The Twitter “Black Hole”

I was recently putting together a presentation on Employer Branding when I ran across what I would like to call the Twitter “Black Hole”.  Many companies are using Twitter for posting jobs as part of their employer branding strategy which makes perfect sense.  However, Employer Branding is about how you look to the outside world.

On Twitter, there are 3 visual ways that will help you with this Employer Branding.  There is of course, the profile picture.  Getting rid of the “egg” as a profile picture is a basic step that everyone has conquered.  Having a personalized good background is another visual that a lot of companies have mastered, but when it comes to the Twitter “cover” picture (Header), that has been lost in translation. A missed opportunity to make a statement.  Or are you sending your candidates into a black hole?

This phenomenon is not only showing in recruitment and employer branding accounts but also on many corporate accounts.  Why?  I think it is more about ignorance that inability.  Some organizations are doing it right as shown below.

Having a great cover picture (Header)  on your profile is a great asset as we all know since a picture says more than a thousand words. The picture should say something about you or the type of company that you are.  Like on Facebook there are creative ways to make use of this picture as shown below.

Next step?

Time to update your 3 Twitter visuals and brand your account.  Knowing the dimension of these picture is key, so here are the dimensions for your reference:

Twitter profile picture: 81 x 81 pixels (Max 2MB)

Header picture: 520 x 260 pixels (Max. 5MB)

Background picture: 1600 x 1200 pixels (Max. 2MB)

Have you seen any creative use of pictures on Twitter profiles?  Let me know!

Social Media Policies in Belgium (Part 1) – Only 1 in 5 company has one!

Social Media Policies have found their entrance into large corporation but the small and especially the medium sized companies have not created and implemented  such social media policies.

Earlier this year PayScale released some results about the adoption of Social Media Policies in the USA (http://mashable.com/2012/06/10/employer-social-media/).  The conclusion was that over 50% of the companies had a formal social media policy.  But how do Belgian businesses match up to these numbers?

A recent survey (October 2012) done via Vanguard Leadership has revealed that only 1 company in 5 has a social media policy in Belgium.  And since Belgium is a country of Small and Medium sized business, we can conclude that the 20% of companies that have a social media policy are mainly  the larger companies.

The same survey uncovered that  65% of the employees accessed Facebook, 52% LinkedIn and 53% Twitter daily during work hours.  You would think that social media policies would be more common since employers are worried about their employees wasting time or damaging the reputation of their company on social media.

A first conclusion is that companies are not always aware that their employees are very active on social media.  Though these companies are aware that such a policy is a must they do not create or implement a policy or guidelines until they have an “accident” which leads to reputation loss.  Over the course of the year we have witnessed several of these examples (e.g. Ikea in Belgium – http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=GVB3M9AGE) where a social media policy is created after the reputation damage was detected.

More information to come about the results of this survey in next blog posts.

Notes about the survey:  Over 200 companies were surveyed.  About 50% have less than 50 employees, 30% have less than 250 employees and  and 20% were larger than 500 employees.

Who controls the social media policy creation?

We all know that control and social media are contradictory, but that is what people and companies think you achieve through a social media policy.

Where in the past social media was the exclusive playing field of marketing, today HR, sales and other departments are finding great benefits in social media.  These departments are discovering new platforms or uses for existing platforms to benefit their departments.  So with this expanding usage of social media, comes the awareness that a social media policy is needed.

Today I am seeing a new battle arise, namely who will create the social media policy.  A number of departments are trying to pull that creation of such a much needed policy to them.  However, there are 3 clear main drivers: HR, marketing and IT. They do this for different reasons.

But first, the creation of a social media policy is project that is done in a number of different ways today.   Some resort to an automated tool to create a policy.  It goes without saying that this can’t be the full answer.  Others will surf the internet for a policy and do a copy/paste, this is a better approach but the reality is that your social media policy is not the same as the one from any other company and thus requires a personal approach.

