Recruiting Disrupted: What’s Your Online Score?

Finding the needle in a haystack in search for the right talent is getting harder as the traditional recruitment models are being disrupted by social networks and increasing number of online services for professional resumes. True story: While professional social network LinkedIn just passed 100M members, growing at a rate of 1M new members per week, an executive recruiting agency just had a seminar on topics ”What is LinkedIn?” and “The difference between Twitter and a chat?”. They better hurry. The landscape is rapidly moving towards social recruiting services in verticals, good example being the newly launched Careers 2.0 by Stack Overflow, offering programmers create free online resume that weighs in their forum activity.

“No longer will your resume be your own version of your work history; it will also include a data-driven third party’s assessment. You will also be judged by your network, online activity, level of contribution, all adding up to your online score. The next time you look for a job, don’t be surprised if someone asks you for your score.”

“How much are you worth and would you opt-out from social scoring systems?”

Student Competitions Harnessing World’s Top Students

Want to show your support to your favourite brand, cause or event? Wish to reward your frequent customers and increase brand loyalty? Find a way to endorse your friends and colleaques?

Don’t worry, there’s a badge for that!

What Foursquare and Gowalla didn’t know, when they first created badges to reward user check-ins, was the massive snowball effect of badges they were about to start, now swiping over the social web like there’s no tomorrow. Everybody’s gotta have one.

Brand Awareness and Loyalty

As Loic Le Meur,  founder and CEO of Seesmic, reminds us, building your online brand is NOT about you, it’s about highlighting others. Badges work as a great vehicle for endorsing and highlighting others, while at the same time strengthening ones own online presence and brand.

Brands are quickly catching up on combining marketing efforts with game mechanics and social networking. One of the interesting companies in the space helping brands to achieve their goals is GetGlue, a social network for entertainment. Users can check-in and rate tv shows, movies, music and books to discover new favorites, see what friends are into, earn badges and even get a free copy of the sticker sent in the mail, for free. In September, over 500 000 users had created 10 million new unique ratings and check-ins, the official and authorized badges coming from major brands like HBO, FOX, Showtime and PBS.

As GetGlue explains it: It’s about emotions, enabling users connecting with the content. Check-in to Mad Men, anyone?

Connect with content, reward engagement and frequent users is also something CNN iReport aims to do by launching “On the campaign trail” badge for those participating in the iReport Election Challenge. More badges and surprises are reported to be released.

Even Q&A service Mahalo Answers has hopped on the train of badges, finding them a great and complementary way to engage and reward its frequent users.

Besides from encouraging user activity and increasing brand loyalty, badges can also be a way to create scarcity around, as to increase search engine ranking, of a brand, company or an organization.

Basno is a new platform that offers authenticated badges either to be sold or given away to users. With help of unique serial numbers, embedding unique invisible watermarks, and creating 2d bar codes for each instance of any badge on the platform, Basno aims to increase the value of digital goods through limited issuance of badges. The badges are stored in a vault, but can be shown on all major social networks.

Social recruiting

As many other industries, recruiting is also being disrupted by the social web, offering new ways to find, refer and match talent with job openings. In addition to competition from professional social network LinkedIn, now listing over 70 million members and one million company profiles, there is an increasing number of niched services like Endorse, helping people connect through friendly recommendations, and Twitter stream filling up with hashtags hunting for talent. How the yet to be launched Work Market, a marketplace for employers and workers with promise to make work work, is to disrupt the recruitment business, remains to be seen.

Founders of Estonian Emp.ly, a social recruiting service expanding the reach of job postings via social networks, are also creators of Talentag, your social CV online. Talentag makes it easy for people in your network, professional or private, to give you career boosting kudos in form of badges and thumbs up. By answering questions and giving thumbs up, or down, a chart with personality traits, such as cheerful, friendly, sophisticated, trustworthy, or giving, gets added to ones profile. Fast, easy, and yes, a playful way to endorse someone in your network. All endorsements can then be displayed and distributed on Facebook. Sign up with your Facebook or Linkedin account and see whether you also are to be endorsed as a Social Media Rockstar?

Talentag also offers event organizers a possibility to let event participants claim and display event badges on their profiles. A quick and visual way of listing my past events from Plancast or LinkedIn, for example.

