According to fonerbooks.com that implies that the book is selling just under 300 books per week on Amazon.com alone based on the graph (below) and multiplying a factor of three (as suggested by) Morris:

“Amazon announced in July of 2010 that Kindle sales are running 3X the rate of the first half of 2009, so you may want to triple the numbers on the sales/week axis below”

Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and thanks for the support! If you haven’t bought a copy, you can download a free first chapter of the book.

About the Book

The book highlights the power of recruiting people with Social Media! Social Media is not only an effective marketing tool to get candidates and customers onboard but also a tool to help decrease costs on communication, interaction, knowledge management/ transfer inside a company and externally with suppliers and customers.

Update (16th December 2010) The book is now available on Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk/ Sony Reader Store / Infibeam.com (Asia)

Book Information

Social Sourcing and Future of Blogging

SourcerSrini mentions how he is uses social media for sourcing candidates.
PunkRockHR good insight on the future of blogging.

Innovative startup in Recruitment

@James_Mayes talks about innovative stuff they are doing within their new start-up

Hardware and electronics have seen the 47% cuts on other online advertising, biggest in percentage, although social media advertising has risen by 56%.  So harware stores like Halfords and B&Q prefer to advertise on Facebook and LinkedIn as oppose to ITV.com and  Guardian.co.uk. Below is an analysis of why we are seeing these changes and why social media advertising is becoming so

Pros of SMA:

1. Social Media advertisements are more engaging.

Have you seen Facebook advertising? It allows you to conduct polls and get users to like your advertisement. If the user likes the advert (and clicks on the thumbs up icon), it automatically tells their friends that someone they know has endorsed the ad. It’s great way for your friends to recommend products and brands to you.

Also, if the user doesn’t find the advertisements relevant, they can click on the close button and that will stop advertisements similar to the ones displayed earlier. Saving advertisers money by targeting relevant people and making users happy about the adverts they see.

2. More targeted.

Click to enlarge

Social Media advertisers on Facebook can target a niche, in the example I’m looking to target executve vice presidents and executive directors who live in the UK. What’s great is that it gives me an estimate on number of people in this category in real time. I can no loosen the criteria to get more people to see my campaign or vice versa.

You can target your audience by their location, age, sexuality, job roles, music genre preference, political views, books they read, authors they like, etc. That sort of pin point accuracy is very hard to achieve on other sites and even search engines.

3. Larger communities for large campaigns.

Social networks have a larger audience than most of the other sites. This is fantastic, if the mission of your advertisement is brand awareness. For example if you are looking to target corporate or business owners, it might strike you that LinkedIn has 5.4million active members versus other business publications with an online presence.For instance WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) has 3million, Forbes.com 2.9million and BusinessWeek 1.3million. If you are looking to target a wider audience (niche or generic), sites like LinkedIn provide you with a huge opportunity.

4. Social media are the search engines of tomorrow.

As the search engine market is maturing, users are increasingly realising that most sites on the front two pages are highly optimised sites. Mainly owned by large publications, who pay a lot to get on the front two pages of major search engines. It doesn’t work for them when they are looking to get opinions on ‘How to get a graduate job’, ‘Which car to buy’ etc. They need forums  and real user feedback on questions they ask. Social Media allows users to achieve that as a conversation and not a broadcast as forums, groups, blogs etc.

5. Better User Experience.

Social Media’s success is based on good online technology coupled with intuitive usability, making lives simpler for the end user. We usually find social media easier to use than the average software or website. Less clutter and making sure the user is happy, this is the reason why you don’t require a manual to use social networking sites. Better user experience also means that punters are more informed, for instance they know the advertisement areas on the site and if they are interested, they would follow the adverts through. Some websites disguise the advertising areas and as a result users click on it, to realise that they have been redirected to another site.

Another aspect to it is connecting Facebook advertisements to your corporate Facebook Pages. Many users on clicking an advertisement want to stay on the same platform, typically on clicking on an advert, on search engine you go to a new website for which you might need to register or login. With Facebook you can develop a page and have a related advertisement on the site. It’s a great way to get user engagement and brand awareness.

Cons of Social Media Advertising

1. SMA is Interrupted Advertising.

Most social media sites like Myspace, YouTube, Bebo etc have advertisements which are placed around profiles, inbox, multimedia pages etc. As a busy user the chances are that you overlook the adverts are high. On the flip side sites like Myspace where advertisements include flashy banners, distracts users from their social networking experience, causing anger and frustration. Hence I often think of some social networking sites as experts in interrupted advertising, more often than not, users ignore them.

2. Timing of Advertisement.

Search engines are great for advertising because generally when you are looking for a product or a service you go on to a site like Google and type to find typical costs, suppliers, best practices etc. When it comes to social networks the chances are that advertisements are not relevant to you at the time, even though you are the right demographic.

Unfortunately social media sites won’t be able to put advertisements on their searches as Overture Inc. a paid search specialist pioneered the bid-for-placement mechanism. In July 2001, the US patent office issued Overture a patent for the mechanism.Patent 6,269,361; also known as the ’361 patent, essentially covered all AdWords like business models.

Conclusion

Looking at all the pros and cons of social network advertising, my conclusion is that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg. Social networking is barely 8 years old and SMA even younger. There are new platforms like Spotify popping up who are revolutionising the way we advertise and engage with audience on social media. Facebook is certainly the leader in innovative social network advertising, I’m sure we’ll see much more from them in the coming years.

If you are wondering what’s Google Wave, check out this video:

If you are a member of the group, please contact me with your email address.

• Candidate Profiles including either the public view or the more detailed view the user may be allowed to see.
• Contants/ connections a list of team or candidate’s contacts
• Status the Twitter-esque message users update. You can set, clear and retrieve a user’s status.
• Search for candidates on LinkedIn with a number of parameters, including name, company and title.
• Invitations can be sent to the user to become friends

The Advantages

Companies can now totally regain control of sourcing candidates whilst using LinkedIn. Software applications can be built to put the entire recruitment process behind firewalls or via a single application. Think of this like having the control of paper CVs with the dynamism of LinkedIn. Below, I have listed five advantages of using LinkedIn Applications:

Manage the recruitment process

For many recruitment organisations, using LinkedIn implied allowing agents to build their own database which they didn’t have access to after they left. Now using the LinkedIn API, organisations can build their own applications and have full control of the recruitment process.

Improve recruitment experience

Managing the recruitment process comes with added benefits. With the tools provided in the API, you can recreate the LinkedIn functionality completely. Making it simpler and more sophisticated for top executives to use the tool.

Build a true database

Companies can also build a database of candidates from LinkedIn and keep increasing the value of the company. This could replace previous databases which can be outdated compared to LinkedIn’s dynamic CV.

Increase flexibility

Companies can now regain the recruitment process completely. For bigger organisations all LinkedIn applications can be put behind the firewall, where consultants can work with candidates via there LinkedIn Profile. Right from looking for companies finding candidates to relevant candidates, electronic communication can now be done via this application.

Build Intellectual Property

More and more traditional businesses are now transforming to technology businesses or going online. A good example is the publication industry, who are slowly but surely making platforms an important aspect of their offering. Building a bespoke application, whatever takes your fancy, can mean owning not only a database of candidates but a more accessible and usable technology.

Want to learn more, get in touch: +44 (0) 1273 251414 | email me <at> rajanand.biz | skype rajanand12 | twitter rajanand | Join LinkedIn group: Social Media in Recruitment

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