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Tweets from the Suites: How Execs Use Twitter

What's Happening

In CEOs Take on Twitter, Business Week looked at the Twitter pages of some C-level execs, and asked them for brief comments about their Twitter use.  The result was actually very interesting.  Since almost all of the people they looked at are in the high tech/social media/PR/etailing sector anyway (think Zappos, TechCrunch, Sun), it’s perhaps not surprising that they are tuned in to the Twitterverse.  But taken together, their insights about tweeting make up a pretty good index of what makes Twitter important.

The sole outlier in this tech-heavy group was Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.  (For those who don’t follow the book trade, Thomas Nelson is the leading publisher of bibles and Christian books.)  Hyatt describes himself as an avid blogger—and a quick review of his Twitter page reveals frequent tweets that mix the personal with the informative.  Most important:  They do not appear to be churned out by staffers.

The Business Week story appeared in August of 2008, so in a way it’s old news.  But the time lapse permits us to see what has happened to the profiled tweeters in the meantime.  And we find out that Michael Hyatt—whose stats in the article were Following: 146, Followers: 1,059, and Updates: 2,045—now has (wait for it) 74,776  Followers and has racked up an impressive 9,809 Tweets.  He is Listed 2,124  times.

Hyatt’s Twitterstream is a textbook example of how to convey personality online (“We just finished Vespers.  Now off to a birthday party.”) and engage community (“I’m giving away 50 free copies of [book title].”)  He answers nerdy questions (“Yes, I just used the Amazon Associates tools, plus a little CSS styling.”) and describes relatable experiences (“We had such an amazing evening. There is something so healing about being with people who know and understand you.”)  Along the way he slips in PR for his blog (“I have two ads left for sale on my blog for March . . . ”)

He retweets his family’s updates (daughter Marissa is chronicling her attempt to quit smoking) along with links to useful content (“7 Ways to Build Your Author Brand Online”), relevant events, and topical stories.  Last but not least—and best of all, or worst, depending on how you look at it—he ghost-tweets a Twitterstream for his dog, @NelsonHyatt.  Sample:  “I can’t believe @MIchaelHyatt left me in the car while he went browsing in the bookstore. Hello! Obviously, I can read!”

@Nelson has 464 Followers and he answers all their comments.

@Michael almost never mentions Thomas Nelson directly, by the way—just an occasional oblique reference, like this one from 15 minutes ago:  “I’m sitting in a Nonfiction Publication Board, discussing five prospective new books. Excellent proposals!” That tweet demonstrates exactly how to evoke positive impressions of a company without appearing in the least promotional.

I’ll follow up on some of the other Tweeters profiled in Business Week, and if there’s anything interesting, there will be another post.  But in the meantime . . . anyone who wants to see corporate tweeting done well for a mainstream company should take a look at Hyatt’s achievement.  Though it’s not the only good approach, it’s an example of one that works.

 

(Thanks to rvacapinta for the original boardroom photo.  It’s been modified a bit for this illustration.)

Hello JobDeck! Plus–Twitter Productivity

 

NYT JobDeck

I recently received this tweet from Skellie, one of my favorite idea sources:

Productivity in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

So–I promptly threw out my entire library of David Allen and Stephen Covey books, closed my Nozbe account, and trashed my Pomodoro.

Not really.  But I do recognize that if I followed the 11-word formula faithfully, I would resolve a lot of productivity problems.  And happily, this thought fit right in with a post I’d been planning on how to avoid the social media time trap.  Then I got a tweet about JobDeck, and everything fell into place!

TweetDeck is just one of the several good tools available for managing Twitter, but it’s the one I know best.  And it’s also the one that recently rolled out a special version for job-seekers.  JobDeck is essentially TweetDeck enhanced with built-in job search functionality, a special column for recruiting news, and a desklike appearance.  The New York Times Technology section offers a nice summary of the product.