As a good general rule of thumb when designing to include any type of social endorsements in your service, neither badges nor recommendations are simply just to be given away, they are to be earned.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

By Julie Blaustein

PR Summit Boot Camp, produced by Shaun Saunders of Graffiti PR and held in San Francisco, brought together experienced speakers in the PR world who provided great tips and insights into how the media and you should be embracing today’s changing landscape. The old and the new protocols of PR 2.0 are starting to blend and with it are new ways of going about doing the business of PR. At the end of the day, it was agreed by all that the key to successful PR is to create, foster and engage your personal and your businesses contacts along with those in your community to create your networks both online and offline.

Social Media & New Media Protocols Panel

There are a number of tools available at your fingertips to engage in social media. The burning question is, what social media tools are the most productive and which are the time wasters? The Social Media & New Media Protocols panel addressed this by asking the seasoned PR speakers how they go about their day in terms of social media. Myles Weissleder of Mylermedia still feels email is the best tool to focus on to do important communications. “Although its beneficial to check your Facebook and Twitter streams numerous times a day, doing so can take up all your time. And if your network is large, it can be like a fire-hose providing you too much useless information.” Daniel Lemin, formerly of PainePR and now the founder of Social-Studio digests his daily news through newsletters which he considers the most credible source of information. He then turns to his Twitter and Facebook streams but strictly for business, to seek out information about his own campaigns. His tools of choice include Hootsuite, TweetDeck, LinkedIn, Cadmus along with in-house proprietary tools. Preston Lewis of Bonfire Communications uses social media throughout the day to build awareness of events to come that night. “My personal and professional lives are blurred on Facebook while Twitter is strictly professional.” And Ryan Singel of Wired.com’s Threat Level views navigating websites as the best source of information and starts his day off by viewing numerous content aggregators through open tabs. He also finds Flipboard and the search engine Duck Duck Go most useful.

Facebook’s Manager of Corporate Communications, Matt Hicks, shared how to grow a company’s fan page. He used Facebook’s own Fan Page as an example of a successful Fan Page. It was launched after the Haiti Disaster and already has 14.8 million people who have Liked its fan page, 9 million monthly actives and 1 million daily actives. It has been promoted in organic ways such as through photos, videos, a link to its blog and is always creating fresh content. Each time you publish an update on your Fan Page with  photos, videos or links it will automatically go out into the News Feeds of all your fans creating not only virality but enabling your content to be searched and found by others. In addition, sharing content on YouTube and Twitter and directing users back to your Facebook Fan page also keeps them engaged.

Akilah Bolden-Monifa, Director of Communications with CBS5 | The CW44 cable 12 and CBS Radio has had decades of experience in the media. Although she receives tons of pitches through Twitter, FB and email for news reports, the reality is that most of the news comes from the wire services. If you are going to do a pitch, she suggests to keep it simple and keep in mind the basic 5 W’s – Who, What, When, Where and Why. To her, the Press Release is dead and ineffective for getting press. She toots the horn for Twitter. Being brief and to the point might get her attention while long wordy press releases, especially with attachments, will most definitely not get her attention.

The Old Spice campaign was brought up numerous times throughout the day as a great example of how using Social Media has revived an old brand. We all associate it with the smell of our grandfather so how did it become the phenomena it has become? Thanks to the cunning creativity of the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy and the help of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, millions of people have viewed the campaign. Daniel Lemin summed the hit as a result of them taking risks and pushing boundaries. “They factored into their campaign that people want to be entertained, add that with the shock factor and you have a HIT.

Much more was discussed at the PR Summit Bootcamp and it was all captured on Justin TV. And check out Amie Vaccaro’s great summary of the confrerence in, “Graffiti PR’s 12 Tips for reaching Your Audience.”

Speakers Teresa Rodriquez, Alkilah Bolden-Monifa and Liana Burtsava

Myles Weissleder, Shaun Saunders and Leyla Fara

Ryan Singel of Wired.com's Threat Level

PR Summit Bootcamp Audience

Online networking privacy is a huge concern right now, especially for Facebook and Google. Both companies have been facing a good amount of backlash for some of their recent product launches, including the new Facebook and Google Buzz. With all the ado about privacy concerns, both Facebook and Google are taking steps to regain user trust and deal with the can of worms they opened.

