Gen Yers aren’t specifically using Facebook for business, but with an average of 700 “friends” and a propensity to change jobs after two years, the lines between social and business are so blurred they aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Data out this morning from a study of Facebook’s Gen Y members (18-29) shows that, on average, each has 16 co-workers as friends. While the average is skewed by those who have many more, the study found that half have more than five workers as Facebook friends.

What’s the significance?

“When they go home,” says Gen Y branding guru Dan Schwabel, “they are still connected to the workplace… Their co-workers are their friends. And because people change jobs so often and have so many friends, their friends become co-workers.”

Ironically, Schwabel says, most Gen Yers aren’t intending for Facebook to be a business tool; 64 percent of them don’t bother to list a single employer in their profile.

That’s why, he says, Facebook is “inadvertently a part of their business life.”

His company, Millenial Branding, analyzed data from Identified.com uncovering the inadvertent consequence of friending co-workers. While BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown are intentional business networks for Facebook users, at least for Gen Y business networking is occurring on the mainstage.

Another key discovery, says Schwabel, is how few Gen Yers work at large companies. Only 7 percent of those listing a job currently work for a Fortune 500 firm.The largest share (7.2 percent) work in the hospitality and travel industry, and 2.9 percent give their job title as “server.”

However, ranking 5th among titles is “owner,” suggesting, says Schwabel, that Gen Y workers are entrepreneurial. For recruiters looking to hire Gen Yers, the implication is clear. “Large corporations need to rethink their corporate recruiting strategy,” he says. ” Companies have to be more flexible and give Gen Y more control over schedules, and their work.”

The best way to reach a Gen Yer, he says, is through their friends or by friending them directly. Don’t message them until you are a friend, he recommends. “They don’t think of Facebook that way.” Referrals by friends are the best way to reach out. “They trust their friends. They listen to their friends.”

Schwabel also had some counsel for his Gen Y peers — advice anyone with a workplace friend should keep in mind: “Be careful what (you) say. It could be the office gossip next morning.”

Texting: All the cool kids are doing it.  Is your nonprofit one of them?

Sending text messages to your supporters is a good way to alert them to news or other information.  There aren’t too many people who don’t carry a cell phone with them, so chances are they are going to receive your message instantly.  Before you start sending your group text messages, though, it’s important to listen to some sage advice.

In her book “Social Media For Good,” Heather Mansfield went over some best practices for group text messaging:

• Add a “Subscribe to Receive Text Alerts!” button on your website, blog, newsletters, social media sites, and other materials.  This will help with your visibility.
• On a related note, have your text-to-subscribe keyword and short pitch code to your Twitter background.
• Your text messages should be timely and relevant to current events.  For example, text donations played a large role in raising money for the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
• Mix up your messages by sending both information and call-to-action alerts.  People don’t want to receive too much of the same thing.
• Send periodic text messages to remind supporters that they can text to give or donate online.  But remember not to overload them with these types of messages.
• Speaking of which, you shouldn’t send more than two or three text messages a month.  These things cost money, ya know.
• If you have a mobile website (and you should), link to it in your messages.
• Use a service like bit.ly to track click-through rates from the links in your texts.  This will give you a better idea of the effectiveness of your campaign.

For more tips like this, check our Management Tips page.

Here’s a collection of odds and ends about startups, new features, and other bits and bytes of useful info.

• You may remember CodeEval from a year ago, and from an update we did when part of its service became free. The company has opened up its database for searching by employers. So if you want to look up one of the thousands of developers who’ve solved programming challenges, you can view their solutions, and contact info. It’s $500 a month, though you can search free to see how many matches you get, before spending the money to get identifying information.
• CareerBuilder says the staffing industry is in for a strong few months as companies ramp-up their temporary hiring. A survey commissioned by the careers publisher found 36 percent of companies plan to hire temp or contract workers this year. The first quarter may well be the easiest, as 27 percent of companies say they’ll be adding temp staff in the first three months of the year.

• Speaking of matchmaking, would you believe there’s another new site aimed at matching employer and employee online profiles? This one’s called StreetID, and it’s focused on financial careers.

• SelectMinds has announced something called “Referral Communities.” Basically this is an addition to SelectMinds’ product which we have mentioned before, called TalentVine. Referral Communities allows referred job candidates to get into a talent community if they’re not ready to apply for a job or not ready to send in a resume; with the old system, the person your employees referred would need to go through the full Taleo application process. Clients like eBay and McGraw-Hill can use the system to “drip market” to job candidates who have been referred employees have referred.
• Google is always looking for the best and the brightest coming out of colleges and universities around the world. To encourage interest (and this extends all the way to high schoolers), it has Google Student Blog. It’s about as soft a sell as you’ll see. Of course, career information is among the potpourri of offerings. Next week begins a series of video chats (on Googe+ Hangouts, naturally) with lead engineering recruiter Jeff Moore. He just wrapped up a Recruiter Tips & Tricks series. You can use Hangouts for your own recruiting chats.

