The original article appeared in the Business Insider

Created by: MBA Online

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Many progressive organizations today are using social media as an integral part of recruitment strategy.  The latest weapon the in the armoury of the HR department is Google+. By now most  organization have aligned social media are part of their recruitment process might have developed an integrated effort on their website, blogs, LinkedIn company profile, Facebook page, twitter and some other tools and applications like bullhorn which helps them maximize their reach.  Now the online recruitment activity is blessed with another awesome tool in the form of Google+ for business.

How to setup up Google+ page

1. Creating a Google+ Page:   http://plus.google.com/pages/create once you click on this link there will be a wizard that will help you complete the process.  The wizard lets you choose your category under which your business will be found.
2. Account Name: Choose your company account carefully. First and foremost create a Gmail account that can be shared by the entire HR team. Don’t used personal email as currently Gmail does not allow multiple users assigned to one account.
3. Creating Public profile:  The HR department and marketing department needs to take adequate care while creating public profile so as to maintain consistency across online platforms. Important thing here is to ensure you choose right tag line that helps you entice candidates
4. Sharing the page: the next step is to promote the page, the idea is to first develop an interactive page as per your online recruiting strategy and only then exercise this option. As promoting the page will share the page with all your connections and a blank or half completed page will not give good impression and will surely not achieve ultimate objective of the page being added in your prospective candidates circle.

Facts/issues/limitations about Google+ pages

• Google+ pages do not allow mentioning yourself unless you are connected.
• Pages don’t have option to extend circles
• Pages can’t  + 1 other pages and they cannot +1 any other content
• One can find a business by typing its physical his  content

• Pages can’t add people to circle unless  the page is mentioned  where as in profiles  can be added to has the
• Default primary setting is visible to all
• Google+ will automatically unfllow candidates who unfollow the page
• Best feature is that local pages have special field where candidates can search companies by location
• At this stage pages doesn’t receive notification

Finally specific pointers on how it can help in improving recruitment using Google+

• Share lot of photos on your Google+  HR page where you can show case  “ happy employees”  and showcase your “ work place”
• Use circles to categorize candidates based on stage at which the HR communication is structured.
• Encourage existing employees to share their experience on posts
• Use Google+ hangouts to organize meetings or webinars for prospective candidates
• Companies can create recruitment related games to engage prospective candidates visiting company’s Google+ page

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In such cases we would think about a lot of stuff like:

• Is it really worth starting a dead blog
• What happens to my SEO
• What happens to my Google indexing
• My audiences would have stopped waiting to read my post

Many such things crop up in our mind and we starting thinking towards starting a new one or just leave this one behind.   Let me tell you, it’s a bad idea to leave this one and let your effort go down the drain.

First and foremost, it’s your blog – your perception your views about topics that you write about and the points mentioned above really doesn’t matter.  This would matter only if you are a PRO Blogger but if you were then you would never land up in this state.

Restarting to blog is more about mindset than anything else. Most people think of having changes in design or functionality some might improve interactivity of the blog and the other would improve / include social media aspect of the blog. Each one of us is trying to give a reason to the world that why you were absent for this long and why are you starting all over again.

Bottom Line when starting to blog after a gap:

You aren’t starting to write because people want you to write, you are because you are passionate about sharing your perception with the world.

I have approached the whole thing with this mind set and everything has worked out well.

Few things I did before I re-started

• Promised myself that I will post at least once every 15 days
• Informed my personal network to watch out for my blog again
• Used social media to spread message so that people can be aware that I am starting again

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In a global and connected economy where the workplace extends beyond the boundaries of a cubicle or office building, human interaction is the key building block in the workforce of the future. Imagine  One happy employee who blogs or tweets about her experience can, in turn, inspire others to change their jobs or their companies, and one workplace at a time, the most valuable assets of future economic development will change the way we do business and by extension the world around them.

The big question is  

• Are you ready for this world?
• Do you know how to compete in it? Are you part of the conversation?

Points to be considered while integrating social media with HR initiatives

• Turn your employees into brand ambassadors, it’s very important to treat the brand internally and externally in the same way.
• Encourage transparent communication internally.  Position social media as a tool for connecting people and thereby foster exchange of cross functional interactions.
• Be judicious with social media policies. Your policy should be focused more on empowering your employees than on restricting them.
• Be involved, be a part of the conversation that is the basics of having a PR activity via social media and be ready to respond if your employment brand is not communicated in the right manner.
• Use social media to share important information, but make sure that communication is two-way and takes advantage of the capabilities of the medium.
• Use social media to hunt passive talent, that’s finding people who are not actively looking for a change but might be the perfect fit for your organization.
• Maintain an effective employee alumni network with social media. Welcome someone back to the organization who might have left to pursue an opportunity with another organization, leveraging the diversity of experience that may have led to significant growth in that individual.
• Redefine learning and development within your organization using social media to create a more collaborative learning environment.
• Cultivate collaboration across divisions and management levels within your organization by empowering employees to form groups and open discussions on social networking platforms that focus on solving specific problems or experimenting with new ideas.

