A Job You Love

Depuis l’an dernier, je suis de très prêt la conférence organisée par mon ami Luke Brynley-Jones de Our Social Times…Il y a eu la première version en décembre 2010 et donc la 2e cette année, le 6 décembre prochain à Paris dans les salons St Honoré.

Sur Twitter, vous pourrez tout suivre avec le hashtag: #SCRM11

La conférence social CRM 2011, c’est quoi?

La conférence social CRM 2011 réunira tous les principaux experts des médias sociaux, du marketing online et de la relation clients pour échanger autour des dernières analyses, tendances et techniques de Social CRM.

Entre autre des têtes bien connues du secteur comme la start-up Française très dynamique, Synthesio et Loic Moysan, l’équipe de “We Are Social” avec Sandrine Plasseraud (mon amie rennaise de l’étape:), la Community Manager de Voyages-Sncf.fr, Yaelle Teicher.

Et à la mode anglo-saxonne, il y aura beaucoup d’études de cas et de l’interactivité…comme l’an dernier pour ceux qui y étaient déjà!

Moi un aficionado du recrutement 2.0…

Moi j’y serai pour faire le pont entre mon activité de conseil et formation en recrutement 2.0 et le marketing sur les médias sociaux…je crois que j’ai beaucoup de chose à apprendre et ça me fait vraiment du bien d’en sortir et de prendre un peu de hauteur de ce milieu des RH qui est très consanguin. Pêcher des idées, réfléchir différemment…et rencontrer des personnes extérieures à mon activité…autant d’avantages pour moi.

Une place à gagner, comment?

Et en plus, je vous offre la possibilité de gagner une place pour la conférence (valeur faciale de 195 euros quand même) en laissant un commentaire sur cet article. Je choisirai de façon aléatoire un gagnant…avec ma main innocente!

Note: Sorry to my English speaking readers, this post is in French as I am launching a French Social Recruiting community!

Ca y est c’est le grand jour pour nous (Jean-Christophe Anna et moi), le lancement du site Recrutement Médias Sociaux. C’est le 1er site communautaire qui regroupe des experts ou praticiens qui écriront sur tous les sujets de Recrutement, sourcing, marque employeur….bref enfin de l’article de fond ou des sujets traités avec une vraie dose de pratique.

Je compte écrire régulièrement des études de cas comme j’ai pu le faire sur le blog de Link Humans! Du pratique, du pragmatique pour bien comprendre où l’on en est!!

Né de la frustration

Ca faisait déjà un certain temps que je ressentais de la frustration de ne pas avoir de lieu pour échanger avec les praticiens des RH sur l’impact des réseaux sociaux. Il y a des sites communautaires comme Locita, Mycommunitymanager ou autre et ….rien qui traite des RH.

Une sacrée équipe!!

Et c’est donc chose faite…et autour de nous, il y a une belle équipe de contributeurs: Franck La Pinta, Julien Cotte, Jacques Froissant, Vincent Rostaing, Gait Le Goaster, Hugues Truttmann, Celine Lappas, Aurélie Girard, Lilian Mahoukou, Marie-Pierre Fleury, Camille Travers, Guillaume Coudert, Damien Joliot, Aymeric Vincent, Jérôme Pallas Palacio, Arnaud Gien-Pawlicki.

L’idée derrière cette communauté est de bouger les lignes et pousser la réflexion et apporter aux RH en entreprises, aux personnes qui sont interessées par le sujet de la nourritute pour avancer.

En anglais on parle de Social Recruiting, en Français il est temps de se pencher très sérieusement sur la question!!!!

Back in March, I had to deliver a conference about Social Media for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and I had a HAHA moment.

2 days before I had given a conference at the London Business School and the students gave me mix feedbacks…but 1 or 2 said that my presentation was lacking of real case studies, real examples, something or someone they could relate to.

So 2 days after, when I had this conference at the Chamber of commerce, I reflected a lot about this (excellent) feedback from my students.

What should I do?

I had already prepared the usual presentation, “Why social media…” How to use it…” “the trends and figures…”. And in the same conference, there was also a person from Linkedin who would talk about social media and trends…

Basically my presentation would be very similar to the presentation of this person…and SMEs in the room would not see a lot of difference.

