Social Media Headhunter

XtraNormal Throwdown: Internet Celebrity Versus The Social Media Expert

Do you like apples?

 

How do you like dem apples?

Changing The Way You Contact Me

I'm making a few changes on the backend of the blog, and you'll see a simplified design and a new contact page in the new few days.  I'm moving over from an ATS to a CRM system, and adding the Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn Share buttons. 

Part of the problem was inertia.  This blog design has been up for three years as an advanced template, and a lot has occurred since then.  But my coding skills are rusty, and so I've put it off.

The most important change in the short term is to forward me resumes to my gmail account, which starts with socialmediaheadhunter.  The database is being converted over, so in the meantime, the best way to add a profile is to go to jobsinsocialmedia.com and add yourself as a member, or connect to Jim Durbin on LinkedIn.  

Please keep in mind that while I occasionally speak to candidates blindly, most of my time is spent digging up leads and finding people for them.  Any time spent talking to candidates, no matter how qualified, takes me away from actually finding companies that need to hire. 

See you soon. 

Xtranormal Social Talent Video: Social Greeting

Just a little fun. It's your first day on the job as a social media guru.  What's in the vending machine?

 

Comments welcome, and don't forget to subscribe to the videoblog series.  I've got some good comment planned. 

Videoblog: Wait, Aren't You A Recruiter?

There's often confusion as to what I do.  In addition to the normal, what kind of recruiter are you, I get the double whammy of running a marketing firm that also works in the space. 

So with my hair spiked today, I decided to videoblog, the marketing me. 

 

Hopefully that explains it better. 

 

And for those curious, yes it is brutal to run two brands (and more), but I learned to break them apart when I started partnering and getting bids to be acquired.  Between the two companies, we have a lot of different ideas, patents, properties, and IP. Right now, we're focused on Social Media Talent, but the others can't be dropped, because their value long-term can't be ignored. 

Social Media Case Studies Mean Jack Squat

Case Studies.  They are the new buzzword after "engagement" and "business metrics" grew stale.  As social media matures and splits into more familiar territory (customer service, marketing, PR, Sales, recruiting, operations), the cry for case studies is now spoken at every conference, and written in the blogs and tweets of charming consultants everywhere.

Blech.  

Case studies are not science.  They are marketing tools written by copywriters to help a client make a sales decision.  They are a risk management tool for buyers that can be compared to a reference check on a company.  Half the point is to show the prospect that other companies they recognize have paid you, the second half is to prove that you're not just making this all up. Most important, case studies are written to persuade, not explain. 

So why the fetish?  Why do so many people write blog posts where it's assumed that having case studies gives authority?  Mostly it is because they don't understand the purpose behind case studies.

  

Let's assume you watched that, which I strongly urge you to do.  After making the claim, this is the point where I'm supposed to back off it and say that case studies are actually important.  I'm not going to do that.  I won't deny that prospects often demand them.  I won't deny that some prospects have case study requests embedded in their RFP's.

I will state that good salespeople don't need them.   If you buy the proposition that case studies serve as an informal reference check, then you can recognize that a request for case studies after a presentation is a vote of non-confidence in your presentation or your company or in you.  Asking for more information on how you worked with another company is known in sales parlance as an objection.  The case study company is different.  It's structured different. It has different communication and market advantages.  How relevant is a case study written to showcase your success?

Do you know when case studies are useful?  It's when they are written internally as part of an after-action report for a project.  Self-evaluation, which includes critical analysis, is as important for a company as it is for an individual.  A Case Study that explores where you succeeded and where you failed is of more use in working with a client because it suggests a willingness to learn from past mistakes.  It shows an interest in how things get done, instead of a marketing tool intended to ease fear. 

In evaluating candidates and companies, my goal is to find out what they know and how they approach problem solving.  A case study, like a resume that shows sales numbers without explaining how they achieved them, is only a tool to filter applicants. Let's quit pretending they are more than that. 

 

 

Adding Large Numbers Of Facebook Fans Is Still Cool, No Matter What The #H8ers Say

I'm a big fan of social media as a tool to measure and alter customer behavior.  While numbers can be gamed (You'd be surprised how much $50 would buy you in fake traffic), there is a value in building a fan base in social media because of what it tells you.  Sometimes, adding numbers is useful because of what you learn. 

