Group items tagged

LinkedIn is adding a new “Volunteer Experience & Causes” field to profiles, the company announced Wednesday. The section will let users highlight and showcase their unpaid or charitable work experience.

Promoting your charitable experience will help get you a job, according to a recent survey by LinkedIn. The company polled nearly 2,000 U.S. professionals and found that 41% said that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work just as much as paid work. Of the hiring managers surveyed, 20% said they gave a job based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience.

Of the 2,000 professionals surveyed, 89% had volunteer experience but only 45% included that information on their resume.

Yet, when it comes to email management, most companies seems to adopt a somewhat broken posture: either they don’t advertise any public email or they advertise too many of them.

The right number of emails to be advertized by your company is ONE.

Fragmented communication issues were numerous and yet subtle. Here’s some anecdotal evidence: Sales team pitched a prospect with the usual 3min introductive verbatim, later to discover that the prospect was already very familiar with our technology, as the prospect was already one week into integrating with Lokad. As a result, the pitch was less than useful, and the sales team appeared clueless. (They were clueless.) Support team, not aware of the importance of a prospect, replied with a short email pointing toward our online documentation to a VIP (Very Important Prospect) who was basically asking for a direct call. Not only we missed a big opportunity to engage with a VIP, but we appeared somewhat carefree too (VIPs expect to be treated as such). A client with a technical question our billing, unsure of the proper contact, decided to separately email sales@, support@ and billing@. He got 3 distinct answers, triple effort for us, and one of them, poorly phrased, seemed to bring a different answer. We spend hours undoing the confusion afterward.

Flash forward to 2011, and philanthropy is the new black. Everywhere you turn, people are spending a few months abroad to build a school

volunteering at the blood bank in the evenings after they finish their 9-to-5 job. Everyone has a cause

This nouveau philanthropic righteousness is definitely making the world a better place and is empowering a generation to believe that they, as concerned citizens of the world, can make a difference to global issues

trategy #1: Try to Get Permission

Strategy #2: Use Advertising to Test

Use advertising as a testing tool rather than a long-term stream of customers.

An overwhelming number of marketers consider social media to be integral to their strategies this year, and 70% plan to increase their social media budget by more than 10% this year

found that the primary social media goal is to increase Facebook “Likes.”

social networking would take 11.9% of their overall budget this year compared with 13% for TV

Corporations have, not surprisingly, turned their marketing lens to the social networks, and they're running their corporate giving programs like a race for prom king.

Too often, it's the popular kid, and not the most deserving one, who wins. This type of giving poses definite ethical questions. That corporate marketing divisions are using social responsibility as a way to boost the bottom line is the least of these. The aforementioned $200,000 is actually but a part of the $5 million Chase claims to have donated

There's another advantage for Chase to hand out money this way: they're splashed all over your Facebook news feed as good-hearted bankers with whom you might just want to do business. But are these dollars solely devoted to helping charitable organizations, or are they just another way of advertising? A multi-billion dollar corporation shouldn't be allowed to write-off advertising as a charitable contribution.

A 2009 study by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education reported that 84 percent of professionals from a variety of industries said that they do not measure ROI within social media. This, tallied with my own experience, suggests there is a widespread desire to jump into social networking without all—or even some—of the answers. But not making the attempt to explore metrics is not an option for businesses with long-term vision and goals. ROI does not mean "Return on Ignorance."

The barrier to entry in social networks is much lower than in most other communications and branding channels. In many cases, establishing a presence in these networks is free. But remember the saying, "nothing in life is free?" The same holds true in social media. Your time has a price tag, and resources don't materialize without costs. At the same time, the imperative of social media is real.