In order to reflect all requirements and wishes within the company, a number of departments must be included in the creation of such a policy.  Each department will bring their unique experience, skills and motivation for the policy to the table.  No department alone should be dominating this effort.  Here is some experience from real life why.

Marketing wants to control all messaging by being in charge while having free reign.  They will try to create either a minimalistic policy (“use your common sense” as only rule) or control the usage by a detailed “how to use social media handbook”.

HR wants to limit the risk, liability and time usage.  Though they do bring the skill of creating successful policies to the table, their angle will be focused on “do not …” rather than “do…” or “become…”.

IT will be concerned about bandwidth and IT security and their driver will be shut down as much as possible in terms of access to social media.

Legal will for liability reasons be trying to cross all the t’s and dot all the I’s in terms. Most of the time this achieved through complex wording that no one understands (cfr. Terms of services of most social media platforms).

Employee will either want as much as possible access to social media with nearly no rules or guidelines while others will want nothing to do with it.  The contributors will be giving the social media policy makers the real insight to the use of social media in the company and they should be considered valued contributors.

Unions are a much dreaded group of contributors.  Companies are afraid to involve them in the process.  However, since policies must also be reviewed, approved or endorsed by these unions, who by the way also use social media, they are critical to implementing social media policies successfully.

In my personal experience, creating a 2 page or 20 page social media policy (guideline or handbook), you need to have all these people and departments involved in the project to create a personalized and integrated social media policy for your company.  To make the roll-out process a success you need to accompany this project with social media awareness sessions and/or training.

Do you have different views? I love to hear from you!

Is LinkedIn running out steam for recruiters?

Over the last couple of weeks I have had many recruiters in my social media classes and every time they focus all their attention on LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.  When I come to Facebook, they seem to be shutting down. It seems they do not take Facebook seriously as a recruitment environment.  Maybe, they should think again.

One reason is that there are over 880 million people on Facebook vs the 147 million on LinkedIn.  Secondly, more and more companies are active through a fan pages on Facebook and using it for employer branding.  Fan pages allow much more flexibility and functionality to companies and recruiters than the LinkedIn Company pages.

And then there are several applications that have started to give LinkedIn a run for its money.  They listen to names such as Glassdoor, Beknown, Talent.me and BranchOut.  These apps bring LinkedIn functionality to Facebook making it the next best environment for recruitment.

Glassdoor is a free jobs and career community that offers the world an inside look at jobs and companies. Using the Inside Connection product lets you find companies and what connections inside you might have.  Additionally, you can find interview questions, salary ranges, company reviews, and job openings.  In true social media style the content is generated by the job seekers.

Beknown is a Facebook application by Monster.  There is a lot similarity between Beknown and LinkedIn: create a profile, you connect with people, get recommendations, find jobs, and follow companies. Beknown will let you see the 1st and 2^nd line connections like LinkedIn. As you accept people in your network, you earn badges like in Foursquare.

Talent.me is a professional networking app on Facebook which answers the questions where your friends worked and who your inside connections are at companies.  The goal of Talent.me is to help you leverage your friend network and make it work for your career advancement.  You can also endorse your connections and build communities around specific talents.  This social media network seems to be very US focused.

And finally, there is BranchOut.  On BranchOut, users leverage their Facebook friends to find jobs, find sales leads, recruit talent, and setup relationships with your professional contacts. BranchOut also operates the largest job board on Facebook with over 3 millions jobs in 60 countries.  Recruiters from all over the world are joining BranchOut and taking advantage of lower priced recruitment packages to find and attract new talent.

Of course, LinkedIn is still the standard when it comes to recruitment, but I am convinced that Facebook will take over very soon.  Today, it seems that BranchOut is the forerunner but it is still early days.

Do you know any other tools?  Feel free to share through the comment field.

Are you ruining your business reputation?

