Monitoring social media
What are job seekers saying about your employment brand? What are your customers or suppliers talking about? Monitoring the social media landscape is becoming an essential activity. Here’s a useful primer on how to make sense of the ever growing social media landscape.

The growth of Twitter & other social networks
Statistics after statistics indicates Australians are quick adopters of social networking tools. Australia is the fourth largest user of Twitter, after Canada, UK and US. Fascinating statistics on Twitter adoption.  Meanwhile Techcrunch attempted to measure the  value of various social networks.  Australia ranked second ($145 on average) after the UK in per capita spending on Internet advertising. 

Social media marketing
All you can eat case studies on social media marketing.

Social media is punk rock
David Merman Scott points us to an analogy on social media using punk rock

Research coming out of the US suggested Social Recruiting, the practice of using social media or networks to recruit staff, is gaining grounds. A study by Jobvite found that 68% of respondents use social networks or media to support their recruitment efforts. More telling is the finding that 66% successfully hired a candidate through an online social network.

There is no doubt that social networks provide ample opportunities to source talent, at the same time there are still many unknowns (How do one measure effectiveness; can social networks be a steady source of talent; what are the consequences of not using social media;  what is the story in Australia?).  However, one have a strong sense that we are witnessing a shift, if not in sourcing methodologies but the way we communicate and interact with potential candidates. Have a look at the report (registration required), our industry is changing rapidly.

Every 30 seconds a new social network is created on Ning. Since it launched two years ago, close to 500,000 social networks has been created on Ning (see graph).  Of course, Ning is not the only player in this space, other white-label social network platforms abounds.

Ning’s, and white-label social network providers, stratospheric growth gives one an idea on where online communities are heading. At this rate, there is likely to be a social network for every niche imaginable. At the core of this growth is the ease with which anyone can create a social network, and the basic longing for everyone to be part of a community.

The explosion of online communities offers both opportunities and challenges for recruiters. For one, it will be easier to identify and reach out to a focused pool of talent (Need accountants anyone?), at the same time monitoring conversations across a large number of networks will prove to be a challenge for most recruiters (How many social networks can you participate in?).

It is not difficult to imagine job listings to become a standard feature on social networks. Already, job listings are a regular features on some popular social networks. Very soon, the jobs listings themselves will be the draw card for signing up with a particular social network.

It’s not clear how social networks will affect the status quo in terms of job listings and talent acquisition, but online communities are here not only to stay but to prosper. As Seth puts it in his new book Tribes, ” Go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.”

250,00 0 registered users, 15,000 daily visits and thousands upon thousands of conversation threads are just some of the big numbers chalked up by  the Whirlpool (not the white goods manufacturer) forum. The forum is probably one of the largest Australian online communities where people (mostly IT professionals) congregate and passionately talk about technology on a regular basis.

Where there is a thriving community, job advertisements usually follows (Mainstream job boards take the reverse route of listing jobs first and try and build a community, some do both at the same time).  As Kevin Kelley points out   “wherever attentions flows, money will follow”

Already, hundred of jobs are advertised on the forum. A job posting is free for employers and forum participants (professional recruiters are not allowed to participate), but it is easy to see that commercialisation is the next logical step for Whirlpool.

As social animals we all participate in one or another community. The Internet just makes it a lot more easier to foster connections, amplifies interaction among like minded individuals and allows for communities to be created quickly.  The proliferation of online communities means the definition of a ‘job board’ will be redefined.

IBM’s ad pokes fun at social network recruitment.  Emarketer points out – majority of adults haven’t heard about social networking, yet.