January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Part 4: How To Embrace Social Media Marketing In The Staffing Industry

I finished the last post with this statement: A service company’s most important resource is its employees, and their skills are crucial to maintaining a cutting edge in the staffing industry tomorrow. I believe long-term social media successes for the staffing industry depends much on how well they succeed integrating their employees to become a part of their online movement, but this will only happen if their company culture is ready for it.

Corporate Culture

Who owns the strategy and budget? Answering that question and we know that social media success lies with how well leaders understands this new game of business. The leaders must understand why and how they should bet on this ball and make it a part of their business routines and work. The leaders are the ones that are responsible. I believe Mark Schaefer who blogs at grow explained it very good in his guest blog post at Convince&Convert.

Lead-in Program

In the last post we talked about having different people around your social media table, then you need to arrange your social goals, guidelines and how to roll this social media band wagon out into the organization. I think when the industry is having their lead-in training for new employees they should have social media as a part of the introductory training. I’m not talking about basic LinkedIn training here, each person must understand the big picture and how he or she should use social media efficient to enhance business results.

Support Your Employees

Sales and delivery teams need to have social media integrated into their everyday business routines and work. If you work with sales you need to understand how this works in all different stages of a sales process: Lead – Phone Calls – Sales Meeting – Sale – Customer Care. You need a social media policy and clear guidelines that supports your staff to make their work, remember confusion kills productivity. This obviously creates new demands on CRM systems (social CRM) and internal communication. If  you climbs this saddle with a goal to “be social” online you can’t communicate efficient internally by using email and phone, support your employees by setting up the right context and infrastructure.

It’s Your Turn

What’s your take on company culture and social media?

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January 20, 2012 By 2 Comments

Part 3: How To Embrace Social Media Marketing In The Staffing Industry

I have received some questions regarding what I mean with “doing social” vs. “being social”? We can see how the staffing industry is using social media for pushing out job offers, advertisement and different campaigns. They are not using social media marketing to create new leads, sales or more loyalty among their customers.

Screenshots From Twitter

In the screenshots below (Swedish) we can see how majority of the companies are “doing social” in the industry, and it’s severe to find any communication (@mentions) at all with people. When we are looking at their Facebook pages it’s the same thing overall.

Don’t miss my video interview with Gary Vaynerchuk when he is talking about the “push” mindset.

Doing Social

Doing Social

Doing Social

Poolia Is On The Right Way

Gap Creating Business Opportunity

Nobody is creating content or sustaining a serious business blog here. I wonder which company in the staffing industry who will grab the chance first? This is a gap creating business opportunity, and right now my bet is definitely on Poolia.

Social Media Is Not A Title

The first step (video post) towards a social media marketing strategy is to get the right people involved around the social media table and then get the wrong people to step down. A Corporate title has nothing to do with social media. Nobody knows exactly where we end up on this social journey, but I know if we have the right crew aboard; then we will find the right social path. The first step is not to set up a presence on various social platforms.

Include The Sales Manager

Business reminds us about the sports world, the success depends on individual players, team spirit and the game plan. The sales manager is primarily responsible for creating strategies, tactics, monitoring KPI, and keeping the team motivated. The customers will be strongly influenced by the team’s performance here and social media marketing is an important tool to leverage when it comes to competitiveness and success in the B2B industry today. The industry needs to put sales in a new perspective, and the sales manager must integrate social media marketing with the sales process (blog post) before someone is checking her or his expiration date as a sales manager (blog post). As a staffing company today you should have your sales team involved around the social media table.

A service company’s most important resource is its employees, and their skills are crucial to maintaining a cutting edge in the staffing industry tomorrow.

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January 16, 2012 By 9 Comments

Part 2: How To Embrace Social Media Marketing In The Staffing Industry

Part 2

Welcome to part two on our journey to help the staffing industry embrace social media. My focus here is mainly on bigger staffing companies in Scandinavia who is operating in several countries like Poolia, Manpower, Adecco, Proffice and AcademicWork (just examples there are some more). Let’s continue this journey by examining the opportunity the industry have with social media marketing. Remember there is no one size fits all regarding this topic and you need to develop your own edge by executing and learn.

The Relationship Account

We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a cash reserve for future events when we need to make withdrawals. With social media we have the opportunity to make deposits into the relationship account with our customers on a scale that never has been possible before, but this is not easy, it takes sweat and hustle to reach great results exactly as the existing sales process you have today. You are on the right track being social when you are doing this thoroughly by building real relationships by out carrying your competitors instead of pushing your message with social media.

Measure Your Deposits

We can understand the relationships we are building online and offline by using the social thermometer perspective. If I only had one minute to explain what social media is all about I should use this picture.

  1. Don’t have a clue about you: They have no relationship with you yet, they don’t know that you exist.
  2. Aware but don’t care: Aware of your brand but have never bought something or never taken some kind of action yet.
  3. Single action: Some kind of action maybe they have made a single purchase from you. Maybe they subscribe to your newsletter.
  4. Frequent action: You have a relationship with the customer and they are repeating purchasers of your stuff.
  5. Advocates: On the top you find the real advocates of your product and service, this is the dream for every marketer to reach this relationship with the end user.

We will talk more about the social thermometer later when we are mapping our audience. The reason why I gave you a glimpse about this here is because I want you to understand what social media is all about. If we are applying this to the industry, I can’t see any staffing company having this perception, can you? Please let me know then. Because I can only see push marketing from companies who are doing social not being social (part 1).

You Reap What You Sow

Depending how much deposits you are putting in to this relationship account you can reap different types of interest. There is no quick fix here, building relationships are long-term investments. It’s always a challenge to replace account managers or human resource managers who have established a strong relationship with customers, because they have traveled together and made many deposits into the relationship account, and it’s in those moments we can experience the famous line; our customers are not buying what we sell, they are “buying” our people (it’s an expression). It takes time to establish know like and trust. Social media marketing can help B2B companies humanize their logotype and letting the company becoming a more significant part of the real relationship, so when people leave, companies don’t need to start from scratch again with the relationship in the same extent.

Old School

When I’m looking at the Industry today I can see how the competition is fierce and majority of the companies is thinking old school tactics to developing relationships with the customers. Last year I did a consultant work for a staffing and recruitment company and I become aware how many different phone calls the customers get from this industry every day. I’m not saying you should quit working the phones to book sales meetings, I think you should leverage new ways to enhance the opportunities to meet your customers where your competition is weak and where your customers don’t have their defending guard up.

New School

Mainly the recruiters and HR managers in the industry is using LinkedIn to find new candidates and connect with people. Account managers are using LinkedIn like as an extension of their CRM system to find information regarding potential customers and connect with existing ones. This is good, and also cheers for the companies who are executing and trying to shape their edge by providing their staff with LinkedIn knowledge how they could enhance this platform. I really think this is a step forward, but I also know that this is where you starts sliding from the path of “being social” towards “doing social”. It’s happening because you jump into social media before you have the whole picture.

It’s your turn

What do you think? Please contribute and leave a comment!

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