A couple of hours before the conference, I decided to drop all my slides and I started looking for case studies that I could present…

A case study or a story that the attendees would relate to…

A case study that would explain in simple terms what social media means exactly for them…

So here I am, a Thursday morning with completely new slides, out of my confort zone presenting a case study…a hair salon which used Social Media to get business.

And it was a real success…the SMEs in the room for the 1st time were able to understand what social media means for a small business and what kind of practical steps they could take straight away.

Since then, my whole way of doing presentations has changed…I only use case studies or real stories from clients or from businesses I research on the internet.

I started also writing case studies on Link Humans blog, with case studies about CH2M HILL, Philips, Schawk or UPS the last one. And it is a lot of work but clients are coming to us precisely because case studies are the best way to understand how it works even if it is not replicable.

And people love it…on our blog, the most read articles are those about case studies!!!!

Case studies are better than the usual pieces of advice that everyone is delivering on their blog.

Why using case studies:

1. It is concrete
2. It shows practical ways to implement a social media strategy
3. people understand concreteness straight away so your message gets across more easily
4. With social media, the only way to learn is by doing…

And you, do you use Case studies, real stories to get your message across?

Are blogs dead? No
Are comments worthless? No

Lately I have been rediscovering the pleasure and power of commenting on blogs.
And yes comments are still a powerful way to influence a community, get your name out there, and improve your SEO…

The other day, I commented on a blog where my comment was the only comment. And this article has been retweeted 60 times…and my comments was really easy to see at the end of the article. So people could see my name attached to the article and the topic around.
For me the benefits of commenting on a blog are:

1. Build a relationship with the blogger: bloggers love other people to comment on their blogs, it is like someone passing by your house. If you look to establish a relationship with someone, start with a comment on the person’s blog
2. Get your name around a specific topic to position yourself as an Expert. I have been noticing that when googling my name, the comments I made on different blogs appeared really high in the searches…so it clearly influences the relation between your name and the topic being discussed on the blog…so be STRATEGIC
3. Improve your SEO. Whenever you put a comment on a blog with traffic (whether qualified or not), you will always improve the SEO for your blog or your name (when googling your name)

Howerver, I have a slight disclaimer: Don’t put the boring comment that I see all the time…”great post, thanks for sharing it”….if you can add some flesh on the bone, it is even better.

Blogging is a human feeling especially for bloggers who consider their blog to be an intimate part of who they are…so commenting is even more powerful than retweeting or commenting or liking on Facebook.

Do it to establish relationships and position yourself in a specific sector/industry/niche!!!

Last week I gave a speech in front of 150 people during the Social Media in Recruitment conference…I especially explained how a company used Linkedin to recruit and got effective results having its costs cut by half (from 7000£ to 3.300£), and the time to recruit lowered (from 2 months to 40 days).

But my concern at some point was not about the presentation itself…it was about the timing of my preparation. I had to deliver it straight after lunch at 1.30 pm. When I learnt about the time of my presentation, I really felt concerned.
I would have to deal with a sleepy audience in the middle of their digestion…How could I change things and make this presentation more appealing?

What to do?

A week before the conference, I met with a company willing to use our Social Media expertise…the company is called PowerVote.
When I met with Didier Moulin, the managing director, I knew straight away that this product would help me to get over my concerns for my conference.

Power Vote!

PowerVote allows you to get your audience engaged…in an easy way.
It is a voting system where people use a small device with numbers on it and they can choose the answers available.
The idea I used was to ask my audience a first set of questions (which channels do you use to recruit)…then at the end another set of questions (which channels do you plan to use more) with the same answers.

Result?

And it is brilliant, I loved it…and the audience loved it as well. You touch a device, you feel engaged in the process, you participate, you give your point of view…you see the results of your vote…it is a Social Media tool.
The feedbacks were great and I still think we can use the results from the audience.

At the end of the day, my speech went well and I think the voting system really helped to get my audience awake and attentive.
Well done for this simple idea, Power Vote and I only can recommend other people to use it for any presentation.

Number 1 in Europe?

I was wandering around the internet and I came across this interesting image from Viadeo, the professional social network.
And interestingly enough they pretend to be number 1 in Europe with 8 million members.
I took my excel spreadsheet and started doing my maths.

