Full transcript: Peter Williams in The Zone

Michael Short: Peter Williams welcome to The Zone. Thanks a lot for your time. You are one of Australia‘s leaders in all matters digital. You’re here today to explore the risks and the opportunities of social media, in particular for businesses and other organisations. Can we start please with the big picture? What is your overview? Should organisations embrace social media?

Peter Williams: Yes, absolutely. The way that the web is used has changed significantly, particularly with the emergence of Facebook. I say that Facebook is the most important website on the planet. I think in Australia there is something like 15% of time spent on the web is on Facebook.

The nature of the way it works is that people say ‘I like you’ and your content goes to them. So traditionally with websites people try to say hey come to my website, come to my website. Now people just like your website and your website goes to them.

That’s why people, I say, live in Facebook. They will Google if they want to find something else. But they are typically living in Facebook. The other thing is Twitter, where we are seeing the ability to get real-time information and share real-time information on a scale that we have never really seen before. And the final thing I say to all clients is get a You Tube channel.

 

Get video stuff out there. The consumption of video on the web, with the increase of bandwidth speeds, has just gone through the roof. You Tube is no longer sort of a collection of Australia’s funniest home videos on steroids. Any how-to guide on how to use for example this machine etcetera is out there.

I was talking to an anaesthetist who uses it to look at various machines that he is working at different hospitals that he hasn’t used before, all through YouTube.

It is not a matter of should we or shouldn’t we, it is how can we leverage this.

MS: So the risk is not being involved?

PW: Yes, well, risk is an interesting thing in social media. I am actually talking to a lot of clients about it as a risk-prevention measure. What I am saying consistently is before things hit the front page of The Age, it is bubbling away on social media. And I know journalists using Twitter extensively to find out what are people saying, to sniff out a story.

 

If you are monitoring what is being said about you, you have at least got a bit of an early warning system. There was an incident recently with Harvey Norman and Get Up around an ad that they didn’t get going on TV but that they are starting to use social media to get it out there. Now, if you are not listening, knowing what’s happening, that can come at you like a bit of a steam train.

But if you aren’t monitoring on social media, over the last few days, you wouldn’t have known it was coming. So there is using it as a bit of a risk mitigation tool. Then there are broader risks around not using it, like how can I attract good staff, how do I get my share of voice, how do I engage in the conversation, how do people find out more about me.

And then the other risk is when a company says something wrong I can guarantee somebody will tweeted and when they do just to deal with it like you would if you had a problem with a face to face conversation, an e-mail, or a telephone conversation. And it is interesting, I still see it is often the e-mails that propagate, like the one this week with the lady and her son and the e-mail to the fiancé that went global. E-mail is as dangerous as anything going around, and if you can handle e-mail I think you can handle social media.

MS: Do you think that the e-mail incident of this week was actually smart marketing, or do you think it was genuine? Once you get a viral e-mail it doesn’t stop.

 

PW: I saw the things saying it might have been fake, and I’m not really sure, but it was interesting. I was thinking that if it is a fake, it was a very good fake because it came across pretty authentically, I thought.

 The thing is now that with the network connectivity we have got, messages can go to places you never thought possible. And social media gets it out there fast. But any of these modern technologies come with risks. Like with any form of communication, you have to learn how to manage it.

MS: It is just an illusion, really, of communication isn’t it? Just another platform, not something that people should necessarily be frightened about or see as new fangled. Do you think that over all Australian companies are being run by people who are embracing social media sufficiently, or are they still a little bit wary of it?

PW: I have been involved in the web since 1993 and what I am saying to people is that this is bigger than the dot com boom. I have never seen anything like social media. And I think it is the fact that effectively people are connecting with people and thoughts. And also there is the capacity for everybody to be almost their own media, if you like.

So historically, sure, anybody could have set up a website or done a blog, but there was a level of difficulty. But now with more than 60% of Australians on Facebook publishing videos and photos and thoughts and sharing links and all that stuff, the volume of self publishing if you like, and even if there is just sharing other published materials, you know my wife is a serial centre of page articles, this sort of notion of sharing is one of the big changes and this is really connecting people.

