Don't Have Time for Social Media? Hire an Intern.
I've been speaking with employers privately, at conferences, on webinars, and by smoke signals for several years about how and why they should use social networking sites such as Facebook and other social media sites as part of their recruitment strategy. Most of the surveys that I see indicate that about 25 percent of employers admit to using the sites yet about 75 percent admit to Googling candidates, at least as part of their background checking process. What many in that 75 percent group apparently don't understand is that when they Google a candidate, they are searching many and perhaps most of the pages on the social media sites so even if they aren't directly using the social media sites, they are using the social media sites.
The frustration level by employers is pretty high when I talk with them about the importance of sites such as Twitter. Just when they're starting to feel comfortable with the importance of their web pages coming up high in Google search results (search engine optimization), buying ads on the search engines (search engine marketing), and social networking sites such as Facebook, along comes yet another opportunity. They just don't feel that they have the time or mental energy to tackle yet another web-based tool and I don't blame them. Time and energy are limited commodities. If we add Twitter to our daily activities, something has to give. So what's a recruiter to do?
Pizza Hut apparently decided that Twitter is a web-based tool that is important but that their regular staff didn't have the ability or willingness to properly use it so they're hiring an intern. According to Bob Kraut, vice president for marketing communications, the intern will attend advertising shoots, product meetings and other corporate events. "They'll be our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what's going on at Pizza Hut," said Kraut. The intern will also monitor Twitter for any mentions of Pizza Hut's brand and alert superiors whenever anything negative about the Hut is being said so they can respond as appropriate. No mention as to whether Pizza Hut will have the intern use Twitter to help with recruitment, but hopefully.
The days are long gone when organizations could exclusively rely upon traditional public relations outfits to monitor and shape the dialogue taking place in the media about them. Just as many organizations don't have the ability or willingness to be on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites, neither do their public relations firms. If this problem describes your organization, then don't pretend the problem isn't there or can be dealt with tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. There are huge opportunities and risks to all organizations from these social media sites. You can either sit back and wait for bad stuff to happen and for your stakeholders to know about it before you do, or you can get out in front of it and be part of the dialogue so when bad stuff does happen, you can minimize the damage and perhaps even turn a negative into a positive.
put the fate of your (multi) million dollar business in the hands of a part-time intern? brilliant.