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Is corporate HR and their executive team receptive to social media?

A commenter recently asked:

Curious of your thoughts regarding how receptive HR is in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix. I think for many of us it is a no-brainer, and I believe Executives are beginning to understand the power of social media and the habits of their target, but from your experience, are you finding HR Execs receptive and willing to allocate appropriate portions of their budgets for this?

Julie O’Reilly
Marcom Village

What do you think when you hear “do you have a social media strategy?” Do you think about making media buys to run banners on sites like facebook and LinkedIn; or maybe placing employment messaging within other publisher’s podcasts? In recent years the number of sites where you can place ads and the forms these ads are offered in have increased. The introduction of these options for interactive recruitment advertising is exciting and the possibilities are growing by leaps and bounds. But, this is advertising - which doesn’t happen to be the core compentancy of social sites and mediums. These sites are forums where millions upon millions of potential candidates are connecting with one another, participating in active conversations, and changing the very definition of thought leadership. The potential for social media to completely disrupt how companies find and build relationships with candidates is powerful, if they can be convinced to learn how to harness that potential.

I have spent the last eighteen months speaking with corporate HR leaders at some of the largest organizations in America on this very topic - urging then to adopt social computing in their recruiting and retention efforts. It is just in the last month that I have seen corporate HR realize that they have to begin “thinking” about adding social media to their recruiting and retention efforts. But when I discuss crafting a social media strategy, I am not talking about using these sites for advertising, I am talking about efforts such as:

• Publishing employee-generated content that shows the real soul of the company and tells the stories that make the company what it is.

• Using photo, video, audio sharing sites to help those stories come to life.

• Using RSS to distribute this content outside of the corporate career site.

• Having real FAQs sections where candidates can ask questions, get real answers, and have this exchange be indexed and searchable for others.

• Evolve the definition of “relationship marketing” to include building and cultivating your candidate community on your career site through real two-way exchange of information.

• Encourage recruiters, hiring managers (all employees really) to seek out potential hires and build relationships within online communities.

What is the “right” strategy for one company is not necessarily right for the other. The key is to allow your employees to express their stories in the way that is RIGHT for them, thereby authentically and quite literally showing candidates who your company is and what it might be like to work there.

So to answer Julie’s question, in my experience, “how receptive is HR in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix?” I think that companies are starting to view advertising within social networks as the no brainer, and they are using budget that they already have allocated to interactive advertising, but just changing where those dollars are being spent. When it come to harnessing the power of social media to connect to candidates and literally give them the a behind the scenes view into the making of the organization - I would say, “not so much.” The fear of creating “too much risk” for the organization due to not being able to control the message is the root of the hesitation.

I have spent so much of my time passionately trying to explain to HR execs what social media IS, describing the changing of the guard that is happening, how thought leadership is changing, how the ability to spread and amplify the affect of messages has evolved, all of this can be seen so clearly through growth and impact of social computing - that I have probably done a poor job of making a traditional bottom-line focused business case for why companies would benefit for using social media to attract and retain the best.

Shel Holtz, an author and blogger with 30 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments, just wrote a terrific post addressing the business case for using social media as a communication channel entitled, Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights, where he simply states:

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention—Deloitte is frequently named the best company at which to begin your career. Deloitte is also the company that hosted an employee film festival, in which employees submitted creative videos articulating the company’s values and culture. The best of these are now on YouTube. Deloitte has engaged in social media in a variety of other ways, which in part accounts for the company’s ability to choose from the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, Clive Holtham, a professor at the Cass Business School, notes some California firms “are finding they cannot attract or retain staff because their IT infrastructure fails to meet the demanding standards of the new generation,” according to an article in Data Storage Today. Let’s face it: If employers in the don’t want to pay for the lion’s share of employee medical coverage. They do, however, because without it, they wouldn’t be able to attract the talent they need to implement their strategies.

• Employee engagement—Companies with populations of mostly actively engaged employees tend to outperform those with populations of mainly disengaged employees. Engagement flows from a number of factors, but it won’t flow at all without trust. Once employees are engaged, they produce discretionary effort on behalf of their employers.

In my view, using Social Media to provide a window into what it is like to work for an organization provides validation for a candidate against the marketing messages. This validation leads to a feeling of trust and genuine interest in the company (engagement), credibility (feeling that working for this employer is a good career decision) and ultimately loyalty (retention). I participate in social media everyday, it has become part of how I work, how I provide thought leadership, and how I judge the thought leadership coming out of other companies - that I know the potential for what it could mean for recruiting and retention - literally in my bones. Is it the only way? No, of course not. But the expectations of candidates are changing. They EXPECT to be able to find out what it is really like to work for a company, and they respect the companies that enable that process and help bubble that relevant information up to the top for them.

Shel says:

People may still want to work there even if they cannot engage in social media. The pay, the experience, the benefits all may carry greater weight than the ability to talk about work on a blog.

In general, though, based on dramatic shifts in culture, society, business and communication, most organizations will be well-served to integrate social media into their communication models.

But for any F500 company, it comes down to money - not passion for an idea. So my goal for the next month is to put together that financial business case for why Corporations cannot afford to ignore the potential of social media for attracting and keeping their best people.

Click to Play

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River of Reputation

Blogs. Tumblr. Twitter. Vlogs. Google. FaceBook. Syndication. Jaiku. Pownce. YouTube. Myspace. User-Generated Content. Indigenous Content. Del.icio.us. Online Community…. Data streams flowing via RSS, ATOM and furiously converging to create a River of Reputation…. a River of Relevance.