It starts with this:  What makes someone click Like? 

Let's say I have an email list of 10,000 customers. I send out an email asking them to like my new Facebook page.  My fan base goes from 115 to 2200 in a week.  Is that a good thing?  What can I learn from it?

Many people would say that the number of fans doesn't matter because 98% of those people liking the page will never go back to it.  But I'm not counting the increase in fans.  I'm counting a response rate in my email list.  Boosting your fan base from 115 to 2200 based solely on an email is phenomenal, because it tells you huge numbers of your email list are responsive and are on Facebook.  It also tells you they like you enough to do what you say and click "Like."

Experiencing a jump in Facebook fans from email, or from putting a sticker on the door of your restaurant, or in having your managers go around tables and asking people to do so, is a very valuable data point.  It's not cheating, it's understanding what you're capable of doing with the resources at your disposal.  In these cases, the traffic, while it may be of little consequence, gives you clues about your information networks that are very valuable. 

That example was a little too easy.  How about we go after one that gets laughed at?

It's not supposed to be kosher to run contests giving away things to get Facebook fans.  Asking someone to Like a page for a contest doesn't measure value.  But what happens after the contest is over? If you go from 1000 likes to 1,000,000 likes because of a contest, that's a PR win, but the agency doing so didn't really help you, right? We can all agree to that (while secretly being jealous that the agency is going to use that as a case study). 

So what happens, when that 1,000,000 turns to 2,500,000 likes in the next year, without a contest?  If it's all nonsense, what is happening that you can see a result like that?  Clearly, having a large number of likes led other people to click like - simply out of the peer pressure of wanting to be like others.  Can we learn something from this?  

I'll leave that for you to ponder (and if you still say no, you can get off my damn page right now), but numbers mean things, and any time you can create activity online, you can learn something about your audience. 

In the argument about social media expertise, maybe we ought to be asking ourselves what social media teaches us, rather than about what we can do with it.  

 

 

 

 

Announcing EmpireHire: A Community To Hire Eavers

Just finished shooting a quick video and building out the first job board community for Empire Avenue.  It's a place for companies to post jobs inside Empire Avenue, allowing jobseekers to purchase stock as indication of interest. 

It's called EmpireHire 

The process is simple:

1) Companies join

2) Companies post jobs

3) Candidates join and browse jobs

 4) If candidates find a job that's interesting, they buy stock in the ticker and send a private message to the company

5) The company decides if they're interested (using the Empire Avenue dashboard to assess the candidate), and either start the recruiting process or thank them privately and say no

6) After an offer is made and accepted, you come back and tell us about it. 

It's my thought that Empire offers a unique insight into people with big social networks, the type of person most companies want to hire.  So why not bring them together? 

How do you get involved?

1) If you're a company, join.  Feel free to message me if you have questions

2) If you're a jobseeker, browse open jobs when convenient and apply

3) If you're neither, spread the community far and wide, using Twitter, Facebook, and Empire.

 
It's that simple.  And let me add here that while I recruit, and don't mind recruiters posting, I won't be using the information in the forum to do any sales.  This is simply a service I want to see if it works. 

The VideoBlog Announcement:

 

 So join in.  Let me know what you think. The community again. 

 

Location Based Services Alter Behavior, And It's Time To Pay Attention

Twitter was quite silly the first time I signed up.  A client of mine I was training in social media started swearing by it, and I reluctantly signed up to make sure I knew about it (ironic that someone I trained found it - either a good trainee or good training).  As I played with it, my numbers started growing, and over the first year, it became a useful tool for marketing, branding and recruiting. 

Yes I thought it was silly.  Many people still do.  Many more use it to drive information and report on stories long before any news organization or company can react. 

When I started using Facebook, I was annoyed.  The walls and restrictions made it useless for recruiting anyone but college kids, and even once the search was operative, the information was paltry.  That all changed pretty fast, and I'm confident in saying that Facebook will be the most important platform in the 2012 election, not because of what the campaigns will do, but because Facebook is now an information sharing platform built of weak links.

Which brings me to Foursquare. I signed on to Foursquare reluctantly when Craig Fisher talked about it at a DFW-TRN meeting in February. My second check-in didn't happen until SXSW.  I've played with Gowalla and Whrrl and SCVNGR, but Foursquare is my main focus.  I check in and post the results to Facebook and Twitter, first to get mayorships, but also to tell people where I think I've been that's cool. 

