Social Media Headhunter

Minimum Acceptable Social Assets For Job Interviews

Way back in the early days of social media hiring (2006-2008), having a blog with 1000 visitors or a twitter feed with a few thousand followers was all you needed to get company attention.  Companies looking to hire a social media expert had little to go on, and views, visitors,a nd followers were the metric they needed to feel confidence. 

Because we were early adopters, we got press.  Television, site links, speaking opportunities, and more site links led to a power law distribution where the rich got richer and the poor quit blogging.  And then we discovered how foolish we were.  Social media in the public sphere was growing faster than anything in the business world, and the need to communicate with real audiences with money outpaced our ability to self-promote.   

Blogs were overtaken by Twitter, which was overtaken by Facebook, then by a dozen other sites including YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest.  Fame was still important, but companies had matured to figure out that fame didn't equal money.  Fame became the minimum acceptable level to get an interview, instead of the golden key to unlock the riches of a social media job.  

I'll stop the teasing.  Here are what I perceive as the minimum to get hired. A few caveats before we get started.  B2C is different than B2B.  National is different than international.  And multiple accounts lends a weight that single accounts do not (So Facebook +LinkedIn +Instagram beats a single Twitter account, unless the Twitter account is huge).  

Social Media Strategist/Specialist/Consultant

A combination of at least three of the following

• LinkedIn:  500+
• Facebook:  300+
• Twitter: 1000+
• Pinterest: 100 images
• YouTube: 30 videos, 100+subscribers
• Blog: 6 months of archives, updated within two weeks of interviews.  

Important: Cross links to all of your social channels to give the impression of depth

Marketer with responsibilities that include social media.

Multiple accounts, updated weekly.  Can substitute the company social media properties if you're the sole author. 

Non-marketing job with social media responsibilities

A single platform that is actively updated with regular content about the business/industry/company. 

Entry-level social media:

Either a Facebook account with 200 friends or a Twitter account with 500.

Youtube/Pinterest/Tumblr:  Something with a lot of content and action. Number of followers/comments doesn't matter as long as you show you are prolific and not immature. 

Director and above (below the C-suite)

Useful To Have:

Blog with intelligent content, updated in the last month.

LinkedIn account, if it is complete, needs 500+ contacts.  

Facebook/Twitter: Useful for being sourced by media and recruiters, but it's more important to understand what the accounts do for the business. 

Senior Executive 

They don't care about your personal accounts unless there's something bad in there. 

 

These are of course minimums across industries, and your mileage may vary, but this is a good baseline for understanding if someone has even a basic level of understanding of social media.  Note also that these are primarily personal accounts - which although they don't necessarily correlate to business performance, do speak to your willingness to be involved in learning (which requires doing). 

 

And a final note.  In the inteview, the more you champion your knowledge, the higher those numbers go.  It's not a particularly good interviewing question, as results matter more than numbers (and are easily gamed), but if you're talking about how good you are, just know the interviewer will have a har time distinguishing between your personal social media stats and your professional ones. 

 

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Social Media Is Like A Crowd Of Six Colored Hamsters

In a few years, we're going to laugh at the idea of social media being a separate discipline.

Back in 2008, I said there was a struggle between social media as a discipline and social media as a skillset.  Skillset won out bigtime, which is why today we have six specific divisions in companies that demand social media experience as a condition of employment.

And that's there the hamsters come in.  Are you familiar with hamsters?  You ever seen one running on a wheel?  They are getting no where fast, and yet, they don't stop.  They're not getting exercise - it's not like the treadmills at the gym where you watch television without the volume to pretend that sticky bun is burning itself off your thighs - no, hamsters love that wheel.  The wheel is their purpose. 

And that's what social media has become for so many people - a purpose in and of itself.  To believe that, you'd have to pretend that prior to the invention of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, an untapped potential lay inside corporations that was just waiting for the right technology to break free.  Is that what happened?

Social Media, despite the tortured attempts to give it definition since 2006, is a breakdown of two works.  Social, meaning friends, and Media, meaning information. Social Media is friends sharing information.  Companies are not your friends.  So in the context of business, social media cannot exist as anything other than a plug-in to existing hamsters functions.

