Graduates and Social Media

I’ve been mulling over how to write this post for some time now and think I have finally found a way to write it.

In my last role I was giving career advice to people who wanted to get into the marketing & advertising space. Because of the area of expertise the company had it made it more niche therefor attracting individuals that were usually more interested in the area of expertise rather than the marketing and advertising element.

I begun to notice that even though both places id last worked fundamentally did similar things there was a disconnect between these applicants and those who I’d met in my previous place.

The thing that struck me the most with the way marketing, branding and advertising campaigns having to be inclusive of a social element, these Graduates didn’t really have a grasp on social media or the digital world.

Minimum percentage were on LinkedIn or knew how to use it……
Minimum percentage were actively using twitter as a network tool …..

I didn’t get started on the other platforms with them through fear they might look at me like I was mad. However it got me wondering the Graduates that don’t want to work in the social/digital space are they really understanding how to use it for benefit, approach and understand its new found importance in any business regardless of sector and role?

I don’t think they do, i think for a percentage the area of expertise the business has is the important part first. I think we potentially at the moment imposing that social element upon them because we as HR professionals are also expected to know who to attract and retain people regardless of sector via social media.

Those HR professionals who have embrace social media and use it as a tool of attraction and interaction, I think are missing a group of graduates who we assume, maybe incorrectly expect to be ‘social media savvy’ because we believe we are.

Maybe this approach and expectation for the moment doesn’t fit all sectors and businesses in their bid to be more transparent and ‘social’ should really think if the business is ready for it, especially in terms of attraction, if your business/sector isn’t ready for it yet…..don’t do it until you are because then you will be able to do it well.

The Importance of Network

I have spent a lovely 2 days at TruLondon and had the privilege of taking part in some of the live stream chats hosted by Kelly Services, you can get to these via this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIWNDLHS3nk

The Track that really got me thinking about writing this post was our first topic the Power of the Network.

One bit of advice I give out constantly and one I think people ignore is the importance of Networking and keeping it current and active. Too many people like with twitter are passive and this does not allow for people to ‘connect’ on a deeper level.

These superficial ‘networking’ conversations people have can often be a case of I’m better than you just in a less domineering way than in a work environment, after all you want the person to like you enough to ‘connect’ with you not just know how amazing you are.

But I think it’s very rare that people automatically ‘connect’ with someone on a deeper level than; I work in this space, you work in a similar one, lets connect and make this thing called Network.

Off the back of this is made me wonder 2 things.

1)      Is it more important to have Quality over Quantity in a Network

2)      Do we refer/recommend people who are similar to ourselves?

I argued the point during the live stream that personally I don’t just follow back on twitter because I feel that if you are following me it would be nice of you to interact with me to make me follow you back. Maybe that’s the wrong attitude to have but I like having my feed filled with information and people I know and care about.

I’m not so precious about LinkedIn because my job was to grow my network with people of all levels to approach for jobs, however oddly now I am job hunting I am much more targeted in my approach on who I connect with and allow to connect back.

I think sometimes in our rush to grow our social media the connections who we bring into our networks aren’t that meaningful or actually hold any value. It’s that idea that less of a really good thing is better than lots of a bad thing.

In my network I still find regardless of the amount of connections I pull on the same people’s advice when things happen and can say that I have some solid friends off the back of my network but I wouldn’t go to everyone for everything. Maybe I view and treat my network  like a friendship network where you have ‘lots’ of friends, from uni, from home, from work but you have a core of people you pull on.

How do you end up selecting these people? Or are they just the ones we gravitate towards due to common ground or is it because we value there experience? I think it’s a mix which leads to my next point was about referrals, while we were talking about referral schemes and the difference between a recommendation and referral I wondered if we refer recommend people who are similar to us or those we aspire to be.

I often look at people I have referred or found to bring into a business and they end up being more my preferred ‘type’ of person. Granted I also look at their experience I’m not going to bring in someone who can’t do the job but on reflection I can’t help but wonder if without realising subconsciously we refer in this way.

I think really understanding our network and why we connect or refer some and not others is more complex and subconscious than maybe we are always aware.
I also think so of it is status a look at me I’m connected to some really important person and they talk to me I must be good at this…… but are you?

Bright Light Employee’s

There is a quote from a book I want to share with you.

‘He was too clever. If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.’ Sense of an ending – Julian Barnes

You hear people say this…. Ok not quite this but similar that the really clever people have no common sense.

Trust me when I say this might be true. One of my best friends is the cleverest people I know; she tried to argue me into believing we all need Pi in our lives  … not the book or the food but the mathematical kind. Yet she can’t cross the road without nearly getting run down.