PW: And it is close to real-time. And also our ability to manage networks of connections, both past and new ones, is growing. You know you meet somebody somewhere and it might be a business guy and then you follow them on LinkedIn and if they are a twitter head, you’ll follow them on Twitter; it allows you to maintain connections.

I know that when I look at my own Facebook stream I have got family, friends, school friends, business colleagues, current staff at work with me, organisations that I am interested in, and you stay in touch with people. So I think it has brought the human side to the web, and that, I think, is the real revolution.

 MS: Just on that, with Facebook, and the melange of family, friends, business et cetera, do you think that Google+ will attack that by allowing people to compartmentalise those things, or do you think it is good that it is all in there together?

PW: Yes, I have had a good think about that because if you look at me, I would be somebody who has got more than 500 Facebook friends, I think, so somebody who has got a lot to manage, and I had a look at Google+ and my first thing was well this is just a Facebook clone that allows me to sort of put my categories of friends, family, colleagues, whatever in different buckets. And so I just thought actually I could not be back in doing that.

Because the beauty of Facebook for me is that I can just go through the stream. And the other thing that you find with social media is it is a bit like looking at a series of newspaper headlines – you look at the newspaper that you do not read every article word for word. You just sort of scan through it. And sometimes it might be oh Fred had a birthday party last week, or here is a picture of my son who just gone on holiday over to Europe, you know, you just have a quick look.

I want to see what’s happening to my friends, what’s happening to my family – I want it all in one place. So, yes, when I look at it, it is not that much better so why would I change? The web market has always been winner take most, not winner take all, but we tale most.

And I think that had Google come up with something that was a great step forward, it would be different, but have you looked at it, it is just Facebook with Google logo on top, with a little bit of compartmentalisation. So I didn’t sign up because I just can’t be stuffed running another social network. I have got enough already.

MS: The one that is really making a big impact at the moment, and at a business level as well, is, as you mentioned, Twitter. It is interesting because it is not just a way for a business to communicate with its clients and suppliers and customers etc, it is the customers communicating between themselves. So you really need to be on top of it don’t you?

PW: Yes. One of the things we talking and lost about, like I did a cute yesterday on social media for retail, and was showing a client I have done a bit of work with Wittner Shoes. What they are doing is they tweet some of their own stuff but they also retweet what their customers are saying about them.

And it is just a great little tweet stream, because if you have a look at them what they have done is harness that conversation and say `well, okay here’s what others are saying about us’. On my Deloitte Digital blog, I pull through a tweet stream where anybody who mentions Deloitte Digital is on the front page of the blog.

Now, some businesses might say `ah, you are advertising what people are saying about you’, and I am like, `well yeah, why not?’ If somebody says something bad, which hasn’t happened yet, but may after this interview, you deal with it, but the majority of stuff people say about us is good and my view is if you want to find out about Deloitte Digital and what people think about us, you can just go on Twitter search and search @DeloitteDigital and that will tell you what people are saying.

If you are not part of that conversation, things could go the wrong way. At least you have an opportunity to converse, and I think that’s the other point, it is a conversation.

Many organisations in Australia are actually running customer support through Twitter. That includes Optus, Telstra, CBA, Aussie Post, Vodafone. They have all got teams now, and people are sitting on hold with a call centre and tweeting about how annoyed they are to be still waiting and then some Twitter person at the call centre goes `hey, what is the problem, can I help you?’

And then there is a twitter conversation and they say this is what you do, and you link there, and the next thing you know, the person becomes advocate. So, using it for customer service, using it to amplify messages is going on. It’s just the same way that if I post a blog, nobody is going to know it is there, so I will tweet it.

 We’ve hiring these days, and if you are not on Twitter or running a blog, you have not much value to me. Because the capacity of media to leverage not only the audience that I have built around Deloitte Digital, but the audience of my staff and their connections, creates huge business value for us.

So we are avid tweeters. And instead of being worried about what people might say, I hire people who have got a demonstrated track record in knowing how to use these channels.

MS: Speaking of hiring, what about recruiting? What is going on there?

PW: In the field I work in, the sort of high-tech and digital space, I do not do job ads. I do tweets. ‘Hey, we need a mobile IOS app developer’. Or, I remember one I tweeted, where I needed a blackberry developer, one preferably with a risk-management background, for an app we were building.

