In this competitive market for talent, it is imperative that employers be at the forefront of what job seekers find accessible. With today’s emerging technologies job seekers have come to expect a more interactive experience when it comes their job search. In order to meet the needs and desires of top talent, employers have to meet them halfway.  The smartest employers are taking advantage of today’s emerging media to connect with job candidates where they work and play, and deliver a more interactive and engaging job seeker experience.

Two forms of emerging media employers need to take advantage of right now are mobile and online video technology. Not only are mobile and video technologies surprisingly easy to implement into your overall recruitment efforts, but they are a must for any employer who hopes to remain competitive in the new recruitment landscape.

Mobile: The New Desktop
According to the latest findings from Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Americans currently own cell phones, nearly half of whom (44 percent) use their mobile devices to get access to the internet. This finding highlights the opportunity mobile devices offer employers to reach job seekers anywhere, at any time. The opportunities to use mobile technology for recruiting are vast, ranging from mobile-friendly websites that enable easy job searches on the go; to quick response (QR) codes that point smartphone users to job listings; to text alerts informing candidates about recruiting events and opportunities.

Regardless of size or industry, every company needs to take advantage of mobile recruiting opportunities. Increasingly, job seekers are using their mobile devices to receive job alerts, search jobs and research companies. It won’t be long until this behavior is commonplace, and those companies that do not embrace this technology are losing out on candidates every day.

Video: An Underutilized Advantage
For all of its power to influence and engage people, video is one of the most underutilized recruiting tools out there today. One thing CareerBuilder has seen consistently throughout our 15 years of research on job seekers is their desire to work for companies that care about their employees, work for the greater good and are at the forefront of innovation. Video enables companies to get this message across better than any other medium, because it enables candidates to really see and hear what the true employee experience is like. The evidence supports this finding, too: According to CareerBuilder internal data, job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than postings without video. On average, CareerBuilder customers receive a 34 percent greater application rate when they add video to their job postings. At the same time, only 10 percent of job postings include video, underscoring a major opportunity for employers to take advantage of this technology and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Dispelling the Myths of Emerging Media
Change can be intimidating, but companies that fail to embrace these emerging media are only cheating themselves out of the opportunity to reach the growing number of qualified candidates who utilize this technology for their job searches. If what’s holding you back is the fear that implementing these technologies is too expensive or simply more trouble than they’re worth, consider the following popular misconceptions about emerging media.

Myth 1: It’s expensive. It’s surprisingly inexpensive to send text messages, create QR codes or create a mobile-friendly career site. Likewise, video is also inexpensive to produce, and it can be as easy as creating a video yourself and posting it (for free) on YouTube. It may not be the most polished video, but it’s a way to start the process and see how much feedback it generates.  From there, you might decide to invest in a more streamlined production process to get an even better return. Implementing mobile and video recruiting efforts can be an investment, but when you look at the return, cost should be an afterthought.

Myth 2: It’s too complicated. Mobile technology can feel like somewhat of a black hole for employers; however, integration with mobile devices is surprisingly simple, and the time it takes to build a mobile website is minimal. The same can be said for video. As mentioned above, uploading video onto any online platform – from a video-sharing site like YouTube to the company career site – is increasingly easy.  When in doubt, consult a third party expert to help you navigate these technologies for the best possible ROI. You won’t regret it.

Myth 3: It’s a trend. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it is that emerging media, such as mobile technologies, social networking and video, is not going away. Consider the following statistics:

• In 2010 alone, the worldwide mobile phone market grew by 18.5 percent.
• More than 5 billion text messages were sent on a daily basis in the U.S. in 2010
• In the last quarter of 2010, smartphone sales surpassed that of PCs, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
• During the course of 2010 CareerBuilder saw over 400 percent growth in job searches on our mobile career site, and the number of job seekers storing resumes on their phones using CB’s iPhone App increased by over 350 percent.
• Web pages with video are 53 times more likely than pages with just text to show up on the first page of Google results
• Internet video is now 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic, and will reach 62 percent by the end of 2015.

