Searching for jobs with no success? Have you made yourself a dazzling LinkedIn profile but it seems to be little more than yet another social networking site? Make sure you’re maximizing your profile so the employers will come to you! This one little mouse click can open up opportunities for you and help you make much better use of your LinkedIn social media profile.
MBWA – Management by Walking Around. A style of management popularised by founders of Hewlett-Packard in the 70’s which involved senior managers walking throughout the office, talking to employees, getting feedback, and answering questions.
Before I was educated and had heard about this revolutionary management style, I had been practicing this in my career as a RMS Clerk (HR Administrator) in the Canadian Armed Forces. It was customary for me to join co-workers and clients in the smoking area for casual conversation. Although the smoking area isn’t quite as popular these days, the premise is the same. Engage in conversation with your co-workers, direct reports, and clients. Conversation is freer, clients feel more comfortable making oddball inquiries or seeking clarification. I heard about more preventable and easily rectifiable issues in this manner and was able to fix these problems quickly without the headaches of “chain of command” red tape and bureaucracy.
This is especially important in an organisational structure which is heavy on hierarchy. There is no better way to get to know your direct reports or your clients than to engage them in an informal conversation. In my experience, they are more likely to open up to you with what is REALLY bothering them. This, of course, has obvious benefits to organisational engagement.
So clerks, HR professionals, get out there, try some HR By Walking Around. You will very likely develop stronger, more trusting relationships with your clients and subordinates. Your body and mind can use the excuse to get out from behind your desk and don’t worry, your work will still be there when you get back.
So it’s been awhile since you polished your resume? Never built a resume before because you are so damn charming people just threw jobs at you? Changing careers and trying to translate the jargon from one industry to another? This is a daunting task, to be sure.
Nearly everyone I’ve met, including recruiters, are a little unsure of how to build their resume, you’re not alone. There are lots of – maybe too many – websites out there to help with this task.
Recently I looked through a pile of resumes which were deposited on the table for the company I work for during one local career fair. There were nearly a hundred. We were interested in hiring for only two or three jobs, no more than 5 positions in total. The jobs we were hiring were predominantly service sales or sales manager positions. We had PhD’s and Master’s degrees in the sciences applying for an opportunity with our company. Were they? Were they really looking for a manual labour job? I doubt it, but what I don’t doubt is that they were close to desperation and would take anything. The thing is, the places you’re applying aren’t nearly as desperate, so you should take the time to tweak your resume so that it acknowledges you’re looking outside your field.
Draw attention to your strengths right away, stand out, be bold. Wow the recruiter – carefully. This is a professional document designed to match employers with potential employees – so match your style with your industry where possible.
Use trusted sources when you develop your resume. There are as many tips out there as there are people sharing them. Personal preferences influence these ideas. There is no perfect solution but in all cases you’ll find professionalism is recommended. I recommend everyone has a look at the guide provided by USask. It’s a pretty comprehensive place to start. Once you have a working document, revise, edit, massage, and perfect it.
University of Saskatchewan – Resume Guide
Do – pay attention to the professional details. Know your potential employer. If they are big they may use electronic scanning systems. Fancy graphics or banners may not be compatible and just eliminate your resume from consideration. Conversely, a smaller business relying on a human to read a pile of resumes will appreciate a well-put-together resume that is legible, professional, and easy to read. A splash of colour or good paper might differentiate you from the rest – but don’t be cartoony or juvenile.
Don’t – double side your resume. Scanners and people dislike double-sided resumes. It either doesn’t work, or looks cheap. Many employers want electronic versions, but if you’re handing in a hard copy make sure it looks professional. Don’t double side but if your resume is more than 1 page then use two pieces of paper and a staple. In a large pile of resumes it’s possible for the pages to get separated. Put your name at the top of both. Number the pages. Make sure your resume can be put together again if it’s inadvertently separated.
Companies that prefer electronic resumes are now able to employ online application processes so as time passes fewer companies will need to “scan” resumes into their Optical Character Readers. Check the websites of the companies you wish to apply to. Do they use online application processes? Make sure your resume is optimized for their technical requirements.
Do – summarize your duties. If you can’t fit everything you’ve ever done into two pages then you need to do some editing. When recruiters are looking at a mountain of resumes they have no time or inclination to read a 7 page thesis. Stick to the old adage “keep it simple stupid”. Hit the highlights, especially those that match the job posting you’re applying for. Even worse than a 7 page resume is a resume typed in 6 pt font in order to cram everything into 2 pages. Edit folks. If you need to, be brutal, and slash the extraneous stuff.
