online marketing

I still believe that nothing has changed with the advent of social media. People are people with their needs and desires, pet peeves and moods. However, communication tools and techniques have changed, especially if you're reaching out to youth. Social media has brought in a set of new techniques and tools that affects many of the HR functions including recruitment. As of May 24, 2010 there is 44,240 users under the age of 16 within 50 miles of Calgary on Facebook alone.

So how do you use new communication tools and techniques to connect with the audience? Below is a list of recommendations designed to help an HR professional get on board with social media.

Know your G.A.P's (Goals, Audience, Product)

Your organization is a product. Your aim is to communicate your benefits to the right audience using the right tools. GAP here stands for Goals, Audience and Product. Knowing these three variables will help along the way.

Be where they are

In addition to asking people to visit your site for job postings, engage with your audience on their turf. Creating a Facebook page and regularly posting interesting links and articles will simplify your engagement.

Stop broadcasting, it doesn't work.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that they want your organization. They now have options. We all have options. And we learned to cover our ears to block advertising. Instead, listen, identify the need, and engage to fulfill the need.

Engage with potential candidates before they are needed

Instead of reacting to the position needs, start being proactive. Get into the conversations before the need arises.

Listen first, listen continuously

Listening is more important than speaking. Use the following listening tools to monitor candidates, and identify opportunities.

• Social Mention. A free social media monitoring tool. Much like Google but focusing on the buzz from social media sites.
• Google Blog Search. One of Google's search engine products focusing on searching through the blog universe. It can help you find blog content by your potential job candidates.
• Google Reader. An RSS management tool. Helps you get all your news in one place. The tools can be configured to list almost any type of content including mainstream media, Twitter, Facebook (open pages), Linkedin, etc.
• Radian6. A state of the art platform to listen to Social Media buzz. Allows you to stop buzz trends on your brand, company, competition, etc.  A very costly alternative.

Get in on conversations, engage

Once you spot interesting content though listening activities, feel free to engage into the conversation. For example, blogs, forum discussions. You can also engage offline through organizing events at schools, career fairs, etc.

Engaging with social media can be a tricky endeavor. But starting with listening and understanding of the type of needs and problems among your audience helps simplify the process and makes it fun.

A list of references and further readings

• StatCan's HR Management Strategy 2010-2011
• Canadian Internet Project, an ongoing study of how Canadians use Internet.
• A list of new media writers, bloggers to follow
• Twitterville by Shel Israel
• Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff
• All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

Although there are events happening on local level, we don't usually get bigger marketing events with reknowned speakers and writers. There's a few organizations in Calgary that are doing great marketing events, among them are Internet Marketing Conference, Digital Alberta, Calgary CMA. I want to share one of the upcoming events by The Art of Productions.

About The Art of Marketing

Building on the success of the SOLD OUT inaugural Toronto program, this one day conference features six internationally renowned bestselling authors and leaders who will share an exciting blend of cutting edge thinking and real world experience on today’s most critical marketing issues. Don’t miss out on your chance to be a part of history and network with over 1,200 of Canada’s most influential marketers. See the event agenda for more details.

About The Speakers

Chip Heath - Strategy & Communications

Chip Heath is the Thrive Foundation of Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Made to Stick has been translated into 29 languages, the last of which was Slovakian, and it was retired from the BusinessWeek bestseller list after a 24-month run. More about the speaker.

Gary Vaynerchuk - Personal Branding in the New Media Landscape

Online marketing trailblazer Gary Vaynerchuk (VAY NER CHUK) is a 33-year-old entrepreneur whose dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him known as the “Social Media Sommelier.” A self-trained wine expert, he revolutionized the wine industry with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affectionately known as The Thunder Show), and grew his family wine business from $4 million to $60 million in five years. More about the speaker.

Sir Ken Robinson - Innovation & Creativity

Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He has worked with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government. More about the speaker.

Mitch Joel - Digital Marketing & Social Media

When Google wanted to explain online marketing to the top brands in the world, they brought Mitch Joel to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the "Rock Star of Digital Marketing" and called him, "one of North America's leading digital visionaries." In 2006 he was named one of the most influential authorities on Blog Marketing in the world. More about the speaker.

Sally Hogshead - Persuasion & Influence

Nine seconds. That’s the length of the average attention span today. Just nine seconds! People become distracted by the next product, the next ad, the next option. How can you possibly hold your customers’ interest long enough shape their opinion? How can you break through the clutter to nail your next sales call, or motivate your internal team? For that matter, how can you influence any decisions? More about the speaker.

Max Lenderman - Branding & Experiential Marketing

A pioneer in the field of experiential marketing, Max Lenderman encourages businesses to look beyond traditional communication to get customers interacting with and living their brands. More about the speaker.

Event details

• When? Monday, June 14th, 2010, 9:00AM – 4:30PM
• Where? EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts – Jack Singer Concert Hall

Find more at the event website.

I hope you get a chance to participate. I plan a surprise for you shortly, so please stay tuned. Talk soon!

I wanted to share a great TED talk about how to start a movement. In 3 minutes Derek Sivers shares insights with an awesome delivery! I hope you enjoy it.

