Social Media Headhunter

Is Social Business Scalable?

A couple of posts by industry stalwarts dovetail nicely into the recognition that social business is hard, because it seeks to change the modern corporation. 

When swept away by numbers like 600 million Facebook users and the belief that social media really does change everything, it's easy to adopt an attitude that change is inevitable.  Change may very well be inevitable, but the timeline for it doing so might not fit into your persoal goals. 

First, the two articles. 

Tac Anderson, who has twice now led me into new thoughts with his posts, asks how social can be scalable when it involves human interaction.  It's very nature demands a team of people rather than one invidividual. 

1-2 years ago social media strategy was one of many jobs the social media strategist had to do (even though it was the job title we preferred). Today most of you are doing social media almost exclusively and several of you may be a part of a team running social media.

If you’re the lone social media strategist who also does some other marketing or if you’re running a small team of people you are likely feeling the strain of scale.

Yes scaling the results of your social media efforts is challenging but I’m talking about the challenges of scaling the strategists themselves.

This is an interesting post on its own, as it suggest building a hub to help you, rather than trying to change the business yourself.  This, of course, is much harder, as companies looking to get into social media aren't ready to launch pilot programs with multiple headcount, especially as they don't know quite where to locate the program (what title, who do they report to?).  What Tac suggests, though I believe is it correct, is much harder than hiring one person or tasking a current employee to run social (not to mention that everyone thinks they can do social, so there's always infighting). 

So to clarify why it is as it is, you turn to Amber Naslund, and her stages of social media grief. 

The people stewarding this change are often right in the thick of these phases, and experiencing these emotions throughout. It’s unpopular sometimes to talk about emotion in context of business, but the reality is that change is emotional. It challenges people’s assumptions, understanding, ego, comfort and familiarity, and tangible experiences. All of those things bring up emotional context that, in turn, affect the processes we build and the decisions we make.

In context of someone like a social strategist or someone engaged in shifting the culture and design of a business, it’s important to not only recognize the stages and their characteristics, but their role in helping guide the organization from one phase to the next, and shorten the time from denial to acceptance. If you can identify where you, your clients, or your organization sit now, it’s easier to plan for what might be coming next

The two identify the main problem with social business.  It's not hard to figure out, but it's very, very hard to do.  It's hard because it's a grind. It's hard because you get tired of doing work constantly while questioned about what you're doing. It's hard because you're afraid it doesn't matter.  You get Social Fatigue. 

Now Craig and I have our own ideas about how to manage the problem of how to hire staff in social media, but it's important to state the problem is the same.  The common goal is socializing a business so it can catch up to its customers.  Pretending a Facebook page or Twitter contest will bring business is a bit like pretending an employee handbook will teach salespeople how to increase their margins. 

So is social business scalable? Of course it is.  The scale, is not the social media department.  It's your entire organization, and the system that supports it from vendors to customers.  That's what we should be working towards.  Training groups of people inside the company, and like a virus, spreading the gospel of connection and communication through the company until we're all smarter, faster, and more responsive to a fast moving world.

 

 

 

A Trial For How Empire Avenue Can Improve Employee Performance

Metrics aren't that hard.  You determine what you're trying to measure, you measure it, then you look at the data.  You run into problems when you can't measure the full impact of something, or when you don't know what to measure, or when you can't gather data. 

In that case, you run trials, just as they do in other complex systems.  I'm a big fan of trials in social media contexts because they are easy to sell, easy to track, and the data speaks for itself.  Take two groups - train one with social, compare the groups. 

Rather than focusing on tasks or individual, unrelated results that can be gained, you focus on outcomes.  

Group 1:  50 Sales people using LinkedIn. 

Group 2:  50 Sales people not using LinkedIn.

You split two groups up based on their average sales. To make sure there is no cheating, you have assign one person with a stake in the matter to split up the groups, and another to pick the group.  This ensures the split is on level ground. 

You run a test, and compare the increase over the baseline, for both groups, but you also look at the individual performance.  The winning group is the one you move forward with.  If the control group wins, but certain individuals excel - you at least have data that helps you determine if the training is bad, or if only certain salespeople can be effective. 