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Again I am sure everyone is aware that enhancing web presence is an ongoing activity and it needs constant evaluation and measurement of its effectiveness to go on and make it even better.  Over time I have been a victim of this funda that once we implement something new, we ask our immediate network and take feedback. We measure it for a while and then assume that the changes we implemented are showing results and leave it there.

The purpose of the article to share awesome tools that I have used to measure and improve online effectiveness and it can be useful to beginners and experienced people as well. There is a company called hubspot they provide software as a service to improve inbound marketing for your organization.  In addition to their inbound marketing software they have developed some really handy measurement tools that can be useful and individuals alike.

Website Grader: This tool evaluates effectiveness of your website from an SEO perspective.  This is one tool that gives me a detailed analysis on how my blog is performing.  You will see a badge that displays website grader rank it’s 98 out of 100 for GigaThoughts

Twitter Grader: Evaluates your twitter account by giving an overall rank and also gives ranks for your followers and the ones you are following. Grade for GigaThoughts is 82 out  of 100

Gobbledygook Grader: This is another impressive effort it helps you evaluate your content for Gobbledygook words. This simply means use of jargons which cannot be easily understood and this one really helps in simplifying the content to a large extent. This article content has been graded 91 out of 100.

Press Release Grader: Very helpful for PR people and for most of us it’s always good to get your press release graded as it helps in identifying its marketing effectiveness score.  We don’t have press release for GigaThoughts but I have tried this at professional level and I can recommend that.

Facebook Grader: This does the same for Facebook for business pages, individual pages or individual accounts. GigaThoughts page grade is 15 out of 100 and my individual account has grade 67 out of 100

I haven’t used the following tools myself but looking at the other tools I am sure these will be good enough as well and worth giving a try

• Action Grader
• FourSquare  Grader
• Book Grader
• Alerts Grader

I would urge you guys to try these tools and let me know your feedback.

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Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game.  My initial analysis of using this application makes me believe that such mashups will play vital role as far as job search is concerned.  Applications like JobDeck will provide an alternate channel for employers to scout for new talent and at the same time give multiple opportunities to the jobseeker.

TweetDeck and TwitJobSearch have teamed up to provide you with a dedicated JobDeck. This makes it even easier to search for jobs, as well as staying in touch with what’s happening now, and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Source: TweetDeck.

The Hiring ecosystem:

Since I run an HR services company and a social media enthusiast I am in a position to analyze the tool both from the employer and employee perspective.  My analysis of the positioning of JobDeck is given below in the table.

JobDeck analysis:

JobDeck consists of primarily 2 column layout where in the first column job related tweets are displayed using the powerful search engine developed by guys at TwitJobSearch. The tweets are filtered in a manner where the content is limited to job hunting.  There is a “Job Search Experts” user list. This area can be used to stay updated with the latest development in the job market and it has lot of HR and career related articles as well. The second column is a dedicated column that is directly connected to the main feed of TwitJobSearch which searches the web and returns search results relevant to jobs and job market.

What I would love to see in JobDeck

• Even more powerful search – based on location, job type, company name like you usually have on job boards
• Ability to filter updated just based on my career stream. Like a customized JobDeck for a sales professional in the telecommunication sector.
• Ability to develop contact base and tweet with each contact from JobDeck
• Trending like twitter
• Better integration with other social media applications

JobDeck is a pretty decent attempt made towards being innovative, it has a long way to go before it can become main stream and threaten the existence of traditional media like Job Boards. Did we just think about News Papers are traditional media?? Sorry that’s dead long time ago.

To me this is a brilliant concept and the first step towards a newer, smarter and a synchronous mechanism for a job seeker and an employer.

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• How many websites were added
• How many emails were sent
• How many internet users surfed the web
• Web servers in use
• Information of domain names
• Social media statistics
• Information on images
• Information on web browsers
• Information on malicious software

The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com

Email usage statistics in 2009

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• 22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

• 62.7% – Internet Explorer
• 24.6% – Firefox
• 4.6% – Chrome
• 4.5% – Safari
• 2.4% – Opera
• 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Reference for internet usage statistics in 2009

Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

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I would like to see companies provide iphone application which caters to varied interest level of internal employees, candidates/ consultants and clients.