Those six functions are:

1. Sales
2. Digital Marketing
3. Recruiting
4. Customer Service
5. Public Relations
6. Customer Experience/Customer Outreach

For each function, social media is best explained as a preference layer existing on top of other functions.

Customer Service:  Call Centers taking phone, email, and now Twitter and Facebook, forum and review sites questions.

Recruiting: Using social media to identify talent (sourcing), reaching out to them through their social media channels (recruiting), and branding through social channels (recruitment marketing).

In each function, social media overlays traditional metrics, replaces other kinds of spending, and magnifies existing spend. Some examples:

 

Call Center:

Cost per call resolution:  $10-$16.
Cost per Tweet with email resolution: $6-8

                    Cost Savings 20-50%

Photo Session: $200,000

Magazine layout: 1,000,000 readers and shares over three months (theorized tracking)

Expanded presence: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, website, slideshare, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube

        400,000 views and shares (actual tracking)

                                            Magnification: 40%

Back to the Hamsters:

Social Media today is not a discipline. It's a code word for modern, hip, and fundable.  What we're trying to do is take a hamster, dip it into Easter Ink, and pass it off as something new and exciting.  

The crazy part is that the colored hamsters are exciting!  The world has changed. It is moving faster. But that's not the result of social media. Social media is actually our way of coping with a world that moves faster (if you're going to blame something, blame hi-speed internet and mobile data plans).

Maybe this was necessary. Maybe without the creation 0f the social media monster, traditional companies wouldn't have had the courage to make major changes.  Certainly the social media disasters of the mid part of the decade led companies like Dell and Comcast to take big steps forward.  That's all above my paygrade, but I can tell you this:

If you want to be successful in selling, getting hired, or training, demystify social media.

Hiring managers want to know how social media will affect their spheres of influence.  Many have been tricked into thinking social media is something new they don't understand.  Learn to talk about it as a group of colored hamsters rather than the Holy Grail.

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Attitudes About Social Recruiting: A Survey

A simple survey - I want to know from readers, followers, and friends what their attitudes are on social recruiting.  Please take only if you are an active recruiter. 

 

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

 

 

LinkedIn Recruiting Quiz Finally Posted

A lot of recruiters talk about their experience in social media, specifically LinkedIn.  Here's your chance to find out how good you are. 

This is a quiz I created for training webinars.  It is not an official quiz, and it requires  a background in recruiting to be successful. 

LinkedIn Recruiting Quiz 2012

View more presentations from Social Media Talent

Five Lies I'm Tired Of Hearing About In Social Media

Mikal Belicove writes a thoroughly banal post at Enterpreneur Magazine on the Five Lies About Social Media Marketing, and after reading through it, I just can't hold my tongue.  The column lists five of the most common complaints about social media, without actually digging into them at all.  And while Mikal applies the "absolutes" argument as cover, no one I've ever read or heard has ever made the claim that these "lies" are absolutes.   

I'll give him kudos for writing a numbered list that plays well on Twitter, but his post deserves a response.  His five lies, with my responses below. 

1) Size matters.

 From the number of connections on linkedin (allowing you to see more full profiles) to comparing conversions against email and PPC, Size can absolutely matter in social media.  It matters as least as much as other channels, like television or email lists or calling lists. This is one of those feel good statements with no analysis behind it. 

2) The medium is the message

 Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Ning, Forums, email lists and television have different community expectations.  You can't be successful if you don't know those expectations and work with your community.  And it's another general comment with nothing on it.  Here's an example of how it's wrong.  Customers looking to get answers now look for Twitter and Facebook for company responses.  Prospects will often surf to a home page and click on links to social sites.  In both cases, the message is the medium.  They want to talk to you on those mediums.  The message is not important. 

And btw - young people weren't the first to use Twitter.  They also weren't the first in blogs, which really kick-started this whole thing 10 years ago.

  

3.) Social Media Gurus Do Exist.

This is one of those really bad statements that is never backed up. Name a fraud in social media.  No one wants to, so they go vague.  Better yet, name a guru in any field, outside social media, and we'll show you how they're not, really.  There is plenty of experience in using social media successfully.  Social media has no more problem with experts than SEO, marketing, PR, TV, politics, science (yeah, you heard me), or child raising. 

