Do you hear what I hear?

I love Brian Solis. He is a rock star of social media and public relations. He is intelligent, insightful, relevant, and his posts inspire me to think outside of the box. Follow his blog and tweets, if you don't already; you won't be sorry.

In a blog Brian posted earlier today, he writes about the culture, behaviors, and demographics accompanying social network usage. What intrigued me most is this graph:

The graph shows age demographics on popular social network sites. This is an amazing tool because it gives us insight into where we need to be listening. Yes, listening. Several of my previous blog postings have focused on engaging our followers. That is extremely important, but let's not forget the crucialness of listening.

Listening allows us to hear, first hand, what people are saying about our organizations, services, products, staff, and customer service. Other organizations pay big money for agencies to do research and find out what people are saying about them, but we have the opportunity to access this information for free. (I love free!)

Use what you hear to make yourself and your organization shine. Market what they love, tweak or do away with what they hate, reward staff that provide excellent customer service, promote products or services they don't know about - our possibilities are endless!

How Could a Recommendation Hurt?

Who doesn't love a good recommendation? When I get a new one on LinkedIn, I am giddy and read it over and over again, just flattered that someone would say such kind things about me. So, how could this possibly hurt?

 

As an employer, a recommendation of a current employee could come back to haunt us. According to writer Patrick Smith, The National Law Journal warns about the dangers of using LinkedIn to provide recommendations to current employees. The concern is that a terminated employee may use favorable recommendations on LinkedIn as evidence that the employer's stated reason for termination (such as poor performance) is merely a pretext for discrimination, retaliation, or harassment. Any communications concerning employee performance, regardless of the media, are potential evidence in a lawsuit.

So, make it your company policy (and include it in your social media policy) that executive management, managers, and supervisors are not authorized to provide recommendations to current employees.

It is, however, okay (and encouraged) to give and receive recommendations to/from clients, co-workers, fellow professionals, vendors, consultants, and service providers. In my opinion, good quality customer service is a dying art, so I like to shout it from the rooftops when I find a true artist. Recommendations help us help each other weed out the good from the bad.

LinkedIn for Employers

According to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey*:

• 38% of those surveyed indicated they had embellished their job responsibilities
• 18% admitted to lying about their skill set
• 12% indicated they had been dishonest about start / end dates of employment
• 10% confessed to lying about an academic degree
• 7% said they had lied about the companies they had worked
• 5% disclosed they had been untruthful about their job title

With these statistics, don’t you think you should be one of the 80% of employers** using, or planning to use, LinkedIn as a hiring tool this year? 

Saratoga Institute estimates that employers invest 8-10% of an annual salary to hire a non-exempt employee and 18-20% to hire an exempt employee. In this economy, it is increasingly crucial for employers to hire the right fit the first time as to avoid these costs repeatedly. LinkedIn is an excellent resource for evaluating job candidates.

Although employment/labor laws are still catching up with social media technology, there is currently no law prohibiting employers from searching social networking sites while conducting background checks of current employees or job applicants. The legal concerns surrounding social media background checks is that an employer may uncover protected information like religion, political affiliation, disability, etc. If an employer were to reject a candidate solely because of these findings, it opens up the organization to serious liability.

LinkedIn is an exception because it is a form of social media that focuses on business rather than personal. Job candidates invite potential employers to view their profiles. If an organization wants to go beyond LinkedIn a social media background check, the best form of protection is to obtain a consent form from the candidate and only do the check once there is a conditional job offer made.

My LinkedIn for Employers presentation is available to view on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/LaurieBoettcher. A great way to stay informed about human resources surrounding LinkedIn is to join the group LinkedHR. Highly professional members offer a wealth of information as well as free webinars.

We'll talk more about this topic in future posts.

Don't forget to become a Facebook Fan of Laurie Boettcher Speaks!

 
*Survey results complements of 'Decoding Background Checks' professional development series webinar presented by LinkedHR.
**According to a November 2009 Jobvite survey.

