(image credit: ernop)

…and no, this doesn’t mean that I want to fight you. I wanted to talk to you about a new goal that I’ve started on. Goal setting is a great way to measure where you are, where you want to be, and can help you on how to get there. So I’ve decided to start a new goal… Read the rest of this entry »

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[Today's guest post is from Gunjan Pandya, a writer of Search Engine City. He is also a guest writer at Search Engine journal.]

We use social networking sites to keep in touch with our friends, business groups, and family. You may be surprised to know that recruiters may leverage Facebook to find new employees for their companies. In the world of the glorious Internet there are so many social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, Friendster, Hi5 and many more. But here are some tips on how to find employees for your company through Facebook.

Creating Your Profile

First things first, you have to create your profile on Facebook and fill it up with things about yourself and your company. It’s also a good idea to update it frequently.

Creating a Business Page/Career Page

To get new employees, it would be helpful to make a business/career page. Be sure to include all the necessary details about your business and always keep your list of openings up and current sor potential employees can see. Click here to create your business pages on Facebook.

Joining a Network

Before you join a network on Facebook you have to think about where you want your employees to come from. I.e. If you want employees from London, it would be smart to join the London network. To join a network click on Account>>Network.

Searching Within a Network:

After you join networks, you have to think about which kind of people you want to find, like SEO, Web Designer, or Web Developer etc. If you want to find SEO in London then enter the keyword “SEO” in the search box; you’ll probably get results of the SEOs in the London area.

Friend Requests and Messaging

Now, it’s time to start adding people as your friend. After searching people from a specific area, you have to send them a friend request with a message. In messages you should mention why you want to add him as a friend, what your company is doing and job requirements, so he/she can understand.

Setting Up an Interview

After getting a reply from those people who are interested in your job, then you have to setup an interview for those candidates. Creating a list of those candidates may also be helpful until you decide on the end finalization of the candidate you chose.

These ways can help you use Facebook for recruiting employees. Big and small companies alike can find employees they need on Facebook.

Straight From the Recruiter’s Mouth

We also had the opportunity to ask a few recruiters to hear their experiences with using Facebook:

Heather Gardner, a Silicon Valley recruiter, comments:

“It’s one of the best forms of true web 2.0 communication you can have with your connections. I have found quite a few folks on Facebook that are NOT on LinkedIn or anywhere else online - Facebook’s user base is still larger than LinkedIn! Facebook offers me ways to be of value to the folks I connect with by offering links to useful information like web links, photo’s, video’s, etc. The IM feature is also a FAST form of communicating with those in my network - it’s far less sterile and web 1.0 - which I find LinkedIn to be.

Facebook is a good branding tool for me. I want to be the recruiter with a personality that builds relationships over time. As much as I want to get to know my “passive” candidates, I also want them to know me right back.. In the long run, people who I form relationships with are more apt to trust me therefore more readily pass candidate referrals, business referrals or approach me before embarking on a new career hunt. I want to be their long term career partner. The only way to achieve this is by offering my network value right back. Facebook definitely helps with that.

Facebook allows me to use third party applications such as the Twitter application. One Tweet that I posted on Twitter was feed into my Facebook profile. This resulted with a Facebook IM producing an order for a Admin Assistant at a large Silicon Valley employer.”

This is a guest post by Dan Zarrella, social and viral marketing scientist. He has put together a viral content sharing report and below is an expansion and exploration of some of the data uncovered by that report.

The research I did on viral content sharing shows that frequent users of social web technologies like Twitter, blogs, and social news and networking sites tend to share online content with more people, more often than those that do not. This means that for marketers these users can be a powerful vector for making content go viral.

While this may sound like some what of a “duh” statement, the concept of “influencers” has been much debated recently. While there is data that individuals give more attention to content passed to them from friends as opposed to A-list bloggers, the fact still remains that there are segments of users who spread content more prolifically than the rest. And by their very nature as savvy social media users, these viewers engage in online activity that makes them easy to target.

We know that people who read Digg, Reddit, Propeller and the like tend to have higher viral reach and sharing frequency than those who do not, so make sure your content appears on these sites. The same applies to those who read blogs, and use Twitter. When it comes time to seed your content, be sure to put it in the path of these extra-contagious users.

An interesting detail of this data is that while frequent users of Facebook and web forums share content with more people and more often in some aspects, generally they’re not as virulent as the users of less-mainstream technologies (with the exception of blog readers). This may be due to the fact that users of sites like Twitter and Digg tend to be early adopters, as opposed to the less-geeky Facebook audience; which seems to indicate that geeks share more content online than non-geeks.

When I segmented these high reach and frequency users, I found that they displayed useful preference trends. When compared to average web users they share more content via IM as opposed to email or Facebook messaging, and they share more news and opinion than humor. When these users share content one-to-one with their friends, they prefer blogs and social news sites to mainstream sites, but that aversion to mainstream media disapears when they share in a one-to-many fashion (broadcast sharing like submitting to Digg, blogging and Tweeting). Again as these users are important viral seeding vectors, we should listen to their preferences and give them news or opinion with short, clean links ideal for instant messaging, and lay off the “funny” email chain letters.

This is a small part of the large data presented in the full report I did on the results of my survey, if you want to know more, be sure to read the rest of my viral content sharing report.

Dan Zarrella is a social and viral marketing scientist, you can read his blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

[Special guest post for Friday fun from none other than my daughter. No, really.]

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

What do you call it when you get 20 Plurkers together on one thread, all discussing the same subject in detail for an hour or so?

Why it’s a Plurkshop, of course.

The number of Plurkers can vary, I’ve seen Plurkshops that had around 5 people doing most of the talking, and others with 40 or 50 people, all discussing the same subject.

Plurkshops can be on any subject, we’ve had discussions on blogs, CSS, marketing, social media, security, second life, and more. To date there have been 13 Plurkshops; the 14th, coming up this Tuesday, August 12, will be discussing the benefits and challenges of switching your blog to WordPress.

Because you have so many people, all typing at once, Plurkshops can get more than a little confusing. To me it feels like a big family dinner, where everyone starts off talking about the same subject, and then the conversation branches out, with Aunt Bertha and Grandpa Fred talking about one part, while Mom is talking to Aunt Sarah and Uncle Tim about something else, and Dad is shouting to Cousin George (whom everyone, except Cousin George, knows is a little hard of hearing) trying to catch him up on the original topic.

If you’ve ever watched While You Were Sleeping, the dinner table scene is a great example of a Plurkshop.

Yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the different conversational threads, Plurkshops end up being very educational. It is especially enlightening to read the summaries afterward because there are almost always threads of discussion that I missed while the Plurkshop was going on.

Paul Chaney, who writes Conversational Media Marketing, donated Plurkshops.com so that we would have a place to gather all the Plurkshop information. It is a great place to read summaries of past Plurkshops or to see what’s coming up soon.

Back when I first started using Plurk, someone asked if I could see a business use for it. My answer then was that I couldn’t, it seemed more of a fun site. Now, my answer would be yes, Plurk has definite business potential.

In fact, plurkshops.com and the link to an actual plurkshop are the first things I show someone who has a business when I’m telling them about Plurk. It has the benefit of not depending on as many variables as statistics from my own Plurk usage, and shows that Plurk can be used for more than just saying “Good morning” or talking about what to eat today.

Teeg is a Social Media Explorer who has been exploring the social part of the web since 1996, when she first discovered chat rooms. She details her exploration of various social media sites on her blog, SU Comments. She is also the author of the 10 Minute Guide to Plurk, a five part series that answers questions other Plurkers had when they were getting started.