Hard to argue with a test like that. So how would you do this for Empire Avenue?  

I maintain that Empire Avenue is best as an individual training tool for a group.  Sign up your trainees, and let them use the system to track themselves.  Don't focus on stock price for an individual, and make sure they know that stock price and portfolio wealth won't have any effect on their salary or commissions or performance.

In other words, don't use it as a game.  Let the game work in the background, but use the tool to train.  And like the previous examples, set the site up as group trial. 

Click on the image for a full-size pop-up, but what I've drawn is a trial on how to teach social media to a group using Empire Avenue, with an outcome that help you understand the most effective method for your team. 

I see this for people with sales teams, remote retail locations, franchises, dealers, recruiters, customer service departments, PR firms, and for associations looking to help their members.  Any group willing to implement a training system for social media can use Empire Avenue to track the results, in a way that decreases monitoring cost and training personnel costs.

Is it easy?   Of course not.  But I could do it. I've trained dozens of people at the same time, and thousands in shorter sessions.  One of the things that makes Empire Avenue so attractive is how it could have helped me have my clients train themselves. 

Which means small-business consultants can use it now, one-on-one, and see results. 

Thoughts?

Empire Avenue Metrics: Twitter Follower Growth

Just a quick note.  I add about 100 Twitter Followers a month, on a pretty steady basis over six months. Since joining Empire Avenue one month ago, I saw a spike, and in the last month, have added about 200 followers.  I went to a conference mid-month, which spiked me somewhat, but I had already added 72 followers prior to the conference. 

For the first month, it's fair to say I'm adding followers at a rate of 140-150 followers a month, as the rate of adds stabilized to the pre-conference rate within four days. 

 

I pulled this  graph from Twitter Counter to show the difference. It's not statistically significant yet, but I'll keep tracking it to show you the difference.  The other picture here is from my Twitter advisor, Declan, under stats on the Empire Dashboard. 

The stats don't fully add up - as I'm not sure when the week starts, but using the advisor does help you track your personal activity in terms of followers and tweets, on a week by week basis.  of note is that RT's of me have gone up 54%, and total mentions have improved by 34%, in the last week. 

A second advisor, Kesley (these are algorithms you can unlock inside Empire Avenue under the stats board), tells me hashtags, most retweets, most posts retweeted, and the people with whom I've connecting the most.  It's about half and half Empire and other users.  The "engagement" for all groups has gone up significantly since my joining.   

Why is this important?  It brings me instant feedback on my social activity, from a place I'm frequenting multiple times a day.  It allows me to see, to actually look at the difference between  quality and quantity, and as an outside check that both are high.  If I see that I haven't made any posts on Facebook in a week, I can alter my behavior (and it happens, as you get caught up reading). 

More initial passes on the impact of Empire Avenue on social activity to come. Please share your anecdotal thoughts in comments, and let me know if you write it up on your blogs. 

 

Empire Avenue: The DNA Of Angry Birds, InTrade, And Radian 6

Empire Avenue is a social media stock market game where you buy and sell profiles with a virtual currency.  You sign in, connect your social media accounts like Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, and boom, you get a share price.

From there, you're thrown on the open market, where friends, investors, and other folks on the platform buy and sell you, pushing your price up and down based on their criteria.  Well, that's not all - your stock and dividend price are also greatly influenced by your social activity.  Get retweeted for great content?  Leave a lot of comments on Facebook?   Have a lot of connections on YouTube?  All of these impact your score, as does activity on the site.  The higher your dividends, the more people buy and hold.  It's the free market at work (pun intended). 

 

Sounds fun, right?  It is, and it's highly addictive, but like all sequential games that award points, levels, and badges, you eventually burn out and move on (Angry Birds Rio anyone?).  And that's where Empire Avenue differs.  It's a game, but it's also a social network and a social dashboard and a research site that helps you monitor your activity, that of your friends, and provides you access to networks of people you never would find on your own.