• Anthony Knierim, who works for Aon Hewitt’s outsourcing business and used to be with Accenture’s outsourcing business, is starting a company called RadMatter, which he says is a “social gaming place” launching this quarter. It’s going to do a free or low-cost beta with 10 companies (it already has five “yesses” and one “maybe”; he told us some of the beta companies and they are well-known). He says a couple of them are “gaga” over the tool, which will first focus on games to engage college or early-career job candidates. Companies will buy licenses that will allow them to host 5, 10, or 30 challenges annually. Venture capitalists are approaching RadMatter, Kneirim says, but right now it’s holding off on giving up control to a big VC firm, particularly to a firm, he says, that doesn’t understand the recruiting industry and might not realize how big gaming, challenges, and similar assessments can be in attracting people. RadMatter also will offer two-hour workshops for business leaders on the power of games and on best practices with games in the workplace and in recruiting, for about $7,500 for up to 12 participants (and is doing an abbreviated one this January 23 in Milwaukee for more than 30 C-level executives). In addition, it’ll offer three-week, $75,000 “culture audits” for companies on “readiness and recommendations for engaging Millenials.”

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.  It’s what all the cool kids are talking about these days.  Anybody who’s anybody has one.

In all seriousness, having a social media presence is pretty important these days, especially for nonprofits.  Not only can you find new supporters you might not have otherwise reached, it also is a place where your followers can converse, and get the latest updates on your mission.  Since Facebook is the big kahuna of social networking sites, it’s important that it provides maximum engagement for your supporters.  One of the best ways to do this is to write great status updates.  In her book Social Media For Good, Heather Mansfield provides five ideas for status updates:

• Success Stories: Supporters like to know that the dollars they are contributing are going towards successful causes.  Fill them in on how their contributions are helping to fund successful programs.
• Photos: We live in a visual culture.  Post photos directly to Facebook of your organization’s latest events or just show people what your office looks like.
• Videos: Videos are also an effective visual tool for your Facebook.  Try sharing a new one at least two or three times a month.
• Breaking News: The great thing about social media is it allows you to communicate with your followers instantly.  When something big happens, take advantage of this by letting people know.  The news can be summarized in a few sentences for your status update.
• Call To Action: Have a fundraising campaign coming up?  Use your Facebook status to get your followers to participate.  You can also do this for petitions or other special events.

In our last lesson, we discussed the credibility power that LinkedIn gives you on the phone, especially from your raving fans’ strong recommendations. We can summarize that power by its ability to credibly convey to your prospects exactly what you do and what benefits your clients and candidates receive by working with you. This month, we’re going to consider the second medium that will empower your telephone selling success: blogging.

I’ll introduce blogging to you first, in precisely the same way it was introduced to me. Then, we’ll walk through the steps you must take if you’re going to ensure a powerful return on investment.

Converting Pasquale – Or, the Irresistible Desire to be a DOMAIN EXPERT

If you’ve followed this series, you already know about my son Nico’s role in converting me into the use of social media to empower my own Diehard Phone Jockey practice. There were several others along the way who helped greatly. When it comes to blogging, though, it was my client and friend Pete Rouillard who pushed me over the line. Pete is a seasoned technology executive, and as a recruiter, it is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals he places. With his long experience and exhaustive vistas overlooking the technology and media worlds, Pete hit me most strongly with this one concept: Domain Expert.

Old school soul that I am, when I hear new buzz words like that, my first reaction is to close my mind. I’d heard those words for years before Pete explained their power to me, and that’s exactly what I’d done, closed my mind. Pete simply laughed at me, and told me that in everything I do I’m always seeking – whether I like the words or not – the reality of being granted “Domain Expert” status. Pete explained that I didn’t have to like the words, I simply had to face the truth. That’s the kind of argument that always gets my attention.

He forced me to break the two words apart. What is a “Domain?” In old school terms, it’s just a market. And, when you’re on the phone attempting to sell just one person, that one person is your current “Domain.” But, if you follow classical marketing definitions, we all know that even just one person is always tied to others and influenced by their perceptions and by the scuttlebutt about what’s hot and what’s not, etc. So, who does the prospect you’re speaking to listen to? Whom is he or she connected to and influenced by? These people are your domain.

Also, from traditional marketing, we know that we must always build our UVP (Unique Value Proposition). The word “Expert” is just a shorter term for the same thing. What is unique about you that would inform a prospect working with you as opposed to anyone else? What unique value do you bring to play? Or, in today’s world, just what qualifies you as an Expert?

What Pete closed me on was this: a Domain Expert is PRECISELY the person a prospect wants to, no, NEEDS to do business with. I realized that I had to open up my mind.

A Blog is Where You Say What You’ve Got To Say

This is exactly what a blog is all about. Look back at those LinkedIn recommendations. What was their key? They were credible, and written by others who are easily found and connected with for verification. Your credibility is built by what others say about you, more than your claims made in a brief encounter. But, there is absolutely a place for you to win the trust and desire to work with you, by your own words. Think of it this way…

A blog is where you say what you have to say.

What’s your message? What’s your position? Where do you stand? To flesh this out, we need one more new term: Cyberspace.

I know, it’s not the hottest of the techno-buzzwords right now, but it’s so helpful in coming to understand your blog. Cyberspace may be electronic space, online, but it is still SPACE. That is, if I want to know who you are, really, and what your position is, WHERE do I go to find that out? Again, the answer is your blog.

It is a common formula that people do business with those that they:

Know, Like, and Trust.

Your blog is where they’re going to come to know you.

