Show #502 - November 19, 2009
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Content summary
Mitch Joel's book offer; FIR Interview with Tac Anderson coming; update on the FIR Twitter List; FIR #500: more listener predictions; Dan York reports; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Ronna Porter's example on calling on your online community to verify your social media credentials in a job application, social media is influencing business decisions says new research from SNCR; David Philips reports; listener comments; music from Mario Tomic; and more.
Time Codes Here!
Thanks, volunteers...
Contributions and Comments from these Listeners
Dan York
Tom Murphy
Mike the Bee
David Philips
Simon Young
Links
http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/digital-marketing-and-personal-branding-freebies/ http://twitter.com/fir/fir-listeners http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ronna+adidas http://internetbrandingstrategy.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-changing-worlds-and-internet-world.html http://www.opportuno.de/stellenangebote/1163381.html http://www.facebook.com/pages/adidas/7652152115?v=app_2373072738&ref=ts#/pages/adidas/7652152115?v=wall&viewas=695206979&ref=ts http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/11/sncr_research_s.php http://everydayinfluence.typepad.com/everyday_influence/2009/11/the-new-symbiosis-of-professional-networks-social-medias-impact-on-business-and-decision-making-.html http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sy Today's music: Tribal Fusion by Mario Tomic.
http://www.myspace.com/mariotomic
Contributors to show notes for this show (add your name here)
- Neville Hobson
- Ronna Porter
FIR #502 Transcript / News that Fits
Ronna Porter’s example on calling on your online community to verify your social media credentials in a job application
It’s a bit out of the ordinary from a news point of view. But it concerns a friend of ours and it’s about a topic that is quite thought-provoking about what happened and why. And this relates to this friend of ours called Ronna Porter, someone, Shel both you and I have met. We both met her back at an FIR dinner we had back in 2007.
And Ronna is somebody very involved with audio among many things. She’s got strong credentials in social media, and that’s really at the heart of this story I’m going to recount to you based on what Ronna has told us too. And what I’ve observed myself online.
And this goes back a while from when she, Ronna moved to Germany, she lives in Nuremberg in fact, and she expressed a desire that adidas, the sportswear manufacturer is a company she’d like to work for, and wrote a blog post about that a year or so ago. What happened in the last week or so is that there’s an opportunity arisen at adidas that would involve someone with some experience in social media.
Again, I don’t have the details so I’m not going to try and interpret what I don’t know. But it lead to Ronna being in touch with them and they basically, from what I understand, have said to Ronna: “Nice to .. whatever they said .. but have declined to allow her to interview for this particular role as they feel that she doesn’t have strong enough credentials with experience in social media and of course she is taken aback by this. I can imagine on two levels. One is the disappointment at her dream almost appearing and not to be able to get an interview, and the HR person simply saying your experience is not at the level they are looking for, so she is taken aback by that as well.
Now what she did is the key thing here. She says that following a very short telephone conversation with personnel, that’s HR:
adidas doubts my social media experience - should they?
I'm interviewing for a senior PR role with adidas. It is my dream job.
The problem is, following a very short telephone conversation with personnel, adidas has decided I may not have the necessary social media credentials for the specific role (this surprises me and several experts in this field).
So I ask that if you know my capabilities well enough, to please corroborate that I know my stuff and am worth interviewing.
Either respond here, on the adidas Facebook page
http://bit.ly/3Ry7sQ or to me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/Ronna .
Many thanks for any support you can give!
Regards,
Ronna
There’s the interesting aspect to this. That Ronna raised this as a point she made in a question that she sent to all her
LinkedIn? network. She also contacted directly a number of people asking for help – I got a request like that from Ronna too. And it struck me as fascinating that on the one hand you’ve got a traditional thing that applies to a job and, sorry we’re not going to invite you in for an interview: What would you do normally in that situation, if you felt you weren’t being given a fair enough chance to just get to that interview. You’d probably just tell your friends, you might right someone about it, do emails .. No, Ronna has called upon her community via social communication tools including networks like
LinkedIn?.
The equally interesting thing is if that you go to the adidas Facebook page which I did, I was taken aback by the shear volume, the shear quantity, of comments from people corroborating, or actually verifying Ronna’s credentials as somebody that adidas ought to interview. And my thought in the comment that I left that really about how could you ignore this sort of verification. If this is not independent third-party verification of someone then I don’t know what is. Now I don’t know the outcome of what’s happened, I’ve not been able to get in touch with Ronna to ask her before the show. So I’ve not seen her tweeting about, or anything on her blog, so I doubt that this has proceeded to interview, but she’s got a huge quantity of support.
