Why Every Company Needs to Embrace Social Media

Social media is changing everything. Business Week recently published an article about the power of social media and how companies are beginning to embrace it, because they really don't have a choice. Not everyone has a blog, or wants to blog, but you would be hard pressed to find many people who aren't on some type of social network. Now it's time for corporate America to follow suit and meet their potential customers on their own turf, or risk falling behind the times.

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The article says, "It's as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides."

There is truth to that statement. Social media is changing how business works, so businesses better figure out how social media works. Here's why every company needs to embrace social media, now.

Brand Awareness and Traffic

Brand awareness is crucial, it always was. But today you have to go beyond old media to market your message to the masses.

On Friday, my post about Gen Y changing the work place was picked up on Stumble Upon and Digg. On Sunday, 60 Minutes re-aired a segment featuring my blog. Guess what? Our site received 4 times more traffic and 10 times more comments on Friday then it did on Sunday. When prime time national media attention can't compete with a couple of niche websites on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, you know that things just aren't what they used to be. These days, if you want to create real brand awareness, you better start with the niche communities.

Passive Job Seekers

Job boards are dying, fast. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Lou Adler, a chief executive of the Adler Group, a company that trains corporate recruiters on hiring practices, says, "I certainly see many, many companies posting their jobs on job boards….and not getting any results and wondering why."

The reason why is because people aren't actively looking for jobs. They are, however, actively browsing social media sites and spending time on social networks, and even if they don't know it, they're passively looking for jobs. The smartest companies are taking advantage of this and creating a social media presence.

Someone may not be looking for a job, but if they stumble across an interesting blog post, Facebook page, or Twitter profile that mentions a great company, they will take the time to investigate further. So everyone is a passive job seeker. It's up to every company to create a large enough online presence so the right people will stumble on them.

Credibility

Online credibility comes from the way you handle your brand and the links and references your blog or website receives. When people link to you, it's like an unofficial endorsement from that person. Think of it like politics. When John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama, it made a big splash. A company can gain serious online street-cred when one of the big guns endorses them.

But again, like politics, the common folks matter too. You must first establish credibility with the masses, and then the big fish can provide you that final push. Even if it takes a while, online credibility will eventually lead to mainstream coolness.

The Coolness factor

The majority of social networks and social media sites are not "mainstream cool." Outside of Silicon Valley and the 900,000 tech crunch readers, the majority of people don't know what Friend Feed, Digg, or even Twitter is. But your company should, if you want to be cool. Why be cool?

If your company can adopt a bunch of these new technologies and figure out how to properly use them to leverage your brand, at some point it will pay off. Not only will your company immediately be considered cool in the tech world, but when one of these sites becomes a legitimate hit, like Twitter is about to become, your company will be mainstream-cool as well.

And when you're mainstream cool, everything changes. You'll have people knocking down your doors trying to get an interview with your company. Just ask Google.

Controlling the conversation

Social media is a constant conversation and because of this, business is now a constant conversation. It's a comment string on Brazen Careerist, its someone's Facebook wall, and it's a Linked In recommendation. Someone, somewhere is out there talking about your company, and they can say whatever they want. All you can do is control the conversation.

Controlling the conversation does not mean telling people how to talk about your company or spamming a couple bloggers with job postings or company descriptions. It means creating a presence where you can initiate and continue a conversation.

What social media requires is authenticity, because even a newbie social media user can sniff out a phony quickly. But authentic conversation isn't what most companies do naturally. So when corporations want to initiate a conversation, they have to find the right people, and they better empower those people to tell the truth, which isn't always great news to deliver.

Starbucks is a great example. When things started going south, they publicly admitted to being at fault. They started a social networking site to ask for help from the customers. And we all remember when they shut down the stores across the country for an afternoon to address some fundamental problems. Smart decisions like that come when you take the time to start a conversation and then remember to listen, too.

It's not easy. It takes a ton of time and it may even consist of a couple full time hires, but establishing a social media presence is worth it. Sooner or later every company will be actively using social media, but the trendsetters are the one's who will get the most out of it. Don't be left behind.

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It's a Great Job Market, So Move Back Home

The unemployment rate is rising, but the National Association of Colleges and Employers says that the prospects of finding a job after college are actually "robust." Forbes agrees. Deloitte's research shows that (thanks to demographic trends) recent college graduates will have their pick of jobs for the next 10 years.