What Will You Write About?

So what will you write about? How often must you do so? How will you find the ultimate message you must convey? Let’s take those questions one at a time.

When considering your content, the very first place to go is victory. Not your own, your clients and candidates. What do they need to know to win? One of the easiest and best ways to access this knowledge within yourself is simply to pay attention to all the defeats your clients and candidates suffer. Be simple. A defeat is anytime anything happens other than what they wanted, or what would have been best for them. As you note these defeats, you’ll rapidly realize you have very significant knowledge about how to overcome them.

Think of all the times you’ve said to yourself, “If they’d only do what I told them…” At your blog, you can now take advantage of every such thought you’ve ever had, and I promise, people will now begin to listen as they never have before. Why is that? One of the greatest and most powerful reasons is this: when you encounter people, you do so in real time. Live interaction has its own rhythm and pace, and there’s really no changing that. But, that pace is vastly FASTER than most people can absorb or retain. They hear you, and some of what you say sticks. But, anything that they’d actually have to think about – that is, anything that is truly serious – has a vanishingly small chance of being processed in the time available.

This time parameter is one of the main reasons why we complain about meetings and meetings and meetings, but no action. We’re there in the meeting, but we don’t really have the mental chops to absorb all we require, real time, and must invest time afterwards in real processing if anything is going to change in our real comprehension.

Your blog corrects for every one of these challenges. It gives people not only all the time in the world to study what you have to say, it also lets them go over the material again and again if they’re truly serious about learning what you have to teach.

The easy thing, as we’ve considered, is finding simple defeats and educating others as to how to overcome them. A positive message about how to win is a bit more challenging. But, you can find it if you just look. Consider all the people you’ve served who have won, who have made significant change for the better with your help. How did you help them? What did they do for themselves? Search out and find the core principles driving that success and you’ll have a mighty message indeed.

We need to take that point one step further. What is your dream? I know most people kind of seize up when I ask them that. You may, like so many others, just kind of go blank never having really attempted to tie it down or express it. The truth is you do have a dream, but, exactly as your dreams at night evaporate in the morning, it is often very difficult to access your dream. A simple step you can take is just this. Just ask once, twice, three times: how SHOULD things really be? Only think of the smallest, easiest things. Look for the very simplest points of progress you can. If you find three of these, you’ve already got the basis of a dream. You’ll see, they build on each other and if all three of these simple things came true, the world you live and work in would be quite different.

Let’s assume that you have found a dream. At your blog, you absolutely MUST share your dream! No, you don’t have to call it that. You can use any terms that your audience will relate to. But, as people come to your blog and come to know who you are, they’re going to want to learn what your vision is. They’re going to want to know where you are leading them. Your dream is a kind of contribution that you can be sure they won’t find anywhere else. Your vision for the future is one of the greatest gifts of truth you can give your audience.

How Often Will You Blog?

There is a hard school of blogging that basically demands you post something every day. In my own blog, I do something like that. I post a 700-word essay every morning, four days per week, 39 weeks per year, for a minimum of 156 postings per year. The thing is, I can tell you, that is a huge amount of work. I have my reasons. But, I’m NOT going to recommend that pace for you. If you have the motivation, you’ll find it a life changing practice. So, I’m happy to encourage you to consider such a pace. That said, you absolutely do NOT need to post that much.

When you’re getting started, once per month, or perhaps at most, once per week is absolutely sufficient. If you shoot for the more frequent posting per week, you don’t have to actually do so every single week. But, if you opt for a once per month strategy, then by all means, make your posting EVERY month. That leads us to the real answer. Blogging is not so much about how often, as it is about the consistency of your rhythm.

And that brings us back to your phone work! If you did make the commitment to posting once per week, does your telephone mind instantly see what that gives you for your conversations? It isn’t just an icebreaker either. It is a substantive topic of conversation. And, you’re never dependent upon your prospects having been to your blog before, either. You can always send them an e-mail link and have them simply click on the link right while they’re on the phone with you. In fact, this is a powerful thing to do relative to those people you don’t reach on the phone, directly.

My own practice is that I almost never leave a voice mail message, anymore, without also shooting off an e-mail as well. And, in my e-mails, I of course invite them to check me out at LinkedIn, consider joining my LinkedIn Discussion group, the Recruiting Tactics and Strategy Group, and absolutely to check out my blog, The Recruiting Manifesto.

These multiple avenues of contact leverage every step of your marketing and connection process.

What Is Your Ultimate Message?

We discussed the steps of noting your clients’ and candidates’ defeats, the steps you recommend for their victory, positively, and your dream. Still, the question of your ultimate message requires just one more element for our consideration. That is, your themes. You can think of these as topics, or as positions, even models if you will. Here’s an example of the theme that drives all of my work at my blog:

1. Bold Vision
2. Relentless Execution
3. Penetrating Analysis
4. Reinvention, and Repeat

I call that theme “The Cornerstones of Business Excellence.” If you head over to my blog, www.TheRecruitingManifesto.com, you’ll find I’ve written up a series of posts there exploring this theme from just about every angle. But, at a deeper level, if you explore my blog you’ll find that this theme actually informs every single thing I write about. I didn’t find that theme instantly, as soon as I started blogging. But, I rapidly found that I needed a way to think of my work there. And, as soon as I did find this theme, my blogging experience came into clear focus and simply became ever so much easier to do. Without it, I would not be able to keep up my grueling pace.