I'm a big fan.  A supporter.  I spend real money to buy upgrades and eaves (the currency - empire ave ='s eaves), and then build networks out of my lists to identify investment opportunities versus friends versus business connections.  And I'm hooked.

Empire Avenue gives me the addiction of a game with a visual inspection of connections (vital to recruiters and marketers and salespeople), but it also connects with me people., folks like Ron Capps (e)NicheProf, an educator from Missouri, or Chris Latko (e)CLAKTO, a developer living in Tokyo.  It's connected me to recruiters and social media folks, of course, but it also connects me with musicians, college students, housewives, executive, and hobbyists, whose networks I've never seen, and whose social media reach differs than mine in every way.

This is important to note, because most people talking about Empire Avenue see it as a way to connect with those of like minds.  The problem is lots of sites already do that, from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to Flickr to YouTube. Empire Avenue connects them all, like the One Ring, and binds them into a single profile you have to spend finite resources to acquire.

Talk about potential.  When I send out a tweet, I reach a possible 6000+ followers.  When I go on Empire Avenue, it's like adding StumbleUpon, Digg, and the front page of the local paper, because my content is seen by massively connected people who never heard of me, but who bought me because my shares and dividends are good.  It's now a message multiplier, it's a network multiplier.  And the best part is the community is self-policing.  The stock market requires content to keep prices up, but your personal networks won't allow you to spam them, so 500 Facebook comments will lead you to losing friends, all for a temporary bump in price.  This forces you to create quality content, connect with people, and keep your social networks happy, while simultaneously boosting your share price through activity. The beauty of the system is it rewards good behavior.

Now the system is new.  Lots of behaviors have to be ironed out.  But the founders and the staff are pretty open to changes, and are riding the changes, rather than forcing them.  That speaks very highly to both their vision and the success of the site, as the people who are involved the most tend to be highly connected already.  It feels a lot like the blogging communities did from 2001-2004, when small groups of helpful people hashed out behavior patterns, which then created the "rules" of conduct for each community.  That's what makes it sticky.  Empire Avenue is a safe place you can share information in your communities (private ones), and get value back. 

I'd strongly encourage you to join, if for no other reason than to be able to monitor your own social media usage (it tells you how many comments, likes, posts you make in a week on all of your social sites).  As you get deeper in, wIll share investment strategies, communication networks, and most important, how to get the most value from your time here and in the site.  

So how do you join?

1) Don't just go there.  Find a friend or someone already in the game, and ask them to invite you.  While you can join on your own, accepting an invite gives you and them an extra 2000 eaves.

2) Invite 25 friends and then bug them until they join.  This gives you 50,000 more eaves to start, and gives you a group to play with.

3) Join your local communities and your interests.  

4) When buying and when bought, reach out to the people and talk to them.  They'll be interested in chatting with you, I promise. 

 

Good luck.  I'm (e)SMHeadhunter.  And congratulations. You'll be joining, and quickly comprehending gamification of business, the next big thing.  And I don't say that lightly.  

 

For other blog posts on the site, check out.

Jeremiah Owyang (a recent, enthusiastic convert and social media rockstar) 

Caleb Storkey

Hank Plumley

Scott Wendling

Michael Long

The Power Of Community In Minneapolis: Jim Durbin and Craig Fisher At #MNREC

 
I'm a big fan of a number of Minnesota recruiters and marketers, but until last week, I'd never actually made it up there (outside of A New Year's Eve social call a decade ago).  My main contact is Paul Debettignies, the MNHeadhunter, whose blog, writing, and friendship I have enjoyed since 2005.

Paul invited us to Minnesota (Craig Fisher, @fishdogs, and the other owner of Social Media Talent), and we had the pleasure of speaking to 210 folks in the recruiting space inside Best Buy Headquarters.

I spoke about the power recruiters have to drive social through the organization.  Craig discussed new ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile.  A third speaker, Amy Langer from Oberon talked about her journey in building an HR, Finance and Accounting staffing firm after working as an accountant for the then Big Six. 