Now being stupidly clever at school usually means good grades, you are taught to seek out knowledge to sound knowledgeable to learn to fill the mind with facts and in order to get by in education you have to hit those top grades, sometimes this is a natural ability people have for a certain subject, are very studious or just gifted with a higher than average IQ

These people normally head off to university get some amazing degree and leave with it in hand, but then what happens to these amazing minds when they get into the work environment.

It often becomes less about just what you know and you are measure on what you achieve, KPI’s which are often hard to measure in terms of actual achievement.

I don’t always imagine they are the top performers or the ones we call top talent.
We’ve moved the goal posts on these people which seem somewhat unfair.

I’m not saying we should give people exams but surely there is a way we can reward these people for their amazing minds not just performance.

Richard Branson is higher than average IQ, he is also dyslexic but he is an idea person, what he does is accept his mind is 3 steps ahead and surrounds himself with the people who will make those ideas happen. Sadly not all of us have the ability or drive to set up our businesses

Instead we are expected to have the ideas and the delivery of them in one package, sadly not everyone is built that way above average people’s minds do work 3 steps ahead they aren’t the finishers, they are the pushers of new great and bold ideas.

If you are a ‘bright’ light at work how do you measure that?
How do we measure our above average minded employees? 

Friday Fun

Hi All,

New year and lots of new music going around, going to aim to get this up every week to two weeks moving forward.
A few albums around at the moment one being Biffy Clyro’s.
Have to say this is one of my fav’s off the album so far

Pocket – Biffy Clyro 

Next up is Mikky Ekko, they have been on a recent song with Rhi Rhi but to be honest this is just a beautiful song.

Pull Me Down – Mikky Ekko 

Wasn’t overly blown away by Alicia Key’s new album but its grown on me, or should I say some songs have grown on me…. this being one of them

Brand New Me – Alicia Keys 

Last Friday whilst over at one of my friends her housemate came home drunk and kept singing this to us all, have to be honest made us laugh and have had it in my head all week.
Happy Friday from Cliff

We Don’t Talk Anymore – Cliff Richard 

HR, Brand & Marketing

I personally sound like a broken record at the moment when I talk about ‘brand’ and often find myself talking less conventionally about thing from a HR point of view and instead of productively dealing with candidates, I fire fighting the volume of candidates we get externally.

As most of you will know I work in HR, I have done for nearly 6 years now, always varied, always in different industries, always in different roles, maybe that’s the only pleasure of being a contractor had but along the road I have clearly had some of those industries rub off on me, or maybe the change in market and the mediums of communication has meant the importance of your companies ‘brand’ has become more important than anything else.

If I was to say I believe that the brand is more important than our actions you might want to shoot me, but the more I look at the market place, the more work/role I believe HR play in shaping what a brand looks like, and not just employer brand.

Maybe I’m a strange mix of a HR person for being so integrated and unafraid of the social media/digital space and the benefits and pit falls it can have to one person (I have been privy to both) but if it can have those on one person alone, imagine what it can have for a whole business, shying away from using it will not be of any benefit.

I think part of my desire for more companies to push brands comes from 4 years in a retailer that was in the process of changing their brand image, not just for its customers and their experience but also the way they treated, trained and incentivised their staff. I’ll put my neck on the line and say I’m proud to of been a part of it and I keep seeing changes in them and how they behave in the market and it’s only for the better.

If you look at established brands they haven’t got to where they are purely on their external behaviors  they are also some of the first to try new ways of engaging employees and learn off others. 

When businesses recreate themselves or rebrand/reposition themselves we often look at the level of resistance from the public and not the level of resistance from inside.

When it doesn’t work, and often brands do flop and ideas fail, for me there is a floor in the plan they forgot to take time to understand their staff.

HMV clearly didn’t see the loyalty the employee’s there were about to fire had for the brand they had been working for, and so hard to keep alive, will this outburst effect what/how we see HMV moving forward?

For me to create any type of whole brand (that incorporates all areas of the business) you need to tell a story. Make people feel part of it, to understand what the business does, what it’s trying to do, how it started, what its people are like. 

Personally for me brands like John Lewis do this really well not just through their adverts that always have a story to them, and are that good that they don’t have to put their brand name on the advert until the very end! Also by making your employee’s shareholders the level of service and belief they have in what they deliver and in the brand they work for increases.

Trust me I am not talking crap when I say how important it is to have people that believe in your story, see the direction and vision your business is going in. Those who disagree or resist change will only serve to poison the business you work for.

