social

5 tools to help graduate recruiters make sure they’re not a proper Charlie.

A couple of weeks back, there was a party that Charlie and Jon decided to head to. Neither of them knew anyone that was going, except for the host of course.

As they arrived they got into the swing of things. Charlie, who was loud and gregarious, jumped right in – he started doing the rounds, interrupting people’s conversations to introduce himself, talking about his job, his girlfriend, where he lives and so on.

Jon however was a little less sure of himself. Being the shy type he was not so keen on interrupting people mid-party to talk about himself. He wanted to make a good impression, but he decided that maybe listening and understanding these people – background, personalities, preferences – was perhaps the more intelligent approach.

The night was going great, the two friends were enjoying themselves, the music was good and the drink was flowing. Jon had lots of people around him, engaging in good conversation, laughing at his jokes and buying him drinks. They wanted to spend the evening with him because they felt he understood them. He was connecting so well with other guests.

Charlie however was not having such a great time. He was speaking to lots of people, sure. But nobody was really listening. He found that after 5 minutes people would wander off and he’d be left looking for the next group of guests he could start talking to.

Jon left with a whole load of new friends and even a girl’s number…the lucky rascal.

Charlie on the other hand didn’t – and he couldn’t figure out why.

We see a lot of approaches to social from a broad range of employers who ask us to plan their strategy and begin conversations. The key trend we always seem to spot is that they all want to jump right into the party, much like Charlie. They want to use social media as a megaphone to shout about their message. When what they should be doing is taking a leaf out of Jon’s book and using it instead as a set of speakers to listen to what people are saying.

Social listening is quite literally that. Listening to what’s being said about your brand online within social communities – blogs, forums, corporate pages and social channels. It can help you understand where you’ve been mentioned, and in what context. You can then begin to compare that to those you compete for talent with which is incredibly useful for benchmarking your strengths and weaknesses.

Knowledge is power as they say and understanding the good, the bad and the ugly will put you in a great position to build out a plan of action – whether that plan focuses on being disruptive, challenging misconceptions or outright education – you need to truly listen before you speak.

Here are a few free tools to help ensure you don’t make a proper Charlie out of yourself.

Hootsuite & Tweetdeck – widely used to plan outbound messages, but have some functionality to monitor and allow you to gather data and respond in real-time.

Twazzup – great for beginners looking for a Twitter monitoring tool

Social Mention – allows you to monitor and collect data across multiple platforms with basic analytics to help you measure positive and negative sentiment

Icerocket – specialises in blog searches but has the functionality to watch Facebook and Twitter too

Google alerts – a very basic way to discover when a websites is posting about you. Doesn’t cover social and is probably the least useful in a recruitment sense

We hope you’ve found this little introduction to buzz monitoring useful. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you really listen, then pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com and get in touch.

HOW NOT TO BUILD YOUR BRAND

*HOW NOT TO BUILD YOUR BRAND*

Here’s a link to our presentation at The FIRM (Forum For In-House Recruitment Managers) conference a few weeks ago. It covers why all the things you think you know about brand and the people you’re trying to talk with, are in fact false. Controversial stuff – but makes a lot of sense when you take a moment to step out of your employer marketing or recruitment bubble.

The slides are 100% self explanatory too, so no need to have them bought to life. Tell us what you think – do you agree with our point of view, or is it a tough pill to swallow?

How useful is Google + when it comes to building talent communities around your business, and can you afford to overlook it?

When Google+ launched in 2011 it turned out to be a damp squib. It was described by many as the party that nobody came to and came in for a lot of criticism. However, 2 years on and perhaps it’s fairer to say that G+ wasn’t a failure at all. It was just a little slow off the blocks.

Now that there’s a party that we can all join, how can employers take advantage of the functionality to build brand and community? How can we use the rather nifty functionality to take advantage of what could be the most powerful tool in your armoury for having conversations with the people you need.

The answer’s quite complex and certainly more than we could cover in a single blog. So, we’re tackling this in a five parts. Each week we’ll cover some of the individual features that G+ offers its members and look at how others have successfully used the site to their advantage.

But is it really a party that we want to be at? Is the kitchen full of interesting people or should we come back a bit later when more people have arrived? After all, a social network isn’t very social if nobody’s using it, is it? We’ll, something that might surprise most of you is that G+ is actually the second largest social network, behind only Facebook.

In May 2013 it had 343 million active users. This means that people were regularly sharing content with the public, their circles and updating their profiles. That’s a 33% increase from the same point last year meaning that it’s outpaced Twitter for growth.

What’s even more interesting is the fact that this growth only looks set to increase. As this research from searchmetrics shows, by 2016 G+ could well take its place as the most popular social network.

It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. It’s free, clean and streamlined. Not to mention the unique features it offers its users and the fact that one password gives you access to all of Google.

If you have never been on G+, I’d suggest taking a few minutes to activate your profile. You don’t need to set up loads of new information – if you use YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs or any of the Google suite, then you simply need to enter the same username and password.

We’re not saying G+ is the be-all and end-all. There’ll always be a time and a place for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But G+ sits in nicely in it’s own niche:

G+ is where you speak with people that you’d like to know.

Next week we’ll talk to you about Google Circles. We’ll explore what they are, how they’re used and what you can be doing to build individual talent communities that are united by the same passions and interests.

If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime then why not get in touch with us at +Tonic Agency Ltd or visit http://www.tonic-agency.com.

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!