Don’t – apply to a different industry or job without including a short statement in your objective to explain why a PhD with a geophysics background is applying to a retail management job. If you don’t it may look like you were scattering resumes everywhere, not caring where they landed – especially if you’re dropping resumes off at a job fair. This can make you look like you’re not really interested in the job or company.
Forbes – Nine Worst Resume Mistakes
Do – proofread your resume. Get someone else to look at it. Make sure you’re using the correct their/they’re/there or two/to/too. Punctuation saves lives.
Don’t – include details about yourself that could result in discrimination. This includes things like thumbnail photos, date of birth, place of birth. Basically anything that falls within the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Some are unavoidable (gender can be a give away unless your name is gender-neutral) but do your best to keep to skills, experience, talents, and competencies that will help you get the job.
Eight skills that can double your chances of being hired – Workopolis
Community Employment Services – Woodstock, ON – Skills Identification (click next to get a glossary of relevant terms)
Resume skills – list of skills for resume
Sources:
https://drive.google.com/previewtemplate?id=12-cGNWljrpBS0ZYZZLzWRZ0gOx2PAmCeX2gIkt0nMtU&mode=public
Connecting with your employees is as important as connecting with your customers. Employees can be your energizers. Employees may already be on the same social networks, wikis, and participating in communities.
Internal groundswells can offer the opportunity to listen, to talk to, and energize employees who already believe in your brand. It can offer the chance to support employees and embrace their enthusiasm.
Employees are the first line of defence, they hear customer complaints directly, they work through the day-to-day problems themselves, and they’ve likely already thought up solutions to the problems. The corporate world have embraced wikis, recognizing that employees can offer insight and solutions to one another.
Embracing the internal groundswell means offering new ways for employees to engage with each other. Management must listen to what is being said, as employees have a lot at stake when they put it out there and let their opinions be known. Ease your employees into the internal groundswell. Participation is key, but it needs to be voluntary or it won’t be honest. Like you would seek out your brand enthusiasts outside the company, find the same type of people internally and encourage them.
Encouraging the groundswell internally means developing and nurturing relationships. This is the key to its success.
Like every other business, WIN House can and should energize their own internal groundswell. Employees work in a non-profit because they are passionate about the work. Take this passion one step further, engage the employees to connect with each other through social media. Share their passion with each other with the help of technology. This is one more way for these dedicated employees to generate ideas and expand their horizons.
This is my last post for school. This course has opened my eyes to the power of social media. As a “joiner” I already belonged to and used many of the platforms we explored in class but I hadn’t realized how beneficial they could be to business endeavours. In my personal life, over the course of this semester, I’ve watched a friend struggle through a problem and take to social media (FB and Twitter mostly) to energize friends and supporters – and it worked! They influenced the government to change their stance and offer the support they should have been providing all along. Social media is a powerful tool that can be harnessed in a variety of ways.
This was a great class and I’d recommend it to business owners and fellow business students.
Cheers,
Barb
Reference:
Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Image retrieved from https://www.juiceinc.com/blog/show/beyond-engagement-why-energized-employees-get-better-results
Getting your customers to want to spread the word about your company, voluntarily and enthusiastically, is what is known as energizing the groundswell. Word of mouth is information coming from customers and it is successful because it is believable, self-reinforcing, and self-spreading (groundswell, 2011, p.130). Word of mouth is honest because its not the company tooting its own horn, its customers sharing experiences. Tapping into this honest, passionate message is energizing the groundswell. The value of this comes from customer recommendations. A customer who will promote your product or company will tell their friends, and they’ll tell their friends (and so on, and so on). In fact, word of mouth can be so effective that there are companies who pay for critics to talk about your product.
Paying for someone to talk about your product online can be costly. You can get people talking yourself by connecting with your customers. Offer an online community and participate in it. Give your enthusiasts and opportunity to engage with ratings and reviews. Know the social technographic profile of your customers and meet them where they are.
Companies like Constant Contact, an email marketing company, relies on word of mouth to sign up new referrals to the community. This activity energizes customers, spawns conversations, and creates revenue.
Energizing the customers can be risky, since you’re leaving them to talk about your brand. Some will be enthusiastic and speak highly of you and your product. Some won’t. Getting your base energized and talking about you can transform your company.
References
Li, C., & Bernhoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Image retrieved from https://www.google.ca/search?q=energizing+customers&biw=1088&bih=475&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIgv3X5eadxwIVEA6SCh1CXg4a#imgrc=JabP2f3EjV-b5M%3A
What can you do with 140 characters? Entertain? Inform? Twitter users make great use of a few keystrokes to get their message out.
Twitter followers: unlike other social media platforms, Twitter users can follow anyone.
Hashtags and searches: as public media, Twitter updates are searchable. Hashtags (#) are used to associate a tweet with a topic, and this makes searching the topic easier and helps to identify trending topics.