I want to share what I learned at an event that was organized by Bruce Jensen through Calgary Web Communications Strategy Group on meetup.com. The key difference of this event was that attendees were either from communications departments inside major companies or from associations within energy sector in Calgary. The only person I knew was Doug Lacombe, who MC'd the event and did an amazing job.

The event was a mix of a panel discussion and short presentations by social media practitioners. Presenters shared their experiences of managing social media for both small and large companies. The three featured companies were: More than Mangos by Belinda de Wolde, TVI Pacific by Rhonda Bennetto and Encana by Belinda de Wolde. Here are my takeaways from this event. I hope it'll help you see how different companies deal with social media.

Social media lessons

• Simplify the way your customers connect with your brand. Connect, connect, connect. Create a separate page on the website: Connect with Us. For example, TVI Pacific page features three different ways to connect with the company.
• Social media can fix the trust issue. Transparency is the key, social media can help gain trust through making your company transparent. Engaging into conversations with your customers can help energy sector companies to regain trust.
• Always consider your audience. Explaining social technology in human terms helps a lot. Speak in the language of your audience. Blogging, tweetting and socializing on the web should be done considering the age and background of the audience you're talking to.
• Engage with your audience through conversations. Create a discussion board on Facebook page. Moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges but having a please where people can share opinions and ask questions about your company is extremely useful. TVI Pacific's practical application: every time a press release is issued, a new Facebook discussion topic is created, and Page Fans are invited to discuss the matter.
• Social media helps general awareness. Social media is not about a new opportunity to broadcast, but a new way to engage with your clients, vendors, partners, investors. Engagement with various parties is the key in distributing information through social media. Encana's practical application: Encana's helps community organizations. These organizations help Encana by linking back and talking about it in the social space.
• Ensure consistent messaging. Regardless of how many social media properties / network profiles you have, make sure the information is consistent across all of them. Ensure the information is consistent between traditional and digital space too. Create ways for your customers to connect with your company through press releases and other traditional marketing channels.
• It's worth hiring an expert. To train you or even take part in expanding your social media presence. For example, hash-tagging of messages on Twitter helps syndicate the messages through the web. This is not obvious when you first start with social media, but an expert, Doug Lacombe in this case, helped Rhonda a lot.
• Blogs are not always necessary. If you don't plan to update it at least weekly, don't start it.
• Be a champion inside your organization. Teach everyone inside your company by doing it and showing results. Dealing with social media you always have to be prepared for controversy and criticism from both inside and outside of your organization.
• Experiment. Test. Flirt. Track. Measure. And be consistent. Have been at observing, flirting stage of social media engagement. Haven't we all?

Thanks again to organizers and participants! Were you there too? Feel free to contribute in the comments section.

Link building is hugely important in promoting your website because relevant links increase authority of your site. As authority goes up, so do your search engine rankings. Not all links are created equal. Some have "nofollow" attribute, some "dofollow".

"dofollow" links are generally better because they pass Google Juice to the site they are linking too. The more Google Juice flows your way, the higher authority your site gets when it comes to search ranking. More about what Google Juice is.

"nofollow" links are still great to have but less desirable because they don't let the Google Juice flow through. Nonetheless, "nofollow" links add balance and should definitely be part of your link building strategy.

Most of the links today are "nofollow" because site owners don't want to let go of the Juice from their site. At the same time there's the whole "dofollow" movement happening... But this is a totally different post about Social Media, Sharing and Value transfer...

To conclude this post, here's a list of useful resources to find sites with "dofollow" links:

• Types of dofollow sites on Squidoo.com
• List of dofollow directories
• Categorized list of dofollow blogs at BlogsThatFollow.com
• An extensive list of dofollow resources by Courtney Tuttle
• A list of dofollow blog search engines

A few days ago I posted about one of my favourite bands - Muse - and their performance at SXSW 2010. Today I wanted to share another band I love - Mumiy Troll also featured at SXSW 2010. The band is Russian! Here's the video and below is a description given to Mumiy Troll by North American media.

Mumiy Troll (pronounced Moo-me Troll) is undoubtedly the most significant band that modern Russia has produced since the fall of the Soviet regime. They have made their mark with startling albums and live performances that are bursting with energy, combining warmth and total debauchery.

What exactly does the band sound like? Consider the term ROCKAPOPS. Contemporary Russian music is actually divided into what was before and what came after Mumiy Troll. Band founder, frontman Ilya Lagutenko, defined their music style as "rockapops" just to avoid pointless Russian media debates on the definition of what is rock and what is pop. Mumiy Troll became the leader of an entire new musical trend, copied now to greater or lesser degree by Russian wannabees and mainstream artists.

You own a site, or you work on optimizing one. You engage in link building, you run a blog, you create pages on your site. Occasionally it happens that you links are broken (both internal and external) and your visitor gets a 404 error page. A 404 error page look like this:

As you can see, getting a page like this does not enhance your relationship with a user. Any time you don't enhance a relationship, you miss out on a great relationship that may result in sales. The goal is to keep developing your relationship at every step of the way even if your links are broken. Here's a great example of good 404 error page:

As you can see, even if something went wrong, you can keep contact with your user. So make sure to review your 404 error pages and here is a couple of links that I found helpful.

• A more useful 404 by Dean Frickey
• Practical guide to 404 error pages by Yoast