In terms of productivity—having a dashboard like TweetDeck, where you can filter and organize many Twitter streams (as well as input from Facebook and LinkedIn), is a huge help if you really want to be involved in social media.  But TweetDeck can also increase the seduction factor by making you aware of just how much is going on in the Twitterverse every minute.  So you might want to browse Tim Ferriss’s article How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You—5 Tips.  One tip (“Set alerts or blocks on Twitter usage”) discusses productivity aids like RescueTime.  I’m about to test-drive RescueTime and will review if it’s interesting.

I’m also trying out Mr.Tweet.  Basically, Mr.Tweet looks at your own followers/followees and recommends other Twitterers you might want to consider.  So far, Mr.Tweet has made some interesting suggestions—and the excellent interface shows how each one was derived, as well as providing individual profiles that include Twitter statistics and sample tweets.  It’s free, and worth a look, especially if you have a focused Twitter agenda and would like to quickly find high-value tweeters.

A final thought about Twitter and productivity.  I was a late adopter of Twitter, and I’m still figuring out how best to use it.  One key (for me anyway) has been finding people whose tweets alert me to things I want to know about.  Getting the most out of Twitter requires practice, but you can learn to scan various streams quickly and pick out just what’s relevant or intriguing, while letting the rest go by.

That’s from the perspective of using Twitter as an information source.  Using Twitter as a search tool has a whole different set of considerations, and there is not a better overview than Boolean Blackbelt’s How to Search Twitter for  Sourcing and Recruiting.

A Macy’s Mystery

When it comes to the “why” of a perplexing matter . . . I’ll keep working on the mystery long after I should have stopped. In this case, I started out with one perplexity and ended up with another–but overall, the quest produced some interesting results. So let’s retrace:

7 AM. A post on ere.net asks: It’s Web 2.009. Is your company’s career portal keeping up? Naturally, I’m hooked! But it turns out the discussion is mostly concerned with usability. (Some good tips on UI testing, by the way, so worth a read.) Very important of course, because really bad functionality will be a deal breaker for most visitors. But “keeping up” today means much more than decent (or even flawless) functionality–and there’s nothing very new in the post. Except . . .

7:15 AM. I notice this sentence: “Congrats to my buds at Yahoo for winning ERE’s prestigious 2009 award for best corporate careers website last week.” Rush to award site to find out the award criteria, rush to Yahoo! Careers to see what the judges liked.

7:30 AM. Disappointed. (a) No criteria. (b) Yahoo very nice but not fabulous. Attractive, upbeat, easy to navigate, and plenty of amenities—but no surprises. And certainly not at the leading edge.

7:45 AM. Since there the website provides no stated criteria for the award (well, not really—just some general questions the nominees must respond to), I looked for previous winners to see if there would be a theme. Hmmmm. For the record, the 2008 award went to KPMG, with Johnson & Johnson and The Warehouse as finalists.

8 AM. Fly-by of cited sites reveals the 2008 crop to be nice (KPMG), nice (J&J), and . . . were they talking about the New Zealand-based retailer? If so, it’s nice. Looks like the common theme in all three sites might be gee-whiz graphic effects on the landing pages.

8:15 AM. Make more coffee.

8:30 AM. Return to original post, then follow another lead, from mention of 2008 Forrester Research study entitled “Best and Worst of Career Web Sites.” Track down press coverage and learn that Forrester reviewed twelve sites for the study:

American International Group (AIG), Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and The Goldman Sachs Group in the financial services industry; JCPenney, Kroger, Macy’s and Rite Aid in retail; and job boards CareerBuilder.com, Dice, Monster and Yahoo! Hotjobs.

8:45 AM: All the reviewed sites failed the test—and apparently, they failed abysmally. According to this summary in The Industry Standard:

“Ten of the 12 sites reviewed scored below zero,” the [Forrester] report reads. A passing score on all 25 criteria Forrester examines would be a +25 or higher, with a score range of between -50 and +50. “Yahoo! Hotjobs fared the best at +10, which is 15 points shy of a passing score; Merrill Lynch fared the worst at -18. The average score across all of the sites evaluated was -8.8,” Forrester reports.

So what was wrong? Here again, specific criteria were not revealed in the summary. But according to Forrester, common problems across all industries included: “missing content and functions, flawed navigation flows, illegible text and poor use of space, as well as poor error handling and missing privacy and security policies.” And the report concludes that “companies need to design career sites with the user in mind and begin revamping by first fixing problems that inhibit site usability.”