Mentions and retweets: Simple protocols such as using the “at” symbol (@) along with the users handle will direct the tweet to that user, or retweeting can send a tweet viral, getting your message around the world quickly.
Links: Lots of people use Twitter to get links to their websites out there. This is particularly useful for blogs or articles.
Lists: Twitter added the ability to create lists in 2010. These are lists of people you follow and they’re share-able.
Apps and tools: There are multiple tools available to help make managing your Tweets easier. They’re available on Apple and Android systems. They can minimize web addresses (which is important when you only have 140 characters to play with).
Twitter users are influential and highly connected. The Social Technographics Profile of twitter users shows us that they’re more likely to be creators and conversationalists and the demographics indicate that twitter users are more educated and wealthy than other people online (table 10-1)
Listening to Twitter is essential. It can help business keep an eye on their brand and see if there are any trends they need to be aware of.
Using Twitter to talk is straightforward. If its done well it can be interesting. The trick is to keep it interesting enough that others will mention it or retweet. Media outlets often have multiple twitter accounts and often reporters will have their own with many followers.
Energizing is to find others who like your product/service and amplifying their voices. Using fans to promote a brand by tweeting or retweeting can be energized with competitions which get ideas trending.
Influential Twitter users will follow trending topics, particularly for their own company, and use the information to ensure customer needs are met.
Embracing with Twitter may be most easily accomplished by communicating with users and customers.
Twitter is easy to use and ubiquitous. Some good advice for Twitter users:
Lock up your handle – there are lots of examples of famous people or companies who’ve had someone “take” their handle. Usually having someone pretending to be you and tweeting doesn’t end well.
Listen first – before you post, learn what people are saying about you.
Be ready to support people – customers will expect support once you’re out there. Direct these customers to someone who can help – tech support group or customer service representatives.
Follow others – it costs nothing.
Be ready for a crisis – increasingly people look to Twitter during times of crisis. Mayor Nemshi from Calgary used Twitter almost exclusively during the floods in 2013, to great success.
Respond, retweet, and link – keep the experience rich; respond to people tweeting to you, retweet or mentions of interesting topics, and links to material on your site.
Staff it – use Twitter regularly, even if its not a full-time job. Make sure someone is keeping the posts coming.
Check with legal and regulatory staff – Twitter is pubic, and on the internet. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.
Having gathered a following, don’t waste it – Keep the interesting posts coming and once you’ve built interest in an account, ensure you have a long term plan for it.
WIN House could best take advantage of Twitter for it’s demographic profile of users during fundraising campaigns. Some clever tweeting can get the message viral (or at least more exposure) to the more educated and affluent people in the city. This is also a target market for fundraising.
References:
Li, C., & Bernoff, J., (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Images:
Demographics of Tweeters retrieved from https:// losscandalous.wordpress.com/
Social Technographics Profile of tweeters retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/beingpeterkim/5788456879/
In Chapter 8 we learn about the costs of traditional customer support versus groundswell support.
Typically, once a product has been purchased a company hopes to not hear from a buyer again, as this would suggest that the customer is in some way dissatisfied with the product. In addition, the costs of providing customer support can amount to upwards of $7 per call, all inclusive. For this reason webistes with self-service options and off-shoring call centres have popped up. While cheaper, customers still weren’t satisfied and took to the internet to start helping each other.
The result was support forums, wikis, and Q&A sites. The value to companies and consumers was, in the case of a well-monitored forum like Dell’s, an enormous cost savings realized from allowing consumers to share solutions. The benefits from a collaboration in the form of a wiki is manifested in dollars and increased confidence gained because people are more inclined to believe suggestions from peers than from companies. This collaborative effort will also engage Spectators, Critics, Conversationalists, and Creators, as defined in Chapter 3 – Social Technographics.
If you’re considering how you can let the groundswell support itself you need to consider a few factors:
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff offer this advice (Groundswell, 2011, pp. 174-176) :
WIN House has an opportunity to embrace these communities and let their clients help each other in many ways. A system similar to CarePages, a secure, non-intrusive, online method for patients to communicate with their friends and loved ones, could be adapted to WIN’s clients. In escaping a dangerous situation at home many abused women have to cut ties with everyone from their old life. Using this technology WIN clients could reassure loved ones of their safety – from afar.
WIN House could look at creating a wiki that offers the information one might need to re-establish herself. This could be low-income housing links, how to legally change your name, which government agencies to see about issues of concern, links and explanations of privacy laws. Input to this wiki could come from former clients, government agencies, WIN employees – the possibilities are endless.
