Social Media

By now we all know how important it is to have a consistent and professional presence on LinkedIn and Facebook but with the rapid growth of Pinterest, experts are saying it’s important to build your portfolio there as well.

And by experts we mean recruiters! According to a recent post on ERE, Dr. John Sullivan writes, “Many users use it to show off their work, so recruiters can use it to spot great designers.”

Considering the site’s demographics lend themselves well to “targeting women or young people as recruiting prospects,” Dr. Sullivan mentions companies are getting on board on using Pinterest for recruiting. Since it’s such a visual platform, in particular graphic designers may bode well by pinning their own work to get noticed.

Plus, recruiters may start using it more frequently to post screen grabs of job announcements. Given his advice to fellow recruiters, it seems we should all lend an ear by what they’re doing, yes?

In the piece he wrote, “Make your pictures easy to find by including the most popular keywords and hashtags. You should also include QR codes and links to your careers page or your LinkedIn profile if you want to communicate directly with interesting prospects. And don’t forget the important benefit that your brand image will likely improve because you’re using this hot app.”

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Sure, in this day and age companies have compiled social media policies as part of their employee handbooks but after hearing the latest story, maybe guidelines should be established for new employees and job candidates overall.

Here’s what went down: Khristopher J. Brooks landed a job at the News Journal in Delaware. Excited about his new role as reporter, the master’s degree student at New York University posted the press release announcing his new job to his personal Tumblr account which he soon found out was a major faux pas. Read more

On Friday, according to Journal-isms, ESPN banned employees from posting photos of themselves wearing hoodies as an act of support for Trayvon Martin, the teenager whose murder has received national media attention.

“We completely understand the strong feelings involved,” ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz originally told Journal-isms. “Our decision is in keeping with our long-standing policy for ESPN content [PDF]. There are other avenues for our people to represent issues outside of sports beyond ESPN Twitter feeds.”

On Sunday, however, ESPN reversed its ban, reports Journal-isms. ”It’s a tragic situation that has led to much thoughtful discussion throughout the company,” Krulewitz told Journal-isms via email. “As a result, in this circumstance, we have decided to allow this particular expression of human sympathy.”

Even the most comprehensive social media policies can’t account for the real world.

The “Google Test” is “type your name into Google and see what comes up.”

But what David Meerman Scott is looking for when he Googles you is not the absence of party photos. He’s looking for the presence of content.

“On the Web, you are what you publish,” he says. “For many job seekers, what pops up on Google are a few random things (like your membership in the company softball league), your LinkedIn profile, and not much else. Sometimes there is a Twitter feed but frequently it was started years earlier and has been abandoned or it’s only updated a few times a month.”

“With more senior people, I always laugh when the top content when I Google your name is the press release that your company issued a few years earlier to announce you are joining.”

If you’re a marketer, you need to be creating content, he says. CEOs are not looking for managers, “they’re looking for doers. They want marketers (even at the senior level) who are passionate about creating content on the Web.”

Meerman Scott says that his CEO friend Jon Ferrara, who is looking for a senior marketer right now, agreed that the “Google test” will eliminate most candidates from consideration.

So don’t delay. Don’t think “oh, I really should update my Twitter” – just try it.

Twitter is planning to allow marketers to “build experiences on Twitter” the same way that a brand’s Facebook page can be far more complex than a user’s Facebook page, AdAge reports.

The new features will include e-commerce, contests and sweepstakes. No date has yet been set for when they’ll go live, but Twitter’s telling clients sometime this year.

That’s good, because the only features that currently differentiate a Twitter brand page from a regular user page are a large, customizeable header and the ability to make a certain tweet “sticky” at the top of the page.

Ad Age points out that the e-commerce feature is particularly interesting, because “Twitter co-founder and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey is also CEO of mobile-payments company Square.”

Some companies have already begun experimenting with commerce on the site: American Express is sending offers to Twitter users who perform certain actions, like using a particular hashtag.

Brand pages are available on Twitter only to advertisers.

Donna Sweidan, career coach and founder of CareerFolk.com, is one of the speakers at Mediabistro’s upcoming Job Search Boot Camp (the early bird registration for which closes today).

We spoke with Sweidan recently about the new way to network.