 

About half an hour later, I got an answer back from a guy in Deloitte South Africa, who said there is a guy called Bradley Clayton who married a Melbourne girl and who landed there yesterday permanently.

He started working for me on Monday. And he was a blackberry developer who used to work in the risk management group in Deloitte South Africa. So it was almost like that is the guy I need. He landed in Melbourne, and there was no recruitment cost and the speed with which it happened was only days. So we use Twitter extensively for recruiting.

We set up a Facebook page for recruiting at Deloitte, particularly for the grads. And we do live-stream broadcasts for question and answer with the CEO and various leaders of the business, or even with people who are working on the ground; `what’s it like to work there, what’s it like to work in the online group?’

We have an `Ask Us’ section where people can come to the Facebook site and ask questions. Lots of technical questions, or questions like `when does the recruiting window close?’ And if the question is `what is it like to work for Deloitte Digital’, people on the ground answer it. We also have an internal social network we use called Yammer.

So we are sort of intensive users of social media. The way we look at it is this is sort of not media, it is really business. And we say `how can you apply these tools or concepts to any part of the organisation?’.

MS: Can you talk a bit about Yammer?

PW: We saw Yammer when it first launched in September of 2008. We were kicking ideas around in an innovation team and we said `why don’t we give this a go’. And I think that is the first lesson about adoption of social media. We did not do a business plan, or a risk assessment. Instead of buggerising around, we said `let’s just start using it and see what we can learn’.

So a small group of us started using it and that grew and grew to about 70. I force myself to use technology. How can I use it for this or that, or try different methods and work out how useful it is? We found Yammer extraordinarily useful where people were not always in the same location, sharing knowledge or even running meetings, and even instead of having meetings, just posting things up. If we are in development of an app or whatever, we put up the screenshots and ask `what do you reckon?’.

The other thing we also found was asking a question and tapping into the source of tacit knowledge of who knows whom or who knows what – Yammer just gives you answers quicker than you would find otherwise.

MS: How does it work?

PW: It is fairly straightforward. You go to Yammer.com and you put in your e-mail address. And so for Deloitte, all e-mail addresses end with Deloitte.com.au, and it creates a network of anybody else who has joined up with that same e-mail domain. If it was theage.com.au, anybody with that e-mail domain, anybody from The Age who signed up, would create a network and that becomes a private network.

It has involved to be a hybrid Twitter/ Facebook thing, but within your organisational network. So when it’s set up, what then starts to happen is you see the conversations, and often they will be social conversations, but over time people start using it for knowledge sharing.

We used it to coordinate stuff in the Brisbane floods. We used it when the ash cloud came over; people in various states who were trying to get back to Melbourne or South Australia were organising car-pooling to drive back. It just allows the organisation to self-organise. The other thing it does is it really just flattens the communication hierarchy.

It’s sort of funny, and maybe it’s just the culture of social networks, but everybody on Yammer is equal. The CEO is an avid user. He will always be talking to various grades, or popping in a short lime so as to who knows about this or that. So he is actively involved, but not as a hierarchy thing.

The other thing it does, particularly if you are geographically dispersed, is it just connects people in ways that they would never have had. So we have got about 500 interest groups on there now, everything from the accounting technical guys to the Deloitte mums on maternity leave, and the Deloitte dads on paternity leave are now sort of trying to get into the Deloitte mums’ group – asking things like `how do you maintain a work and family life when you have just had a new baby?’.

We find that stuff incredibly powerful, and we also find that it is really helpful to increase engagement of the staff. We have got about 4000 of the 5500 people in the firm using it. Nobody has said that you must use it. It has just really made us a much more agile organisation.

MS: What are some examples of a bad use or a gormless use of social media? Where have they been some problems for companies?

PW: To be honest, I am not a big fan of a lot of these dinky campaigns. You know, even getting back to that e-mail thing, if it is contrived. There was one company that did something about a lost jacket, and it was an ad.

One of the chocolate companies, I think, objected to people who were using their logo on their avatars or their profile pictures on Facebook, and the company wanted to bring them down.

If somebody wants to use my logo on their profile pic, knock yourself out! Not that I’m sure why they’d want to but if you do want to, it’s not hurting me. I also think beware of just robotic spam messages that don’t have any flavour or personality.