I repeat, there’s no need for you, as a Diehard Phone Jockey, to set the kind of writing pace I live by. But, at any pace, finding your own theme, where you truly stand, will be a great line in your process. Once you find it, you’ll be hooked!

Where do you get your ROI on the phone from all this work? Pete Rouillard gives us the answer. As you build your blog’s recognition and the strength of your message, people will begin to speak about the things you have to say. In a word, this is called winning. Your blog has a very clear victory or defeat line. You do want people to come, to read and most of all, to speak!

Are you familiar with the old industry term “Power Broker?” I will always associate that term with Bob Marshall and his two great training sessions, Your Desk as a Manufacturing Plant and most especially, The Concept of the Inverted Cones. Those two videos, first recorded back in the late ’80s, were two of the most impactful sources of learning I’ve ever enjoyed. In them, the goal of becoming a Power Broker is mapped out to perfection. Bob teaches us that a Power Broker is the “Go To” guy or gal in an industry. If you want the best talent, you simply have to call this person. Pete Rouillard is not quite as old school as me, and I’m not sure that the term resonates for him the way it does for me. Expert status, or as Pete says, winning the battle to be THE Domain Expert – this is what we have always been searching for.

Winning Power Broker Status

In closing, let me tempt you in this way. Most of today’s Power Brokers did not come up in the New School of highly leveraged, empowering Social Media. To me, that means they’re vulnerable. How so? Whoever wins the war for the most powerful, most beneficial, best blog in any space is the person who has the greatest leg up on winning Domain Expert status in that space. If you’re not a Power Broker yet, and if you look around, find those who are in your space, and discover either that they don’t have a blog, yet, or if they do, if it’s a blog that doesn’t impress you…then you have a shot to step up to the front of the class.

If you do, the rewards, and the return on investment will surely be fantastic. But, do be clear, you don’t have to be shooting for the most powerful spot in your entire industry. You simply have to desire to give your clients and candidates the benefit of your wisdom, your tactical and pragmatic learning, and your best thinking. If you give them that, then your blog will empower your telephone success.

Stay tuned next week for more from the Die-Hard Phone Jockey series…

If there was a LinkedIn war for dominance who would win? I believe that the greatest of the “Cold Call Sellers,” the most “Old School” and yes the die-hard Phone Jockeys are the ones with the greatest edge. We are the ones who have the most to gain from staking a claim in the rich land that LinkedIn has created in cyberspace.

I propose that LinkedIn is actually the current ultimate source of unstoppable leverage for cold call selling. This leverage comes from LinkedIn’s unique, revolutionary method of organizing and presenting your most rabidly raving fans’ boldest recommendations. We will also discuss the power of the small, free step of connection when building relationship to your prospects, and also the power of your LinkedIn profile as your most important marketing document (and most definitely NOT merely an online resume!). But our main focus will be unleashing LinkedIn’s power to build instant, overwhelming credibility to enhance our cold call selling success.

LinkedIn Recommendations as an Irresistible Sales Asset

How do LinkedIn recommendations improve telephone selling? Once we’ve broken through the resistance we always meet, connected with our prospect, and succeeded at opening up a new conversation, we must immediately face and overcome the great challenge of building trust and credibility. In overcoming this hurdle, LinkedIn changes the game like no other instrument a cold call seller has ever had at his or her disposal. We’ve always attempted to marshal the power of testimonials and recommendations in order to help us overcome this barrier. But any other form of recommendation cannot hold the same power for credibility that LinkedIn recommendations enjoy.

At LinkedIn you can follow the trail of connection instantly. When anyone posts a recommendation there, they know that they can be contacted for verification. The ease of this means of checking naturally results in the fact that most people never check. Thus, the reader experiences a type of immediate credibility that is truly new in the world of normal, everyday business.

The exact same testimonial published at your company website holds NO such ease of verification. Until now, no written testimonial held the instant emotional force of complete, easy verifiability. In some ways, LinkedIn’s power of recommendation is exactly what Ronald Reagan used to push for as he and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated over nuclear arms issues. Reagan used to hammer away, “Trust, but verify,” in every meeting. This exact capacity – trust with verification – is precisely what your prospects enjoy when learning about you at LinkedIn.

So what must you do in order to tap into this incredible source of leverage? And, how does this flow back into your tactical telephone work?

Recommendations for Beginning Recruiters

Let’s take the hardest case of all: you’re just getting started as a recruiter and have no clients or candidates who even know you, let alone can rave about you. LinkedIn gives you incredible power to get started even here. First, think back over the things you’ve done in your life that would count as successes by any definition you care to employ. I’m not kidding. Old blue ribbons from art class in elementary school may be too much of a stretch, but your high school debate club instructor is as appropriate to validate your business abilities as you need to come. And hey, one of the most credible sources of reference in the business world is any athletic endeavor in which you excelled. If you were on a varsity team, and if your coach is on LinkedIn – or willing to join on your behalf – then you have a fantastic recommendation waiting for nothing more than your well-executed request.