Facebook, which revealed a new set of default privacy settings late last year, has spent the last few weeks amending the rather open sharing policies that the new site features. This week, the social network has updated the privacy settings around third party apps, letting users determine settings for individual apps. Before, you could set the privacy settings for all third party Facebook apps, essentially making them all equal in how they’re shared throughout your social graph. Now, you can manage settings for each individual app, indicating how you want each app to interact via your Facebook profile.

The change is quite similar to what Facebook did with profile postings, which first had overarching settings as well. Now you’re able to have a more detailed set of options for individual posts shared on your profile wall, meaning each item shared comes with its own privacy settings. In all, it appears that Facebook is reverting to a more customizable approach to sharing on Facebook, creating standards around each item shared instead of the standards being focused on your relationship standing with other users.

Combining the two major facets of socializing on Facebook, users are able to manage their relationships through their sharing activity, which is more fluid and realistic to the way in which our relationships play out in life. It’s a tight rope walk, for sure, but it’s Facebook’s thing. Returning to that principle is likely a good move for Facebook.

Hopefully Google Buzz can learn a lesson or two from Facebook’s recent mistakes. The public default settings have caused a huge uproar and even a class action law suit, which Google now has to deal with. Google has already made changes to the way in which Google Buzz interacts with your email contacts, though it may have a few additional tweaks to make in order to reach a happy medium for its own objectives and the desires of its users.

That happy medium is what makes things to tricky to navigate for the likes of FAcebook and Google. In pushing out new features that will help the companies reach their ultimate goals and achieve higher monetization, th consumers are sometimes left wondering why things have changed so drastically and with what seems to be little regard for their own concerns.

Facebook knows first hand how this can affect a company’s relationship with its user base, as its news feed feature first received a great deal of backlash but soon became a primary means of communicating the stories of our personal lives. Figuring out when a company knows better than its consumers is a tough problem to work out, so we’re likely to see ongoing changes made to Facebook and Google’s integrated Apps as users continue to recognize the compromises they’re making for the convenience of centralized social networking activity.

Flickr cc: Jösé

Bambuser, Swedish live video streaming service, keeps climbing the online social video ladder by announcing Facebook Fan Page integration. Fan Page integration has been one of the most requested features on Bambuser since enabling broadcasting live directly on Facebook Wall feed for three months ago.

The fact that the service, including Facebook Fan Page integration, is free to consumers and non profit organisations as well as ad free, makes this launch very interesting, thus challenging giants like Justin.tv and Ustream. It was only recently UStream launched its Facebook integration, for time being offered free in an add supported version only to brands, artists and partners – on request. To my knowledge no other service supports live broadcasting including commenting directly on Facebook Wall or Fan Page feed.

What’s neat about Bambuser’s solution is that the broadcast is pushed directly on the Wall and Fan Page feed, no additional clicking on tabs or boxes needed. The Facebook integration is easily done in Bambuser Settings via Facebook Connect by just filling in the Page URL.

The service has today users in over 150 countries supporting live broadcasting from over 200 different mobile devices, as well as from desktop browsers. The Facebook Wall integration in October significantly increased the number of channels created per week, having Facebook now counting for approx. 30% of all the videos viewed on Bambuser. In a tight iPhone race with UStream and Qik Bambuser managed to get their iPhone application approved just before Christmas. The iPhone app immediately made it to top ten downloads in the Swedish App Store, iPhone the most used mobile device for Bambuser, and doubbled the number of channels created per week to 6 000.

Enabling easy sharing across social networks is very powerful, which Justin.tv has also come to experience. It reported 68 percent increase of traffic and doubble the number of links shared since it started using the Meebo tool bar last summer.

With Fan Page integration Bambuser is now able to expand its offer to 1.6 million active Facebook Pages, of which 700,000 are active Pages for local businesses. This will not only going to play an important part for the future growth of Bambuser, but also for the use of social online video as a communication tool for businesses and brands, as Facebook is becoming the premier destination for marketers both in the U.S. and many worldwide markets with its 350 million users.