And back to that point about leaders in organisations: the problem is that the leaders either see the light or feel the heat, but in most cases don’t use it. It is much more an attitudinal thing. You know, ‘if I don’t use it, it therefore must be bad’.

That is one way that people look at it. The other one is that ‘well, I’m not sure about it, but I cannot walk past an Internet cafe or go on the train without seeing everybody using this stuff and the fact that I am not using it means I might be the one who is missing out here’.

I suppose the most enlightened CEO I have worked with is Greg Swann from Carlton Football Club. I’ve known him for a long time, and he just rang me up and said `look, I do not really understand this stuff but I know it is huge. Can you come and help us out?’ And their level of fan engagement over the last eight months or so has just gone through the roof.

The club is getting a lot of benefit from it. And that was a case of `well, I can see something is going on and I don’t really understand it and so I might get someone to help me’.

But I have had others who are not like that. I had one the other day. He was trying to run a big social media campaign and mentioned to me that they had banned use of You Tube, Facebook and Twitter in the organisation.

And I’m saying, `well, you have blocked your organisational capacity to use this stuff. And if you are trying to use it for this big lobbying campaign, it isn’t going to work’.

MS: I was about to ask that, actually. Should employers regulate their employees’ use of social media in any way?

PW: I often use the example of those security people at the airport: you know, you walk through that area and I do not really want them on Facebook. I want them checking that there are no guns and knives in the bags. But in their breaks, if they want to use their own iPhones at the kiosk for social media or whatever, that is fine.

It can be task-specific, but in general I say that the social media policy of so many Australian companies has been set by Hosni Mubarak. You know, ban Twitter, ban Facebook and shutdown the networks – the approach that the way to control it is to just ban it.

My sense is that this is the biggest thing I have seen on the web since I have been involved. And it is not going to go away. So if you as an organisation want to shut it down, suddenly people will not really want to work there because the way that more and more of us communicate and get stuff done is through social networks. And if you get inside an organisation that doesn’t allow them, you just can’t move. The organisation becomes so less agile than what you are used to dealing with in your own life.

The other thing I am saying a lot is that these days we get better computing at home then we do at work. In the old days, you would come to work and have your own computer and that would be like `wow, I have got a computer!’ I remember when I started it was a computer for the whole office. So, you have got nobody at home saying `do not use Twitter or don’t use a Gmail account, it must be insecure’.

I’m like, `well, since when did we get better security guys than Google?’ So it is this sort of attitude. People are adopting this stuff at home, and then go to work in the organisation and get told `no, you can’t use it’. But these skills and capabilities to get stuff done through their networks are developing.

So you talk to any CEO and they will say `oh yeah, my employees are the greatest asset we have got’. But in the next breath they say `if you put those people in front of a bloody computer they will scam it’. It is just not right.

Social networking either inside or outside will reflect the culture of your company. If you have got a bad corporate culture and people are unhappy, do not be surprised if those messages filter out, either through your own social media channels inside, or through your channels externally.

What we find pretty well everywhere is that the internal use of social media self-regulates. If somebody is being stupid or doing the wrong thing, there are enough people around to say `hey, that is not really what we do here’. So we have not had any problems.

My view would be as a rule, say yes. And only in exceptional circumstances say no. Whereas I think the rule is at the moment people say no and only in an extraordinary circumstances say yes. Those organisations that are going to thrive in the future are those that are agile and well-connected.

The more rigid and hierarchical you are you will go the way of our friends in Egypt. Anyone wanting a highly rigid hierarchy or to be in a controlling position will find himself increasingly under threat from active social networks.

MS: That is analogous, is it not Peter, to the difference between the philosophy that that which is not permitted is forbidden, which is so inferior to the idea that that which is not forbidden is permitted?

PW: This is as big a change in society as I have ever seen. I do think that the fall of the Egyptian regime made people think. And then you Gaddafi’s son two weeks later talking about Facebook, and I thought to myself that if in 2006 we said that Muamma Gadaffi’s son is going to be saying `we are being brought down by Facebook’, you would have gone `what is Facebook?’