One of the great powers of all social media is that it gives you a basis to reconnect. If you look at my profile, you’ll find a perfect example. One of the recommendations I enjoy and am most proud of is from my first boss in life, a fellow named Norman Hallett. Previous to my time as a commodity broker, I’d been self-employed. I have been self-employed ever since. So, Norman is actually the only “real” boss I’ve ever had — and he taught me so much! But when I joined LinkedIn, he and I had not spoken in 22 years.

You can imagine that finding him after all these years and winning a glowing recommendation from him was a profoundly emotional moment for me as a new LinkedIn user. Customers top the list of desired recommenders, but the very next group is your former bosses. Actually, they may be the favored group of “customers” considering the fact that your bosses likely paid you more money for your work than any other group of people. The key is the conversion of paid-for effort into profitable, dramatic return-on-investment and pleasurable benefits that are fun to recall and a delight to share with others. Every value you’ve ever created is the basis of a potentially powerful recommendation.

I hope I’ve persuaded you that even the newest player to the field can get started. But if you’ve been a successful recruiter for any period of time at all, then investment into your profile and most importantly your raving, worshipful fan testimonials is the most powerful marketing step you can make here in 2011.

Discovering Your Own Greatest Values

How well do you think you can define and communicate what you actually do, and why someone would be a fool to NOT use your services? I hope you’re not still using those ancient, boring, “Our 57-step search process is the most thorough…blah, blah, blah” statements of value! If you’re like me, identifying my greatest values and most compelling sales arguments is one of the most difficult parts of your selling practice. Funny thing is, guess who often has no difficulty identifying your most powerful benefits? Your delighted and satisfied customers are able to identify these values and are often thrilled to do so.

The difficulty is one of perspective. When thinking about your work, your mind can’t escape going through the comprehensive list of all the steps and actions you take. Often it’s the tasks you hate that you think about the most. But, those who benefit from your work have a totally different point of view. They just see and feel the magic. It is virtually impossible for you to step into their shoes and fully feel the power of what you do for them. The only way to even discover this is to ask. But if you’re just in a conversation and ask, they may stutter and stumble. It takes time and effort to express it. Even to think about it takes time; not much, but some.

LinkedIn provides the needed context like no other medium. Simply connect with your customer and then shoot them a recommendation request. Go to their profile you’ll see the link offering this action. LinkedIn fills in a simple, basic message for you. Typically, I recommend against using the default message. The smallest effort in personalizing your message makes such a tremendous difference. Better yet, you really should SPEAK ON THE PHONE.

What is needed is a warm, personal connection. You are asking for a favor. Do not be boring. Do not be assumptive. If you are, your recommendations will have no spark or fire to them. No, what you want is to have a conversation in which you ask for your customer’s help, and then, only if they are true “raving fans”. Remember, this is no small tactical maneuver, quickly done and then over. This is a strategic investment of the highest order.

You are requesting the thought and effort to express your greatest values boldly, in public, and as a permanent record. Imagine how much this really means. I propose that no other effort offers the same return. Approach this with respect and, yes, love, even if you don’t call it that. Ask kindly without expectation, only desire. Always be ready to let someone say no, too. You only want recommendations from those who will feel happy to have written them, and even happier to be called upon to stand as a witness to your glories and amazing powers.

Telephone Power

How does this translate back to the telephone work you do all day every day?

You will surely want and need to connect with your prospects at LinkedIn. This brings an additional and positive dynamic to your call. Understand that the more ways by which you connect with your prospects, the better. This must be emphasized. One of the great principles of cold call selling is the dynamic of permission-based interaction. At first, you’re interrupting and have no permission to do so. The sooner you get permission the better. And, the simpler, smaller, and less costly any choice to be connected is, the better.

When you speak to a new prospect, and then that person decides to connect to you on LinkedIn, this is a virtually pain free and absolutely cost free step. This new element to your cold call is so perfectly constructed we should have figured out some such equivalent decades prior to the Internet. Actually, if you’re old school enough, you might remember lead cards we published in magazines. When someone filled out a lead card, they were giving us permission to contact them. It isn’t the same, but it holds some of the same force.

A LinkedIn connection, though, is the perfect form of permission to win, even in a very first cold call contact. This is worth much meditation on your part as you envision your evolving practice.

Your Profile as Your Mightiest Marketing Tool

Once connected — or even if you’re not connected — you will surely want to recommend that everyone you speak to go read about your magical powers and amazing prowess at making money and building success for your customers.

Which brings us to our last point. For all the power of your recommendations (and nothing else matters so much) you do still have to think carefully about your profile itself. Let me tell you what it is NOT:

Your LinkedIn profile is NOT merely a boring online resume.

Now let me tell you what it is, or actually what you must make it to be:

THE MOST POWERFUL MARKETING DOCUMENT YOU’RE ABLE TO CREATE.

Here, you really can think about it exactly as if it were going to be a simple, old-fashioned, typewritten document. LinkedIn is becoming more visual, bit by bit. Soon, we will surely hire graphic designers and artists and people with visual design backgrounds to help us improve our profiles, and wisely so. But, the technology base is not quite there yet. So for now, you really can think of your profile mostly in terms of the written word.