While the presentations were awesome, and yes, I can say we were all great, the really impressive spectacle was this interconnected group of corporate and agency recruiters joining together to learn and share and make friends. The group was tight, and that's not something you always see.  Maybe it was just my first chance to see Minnesota nice, but my impression walking away from the mini-conference was that working in Minnesota would be a blessing for a lot of people and lot of companies. 

While it's impossible to judge a market from such a brief time, I walked away impressed.  While I knew folks like Gregg Dourgarian (Tempworks and Staffing Talk), Steven Rothberg, and Joshua Kahn were there, that's true for every town. There are always a few great people you can get to know online.  What struck me about this was how many others I wanted to meet while up there.

Minneapolis-St Paul is home to some big companies. Target, Cargill, Deluxe, 3M, Best Buy.  It has a stable workforce and a cool, active downtown.  It's a place to keep your eye on.  It was certainly a place I'll visit again.  

Is Social Media In A Salary Bubble? And If So, Who Cares?

If you're in the social media industry and you're not reading Tac Anderson at New Comm Biz, you're missing out.  His latest on Job-hopping Social Media Strategists is thought provoking and fair, and that's just the first of many gems on the site. 

I've asserted in interviews and on this site that a bubble exists for social strategy.  Strangely it is not in the upper levels of consulting, nor is it in the entry-level positions.  The high-level consulting, ranging from $150-400 an hour, is entirely consistent with other kinds of management consulting on the market, from techology to human resources to marketing and law.  The lower levels pay as low as $10 an hour, with most jobs in basic entry level range of $30-35,000 (not so great with inflation, but in line with other positions with that experience level).

The bubble exists outside of this range, with people with a year of more experience seeing large jumps in pay up to $75-85,000, and in some cases six figures.  When comparing resumes, the only thing that leaps out is social media experience, and in most cases this has more to do with pedigree and personal profile.  In other words, taking a job with a firm after working with name brands gives a large boost to your pay, as does having a large online following.   In these cases, the candidates do a lot of job-hopping, spending less than a year, and sometimes only 3-6 months at different companies, all with little to show for it and little in the way of impact. 

The middle of social media jobs is hollowing out, and there isn't much to replace it.

Tac discusses the problem from a senior level.

With very, very, very few exceptions, I, and every one of my friends working as social media strategists, have changed jobs *at least* once or twice in the last 5 years. Some as many as 4 or <cough> 5 <cough> times.

Why have we changed jobs so many times? Those of us doing this for the last 5 years got an early start at developing a critical skill set that few people had and every major company all of a sudden needed very, very badly. This placed us in the *star* category and has lead to a ridiculous number of job offers, made even more ridiculous when you consider they came during the worst job market we’ve seen in our adult lives.

Changing jobs twice or even 5 times in 5 years, especially in the last 5 years, isn't bad.  The people Tac is talking about are literally cutting edge, and they're experiencing a high degree of dissatisfaction.  Ultimately, they will move into consulting on their own, or enter domestic periods where job-hopping is too destructive to do. But they'll be okay.  They already have careers behind them that can be used to great effect in the job market.

Will there be fallout?  Sure.  The major failure of the social media consultant class he describes so well is their refusal to accept that there is no such thing as a perfect company.  At SXSW, I was barraged with people talking about finding clients and companies in line with your values.  That's a nice pipe dream, but if you're talking about revolution, you seldom get to carefully select the perfect manager at a rising company with money to pay you and compassion for your personal quirks.  And when you do find that perfect company, most of us make the mistake of leaving for more money elsewhere, regretting it only after it's too late to return.

This class will learn that fast enough (we all do - and it may just be life experience that teaches it), because they are smart and capable, and when they do focus, they are powerful employees.  They've built up an expertise that carries them through a new learning curve.

This is not true for those in the middle. The doers.  Jumping jobs early can help you boost your salary, but it also prevents you from learning lessons like, "sometimes just putting your head down and working solves your problems."  Lessons like "outside forces sometimes make managers assholes, but it's temporary, and if you keep your head about you, both you and the company come out stronger."  This isn't universally true, but it's very difficult to pick up expertise in an industry or company if you don't ride that company or industry through up and down business cycles.