These are just a few of the findings that underscore both the reach and power of emerging media, as well as the need for employers to adapt their recruiting efforts to keep up with mobile usage trends. As these technologies become the norm for candidates as they search for jobs and research companies, employers need to adjust their recruiting efforts accordingly to remain competitive. In other words, you might not be taking advantage of emerging media, but your competitors are. Don’t get left behind.

Andrew Streiter is an Area Vice President at CareerBuilder, LLC, where he is responsible for developing human capital strategies for organizations ranging from Fortune 1,000 companies to mid-sized businesses throughout the US.

JobSpeek’s inventor is Chris Russell, a veteran of the online recruiting space and widely considered by many in the industry to be the “mad scientist of online recruiting.” He wanted to create a new kind of job listing, one that uses the features of the device itself to make a better job description. “Recruiters can now create a compelling job ad that differentiates their company and syndicates the job in one click,” he says proudly.

The app also syncs with social media accounts on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. As more employers begin to adopt social media in their recruiting strategy, JobSpeek makes it easy to spread the word that “we are hiring.”

Features of the app include:

• ability to record 60-second audio “hiring message” to describe the job
• upload a picture of your business or office environment
• free distribution to 10+ million job seekers through sites such as SimplyHired
• ability to manage/edit/add listings quickly and easily
• social media integration

How It Works

Enter a few basic details, add a picture and record your audio message. Each time you post a job through the JobSpeek app, it gets posted immediately to our website at http://jobspeek.com. The job is then syndicated to the job search engines within 24 hours. You tell the job seeker how to apply via email, URL, phone or fax.

JobSpeek is available for free in the iTunes app store today. Download it here: http://tinyurl.com/jobspeek2

Go to http://jobspeek.com to learn more and listen to the current job listings.

Contact:

Chris Russell
800-399-6651

This press release was issued through eReleases(R).  For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at http://www.ereleases.com.

When we last off, UPS said that the candidates who were coming its way via Facebook and Twitter were more likely to convert to actual hires than were any old candidates. But the sample was small: in other words, social media recruiting seemed to pay off in terms of ROI, but not in any large volume.

Things are different now. 

As 2010 progressed, TMP’s Mike Vangel says that UPS wanted to know: “What was the ability to scale? Would we be able to continue at the same rate of growth? Would it plateau, or would it accelerate?” 

So far: no plateau. UPS attributes 955 hires in 2010 to the social media efforts, breaking down like this: 45 from Twitter (out of 681 people who arrived via Twitter and created applications); 226 from Facebook (out of 3,926 people who created applications); 84 from text-messaging (out of 1,004 who created applications); and 600 from people (out of 7,919 creating applications) going to UPS’s mobile-friendly careers page from a mobile device. That mobile-friendly site had about 510,000 page views in the last 4-5 months of 2010, with people averaging about a minute and a half each on the site. 

We’ve learned a lot from the process, and with the benefit of retrospect, I have distilled our ideas and lessons learned into 10 rules that should help any organization confidently launch a social recruiting effort. These 10 elements are crucial to consider when developing your social media recruiting strategy. And they’re applicable across organizations of any size, in any country.

1. It’s Not Just About You and Your Open Positions

Just dumping a list of your open positions into Twitter or Facebook won’t work. At Unisys, we provide information not only about Unisys and our open positions, but also share helpful job hunting information in general. Whether it’s interviewing techniques, job-seeking techniques, or resume writing, we’re sharing our careers expertise with the people we want to connect with. It’s not just the Unisys story. It’s a career-focused information resource that incorporates Unisys principles.

By engaging candidates in this way, we can provide a better sense of who Unisys is and what we do. Prospective candidates are more likely to share what we talk about through social media outlets with their friends through e-mail and other networks. And that ends up promoting and cross-promoting our brand and employment opportunities, as well as generating employee referrals.