Facebook reaches currently one third of the population, over 3 million people, in Sweden, establishing it as an important communication channel. With the upcoming Swedish general election this fall, I’m curious to see how the political parties are to utilize online video and Bambuser in Facebook.

Thus, stating the obvious, social media truly is making online video going mainstream.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Wow.

That’s a big number, especially when you consider that most people think of LinkedIn as the “boring” social network. They’re not wrong. When I teach a class on social networking, I include LinkedIn. But I also stress that it’s very professional, unlike Facebook, and that most people aren’t posting status updates about their cat on LinkedIn.

Where are these 50 million connections? According Jeff Weiner on the LinkedIn blog,

LinkedIn has been global since inception — about half of our total membership is international.  There are now 11 million users in Europe alone. India is currently our fastest-growing country with almost 3 million users, while the Netherlands has the highest rate of adoption per capita outside the U.S., at 30%.

I bet that’s not surprising to you. It’s certainly not to me. Personally, I use LinkedIn to track potential jobs and clients, as well as research potential jobs and clients. You can learn a lot about a company based on who used to work there. Additionally, I try to answer several Questions on their Q&A pages on a regular basis. It never hurts to be known as an expert in something.  I list it on my business cards as well – it’s an instant resume where I control the amount of information that’s viewable. LinkedIn is, in my opinion, sort of like Old Reliable. It doesn’t frighten social media newbies (and yes, they’re out there) as much as Facebook and I can trust that it will probably be around for a while.

Do you still use LinkedIn or do you find it has outlasted it’s usefulness?

I’m a big fan of BlogHer and I’m speaking on a panel at their Chicago conference this summer. So I was thrilled to hear that the organization “for women who blog” has grabbed a third round of funding for $7 Million. The new round is financed by two current investors, Venrock and the Peacock Equity, and new investor Azure Capital.

BlogHer CEO Lisa Stone told Boomtown that

“This is a true grassroots effort that is shows that growing influence women in social media,” said Stone. “We want to focus on taking advantage of that growth and momentum with this new funding…We have been trying to create a place for women to participate in social media with civil respect and also to engage readers.

BlogHer was founded in 2005 by Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page, and Jory Des Jardins. They run their popular conferences, including the large bi-coastal BlogHer and the traveling BlogHer Business events, as well as an advertising network and the social networking site.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

Everybody has growing pains.

Nielsen is reporting that while Twitter is growing, it is also suffering in the retention category. Where’s the user loyalty?

A couple of weeks ago, I speculated about the Oprah effect – that thousands would join and those accounts would then lie dormant after a month. It seems I’m not that far off on how users react to Twitter in general. According to Nielsen,

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

When I teach Twitter (and for that matter, all social media), I stress that you get out of it what you put into it. What Twitter does poorly is demonstrate how to effectively use the tool. From the question (What are you doing?) to the interaction, it is just not always clear to a Twitter – and Internet – newbie.

I’ve long thought that Twitter should change their question. What are you doing? is not the question people are answering. They’re letting you know where they are, what is new, what is interesting, and where they need help or are offering help. The very question confuses people and causes skeptics to call Twitter silly because they don’t want to know when someone is refilling a coffee pot.

The problem with Twitter is that you have to use it to truly understand it. You can’t just lurk and read other people’s tweets coming in on your feed. You need to participate. Twitter actually loses some value if you don’t join the conversation. Of course, how to join the conversation is also a problem. Even if you find people to follow, how will they know you are talking to them? I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time explaining D (not DM) and @ to people who are new to Twitter. After all, it’s hard to contribute if no one can hear you talk.

So, my advice to all those Oprah, Ashton, and Ellen followers – find someone else to follow. Search on your favorite topics, see who is chatting about them, and follow those folks. Follow many folks. Then join the conversation. Don’t just sit back and read – contribute. Use the @ symbol  and get to it. Again, you get out of Twitter what you put into it. Joining any social network isn’t going to expand your horizons or even just brighten your day if you don’t participate.

In this case, the onus is on both the new users to participate as well as Twitter, who needs to make things clearer and easier. They’re moving past just early adopters using the system. It’s time to release some tutorials and some demos so that Twitter really can be mainstream – and keep those new users who followed Oprah.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net