Smart – Social Media for Business 2011, A Brief Insight

The Smart Social Media for Business Conference (#smart_2011) made for a refreshing change to many of the conferences I’ve attended recently.  Providing a number of demonstrations, speakers and workshops, divided into 3 ‘streams:’ Talent Management, Business Strategy and  Tools & Techniques, it attracted a diverse group of people from various backgrounds, the majority of whom were from outside the recruitment world.

Many of the basic principles being discussed relating to developing a social media strategy for business in general could easily be applied to recruitment.  There was a lot covered during the day so I’ve written a separate blog post to cover specifically a couple of the recruitment case studies.  See Social Recruiting Case Studies from Smart

The conference was kicked off by Charlie Osmond, MD of Fresh Networks discussing Social media optimisation and maximising the business benefits whilst managing risk.  To summarize a lot of what Charlie covered he indicated that you need to focus on 3 main things when it comes to a successful social media strategy.

1)      Have a strategic Social Media Plan

2)      Manageable risks

3)      Measurable Returns

When it comes to measurable returns, the ROI of social media is always a hot topic in recruitment; indeed Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting who gave a presentation later in the day relating to ROI and Social media, argues it’s too early to be discussing ROI. Social media has not been around long enough and it requires a long term investment.  To paraphrase both Andy and Charlie, social media is about engagement, it’s an ongoing conversation.  The early adopters of social media recruitment such as Microsoft, Vodaphone and T.G.I’s are already seeing the fruits of their labour.  EA (Electronic Arts) explained at a recruitment conference I attended during 2010, that they now recruit 65% of their staff purely via social media.

Going back to Charlie’s presentation, there were a couple of aspects I thought  were specifically interesting for recruiters to think about.  Firstly was to look closely at the meaning behind the numbers/targets you are striving for.  It’s easy to become obsessed with building twitter followers, facebook fans etc but are you actually driving behaviour that has no ROI?

The second point was some benchmarking research Fresh Networks had done into social media monitoring tools.  Tools such as  Alterian, Brandwatch, Buzzmetrics and  Radian6 are used by some companies to measure sentiment.  What this means is they are tying to determine the broad attitude of people towards their brand, whether it is positive or negative for example.  After independently comparing 7 of the best tools in the market they found automated sentiment analysis to be less than 50% accurate.  Charlie still felt these tools were very good, but in this particular aspect you can’t take the results on face value.  Something for recruiters to think about should they be using such techniques as part of their ROI statistics.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: monitoring tools, Recruitment, Recruitment Conference, smart 2011, social media monitoring, Social Media Recruitment, social recruiting