2. Conversations Are the Key to Success

You never know where conversations are going to start from or where they’re going to lead. By listening to your Twitter stream, for example, and by being engaging, and posting information you might think is meaningless, your conversation could turn into something important that ends up delivering a valuable contact. For instance, a conversation that starts out as a plug for a new product could lead you to your next hire.

3. Align Your Career Brand with Your Corporate Brand

Search engines love social media. It’s important to realize that everything you say and do on these forums will contribute to your organization’s online brand, just as much (if not more!) as the official company website.

This is one of the reasons our social recruiting efforts have been so successful. We began working very early on, and very closely, with the Unisys corporate communications department in (1) establishing an overall social media strategy for the entire company, and (2) developing a social media recruiting strategy that aligned with the corporate social media strategy.

We spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that everything we did with social media was branded and worded correctly. The goal was to establish a workable cadence between our corporate brand and our careers brand that represented Unisys well. It continues to be extremely important to us to align what we’re posting with our overall corporate strategy.

For example, if our corporate efforts are focused on cloud computing, then it’s important for the career side to also reinforce that by talking about different cloud opportunities. Actions speak louder than words. Social media amplifies our actions related to hiring and recruiting, and allows them to play a meaningful role in reinforcing our overall corporate branding.

Don’t try to do social recruiting in a vacuum. Join forces with others in your organization to ensure everyone is well-aligned with the corporate brand and that all external messaging is in sync.

4. Go Where Your Audience Is

It might sound simplistic to say that you should focus your social media efforts where your targeted talent is. Yet I continue to see many recruiters focus on the technology rather than the people side of social media.

It’s much easier to attract a large following on a site that already has a large following or user base. But you also have to remember that you want to reach the right people. Constantly evaluate new sites for their recruiting potential. Go to the sites that cater to and attract the sorts of people you want to connect with. Look for quality, not quantity.

For Unisys, services such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter were important, as we wanted to reach several different demographics. It might not be the same for your company, especially if you are not in the U.S. Each of our geographies has sites that are unique and relevant to their region of the world.

5. Remember that Social Recruiting Is Still Evolving

Social media is still a relatively new world for the vast majority of organizations. And it’s also new for most job seekers. There’s a lot of buzz about the use of social media in a job search, but that doesn’t mean everybody is doing it, is comfortable using it, or is effectively using it.

You might not be able to reach your ideal candidate using social networks. And even if they are on a social site, they might not be open to being contacted by a recruiter. Don’t lose faith. That doesn’t mean social media in general isn’t an effective recruiting channel for you. It simply means you need to keep searching and leveraging social media outlets to find the right mix of services and engagement to start networking with your intended audience. The additional effort on the front end might provide you with new effective methods for future searches.

6. Educate Your Team on Best Practices

It is important to educate your team on best practices for using social media, especially in a corporate sense. Authenticity, interactivity, value, and just plain respect can put a human face on your corporate social media efforts. Being too aggressive or insincere in your interactions can doom your efforts. Have your most effective social media users coach your other recruiters and keep track of usage to ensure that you have consistency in your messaging and tone.

7. Involve Management

Social recruiting is not just for the recruiting team. Management can play an important role here. Unisys has a new regional recruiting leader in the Asia Pacific region based in Sydney. One of the first things she did was set up meetings with the local management groups trying to hire for some unique positions. She laid out how these hiring managers could use LinkedIn to their advantage. She worked with them to tune their profiles. She encouraged them to regularly add status updates that announced Unisys was seeking talent for a particular role. Publishing that information out to their network of contacts, it helped make the outreach viral.

Educate management on the benefits of LinkedIn for recruiting. Train management on how to tune their LinkedIn profile for recruiting, and build and manage their professional networks. Use their network updates to keep their contacts aware of job opportunities and business activities. Do the same for each of the social networks that your organization is using (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

8. Recognize the Risks

Using social media is a double-edged sword, especially with regard to LinkedIn. If you’re having managers tune their profiles to attract job candidates, they could just as easily attract recruiters who will try to woo them away, especially if they have a unique skill set.