What happens is you're always stuck in start-up mode, which is great if you're a rich entrepreneur, but sucks if you're a mid-level employee. 

Tac is going to be okay. The very fact that he's thinking about the choices he's made suggests a mental state of learning, which is hard to achieve both when you're desperate and when you're in a rut.  That said, he goes on to describe some very good long-term lessons about hiring superstars that are worth taking a look at.  I'm not sure his conclusion that building internal teams is yet applicable (and not that original), but it's at least worth exploring.

There is a salary bubble for the people Tac is speaking about training.  Sitting and waiting for him to train them is not good for their salary, but it is important to their career.  As I wrote in the comments:

Moving is certainly causing a problem, as fast moves tend to cut off the experience needed to succeed in the next job. Social business is about changing habits and altering the DNA of a company. If every time it gets difficult, you jump to the next company who is looking for "social talent," you're not boosting your resume, you're playing with your online profile. Eventually, the music stops and you're left without a chair.

The market is in flux, but that's normal based on where we are in terms of social media maturity.  When Java first came out, there was a lot of movement and a salary bubble.  Those who jumped around and never learned anything but how to interview suffered when the drop came in 2000.  At the same time, those who did not move found themselves well-educated, but with much lower salaries.  Those who jumped, but who kept working at their skills on and off the job were the best off.  They were able to improve and stay current, while boosting their income. That's the ideal for social media, which allows you to work both on and off the job.  Heck, it practically demands it.

So if you're in this situation, focus on learning the lessons of your industry, your company, and basic business lessons.  Your social media experience is more like sizzle, but basic business concepts (cost versus expense, hiring, supply and demand, cash flow, politics), and basic business skills (writing, presenting , research) are the steak.

Job-hopping isn't anymore of a problem than sitting at one place too long.  The problem is failing to learn what you can in your environment, and learning to apply those lessons in new environments.

SXSW In Small Bytes: What's So Wrong With Being A Douchebag?

SXSW has some funny traditions.  One of the chief ones is not selling while you're there.  It's strange, because not looking for leads at a trade conference is a bit like not picking up women at a bar (hint: those who don't try never succeed at it).   From what I could see, the ethos of sharing and smiling and not bringing any revenue to your company with a direct pitch is alive and well.  Like the early days of blogs when making money was considered beneath us, SXSW is all about spending money without asking for anything in return. 

We even have a fun name for it.  People who market at SXSW are douchebags.  There was even a whole panel devoted to it.  Being a douchebag covers all manners of sin, including looking at someone's badge to see where they work, spending too much as a company instead of participating in engagement, and even trying to get into a cool party or checking in too much on Foursquare.  Also, don't introduce yourself to people you don't know.  That whole meeting turning online contacts into real world contacts?  That's out of line, buddy!  

And no matter what.  Don't even think about discussing how your services or product can improve a prospect's working situation.  That's for douchebags.

Ha ha ha!  See, selling is for losers!  Just like being cool enough to have women fawn over you is better than having to come up with a lame line to get attention, so is being awesome enough to have people throw money at you instead of trying to do icky things like picking up the phone and cold-calling or making pitches to people you don't know well.  What's wrong with those people?  Don't they know that selling is so 1995? 

That's actually the pitch, and it is supposed to represent the new way to make money.  Show up, make friends, and only work with the most awesome companies that see the value of what you're selling, I mean offering for free, and then magical VC money leads to being the next Google!  Magic! Unicorns!  Scott Baio!

If you want to stop any conversation short at SXSW, just ask how they plan to make money.  The younger folks there will give you some version of "we lose money on every sale, but we make up for it with volume."  The older ones will sheepishly admit that yes, they sell their services, usually for a pretty penny, but they just don't feel that doing it at SXSW is useful.

They're right of course.  You get information at SXSW, not sales leads.  The corporate folks who arrived in droves and paid several thousand dollars for the privilege weren't there to be pitched.  And yet, selling still went on.  I'm a recruiter, and so over the last 12 years I've learned to attend networking events and listen while I'm talking.  Picking up information and working a cocktail party takes experience, and recruiters are very good at it.  So despite all the warnings, selling at SXSW occurred, but it occurred under the table, accompanied with vague promises of working together, and probably forgotten the next day and never followed up on.