Don't believe me? I recently spoke with Aaron Bare, CEO of Career Tours, an innovative, video-based job board. They are consistently attracting every kind of client, from the Minnesota State Patrol to huge corporations, like Microsoft and Nike. And the clients are all trying to figure out how to reach Millennial candidates.

That suggests that corporate America is no longer chasing just the class presidents and Ivy League elite–it's the middle-of-the-pack folks, too. But being chased is a tricky game that young professionals–and their parents–need to learn how to win. And winning the game means learning some new rules.

Whatever you do, do not get sucked in by promises of a big salary, quick promotions, and a fancy office. That's what a successful career used to be, but not anymore. By watching our parents, Millennials have learned that such things are just superficial rewards that leave you feeling burned out and empty at the end of the day (and at the end of your career).

Today, a successful career means finding a job (or two) that provides you with interesting work, a sense of fulfillment, and plenty of room for professional and personal growth. To find this kind of career, you must forget the money. Even in an amazing job market, no one gets perfect work at a great salary.

But passing on the big salary is not an easy thing to do. The average college student graduates with more than $20,000 in debt, and shacking up in any big city can put a serious dent in your wallet. I spent last year living in a two-bedroom apartment outside of Washington D.C. for $3,000 per month. When you figure in credit card debt, food and a social life, your monthly burn rate can be ridiculous.

This is where the parents come (back) in. You can call them overprotective and over-involved, but the smartest parents today are encouraging their kids to come back home for a couple of years after school. Moving home allows you to get a handle on your student loan and credit card debt by saving on rent. Plus, it enables you to jump-start the process of building a truly successful career, based on today's standards, not the old days.

Only in America, and only in the past few generations, has living at home well into your twenties been frowned upon. But if you're truly opposed to moving home, or you can't stand your parents, get creative and find a job in a cheap city. Ryan Paugh and I have managed to live in Madison, Wisconsin since September on a minimal salary. Rent is a fraction of the price that it would be on the coast, and the living conditions are better in many ways.

Finding a great job in a smaller city might take a little more effort, but they're out there, you just need to look in the right places. I know first-hand that Madison, Wisconsin and my home town of New Haven, Connecticut have a bunch of cool companies looking to hire hard working twentysomethings. I have to admit, it's definitely time to give myself a raise, but the point is, you can live cheap if you face the reality that big cities aren't always what they're cracked up to be and good jobs do exist everywhere.

You'll know you've achieved success when you wake up almost every morning excited about your job. So if finding that job means trading a couple of years on your own for a room at Mom and Dad's, or giving up on living the dream in New York until you can afford it (when you're a millionaire) that's cool with me. I guarantee it's worth it in the long run.

3 More New Marketing Rules for Recruiting Millennials

This is the second in a series of posts discussing how Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae applies to recruiting Generation Y. In short, the rules for marketing have changed. But the number one problem in corporate America is recruiting, not marketing.

What I've come to realize is that recruiting and marketing are not as different as one would expect. Godin's 14 new rules for marketers capture perfectly the new rules for recruiting and retaining Gen-Y.

Here's how trends four through six from Godin's book relate to recruiting.

4. Extremely short attention spans due to clutter

I'll admit it, my attention span is virtually non-existent. When a friend sends me a link to a YouTube video, if I'm not hooked in 10 seconds, I don't watch the rest. When I stumble onto a new blog, if the first post doesn't suck me in immediately, I usually leave, never to return again.

Godin says, "Commercials used to be a minute long, sometimes two. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long."

People will not invest time and energy into something that is not immediately appealing.

So what does this mean for recruiting? It means that your job descriptions must be amazing. The first sentence has to hook the candidate: it should explain why your company is great and how you are making some sort of difference. The rest should tell them how your job will position them for success in their career–and not just with your company.

The old approach is to list all of the responsibilities someone will have when they work for you. But we Millennials aren't looking for a laundry list of things that you will tell us to do. We're looking for a reason to believe in your company. Give us one.

5. The long tail

In his book and blog, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson claims that given the choice, people want the choice. In any normal marketplace, if you give people more choices, revenue goes up.

That's why Amazon.com has defeated traditional booksellers. Since they don't need concrete bookstores, they can sell millions of books, not just the 150,000 top sellers that fit in a Barnes and Noble. In other words, the internet provides too many choices. And the choices aren't between Pepsi and Coke or Careerbuilder and Monster. The choices include every niche product out there, which can be found everywhere because of the ease of starting a business today, again, thanks to the Internet.

