Here is my presentation from the ATC Social Media event. My main messages that I hope people took away were:

• Using social media for marketing is ok, but engagement and community is better
• Engagement and community is harder than just a Twitter account or Facebook
• Social Media is not easy, nor is it free
• True engagement with social media is about people conversing with people, not brands servicing people
• CFO’s like to talk about dollars

I have been pondering the future.

What is next? Do you know? If so please do tell.

A number of years ago I pondered what was next from blogging and podcasting, neither of these forms have really survived in the way the were circa 2005/2006. Let alone what happened to MySpace, Friendster, Orkut…

Let’s look at the user base of popular social networking sites in 2005 .(Of note the term social media was not really in our vocabulary then. In fact social media was called “new media” we knew it was new but just what was it?)

So not many of the sites in the above list really play a part in Social Media 2011, so where does this leave us?

I have no idea. Yet.

Well personally I want to find the 2005/2006 version of Twitter/Facebook in 2011/2012 and see what it will do to society in five years time.

Once again a longtime between drinks, however this post might start to demonstrate why.

For many months I have felt that something is not right in the world of social media. The problem was I have not been able to put my finger on the issue.

I happened to read a post over at Social Media Today that might help to shed some light on the issue. To sum the post up in a few words – we have lost the social in social media.

Ernest Barbaric discusses how the Human Factor in Social Media has disappeared:

Go to almost any brand’s twitter account and you’ll see exactly what most marketers get wrong. There is little more then business updates. No conversation, no relationship building, no questions being asked or answered. Just another “blast post”, a sad remnant of traditional one-way thinking.

Very sad really.

Maybe I am just a cranky old man, but please go read Cluetrain Manifesto and maybe I will start to enjoy what you put out on the Internet again.

A growth area for both agency recruiters and internal functions is that of sourcing and over the last few years the availability of tools to source candidates have changed dramatically. A decade ago to undertake the sourcing of a hard to find candidate involved a lots of phone calls and a really good contact list. While in 2011 the same holds true the internet has provided sourcers with a massive database of potential candidates. The rise of search engines and social media may have made us lose our memory but they have also given rise to the role of the internet sourcer.

Usage of boolean search, LinkedIn and other social media sites have made it easier than ever to proactively find candidates. For many of you this will not come as a surprise.

What might be of interest is a small conference I am speaking at in August, Finders Keepers, put on by my friends at ATC. Finders Keepers will have several international speakers in attendance, in fact the speakers list reads like a Who’s Who of sourcers; with internationals such as Glen Cathey (Boolean BlackBelt), Jim Stoud, Kevin Wheeler, Bill Boorman, and locals Ross Clennett, Martin Warren, and Andrea Mitchell. I will be doing a half day workshop with Jim Stoud looking at “How to Find the Hidden Talent Your Competition Overlooked”.

While the act of building a half day workshop with someone from the other side of the world is interesting enough, I suspect trying to keep up with Jim will be the hardest part of the session. If you have no idea who Jim is, watch the video below and you will see what I mean.

If you are interested in sourcing and where it is at in Australia get along and attend.

Well a long time between blog posts.

Why the break? Lots of reasons too many to list really.

Anyways.

Today I am preparing to judge the Fairfax Employment Media Awards, while I am not (and can’t) mention specific enteries some observations:

• Big corporate’s are always big corporate’s in everything they do, PowerPoint anyone?
• Recruitment Advertising Agencies love to be creative, in everything they do, I mean everything! I will need new printer cartridges after this.
• If you submit to enough categories you are more likely to win something!
• If you submit enough entries to the same category you are more likely to be able to claim to be “The Best….”

Anyway better go back to reviewing the Best Small Recruitment Firm submissions.

Tomorrow morning I am doing a presentation for MyCareer and some of their clients looking at the wonderful topic of:

Who owns your brand in a social media world

An interesting topic some might think more interesting have a job board promote social media, more on that later. While I have a large amount of content, even spoke on a similar topic in October last year, I have revised a major portion of my talk based on some ideas from a few others:

• Dr John Sullivan
• Jared Woods
• Chris Hoyt
• Jenny DeVaughn
• Shannon Seery Gude

Some of the topics I will cover include:

• What is social media, I like to ensure the audience knows where I am coming from
• What can happen to a brand online
• Strategies
• Learn to Adapt
• Be Smart no Clever (hat tip Jared)
• Add value
• Be consistent but authentic and definitely not generic
• Provide support to recruiters
• Processes, Processes, Processes

If you happen to be lucky enough to attend I would love to hear your feedback.