When it comes to business networking, LinkedIn has been the trusted platform of choice. A large number of members are conscious of the fact that they need to have a professional profile. A further reduced number is making the most of the “Status update” to bring value to their network and drive traffic to good content. Over the last weeks and months, the level of professionalism of the “Status Updates” has dropped considerably. When you were looking for people that said that “hated their job” or “were bored”, you needed to do this on platforms such as Facebook. We all remember the “OMG, I hate my job post on Facebook”.

Well, today you can find similar posts on LinkedIn with compliments of Twitter.  Thanks to LinkedIn Signal search option, these messages now become very apparent and public.  I am even convinced the people who have these types of posts are no longer aware of the fact they linked their Twitter account to their LinkedIn account.  So messages such as below are now regulars on LinkedIn reducing the level of professionalism of certain people.

On another note, we all know the name calling of Facebook, but say welcome to similar expressions on LinkedIn!  Here are some examples.

Do you really want your professional reputation tarnished by these types of comments?  Your co-workers are listening to you on business networks… not to mention your current and future employers.

Though it is simple to connect your social media accounts, you really need to think this through.  Do you really want people to see where you are eating (Foursquare to Twitter to LinkedIn)? What you are doing in the garden or what store you are at?  If you are a frequent Twitterer, the constant status updates will annoy the hell out of your contacts and you will soon be stopped being followed in professional networks achieving the opposite of what you were aiming for.

If you want update your status on multiple networks, consider using tools such as tweetdeck or hootsuite where at least you know where you are posting the messages.  And remember to disconnect all post-through actions.

Not getting recruited via social networking? Do not worry, you are not alone.

The results from a recent survey (September-October 2010) from Executives Online Ltd (www.executivesonline.com) puts a bit of shade on the so much hyped social networking as a means to efficient recruitment. This is the second year the survey was conducted.

Over 1200 senior executives were surveyed and asked about their opinion and effectiveness of social networking in their personal and professional life.  In concurrence with many surveys in this area, including the study done by Mic Adam from Vanguard Leadership of July 2010, LinkedIn was deemed by most professionals as the most interesting social networking site with Facebook coming in as a good second and Twitter as a third.   All these platforms grew in importance over the last 12 months.

As can be expected, LinkedIn is viewed as the most useful platform for recruitment (90%) while the other platforms are struggling to get to 50%.  This is understandable since the audience surveyed is executive level.  Facebook is still viewed as purely private networking while Twitter is a big unknown to many.

With the hype around social media in general, more and more people are resorting to these platforms to find a new job but few have actually succeeded at securing such a position.  I think this really reflects the practice in the recruitment market. The numbers do show a 50% increase over last year’s results which holds a good promise for the future.  Let’s be honest, social networking still has to find its ‘balanced’ place in the mix of tools used by managers and recruiters both professionals and corporate.

When it comes to hiring via social networking sites, the numbers are even lower.  Fewer than 5% of the respondents have actually tried to hire through social networks and even fewer have hired people recruited through social networks.  So the conclusion is that the supply of job seekers far exceeds the demand (job offerings).  However, here too the numbers are on the rise.

Even though there is certainly an uptake of social networking for recruitment, there are some serious showstoppers which hold true for all trades when it comes to social media.  They can be summarized as follows: lack of authenticity, the myth that social networking is for younger and less senior people, and most importantly, the time factor since keeping a social media presence takes time to maintain and follow up.  This is where a lot of falls apart.  Managers and recruiters, just like marketeers, are finding that using social media & networking is a time consuming activity but keep in mind that going to network meetings is too!

Even though these numbers do not seem to live up to the hype, I feel they really reflect the reality of today.  There are,  of course, today recruitment agencies as well as private companies that are getting more than 15% of their new hires through social networking, it is realistic to say that social networking recruitments will be responsible for 10% of the new hires in the future.  The traditional method will continue to exist and possibly regain their strength.

