The social web allows you to participate in conversations about your brand, listen to customers, and build brand loyalty.  Far past its infancy, social media strategy should now be a significant component in your overall marketing and communications plan.  Some industry pundits have gone so far as to say that marketers who participate in social media today will be successful tomorrow, and those that don’t… well, they won’t.

Here are 10 easy social media rules to follow:

1.  Be relevant and offer value

When engaging in social media conversations and environments, the relevancy of your message and brand is important. You will want to make sure that your communication is targeted to your audience. Relevancy will play a large role in return visits to your social media platform.

Whether you are engaging customers through mass social media channels, or a custom community, a positive member experience should be your first goal.  Rather than simply offering your customers the opportunity to connect with you, provide them with opportunities to connect with each other to learn, network, share and offer advice. Your members will also appreciate product sneak previews, usage best practices, industry news, and access to other relevant information.

2. Be conversational

Throw out the corporate/marketing speak guidebook when contributing to social media. Your tone should be casual, conversational, authentic, personable, and friendly.  A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group social media study found that successful social media marketers have a conversational style as opposed to “the approach of traditional communications and early corporate blog experimentation , which emphasizes messaging and talking points.”

3. Be present

Being present is one of largest challenges for organizations. Social media is a strategy that should be proactively managed- and by more than just one or two people in an organization.  A study by Deloitte found that 30% of online communities have just part-time employees in charge and most have just a single person managing the entire strategy.  Mass social media environments and custom communities will grow exponentially, but they do need monitoring and a team in place to do some heavy lifting during their first months.    Appointing a community manager is a great way to ensure that your strategy receives the attention it needs.  Working with your custom community solution provider is a great solution if you are unable to increase staffing resources. Typically your partner can provide community management tools such as monitoring software and dedicated people resources. 

4. Be Evangelists

A thriving social media strategy usually has an Evangelist at its core. This person, or team of people, is highly visible amongst the company’s employees, customers and prospective customers. They are blogging, tweeting, posting discussion topics, responding to messages, and in some cases even speaking and sharing best practices with their peers. Become an Evangelist for your brand.

5. Be focused

One of the mistakes businesses often make is to try to be everywhere at once.  Choose your social platforms much like you would your traditional media. Benchmark the environments audience demographics, usability, and your competitor presence.  The goal of social media is to engage your customers and prospective customers, not to reach out to as many people as possible. Focus on quality over quantity with regard to the number of environments you engage with. Choose three or four relevant platforms that include both mass social media as well as targeted/community focused social media.

6. Think conversation, not advertising

Social media is a conversation. It changes the traditional thinking about brands and marketing from a story to a dialogue.  Traditional ad messages won’t be effective on social platforms. Instead, customer engagement will occur when the interaction is fluid, informal and mutually beneficial.

7. Build an advocate network

One of the greatest benefits of social media is that it allows companies to build an advocate network.  Identifying brand ambassadors or advocates within your communities will promote your brand and drive traffic to your social media platforms. A tip here, your employees can be your best ambassadors.

8. Initiate, don’t dominate

During the beginning stages of your social media strategy and communities, you and your teams will need to initiate conversation to encourage participation. Once the site takes off, you will find that your community members and fans will play a very active role.  The best strategy for the marketing organization is one of participation, not dominance. Let the discussion occur, but don’t try to take it over. So at the beginning it may be 80-90% you, but once the platform matures it will be 80-90% them.

9. Integrate

Social media is certainly not a magic bullet, nor does it exist in a vacuum.  The best approach to social media is full integration with your traditional marketing plan.  Use traditional media to drive traffic into your social media.  If no specific social media budget exists, resources can and should be taken from traditional media. In fact, Forrester research recently reported that although ad budgets are expected to shrink, social media marketing is expected to balloon to $3.1B from $716M in 2014 and grow at the highest compound annual rate.  Forrester also reported that owned social media assets (blogs, community sites, etc.) are currently the only emerging media gaining traction today.

10. Measure

The last rule is measure. Measuring for social media is different than measuring for traditional web media.  Again, your goal here is not maximum members, fans, clicks, etc. Your goal should be deeper customer engagement and loyalty as well as increased revenue.  Your strategy should include benchmarks that measure key outcomes as well as a plan for ongoing customer feedback.

The social media landscape is rapidly growing and evolving. Conversations about your brand are occurring in real time.  Marketers who participate in the conversation and foster communities for customer engagement realize greater revenue potential and stronger marketing ROI. Have fun and good luck with your social media strategy!

Now is the time to invest resources, retool, and restructure so that your organization is providing and maintaining a positive, memorable, and engaging employment brand experience for current employees, tomorrow’s employees, and future employees.