Well there has not been a lot of movement here, but neither I nor this blog are dead.

At this point some of my larger projects are taking a lot of my time and most of what I am doing is not at a point where it can be shared on the blog. Having said that do expect updates in the near future.

In the meantime you could sign up for some of the training which I am running with Inside Job such as Essential Social Media for Recruitment or the Advanced Social Media for Recruitment.

Only 10 days to go before the early bird pricing for this year’s ATC Social Media conference expires! If you are thinking of going, and why wouldn’t you, register now to save 20% on your registration.

What will you get from coming along? Well other than listening to me natter on about mobile recruiting you will hear from international speakers such as:

• Chris Hoyt: Talent Engagement and Marketing Leader at PepsiCo
• Kevin Wheeler: a globally known speaker, author, teacher and consultant in human capital acquisition and development, as well as in corporate education

Local speakers include:

• Jared Woods, now at OneSteel looking after all sorts of things including their social media strategy for recruitment
• Nick Duggal, Special Counsel at Tresscox Lawyers, has practiced exclusively in the area of workplace relations
• Simon Cariss is one of the founders of PageUp People

If you attend you will also get to experience social media in it’s human form with our unconference and world cafe sessions.

One of the things that has been going on in the background for the last couple of months has been the building of a social media for recruitment training program, in partnership with InsideJob.

The program consists of three modules; one hour webinar, 1 day introduction and 2 day advance course and is structured to take you from one module to another. (In fact you cannot attend the next module until you have completed the one before.)

So what will you learn?

1. What is Social Media for Recruitment

1 hour Webinar as an introduction and pre work for the Essential Social Media for Recruitment program we will discuss:

• What is Social Media
• Social Media Channels and Tools
• Trends in Social Media
• Introduction to Essential Social Media for Recruitment program
• Q&A

2. Essential Social Media for Recruitment

1 day workshop where you will gain the skills to develop an effective Social Media strategy for your business including:

• Social Media Strategy, Guidelines, Policies and Barriers
• Defining your Business Drivers and aligning your Social Media strategy
• Social Media Best Practice Framework
• Getting Started – what now!

3. Advanced Social Media for Recruitment

2 day workshop where you will gain the skills to develop and deploy an effective Social Media strategy for your business including:

• Effective use of Social Media Channels & Tools
• Developing your Social Media Content
• Search Engine Optimisation & Marketing
• Defining your Business Case for Social Media to gain key stakeholder buy-in
• Aligning your EVP and Social Media Messaging
• Developing your Social Media Strategy in Detail
• Deploying your Social Media Strategy

If you are interested in attending the next sessions head over to the InsideJob web site and register!

At the upcoming ATC Social Media conference (early bird prices until 30 September) I will be talking briefly about mobile recruiting. A topic I know is a little strange to some people, but I think effective use of mobile technology is going to become a critical part of a recruiters toolkit. Let’s face it mobile technology is not something you can ignore, as of December 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile subscribers globally!

I am going to look beyond SMS, Bluetooth and email on smart phones, while they have a critical place in your mobile strategy there are other things to consider.

For example, while a traditional computer is replaced on average every 3.5 years mobile devices are averaging a replacement cycle of 18 months! This means just because something did not work last year doesn’t mean it won’t work this year!

Other topics I will look at include location based services, there is more to it than FourSquare or Facebook Places, areas like sales force automation and the impact of cloud computing on mobiles.

I am also trying to think of a good demonstration for the session so if you have any ideas, leave me a comment.

Last night at around 5.30pm I received a call from Penny Elmslie, the marketing manager at NGA.Net about two topics that they were very excited about. First was they had started a blog, second they had purchased a company.

While the first piece of news is not that earth shattering for some, I personally feel it is great that another Australian vendor has entered the blogging space. Hopefully NGA.Net will use this as an opportunity for people outside the organisation to learn a bit more about what makes them tick. You can find the blog at http://blog.nga.net/, the RSS feed is also available.

