corporate communication Archives - Page 7 of 14

How to Use Social Media to NOT Land a Job.

According to a New CareerBuilder Survey, the number of Employers passing on applicants due to Social Media Posts continues to rise. This year 51% of employers said they have found content that caused them to not hire a candidate, up from 43% last year and 34% in 2012. An additional 12% don’t research candidates on social media, but plan to start.

What are they finding that’s eliminating candidates from consideration?

The most common social media reasons to exclude a job candidate:

Posting provocative or inappropriate photographs or information (46%)
Posting information about them drinking or using drugs (41%)
Bad-mouthing previous company or fellow employee (36%)

The most common social media reasons to hire a candidate:

Feel for candidate’s personality – see good fit with company culture (46%)
Background information supported professional qualifications for job (45%)
Site conveyed a professional image (43)

How to Use Social Media to Land a Job.

The Society for Human Resource Management survey reports that 77% of organizations use social networks to recruit, 69% use social networks to target and recruit candidates with specific skill sets and 57% use social networks to make it easy for potential candidates to contact their organization about employment. Career coach Miriam Salpeter suggests using the strategies below to land a job via social media.

Take advantage of employer’s reaching out to you in social media:

Use every network that makes sense for you.
Be active on networks that take advantage of your best skills.
Identify your target audience, “like” and engage with them.
Visit, “like” or “follow” the companies that interest you.
Optimize profiles with keywords employers use to search for someone like you.

How to Use Personal Branding to Land a Job

“Personal branding” is a term first used by Tom Peters in a 1997 article. Your personal brand refers to how others perceive you, how they consider your knowledge and skills and the things that make you unique and different. Today the prevalence of social media makes personal branding more important than ever. With so many employers searching social profiles, you should spend some time figuring out your personal brand. Then let your personal branding strategy drive your social profiles and your social content. Brand relationship trainer Maria Elena Duron suggests starting to create your personal brand by answering the questions below.

Find your unique promise of value by considering these questions:

What does my personal brand promise to my clients and customers?
How will I consistently deliver that promise?
How will I make people remember my promise?
How can I ensure my brand promise is unique and memorable?

I am currently reading Sally Hogshead’s new book How The World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through The Science of Fascination. Sally is a former advertising copywriter who is now applying what she learned in branding products and services to branding people. Her system comes with an online assessment and ways to create an anthem of your highest distinct value expressed in 49 personality archetypes.

I discovered my personality archetype is Avant-Garde which lead to my anthem of “Delivering Enterprising Vision With Resourceful Action.” For the Spring I am incorporating these insights and resources into my classes at Johns Hopkins University. I have developed a graduate course 663.610 Personal Branding & Writing for the Web, plus added personal branding to my 661.454 Blogging & Digital Copywriting course.

Have you thought about how your social media activity affects your career? How can you use social media to find career opportunities? Have you followed a personal branding exercise and integrated it across all your social media accounts and activity?

Restoration Hardware’s annual catalog set a record with 13 sourcebooks, 3,000 pages and 17 pounds. This tree killing giant print job has created a huge backlash on social media. One article describes the catalog as sending “critics on social media into an indignant tizzy.” But how big of a problem is this really?

It is true that people are making negative comments in social media. A simple search on Twitter reveals comments calling the catalog “wasteful,” “appalling,” “reckless/unnecessary marketing” and “a risk for shoulder injuries.” My quick search reveals the comments below. There is even a Tumblr page called Deforestation Hardware that is organizing a mass return of the “unwanted mailings.” Is the backlash massive?

The negative comments on social media are only “1/10th of 1%” of those who received catalogs reports Restoration Hardware CEO Gary Friedman. The problem is these 1/10th of 1% are vocal and active on social media. Plus there has been enough to generate traditional media stories about the controversy in mainstream pubs such as Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, Huffington Post, and CBS News. When social media reaction gets picked up by big news outlets comments get a huge boost of attention that may overhype the backlash.

I found a 5:1 positive to negative sentiment rating for “Restoration Hardware Catalog” on Socialmention. In my brief Twitter search above, I also did see positive comments about the catalog. So have these negative social media comments been blown out of proportion when picked up as a “backlash” news story by the traditional press? This is especially a consideration when only 1 out of the 10 stories I read mentioned the “1/10th of 1%” statistic to put it into perspective.

How much buzz constitutes a trend worthy of a news story? Visible Measures monitors viral videos and claim that 5 million views is the earned media threshold for when news media picks up something as “viral” and that story in turn boosts attention even more. What about journalistic standards? Amanda Hess from Slate reports that Shani O. Hilton, BuzzFeed deputy editor-in-chief told her, “There are no rules. “We’re all trying to figure it out.”

Overblown or not, Huffington Post’s Robbie Vorhaus says “This could become one big PR fail.” How should Restoration Hardware react? Vorhous indicated they should publicly admit that “the mass mailing model of a group of catalogs is outdated and no longer fits with a company dedicated to customer satisfaction and sustainability.” But is this really a “controversial, wasteful campaign that fuels extensive anti-brand sentiment?” Maybe the true number of negative comments doesn’t mater. Once traditional media labels it as a blacklash, it is a backlash no matter what.

But sometimes what consumers say doesn’t always match what they do. I did find research that print catalogs are in fact a successful marketing tool. For example, online retailer Bonobos started delivering a print version of its catalog last year and says 20% of first-time website customers place orders after getting the catalog and spend 1.5 times more than those who didn’t receive it. The same research also reports 58% of online shoppers say they browse catalogs for ideas, and 31% have a retailer’s catalog with them when they make a purchase online.

We will have to wait to see if Restoration Hardware’s Social Media Catalog Backlash will hurt sales. But this year the retailer’s net income was up 217% from last year despite similar news stories in 2012 about the social media backlash over its 992 page catalog.

How many negative comments makes a backlash and how should brands react?

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