There is a massive social shift going on here, and it’s quite exciting. It can be scary, but my sense is that if you don’t embrace change, and understand how you can leverage it, you will just fall behind.

It’s the fastest pace of technological change we have ever seen. And those changes in technology and the changes in society are both driving each other. And the next thing is obviously the mobile revolution. It is as exciting a time as I have ever seen in technology.

MS: Where do you think things are going?

PW: Clearly mobile. I coined a word which is sort of starting to get some traction – clomosoda: cloud, mobile, social, data. So, what I am saying is that from a tech point of view, the old model of I must take a long time to put in the hardware, install software, configure it all and then deploy it out to people has gone. I can get computing like a utility.

If I want water, I do not dig a well. I turn on a tap. Computing is like that now. If I want a blog, or a video channel, or a word processor, it is on the cloud. If I want to do accounting, there is a whole heap of online accounting packages that I do not have to install and manage. If I want an e-mail management tool, pretty well anything you want to do, it is out there on the cloud.

You just turn it on and if it doesn’t work, you have not invested an enormous amount of time and money. You can throw it out and change. So, cloud is important.

Mobile: mobile will just dominate the way people access and connect in the future. Whether that be through tablets or whether that be through smart phones, we have seen that shift happening very quickly.

Social: whatever technology you are running should have social in it. I run an online accounting system which has got social in it. People can be invited in to look at the numbers and discuss and all that stuff, as opposed to being just a dumb set of static numbers.

Now we can say `let’s animate that data. Let’s talk about it’. Your accountant can come in and review your numbers and say `hey, this is what’s going on in each month’, and give you some ideas, as opposed to the old model of transporting the data once a year to do a tax return.

And then finally, data: there is an explosion of data and that data is continually being made available. So, whether that is weather data, government data, bureau of statistics date, you can combine that with your own data to get real insights.

There is a great Melbourne start-up called Kaggle, Kaggle.com, who run data competitions. Recently they appeared on the White House blog because in the US, NASA and the Royal Astronomical Society ran a data competition on mapping dark matter.

They had been working on this for 50 years with some of the greatest minds in human history, and some 35-year glaciologist solved it in a week. And so one of the greatest scientific challenges, by crowd sourcing and making it open and leveraging data, was solved. Bang! There is a guy out there who knows how to do it, it’s just you never ask the right person.

And that is something that is wonderful about Melbourne at the moment. Kaggle is just tearing it up over in the US. We’ve got 99designs, the dominant crowd-sourcing platform for design, which just had a big capital injection from Axel, which are one of the founding investors in Facebook.

And Melbourne is starting to get this global reputation as the home of crowd sourcing. I find that exciting as well. I’m always saying to people `forget the war for talent and start fighting the war for crowds’. If you can get crowds interested in working with you, just as Apple have done with the iPhone, or what 99designs have done with design, or what Kaggle is doing with data scientists, your capacity to do stuff is just through the roof.

MS: What about the cloud? Can you talk a little about that, please, for people who may not be particularly familiar with it?

PW: It’s funny, whenever I present I say `who uses cloud computing?’ And one in a hundred put their hands up. Then I say `who uses Hotmail, Gmail, or a Yahoo mail account?’ And then every hand goes up. And I say `good, you are using cloud computing’.

So, what it really means, and again hopefully most of the readers and listeners have got a Hotmail or Gmail account – if they are reading this they probably do – but the idea is that rather than you having to install software on your own machine to get access to some functionality, somewhere somebody out there just does it and you just access it through the web.

We do not know where Google stores our individual e-mails, and to some extent we don’t care, because we know it just works. So, taking that example of e-mail – and Hotmail was the first big cloud thing – we are seeing many more software applications being made available in this on-demand way. I don’t have to install software, I just subscribe online and set up my own account, whether it be a blog or a Twitter account or even Facebook, you know, where I have my personal information.

Then the other layer of the cloud is the infrastructure layer. Traditionally organisations would have their own data centres and server farms and all these guys managing it. Now it’s like I need some server space so I can get it from Amazon or I can get it from Microsoft on their Azure platform.

So we don’t have to run all this bloody hardware. I can say I’ll stick it on Microsoft’s cloud platform because those guys know how to do it and they do it on a big scale. So, really what this is doing is it is turning computing into a utility.