In France, Linkedin has 2,2 million members and in the UK and the latest figures that I took from this infographic is 5.9 million members.
Overall if you add on Uk+France+Netherlands+Spain = 12.2 million members or more than 8 million.

So in Europe, Linkedin is number 1. And obviously this infographic is inaccurate!!

Why would they claim they are number 1??

However what is interesting from this infographic is that 40% of connections are made with someone within 5 miles radius. We tend to network locally and that is important to understand.

The people on Viadeo are slightly younger than on Linkedin (43 years old vs 37 years old).

Now the big issue for Viadeo is: Can they survive? and if so how? Local markets obviously, niche markets, china and india…because the way we do business in China, they may have a competitive advantage…But why lying on European figures?

Let’s see what is going to happen…And by the way, if someone from Viadeo want to explain these figures, I would be more than happy to include it in this post…I am open minded!!

Linkedin launch party Paris

Last Thursday I was in Paris for the launch party of Linkedin in France. We were around 50 in the room, some happy few and some known faces from the French internet.

Now Linkedin has been growing steadily in France and even though it is still behind Viadeo in terms of members, Linkedin is growing quicker than Viadeo (72% last year). Linkedin in France, it is 2,2 million members vs 4 million for Viadeo.

On this picture, you even can see Loic Meur who was filming the event…

So now what’s next?

For Linkedin in France, the goal is to increase the base of its members and cope with the increasing needs from their clients…advertising or recruitment solutions. The office is set to grow quickly and currently there are Laurence Bret, the EMEA marketing director and Guillaume Larronde, account director and probably 2/3 new staff will be joining forces.

The biggest issue for Linkedin in France? To manage to get French people pronouncing properly Linkedin…once it is done, things will move faster!

What about the competition with Viadeo?

I don’t think it will be relevant…the positioning is different but I am sure that Viadeo will lose ground over time…Remember, The winner takes it all!

So it was good to meet with Lilian Mahoukou, Eric Tenin, Hervé Bloch, Jean-François Ruiz, Jean-Noel Chaintreuil and the CBS outdoor team (Cyrille Lavizzari and Sarah Shepherd)

And as a bonus the video, “How French people pronounce Linkedin…Linkeeedddin!”

Auto-DMs are as personal as an airport announcement about unattended baggage.

I came across that article yesterday.

And 2 days before, I had received 3 auto DMs from the same person.

The more people have power, the more they start abusing the system. That is a simple rule of life.

We created the cars, but we also created the car accidents.

We created Twitter, but we also created the DMs on Twitter.

These people don’t realize that they annoy everyone and instead of adding a human touch to their communication, they actually harm their reputation.

People have the impression of being looked after till they understand that this is an automated DM…you feel like a betrayal after a love relationship. It is even worse than doing nothing.

Basically there are 2 type of annoying DMs:

1) when you start following someone, a DM saying: “you can join me also on my Facebook page…” or “Welcome, I have a book as well”…and so on

2) a type of DM which is spreading quickly, the spam DM, where people send you spam DMs promoting their articles, new stuff, workshops…this type of DM is worse as we are following people on the basis of trust. Result? Unfollow!

Twitter, as Social Media in general, is all about conversation and building trust! Do you think you build trust with auto DMs?

Now if you want to spread an article or something specific, you need to build the relationships first…And once is done, you can ask with a personal message, if the person could kindly retweet your article.

There are no other ways, no ther shortcuts.

So please, stop your auto-DMs, you are wasting your time, and people’s time!

My good friend and LinkedIn specialist Lincoln Coutts talked to me about Michael Dell’s profile on LinkedIn the other day.

To be like Michael Dell on LinkedIn is to be exclusive (check his profile here)

What Michael did on his Linkedin Profile is to put a simple sentence:

“Please do not request to connect with me unless we know each other or have worked together”

He is being exclusive…And that is where the power of the network lies.

You need to be exclusive to accept only people you know in real life or people who bother to put a personal message explaining why connecting.

At the end of the day, LinkedIn allows you to leverage your physical network and if you have people you can’t trust in your netwok, how are you going to ask for an introduction to a LinkedIn contact?