Employment brands are so much more than a tagline, a theme statement, and some pictures and graphics.  An employment brand is largely influenced by perception the candidate or employee has of your organization, either through interactions with your company representatives (i.e., employees, leadership, recruiters), media/press/news (either social or traditional), or other encounters with your organization.  The way candidates are treated today should be no different than how they are treated in more competitive labor markets. People are people, and good people will always be harder to recruit.

Your organization may have spent considerable time and resources uncovering your employment value proposition and marketing your employment brand, only to have your employment brand experiences tarnish your positive message.  This article is written with the candidate in mind and from a candidate’s perspective, which is so often forgotten with all of our technology and seemingly endless piles of resumes.  So what can you do to ensure your candidate experience is a positive one?

Make sure all communication is on brand

Everything from your web site, to your job postings, to your follow up material and Facebook presence should reflect your employment brand. Enough said. For more on this and training employment brand ambassadors inside your organization see my previous post “Employment Brand Integration”.

Improve application process

If your company is posting jobs to the major job boards or even niche sites, drive all traffic back to your career site and your own application process or ATS. Candidates are very leery of sharing their resume on mass resume boards. Job seekers want to connect directly with employers, not post their resumes on sites for the world to see (and hopefully not their current employer, credit card scammers, or identity thieves).  If your application process doesn’t allow for a simple upload of resume (and requires pages of custom fields to be filled in) I would reconsider it.

Candidate responsiveness

This is an important one- respond to people who apply for your jobs. Thank them. If you can’t respond to everyone (and in larger companies, you couldn’t possibly do this) set up an auto response.  Once your candidate uploads their resume (AKA their life story proofread 3 times, personal information including address and phone numbers, and carefully crafted cover letter with special detail pertinent to your organization) they are left to wait and hope.  If you (or your ATS) don’t respond to them letting them know their resume has been received, the candidate is left to wonder if you ever received it at all.

This becomes increasingly important if you have shown any interest in the candidate (phone screen, in-person interview, web assessments, you recruited them, etc.). Keep the candidate informed of the next steps in the process. If the hiring manager is going to take 3 weeks to set up a meeting, let them know. And by all means if they are out of the running tell them as soon as possible. Let people move on.

Two-way communication

In an interview, especially the early phone screens, don’t assume you are the only one with questions. Allowing the candidate to ask questions early in the process gives them a voice and allows them to make intelligent decisions on whether or not pursuing the interview would be a waste of either party’s time.  Schedule enough time on that initial interview for a two-way conversation.

Another note on this, emailing the candidate to set up a time to talk saves you both time in playing phone tag. It also alleviates the candidate from feeling taken off-guard and gives them some time to visit your website and re-familiarize themselves with your company (particularly if weeks have passed since you received their resume). If they have applied to several companies (which many have), this saves them the embarrassment, and you the frustration, of asking “Who are you with again?”  It also ensures that they are able to talk and not at their kid’s softball game, in the garden, or in a public place in their office.

Weird interview questions

I understand each company has its own methodology of interviewing, assessing, and sizing up candidates. Behavioral interviewing is very common and effective. If your organization is one of those that ask weird questions, rethink the validity of that approach. To a candidate it comes off as whacky, irrelevant and sometimes insulting.  Some questions are crafted to determine the candidate’s ability to think on their feet, or handle stress, or even to catch a glimpse of personality.  Some of the odder questions I have heard of include:

• If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you?
• If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?
• If you could have dinner with anyone from history, who would it be, and why?
• If you could compare yourself with any animal, which would it be and why?
• If you were a car, what kind would you be?
• In the news story about your life, what would the headline say?
• How do you organize your closet?
• What’s the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up?
• Do you like pineapples? What do they mean to you?
• If you were a breakfast cereal what would you be and why?

Know your web brand

Surprise! People are talking about you online and you don’t even know about it. These conversations are strong influencers for both employees and candidates. A person considering your company as an employer will most likely Google “working at (your company name)”, or some iteration of this.  What they will find will craft their perception of you as an employer.  Let’s look at several ways your brand is influenced online:

1. Your own career site (hopefully this is the strongest voice with testimonials and real employees talking about their jobs).
2. Forum and job rating sites like indeed.com, glassdoor.com and jobvent.com foster conversations about what it is like to work at your company. Your employees tell it like it is- good or bad.
3. Social networks like Facebook are forums for conversation. Your fan page is a great place to promote your brand and participate in the conversation. Unbeknownst to you, people may be creating groups about your company- either positive or negative.
4. LinkedIn and Twitter are great resource for both candidates and employers. Before an interview, a savvy candidate will most likely check your LinkedIn profile and seek out your Twitter page and those of your company’s leadership. They are making judgments about you and your company based on the content (or lack thereof).

