Are You an ‘Aspirin’ or ‘Vitamin’ to Employers?

By J.T. O’Donnell
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121009124325-7668018-aspirin-vs-vitamin-which-job-seeker-are-you?_mSplash=1

Yesterday, in a group coaching session, I had a heart-to-heart with one of our new members. She explained, in spite of glowing recommendations and lots of supportive friends and family telling her how great she is, deep down, she questioned if they were all lying to her. Why? She’s been looking for work for 18 months and can’t seem to get anyone to interview her, let alone, hire her. I asked her what qualities she was showcasing when she networked and met with potential hiring managers. She said, “I share with them all the important ones, like the fact that I’m resourceful, upbeat, hard-working, organized, and efficient.” To which I said, “Those sound like vitamins to me.” And employers don’t buy vitamins today. They buy aspirin. Let me explain…

You Get Hired to Alleviate Pain

There is only one major reason a candidate gets hired for a job: The hiring manager has a problem and the candidate is seen as the one that can solve it the best. Which means your goal as a job seeker is to showcase how you will be the hiring manager’s aspirin for their pain. Being “resourceful, upbeat, hard-working, organized, and efficient” are all qualities hiring managers naturally expect from an employee. They are like vitamins, they keep future pain away. However, it’s the aspirin which stops acute pain – and, my friends, makes aspirin always perceived as worth more to the employer.

Translation: You need to differentiate from all the other vitamins (a.k.a. job seekers) out there by showing how you solve problems to alleviate a hiring manager’s pain. In short, BE THE ASPIRIN!

Here are three steps you can take to do that effectively.

Step 1: Identify the Symptoms

To start, you need to look at what problems hiring managers in need of your skill sets are having today. This requires some research. You must figure out what is causing the need to hire someone, and more importantly, what will happen if they don’t find the right person to alleviate the pain. Once you do that, you can start to tailor your personal brand to showcase how you solve those problems.

Step 2: Be Proactive in Dispensing Your Aspirin

The next step is to reach out to hiring managers directly to inquire if they are currently experiencing these types of problems. You want to start a dialog around their pain so you can introduce the fact that you are the aspirin. Think about it: If you are the one who reaches out about the pain and has the solution, don’t you think the hiring manager is going to be inclined to check out what you have to offer?

Step 3: Keep Your Aspirin Within Arm’s Reach

Even if the hiring managers you speak with aren’t currently in pain, they most likely will be at some point in the future. Your job is to stay in touch with them regularly so they remember you are the aspirin. The goal is to use a simple job search technique that lets you share some value with them on a small scale as a way to showcase to the employer your pain-relieving skills. It’s the ideal way to earn their trust so when the pain finally hits them; you are the first person they contact.

Struggling to Determine What Pain You Relieve? Get Help

If you feel like you are struggling to determine what problems you solve for employers, then I strongly suggest you get some help. Knowing what pain you alleviate is vital to being able to identify employers who will appreciate you. The alternative is to blindly apply to jobs and hope they see you as the aspirin – a long shot at best. Why not get clear on your value and start showing employers your true abilities as a problem-solver. Not only will you find being the aspirin to their pain a real confidence-booster to your self-esteem (who doesn’t like being the aspirin?), you’ll also increase the chances they take you up on your offer to make them feel better.

Management is (still) not leadership

By John Kotter
http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2013/01/management-is-still-not-leadership.html

A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently.

That’s not leadership, I explained. That’s management — and the two are radically different.

In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people use the words “leadership” and “management” synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time.

The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:

Mistake #1: People use the terms “management” and “leadership” interchangeably. This shows that they don’t see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.

Mistake #2: People use the term “leadership” to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization “management.” And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.

Mistake #3: People often think of “leadership” in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.

In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it’s not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it’s a recipe for failure.

Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.

There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we’re never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we’re not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.

Content is Key to Search Engine Visibility and SEO Infographic

Source: http://hosting.ber-art.nl/content-seo-search-engine-visibility/?_tmc=kpxfdSmuUhNezJMz8FElSNGgr8G80BI5H7vUuIyz6Cs

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Explores how content is key to search engine visibility on why is Content Good for SEO #Inforgraphic

 

These Are The Biggest PR Disasters Of 2012

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-pr-disasters-of-2012-2012-11?op=1

From corporate social fails to “pink slime” scandals to Apple launching a widely hated mapping feature, 2012 was filled with epic PR disasters.While many of the public relations nightmares were due to typical company failings, others were unique to the digital era.

