If You’ve Got It—Flaunt It!
July 26, 2010
Recently, the Boston advertising agency Conover Tuttle Pace started its second annual Summer Sublet desk swap. As reported by the Boston Globe, the Summer Sublet is a combination lottery/draft, in which employees maneuver their way to better quarters for a month. This year’s big winner traded his spot in the communal workspace for the president’s glass-walled corner office–complete with TV and a garden view
Summer Sublet requires everyone, from the newbies to the bosses, to sit in a different place until Labor Day. As a small company (just 35 employees), Conover Tuttle Pace is in a position to move folks around without too much hassle, and obviously, this kind of exercise would be logistically impossible in a big corporation. But Summer Sublet is a playful idea that stimulates cross-functional interaction by mixing up the creative types, the technies, and the execs in new ways. According Amara Bassiri, the company’s “workflow, wellness, and broadcast guru,” an “exchange of ideas happens organically.”
When the Boston Globe wrote up the Sublet caper, Conover Tuttle Pace swiftly put a big link to the story on their company’s home page. (That’s it in the post illustration.) Which brings us to the point: This is a knockout story for their employer brand.
Again—this particular idea would not translate easily to a corporate milieu. But there are plenty of clever, creative activities going on in big companies, and as a rule they are not exploited. A few typical reasons:
- The Careers/Jobs section is in a silo, not integrated with overall PR and marketing efforts.
- The PR and marketing folks don’t pay much attention to employer branding.
- The Careers/Jobs section is focused on job posting and application gathering, with only sporadic attention to the employer brand.
- The Careers/Jobs section is updated infrequently, and may have no easy way to add newsy items.
Takeaway: The (very) slightly more relaxed pace of summer offers a good opportunity to find out about innovative ideas and activities in your company. Even if there is no currently convenient way to report these activities on the corporate website, they make great blog posts, and can be included in social media—Facebook loves this type of item, especially if there are photos. And “cool” stories provide an opportunity for recruiters to tweet something other than routine job postings.
To see fun done right, it’s always worth stopping by Southwest Airlines. Check out the SWA Facebook page.
Phenomenal Facebook
July 22, 2010
I am (at last) getting into Facebook. For some reason, Twitter made sense to me immediately, while Facebook has remained largely a mystery. But after a few weeks of floundering around, I’m starting to understand a little better.
Biggest help: Oddly enough, a talk by David Kirkpatrick on BookTV. Kirkpatrick (formerly senior technology editor at Fortune magazine) is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, which came out just a few weeks ago in the US, and will soon arrive in a UK edition.
Needless to say, The Facebook Effect has its own Facebook page, where you can read an excerpt, watch an interview, and (of course) “like” the book. More than 5,000 likers so far, and the book is well-ranked on Amazon niche lists for E-Commerce (#3) and Company Profiles (#7). In addition to an in-depth retelling of the well-known dorm-to-dominance story of Facebook’s creation/evolution, Kirkpatrick provides thoughtful analysis that applies not only to Facebook, but to the whole social media landscape.
The second biggest help in my Facebook education was stumbling over what I now think of as the “friend tripwire.” As an individual, you can plunk along for quite a while just adding friends occasionally for some seemingly good reason. Then–you add one well-connected activist, and you find yourself with a generous pile of recommendations and requests. (If you open the door at this point, you need to understand about lists . . . )
So all of a sudden, I began to think of Facebook as something like a fractal generator—i.e., a self-similar replicating system that creates intricate patterns. From a slightly different perspective, it’s like a complex system organizing itself in response to initial conditions (“me”) and various attractors (“friends”).
If that works for you, happy to be of service! But if not it doesn’t matter, because probably everyone finds their own point of entry for Facebook, and no one really needs to think of it beyond the practical applications anyway. Which brings us to the real point: Facebook for recruiting.
In 2008, there was a lot of hype around “Facebook for recruiting,” and companies like Jobing and Appirio introduced apps and services to build out that potential. So far, however, these approaches have not seen spectacular success in performance or adoption . . .
So how is Facebook being used effectively to find talent? That turns out to be a longer story, so stay tuned for two more installments: Corporate Recruiting via Facebook (with a useful case study) and Recruiters on Facebook (with some interesting examples).
(And yes, that’s a lovely Julia set, shared by Eequor.)
Summer Fun
July 16, 2010
Summer isn’t really less fraught than the rest of the year, but we keep on thinking there’s more time to play during the warmer months . . .