4) Social Media is "new media"

Social media started out being called new media because we differentiated blogs and social networking sites from "digital," which itself was differentiated from "Creative."  Aside from that, there's the truth that social media represented many-to-many communication, as opposed to one-to-many communication.  It was new because it enabled an audience to talk back, and to each other.  

5) Social Media can be effectively outsourced to a PR firm.  

On what basis is this considered a lie?  Successful PR firms don't brag about their work when they have confidentiality agreements, but it happens all the time.  What is needed is full client access, but outsourcing works fine in many cases.  It works better than internal work if you're being brutally honest.  It doesn't work for everyone, but this is another example of a general statement that is nonsense, unsupported by fact, and generally harmful.  Mikal knows this, which is wh he backtracks in the comments, but if you have to clarify yourself, it's because your column was poorly written.  

Mikal is no goofball, but he deserves to have his nose smacked on this one.  The column has no value, and instead is counterproductive in that it rehashes general arguments without an ounce of specificity and a number of arguments divorced from their historical context. 

We'd have been better off if he tossed this first draft, and instead published his comments defending his work.  

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. 

 

 

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.

We May Not Be Experts, But We Know Frauds When We See Them

There's an old joke about how to win an argument.  When you have the facts, stick to the facts. When you don't have the facts, make your argument louder.  When you're losing the argument, bang your shoe on the table.  We have no tables in social media, but we see this kind of behavior way too often. 

Social media is hard.  In addition to having to learn at a breakneck pace, much of what you say and do is obsolete shortly after you produce the content.  I know this in a painful way, as my training DVD's had a shelf life of less than six months, as Twitter, LinkedIn, and especially Facebook altered their look and functionality so much, my content was no longer relevant. 

And because that functionality changes, old pronouncements can come back to bite you, as in when I said Facebook was worthless to recruiters not serving the college graduate crowd.  When that changed, I changed my mind, and wrote about it, fessing up to my mistake.  

I've had to eat crow, update, confess to rushing before I got facts right, and I've even had to apologize.  And it was good for me.  It's a sign of character my parents taught me, and it's more important than ever in understanding social media (or really any expertise). 

I want to give you four examples in recent weeks of people making outrageous statements.  All four have a large online presence.  All four have been called experts by others.   All four reacted differently, and it's my contention that their reactions were more important in the determination of their expertise (and their character), then their initial statements. 

Number One: Peter Shankman And Social Media Experts

   In a blog post that got picked up by the Business Insider and tweeted and shared thousands of times, Peter Shankman said you should never hire someone who calls themselves a social media expert, and he joked they should all burn in a fire. 

First, I'd like to refute the argument visually.  

Note Peter spoke at an event in October where he is listed as a social media expert. By his own words, we should not hire him, but instead should give him a book of matches. 

But hey, we all say things we come to regret. Shankman was trying to make the relevant point that social media has to be tied to business goals (actually he said revenue, which is only part of the picture, but the argument is a valid one).  Where he made a mistake was punching down and insulting a broad swath of people with little more than innuendo. 

When called on it, Peter did three things. First, he argued with people on his site and doubled down on his comments.  He refused to acknowledge that he smeared a group of people unfairly (and no one specifically).  

Second, he contiued to argue with people on other sites, but he did so in a mocking manner.  The one that sticks in my mind is the guy who found this picture and asked about it on Twitter.  Peter insulted him, mocking the guy's personal website for having broken links.  Not exactly a classy move.

Third, and the worst part, was Peter's failure to address the substantive issues in a forum online.  He let the original column stand, and then moved on.  For a guy claiming to be a social media expert and worldwide connector, he sure seemed to miss the point about engaging critics in an honest manner.  

In short, Peter acted like a jerk, and his personal reputation deserves to be measured against those actions.

Number Two:  Gary Vaynerchuk, and the social media clowns.

Gary made a comment in an interview that almost all social media people don't have a clue how business works.  the interview title was provocative, and so Gary came out with a video backing up his statements, but explaining what he meant.  The argument was very similar to what Peter Shankman was hinting at, that social media has to produce a result, and that requires expertise and hard work.