In-person experience/the interview

Should the candidate make it to the in-person interview and office experience, their encounters here will have a strong impact on their perception of your company as an employer.  Your firm should treat that candidate as if they were your best client. Appearances, demeanor, promptness, courtesy, professionalism, and friendliness are all important here.

If your employment brand experience is not reflective of your employment brand communication, or vice versa, now is the time to take a close look at the experience your firm is creating for candidates.  Aligning these two key areas is key to ensure candidate attraction and employee engagement success today and into the future.

Branding your organization as “a great place to work” has become mandatory for any strategic staffing organization.  Identifying employment brand attributes, brand opportunities, brand barriers and the unique employment value proposition typically requires time, resources and investment. Employment brands are also a highly visible initiative, often drawing feedback and attention from executives and the C-suite. Once you have gone through the research, strategy meetings, brand development and approval process, you may be left wondering, “Now what?”

The next step is to extend and integrate your employment brand message strategically and holistically. Whether you are working with internal resources or your employment branding agency partner, the following brand integration strategies will help you achieve a positive outcome:

1. Employment Brand Ambassador Training
When you launch a new employment brand, it’s essential to train and communicate with key stakeholders on your new messaging. Unless you work at a very small company, you’ll find it nearly impossible to train all employees. But if you identify specific employment brand ambassadors across the organization, you can build a “train the trainer” type of program. Typical employment brand ambassadors include recruiters and recruiting leaders, key executives, key hiring managers and representatives from your internal communications/marketing department.

During the employment brand ambassador training, you will want to convey the definition of an employment brand, the reasons why branding for employment is important, and the process you followed for creating your organization’s employment brand so that all participants have a 360-degree understanding of the strategy. You’ll have the opportunity to unveil your new employment brand and establish the role each participant plays in carrying out the brand. You’ll also be able to share the brand themes, positioning statement, attributes and the visual concept that will represent your employment brand.

2. Employment Brand Guidelines
Creating an employment brand usage guide—and reviewing it with your brand ambassadors—is crucial to ensuring that everyone markets your employment brand as intended. Usage guides include approved color palates, fonts, photos, images, etc. If your recruiting team is decentralized and sources through media independently, you’ll also need to include guidelines for print and online media.

3. Recruiter’s Tool Kit
The recruiter’s tool kit encompasses all of the tools your recruiting team will need to engage candidates. This may include display exhibits, e-communication, direct mail, brochures and collateral, video, giveaways and flyers.  By conducting a recruiter’s roundtable and identifying a priority list, you can review your current materials and determine which are most used/useful. Begin by updating the most critical pieces, and then create a phased in project plan. As you continue to build out your tool kit, be sure to consider target audience, shelf life and potential impact. If your budget is tight, it’s best to focus on interactive and Web-based tools that can be inexpensively altered and do not require printing expenses.

4. Corporate Career Site
The corporate career site is, arguably, the most important tool for employment brand integration. A successful career site weaves together the employment brand messaging, imagery, tone and positioning as early as possible in the brand integration process. Sites such as JohnDeere.jobs and SUPERVALU.jobs are great examples of how the employment brand messaging fuels the overall career site. Key considerations for brand integration on the career site include target audience (campus vs. mid-career), job family branding, employee testimonials and the overall candidate experience.

5. Onboarding
Successful onboarding communication for new hires reinforces the recruitment message and employment brand they received as candidates and during the hiring process. You’ll be able to integrate your employment brand messaging through various touch points for new hires, including the welcome website, offer packet, new hire collateral, new hire presentations/orientation and recruiter emails.

6. Employee Communication
Another effective way of reinforcing the recruitment message is to integrate the employment brand throughout the employee’s entire talent lifecycle. While the messaging may evolve slightly, depending on the communication, the employment brand itself will remain the same. By effectively communicating your employment brand to your employees, you’ll positively impact retention, engagement, employee referrals and overall brand acceptance. Ideally, your employees will fully accept your brand and be extensions of the brand itself, living your message every day.  Other useful venues for integrating the employment brand themes and building awareness and pride include internal message campaigns, the intranet and employee newsletters.

7. Media
Today’s world of media fragmentation is a challenge for brand marketers. Candidates and consumers come into contact with messages through multiple media sources every day. Maintaining brand integrity despite media fragmentation and the transparency it creates is challenging, but it can be done. By providing recruiters and media partners with approved media branding for specific executions—online job templates, text-only postings, banners and rich media, print media, video and podcasts, text messages, email templates, search and social media promotions, etc.—you’ll be able to evolve the brand to fit any target audience.

With the help of this brand integration plan, you’ll get off to a great start marketing your employment brand message. The most important rule to remember is this: your brand is only as strong as your marketing strategy. Take every opportunity to reinforce your brand message with your potential candidates.