As with every biarenaissance post thus far, the utmost concern and attention should be paid to the safety and security of users. In a potentially volatile environment, pseudonyms may provide the anonymity needed to set up a community such as this, in concert with a carefully monitored website.
Reference:
Li, C., & Bernoff, J., (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Image retrieved 19 July, 2015 from http://liveworkstudio.com/topics/online-powered-by-call-centres/
Chapter 6 of Groundswell tells us about connecting to our customers through the groundswell, by talking. This increased level of communication effectively pushes potential customers along the marketing funnel.
Talking, which is not to be confused with shouting (which is what mainstream advertising relies on to get their message to as many customers (reach) as often as possible (frequency)) includes finding out what customers want and need and then having the conversation with them.
We are given several examples of companies, like Proctor and Gamble, using the Social Technographics profile to determine the best use of the various social media platforms to get their messages and brand across, and these include:
1) Post a viral video – see YouTube for the viral videos made for willitblend.com
2) Engage in user-generated and social networks – as Ernst and Young did by building a Facebook page to get the attention of college students
3) Joining the blogosphere – HP took great advantage of this to get employees communicating with customers
4) Create a community – as we see Proctor and Gamble doing in beinggirl.com, where the focus is building a safe place for juvenile girls to share, with subtle marketing influence.
Li and Bernoff also recommend that brands use social networks, since that’s where their customers are. If a company already has a brand that people love and are passionate about, even better. Companies would be well advised to see what’s already out there, then create a space that encourages two-way communication.
Blogging, if done right, will have a positive effect on the bottom line. Cheaper than traditional advertising, there are still costs to blogging – particularly in terms of the time necessary to ensure the blog is properly maintained, both for quality and quantity.
WIN House can use these concepts to their advantage and start creating a website which will foster the same level of trust that the bricks and mortar facility has. This may look like P&G’s “Ask Iris” service, in which a qualified psychologist answers candid questions. Most important is to create a dialogue amongst the predominantly Joiner/Spectator social technographic that look to WIN House for help. The same creativity that was used to develop a website, beinggirl.com, for young self-conscious teenaged girls can be applied to tentative and unsure women.
Reference:
Li, C., & Bernoff, J., (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Marketing Funnel image retrieved 12 July, 2015 from http://wearesocial.net/blog/2009/06/purchase-funnel/
POST is an acronym for the 4 step planning process for building a groundswell strategy. In order to make the most of your groundswell it’s important to understand what your customers are doing online, what they’re comfortable with, so that you can meet them where they are.
P = people. Who are they? Look at your social technographic profile. This will help you to understand what they’re ready for. If your customers are largely Spectators then starting an online community and expecting them to initiate conversation will probably disappoint.
O = objectives. You need to consider what your goals are. Are you interested in generating sales? Or is your goal to encourage employees to work with each other in a collaborative way or more efficiently? Do you want to increase your marketing reach? Deciding what your objectives are will help you to focus your efforts and achieve success. Li and Bernoff (2009, pp. 68-69) outline the 5 most commonly successful objectives in Goundswell as Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing.
S = strategy. How do you want your relationships to change? What will these changes look like over time. The strategy is more than deciding on an objective, but fully thinking it through its lifecycle.
T = technology. One you’ve selected your strategy based on the people and your primary objective then you can consider the best tool to reach your customers. This may be through a blog, video file sharing, social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. The technology you choose should be able to engage your customers in the way they participate online.
For WIN House, the predominant technographic profile of clients are Joiners, Spectators, and. Critics. Using the traits of these specific profiles, as characterized in the technographic profile from Forrester Research, below, will lead us to the conclusion that WIN House customers are present online, mostly passive – in that they will join sites and read others’ blogs, watch videos, perhaps even comment on other users’ uploads, but are less likely to start conversations. In light of the information gathered during the POST process, I would suggest that WIN House start with a blog to inform their clients about available resources, both within WIN and in the outside communities, including the online community. This will require an executive sponsor to demonstrate the priority placed on first talking to the customers.
Image retrieved from http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell /2010/01/conversationalists-get-onto-the-ladder.html
Li, C., & Bernoff, J., (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
There was no blogging exercise this week but I did have the opportunity to share some thoughts about this class with some friends of mine – in person. I know someone who has been getting the run around by his employer and has taken to social media to gain some groundswell support for his cause. An active Facebook presence, tweeting, letter writing, engaging traditional media resources have gained some publicity for the cause but with every new chapter I see how accessible the global community is – with a working knowledge of the groundswell and the various social media platforms. I’ve had a twitter account for a few years but hadn’t tweeted or retweeted anything. I now feel that I can use this technology for good and not evil – and I have every intention of doing so.
biarenaissance 