As part of this presentation, I’ve put together a brief on social media’s impact on the recruiting industry.  The purpose of this brief is to describe five common social media approaches and to illustrate how staffing companies are using these leading-edge tools to expand their business.

Blogs

Editorial-styled website, frequently updated.  Microblogs are for shorter communications.

Examples: WordPress, Twitter

Recommended application for staffing executives: Communicate information about your thought leadership, customer relationships or the way you do business. Easy applications: hot jobs on Twitter to your followers.

Industry Best Practices: Manpower (global staffing company), Veredus (IT staffing firm with 4 offices)

Social Networks

An online community of people with similar interests

Example: LinkedIn, Facebook

Recommended application for staffing executives: Facilitate discussion and brand awareness through groups and profiles. Set up company pages and engage with your customers. Join or start up groups that connect your company with customers.

Industry Best Practices: The BOSS Group ($23 million creative staffing firm), Eliassen Group (~$100 million IT and clinical staffing company)

Media Sharing

Facilitates the sharing of a variety of media, especially photos and videos

Examples: YouTube, Flickr

Recommended application for staffing executives: Shoot videos and photos featuring your value proposition and post them to media sharing sites for increased visibility. Recruiters can give advice to jobseekers; temporary workers can give testimonials; hiring managers can provide case studies and/or testimonials.

Industry Best Practice: Denham Resources (professional staffing firm in Fresno)

Reviews

Online reviews that allow hiring managers, decision makers, candidates and temporary employees to review staffing companies and influence potential users

Example: Yelp

Recommended application for staffing executives: Find out what buyers and contract or temporary workers are saying about your company, and respond with solutions as needed.  A rapidly growing population follows and reads online reviews, so it’s important to be aware of what your audiences are saying about you.

Industry Best Practice: The Larko Group (office staffing firm in Chicago)

User Generated Content (UGC)

Publicly available articles, video and other media that are produced solely by users of a product or service

Examples: Q&A data bases, video, blogging, podcasting and wikis

Recommended application for staffing executives: Engage your customers, contract employees and temporaries in the operations of your business.

Industry Best Practice: Express (multinational staffing firm) 

That’s a pretty good theme for these days. There’s no absence of difficulty in just about every market. But companies can grow — and prosper. Especially if they position their businesses and package their messages in a compelling way.

In a recent column I wrote on business resilience, I described three companies that have uniquely positioned themselves in the healthcare market. (I’m speaking on business growth at a healthcare summit in September.)  And each of those companies have had some pretty spectacular results.

In any economy, positioning is critical to success. In the world we live in today, it may be life-or-death for some companies.

Q Analysts specializes in software quality assurance and testing, business intelligence, data warehousing and professional services. They got their start in 2003 and since 2004, the privately-held company has a five-year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 104.4%. 2008 sales were $17.4 million. 2009 sales were up 56% in Q1.

The company serves Fortune® 500 and emerging growth companies. They’ve got several high-quality hooks, including a unique operating model that combines focused practice areas with its Follow-the-Sun Recruiting Model.  And they’re a certified minority business enterprise — a designation that will open more doors as time goes on.

Ross Fernandes, who founded the firm, put it on a smart, vertical growth plan. They executed well in their core service areas of QA and testing and then expended smartly into other tech services like business intelligence and data warehousing.

And Staffing Industry Analysts just named them the fastest growing company in the industry. Here’s the press release that went out today.

Or a campaign for that matter.

Take Roger Federer’s win at Wimbledon earlier this month.  The moment NBC broke from coverage into some spots, Nike and NetJets were teed up with timely commercials about Federer’s achievements. The NetJets spot is repurposed from his win at the French. But a Nike spot with Tiger, Jordan and friends is just deadly and funny as hell.

Regardless of the quality of the creative, the media buyers knocked it out of the park with the placement. On the same broadcast is very good. But right after the win? Very cool. And very effective. Recall had to be just huge.

And McEnroe just kills in the Nike spot.