Features that I would like to see in an iphone app by category

Candidates:

• Resumes submission
• Push notifications for jobs of their interest
• Search for jobs
• Contact details of recruiters
• Applications status
• Job referrals

Companies:

• Push requirements to the vendor
• Status on applications
• Contact details of the team working on the assignments

Internal employees:

• Access to internal recruitment system
• Quick submission of resumes to client
• Contact details of client
• Send out job alerts
• Access to candidates social networking details for quick connect

My research recruitment apps on iphone resulted into very few well designed apps.  A quick search on iTunes and Google search resulted in apps like:

• Radar Recruit – very well made application by an Australian recruitment which specializes in creative jobs in the advertising sector. Radar is primarily using this app to provide job listing by category where the candidate can search for jobs and apply or refer the job posting to someone. You can view the app screen shot here
• JobServe connect – Provides a job search engine where candidates can search for more than 50,000 jobs globally with locations services on, it has an interesting feature to find jobs near you. It also provide generic functionality like creating a search agent, emailing the job etc You can view the app screen shot here
• Korn and ferry – this is one company that is taking social media recruiting to the next level. They have developed an iphone app with a lot of real good features. You can read the features here
• Recruiterapp.com – these people have gone one step further and have developed a full blown app to manage recruitment cycle for recruitment agencies/ consultants. You can read about them here

The iphone app market is heating up and along with social media I foresee companies will have to develop innovative apps to reach candidates via mobile devices.

I would love to see a list of features that you would like in an iphone app that can facilitate the recruitment experience on a mobile device.

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The latest Hollywood offering, ‘2012‘, is a $200 million movie about the end of the world is based on myths backed by the Mayan calendar.  Since the first promotion and marketing event of the movie 2012 there has been a casual buzz about world coming to an end and people are highly curious about the prediction.   In the past there have been numerous predictions about the world coming to an end.

To me the Barack Obama online marketing campaign was the best in terms of strategy and execution. The team at Sony has similarly done a great job at strategizing and executing online marketing campaign for the movie 2012.

Online marketing Lessons we can learn from 2012′s.

Strategy

• The What: Exploit people’s fears and generate curiosity amongst the target audience
• The Where: social media – primarily websites, Facebook pages, myspace twitter and video viral
• The How: Use of organic Google search coupled with highly focused SEO, SMO and SEM activities

Execution

It all started with a phrase “Find out the truth, search Google for 2012″. This prompted people to do just that and as a result in Google and SEO parlance the key phrase was searched over and over again in very short period of time. This increased the SEO value of that keyword and since it was passed around over various social networking sites there was a huge viral effect. Initially 2012 was not ranking first in Google it came right up there in couple of days

Big Viral effect

Search Google for 2012 the movie and you will see loads of articles, websites, videos, images, fan pages, groups, social organizations, NGO’s and last but not the least even NASA has to get into the act.  This topic appeals to wide variety of audience the viral effect was very strong and fast, this can be clearly seen in the research on Google Trends

Google Trends

Alexa Ranking

In addition to the official movie site, whowillsurvive2012.com, the search results pages include Wikipedia pages as well as Web sites built by devotees of the Mayan doomsday prophecy, lending more credibility to the premise of the film. You’ll find the same type of results at Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.

There has been a negative impact of this marketing campaign as well, since the news that the world is going to end by 2012 spread like wild fire authorities like NASA has been bombarded with people asking them to question if the world would really end.  The authorities at NASA had to create a FAQ page on their website clarifying that the nothing wrong is going to happen.

To me the marketing campaign of the movie 2012 is a huge success considering its effectiveness online coupled with its offline marketing and promotions activities.

Movie reviews for 2012 look promising the world over,I only hope that the movie lives up to the hype and expectation.

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Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 56.1 million active users in October 2009. Source Wikipedia.

Why this game is so famous:

• Everyone can relate to farming
• Everyone has basic knowledge about agriculture
• It’s not like normal role play gaming that gets over at that instant
• Game can be played over period of time
• Creates an environment of healthy competition

Management lessons that can be learnt from FarmVille game on Facebook:

• Strategic planning: Improves your strategic thinking capability as you need to strategize on what you’re planning to grow according to the time available.
• Utilization of resources: Need to choose your options (trees, flowers, fruits, animals and crops) to earn income on harvesting thereby one has to ensure optimum utilization of resources
• Planned Growth: Growth largely depends on your experience level and that can be achieved by planting can be gained
• Team work: sending gifts and helping friends farm leads to better team work.
• Cash flow: since everything has to be purchased and has a return on investment, it becomes important to manage your cash flows and invest in the right areas at the right time.
• Time management: each crop/fruits/tress has a predefined time to mature where the cost of planting and time of harvesting is fixed. It becomes imperative to choose what your are going to plant based on the time available with you

At the end of the day this is just a game but I am sure if played with good intent one can surely learn a lot of aspects of business.  Feel free to add me as your neighbour on FarmVille.

It would be nice to receive comments from people who have played Farmville and let us know what their experiences have been playing this super cool game.

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