10 takeaways from this video:
00:00:50 Five years ago, nobody would have considered social media as a part of Human Resources. The debate today is how companies can effectively use social media to help Human Resources best do its job.
00:02:50 There are actually companies out there who shouldn’t use social media because their company lacks the culture, legal conditions, and openness required to be successful on social media.
00:03:36 Web 1.0 sites are very simple websites where a publisher such as a newspaper, a consultant, a small business, etc.posts content and consumers read it. With Web 2.0, ‘consumers’ become ‘prosumers’ (producer/consumer) and both produce and use content. Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Ebay, each provides the platform, and prosumers work together to provide the content.
Social media is web 2.0, however what you find on social media are people, their social network, and the individual content created and shared (liked, pinned, tweeted, etc.) by the people. The importance of content depends on how many people like it.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Recall in my interview with Web Developer John Foland that Google’s algorithm is like a voting system, and every link is considered a vote. But not all votes are equal: higher PageRank-ed websites have more heavily weighted votes.
So if website A is important and has hundreds of backlinks and links to B, and website C also links to B, but C is but a small site, then if B links back to A, that diminishes A’s vote to B by a little bit. And if B reciprically links back to A that diminshes the vote a lot more.
So from a selfish point of view, blogrolls and link sharing are a bad idea. If you want to be number one, you want a lot of people linking to you and you want to link to very few.]
00:16:53 Forrester’s Seven Overlapping levels of Social Technology Participation shows in real-time how a particular consumer demographic behaves.
This knowledge is important because markets change. When you’re happy or unhappy about a particular product or brand or event, you want to let everybody know.
Many Human Resources Marketing resources were written prior to Web 2.0.
00:33:43 An error on a retail website was selling Apple mac book online for only 49.99€. A man with a large Twitter following bought a couple and then tweeted the deal to his followers. This sale went viral and within minutes 1,000s of Mac books were sold. In the end the company didn’t honor the sales, but gave vouchers and held a lottery so some of the buyers did get a Mac book at that price.
The customers understood the mistake and appreciated how the retail website handled it.A potential social media public relations nightmare turned into a success.
There isn’t anything in Human Resources which cannot be supported via social media.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture How to Keep Quality Employees (Part 2) that one of the most important things for Millennials are their peers. One of the best things companies can do to retain their employees is to let them become friends.
The boss is also a very important facter with regards to whether an employee stays with your company.
You could have the best company reputation which attracts all the best job candidates, but if the boss or the peers aren’t compatible, then your employees will leave; employees join companies, but leave bosses and peers.]
00:41:13 When employees have work-related questions, they will more likely find solutions online or with their colleagues than immediately with their boss.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture Identifying & Developing Key Employees that ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.
Also, recall also in Keith Rabois’ lecture Operating Your Business For Growth & Success that there are two basic types of employees: ammunition and barrels.
- Ammunition – these employees are good at doing things and getting the job done. These employees are important to the success of your business.
- Barrels – these employees are good at focusing and shooting the ammunition. These employees are crucial to the success of your business because they can take an idea from inception to production and because no matter how much ammunition you have, you need the barrel for the ammunition to be useful. Barrels are VERY hard to find, and when you find one of these kinds of employees, make them a priority. Find barrels and then stock them with ammunition.
How to identify the ‘barrels;’ the people to promote in your company:
- Watch how they handle simple, stupid, mundane tasks such as having cold, fresh smoothies delivered to a group of hard-working engineers at 9:00 PM every night. Expanding the scope of responsiblity of your employees until they break shows you how much responsibility each person is comfortable with and ensures that that person is being used to their full potential.
- Watch which person in your office has the most people approaching his or her desk, particular people that aren’t responsible for. In a working environment, people approach people who they believe can help them. If one employee has more and more people approaching him asking for help or guidance, then that person is perhaps a barrel; promote them and give them more responsibilities.]
00:43:04 The above slide is just an example of the different ways Human Resources can use social media for talent acquisition: attracting & selecting the best candidates.
How to launch your social media campaign:
00:47:26 Don’t just launch a Facebook fan page. Look at the company strategy and the define the target demographic the company wants to reach.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Recall in my interviews with Data Consultant Thomas Palugan and Digital Consultant Aurélien Pécoul that one mistake a lot of brands make is thinking that social media strategy is easy to set up, but thinking it’s easy is not good. As soon as you have a facebook fan page, you suddenly have to handle important issues like:
- “What is my community management style?”
- “What is my conversation calendar?“
- “What is the real value for the consumer of becoming new fan?”
- “How can I distinguish between fans who are merely fans and fans who are also buyers and owners of my product, service, or royalty program?”
As soon as you have a fan page, you also have to have a crisis strategy. Because as you’re opening a page, you’re letting the possibility for everybody and anybody to talk with you, but also to critique or insult you. You need to find a way to be reactive and manage these kinds of situations. Opening a facebook page and simply posting things isn’t a safe solution.
Also, considering which and how many social media platforms you communicate on is also an important decision that depends on: Your demographic/target audience, the market you’re in…
Some brands think in terms of channels and not content. You ‘need’ a facebook page but don’t know what to do with it. You ‘need’ a website but don’t know where you want to go with it.
There was a time when everybody ‘had to’ be on facebook – no matter what – as it is a popular social network. Steven Brinlee, Senior Creative Director of AR NY points out that brands can get so “caught up in this forward momentum, it can become a sort of ‘me too’ default reaction for brands, causing them to be easily enticed into jumping headlong into the pool before taking the time to define what they actually want to be in that digital space.” But it’s important to remember that without a goal and a clearly defined brand objective there’s no reason for you to be on facebook, or any social network for that matter.
Finally, it’s really difficult to have a consolidated view of your market. If you’re a brand and you have 20 platforms, it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to have a consumer-centric view. It’s also very important NOT to have a vertical strategy for each social media platform, but to link them all together. If you’re going to have that many platforms, you’re going to need an approch to help you organize all your data into one easy-to-read location so you can collect and analyse the data from the different social media platforms.]
00:48:22 Some companies are so out of date that they’ll need to be explained what all the different social media sites do and who they are for. In most companies the DRH is in his or her 40s-50s, and so wouldn’t be ideal for choosing the content for a Facebook page created to attract university student graduates.
A good blog is a blog which is read by many people.
01:05:11 Companies use social media in so many different ways that it’s difficult to classify, but can be boiled down to six basic types.
Final thoughts…