• Comcast has been monitoring social media sites for a while. But one team, led by Frank Eliason, has made a real difference for the company by proactively working Twitter and other sites to help customers solve their problems. As a result of these actions as well as the resulting publicity, Comcast’s customer satisfaction scores jumped 9% in Q1 – the largest gain in cable
• Dell generated >$1 million in sales from a holiday promotion aimed only at its Twitter followers. Today, it has more than 490k followers on the social media site
• Adobe’s “Real or Fake” game on its Facebook page generated new 6,000 new fans as well as revenues: 10% of visitors played the game. 6% of players clicked “Share”.  Most importantly, 6% clicked “Buy Now”

The biggest takeaway: engaging customers where they want to do business and rewarding them — with unique offers and solutions — for following you. And, just as important, understanding that the customer controls the conversation in social media settings. These organizations are smart enough to realize that they cannot thrust their approach upon their followers; they can communicate their messages, but they can’t control where the audience takes them.

One final thing. Marketers have been searching for ways to measure social media investments. From conversations I’ve had with folks who have been successful in this nascent field, here are the metric categories that have been used most often:

• Revenue growth/customer
• Customer satisfaction
• Referral rate
• Quality of relationships
• Search engine positioning

I’m starting to get the same feeling about social networking. Will there will a “never mind” moment soon?

In the B2B world, the initial buzz had better start turning into something more than “that’s cool” or companies will lose interest and stop investing. From my end, there are a few ways social networking will create tangible, measurable and long-term value:

• Improve win/loss ratio. To me, social networking is another nurturing tool, like telesales. It’s greatest role may be in providing sales with a warmer lead that’s already seen some of your firm’s thinking. With Twitter, for example, a recruiter could educate prospects with his or her thinking or job postings. Then when a follower sees something that’s interesting, they may reach out. Then the cycle begins.
• Shorten sales cycle. Is social media nothing more than a fishing net? It will be if there’s no end goal in mind. But, if used correctly, it can leverage the nurturing discussed above and set the stage for a shorter sales cycle. I’ve been nurturing an old friendship with an old friend — who’s now a CEO — on Facebook. She and I have known each other since the 1970s and reconnected a few months ago. Between Twitter, Facebook and this blog, I’ve set out my philosophy on business growth and how firms can get the ball rolling again. Let’s see how it plays out. I’ve recently put a nurturing strategy in place on Facebook on a pro bono project that’s about to launch. Take a look and let me know what you think.
• Reduce churn. Social networking will continually help manage customer expectations and improve customer support, leading to a reduction in turnover. Several firms do it well, including Comcast, Southwest and Yoh, my old stomping grounds.

Have any others to add? Let me know.

Last week, Springwise introduced Jump Start Social Media, a new service from Digital Brand Expressions, a SEM company. What’s unique about Jump Start is that it helps people become social networkers for $89.95 and get’s them going on Facebook or LinkedIn. The revenue model may not make them millions, but it’s a great example of how a company creates a new product by leveraging their core competency. Not many would draw a straight line to a consumer offering from SEM, but the initiative has generated juice for Digital Brand Expressions, with recent ink in The New York Times.

My favorite data point is that 75% of companies are spending less than $100k on social media. Let’s try less than $25k.

It’s quite compelling and is way better than the campaign featuring Sprint’s CEO.  But that’s besides the point.

What works best about this spot and the overall Direct Connect campaign is that it takes borrowed interest and engagement from the world of roadies and creates a reason why for the product. Brilliantly executed. Good humor. And illustrates the product benefit.

Makes me think. What if the agency decided to add another spot to the campaign and focused on marketers running the world? My view: Everything would be perfect. No one would ever complain. All ideas would be accepted as-is. Budgets would be abundant. No one would ever make a mistake. Customers would love products and services immediately. No one would TiVo ads. Integrated campaigns would be seamless. Operations folks would gladly go along with initiatives. Experiences for all involved would be flawless.

And the world would be a scary place.

The goal of this approach is not to smack around the poor performers, but to highlight firms that get it.

Sorry if my ego gets in the way of this one, but the first project I’m going to highlight is the last thing I led up before I started Scanlon.Louis. It’s Yoh’s page on Facebook. I’m not highlighting it because of my team’s efforts. I’m calling it out because it adds two compelling value propositions — market uniqueness and operational integration.

What our team focused on was building a social networking portal through Facebook. The strategy was to aggregate content from a variety of sources, including  blogs and video and add our core eCommerce tool — open consulting jobs. In essence, it’s a way to extend the recruiting relationship to a new platform and to help add new customers.

I like the final result: clean design, easy-to-find resources and a way to interact by responding to the open positions. And, it positions the firm as a unique user of social networking in the hypercompetitive staffing market.

The fan count is modest, but the ROI potential is huge. Time will tell how it plays out.