I started playing with Slideroll yesterday and ended up creating this slide show regarding how Employer Brands are affected by ‘Rivers of Reputation’.

This is a work in progress meant to get across the concept of the decentralization of the Employer Brand via the flow of easily accessible information regarding your brand that is being generated by individuals everyday. Let me know your thoughts.

Hat tip to a twitter mention of a conversation between Scoble and Anil Dash. I was also influenced by Brian Solis’s post Lifestreams Channel Online Activity, Creating Rivers of Relevance, discussing data streams and one’s personal brand.

Thanks to one of Shannon’s partner’s in crime (hat tip Laura) we have the following representative example of old fashioned marketing colliding with today’s consumer.

The inspiration for the movie comes out of Microsoft. Surprised? You shouldn’t be - Microsoft has proven more than any other company that if you get out of the way of your people, your people can save your ass.

In this example Microsoft employee Geert Desager AND Microsoft’s Belgian communications agency Openhere have been turned loose in the blogosphere with some good ideas, a blog, and some video production talent. The result? Here’s what Geert has to say on their results after two weeks.

“Another small update:

• more than 75.000 views of the movie
• more than 240 incoming links
• more than 250 comments on the blog”

What a couple of people at Microsoft did, and even more importantly, what Microsoft DID NOT DO (try to stop bloggers like Robert Scoble), is what makes it possible today for Geert and Openhere to do this.

Today this outreach continues and has continued to evolve with stories like Geert’s and Microsoft Recruitosphere pioneer Heather Hamilton. To these people, The Scoble’s, The Hamilton’s, their bosses, and bosses bosses go the thanks! Not only does Microsoft win in advancing their products and services but they also build a stronger employer brand and employee culture. Moves like this make it easier on the recruiters at Microsoft to land their next software guru. It’s a nice contrast to the tyranical employer brand that Apple is presently building for their abusive blogging and employee communication policies. Apple would do well to go back and watch their famous lemming commercials while consulting Wikipedia with a keyword search for “Orwellian.”

Well done Geert, and Robert and Heather and the legions of other Microsoft talent who have helped move us forward. Everyone in corporate america owes you and Microsoft our thanks, and not just for Excel or Word.

– Jules

p.s. Check out Openhere’s about page. I love their pitch (even if it isn’t a pitch).

“Openhere is an agency where open-minded people work for open-minded advertisers. “

You get the idea that soon the agencies that pretend to hold these values will be replaced by ones that really DO believe in what they’re selling. We believe.

Focusing on the corporate careers site as the main destination where companies can connect with and engage talented people is a continuous theme here on EXCELER8ion. It used to be that the corporate careers site was THE destination where job seekers could learn about the company and have their first exposure to the employer’s brand messaging. I now find myself in every client presentation having lengthy discussions about the new reality we face that when someone does a search on Google or Yahoo! when researching your company - it is likely that the search results returned will be posts from the blogosphere, not necessarily the corporate careers site, and not necessarily with a positive message.

This has a huge impact on how job seekers perceive your employer brand - as the information that is found on a blog post is often considered more credible and real as compared to the ‘controlled’ information that companies usually make available to job seekers on the careers site. Since the information posted on the corporate careers site usually does not really portray what it is really like to work for a company this lack of real information is literally forcing them to go to search engines to seek out the ‘real deal’ before deciding if they want to consider a company as a future employer. The result is that your employer brand message can now be found (but not controlled) on dozens, hundreds, and possibly even thousands of sites across the web.

The changing expectations regarding where job seekers can go online for ‘real’ and transparent information about a company are being seen outside of Careers as well. Shel Holtz, VP of New Marketing for crayon, spoke at the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas last week (I would have killed to attend all of Track 1) and he just posted asking his readers what their thoughts are regarding the value of company websites:

A recurring theme here at the New Communications Forum (in Las Vegas) is the value of corporate websites. Speakers from David Weinberger to John Bell (from Ogilvy PR) have reiterated the point: People will search Google and engage in the blogosphere to find out what’s what with a company before they visit the company’s website. Even if they do visit the company website, it’s only to get the company’s point of view, not to make an ultimate decision or establish an opinion.

While Shel is looking to discuss the extent to which this is indeed the case - the fact remains that from a employer brand point of view - every day there are conversations that are taking place on blogs about what it is like to work for a company, and those conversations are being indexed and found during searches.

The result?

Companies do not have one careers site - they may literally have thousands. Instead of fighting this reality, I want to to talk about the possibility of breaking away from the traditional careers site experience and provide people with an ‘Un-Careers’ site? (I owe the credit for coining this term to my colleague, Jeremy Shapiro - VP, Hodes iQ).

What to do?

Make the site a destination that aggregates all of the content out there about a company - all of the employee blogs, past employee blogs, personal blogs - all of it - not just the typical careers marketing spin.

Shel discusses how Microsoft did this a few years back (not for careers):

There also are ways to make the corporae [sic] site more of a destination. Microsoft did this by creating a bias-free clearinghouse of content related to the federal and state lawsuits it was facing a few years back. By offering all content—not just that which was pro-Microsoft—the company ensured that, for at least some journalists and others—the Microsoft site would be the go-to destination for documents and other materials dealing with the lawsuits.

I view this as an immediate, no BS way to provide a real and transparent view of the company, and as a byproduct, such a move would also up the credibility of the more “traditional” careers content that might otherwise have just been brushed off as spin. Once companies leverage the social network, instead of hiding from the content that already exists out there - a world of possibilities immediately opens up for distribution of job postings via rss and widgets - but I will save that for another post.

What do you think - will corporate America ever be ready for such a move as a un-careers site?