Social Media has become impossible to ignore, and laying the foundation of social media techniques can enhance an organization’s engagement and connections, increasing return on investment overall. Understanding the value of this resource is essential, but what’s also essential is knowing how to PROPERLY use it!
The two owners of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale, AZ, recently had a major, major meltdown on social media, gaining national attention and making an embarrassment of themselves and their brand. The couple was recently dropped by Gordon Ramsey on Kitchen Nightmares for being too difficult to work with.
The owners, after reading poor Yelp reviews of their store, decided to take to social media to give the world a piece of their mind. What resulted was many disgruntled posts from the owners on the company’s Facebook page for hours at a time. The Facebook posts grew angrier and angrier and more aggressive, which only egged on the delighted and amused readers and commenters. In the end, the owners made excuses for their actions and did not own up to what they had done. The damage to their business will likely be irreversible.
Which brings me back to my point about using social media wisely! Positive interaction is a key driver to successful business practices when done properly. Avoid being insulting even when provoked. DON’T speak in all caps and speak down to your audience. While company culture must be open to criticism, DO know when to walk away from an online conversation that has gone South.
Try to stick to the Four Goals of Social Networking:
1. Raise Awareness of Organization’s Purpose & Mission
2. Increase Customer Relationships and Loyalty to Organization
3. Enhance Customer Service – Listening, Responding, Engaging
2. Gain Traffic to your Organization’s Content & Resources
Social media is a great listening tool for companies, but we all must be careful about causing trouble. Know when to join the conversation and when to let it be! What other social media disasters have you seen? What did you learn from them?
It was announced recently that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to take a salary of just $1 this year. This decision puts Zuckerberg into a growing group of large-corporation CEOs who receive a dollar annual salary (while still having an exorbitant amount of stock).
I applaud CEOs who take part in this. As an entrepreneur, I see this as a great thing!! A CEO’s income should be based upon their employees’ performance. If the business and all of its members doesn’t succeed, the CEO doesn’t succeed. This ideology is reflected well in the $1 salary efforts.
I’m not saying CEOs shouldn’t have a salary at ALL, but a base salary for the first few years and then joining the $1 club guarantees that if the company doesn’t excel, neither does the CEO. This way it’s more of a group effort.
The “$1 Club,” as some call it, is a strategy that became popular right around the dot-com boom, when Steve Jobs took a $1 salary at Apple in 1998. But its roots are way older. The idea dates as far back as World War I and II, when top government executives known as “dollar-a year-men” would take the $1 salary to help the country stabilize. The practice has resurfaced recently because many CEOs are receiving flak for their substantial paychecks while the economy struggles to get back on its feet.
The $1 Club is especially popular with leaders in the tech industry: Those who have taken part in the Club include Eric Schmidt of Google, Meg Whitman of HP, and Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Zuckerberg in particular won’t have much to worry about: His share of Facebook’s IPO in 2012 was worth about
$2.3 billion.
Is the $1 Club just a symbolic gesture to make those on top appear humble, or a genuine
collaboration-building effort? CEOs: Would you try this? Why or why not??
A couple months back, I hosted a SkillSurvey Webinar about the key dimensions of a candidate: Skill, Attitude, Competency, and Culture.
This was spurred by a blog post I made back in January that posed the question “Is it skill or attitude that makes the best candidate?” which prompted amazing discussion.
I combined these ideas and turned them into a guest article for Recruiting Trends that is featured on their website today. The article, “Dimensions of Necessary Attributes: Measuring a Candidate’s DNA,” explains how these attributes are often overlooked in the hiring process, and how much of this disconnect is attributed to traditional recruiting processes (and how to fix it).
Check out the article here!
What a fantastic session we had on Tuesday at the SHRM Talent Management Conference on Tuesday! The room was packed and full of very vocal, very engaged HR and talent acquisition professionals. Its always great to have some laughs while learning some of the best practices in the business – often we forget the basics of our craft and the huge impact it has on the recruitment process and our relationships with our hiring executives.
Some of the stories on manager relationships were priceless and my thank you goes out to those who played along with the fun – especially the group that takes their hiring managers out for a round of paintball to develop stronger relationships – who wouldn’t want to splat a paintball on some of their foreheads????
In all seriousness, it was a great time and a great crowd and as promised, following is a link for you to download the presentation – happy hunting!
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