It's not that you don't sell at SXSW.  It's that people sell poorly.

I come from a hardcore sales traditions of cold-calling to set appointments in a jaded market.  Yes, the world is different than it was when I was making 125 calls a day selling vacation incentives in Florida, but in some ways it was better back them.  We were honest about it.  And while I hated it at the time, the skills I picked up in three years of phone sales, followed by six years of staffing, and five as a business owner still rely heavily on my first year of training.  It was hard, but it had a purpose. 

Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.  It's a great line from GlenGarry Glen Ross, and it underscores a simple truth about business.  There is no client relationship until someone signs a check.

When you do something like travel to SXSW on the company dime and you're not selling, you're spending the company money to play.  If you choose not to talk about your company and seek out relationships with people who can keep the lights on, that's your right, but just don't lie to yourself that no one is paying for it. 

Salespeople usually get a bad rep, because most salespeople are bad at what they do.  I hear it all the time - people complain about salespeople (and recruiters, who are really just sellers of people) because they don't like to be bothered.  And yet, what does a salesperson do?  They ask you to come to a decision.  Talk to them or don't talk to them.  Listen to their pitch or do not listen to their pitch.  Buy, or do not buy.

Asking someone to come to a decision isn't douchebaggery.  It's the basic function of business.  Covering it with social or marketing or PR and saying that inbound marketing is the new selling lacks one essential historical fact.  It's always been rude to sell.  Just ask rich people.

The elite have a unique way of buying and selling.  You join the right clubs, wear the right clothes, go to the right schools, give to the right foundations, and when the time comes, you do business with one and another (and with their children).  It's not a new way of selling, it's a very old way of selling.  What we're creating at SXSW is a new elite.  A group of people with a set of rules on the right and wrong way and the right and wrong time and the right and wrong people to work with.  We're subconsciously doing what the uber-wealthy have always done.  We're doing business based on pedigree, and not what you can do for a company.

 

Does that sound about right?  We use social shaming and social pressure to warn people away from doing what they're paid to do - drive results for their company in a tough economy.  And then we celebrate it and laugh at those who didn't get the message. 

Because they're douchebags.

Of course, there's one problem with calling someone a marketing douchebag.  A douchebag at the club is someone who gets hot women, but none of us can figure out why. A douchebag is someone we think is ridiculous, but something they are doing works, because they're there with the hot woman.  It's so ridiculous that we take pictures and put them on websites and marvel at how they do it.

The douchebag, for all of their douchebaggery, is asking for the sale and then closing the sale.  They're getting the digits.  You can mock them all you want, but if you ever find yourself lacking the right pedigree (as many people find out when they leave MegaCorp to start their own business), you're going to wish you focused a little more on learning to sell, and a little less mocking those trying to do so.

Douchebags at least can't be accused of not trying. 

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm sure many people are going to be offended by this, and I'm not defending bad selling practices.  I'm no more suggesting that hard pitches at a conference are welcome than I'm suggesting that douchebags are role models for happy hours.  I'm saying that selling, good selling, is a respectable action.  Discovering how to fit into a social situation and turning it into an exploration of a prospect's needs is a good thing.  Asking questions, and learning new things, and expanding your mind are all good traits you can practice at SXSW without coming across as a jerk. 

Knowing when someone doesn't want to hear your sales pitch is a skill good salespeople have.  We sometimes forget, or charge ahead, or just get tired of pussyfooting around, but annoying someone isn't an effective sales strategy.  You know what else isn't effective?  Never asking for a sale.

Let's make a promise for the next SXSW and for all conferences in the future.  We'll do our best to understand the atmosphere, but keep our eyes and ears open to people who want to hear from us.  And when it's all said and done, we won't contribute to the public shaming of anyone trying to pay their mortgage and put food on their table for their children.

Because doing so?  Yeah, it kinda makes you a douchebag.  And not in a good way.