All it takes is a single employee’s bad tweet — like a Burger King staffer standing in a tub of lettuce — to send corporate headquarters into damage control mode.

We’ve collected 10 of the worst PR disasters of the year.

10. KitchenAid tweeted about Obama’s dead grandma.

During one of the presidential debates, KitchenAid tweeted to its 24,000 fans that “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’. #nbcpolitics”.

KitchenAid immediately deleted the quote and tweeted an apology.

A spokesperson said that “The tasteless joke in no way represents our values at KitchenAid, and that person won’t be tweeting for us anymore.”

9. American Apparel exploits Hurricane Sandy.

American Apparel

People were outraged when American Apparel used Hurricane Sandy — a storm that killed over 100 people and initially left 8 million without power — as an excuse to sell merchandise.

The retailer were offered a 20 percent off sale if they typed “SANDYSALE” in the online checkout “in case you’re bored during the storm.”

American Apparel decided to ignore the PR disaster and didn’t apologize.

Gap, on the other hand, also did a Sandy sale and then tweeted apologies for offending people.

8, The NRA’s magazine posted an insensitive tweet after the Aurora shooting.

Hours after the nation learned about the tragic Aurora shooting that left 12 people dead at a late night showing of “The Dark Night Rises,” American Rifleman, a magazine for the NRA, tweeted: “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?”

The tweet went up at 9:20 am EST and was taken down three hours later.

A spokesman for the NRA stated, ”A single individual, unaware of events in Colorado, tweeted a comment that is being completely taken out of context.”

PR lesson: be careful with pre-scheduled tweets.

7. Apple Maps was so bad, the CEO had to issue a public apology.

When Apple banished Google Maps from the iPhone in September, consumers were concerned.

Apple’s own maps app turned out to be riddled with errors, and didn’t even include public transportation mapping.

CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public apology, conceding that the maps “fell short” before suggesting users download competitors’ products from the Apps store. Cook specifically called out Bing, MapQuest, or going to Nokia and Google’s website.

The product manager who oversaw the maps team was fired months later.

6. The Internet exposes a Burger King employee who stood in tubs of lettuce.

geobeats via YouTube

In July, a Burger King employee thought that it would be a fun idea to post pictures on 4Chan of him standing (shoes on) in two large tubs of lettuce. The caption read: “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.”

Within minutes, other 4Chan members tracked down the culprit.

Burger King addressed the PR disaster in a public statement regarding the chain’s “zero-tolerance policy against any violations such as the one in question” and fired three employees for the incident.

5. A Taco Bell employee tweeted a picture of himself urinating on a plate of nachos.

Flickr/theimpulsivebuy

Even though the Indiana worker assured people that the plate was going to be thrown out anyway, Taco Bell dealt with the crisis immediately by firing him.

4. Chick-fil-A’s president bashes gay marriage.

Amazon.com

Chick-fil-A caused quite a stir when its president publicly came out against gay marriage.

Dan Cathy, who also serves as the COO, told “The Ken Coleman Show”: “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”

This caused a national outcry — some for, and others against. Citizens held boycotts and kiss-in protests at local chains, and mayors threatened to ban the chain from their cities. (Which mayors can’t actually do.)

More controversy arose when Jim Henson Co. slammed Chick-fil-A for its public stance, and then Jim Henson toys were prematurely pulled from the chicken chain.

3. “Pink Slime” is discovered.

Flickr/Ryan McDonough

In March, ABC News released a series of reports raising concern over a hamburger ingredient dubbed  “pink slime,” a mechanically separated and disinfected beef product officially known as lean finely textured beef.

People began petitioning to get supermarkets, restaurants, and schools to all stop carrying the slime, even though various consumer experts said it was safe. This PR disaster led to massive layoffs.

BPI eventually filed a lawsuit against ABC for $1.2 billion for allegedly making about 200 “false and misleading and defamatory” statements about the product.

2. McDonald’s #McDStories Twitter campaign gets out of control.

Twitter

McDonald’s January Twitter campaign asked readers to tweet their own special #McDStories.

The problem: people used the hashtag for horror stories like: ”Fingernail in my BigMac” and “Hospitalized for food poisoning after eating McDonalds in 1989. Never ate there again and became Vegetarian. Should have sued.”