Another of our listeners, indeed a voice you hear on this show from time to time Krishna De from Ireland dropped me a note about this asking if we were going to talk about this on FIR, and she had a couple of thoughts herself. Got her wondering , she says, is this a savvy approach lobbying your network to support your work on a company’s facebook page. And secondly, if you were the brand owner or the recruiting manager, how would you respond?
And these are two very good questions, because I’ve not seen any response from adidas. Having said that, I haven’t looked at the Facebook page for a few days so there might be one since. But I’ve not seen anything, and I doubt there has been one as I’m sure I would have seen someone in Ronna’s community whom I’m connected with tweeting that Ronna has got a result of some kind.
So this is still up in the air in my view. So here we’ve got someone with some influence, connected to people with influence if I can say it that way, who is asking questions. And adidas is being mentioned all the time, not in very flattering terms. It’s not like they are getting lots of criticism, but you can just look at the issues that are being thrust at adidas, who are not responding at the moment.
And that is probably the thing. Now we don’t know, and without Ronna’s disclosure exactly what the detail of this is, what the reason is that they have decided against inviting her in for an interview. Nevertheless it is rather interesting that nowadays you can call on your community to support you in a way that is transparent, that is open, that is public – its on the public internet. Anyone with a connection can see the tweets. Anyone with access to Facebook can go to adidas’s page and see what everyone is saying about Ronna, and indeed on
LinkedIn? as well. So this again another dimension of what being online means when you have a point to make and you ask others to support you or at least contribute some opinion. And this to me simply just opens up another dimension to this whole thing of personal inter-relationships, whether on a personal or a professional level. If I were adidas I’d be, well frankly I’d be responding in some way. They may well have done, but it doesn’t look as though they have in which case they are missing a trick here. Shel?
Shel: Well, yeah. And I think Krisna’s two questions are good ones. The first one’s being, is this a good idea. And my answer is: it couldn’t hurt, she’s been declined the interview, so by undertaking this initiative I don’t think she’s undermined her chances of getting an interview. She’s already been told no, so its either going to get adidas to pay attention or its not, but it can’t hurt. I’m wondering if there are other company’s paying attention and adidas ignoring of Ronna is going to turn into an advantage for some other organization that’s going to say, well, we want her. And we want her social media chops here.
Neville: That’s actually what I mentioned in my comment that I left on adidas page. Their loss will be a competitors gain, cos’ someone is going to look at Ronna and say, we’ll hire this person, I would think.
Shel: Well the way an HR person should react is contingent upon how clued-in the organization and the HR department are on all of this. I think there might be some who will roll their eyes and say “Oh, just getting all of their friends to weigh in doesn’t really mean anything”, but somebody with a clue is going to say oh this is a person who has built a strong community online and obviously understands what community means and how you can activate a community that I think we should pay attention to.
Neville: At least get them in for the interview.
Shel: Absolutely. Talk to this person at this point. But, you know I remember we talked several shows ago about the idea of the networked company. And one of the characteristics of a networked company was going to be that recruiting was going to happen through social networks. The people that you are interacting with that you identify as someone just perfect for a particular position that you have to fill.
That’s where you are going to go for those people. You already know them, you’re already interacting with them, why would you put a display ad in a newspaper or on a job site when you already know the people out there you’d like to bring in. So I think the very nature of recruiting is going to undergo a change.
I saw, and I’m not at liberty to say who this is, its through a public relations agency with which I have a professional relationship with. But they are trying to recruit a senior level social media person for one of their clients, a big company that you would recognize the name of this organization. And the job description requirements, I told my contact at the PR agency that I thought they were completely unrealistic, with 8-10 years senior management experience, but also social media experience. I’m wondering if the whole issue with adidas that’s keeping Ronna from being brought into an interview is that they have unrealistic expectations about the qualifications of people that they can find out there.
Neville: Mm. Its and interesting one isn’t it. And we’d love to know what happen’s next. Ronna, if you’re listening, yes let us know what has happened since the commentary that we’ve given today.
Shel: And include in that any unintended consequences, such as approaches that you’ve had from other organizations.
Neville: Yeah, we’d love to know that.