Obivously in the case of Michael, as he is famous, he needs to protect himself from constant unsolicited messages.

But for you, simple user, the key fact comes from your ability to use your network on LinkedIn.

And what if your online network is filled with unknown people?

Time to discover the pleasures of exclusivity!

I run a workshop  on the 16th of February in London on How to use Linkedin…and I will be talking about exclusivity!

The other day I was reading an article talking (Thanks to Romain Thery) about the end of follow friday and the guy was explaining that the Follow Friday trend is almost dead.

Micah Baldwin

The Follow Friday was “invented” by Micah Baldwin in 2009. And it was done in a spirit of really following the person he was mentioning. Now it has become a boring list of thank you for the exchanges or for the friendship…or whatever. But every Friday, we can see these boring lists of #ff.
Being quoted by Micah Baldwin at the time was a rare opportunity and it had real value. It was a good way to discover a new person, someone you could be interested in following.
Now some people have even set up automated follow fridays and they #ff the same people over and over.

A guy even created a website called End Follow Friday explaining that it is a new form a spam!

Result?
There are still some people doing #ff but the trend seems to be in the end of #ff. On my TL, less and less people are doing #ff and in the UK, the end of #ff seems to be a step further than in France.

The victory of Quality over quantity

At the end of the day, the end of the #ff is a good news. When you see these lists of compulsory #ff, you realize that quantity has replaced quality. Because you want to please everyone, people tend to think that the more names they put, the better.

So it is not about who to follow, it is about who to please. The real spirit of the exercise is perverted.
And the end or the death of the #ff can’t be a real problem as quantity is the rule…the only way of creating real value is to be able to advise who to follow in an authentic manner. If it is quantity, you don’t believe anymore in the real value of Follow Friday!
Networking and relationships rely on Quality bonds, and quality bonds can’t be handled with quantity.

So by bye Follow Friday….

But I am not afraid…it will be replaced by something new maybe wrapped around more quality.

I have been working on a new brochure for our Linkedin Programme for recruiters…and all in all I was wondering: “If I have to sum up all the benefits of using LinkedIn when you are a recruiter, what would it be??”.

It is really donw to basics. Why recruiters should be using LinkedIn?

After all they have google, and all kind of data bases. And the only thing they want is to get on the phone…

Sometimes you can give trainings all day long and forget about the real questions.

I came up with a couple of answers but I would like you to help me on that and give me your ideas. I created a poll on LinkedIn (I only put 5 benefits but actually there are much more benefits), so you can do 2 things:

1. Vote for the benefit you think is key
2. Add other ideas in the comment section!

Are you sure your profile on LinkedIn is not boring? Do you have these words on it?

I came across this article which gives us the 10 most overused buzzwords on your LinkedIn Profile.

The most used phrases on LinkedIn profile are (depending on which country you are in):

• Extensive Experience – USA, Canada, Australia
• Dynamic – Brazil, India, Spain
• Motivated – UK
• Innovative – France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands

Obviously, you should not use these terms and clichés on your profile…it does not add any value to what you do and who you are.

On LinkedIn it is about being visible with action words and a simple but punchy presentation.

The 4 rules for crafting an efficient profile are simple:

1) Short: Attention span on the internet is really short so I would advise not to write dozens of lines but a well thought paragraph

2) Simple: No bullshiting or complicated words that consultants may use, but simple and straightforward words. Short sentences with a verb is really enough.

3) Actions and Achievements: Instead of putting the boring “I lead a team and manage an office of…” put “I lead a team of 10 designers and managed a 2 floor office” for example. It is all about figures and concrete examples more than the boring profile. If you wrote a book or wrote a specific article, name it! Remember that the achievement you chose must be aligned with your goal on LinkedIn.

4) Personal: I think that on LinkedIn it is good to put something personal on your summaryand what I mean by personal, I mean something different. What makes you different? “And by the way, I am a scuba diver in exotic islands”. It shouldn’t substitute the professional part but only make it a little bit more lively.

So what does your profile look like? Is it boring?

If you are in London next week (18/01), we run a Linkedin Workshop and we will be talking about profiles!

I would like to wish you all a happy new year….2011…

What will 2011 be made of?