MJD: What do you do?
DS: DS: I take people from soul-search to social media. As a trained therapist and a career counselor, I strongly believe that people need to understand who they are and what they have to offer before they can market themselves. If they don’t do that initial work and create that foundation it’s really hard to sell themselves. And, of course, social media has changed everything. It’s revolutionized the way we live, but also changed job search and career management.

My talk is on the resume, and I am going to talk about how the resume has changed. Today, your Google results are your resume.
Read more

Poynter has a thoughtful piece up about what happens when a journalist’s brand clashes with a newsroom’s social media policy.

Example: CNN’s Roland Martin, whose homophobic Super Bowl tweets got him a suspension; Britain’s Sky News, which recently forbade its journalists from retweeting competitors (are you serious??), and many more.

Sometimes a newsroom is right to clamp down on a journalist (like in the case of CNN’s suspension of Martin), and sometimes a newsroom’s social media policy is just crazy (i.e. Sky news)

Another example is this post from social media editor Matthew Keys, who lasted only eight months at KGO-TV, owned by Disney-ABC. He was hired, he writes, due in part to his social media savvy, yet his bosses took issue with his use of social media. “There were several behind-closed-door discussions and back-and-forth emails about my Twitter methods, the sort of language I’d use in certain tweets, the frequency at which tweets went out and whether or not it was acceptable to mention or tweet competitors….I think the bureaucracy, mixed with stagnant progression on the perception of social media at Disney-ABC, led to a decline in influence by way of my personal brand on Twitter. That was definitely disappointing, as I had hoped it would be perceived as a benefit to the company and the station, not as a disturbance….In the end, we perceived things differently, and it just didn’t work out.” He talks a lot about Klout, but we’ll overlook that as this is definitely a post worth reading.

NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik tries to strike a balance in his Tweets: he follows the same guidelines he would if he were giving a speech in public. A personality, not an ideologue.

As journalists with personal brands (and personality) are more valuable to a news organization, it’d be wise for any news organization to embrace social media and put policies in place that leave breathing room for reporters and others to express themselves. But as digital media professor Sree Sreenivasan told Poynter, it’s still true that the best way to build a personal brand is “by knocking it out of the park at work every day.”

Facebook Timeline has just gone live for brands, and Ad Age says “it’s as if dozens of little corporate museums just launched on Facebook.” Coca-Cola has posted memorabilia going back a century and a half, including a handwritten letter from a store owner praising Coke, the New York Times is posting historical front pages, and Old Spice has decided that it was created when a ship’s captain and a one-eyed leopard “accidentally mix space rocks, tank weaponry, a race-car spoiler, cool sunglasses and a vampire fang.”

Ad Age has posted a handful of its favorite uses of the new storytelling medium. Here’s another, courtesy of a commenter: the Timeline for the new show Dallas. The show is a continuation of the original ’80s drama, and so to get new viewers up to speed, the page features one of the old show’s characters telling “the truth about the Ewing family”–aka the plot of the original series, complete with stills and movie clips.

While this is certainly a powerful new tool for brands, it’s important to use caution. We note that Coke has plenty of information about “New Coke” (perhaps its biggest failure as a company), which is admirable, but will BP promote information related to Deepwater Horizon?

You read that right. The U.S. Army is on Pinterest. Its pinboards feature things like patriotic food, flag-covered home decor, and so on, but also pictures of historical uniforms, photos of basic training, and more.

The Atlantic called the Army’s social media strategy “quite impressive.”

“The Army knows what’s up content wise, in a PR sort of way, at least. Most of the stuff is more like promotional material than anything else, the badass Army image, like this wounded soldier video or these heroic soldier photos on Flickr….The understanding goes deeper than “what to post.” The Army also gets Internet pace, updating these profiles on just the right type of regular basis, tweeting a couple of times every hour, or Facebooking a handful of times a day. None of the profiles go dormant for too long. Our own social media editor, Jared Keller, tells us that this type of timing is strategic, as to neither bombard or disappoint followers. To maintain all of these unique platforms with the right kind of content as well as the Army does must take … an army.”

The Army even gave a presentation on Pinterest (Slideshare below), in which it notes that “Currently, only a handful of military organizations are using Pinterest.”

Well, yeah. But this is a great example of a bureaucratic (and male-heavy) organization using a site like Pinterest for marketing.