That said, remember that strong candidates with unique skills are likely targets for recruiters anyway, regardless of the quality of their LinkedIn profile. Candidates make their own career choices. You can’t control whether someone will be found by a recruiter, but you can control whether your own organization capitalizes on the power of social recruiting.

Another risk of social recruiting is the permanence of information on the Internet, and the ability for anything to go viral, for good or bad reasons. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Unlike love, the Internet is forever.”

Anything you do online is likely to be captured and archived somewhere, free for anyone with access to a search engine to find, even years later. It’s difficult to predict what will make something go viral, but training your people on the best practices for using social media responsibly will minimize the chances that something negative about your company will make the rounds.

9. Use Video, but Don’t Force It

There is great interest in the use of video for social recruiting. Search engines love video, so it can be a great way to gain visibility. Our experience has shown that not everyone is comfortable with video, no matter how enthusiastic they might be about a project. Some people do well on video, and some people don’t.

Don’t force anybody to appear in a video. While it can be a powerful tool, there are other avenues that can deliver similar results. There are also questions about what sort of video is best. Should it be informal and shot from a Flipcam? Should it be done professionally? How much production is too much?

There are implications for choosing one production approach over another, and what that might imply about the style or professionalism of a business. We’ve found a wide difference of opinion throughout the world on what style of video is most appropriate. Align your efforts to these regional preferences.

Video can work well as an element of a social recruiting program, but it needs to be approached judiciously. Try several styles and see what works best in each circumstance. Note the successes, and establish them as your model for future use.

10. Start Small and Grow

Don’t try to do everything at once. Start small, think big, and build on your successes. LinkedIn is a great place to start because it’s accepted as a professional business networking tool, even if someone is not in an active job search. And it’s very easy for recruiters and job seekers to use their LinkedIn account as a first point of contact.

Once you build up to a level of comfort using LinkedIn, begin to expand into other areas of social media. The key is to build trust, add value, and start authentic conversations. It takes time to build trust — about as long as it takes to build a large and active community. The more people who are engaged and interacting on a page, the greater their sense of trust. Scale creates an environment where candidates will seek you out.

The corporate blog has a tremendous ability to build the value and trust essential to social recruiting. Unisys has had great success tying its blogs to its recruiting practice. But blogging is not for everyone, so think carefully before you take it on for your company and have a plan around frequency of posts and line up some back-up posts to fill in any gaps that occur once you begin

If you decide it’s the right move, identify the folks who are open to contributing, because it’s an ongoing and regular commitment. Also, is it right from a strategy perspective to have your own careers blog, or is it better to integrate it along with a corporate strategy? Again, start small with any corporate blogging plan, and expand it as your needs and experience grow.

The End of the Beginning

These are the lessons we learned as we embarked on our social recruiting initiative. The effort continues to deliver results for us and we continue to review and expand our usage of this growing medium. I hope these best practices help you build your social media recruiting strategy. Feel free to comment here or write to me if you have any questions, opinions, ideas, or need more information.

The buzz around location-based social networking

For this post, I’ll be focusing on location-based social networking sites; namely, Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt (BrightKite, Google Latitude, and many other services are also in the space), as a lot of attention is being given to these types of sites. Brian Solis describes location-based social networking as “a universe where physical and online activity merge to improve experiences and relationships between people and also between people and businesses, services, and locales.” Simply by using these sites, businesses are already building relationships with potential candidates and strengthening relationships with employees — and there’s a lot of potential for the future.

Keep in mind, although we’re talking about location-based sis, you may be able to use the ideas in this post for that next “big thing” in the social media world; it’s all about getting creative and thinking about how you can use the new tools you discover in the social space for recruitment, engagement and retention. Before you know it, your business may be ready (or have a sudden need) to participate in something new, and by learning about social networking sites as they emerge, you’ll be one step ahead when you do.

Location-based social networking: What is it?

Although the sites I mentioned above all work a bit differently, location-based social networking sites, or “lo-so networks,” allow users to “check in” at venues through mobile devices, to let people in their network know where they are at any given moment — or find out where their friends are staking claim.