The second piece of news is far more exciting, well in my mind. NGA have acquired Acelero, the Sydney based Performance Management vendor. The acquisition fills a much needed gap in the NGA product line and to be honest allows them to meet their marketing claims:

“Software that helps large organisations to connect, recruit & develop their people”

Good news for Acelero staff as it seems 14 of them will be joining NGA, with Managing Director Ken Sheridan remaining as the head of the new NGA Performance Management division.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to fully integrate the product lines so that NGA.Net customers have a true integrated talent management solution. I am not aware of the technical platform that Acelero was using, however it is good to see NGA were sensible and purchased an existing SAAS vendor so at least architecturally they are somewhat aligned.

Yes once again I have gone AWOL on this blog, I know I’m a bad blogger. Well if there are any readers left I will try and post some more here.

The last 2 months have been filled with lots and lots of work two major projects not to mention the planning for the ATC Social Media 101 conference in December, more on that later, and the InsideJobs Social Media for Recruitment Course.

That’s it, just a short post to let you know I have not forgotten about the blog.

Last week while I was at ATC Sydney there was lots and lots of talk about employer brands and who really controls them in today’s social media world. For example Steve Fogarty, Recruiting Captain, from adidas in North America covered the topic highlighting that recruiters need to think more like marketers to attract top talent, not to mention that everything that happens online create meta-data about your brand. Kevin Wheeler touched on the topic during his closing keynote saying the personal brands are taking over from corporate brands.

So what does this mean?

Like consumer brands your employer brand is not longer “owned” by you the employer, candidates, employees, ex-employees, analysts, everyone can now shape how your brand is viewed by the world. From a consumer perspective just look at the fake BP Public Relations Twitter account, who has many thousands more followers than the real BP PR team, and their comedic look at what is shaping up to the worlds largest environmental disaster. Every tweet has a hashtag #bpcares creating a creative and funny stream of tweets however I doubt the BP PR team is very happy.

About 3 weeks ago Facebook released a new feature, Community Pages (read the official blog post) where they are aggregating Wikipedia content, along with user generated post from across the web to create a “profile” of brands, places, organisation etc. The difference between these pages and corporate sponsored pages is that right now no one controls the content on the Community Page! Now Facebook has said they are looking for passionate people to help curate the pages content. But for now your brand is at the mercy of automated collection of content. To make matters worse Facebook profile pages have been changed and now there are links attached to employers, likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies!

You do not own what Facebook is displaying on these new Community Pages, and you may never own the content.

Still think you own your employer brand?

For the last 12 years CedarCrestone has been conducting research into how organisations are using technology to support their HR functions, the resulting report is a must read for anyone involved in the HR Technology industry.

Once again it is time for the survey and I really encourage all of my readers who are part of organisations with 500+ employees to participate.

Below is the invite from Alexia Martin Research Director from CedarCrestone:

CedarCrestone requests your participation in its CedarCrestone 2010–2011 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 13th Annual Edition through July 5, 2010. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv3.

All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in late September 2010. We will invite you to a special webinar of results thereafter. The first 100 respondents completing the survey will receive a $5 Starbucks card. There are further enticements described at the end of this letter.

The 2010–2011 HR Survey covers questions about:

• Application adoption
• HR software acquisition and deployment trends
• “Going global” trends
• The value of HR technologies

“For six years in a row,” says HR Technology® Conference co-chair Bill Kutik, “we have asked CedarCrestone to debut its survey at our event because it is the most thorough, highly respected and useful survey on technology usage in HR. Clearly, HR and IT practitioners know that, too, because it draws standing room only attendance every year.”

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned. We invite representatives from organizations in all industries with over 500 employees to participate. All responses are anonymous and will be kept confidential. We will only use your information in the aggregate. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv3.

We appreciate your contribution to the most comprehensive collection of data focused on HR technologies usage and overall HR service delivery.

Best wishes,

Alexia Martin
Director, Research and Analytics

I noticed an interesting development over night, Twitter is looking to ban all third-part ad networks from injecting ads into users Twitter streams.

From the Twitter blog:

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

Now as the terms of service have not been updated we do not know what this really means but this announcement got me thinking with regard to Job Ads.

Are job boards just another ad network? If so will job boards be prohibited from pushing job ads into Twitter?

I’m sure it won’t come to that but interesting to think about the consequences if it does.