8:45 AM. There are now three fascinating new questions that demand following up. Question 1: Did the Forrester-reviewed sites fix their problems in the months after the report was published? Question 2: How did Forrester manage to extract what it calls “best practices” from this batch of bad sites? And Question 3: How did the Macy’s Career site go from industry-leading innovator to—

9 AM: Decide post will have to be in at least two parts. Stay tuned!

From A to Z: Will Amazon Zap Zappos?

a-to-z-headline-2

Names say a lot.  “Amazon” is the name of a really big river and “Zappos” (even though it’s actually a derivation of zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes) has the flavor of a comic strip exclamation.  Zap-wow!

Or it could sound like “zippy”–which certainly captures the brand personality of scrappy little Zappos, the company that took a whimsical idea like buying shoes online and turned it into a retail charm offensive.  Zappos has become a marketing star by virtue of its quirky style and wide-open spigot of corporate communications.

For an example of the latter, just see this pages-long memo on the recent acquisition, which promises that the Zappos culture won’t change.  And if you need a refresher on the Zappos culture, just check out their famous Core Values, or visit Fun & A Little Weird!, “The Inside Zappos Blog.”

It’s hard to believe there won’t be some culture effects at Zappos when the river rolls in, but that remains to be seen.  In the meantime, let’s take a look at their respective approaches to recruiting.

Zappos:

zappos-jobs

And Amazon:

amazon-jobs

Let’s look again!

a-and-z-comparison

That may not need much commenting, but just in case . . .

Both use similar color schemes (the always-safe “blue plus bright”) and a grid layout.  But there the similarities end.  The Zappos page is full of energy and playfulness, the Amazon page is full of–well, it’s not full of anything.  In fact it’s rather empty, from a visual standpoint.  (I didn’t show the full screen proportion, but there is even more white space to the right.)  And from a content standpoint, there’s no information (really, none)–just labels.

Okay, there’s a paragraph of text.  But I would describe it as empty of content.  There are 71 words, and 8 of them are “day.”  The 71 words are divided into 8 sentences, all but one containing the word “day.”  Here’s an example:  “And your day to join a company that redefines itself every day.”  And here’s another:  “It’s your day to be a part of something great.”

This dogged repetition might have seemed rhythmic if chanted, but it really doesn’t work well as a passive block of text on a white page.  It actually reminds the reader of something robotic–and while that might connect up with Amazon’s great approach to automation, I don’t think that was the intent.

Back at Zappos, there’s not much text either (56 words in 2 long sentences, plus three exhortatory fragments).  But it’s definitely not robotic.  And it delivers a focused message:  Zappos is not an ordinary company and it’s fun to work here.

Whereas . . . the message I took away from the Amazon page was “No one cares about this message (or this page) very much.”

To be fair, the goal at Amazon may have been to create a pleasant, professional appearance and tone, with a clean look and feel–and there may be reason to think that would work effectively in terms of its target audience and employer brand.   But the Amazon tagline is actually very similar to Zappos (at Zappos it’s “Work Hard. Play Hard. All the time!” and at Amazon, it’s “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.”), so we have to ask:  Which site delivers that message more successfully?

And two final points:  The Zappos page has social media links, the Amazon page does not.  The Zappos page has a video, the Amazon page does not.  Inevitable impression?  Zappos is on top of the times, while Amazon is lingering a bit behind.

Let’s see what happens when the waters rise.


Circular Motion: Two Views of Employee Referral

swa

Conventional wisdom says: Employee referral programs are an excellent source of high-quality, low-cost hires.

Leigh Buchanan says: Not so fast there, buckaroo.

Or words to that effect. The funny and insightful Buchanan, an editor-at-large for Inc., asks a good question in the March issue:  Is Your Company Inbred?

And though she acknowledges the advantages of employee referrals, she also points out that:

Biodiversity is one sign of a healthy ecosystem; mutts tend to be sturdier than purebreds. Companies that hire lots of people who know one another—because they attended the same schools or play golf together every weekend or used to work together someplace else—may reduce the diversity of their workforces’ experiences and perspectives.