From my perspective which is to attract people to our business it’s one in the same thing, how we are positioned as a brand in the market and how much leverage that gives when approaching people, I can say I am part of how our Brand looks when going to external people, I am not just HR, I am our Brand, have those of us in HR become our Employer/Employees Brand Marketers?  

Lost In Communication

Has anyone ever noticed the habits we have for our communication?

We have so many platforms to choose from to communicate with each other on that it can be confusing to know which one to use and when.
Do they have different levels of importance?

If I what’s app is that less than if I actually text you?

What if I call is that more than an Email?

Don’t get me started on twitter, Facebook there are so many options on which to use. Even LinkedIn can send messages to other inboxes!

This isn’t just a challenge between friends and networks but what about how we communicate with clients or potential employees?

I have 2 inboxes at work and my linkedin that’s 3 inboxes to manage not to mention landline and mobile. How on earth am I expected to have conversations of any value with anyone when I am so accessible all of the time?

We hear a lot in HR when interviewing people who say they are a strong networker and how important it is to communicate to build those relationships with whoever your key person is, but what does that actually mean anymore these days?

Is it better to have fewer people in our networks but have better conversations than have a million connections a massive network where everything you want to communicate gets lost?

We have all become accustomed to an instant response both in and outside of work and if we don’t get that it drives us insane even more so with the fact most platforms tell you when someone was last active and I think anyone would be fibbing if they said they hadn’t sat and watched someone be online on what’s app and ignore what you have said!

Yet all these forms of communication seem have their order in our lives.
- Emails for work or contacting friends who are also behind a computer at work.
- What’s app for those pointless conversations and photo sharing of last night’s drunk photos.
- Texts for those who really truly matter (you are spending money)
- Twitter for modes of banter and the DM for those conversations that suddenly need to be taken offline.
- Facebook is a mine field, messages, invites, wall posts, comments, likes they all severe a purpose and have a level, comments on photos mean way more than likes!
- Calls I don’t think people really call each other anymore, it goes to voicemail rather than picking up!
Letters, no one seems to write to each other anymore which is a shame because it’s nice to get letter that aren’t bills

With all these forms of communication it can get confusing, does the message really get through or is it lost in translation?

Technology & Social Media – The Changing of a Culture

It’s easy for someone like me to say that it’s amazing how I’ve watched technology grow since i was a kid and more so social media grow since I was at university. I remember us studying the idea of its growth and where we thought in our wildest dreams we would be with it in the next 10 years.

6 nearly 7 of those years have now passed and our once far fetched idea of technology and social media are coming true around us all the time which in its self is scary.

While we were all enjoying learning HTML for my space which in its time launched so many bands, which in turn demonstrates how powerful ‘social media’ ‘WOM’ just was before we even realised what it was, Facebook had only just started when I was in my last year and to think where it is now, how it blew Myspace out of the water and the value of what was once just a platform for students to communicate on still blows my mind.

Being slightly dramatic I know but I went back to Argentina for Christmas, it has been 5 years since I’d been back to see the family and there are a few things that struck me.

1) everyone has Facebook, from no one even knowing what I was talking about 5 years ago to everyone I know being on it. Also twitter I am now more up to date with my families lives then ever before. That’s not ways ideal ill be honest.

2) I on purpose upgraded my phone to the iphone5 before I went over to knock
the socks technology wise off my cousins. But while they were impressed not in the same way as 5 years previous when I’d turned up with a Sony snapshot.

Leading to point

3) because everyone has a phone! And I mean EVERYONE

Argentina has a level of poverty you don’t get over here, the homeless are families of homeless not individuals, they beg on the streets, restaurants, trains anywhere they can but what you find is those who are that one level who live in the villa slums around the city seem to value having a phone above all else.

I was in the pub a few days back and someone commented on how the person I was with had responded straight away to someone while I was getting drinks …. I guess I was just left startled because its common practice in countries which are deemed 1st world for people to be attached to the phone all the time and no one to bat an eyelid at it.

But something in the Argentine culture has changed to fall in line with the rest of the world, it’s ok to be constantly checked when people will arrive when before it was a trait that everything was ‘around a time’ and no one kept to that.
Or phone calls were made, now no one calls, everyone what’s app’s each other on Skype calls the whole family on the other side of the country for new year.
Wifi is always on, streaming films, uploading photos to Facebook and twitter.

It seems that my holidays where i didn’t talk to a soul unless i found an internet cafe have gone and technology and social media really is changing not just how we communicate but our social structure and the things that used to define one countries culture or wealth from another no longer apply because they have it also, they are no longer behind in the world that is ever shifting owards dependence on technology, social media and mobile.

I wonder where we will find ourselves in the next 6 years