McDonald’s had no way to control what people tweeted, and all the stories showed up whenever anyone clicked the hashtag.

McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion emailed BI that:

While #meetthefarmers was used for the majority of the day and successful in raising awareness of the Supplier Stories campaign, #mcdstories did not go as planned. We quickly pulled #mcdstories and it was promoted for less than two hours.

Within an hour of pulling #McDStories the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1600 to a few dozen. It is also important to keep those numbers in perspective. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald’s overall that day so the traction of #McDStories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that.

With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger.

1. Penn State covers up the Sandusky scandal.

AP

Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was charged and later convicted of repeated counts of child molestation while at Penn State.

Although the scandal was unveiled in 2011, the university felt the full fallout in 2012 when the Freeh report stated that Joe Paterno and the administration covered up Sandusky’s abuses, Major companies pulled sponsorships of the program.

Part of the PR disaster was due to Penn State’s initial difficulty addressing the problem. Pulitzer-winning stories in The Patriot-News of Harrisburg initially uncovered the scandal in March 2011. But Penn State remained tightlipped. PR firm Ketchum was hired in November of 2011, and the school hired Edelman and La Torre for crisis management in April 2012. The school pledged to spend $208,000 a month for 12 months on PR support, but the damage was done.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-pr-disasters-of-2012-2012-11?op=1#ixzz2FJWojtAy

 

5 Must-Haves for Social Media Management

Posted on 12th December, by Peter Marino in SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

http://reelwebdesign.com/blog/2012/12/12/5-must-haves-for-social-media-management/#sthash.Zt5EmQnj.HYBVpuyH.dpbs

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Social media has grown from a curiosity to an integral piece of corporate strategy in the space of only a few years. Nearly overnight, companies have brought on whole teams of specialists to craft effective social media strategies and manage multiplying numbers of social media accounts. Companies are hungry for better social media tools to engage their constituents. Below is a list of five features key to delivering on a social media strategy.

1) Scheduling
Social media doesn’t sleep, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to! Ensure your social media management tool of choice allows you to schedule messages in advance. So even if you’re in New York, you can schedule messages out to your customers in Tokyo during their workday.

If you want to take scheduling to the next level, look for a tool that offers the ability to schedule large batches of messages at once. This will be a super useful time-saver when it comes to managing campaigns or contests that require heavy messaging around a certain period of time.

2) Geo
When it comes to interacting with your customers, those in different locations may have different needs, speak different languages or follow different trends. You’re going to want a tool that optimizes your searches and filters your searches by language to help you curate relevant content for different demographics.

3) Keywords
Social media is also an effective way for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse. Setting up keywords or search streams provide insight into what is trendy among your customers. This can help you develop a marketing strategy that focuses on customer’s lifestyles and personal preferences.

Keywords are useful for keeping track of competitors’ activities but they’re also useful for tracking brands that are complementary to your offering. If your product is often purchased in conjunction with another product, keep an eye on the complementary product’s social media activity to take advantage of promotions or recent sales, as these are potential leads ready to be converted.

4) Collaboration
It takes two to tango especially when it comes to being social. Collaboration is key when it comes to developing and executing an effective social media campaign. Ensure your social media management tool enables you to seamlessly collaborate with your team to ensure you execute an integrated social media management strategy.

5) Reporting
Gone are the days of social media purely being about ‘building buzz.’ It is now a line item in budgets as companies invest resources in these channels and there is an expectation for reports which show ROI for social media outreach.

Make sure your tool has the ability to analyze important metrics such as click-through rates on shortened links, clicks by region and top referrers. It’s also important to have access to Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

The most effective tools will provide the ability to access in-depth granular metrics on the efficacy of your social media programs. This will allow you to determine which messages resulted in the highest number of conversions, which platform is providing the greatest return and which time of day is most effective to drive traffic.

What does it take to go Pro?
Social is here to stay and to maintain a competitive advantage, businesses need to stay abreast of this ever-evolving space. HootSuite Pro help teams engage with audiences and analyze campaigns across multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from one secure web-based dashboard.

- See more at: http://reelwebdesign.com/blog/2012/12/12/5-must-haves-for-social-media-management/#sthash.Zt5EmQnj.HYBVpuyH.dpuf