This particular concern is probably more of a danger for small to mid-size companies than for giant corporations. But it might actually be most hazardous in specialized departments of large companies, where cliqueishness can take root easily.  And there are other potential issues as well, so it’s worth taking a look at both sides of the referral coin.

Employee referral programs have the power to create “virtuous circles,” where well-chosen employees provide links to other good employees, and the effect builds. Ideally, the circle develops and sustains itself because . . .

  • Employees won’t risk their own reputations by referring people who don’t fit the company or job.
  • Referred applicants already have knowledge of the company from their referring friend, so they have positive (or at least realistic) expectations.
  • People who already know and like each other have an enhanced chance of working together well.
  • Referrals often produce passive candidates who would otherwise be hard to find.
  • Referring employees have an investment in the success of their referees.

Case in point: I spent a year on contract at Southwest Airlines (and yes, it’s a ton of fun there), which is perhaps the poster company for employee referral. Indeed, getting your resume read at SWA can be about like getting your toddler into a top-tier nursery school: you just have to know somebody!

To get a feel for the virtuous circle effect at SWA, look at their Careers landing page (which is conveniently reproduced at the top of this post). The prominent visual of happy people serves the purpose of attracting applicants, but it also sends signal that Southwest is looking for people who will be happy. The happy factor is established as a key driver for hiring—and every single page on the site builds that message.

Happy people want their friends to be happy too! And companies (like SWA) that actively look for sociable employees get an automatic advantage, since sociable people tend to know lots of other sociable people, so the effect expands. Many of the companies on the Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work For have harnessed the power of happy to build their own ranks through employee referrals.

But the potential also exists for employee referrals to create vicious circles, in which employees manipulate harried hiring managers in order to build their own little fiefdoms, populated with people that agree with them or will at least go along with them.  (Sounds harsh, but harsh happens.)  And since happy-ness is not a key reality at every company, employee referrals may sometimes be driven more by incentives than by team spirit. In addition, employee referral programs are increasingly exploited by external systems—but that’s another post.

At the bottom line, though, employee referrals are usually very cost-effective, yielding the best cost-of-hire of any method. So check out John Sullivan’s list of reasons why referral programs fail (sort of best practices in reverse), and take a look at a few Careers sites that do a nice job of promoting employee referral programs:

For further reading, there’s an interesting white paper on employee referrals, plus a LOT of links, at The Corporate Recruiters Blog.

Farewell to Flash? (And Why That Matters)

 

Mashable screenshot

Among the Earth-shaking events of April 2010 was Apple’s announcement that iProducts will never, ever have support for Flash.

So?

It may not be important to follow the back-and-forth technical arguments about Flash, but anyone who has anything to do with corporate communications online should acquire at least a high-level overview of this development.  And since employer branding in general, and the Careers site in particular, have a strong interest in social networking and multimedia, there are very good reasons to be in the picture on this topic.

Oh?

Skip the details, and the issue is mainly mobility.  For good or otherwise—folks today want to see/find/do everything on their phones (and other mobile devices) that they can see/find/do at their desks.  In fact they want to do more, since they will be operating in physical space, in real time, rather than just looking at a static monitor.  Plus:  They want it all to be seamlessly familiar, easily accessible, battery-friendly, and plenty quick.

Leveraging the mobility agenda is increasingly important for effective recruiting.  So companies need to be aware of shifts in technology and ahead of the adoption/implementation curve.  If IT is trying to talk to you about HTML5, listen.  If they are not talking about it, worry.

For a fairly friendly introduction to the issues at play, follow these steps:

  1. Read Steve Jobs’s clearly written and well reasoned explanation of Apple’s position.
  2. Read Mashable’s follow-up post, Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML5 Did.
  3. Read another point of view from Flash developer Richard Leggett
  4. Zoom out and review the big picture with Wired’s analysis of the Top 7 Disruptions of 2009.

Finally, make sure tech evolution is getting serious consideration at your company. Will those high-value passive candidates be able to view CEO greetings, employee testimonials, and other cool Careers content on their iPads??