In the spirit of the season, here are a few ideas that have (or at least could have) something to do with careers/recruiting/work/job, with a little fun in the bargain:
- Catch up on your reading. If you haven’t already followed last year’s Summer Reading suggestions—why not now? And add to the list Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a quirky look at what works—and what matters—in today’s employment environment. Some chapter titles to give you the flavor: First-Time Managers Do Not Need to Suck; Sex Discrimination Is Everywhere, So Don’t Try To Run; and Getting a Promotion Is So Last Century.
- Start your own blog. Seriously. TypePad is super-friendly, offers dozens of great designs, and gives you a 30-day free trial or even a free microblog. WordPress also has a free version. Don’t think about it in terms of an audience–blogging is a great way to talk to yourself!—but if you want to do something more in the professional line, you can start your own blog on ere.net with almost no effort. (Extra motivation: ere.net bloggers can compete during July to win an iPad.)
- Get some business cards. No, not those dull ones you already have a box of. Some really great ones from MOO. MOO offers a wonderful array of designs, or you can upload your own images—and every card in your order can have a different design if you want to go nuts. These cards really do grab attention, so they are worth the small investment. Use them to invent an extra/alternative version of yourself, start that freelance thing you’ve been thinking about, or add some snap to your professional image.
- Organize your life. That’s a big one—but hope springs eternal, so if you’ve already run the gamut of time management methods with no luck, the Pomodoro Technique may be just what you’re looking for. All you need is one of those kitchen timers that looks like a tomato, plus a free ebook from the Pomodoro website. You’ll either love it or hate it, but you’ll get some fun from the try-out. And some people say this method worked for them when nothing else did. (Pomodoro is Italian for “tomato,” by the way.)
Enjoy! And if you guessed that today’s illustration is from the 1804 edition of Youthful Sports, give yourself ten points.
Jeremiah Owyang’s Roadmap for the Corporate Website
July 14, 2010
Jeremiah Owyang is definitely one of the most influential voices in the social media space–and he has questioned the relevance of traditional corporate websites in the new online landscape. In this presentation he outlines the issues and projects a path toward integration of social media and corporate website.
Although his overview is mainly focused on consumer-facing aspects of the corporate site, and he doesn’t touch on Careers or employer branding, the presentation offers some very useful information and insights. Worth watching!
Making your Corporate Website Relevant
And here’s the related post.
Interesting note: This presentation has received more than 16,000 views on SlideShare and is embedded on more than 60 sites.
The June Wrap-up: Spotlight on BP
July 7, 2010
The standout story of June was British Petroleum’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “Careers” Meets Crisis, posted at the beginning of June, noted that BP’s Careers page remained unchanged more than a month after the crisis began. Not only was there no mention of the spill, the “Featured job category” highlight extolled opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico.
A month later, the featured job category is IT. But nothing else on the page has been added or updated to address the ongoing Gulf crisis. Similarly, nothing has been added or updated since the spill on BP’s Environment and Society page—which seems like an even bigger disconnect.
However, a few changes have been made to the corporate site.
- The Gulf Response tab, which was put in place soon after the crisis began, is now more tightly organized, focusing on technical and practical issues. The level of detail on this page conveys much more effectively the seriousness of BP’s efforts.
- Some of the content originally shown on the Gulf Response tab is now on the landing page—so users who navigate directly to the site by typing www.bp.com into their browsers (or clicking on a sponsored link) will see Gulf-related material immediately. The page begins with a large photo feature that depicts people at work: cleaning sand, pointing at maps, rescuing birds, etc.
- Also on the BP landing page: videos about the company’s good intentions and positive efforts, along with information links (both contact information and news stories). Overall, the page has a slightly positive spin, but not a pronounced “PR” flavor.
- On the Investors page, a headline feature leads readers to the “Chairman’s letter to shareholders.” That’s the only reference.
In reality, people looking for information on the Gulf spill don’t make a beeline for the BP site. Traffic statistics show that the majority of searchers proceed to stories from the Huffington Post, the New York Times, or other news sources. But people looking for a job at BP are very likely to go to the corporate site—and the impression created there will matter to some job-seekers.
BP has made some moves into social media in the meantime, with a decent Twitter performance, a YouTube channel, and a Facebook page. However their YouTube effort drew criticism because comments were not allowed for the first few weeks, and on Facebook comments are only allowed from those who have “Liked” BP. These policies don’t seem to improve impressions of the company . . . .
A hat-tip to Fran Melmed, whose comment on our original story included the idea that BP could feature positive comments and stories from Gulf Coast employees on their Careers page. (Fran tuned in to the BP/Careers story early with a hard-hitting post on her blog.)
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