The full survey can be found at:

http://www.executivesonline.co.uk/about_us/reports/social_networking

Do you have a success story and want to share your secret on how to get recruited via social networking,  I would love to hear about it.

Does your social media policy fall short?

If like me, you keep an eye on the trending topics of your business, interesting stories show up. In the world of social media, there were 2 trending topics over the last week. One was the fact that the American Medical Association just created a social media policy for physicians and the other about a medical technician being laid off on the basis of her comments about her supervisor on Facebook (NY Times article).

First to the policy, it is simple, straight forward and still comprehensive. It can be summarized in 5 short statements:

• Separate private and professional presence online
• Respect Doctor-Patient privacy and confidentiality
• Maintain Doctor-Patient relationship online
• Use security settings to the maximize protection for your social media profiles
• Know that your online presence will influence your offline reputation especially true with negative content

This is a great start but it is by no means a complete policy. I would consider it more some guidelines on usage rather than calling a policy. Some hospitals are taking this one step further and making more extensive policies that include aspects such as authenticity, honesty, disclaimers, etc. Good examples are the policies of the Mayo Clinic, Ohio StateUniversity Medical Center, etc.

However, as companies are hurrying towards making and implementing such a policy, the latter trending topic is generating a ground breaking legal case, which is stopping companies in their tracks. What is going on? A medical technician was fired over violating the rule for depicting the company in a negative way on social media (specifically Facebook). National Labor Relations Board has jumped in and said this firing was illegal since employees have the right to talk about the working conditions whether that is at the water cooler, in a bar or even facebook. It is unrealistic to think that barring employees to talk about their company anywhere is an option and even a very restrictive social media policy will not help.

There are five conclusions I would like to draw up:

• The best way to address such a situation is to have an open door policy where unhappy people can go and vent their frustrations to a real human being with no repercussions so they do not have to do this on social media.
• Include a paragraph addressing respect for and defamatory statements about company, co-workers, clients, suppliers, etc.
• Additionally, social media policies should include actions and consequences when the policy is not adhered to.
• Often forgotten, is the fact that you need to make sure employees have read and understood the social media policy to the same extend as the employment policies.
• Finally, employees have to keep in mind that they are also tarnishing their own reputation making these types of remarks and burdening their future employability.

hospitals and their social media policy

I did not think I was going to write so quickly a follow up to my last week’s post on social media in the hospital area, but my interest was peaked this week by a poll I saw via Twitter (@reedsmith).

The polls asked the question whether the organization/hospital had a social media media policy.  The result was somewhat amazing.

72% of the people who answered (25 answers) the poll said they did have a policy.  This number is very high but due to the fact that on average only 1 in 3 has a policy.  The fact that this poll was run through Twitter probably skewed the results.  The users are already on social media and thus somewhat likely to have a policy.

Looking at some publicly published policies, the areas that are covered can be summarized as:

• Clear definition on where the medical facility stands when it comes to social media and what usage during and off work-time.
• Commenting guidelines and rules
  • Focus on positive comments
  • posts with abusive and offensive language will be removed
  • posts with personal attack  will be removed
  • All spam-like posts will be removed
• Blogging guidelines including the use of disclaimers in both directions (medical facility and the commenter)
• Identity and affiliation with the medical facility
• Use of code of ethics including all other applicable policies
• General rules of conduct (add value, be smart, be authentic, etc.)

Though it is great to see that there are good examples of social media policies being put in place?  There are in my opinion 3 major components missing in these types of policies:

• What are the clear guidelines to deal with negative comments?  What is the plan?  Who is the go-to person/department?
• What monitoring is being done to make sure this policy is being “enforced”?
• How has the policy been communicated to the employees?  Just put on the intra-net does not do it.

So as a conclusion, I think that having guidelines for your employees is great, but they need to communicated and monitored effectively so. People must know what can and can not be done and what to do in cases of emergencies.