I don’t know. For me, 2010 has been a year of huge changes. I never thought that I would build a business, I never thought that I would be working like that a year ago.

On the personal side, 2010 has not been good at all but hopefully 2011 will be better.

I have been running Link Humans for the past months with my colleague and business partner Jorgen. And now we are clearly reaching a point where clients are coming in, we are building slowly and carefully our business.

But what I want to emphasize is the help of all my friends to build that huge endeavour. All the people around me, all our community, have helped me a lot.

From creating the business, to getting feedbacks, cutting paper, crafting invitations, every little help we got was a huge push for us.

So thank you Sophie, Eric, Frédéric, Aude, Bendan, Bill, Rupesh, Aurelia, George, Mike, Anne-Helene, Chouch (Anne), Mathieu, Valérie, Georgi, Emily, Kevin, John, Edna, Stephane, Guillaume, Phil, Sam, Kes, Etienne…

And see you in 2011

I am running a workshop about Linkedin on the 18th of January…Here is the link!

Are you growing fed up with the word “SOCIAL”?

Now everything is Social! Social Media, Social interaction, Social Community, social engagement…

You Kids are social, you dog is social, the companies need to enable social interactions and social exchanges between people. You name it!

What does Social mean?

Social comes from the Latin word “socialis” which means “companionship”. Social is everything related to life in community.

And obviously we have been living in communities since the very beginning of the Man’s birth.

So basically almost everything we do is social. In the past people used to live in small local communities connecting with a limited number of people. They were socializing. And the main place of socialization was the church.

So everything they were doing was within their community. Everything was social as well!

Now the church has been replaced by internet.

Yes we do socialize today when we interact within communities, we start talks or conversations, we exchange ideas or projects.

We socialize in everything we do in that sense.

But we do socialize as much as people in small communities used to with the church or the local butcher.

Why this word “Social” has become such a trend?

It is difficult to explain but we put a new word for something that has been existing for ages.

But the biggest difference with the church is that we can interact with much more people and anywhere on the planet. The number of ties we can create is much bigger. And obviously the leverage is much higher.

The best part of the mass was not the mass itself but after the mass…where people discussed and met to exchange information, news and social currencies (jobs, marital updates, valuable help and information…).

So Social is everywhere, but do we need to call everything we do on the internet “Social”?

PS: I have decided to help my friends from Influence People to organise this event in Paris..So this post is in French exceptionally

La semaine dernière, Influence People a organisé la Conférence Social Media Monitoring à Londres #MSM10 et cette conférence a eu un retentissant succès avec plusieurs centaines de participants et un véritable buzz sur Twitter.

Le 10 décembre, la conférence débarque à Paris et je voudrai profiter de cette occasion pour vous faire gagner une place si vous retweetez ce billet avec le hastag #MSM10 (Merci à Luke Brynley-Jones qui offre un billet d’entrée gratuit, valeur faciale de 240 Euros et qui a écrit un bel article sur la veille, Vous faîtes de la veille, et après?)

Pourquoi participer?

1) Pour rencontrer Brian Solis qui est l’expert mondialement connu sur le sujet du monitoring sur les Media Sociaux (Loic Le Meur va peut-être venir mais ce n’est pas confirmé…)

2) Pour vous donner un avant goût, j’ai traduit un résumé sucinct des discussions de la conférence de Londres:

- Est-ce que les “experts” en Réseaux sociaux sont les mieux placés pour mesurer l’impact et surveiller?

Cela dépend de la culture et de la structure d’entreprise, mais on manque de recul pour avoir vraiment une idée.

Ce sont les community managers qui sont à priori les mieux placés car ils écoutent et comprennent les conversations Online.

Voici un résumé plus complet!

4) Pour rencontrer les gens de We are Social que j’apprécie particulièrement (Camille Jouneaux) et notamment Sandrine Plasseraud qui parlera à la conférence sur les stratégies numériques. Mais vous y verrez aussi les experts français de la surveillance comme Synthesio avec Michelle Chmielewski

5) Pour me rencontrer lors d’un de mes séjours à Paris (bon d’accord, je ne suis pas une célébrité)

Bonne chance, et j’espère faire gagner ce ticket d’entrée à quelqu’un qui souhaite passer un bon moment après la conférence Le Web10!