the scenes. You’re also using tweets to promote job openings—landing you the largest applicant pool you can, helping your HR department to recruit top talent. It’s a smart move. As more ‘net surfers turn to Twitter for news, information, and—let’s face it—recreation, maintaining a presence is just good business sense. Here are a few tips to make your tweets go from peeps to hoots.

Make it diverse. By changing up the tone and subject matter of your posts, you’re proving that there’s an actual human behind your machines. That’s a good thing.

Keep it to 140 characters. No, really. Short-linking makes it very easy to gush about your latest product or service, but people read Twitter because they like brevity. Give the people what they want.

Re-tweeting isn’t cheating. While your Twitter account shouldn’t be a directory of other people’s offerings, don’t be afraid to re-tweet the latest buzz from another source.

Be interesting. Seems easy, but the art of pushing out interesting content for users to consume is, well, an art. Some companies never get it right. The ones that do enjoy more online sales and better candidate pools.
Visit our own Twitter and Facebook from our website: www.buyerads.com

New Methods for New Media

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The face of recruitment is changing. There’s already been in shift in how your organization hires employees, and social media is responsible. Where job seekers used to open the classified section of their newspapers, where they once logged into Monster.com, now their method of choice for securing a new position is to turn first to their social networks. That’s where you come in. To recruit top talent, you need to put yourself at the front lines. But it isn’t as simple as building a site on Facebook, as Tweeting out your jobs every morning. Tackling recruitment using social media has to be effective—not just cost-effective. It requires a new strategy.

To reach the maximum number of hires, talk to the client in a more personal way. If your approach comes across as too business-like, you’re going to scare potential recruits away. Answer questions as they arise on your networks. If you prove to a there’s a human on the other end of the keyboard and that your social media site isn’t simply Job Board 2.0 or a bullhorn that’s an afterthought to your hiring practices, you’re going to have more interest in your open positions.

Another approach to consider is building a place for social media promotion into your traditional marketing. Update your website with links to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Build job promotional details into your current materials and job marketing efforts. The more people would follow your lead, the larger the pool of quality of employees you’ll have.

3 Super Strategies for Employee Engagement

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Motivating an employee force is critical to the success of any business. Unhappy employees can slow down productivity—while happy, enthusiastic ones can re-vitalize the culture of a business and provide exceptional results. Here are a few tips on how to go about energizing your employees.

Do your homework. Take the time to conduct research and get to know your employees: what makes them tick, their aggravation points, and what they’re looking to take away from their careers. Run surveys. Ask questions. Arming yourself with this fundamental knowledge will make future engagement efforts that much more effective.

Reward and recognize. Every workplace has their heroes and heroines. Identifying these individuals who perform exceptionally well—and rewarding them accordingly—not only inspires them to keep on going the extra mile, but also shows the rest of your workforce that extraordinary efforts yield real benefits. Contests and promotions help grease the wheels, too.

Encourage the culture. Every workplace has its own character. If you’ve taken our first tip, then you’re starting out with an overall knowledge base on your employee population. Tap into the culture, anecdotes, legends, stories, and overall flavor of your day-to-day operation. Use it as a template to develop programs specifically aimed at your unique place of business.

Managing Negative Facebook Feedback

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You’re a business, and that means you’ve got a Facebook account. As the nation’s consumers and potential hires continue to toss out the newspaper, delete their links to monster.com, and instead log onto social media, crafting a Facebook presence is a good idea. But what happens when good ideas go bad? If there’s one inevitable in life, it’s that you’re going to run into conflict. People will badmouth you. On Facebook, this takes the form of negative and sometimes downright nasty comments, justified or not, on your Facebook Wall—right where it’s viewable to all who visit. What should you do? Here’s some advice.

Stay positive. Facebook is still so new, and it’s all too easy to confuse the personal nature of the medium and reply in a personal manner. When you respond to negative comments, don’t get defensive. After all, you’re representing your business, and as a rule, businesses have thicker skin. If you decide to write back, remain calm, courteous, and professional.

Engage your detractors. Oftentimes, a person will make a big splash to get noticed. Barring profanity, try and find out what they’re after. If you turn an unhappy customer, that’s positive PR that lives on your wall for at least a few weeks. Nice!

Don’t be afraid to hit “delete”. Should the conversation go from productive to public spectacle, you need to take action. Delete the thread. Some folks are just out to do a little mud-flinging, and Facebook empowers you to nip that in the bud. If your online assailant uses profanity and verbiage of an adult nature, get it out of there. You don’t want other (and possible younger) consumers exposed to that.

Social Media and Recruitment for Education

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Social media: it’s a phrase that inspires thoughts about real-time interaction, reminiscences of the flowing green fields in Farmville, and a healthy dose of anxiety if you haven’t been keeping up with the trend. With an astronomical growth in popularity of Facebook and Twitter—not to mention a user base who is spending more and more of their leisure time online—social media remains a premier way to tackle your recruitment initiatives. Recruitment trends in education have a distinct flavor. Read on and discover what strategies schools and universities are using to pull in top talent.

The multi-platform approach. Facebook, Twitter, blogging: educational institutions have been using a multi-pronged strategy to reach out to students and talent alike. As large educational institutions create spaces for sports and students activities, it’s a no-brainer for them to use separate Facebook and Twitter pages specially designed to advertise jobs opportunities.

Real-time feedback for job seekers. Nothing is more discouraging to potential job applicants than submitting their letter of interest or resume and then waiting… and waiting… and waiting. Posting their interest as a Facebook entry or blog comment allows an administrator to acknowledge them as a person and give feedback.

Research goes both ways. Just as candidates can click through and explore the culture and information on an institution of a higher ed., so too can a school explore the personality of a person. The tables have turned, and some hiring decisions are being made without ever meeting a candidate in person.

Facebook Changes, Ahoy

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Change is good, right? That depends on who you ask. On April 21—and like an April Fool’s Day prank 3 weeks too late—the creators of Facebook pushed through several changes to their system and revamped the way Facebook users interact. If your company has a presence on Facebook, you’re probably scratching your head and trying to put it all together. Let’s take a look at these changes in general and what they mean for your business.

No more fans. Only “likes”. The biggest change that rolled out is the dissolution of “fans” on Facebook, only to be replaced by a button to “like” a particular company page. The mechanic is still the same—your posts show up in visitors’ news feeds—but the Facebook creators wanted a more casual way to connect people with groups. What does this mean for your page? Verbage such as “Become a Fan!” is already outdated, and could sound stale in the coming months. Think about updating your company webpage and print materials if you’re using them to drive customers to your page.

Overhaul to Facebook Connect. An aggressive integration of Facebook into many third-party websites, such as CNN.com and others, means you can now tag an article and share it with associates—without logging in. This is good news if you have dynamic content such as articles or a blog on your very own site, as it’s now easier to gain exposure on personal Facebook pages in a method akin to Twitter’s.

The nuts and bolts. The boys running the show at Facebook shrunk the size of custom tabs on business pages from 760 to 520 pixels—meaning if you sport a custom setup, things may be off. Also, welcome with open arms Facebook’s real-time search, which makes posts searchable to search engines like Google. Very nice for companies seeking better exposure through social media.