social recruiting

How can Google Communities help position employers as a source of value?

Welcome to the penultimate part of our 5-part blog on how employers can make best use of Google Plus. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading and viewing our content as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it.

Last week we shared a video blog that talked about Google Hangouts and how employers can use them to be more personal. If you missed that, take a look at the video here.

This week we’ll be discussing Google Communities, and how they can be used to help position employers as thought leaders and a source of value amongst their audience.

For those who are unsure, a Google+ Community is something that resembles a traditional message board that focuses around a central theme. This could be “I love my cat” or “Manchester United fans” – literally anything. In these communities, followers can interact with other like-minded individuals while allowing the community moderator to share personalised content with that specific community.

Google+ already has a large variety of communities to choose from, whether they focus on engineering, computer science or quantum mechanics. If there’s nothing that suits your needs already, you’re able to begin building your own community and driving the conversation yourself. This can be open to the public or invitation only – whichever suits your purposes.

Communities on Google are fairly young, but as interest in G+ grows, so does the number of communities. And when you consider the rate at which the network is growing, you’d expect the current figure (100,000+) to grow extremely rapidly, largely due to the Google Eco-system, but also due to the way communities differ compared to groups on other social networks.

So what does this mean for employers?

Let’s take John, an Engineering graduate in his second year at Kingston University. What exactly makes an employer valuable to John? Is it the fact that they’ll be making him plenty of job offers in the future and filling his Facebook page and Twitter feeds with current vacancies? Or will helping John with careers advice and guidance be more helpful? How about giving John the latest thinking around an interesting Electrical Engineering project? Or perhaps sharing useful resources for him to visit online? The bottom line is that people will talk to you if they perceive value in it for them. By helping people, you automatically gain the status of a good source of value and naturally, you’re front of mind.

If you missed our thinking about how HelpMarketing can tie into your attraction and reputation strategy, then have a look here.

G+ communities allow you to develop or participate in a community conversation around a specific shared interest. This not only raises awareness around your brand, but allows you to develop authority as an industry expert, share advice and latest thinking and furthermore, allows you to engage directly with potential talent and begin following them or adding them to your circles to continue the conversation you’ve begun.

A few other nifty features of G+ communities that similar platforms such as LinkedIn groups don’t offer are:

Using #hashtags to tie posts to specific searches on the platform and to a broader audience outside of G+
Creating categories within communities to allow you to group and allocate content as you see fit
With Google Ripples you can create an interactive graphic to see how a particular post has been shared and re-shared over a period of time, useful to assess the reach your content has
Posts within a community are indexed by Google and will be found easily via anyone searching for that topic on a Google Search
As with most of the G+ platform, the ‘plus one’ gives an indication of the popularity of the content you share – a good indicator to see if your content is resonating with your community

All of the above go a long way when it comes to helping employer’s position themselves as a source of value amongst the people they hope to begin a conversation with. And ensuring you remain font of mind means half the battle is won.

Next week will be the final of our 5-part blog, and we’ll be talking about the beneficial impact of G+ on your SEO and search visibility and tying together all the features we’ve discussed so far.

If you’d like to talk to us about any aspect of G+, or simply find out how you can be more valuable to talent, then pop over to http://www.tonic-thinking.com and get in touch.

How employers can make use of G+ hangouts to be more personal and human

The 3rd installment of our 5 part blog on G+. This week we look at how employers can make best use of G+ Hangouts to be more human and more personal with talent.

How can you use Google Circles to be more personal?

In the first edition of our five part blog focusing on G+ we asked if employers could afford to ignore what’s set to become the most used social media. In this, the second part, we’re going to talk about Google Circles and why they’re a really useful feature when it comes to delivering truly personalised content to your audience.

Quite simply a Circle is a group of friends, followers or contacts. Much like Facebook or Twitter, but with a difference. Unlike Facebook or Twitter there is no limit to the number of circles you can operate – each receiving a unique content feed. This offers endless opportunity to segment and personalise your messages and conversation to each of the communities you’ve built.

This allows you to be much more specific about what you share with each group. Facebook offers a single stream of content as does Twitter – G+ however, allows you to share engineering content with your Engineering circle, Marketing content with your circle of marketeers and information about what you’re planning to do at St Andrew’s University with your St Andrew’s University circle. You get the idea?