Social Media in Belgian Recruitment Companies

Recruitment and social media seem to go hand in hand.  Candidates who are looking for a new job are often told to update, complete and professionalize their profiles on all of these social media platforms in order to be found easily.  However, how professional and visible are recruitment companies and professionals?  It is clear that these companies and its professionals are making progress using social media but there is certainly a lack of strategy and direction.

Limited visibility.

Though recruitment companies are present in social media, few promote their presence (14%) on their website of jobsite.  8% of all companies analyzed did not have a website nor a social media presence.  LinkedIn is the social media platform that recruitment companies seem to embrace (57%).

Room for improvement on the professional image.

Job searchers are often told to professionalize their social media profile on LinkedIn by completing them as much as possible.  However, this can not be said about the recruitment professional!  They seem to leave all the good advice behind them with as most notable examples the fact 51% does not have a profile picture and 52% do not mention their own company website.

Lack of engagement.

The limited visibility of recruitment companies and the poor level of professionalism by the recruitment professionals lead to a lack of conversation and/or engagement with candidates.  The mostly mentioned reasons for this behavior is the “lack of time” and “lack of results” (aka ROI).  The conclusion is that today social media is being used reactively as to mainly verify that the paper resume corresponds the online resume.

Recruitment companies let a lot of opportunities slip because of this lack of engagement with possible candidates including those not actively looking.  Engagement will lead the way to finding good candidates with the right profiles more easily as a few companies in the research have demonstrated.  Creating the right image will build the brand even in the recruitment business.

This research is the result of a market study done by Vanguard Leadership in July 2010.  In this market study we have used social media and the internet to build the dataset.  We have analyzed 180 websites of recruitment companies and 850 profiles (in LinkedIn) of recruitment professionals in the Belgian market). The complete report and the presentation can be found on slideshare (report: http://slidesha.re/9rJlt8 or http://scr.bi/atOa17 – presentation: http://slidesha.re/9q47JN or http://scr.bi/aM94PS).

Contact:

Mic Adam

Social Media Policy Creator/General Manager

Adammic@vanguard-leadership.be

Phone: +32 478 50 41 35

Vanguard Leadership (www.vanguard-leadership.be) is a company that helps protect companies and individuals protect their reputation in social media by providing awareness presentations, social media inventories, creating social media policies, training and social media monitoring.

Turning the table on recruitment companies.

When you have to look for a new job there is one message you can not miss since it is shouted from every rooftop: “make sure you have your social media profiles available everywhere, updated and looking professional” because recruitment companies will be using them to screen you before meeting you.  It is whispered they might even be looking for you, but are they really!

And this is the moment when I would like to turn the table on the recruitment companies.

For those of us passively looking for a new employment opportunity, we are the ones looking (and shopping around)… and here the sky darkens above the hills of recruitment companies.  In my current research of “social media in the recruitment world in Belgium”, some of the results are staggering!  The results are based on factual findings using social media, so “no correction by discussion”.

The final results will be available next week but here are some of the questions I am asking myself (and the recruitment companies):

• Why do candidates have to be active, visible and findable in social media when recruitment companies are not (check their website for social media links)?
• Why do candidates have to have a professional picture when most of the recruiters do not have one at all?
• Why do candidates have to have many connections (let’s say 300 for argument’s sake and of course visible to the recruiter to check the quality) and the recruiter less than 50 (I am not kidding)?
• Why do candidates have to have blogs and links to their websites and recruiters or their companies not?

So far I have not heard or found any good answers to these questions other than recruitment companies saying they are using social media.  I wonder how?  Anyone care to comment or to enlighten me?

By the way, if you are interested in a copy of the results, you can reach out to me!  Contact details below.

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Email: adammic@vanguard-leadership.be

Mob. +32 478 50 41 35

Website: www.vanguard-leadership.be

Blog: http://micvadam.wordpress.com/

Find me also on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Netlog, etc.