Like, do I build a well or do I just leverage the outsourcing to somebody who just manages the water storage system? It is computing on demand with no installation. You just use what is there. And you are either at an application layer or an infrastructure layer.

MS: A smart and agile business would see this as a great cost saving and creative opportunity.

PW: Absolutely. And if you go through airports like I do, you see that IBM and Google and Microsoft are advertising the cloud everywhere. The cloud gives you the capacity to avoid the cost spike that has been traditionally involved with large computer deployments.

Say SAP, for example – a lot of businesses use that and it has got a long lead time, high costs, lots of hardware and all that stuff. The poster child of large-scale cloud computing is salesforce.com, which is a customer relationship management system. If I want to use it I go along to the cloud and it does not take me two years to deploy, it takes me about 10 minutes.

The other thing, therefore, is that you have not made a massive investment and hope like hell that it is going to pay a return. There are some risks with cloud. We have seen with various airlines where their systems had gone down over the last year or so, where they had put it out to the cloud but then the provider falls over.

So it does not obviate the need to make sure that the people that we are going with have really good redundancy, that if something does fall over it is spread around enough that it can be kick-started immediately and got back up.

You still need to apply that same business continuity stuff, and make sure that there is not one single point of failure. It does not obviate the need for that governance, but it does mean that if I have done my due diligence I can put a mission-critical system on it.

There are some organisations like government organisations with data who say `no, we can’t store data outside our four walls’. But for most businesses, and for small businesses, I’d love to see them jump on this stuff because it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it works. And we are seeing a lot more big businesses starting to leverage it.

MS: Is this creating a skills shortage? There is a level of skills that many, many people have now because they are using Twitter and Facebook etcetera, but within an organisation is there another layer or level of skills required, and is this creating a very tight labour market in this area?

PW: Yes. You know that old saying that just because you can drink in a pub doesn’t mean you can run one. The same applies here. Just because you have got a Twitter account does not make you a social media guru. And I am saying to people this sort of capacity of people to out-think and out-execute rather than out-spend is where it is at now.

So having people that are savvy about using it but also are able to be creative in terms of what they can do with it, is where it’s at. Having people with the capability to use it is great, but what you want to do is find out who are the thinkers, who are the people out there who can bring different ways of using this thing or spread it across the business.

MS: Peter, how did you come to be doing this? What has been your evolution?

I am actually an account. I qualified as an account and I used to be a liquidator and receiver sort of guy. I did that for a number of years and then when the web started to emerge in ‘93 I was hearing a lot about it so I went to an Internet cafe in London and said `show me the Internet’ and some guy started showing me and about two minutes later I was thinking `my god this is going to change everything’.

And the guy in the cafe sort of said `yeah, I reckon it will’. And I thought, you know what, I want a career change, I reckon I’m in on the ground floor here. This is what I am going to do. So I quickly taught myself to program and all that stuff and realised that whilst I was good at it, there would be a lots of people who were much better. But what I was finding was people were not thinking about how you could use it.

They were more into the plumbing. And I was thinking more about what you can do with it, so when I came back to Australia in ’96, I set up an e-business consulting group in Deloitte and then we bought a large web-development company called Eclipse in 2002 and I ran that, and that’s now called Deloitte Online and is going gangbusters, particularly in the mobile space. And when it got to a large-scale size, I started saying why isn’t Deloitte using this to deliver services to customers.

So I founded a new business called Deloitte Digital. This was about how can we deliver professional services online. I think we have still are a category of one, or so Forrester told me that the other day. I just love exploring the art of the possible. I love doing stuff that has never been done before.

I also love just hanging out with people who are wanting to try stuff. I get a great buzz out of it, to be honest. I love keeping abreast of stuff. I love seeing something and then thinking oh maybe I could do that with it. It is a curiosity, a passion.

People say how can you keep up with it. Filling up the glass in `93 when I was an accountant to get across this area took a while, but once you have filled the glass, it’s not too hard to keep topping it up as new stuff comes through. I am a junkie. I just love it.

MS: The final question I ask everybody in The Zone is a kind of personal question. It is: what is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do, that you are prepared at least to talk about here?