By the way, you don’t have to become a great writer. You do, however, need to build your business sense. What is it that impresses prospects? What values will drive their decision to work with you? Solid business claims of verifiable value; these are the hallmark of your profile. It is an advertisement. This means that you must never forget your target market and their values for a moment. Here, the more you invest in to your recommendations, the more they will help you and guide you toward crafting the mightiest, most powerful message you can with the rest of the profile itself.

One small design element I’m happy to clue you in on is this. The sections of your profile can easily be moved. Most users don’t realize this yet. As you might imagine, I strongly recommend moving your recommendations as high up and close to the top of your profile as you can. Your recommendations are far more important than your own statements of your background or job history, etc. You really do want them front and center, and LinkedIn makes that very easy to do…but not obviously so.

LinkedIn Black Belts

Before we conclude our LinkedIn exploration, let me say a word about all the many powers and directions that LinkedIn mastery will take you. There are scores of powers to be won. The best way to think about this is as if you were going to learn a martial art — or any art form, for that matter. If you decide to take up oil painting, you won’t likely be competing with Rubens or Da Vinci in a matter of days or weeks. In Taekwondo you will not master a perfect roundhouse kick overnight. So also with LinkedIn and all social media investments. You want to find the smallest steps you can, and work to master those as well as you can, and then move forward gently.

And on that note, I must say a word about all the powers of LinkedIn that we’re NOT discussing in this article. If you search for it, you’ll find a seemingly infinite set of guides out there all offering to teach you how to extract maximum value from this amazing technology. My focus, as you’ve noticed is a bit different. I want to help you capitalize on LinkedIn’s powers while you improve your telephone performance and enhance your ability to hit your objective goals. The most important value to go get, right now, is the power of credibility that will immediately transform your cold call selling success.

Conclusion

If you’ll execute the steps we’ve discussed, you’ll rapidly discover your own new strength in each and every call you make. I can honestly testify that for me, the ability to confidently direct prospects’ attention to my profile was nothing short of a stunning new ability. The truth is that my clients and I have fought dragons together, and we’ve lived to tell the story. Now, LinkedIn empowers us to share in the telling like never before. My prospects don’t have to connect with me in order to see these testimonials, but closing on that connection is a wonderful, easy, resistance-free action they can take. That too makes me bolder, on the one hand, but more comfortable in my selling steps on the other. I don’t know that my profile is the best marketing document I’ve ever created for my practice, but I can easily attest that it is, by far, the most successful such marketing instrument I’ve ever invested into.

My strongest counsel to you is simply this: put the power of your most raving fans’ witness to work for you at LinkedIn as soon as you can. If you have a few recommendations already, go get a few more. If you have none, get some right now. You will immediately empower your telephone work more in this way than by any other single step you’ll take.

Next week we’ll bring you another installment of the Die-Hard Phone Jockey’s Guide series. Stay tuned!

Ever hear of Squidoo?  It’s a site that allows you to create pages on a given subject.  The NonProfit Times has just created a Squidoo page that covers the all-important topic of nonprofit fundraising.  The intention of this page is to give nonprofit managers and employees another venue to get free tips to help their organization succeed with all of their fundraising activities.  We already have three articles on there, including one on how to find volunteers for fundraising events.  Let’s take a look at an excerpt from that piece:

Nonprofits can raise funds through a variety of different methods. While a large amount of these funds come from direct donations, fundraising events play a large part as well. These events can be concerts, galas, special speaking events, or other large gatherings. These can take a great deal of effort, but that effort is repaid well if it’s done properly.


The backbone of a great fundraising event lies in the strength of its volunteers. You are going to want to find individuals who are totally committed to the cause for which the event is raising money. If a volunteer is not enthusiastic about it, they will likely not put as much effort into making sure things go smoothly. That’s why it’s important to have a solid screening process when picking volunteers. One great suggestion is to create a questionnaire for potential candidates that might include questions like: “How many people are you comfortable working with?” or “What skills are you proficient in?”

Head on over to our Squidoo page (linked at the top of this post) to check out the full article.  You should also check out our other Squidoo Lens that covers nonprofit jobs.

I’m not just a Phone Jockey; I am the proudest and most happily defiant of us. You may find this hard to believe, but I typically knock out five to six hours of actual connect time every day. Intense phone days for me head past seven hours, and an 8- or 8+ hour day is not unusual for me. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean total time working; I mean the time I’m actually connected on the phone. I really am a die-hard ‘Phone Jockey,’ and I always have been – dating back to the mid ‘80’s as a commodity broker, and then in years of contracting and telemarketing, and ultimately in my job of the past 24 years, as a consultant.

As a consultant, though, it took me almost ten years to arrive at my conclusions about phone time for recruiters. My first reaction to recruiters’ numbers identified no positive correlation between phone time and performance. In fact, I actually saw a negative correlation. Back in the 90’s, the best performing recruiters knocked out more placements at higher fees with less phone time than the less successful ones. So, when I heard the famous four-hour rule and then, upon asking for the data, no one had it, I became a true skeptic.

But, those were in the halcyon days of the great Bull Market, and I couldn’t realize back then that I what I was observing was absolutely a Bull Market phenomenon. I had to see the economy shift, and it took me until 2002 to be able to find my first data demonstrating that the recruiters who thrived in challenging conditions had dramatically higher phone time than those who washed out or simply struggled their way through. Thus, it wasn’t until I could sum up my new data in 2003 that I found my initial Bear Market faith in blunt, straight up, raw phone time as, for me, the ultimate measure of a recruiter’s real efforts. Since, I’ve come to believe that no other measure correlates more directly to the creation and sustainability of recruiting success. There are pros and cons to the measure, and I understand that. My position, however, is that when we understand it properly, no other measure is quite as powerful.