I especially relish it as small businesses, believing I might bring a customer or two to the location, but something weird has been happening.  The more I use it, the more I want to tell the world about my experiences.  The act of checking-in has led me to want to do more, which includes leaving tips, reading tips, suggesting food and beverage, complimenting waiters, and recently, talking about service. 

Last night, I was buying shelving at Home Depot.  As I stood in the lumber aisle, looking around for someone to help me, I inwardly started complaining how Home Depot just isn't as friendly as it used to be.  My first thought, was to share it, on Foursquare.  The connections that were made were organic - I had noticed that Best Buy Locations had lots of complaints for the Geek Squad, and it made sense that tagging it to the location was a useful way of creating a database of information for other people.  So when a specific location failed me at customer service, it made sense to penalize that location, and not the entire brand. 

That, my friends, is when I realized that location based marketing is just like Facebook and Twitter.  Continued use of the platform alters our expectations, gives us a voice, and leads to new behaviors.  While recent research (I read on Twitter, can't find it now) shows that social media is used far more for expressing positive information then negative, what's more important is the idea that we are actively expressing our emotions about what we're doing, while we're doing it.  Twitter is good for that to some extent, but tying it through a location based service allows companies to track that information to the source. 

And my friends, from past experience, I can tell you that what early adopters are doing now, the rest of the public will be doing soon.  

So what can you do? One, is to figure out how to use the service yourself.  If you have privacy concerns, consider checking in to places as you leave, or putting up a name that doesn't have identifying information (so for me, it shouldn't say smheadhunter or jim durbin).  Practive checking in and start reading what other people say.  Think about what checking in wants to make you do, in addition to thinking about what it makes you fearful of doing (and how that changes over time).  You don't have to build a location based marketing program to do that, but if you can learn how the services work, you'll be able to understand their effect on your business (think hiring, retail, customer retention, and small business sales leads). 

Like Twitter and Facebook, location based marketing seemed foolish when it started. I'm now starting to understand its applications.  Isn't it about time you did the same? 

 

The World Is Going To Be A Place, Where We, Can Carry On

My mother loves to tell a story about brushing my hair when I was a little boy.  I was in my grandmother's house, and my mother was brushing my hair, when I piped up with this little gem. 

Yesterday is but a dream.  Tomorrow is just a vision. But Today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. 

She was blown away that such a young boy could come up with such a profoundly worded statement, until she turned around and realized I was reading a plaque on the wall.  I read that plaque every time I was in my grandmother's house until she passed away in 1994.  When I think of it, I still think of her, because she was an incredibly optimistic woman who dealt with the pain of polio her entire life, but did so with a warmth and joy that overwhelmed all of her grandchildren.  

Hope is a powerful emotion.  

I'm here at the People Report Summer Camp, listening to Amanda Hite of Talent Revolution and Paul Barron, the founder of FastCasual.com. They're on stage sharing stories of personal growth, individual improvement, and charity.  They're inspirational. They're challenging us to be our best.  They're believing in the idea of human power.  

While listening to them, I skimmed my Facebook and saw that Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist and author, has written an article bemoaning the state of the world.  Friedman quotes a man who predicts societal collapse and resource restriction will alter our entire economic system into a happiness-based, sustainable, eat less, drive less, own less, work less world.

This is nothing new.  Some people just can't help predicting the end of the world, whether it's Harold Camping or Thomas Friedman.  Doom is coming, and the fault is always the sinners, whether that be eco-sinners or the religious ones.  Friedman, for all of his sophisitication, is yet another in the a long string of prophets who suggest the end is coming. 

It was a very odd contrast for me - to be listening and watching a message of hope, while skimming through an article of doom.  Should I build a bunker, or go out and feed a child?  

Friedman, for all his wisdom and travel, misses the point about systems.  Every culture, at every time, is in a race against decay. Every generation faces the dilemma between finding new technologies and new ways of doing things and running out of a resource that they used to power their current lifestyle.  Don't get me wrong.  Our system may crash.  No one has been right about it so far, but someone, somewhere, eventually will be.  Where Friedman errs is his approach.  He believes in a top down system change, and if it takes a crisis to get that change, that's because we weren't smart enough to give the elite control in the first place (that's the genesis of the idea that we deserve to suffer).  