PW: God! Over the years in business I have had to terminate employees. That’s something that is terrible. I remember one  boss said to me once, you know if somebody is not succeeding in the position they are in, they know it and you know it and you are not doing them any favours by just letting this persist.

But still, where I have had people I am close to that haven’t been quite cutting it or whatever, or it was time to move on, I find that really hard. I find that really hard. I invest a lot of myself into the people I work with and it’s not that I do it every day, and I cannot remember the last time I did it, but it takes me back to over the years where I have had to have those sort of conversations. That is really, really hard.

MS: Peter Williams, thank you very much for your time today.

PW: No worries, thanks Michael.

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Job recruiting moves to social network sites

Social networking is creating fundamental changes in the way employees search for jobs, and how companies recruit.

One in five people now begins his or her job searches online via social networks including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, according to a recent survey of 18,000 job hunters in the United States by Michigan-based Kelly Services Inc., a workforce solutions provider.

“It’s not like the days of the past where we waited for the Sunday paper to look for job postings,” says Rich Struble, a vice president with Kelly Services who manages the firm’s Cincinnati territory. “Social media is really the next step in online recruitment, and it’s changing rapidly as it creates instantaneous lines of communication between employers and jobs seekers.”

For companies, social networks can help cast a broader — and still more focused — recruiting net. As social job hunting increases, more companies are fine-tuning their recruiting strategies to optimize the new tools, says Struble.

“They’re realizing a good digital presence isn’t just posting a position on an online jobs board,” Struble says.

Nearly 90 percent of companies say they will begin recruiting through social media this year, according to a June survey of 800 employers by Burlingame, Calif.-based Jobvite Inc., a recruiting products provider.

That’s up from 83 percent in 2010. And 55 percent of survey takers say they plan to invest in social media recruiting this year, making it the most popular area for new-hire spending, according to the survey.

“Companies are getting serious about developing training for recruiters to use social media and developing their presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook,” Struble says. “Job seekers are beginning to expect it, and if a company doesn’t have a presence out there, it may lead a candidate to wonder why.”

At Farmers Insurance offices in Mason, Ohio, a team of eight recruiting officers are working to help the firm more than double the size of its Ohio market share by 2020.

“We still use traditional job boards and networking, but it doesn’t always get you in front of the candidates you’re looking for,” says Jad Buckman, a recruiting specialist.

Buckman says his firm has relied heavily on LinkedIn to break into the world of social media recruiting.

The professional networking site says it has more than 100 million registered users in more than 200 countries.

A better snapshot

Compared to other networks, “one of the benefits you get is a much better snapshot of someone’s background,” he says of LinkedIn.

ATT is actively recruiting candidates for thousands of jobs across the United States. The firm uses a variety of tactics, including tweeting links for positions to its 7,200 Twitter followers and more than 110,000 followers at the company’s LinkedIn careers page, says Carrie Corbin, associate director of staffing and talent attraction at ATT.

“(Social networking) is a direct path for conversation that allows engagement and brand enhancement,” Corbin says.

“It has truly enabled us to steer applicants away from the black hole of submitting a resume and never hearing back. We like to say a ‘no’ answer is better than no answer.”

In a digital world, the notion of brand appeal and awareness isn’t for companies alone, says Kelly Services’ Struble.

“Job seekers can really create a professional brand through these various social media sites that allow employers to better understand their capabilities and strengths,” he says.

When Louisville, Ky., native David Heyburn decided to switch his career from retail banking to urban planning, he first enrolled in the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.

Then he turned to Twitter to immerse himself in his new field of study.

“I needed to educate myself as much as possible about the field, and I found with Twitter that I could connect with people who are real idea generators,” he says.

“The information there is coming directly from people who are at the top of the industry.”

While he also uses Facebook and LinkedIn, Heyburn says Twitter allows him to engage with people through channels that normally would be guarded by “gatekeepers and red tape.

“The key is you have to have something meaningful to say in the first place,” Heyburn explains.

Failing to update profiles or carefully manage their digital presence can wreak havoc for job candidates, says Krista Canfield, a senior manager of corporate communications at LinkedIn.

Profiles with photos, she says, are seven times more likely to be viewed by employers.

Nearly half of employers said they use social networking sites to screen job candidates, according to a Career Builder survey.

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