Essentially, it’s social networking meets gaming — users interact and compete for “prestige” through badges, points, items or other awards (both virtual and real-life awards). Right now, these sites are primarily for businesses like bars, restaurants, retail stores, and tourist destinations (TV networks, magazines, and foodie guide Zagat also make up the list of top brands on Foursquare) — but that’s likely going to be changing soon, as evidenced by Foursquare’s message to us at CareerBuilder when we tried to claim our business on Foursquare: “While we’re working the kinks out of our system, we’re trying to limit foursquare specials to places where people meet, socialize and linger. Think: cafes, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, museums, theaters, etc. But stay tuned! We’ll be expanding the system soon, and you’ll be one of the first to know when we’re ready for all types of business!”

How can businesses use these sites for recruitment?

Right now, the capabilities for granular recruitment through location-based services aren’t robust — but future possibilities are vast. And in the meantime, it’s smart to get familiar with these sites, gain a presence — and get creative. Every medium you use to promote your brand and expose others to your business equals another touch point between you and the users you want to reach.

1. Loyalty programs

If you’re like me, you get to a store counter, frantically fish for that “buy 10 coffees and get one free!” paper card in your wallet, and, after a fruitless search, dejectedly get a new paper card and start the whole process over again — no free coffee obtained. Good news — many businesses have been using location-based services to test these types of loyalty programs — but instead of a little paper card, you get your stamp by checking into their place of business.

For instance, users on Foursquare can accumulate points for checking in and become Mayor of a certain location — and many businesses are now awarding the Mayor of their location (a title that changes hands all the time) with specials or certain privileges for their patronage. Similarly, users on Loopt Star is Loopt’s mobile rewards game where users compete to become “Boss,” and are awarded with special offers and free music for checking in at venues.

Other businesses are giving significant discounts to a user’s order when they check in for the very first time — a great way to welcome new users and say “Thanks for your business.” Still, most businesses on Foursquare aren’t offering specials (only around 3 percent are) — so the potential for your business to get in the space and make yourself stand out is huge.

2. Contests and Scavenger Hunts

Contests are a great way to promote user engagement. Some companies are doing raffles, in which every user who checks in gets entered to win a prize. Other businesses are creating scavenger hunts for users — like SPIN magazine and SXSW’s recent team up for a musical hunt.

Something similar could be done as a team-building event for employees — not only are scavenger hunts a fun event, but employees can participate in a little friendly competition and get to know co-workers they may not come into contact with on a daily basis. Games like this allow employees to come together as teams or interact with customers in a new fashion. They also have a lot of potential for increasing employee engagement and recognizing employee achievements (and, ahem, recognition is one of the top things employees said they wanted in CareerBuilder’s Mid-Year Job Forecast).

Geotoko is a site that just launched for mobile-based contests and sweepstakes that supports multiple location-based services. So, if you’re a business running a contest, you can maximize your reach by opening it up to Gowalla obsessives and Foursquare devotees all at once.

Another advantage of contests? Competition promotes teamwork among co-workers, and are a great supplement to other things you’re doing to onboard new employees and help them get to know the veteran employees.

3.Listening, observing and communicating

Foursquare recently introduced analytics tools — which allow businesses to monitor activity and adjust specials or engagement accordingly (like the P.C.C. Natural Markets, who used the tools to find out a lot of their Foursquare visitors were coming in for a specific type of donut). Foursquare is also currently testing Staff pages, which will allow employees to interact directly with customers.These pages have major potential for businesses to promote their company culture, let their employees’ personalities shine, and put a personal spin on their “business” face.

Many companies are getting creative and finding ways to communicate with their users to increase traffic to their business and enrich their relationships with users and the user experience itself. Rev. Dave Davis, executive pastor of Glen Ellyn, Ill.’s Parkview Community Church, says if a person checks into the church on Foursquare, they are greeted by a message welcoming them to the church. He adds that by reaching out to the younger generation in particular, speaking their language, and trying to reach them at their spot, they are more likely to visit your spot. (And he seems to be on to something — according to recent Forrester research, nearly 70 percent of location-based service users are 19-35 years old, and 70 percent have college degrees or higher.)