Over the last 2 weeks I have been giving a series of presentations looking at how social media (and Enterprise 2.0) can drive employee engagement. While the slides are available on slideshare for download I wanted to give a bit of context.

As part of preparing the presentation I came across a presentation by Susan Scrupski from Soco Partners (I also lifted several other ideas from one of her presentations to the 2.0 Adoption Council, thanks Susan!), where Susan introduced the concept of 2.0 Zen:

• Collaboration
• Trust
• Authenticity
• Transparency

This struck a chord with me. If someone had asked me to describe good social media these are the words I would have used. But I started looking at this a little further, from an HR point of view, and from my research on engagement. I have found five general attributes that enable employees to feel valued and therefore engaged:

• Involvement in decision making
• Feel they are able to voice their ideas, & managers listen to these views
• Have line of sight between employee performance & company performance
• They have career development
• When the organisation is concerned for employees’ health & wellbeing

While looking at this it occurred to me that an organisation that had a highly engaged workforce exhibited the same attributes as Susan’s 2.0 Zen:

• Collaboration
• Trust
• Authenticity
• Transparency

From this I built the rest of the presentation, which you can find below.

Every employer wants to get the most productivity from their employees. If you push too hard, though, you risk making employees unhappy, causing unwelcome turnover and costing you money. So the question remains, how do you motivate your employees to work their best?

Praise

Employers are often amazed how well this one little trick, which costs nothing, can so strongly motivate employee behavior. Bosses often think that their employees are only motivated by money, but the truth is, employees want to like their jobs. They want to like their bosses and the companies for whom they work. This can be a huge leverage for employers, especially in tough economic times when money just isn’t there for performance bonuses.

Every employee performance review should highlight two or three positive aspects of the person’s performance for every negative aspect. Show appreciation for the work the person does for you every day while asking for better performance in certain areas. Don’t make performance review time something to be dreaded, but rather something the employee looks forward to.

Make the employee newsletter a chance to praise and highlight high performing, rank and file employees. Institute “Employee of the Month” or even week programs. Rewards can be as simple as a preferred parking spot, but it’s the recognition that will gain you loyal employees.

Talk to Your Employees

Something as small as time spent with company management can help motivate employees. Have a weekly brown bag session with randomly selected employees. Allow them to give feedback and feel like their voices are heard. Let them ask questions, and answer those questions seriously.

Take time to walk through your production areas, greeting employees and chatting for a moment. If your production is industrial, then do this in the lunchroom. Better yet, eat in the lunch room once or twice a week. Be present to your employees. The more you show that you care for your employees, the more your employees will care about you and your bottom line.

Invest Employees in the Bottom Line

Many companies have a performance bonus plan, but it’s often limited to management. Why not provide performance bonuses to all employees, at least at some level. Employees will be more conscious of the bottom line if they have some stake in the company’s quarterly and annual outcome. Watching waste in the little things can add up to big numbers at the end of the year. Finding ways to streamline production, save steps, or use less can have a big impact. If every employee is invested in finding ways to make the company more profitable, instead of just management, your company can make a big turnaround.

Provide Careers, Not Just a Job

Providing opportunities to grow in their career is a great motivation for many employees. Have plans in place for a career path for your employees. Talk to them about what is required to grow from one level to the next. Help provide training for those who with to move up in the company. Whether it’s sending your assistant to a yearly professional conference or having a tuition reimbursement plan, helping your employees’ careers helps you in the long run.

Remember, employees are not just motivated by money. They spend almost half of their waking time working for you. They want to feel like that time is an investment, not just a necessary evil needed to pay the rent. Employees want to enjoy their work and their work environment. They want to feel good about their work and the company they work for. Filling these needs can go a long way to motivating long term, loyal, and productive employees.

Marshall Goldsmith opened the 2010 AHRI National Convention with a highly interactive and thought provoking talk looking at how to be a better coach. Marshall began the session by saying his focus is to teach leaders what to STOP doing instead of teaching them what to do.

Marshall provided us 5 key challenges of successful leaders that they all need to overcome to be truly great:

1. Winning to much
2. Adding too much value
3. Telling the world how smart we are
4. “I already knew that”
5. Passing judgement

He then went on to demonstrate that the key to solving each of these challenges is starting to think more about others than about you. For example, when you try to add additional thoughts and ideas someone’s idea the quality of the idea might go up 5% but their commitment to the idea goes down 15% as it is not longer their idea. Further focusing just on achievement is really all about focusing on me, whereas leadership is all about focusing on other people.