Manage Your Social Media Time

Now that we have talked about justifying our time in using social media, how to begin gaining followers, and how to engage followers, the next step we need to discuss is managing our social media time. This is a significant concern for a majority of individuals and organizations. How do we keep it all straight? How do we monitor everything and still remain productive?

The first step I recommend is signing up for a social media aggregator. A social media aggregator is a free web site that allows us to coordinate all of our social networks from one spot. Nice, huh?! There are some fantastic aggregators available. See the bottom of this post for a list of very popular aggregators. My personal favorite is HootSuite. The greatest benefit of an aggregator is that we only need to log into one web site to see activity on all of our accounts, rather than taking the time to log into each. This is a huge time saver. However, I do recommend that we still log into those accounts once a week or so to check things out.

Another time saving apsect of aggregators is that they allow us to schedule posts and status updates. So, let's say there are several tweets we want to send out in a particular day/week, but the day/week is crazy busy and we don't want to forget. Well, with most aggregators, we can schedule a tweet/message/status/whatever to be sent at the date and time we choose.

The next step I recommend is setting a social media timer. In the beginning this timer may be more of a 'I have to spend this much time on social media efforts today/this week.' The timer may be set for 30 minutes. It simply encourages us to use social media and remain engaged with our followers. After we get into the social media swing, the timer may turn into more of a, "This is all the time I can spend on social media today," because it can become addictive with all of the great information out there.

Social Media Aggregators (compliments of Francine Kizner, writer for www.entrepreneur.com):

• Digsby: A desktop IM, e-mail and social media aggregation app that brings together Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as multiple e-mail and IM programs 
• Flock: This social media web browser gives you quick views of your friends' activity on various networks, allows drag-and-drop media sharing and has a built-in RSS reader to track buzz around your brand.
• FriendFeed: A social network built around aggregating social networks, FriendFeed has you create a lifestream of all your online activity and lets you see and comment on all your friends' online activity.
• HelloTXT: A status blaster program that lets you update multiple social networks via web, SMS or e-mail
• HootSuite: Never miss an update with HootSuite's multiple columns feature. Organize your social networks into friends, news, search terms, keyword tracking - whatever you like!
• iGoogle: Google's personalized home page lets you add Gadgets for various social networks to get an overview of recent activity.
• Minggl: This browser plug-in for IE and Firefox gives you a toolbar and a sidebar to keep track of contacts, link up your profiles, send cross-platform messages and do mass status updates.
• PageFlakes: This personalized home page application gives you widgets where you can see the latest activity in multiple social networks.
• Ping.fm: A status blaster tool that lets you update multiple social networks via SMS, IM, e-mail and other mobile and desktop apps
• Tweetdeck: This desktop dashboard lets you manage Twitter, Facebook and 12seconds updates, and also allows you to set up filters and friend groups to help manage a large network
• Twhirl: This Adobe Air desktop app brings together Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic and Identi.ca, letting you send and receive updates and sending notifications for personal messages

Each aggregator has its own pros and cons. Make sure to do a comparison of the to find one that is the right fit for you and/or your organization. Comment below on your favorite aggregator and why it is your favorite to help others in their searches.

Don't forget to become a fan of Laurie Boettcher Speaks on Facebook!

What do YOU want to know?

I recently did an interview on social media with Chris Baylor of NBC affiliate WEAU TV-13 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Chris did an excellent job of taking over an hour's worth of interview material with me alone, integrating it with other social media information and interviews, and creating a story.

What I found most interesting is that while Chris and I were doing the interview, he was asking me, "What do people want to know about social media?", "What are they most interested in?", "What are the biggest concerns people have?" "What do you stress in your presentations?"

To be honest, each presentation/workshop/training session I do is different because the audience comes with different levels of experience and expectations. My speaking philosophy is very parochial in that I start from the basics so there is a good foundation to build upon.

Now, what I want to know from you is, what do YOU want to know? What questions do you have about social media? What are you not getting answered? Where are the gaps? What are your patrons, clients, staff, executives, etc. asking you?

Check out the TV-13 segment that aired February 17: http://www.weau.com/home/headlines/84633272.html