Imagine what businesses could do if they were able to identify candidates specifically and reach out to them? Even at this point, though you don’t necessarily know which users, if any, are interested in a job with your company, location-based sites are a great way to start building relationships and listening to what users want. For instance, when people check into your venue, they can give feedback or leave a “tip” about it for others to see when they check in. This is a great way for you to find out what people do and don’t like about your brand and make adjustments quickly when needed. Taking this even further, some businesses see who’s checking into their business on a location-based service and then follow up with a personal message on Twitter — taking one touch point and expanding that relationship to another medium.

Quick Tip: Aside from finding a user’s Twitter handle on his or her Foursquare profile, you can search for your business name and Foursquare check-ins on Twitter to find out who’s checking into your business on Twitter by going to search.twitter.com and typing in “at Company Name” 4sq.

4. Search engines and Foursquare

Foursquare is now reportedly in talks with major search engines, which could change the game for businesses and recruitment, as businesses would be able to gain presence on search engines through more people “checking in” and causing their business to trend in search. What implications could this have? If a business attracts more Foursquare users and conversation around that business increases, more search engine users will see that business’s name — and the buzz around it — online while searching. This would help businesses build a stronger employment brand, expose it to a larger audience of candidates (some of whom may not have been aware of the business — or even of Foursquare — before), and get more people applying to jobs there. The addition to search engines would eliminate the need for people to be part of Foursquare to see a business’s activity on the site — meaning larger reach. At the same time, giving a site like Foursquare exposure on search engine results would increase their user base: A win-win.

How much of an impact would this move have? That remains to be seen — and as I see it, significant potential lies in the staff experience of a business being displayed in search results. How much information about the business would be given in results? Would users see comments made via “tips”? Would businesses have an option to show “staff” check-ins with commentary in results? Would there be filtering options? If so, candidates could see which businesses had the most positive staff comments and experiences, as well as how active the employee community was for that business. What speaks better to a strong employment brand than happy and engaged employees?

5. Employee Orientation/Onboarding

In “4 ways Foursquare can improve your workplace,” Sharlyn Lauby talks about the potential of using Foursquare for employee orientation, as Harvard and other schools are already testing out. College and universities are using Foursquare to orient new employees and get them acclimated to surrounding hot spots — so why shouldn’t workplaces try it too to help employees learn their way around the office or surrounding area? Workplaces with big campuses could orient new employees to the campus and surrounding area with an orientation “game”; employees could receive points for visiting places like the gym, cafeteria, and library, and check off various venues to complete their orientation.

Any type of business could get new employees acclimated by leaving “tips” on Foursquare or other location-based sites for hot spots to eat or grab a coffee near work, getting employees familiar with the area (and helping local merchants in the process). This could also enhance the candidate experience; those who use location-based social networking sites may not only see you as active on these sites and learn a bit about your company, but could also see you leaving tips or recommendations of other places to visit in the area. This could in turn help to make your business’s location more attractive to potential candidates (it could be that one factor that makes someone want to commute a bit farther to work for you).

6. Event Marketing

Event marketers are using location-based sites to to drive participation in their events and create lasting word-of-mouth buzz about their business; Cynthia Rowley launched a new bridesmaid collection with the help of Foursquare and gave attendees at the launch unveiling a gift when they checked in. The restaurant AJ Bombers created huge buzz and the restaurant’s biggest sales days ever by creating an “I’m on a boat!” badge and having users check into a “boat” location for a restaurant event he threw. Difficult? No, it just took a couple of days of planning, a bit of creative thinking and a willingness to experiment.

Chris Bruzzo of Starbucks says in a recent New York Times article that the company hopes to use Foursquare for things like invitations to special events, photo sharing (which some location-based sites currently support), and online reputation scores.

