Social Media Headhunter

The Role Of The Enterprise Architect In Social Media

I was speaking with an Enterprise Architect at a GIMA meeting last week, and it got me to thinking about the technical background that could be useful in social media.  Most success stories in social come from marketers, PR folks, and SME's inside a company (recruiters, customer service, technology) who connect with an audience through content and social networking.  For most of us, one of the founding principles of social media is to focus on the content, not the technology (it's even one of my slides in my presentations).  But I've been short-sighted.

Most of the time, I don't want Information Technology involved in my social media projects because they want to control the software, which puts up a roadblock to conversation, and often is a sub-par product.  I can't tell you how many developers want to build their own blogging software when given the chance to be in on the project (please don't, just, please don't). 

But there's more to it than just the blogging platform. I've been amazed at how rarely we use social media software to rethink our web content strategy, but it's not surprising that as we begin to embrace open source programming, the bias against home-grown products would lessen to allow the enterprise to take advantage of social media tools to present a more comprehensive face to the public.  Take a look at the following corporate events and divisions. 

Career sites
News and Press Releases
Customer Service
Advertising (Online and Print)
Commercials (Television and Radio)
Charity Events
Company Events
Industry Tradeshows
Industry Roundtables

The information to present these parts of corporate life to the outside world is almost always available in digital form, but most companies aren't set up in a way to take full advantage of them.  Most companies also don't take advantage of the expertise they have internally in educating the public what it takes to run a business.

Internet Marketing Conference In St Louis

I signed up for the social media presentation for the Internet Marketing Conference in October.  It's a joint conference from DMA, GIMA, and other groups in St Louis.  More details to follow

Social Media Flame Wars And Reputation Management

I received an interesting call today.  A prospect rang in and wanted to know if I could fix his reputation.  It seems that information online from a previous company was damaging to a current endeavor, and he wanted me to fix it for him by blogging.

It's not what I do, and although it's possible, it did underscore the problem of online reputation.  Which is why this post from Jeremiah covering online reputation so interesting.

Two people, Thomas and Simon, have a disagreement.  Thomas has a blog - a well-read and high ranking blog.  The blogger writes about the disagreement, and calls Simon a name.  The story goes onto the net, and quickly, the search engine result pages make a search for the Simon pull up the story.  So what does it mean?  Here's my comment, but you should read the whole post for a sense of what other people were saying.

The Google SERP results are temporary. We’ve seen this played out many times, and while it currently looks bad, over a period of months, sometimes just weeks or days, many of those results will drop off (as the posts move to archived posts with lesser PageRank).

As a recruiter, and someone who has been warning recruiters and candidates for years about Google search results, I can only say that the results of the study are overstated.

Yes, we do filter candidates from information we find online, but a smear campaign, or a blogstorm, will not permanently damage a candidate’s reputation unless it was something serious.