I guess that makes me a Phone Jockey twice. Once as a practitioner and then as a teacher and champion of the Old School rule of four hours per day. I prefer to think of it, though, as twenty hours per working week. More minutely, I urge that you master the art of being connected for all of 1,200 minutes per week. Then, returning to hours, I ultimately champion the 260-hour, 13-week quarter. While I’ve heard about the 4-hour rule since I first started serving recruiters, I’m unaware of any who monitor the 20-hour week or the 260-quarter with the same fierce faith and passion.

There’s one other Old School qualifier I must brag about. Up until 2009, I opposed and happily refused to engage in any form of social media. I viewed myself as the last 20^th century man standing, and simply loved being the ultimate holdout against modern technology. I used e-mail extensively, but not without some very real resentment. I do recall back in the ‘90’s before I started using e-mail being on the phone with an industry leader in technology who wrote me off since I had the temerity to ask him how I’d get paid for the time I spent writing to people.

I must share a little bit with you about how I was converted. Not away from being a die-hard Phone Jockey, but rather into the addition of social media to my tool set – really, to my business arsenal of weapons.

My conversion

The context is this: up until the end of 2008, all previous economic downturns had been simply wonderful for my consulting practice. In tough times, people are simply far more ready to hear and pay for the tough pill of real change. It’s easier for people to justify working with me when times are hard, and so my business always thrived in the downturns, until the recent one. Fool that I was, when I saw the turnaround coming, just like everyone else. I was actually happy, thinking this one would be like all the previous Bear Markets, I so enjoyed. Talk about a gut punch! The effects started striking in January of 2009, and it didn’t take me long to discover how wrong I was.

During 2009, I engaged in the longest, strongest series of failure analyses of my career. I essentially rewrote the book of my business methods from the ground up, actually reinventing what I do. Most of this was truly practice-oriented, but I grew ever more aware of my marketing weakness. I’ve lived by the salesman’s arts, and until 2009, I never believed I needed to engage in any marketing outside of my cold call selling strengths. As I rewrote my business, though, my son was gently, yet powerfully, leading me into this new world.

What he finally was able to persuade me to do was this: up until the leveraging power of the Internet made it possible, marketing was always massively expensive and truly only available to great institutions and corporations who could afford it. But the advent of the Internet itself, especially social media, reduced the cost of marketing down to nothing other than sheer time and effort. Where in the past, the dollar cost of marketing was prohibitive, Nicholas challenged me that to choose to reject marketing today was simply a form of denial and laziness. Any person – even just a single individual – could now create their own personal marketing endeavor at no cost other than effort and learning.

Anther part of my son’s genius was this: he knew that with my Old School mindset, I did not believe in complex business plans which, in my judgment, tended to not be worth the paper they were printed on. But, he also knew that in my soul, I’m the truest believer in what I call “real planning” that you’ll ever find. I’m less about formal structure and far, far more about internal dedication and commitment. I bring a martial arts mindset and the infinite journey toward mastery to everything I do.

The ‘New School Masteries’

So, Nicholas created and presented our business plan in that manner. It was actually an interlocked set of four separate New School Masteries he presented to me as challenges.

Not only that, he assured me that each Mastery was sufficiently advanced as a technology and that all I would need to do would be to learn the skills of a user. I would NOT have to become proficient in computers themselves, any more so than I was as a user of word-processing or e-mail. It was just a new set of skills, not a transformation of my relationship to computers or technology itself.

Lastly, he of course was there to coach me at every turn. With every mind-breaking frustration, seemingly illogical action or incomprehensible error message (or just personal blindness and impatience to simply read what was on the screen), Nico held my hand and slowly, carefully, and gently explained the same thing as many times as I needed until the stroke of comprehension finally struck.

What were these four masteries?

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Email Newsletter Marketing
4. Facebook

…You may be wondering, “Why NOT such social powerhouses as Twitter or YouTube, etc.?”

Of course, you cannot pursue every new technology, nor would I or anyone else expect you to. Please refer to the P.O.S.T. Planning article by Amybeth Hale from earlier this summer for further explanation. Only do what you understand, and only invest into what makes most sense to you. For me, Twitter’s time frames just don’t work yet. I may well cross that line, even here in 2011. But, I haven’t made that decision yet and I’m very happy to NOT be doing it at this point. On the other hand, I really do wish I were farther along in using You Tube. Its power is gigantic. But again, the demands of mastering recording video and the time investment required even just to spend time watching videos does NOT yet fit into my work schedule. So, in spite of being quite attracted to video power, I haven’t crossed that line yet, either.

The same freedom is absolutely yours. Don’t invest into anything that doesn’t compel your investment with clear rewards that are richer than the price of playing. The four media we’ll be discussing in the coming months are those that fit the criteria for me. In each case I hope to offer you the right way to think about the medium as a means of empowering greater performance on the phone. I’m happy for you to say, “Not yet,” of course. But if you’re intrigued by the possibilities, I intend to help you approach their usage in a way that fits into your Old School, die-hard Phone Jockey mindset.