The difference was in how it was handled.  Vaynerchuk is no shrinking violet, and he clearly loves a good fight, but his responses, from the video to face-to-face conversations were intended to move the argument forward, not take pot shots at people who dared question him.  

What a difference.  Two similar statements, and yet my impression of the reactions determined which person I would call expert, and which I would call a fraud.  

Number Three:  Chris Penn and Empire Avenue

Chris Penn wrote a post calling Empire Avenue a virtual Ponzi Scheme.  Chris had his facts wrong, and that led him to a conclusion that was very wrong. People across the net quickly called him out on it.  Chris's response?

I'll look into it, and get back to you. 

At first, I thought that was dismissive, but within a day, Chris had updated the post and his Twitter page to acknowledge that his column may have been wrong, and he was looking into it. He even listed me by name (I criticized the column in the arguments).  In doing so, Chris earned an enormous amount of respect from me.  He didn't need to backtrack and apologize - he just needed to look into it further and then make a new judgement.  He owned his words.  How can you not like a guy like that, and more important, trust a guy like that - give him the benefit of the doubt in the future if you think he makes another mistake?  Owning up to his mistake, makes he think he's someone worth listening to because he's not afraid to be wrong.  Chris doesn't know me, and could have ignored comments, but instead, he displayed intellectual curiousity and honesty, a trait any online expert needs.

Fourth Example: (Still Pending)  Dan Schawbel and Job Boards

Dan is a personal branding coach who has been out in front for Gen Y pitching reputation management, wrote a column in Forbes about LinkedIn replacing job boards. In the column, he displayed a shocking amount of ignorance about the employment process, as well as gratuitously insulting recruiters who use job boards as "lazy."  The column was a trainwreck, one that many big names in the online recruiting industry quickly eviscerated (Recruiters were some of the first to use social media, and we've been doing it as a community for 8 years).  

The column was not researched well, poorly thought out, and quite frankly should  be retracted (yeah, it's that bad).  Dan answered a few comments at Forbes, but has now seemingly moved on, going so far as to delete a Facebook wall post from Paul Debettignies (MNHeadhunter.com), claiming he prefers to have his own content on the wall.  Hey, it's Dan's wall, but failing to engage critics who know more than you are is the same sort of nonsense Peter Shankman was peddling.  It's weakness, and cowardice, to simply run from arguments made by people with substantive claims. 

Look, I'm not saying that every person writing online has to engage with every single person who disagrees with them.  I get it.  But when you occupy a position of prominence, and you really screw up, you should be willing and able to face the music.  You can ignore trolls and people picking fights with you, but when you ignore everyone after writing a provocative piece, then you're a media whore, not a serious business consultant. 

Dan still has a chance to come back from the abyss, but he's seriously damaged his digital relationships with the online recruiting community, many of whom have spent the better part of four years applauding him for his initiative.  He burned the very bridges he speaks of building to his audience. 

And so you have four examples of social media pundits, whose reactions helps us understand whether or not the emperor has any clothes.  Those you can trust, back up their arguments or admit a mistake. Those you cannot trust, run away from arguments, mock detractors, and pretend their social media fame is some kind of shield from honest criticism. 

If there was a test for social media expertise, owning your words would be on it.  

 

 

 

 

 

I Can Measure Social Media ROI. Why Can't Everyone?

Simon Salt, a specialist in location based marketing and good guy, points out that people measuring Social Media ROI tend not to understand it's a financial device. 

"Let’s clarify here, while I do not deny that there are returns to be made from making an investment in social media, social media ROI does not exist in the terms that it is usually couched in. ROI or Return on Investment is a financial term, usually defined in the following way:

"

Simon identifies a real problem, which is misuse of terms, but these types of measurements aren't difficult to come by.  In fact, I find Simon's title to be innaccurate, even though his reasoning is sound. 

Here's the Title:  Why There Is No Social Media ROI

Here's my response. 

• Count Likes on Facebook
• Survey Facebook Likes for money spent per sale/month/quarter/year. 
• Run Social Media Campaign to boost number of Likes 
• Survey Likes post-campaign for money spent per sale/month/quarter.year.
• Compare data on a per customer basis (recognizing a Likes campaign may dilute that share with fake likes). Contrast per person data for success of campaign inside social media (revenue per customer)
• Analyze email list, or in-store visit list for similar per-person data.  This is your control group. 
• Crunch data to find increase in per person sales during the campaign, based on the number of likes and the baseline data. 
•  Contrast to control group to determine if the social campaign was more effective than the email list. or general in-store customer. 