What kinds of events could you use location-based services to promote? One possibility may be to encourage users to check-in at your booth at a job fair, for instance. This could also be a way to quickly see who visited you, and even follow up with a short thank-you message or targeted communication.

Guidelines to keep in mind

Make sure your business is listed on each network by making an initial “check in” to your business, even if you’re not yet able to “claim” your venue (this way, others can still find and check into your venue).
Different sites have different options for customization — customize and brand yourself as much as you can depending on that site’s capabilities. For instance, you can create a banner ad on Loopt — giving you significant potential to brand your business, get your message across to Loopt users, and even insert unique messages like job opportunities or upcoming events. And on Foursquare, you can create to-do lists of places for users to explore in your area.
Make sure employees understand your social media guidelines, are aware of your social media efforts, and know how to use the tools and successfully interact with users.
Determine your goals with this, just like any emerging social media tool. Do you have the resources and the time? What is your purpose?
As Jonathan Carroll of Gowalla advises, don’t leave fake reviews or tips, don’t put up poorly designed ads, and don’t forget to monitor activity. “Chances are if someone has a gripe or praise with their check-in, it’s a real-time thing: The patron is probably still there… so the business has a chance to make the experience even better.” Good point.
Get leaders involved so they understand the platform and can appreciate the application from a communication as well as a “bottom line” perspective.
These services may be virtual, but many say the key to success is providing users with real-world value. Think about what kind of value you can bring to customers, potential candidates, and your employees.
Other advantages to participating in location-based social networking sites

Increase your brand exposure and raise awareness of your business (Note: Many user check-ins are also posted on Facebook and Twitter, not just the location-based service itself, so you’re automatically gaining exposure to your users’ entire networks.)
Show potential candidates you’re savvy and interested in engaging with them.
Give potential candidates the opportunity to notice and learn about your company.
Connect with local candidates; users are using these sites to check in at venues in the area where they live.
One more touch point to reach both potential candidates and your own employees.
Potential to increase loyalty by customers/users — and recognize that loyalty with incentives.
Communicating with consumers at point of entry, service, or sale can be very valuable.
See for yourself what your customers and potential candidates are doing.
Strengthen your brand. We know that people now are much more likely to research products and services on their own, learn from their own observations, and listen to the feedback and opinions of peers rather than experts.Location-based sites are a great example of this in action.
Empower your employees while enriching user experience. As Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology for the Brooklyn Museum, says, they used Foursquare to create a multi-faceted experience for museum goers. One of the prongs of their three-faceted campaign involved asking their staff for their opinion on the best stuff in the neighborhood, and then leaving “tips” at these venues for Foursquare users to find. It’s a great way to engage your employees, who enjoy having some input into the experience — and the users they come into contact with may include customers, potential candidates, and even other employees. Get them involved as much as possible.
What critics are saying

Ad Age points out recently released Forrester research on location-based startups that says these applications are still too small for major marketers, as only 4 percent of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. In addition, 84 percent of respondents to the survey say they are not familiar with these apps at all. However, sites like Foursquare are adding around 100,000 users every week, and some say now is the time to make those early adapters your brand ambassadors. One commenter even argues that “early adoption by marketers will increase the quality of venue content and number of available offers, driving mainstream consumer adoption.”

As Yan-David Erlich points out in a recent Mashable post, “Ultimately, the location-based social networks that will thrive in the long-term are the ones that design their user experiences around users’ real motivations. The checkin, as a stand-alone act, is fundamentally empty. It begs to be put into context.” What that context plays out to be, exactly, remains to be seen. And a lot of what happens will likely be a result of businesses like yours experimenting in the space — and making your voice heard.

The bottom line

While many people claim to be “social media evangelists, experts, or (insert superior-sounding word here), the truth is, there’s a lot about social media that we’re all still kind of figuring out. As Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research states in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “The reality is the space is still very much a Wild West.”

It’s smart to experiment with these sites now while the user base is still relatively small (compared to sites like Twitter and Facebook), and see what sticks, knowing that the returns at this point may not be huge.