In context everyone wins. Your community get more relevant content – relevant posts that mean your message will be heard. And that’s a good thing – in a world where our attention spans are getting shorter and we’re demanding tailored content delivered faster, the ability to deliver information that is interesting, relevant and insightful is key to building brand advocacy.

So what’s our recommendation? Here are some ideas:

Treat your Public circle in the way it’s intended – give broad-brush information that is designed to engage and attract. You need to attract followers too.
Sub-divide the people that follow you into circles based on your target communities and develop content plans for each group
Use the opportunity to add value – see our blog on HelpMarketing for more about this
Think for the long-term. The objective here is to build engagement and then hire. Don’t simply broadcast a long list of vacancy announcements. This serves no-one and is a sure fire way of turning the people that you want to hire off.
Content is king, and delivering the right information, in the right way at the right time is something many employers find difficult. G+ Circles make that easier.

If you want to have a quick look at Circles being used intelligently, then I’d recommend looking at what Cadbury achieved with their ‘Tasters Circle.’ It’s a great example of a community that was quickly built and united by the same passion.

Cadbury went on to further engage this community using another of Google’s handy features – the Hangout. We’ll be looking into those in more detail next week.

If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime, or simply want to keep up to date with our latest thinking then why not add us to one of your circles at +Tonic Agency Ltd? Alternatively you can visit http://www.tonic-agency.com for further contact details.

The experiences and opinions of those within our communities has a far greater impact than anything you could possibly tell them

So what is Social proof?

Well, it’s widely been studied in the field of social psychology, and is tied to the human condition that results in the Fundamental Attribution Error. Yes, I know what you’re thinking!

In laymen’s terms it simply means that given limited time and motivation, people will often evaluate people, products, companies, jobs (and most other things) based on how those around behave toward them. It’s caused by a ‘fear of missing out’. Ask yourself this. If you were walking past a coffee shop, and you saw that there was a queue stretching right down the street, naturally you’d begin to wonder what’s so special that it’s got all these people waiting to get a slice of the action? How intrigued would you be? Would you let yourself miss out? I guess in this case it largely depends whether you like coffee, but you get my point.

The way we all make buying decisions had changed drastically. We’re all far better equipped at seeing through traditional marketing hyperbole. Instead, the views and opinions of those around us play a much bigger role in influencing how we feel about a particular ‘thing’. Those people could be your friends, family, colleagues or peers. Perhaps those we’ve never met before. And here’s the tenuous link to TripAdvisor – it’s essentially the Glassdoor equivalent of recruitment, but for holidays. But the principals are what matter here. It’s a thriving community full of those who are looking, and those looking to be influenced.

Social Proof has been used for a long time in selling us all products and services – celebrity endorsement is a simple example of this, as is the current KIA ad which majors on the opinions of ‘people like you’ rather than what the company thinks you need to know (obviously the good things have been picked out here). But rarely is it a topic that’s talked about in the world of recruitment. And it’s an interesting one.

We all know that we we live in a more social, mobile and connected world (I think!), as we see many employers ramping up their activity on various social platforms. Some do it well, others not so well. Heineken have a great example of crowd-sourced recruitment, which I thoroughly recommend watching here. We’ve also created a twitter activated vending machine for Mars which toured UK campuses to help recruit graduates. You can see a video for that here.

Yet when the large majority or employers and recruiters talk about social recruitment the focus tends to be on the same things. Channels and self-promotion. Let’s push out yet more messages and job posts to people through different channels. That’s bound to get us some applications.

This is largely missing the point and replacing like for like. What you should be asking is what value could we add to the talent communities we want to be invited into? How are we going to tell them what they need to know, where they want it and how they want it? And, how are we going to get people talking about us, become advocates of us and encourage more of the right people to join?

If we go back to thinking about the way we make buying decisions the use of advocates to do your selling for you is the most powerful tool in your armoury. Yet it seems many organisations have an inherent fear of letting their staff actively talk abut their company and their work with their own communities. But why is that?

By having a point of difference and engaging with talent communities (internal and external) in an authentic and human way and by ensuring that you live up to the promises you make, social proof should be nothing more than ratification of your efforts. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. But, by acknowledging that these conversations are taking place and more importantly, being present when they happen, will give you a much better hope of influencing them as opposed to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending they didn’t happen.

Visit tonic-agency.com for more insights and get in touch!