What this means is that you should find some niche job sites. Careerbuilder is a giant job board with cool commercials, but too much spam, and Monster is, well, a monster. Instead, use Dice or Tech Crunch for technology, use the ladders for the $100K plus hires, and scour the Internet for the top blogs in your particular field. The best candidates are hanging around the niche communities. They've already sifted through the mass of career-related clutter online. Now they're waiting on your company to do that, too.

6. Outsourcing

We've all heard about people losing jobs to workers abroad who can perform the work for 1/5 of the price. It's a very real problem and it's going to continue.

Godin says, "Either what you're doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or its homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgment, in which case you can charge for it."

At first glance, this has nothing to do with recruiting or with Millennials. But, think again: if your recruiters are doing the same thing now that they were doing five years ago, they're wasting your time. Writing standardized job descriptions, preparing rehearsed speeches with three year old PowerPoint slides, using old marketing copy–all of that outdated recruiting activity can be outsourced for next to nothing.

However, you cannot outsource the personalization of the recruiting experience. You can't send YourManInIndia to a college campus for dinner and drinks with a recruit, and you can't send a worker in China to Mind Your Decisions to join in a conversation about Finance with some very smart young people.

A competent, contemporary recruiter can do these things. And if he has that kind of initiative, he can probably write you a great job description, too. And he will do these things, because it's the only way to get top talent.

Can your recruiters be outsourced?

Millennials in the Newsroom

As millennials come of age, they're infiltrating the work force in all areas and all industries. Many, like me, are becoming journalists. And some, like me, are continually re-evaluating this career decision. While I think you can find recovering journalists in almost every generation (I've chatted with way too many people who seem to have concluded that being a journalist was more appealing on paper than in practice), there are some unique reasons why the news room can be a toxic place for millennials. At the same time, the digitalization of news is providing opportunities that mesh really well with the Gen Y mentality.

Keen observers of Gen Y know that this generation craves work-life balance. For us, sacrificing a personal life to climb the ranks at work isn't a reasonable trade-off. We want jobs that can accommodate life, not a life that has to accommodate the job – an aspiration that is often at odds with the status quo in many work places. It is an especially lofty goal when it comes to journalism, a career that often requires late hours and weekend work to meet deadlines.

Predictably, millennials in journalism aren't happy about those long hours. According to a 2005 Poynter survey, journalists between 20 and 34 years old were most likely to say they had considered leaving journalism because of work-life balance issues. And newsroom vets generally aren't getting it. Danna Walker, an adjunct journalism professor at American University who also works as an editor and producer at CBS, says that "the older generation didn't know what to think" when millennials first showed up in newsrooms. "The assumption is that millennials aren't as willing to pay their dues," she says. In fact, the whole "pay your dues" mentality is "worn out," according to Bea Fields, author of "Millennial Leaders." Control tactics do nothing to attract and retain Gen Y employees, as Fields explains over at Y Blog.

Newsrooms also rarely meet Gen Y's mentorship and training expectations. A young journalist recently submitted a question to "Ask the Recruiter" columnist Joe Grimm, a well-know recruitment and development editor for the Detroit Free Press. The recent graduate wrote that he got "minimal feedback" from the editors at his paper, leaving him with "no idea" whether he was doing a good job or a bad job. "If misery loves company, you have plenty of both," Grimm writes in response, citing a survey that found that lack of training is the number one complaint that journalists have about the profession.

But millennials aren't totally doomed to an otherwise unhappy or non-existent future in journalism. The Internet and multimedia news can add a "wonderful dynamic" to newsrooms, says Jill Geisler, a journalism leadership and management specialist at Poynter. Young journalists with technical skills are in big demand to staff news Web sites. As a result, many new hires are commanding respect from day one because they're often the only person in the newsroom with the multimedia know-how to perform certain tasks. "As editors realize they need new approaches and people with new media skills, younger folks are becoming more valued," Walker writes in an e-mail. A Gen Y friend who works for NBC in Washington, D.C. tells me that she and some of her other colleagues are sought after by their older newsroom counterparts who are hoping that the millennials can teach them a thing or two about the computer programs they learned in journalism school. In many situations, multimedia is not only allowing Gen Yers to get a foot in the door, but it's immediately positioning them in roles where they are taken seriously from the start.