It’s important to remember that these tools often serve to complement what we’re already doing. Depending on your particular business, you may just be considering now to get involved in any kind of social media, or you may be on the cutting edge of new applications. Either way, the beauty is that you can find what fits for you, and make the most of it. Reach out to new (virtual) faces. One of those virtual faces just may become your next star employee.

Is your business getting involved with these emerging sites — and if so, how?

• Mobile is NOT a technology but a channel.
• Mobile is about personal one 2 one ENGAGEMENT.
• Mobile is about PUSH and PULL communications
• Mobile is about REAL TIME communications
• Mobile is engagement on the MOVE.

HR and Recruiting are about or should be about:

• Channels and community.
• Personal Engagement
• KIT messaging

• Internal Comms – make the intranet site an app.
• Onboarding – KIT real-time with your prospective new employees.
• Mobile Time sheets for contract staff.
• Employer Branding – no not the “recruiting element” but engaging with employees – getting real-time feedback on the “pulse” of the business.
• For Recruitment – mobile is the missing link between social media and recruitment but it is also a great database push communication tool.

Some key statistics

• Mobile will over take the desk top as the no one way we access the internet.
• It took two years to sell a million iPods, it took 90 days for the iPhone and 28 days for the iPad.
• One third of all mobile traffic is from an iPhone.

• 96% of Candidates with an iPhone use the mobile to access the internet every day.
• 100% have downloaded apps.
• 81% use the AppStore or equivalent as the main search for apps.
• 4% of candidates download apps from website links and 4% based on word of mouth.

Mobile will be huge BUT don’t please get caught up with the hype, it is not some panacea that will solve your recruiting problems but it will become part of your media armoury….and finally it is NOT a technology BUT a channel.

Next week I’ll look at what can you do with a mobile app.

LinkUp’s iPad website says the app has the following features:

For those not familiar with LinkUp, the site provides a search platform for jobs posted on company’s career pages, that may not neccessarily available on the big, generalist job boards.

While chatting with them, I found out that in March the company launched an iPhone app for their popular ATS product.  This is a remarkable accomplishment as it marks the first fully functional ATS to ever be a real, viable solution on a mobile device.  The platform itself is built for such innovation.  The Jobscience ATS is a SalesForce.com SaaS type of service.  Find out more by watching this video or visit the Jobscience Blog.

Facebook isn’t the only place you can reach Hispanics though.  There are a handful of spanish-language and Hispanic-centric social media sites like MiGente.com, MySpace Latino, or QuePasa.com (http://www.hispaniconlinemarketing.com/2009/04/reaching-spanish-preferring-hispanics-on-facebook/).

Hispanics Are Really More Social

By: Lee Vann (source – http://www.capturagroup.com/)

As a follow up to my previous post, I wanted share the highlights of my recent presentation, Are Hispanics Really More Social? and also some great insights that I picked up at this week’s Hispanic PR and social media conference in Dallas, Texas.

I chose a rhetorical question for the title of the presentation because most of us know that being social is hardwired into Hispanic culture. Being at the conference with a couple hundred Hispanics really brought this point to life. The atmosphere was friendly, fun and-well-social.

In addition to being highly social, Hispanics consume a ton of media. I came across statistics that indicate that Hispanics teens spend 13 hours per day with media, more than any other ethnic group.

I then took a look at technology usage and showed that Hispanics are leapfrogging to the latest and greatest technologies, including mobile. What’s more, Hispanics have an extremely positive view of the technology and once they get their hands on it, the use it and love it. Here are some key facts:

84% of Hispanics have a broadband connection vs. 79% of Whites
36% of Hispanics view the Internet as tool for building a better life vs. 30% of general market
68% of Hispanics are wireless Internet users vs. 54% of Whites
81% of Hispanics text vs. 62% of Whites

Hispanic social media, the perfect storm

When you combine the highly social Hispanic culture with strong technology usage, you get a perfect storm. I argued that social media is the