In the coming parts of this series, in exactly the same way Nico taught them to me, I will introduce you to each one individually. That’s worth emphasizing.

One thing at a time

There is a great ongoing convergence driving all social media, today, as well as all our technology-driven personal marketing tools. But, if you let them all merge together in your mind the whole will be too overwhelming for an Old School soul to handle. You really do have to take them one at a time and dedicate yourself to them in a serial manner. At least if you’re like me you do. Then, the convergence can mature on its own as you get there. First, pick just one and make the plunge. Then, if you’re ready, you add a second. Do NOT try to go too fast, you will regret it.

Our purpose in this series will not be to get you all the way to the point of convergence. Rather, I hope to help you use an Old School mindset to understand the power of just the four New School instruments I’ve personally tackled as I’ve made the plunge myself. After this, we will bring everything back together, giving you a Recruiting Phone Jockey’s map to the four that I personally employ, and hopefully empowering you to move forward…gently.

Enhance your telephone activities

As you contemplate these new tools for your recruiting practice, do keep this in mind: when a tool is working, it truly will empower your telephone conversations. In fact, allow me one specific example to make the point.:

For all the previous years of my career, I truly did have to fight for credibility with each and every prospect. That fight was both tremendously time-consuming and highly challenging. From the moment I started collecting testimonials in the form of recommendations for my LinkedIn profile, that battle changed instantly. I found that what I attempted to say on my own behalf simply did not carry one tenth the amount of credibility that reading what my clients said held. I’d collected testimonials before, but they’d never been organized, easy to access, and easy to check out on your own the way my LinkedIn profile made possible.

A key point has to be emphasized here. LinkedIn creates its own credibility, or perhaps I should call it a credibility premium. When your LinkedIn profile is invested into by those you serve, others who use LinkedIn are more powerfully affected by this than by the exact same testimonials in another format, such as your own website or more traditional marketing materials. That premium is something you simply MUST put to work for yourself, which is why I urge LinkedIn for every recruiter, even if you’re not going to engage in any other social media.

As we’ll tie down in our next article, the testimonial portion of your LinkedIn profile is the single most positively leveraged New School investment you’ll ever make.

I can assure you, the moment my faith in what my son was selling to me began to explode west the exact moment I noticed that I did not have to fight so hard for credibility on the phone. My Linked profile page was absolutely and undeniably the thing that made all that difference. That’s how I got hooked.

LinkedIn is the most powerful, but it’s just one example. Each of our four media demonstrates its own unique power and benefits for recruiters. In the coming articles to be shared over the next several weeks, after I introduce each medium and its tactical use, I will tie the benefit of getting it right straight back to your work, as I know you are the same kind of die-hard Phone Jockeys that I am.

It’s pretty incredible how much can change in a decade.  Back in 1999, the Internet was still a new phenomenon; people still didn’t know what to make of it.  In 2011, the thought of doing anything without the it seems absurd.  The rise of social media and mobile technology has allowed us to be plugged in at all times, for better or for worse.  This has made the world of nonprofit communication much simpler, but it’s also made it more convoluted.  That’s why Herschell Gordon Lewis, author of Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings and frequent contributor to The NonProfit Times, wrote a new column which we just published on our site.  He outlines “10 Commandments” that all nonprofits should follow if they want to survive in this new era of technology.  Let’s take a look at some of them:

The First Commandment: Thou shalt make response simple.


We’re deep in the Internet Era, in which attention spans have shrunk to minuscule size. Don’t ask for more information than you need until you have the prospect at least comfortably secured in your own web. And, avoid the nasty and too-common word “Submit.” Right now, before facing “Submit” head-on, start thinking about a substitute.


The Second Commandment: Thou shalt stay in character.


A peculiar development is what some veteran fundraisers call “The Facebook Effect.” The projected mood bobs, weaves, and shifts as the appeal thinks it progresses but actually generates confusion for what should be the most probable donors.


The Third Commandment: Thou shalt not steal, except from noncompetitive sources.


Yes, yes, all nonprofit appeals are competitive with all other nonprofit appeals. But if you’re a hospital in Albuquerque and see a usable bright idea in an appeal by a college in Pittsburgh (you should be decoying every nonprofit mailing and email you can find), grab it and run with it.


The Fourth Commandment: Thou shalt not fall for fads.


This is back to Facebook and Twitter. If with dollars spent, against dollars returned, these media work for you, stay with them. But if you’re there because you subscribe to the dangerous dictum “That which represents a change automatically represents a profitable change,” be more than observant. Be critically comparative.


The Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt never again start a fundraising letter with the ancient cliché, “Dear Friend.”


If this Commandment puzzles you, you’re in trouble.

Don’t stop here, there’s still 10 more commandments to go!  Read the rest of them over at The NonProfit Times.

Back on July 1, Amybeth Hale posted about a recruiter named Jerry Albright who’d decided he’d had enough of Twitter.

I caught up with Albright on the phone to ask him whether his decision to give up on tweeting was a good one. We also discuss:

• The sky-high expectations of new Twitter users, and social media users in general
• Whether Twitter is work or personal
• The convergence of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
• Whether you really need to quantify your social media efforts

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