In addition, the expansion of online news is also catering to Gen Y's job-hopping tendencies. New positions are popping up in many companies that are launching or expanding Web sites to complement print work. Job-hopping within the industry is common, observes Meg Martin, a multimedia producer for the Roanoke Times. "There's a lot of crossover and a lot of news organizations are encouraging people to explore different positions," Martin says.

The news industry is facing a moment of significant challenges and prospects in terms of recruitment of Gen Y journalists. Will digital news be journalism's proverbial "knight in shining armor" when it comes to recruiting millennials and then retaining them for longer than five minutes? Could it set journalism apart from other industries in the quest to adapt to Gen Y? The answer will certainly depend on how individual newsrooms resolve work-life balance concerns, training needs and other issues that matter to millennials. But for me and the thousands of other millennials with notoriously high student loan payments, the bottom line might just end up getting the largest say.

3 New Marketing Rules for Recruiting Millennials

The rules have changed. No longer can companies relax and rely on their name brand to attract and retain top young talent. Gen-Y workers want engaging work and a relaxed environment. And we want to be treated like we are (dare I say it?) special.

Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae contains 14 marketing trends that no marketing professional can afford to miss. More importantly, it claims that the rules for marketing have changed drastically. Godin describes the difference between old marketing, disrupting an audience with a product they aren't looking for, and new marketing, bringing a product to the exact community or niche that is looking for it.

But here's the best part: the new rules for marketers capture perfectly the new rules for recruiting and retaining Gen-Y. Employers can't afford to ignore these new rules if they want to recruit and retain top employees.

Here are how the first three trends from the book relate to recruiting.

Direct communication and commerce between producers and consumers

The recruiter's company is the producer. Your potential employees are the consumers. Your potential employees want to know when they will hear from you after the interview, and they expect you to meet that deadline. I can't tell you how many people I talk to who interviewed for a job where they were supposed to hear back within three days. Often, weeks later they still haven't heard back. And it's not just the ones who were turned down; many of these people end up receiving an offer a week or two later than promised.

This is unacceptable. If your company can not hold itself accountable to your potential superstar employees, your employees will see little reason to be accountable to the company, and they are less likely to take the job.

Set up a shared calendar that each interviewer will use to record the mandatory response deadline. Make sure one person is in charge of reminding each interviewer to respond to the candidate they interviewed.

Also, it's essential that the person who interviewed the recruit sends a follow-up email (this should be easy because any smart candidate will immediately send a thank you). This is direct commerce between you (the producer) and me (the consumer). If there are extenuating circumstances, it's fine to send an email explaining why you don't have an answer.

Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities

In Meatball Sundae, Godin tells the reader to do a Google search on "Dell Hell." Do this and you'll see Jeff Jarvis' name all over the place, and you'll quickly see the power a consumer can have on a brand. Well, guess what? There are quite a few potential employees that can have that same power.

You never know who, but some interviewee is bound to have a big-time blog or a few deep online connections. Therefore, your company needs to treat every single employee and recruit with an extremely high level of respect. It doesn't matter if they're a VP or an intern, everyone should be treated with equal respect.

And you must make sure to answer every email. Make sure someone is in charge of personally replying to every inquiry from a potential recruit or disgruntled employee. It's basic customer service, but it's also marketing and brand management. And we all know how important that is.

If you do happen to piss off the wrong "independent authority," take a hint from Dell and own up to your mistake in a public forum. Go straight to the source. Join the blog conversation. Apologize for whatever you did, and don't make excuses.

Need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases

You cannot tell a recruit that they will be on the fast track to making partner after two years if 99 percent of employees never make it!

One of those people who didn't make it is bound to know someone who knows someone who told your recruit (on their blog) that the company works you to the bone for two years. And the only way to make partner is to give up your personal life for those years.

After you make your story authentic, you need to actually tell some stories! Stories are sticky, while job responsibilities, salaries, and bonuses are not. Tell your recruits a few first-hand accounts of what people have done and where they have gone since joining the firm.

If it's true that a new employee gives up two years of a social life to get on the track to partner, tell a story about how someone did it, and why it's worth it. Some people actually want that type of job. Besides, you should only want to hire someone who knows exactly what they're getting into.

These are the first three trends that no marketer (and no employer) can afford to ignore in today's work environment. Stay tuned for the next 11 trends in the coming weeks.