I believe in something different, and I believe social media, while not the source, is a training tool that is showing us the way.

In August of last year, I realized that social media is the human version of Moore's law.  Moore's law talks about the advances in computer chips that has powered our technological rise.  Chips get faster and smaller, letting us do more and more.  Our technology improves, but human beings do not.  We're not upgraded versions of ourselves from the 70's.  And yet, we could be.  Social media shares information at unheard speeds, demolishing power hierarchies and unleashing a wave of creativity simply because a population of connected people can test something, modify it, and adopt or discard it while learning from others. This is why businesses so badly need to understand social media.  The public is faster and smarter than we are in aggregate, which means we will forever be playing catchup. 

That's a good thing.  The same public that can outlearn a company can outcreate the problems that face us.  To achieve that, we need a functioning society.  We need power and water and food and housing and social concerns and families and hope.  The problem with a crisis is that people stop thinking about improving their lives and start thinking about saving their lives.  A crisis that is big enough to remake the free market system is one that is big enough to plunge the world into centuries of darkness, as has happened before.  

And if that's coming, there's little you can do about it as an individual.  As a group, though, as a society, you can stave off disaster by altering your behaviors when you are not in a panic mode.  What I saw and heard from Paul and Amanda was a clear and shining example of unleashed creativity and optimism in changing the lives of people with our actions.  They were doers, not talkers. 

We are on the verge of greatness.  Some people call it the Singularity.  The idea is that technology, from nanotech to networked computers, is going to alter the way we interface with the environment down to the cellular level.   It may or may not happen, because it's always a race against time.  Can we continue to innovate, to create, to test, to try, and to believe?  Can we grow?  Or do we slow down, cut back, and accept that it was a nice ride while it lasted?  

Columns like Friedman's deflate us.  They kill off our creativity and fill us with despair.  They sap our will to improve with the message that we're bad people digging our own graves.  You can't let that stop you.  You have to seek out people like Amanda and Paul, people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen and Pamela Slim and John Jantsch and Bill Whittle.  All of them believe in the future.  

We have endured a terrible economy for years, but in that time, unbridaled creativity is blooming.  The social world I've lived in for a decade is that promise of a better future where exciting people are shedding their old selves and recreating themselves in a new image.  We do not have to be oblivious about the world around us, but we should never fall prey to the decay of the spirit that leads us to forecast doom.  

We cannot alter yesterday.  We can only prepare for tomorrow.  Approaching today with optimism is the only way to ensure it is well-lived. 

 

 

 

You Have A Lot Of Experience In Your Head

Sitting down with a client, my marketing firm brandstorming was asking questions about where the client stood on a new marketing plan for a new product. 

Of interest was the messaging they were going to use, and in the discussion, it became clear that their marketing messaging in their main business was very strong personally, but was not clear online.  Like many businesses, the quality of their work was much better than their online presence.  

They didn't need me to create a new way to market, they needed me to pull the right answers out of their heads and put them online.  We reached a point where we all started nodding, and realized that what we really needed was to give the owners the time to think about how good they really were. 

I got the idea from blogging. It's always been my idea that blogging is good for introspection.  It forces you to write more than you know off the top of your head, which forces you to think about what you do and why.  Many qualified people don't think about what they're good at, and instead look for slogans to short-cut their way to explanations. That's the whole point of a job title.  Job titles are marketing of people. 

Why does this matter to you, especially for social media?   One, you need more introspection about what you really do. Two, you need to slow down with the promises and instead figure out what you've done in the past that would be useful to a client or employer.  And three, you need to do a better job of finding people who need your particular skills.  If you don't know what those skills are, how can you figure out how to apply them to clients? 

I beat the drums quite a bit about experience being more important than social media skills, but that's just word play.  Social media is something that lets you do what you've done in the past, better.  If you can discover what you did, and why that might be of interest to a prospect or prospective boss, social media is easy. 

It's when you try to make social media the destination that you fail, and sound like a fraud.  Is there a social media future where "social media" changes everything?   Yes.  But you have to get there first, and if you're broke and unemployed, you won't be the one they trust. 

It looks like this.  $$$ now ='s success later.  

Or maybe look at it on this timeline.