Marshal provided an amazing statistic that the percentage of all interpersonal communication time spent on people talking about how smart they are and people talking about how stupid, bad, inept others are is around 65%!! He did a quick survey of the room and found we felt the average was around 70%, very close. Essentially if business wants to increase productivity then just look to reduce this number as these activities are not revenue generating.

A great coaching tip from Marshall is he has found that creating an environment where people lose small amounts of money creates very large changes in behavior. For example, fining yourself $1/$5 or $10 whenever you do one of the following:

• Start a sentence with no, but, or however
• Start a sentence with Great, but or however
• Give destructive comments about someone

He asked everyone in the room to raise their hands if they had said something negative about someone else in the last month that they didn’t really need to say, hands in the whole room went up. He then fined us all $1 we had to place it on the floor, proceeds went to breast cancer research. He had several very interactive and entertaining activities where we all learned how to give and receive feedback.

He suggests a really good question to ask to your coworkers and family is “How can I get better at work/home?” Unfortunately we don’t ask it enough as we don’t want to know the answer.

Marshall wrapped up the session talking a lot about while these practices are good in business they are critical in your personal life. The guy sitting next to me even mentioned how emotional he had felt during the session when talking about creating better relationships with your partners, parents and children.

All in all an awesome session.

The team at Navigo, distributors of OrgPlus, have released their 2010 reasearch report into HR technology usage by larger organisations in Australia, you can get your copy of the report at http://hrtechreport.com.au.

The report is an interesting read focusing more on organisation’s satisfaction with their solutions than looking at overall trend in usage. Having said that the team at Navigo have been able to extrapolate 8 key conclusions and recommendations:

1. HRIS use in Australia is diverse
2. Technology-based solutions are more satisfactory
3. Organisations satisfied but rarely “very satisfied” with systems
4. HR targets efficiency in drive towards strategy
5. Reducing costs is not a motivator despite the GFC
6. Organisations are ill-prepared for an aging workforce
7. True business intelligence is elusive
8. No one size fits all

From my work and research I agree with every one of these conclusions.

I do not 100% agree with their breakdown of the solutions areas as they are more heavily weighted in the area of talent management, at the expense of other areas. However given the importance of talent management focusing more on this area makes sense given the confusing that exists within most HR departments on what HR technology they are running.

Some stand out pieces of information.

SAP and Chris 21 stand out as the top two HRIS vendors used in the organisations with 500 and above employees. Interesting Neller, who was recently acquired by Northgate Arinso was 5th.

The biggest motivator for improving HR Systems and Technology is still reduce time spent on administration and increase efficiencies. I say still as from my experience has been the number one of two for many many years. One has to wonder about the success of all of the recent projects to implement Employee and Manager Self Service the number one way to drive these two objectives.

PageUp People, PeopleStreme and Successfactors are the most popular systems being referenced as supporting Performance Management processes.

Thomas Otter, Gartner Analyst by day cyclist by night, posted on his Gartner blog last week about the new XING Competency Card and how it raises questions around the need for “complex, expensive, poorly maintained HR competency management applications behind the firewall”.

The competency card allow you to add skills to your XING profile (think a LinkedIn profile), back them up with commentary detailing your experience and then have your contacts validate this experience.

I decided to give the process a bit of test, as such I signed up to XING and created my own profile including a Competence Card (which you can find under the Applications tab). I have to agree with Thomas, while a basic implementation the look and feel are nice and very easy to use. The simplicity of implementation is part of the attraction, making the tool one of the easiest competency tools I have used.

The idea of peer validation is great and something that is really needed for inside the firewall applications, with a bit extra. The ability to have validations from both internal and external contacts, as not competency can be validated internally, especially in a world of partnerships, outsourcing and the like.

The peer validation process reminded me of survey feature found in PeopleStreme, which allows anyone to create a quick survey to collect feedback on their performance. A feature especially liked by the “validation seeking Generation Y” (yes vast generalisation).

I note in the comments of Thomas’s post Jon Ingham raises the point of still seeing a need for internal competency maps, agree. However a tool that supported both internal and external validation would allow for these maps and still incorporate the user generated aspects of XING’s Competency Card.

So who will be the first vendor with such a feature?