Problem solved? 

Back In My Day, We Didn't Have Experts, Just Moderately Experienced Marketers

Is it bad to call yourself a social media expert?  There sure seems to be a lot of anger about it. Hard to tell if the knee-jerk response to snort at a social media expert is honest derision, or a superstitious attempt to to ward off evil, the 21st century version of "There but for the grace of Google go I."

Given how big an area the definition of social media can cover, one can either throw up their hands and say it's not possible to be an expert, or one can accept that social media is a preference layer that has more to do with our target audiences than the discipline itself. 

And make no mistake, social media is a discipline.  It's not enough to call it a tool in a tool box.  It's a skill set that is distinct from marketing, PR, and customer service.  Do you know how we can tell?  Experts with decades of experience in marketing, PR, customer service, and sales are often completely clueless when it comes to using social media to bring value. 

If social media is as easy as taking a piece of bread out of a refrigerator, why do so many people foul it up on their own?  Why are there so few true examples of social media success, if it's so easy?

It's because it's not easy, and we're not driving it.  Social media is the public's way of learning. The mass communication and connectedness of our audiences is driving change that companies cannot keep up with, and they know it.  It's simple math. There are more of them, than of us.  Because there are more of them, they learn faster.  So why do they need someone who is an "expert" in social media?  it's the same reason they need a recruiter. 

Here's a dirty little secret about the recruiting industry. We're not that much better than internal Human Resource departments.  But we don't have to be.  We just have to be a little better, a little faster, than internal departments.  And we are, because we have structural advantages, from representing multiple clients to being sales-oriented to spending more time searching and calling candidates and less time on paperwork.

Some people hate recruiters, but the industry continues to do well, because the marketing of the industry says we're experts in hiring.  Some of use are, some aren't, but the industry has a reputation of solving problems a little faster and with less hassle than internal departments (on average).

Do you know what you don't say as a recruiter to a client?  You don't say, "I'm slightly better than your internal people." You say, "I'll do the job, with my massive database, and I'll be accountable solely to you because I'm an expert."

That's mostly true, but it's still marketing.  We're marketing ourselves to sell our services, just like every other industry.  Do you know what we call ourselves?   Headhunters.  Staffing experts.  Talent acquisition experts. National Account Executives.  It's title inflation, common to everyone from teachers (educators), to Senior Digital Communication Vice Presidents for Advertising and Messaging, International Markets. 

Thus, the social media expert, or whatever they call themselves, from consultant, to strategist, to connector, to integrated marketers, to social business analyst, is engaging in a form of marketing called personal branding. Everyone does it.  Everyone does it. 

Calling yourself an expert in an area is an attempt to convey the idea that you are worth paying for your advice.  It's a rookie move, when you can call yourself better terms like Digital Integrated Director, Social Business Communicator, but it's all the same.  And mocking it is disingenuous.  

There is no difference between calling yourself a "social media expert," and describing a product you sell as a "revolutionary step forward in household disinfectants."  It's just marketing.  We can complain about it, we can mock it, we can judge it, but let's not lie to ourselves that making fun of someone for marketing themselves is authentic criticism, if we ourselves do any form of marketing, or if others do it for us (so no ducking if your job is help desk.  Someone markets your services for you).  

We have nonsense titles in most companies.  We have training programs that have little value to anyone not sorting resumes.  We have college degrees for people who can't write or speak in public.  We have Master's and Doctorate programs for 2nd grade teachers who now call themselves "educators," but whose children can't read when they leave the classroom.  We all market, from fake hair and nails to car leases we can't afford in neighborhoods where are house payments are based on no interest loans.  

Social Media Experts don't get special passes because of their titles, but do we really think they're horrible people?  They tend to be small fish trying to sell (and often failing), but sometimes they are people who recognize that social media is sexy, and thus it gets attention.  When attacking social media experts, why is there so much venom?  Is it because we're mad about title inflation?  Or is there something else?