These connected whiz-kids are looking around, wondering where they should work… and where are they looking? Online, naturally; but they’re not just looking at company and jobs websites, they’re checking out your online reputation on social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others, and are looking for the profiles of executives on professional networks like LinkedIn.

Social screening is a two way street

You read a lot about how employers are trawling these networks both to “check” applicants’ details and looking for prospective employees; about how candidates should have their professional profile up on LinkedIn, and how they should be aware of their online footprint and watch what they post. What you don’t hear much about is the fact that those same candidates are doing exactly the same thing in reverse. Be under no illusion, your prospective employees are checking you out too… and as digital natives they’re in their natural environment: i.e. they’re probably better at it than you are!

In a nutshell: if you don’t measure up, then sorry, you don’t get to employ the best and the brightest — and that could hurt the long term prosperity of your business.

Krishna De, a leading business, personal branding and social media coach based in Dublin, Ireland; highlighted the fact that Generation X employers really don’t get that social media is a two-way medium in a recent blog post. She reveals that even companies that consider themselves progressive in the social media space are lagging behind in this potentially crucial area.

Marketing your company to prospective employees — projecting it as a progressive and innovative place to work – is every bit as important as using digital channels to promote and sell your products and build relationships with your customers. And yet few organisations, and even less senior managers, seem to acknowledge it, let alone embrace the remarkable opportunities that social media affords to put their brand in front of tomorrow’s brightest young stars.

As Krishna De so effectively puts it:

If you want to win the war for talent, don’t leave it to chance what potential candidates may find out about you online – be sure to create your professional profile representing your personal brand online

Incidentally, you’ll find my public LinkedIn Profile here.

Are companies embracing social media effectively in the fight to attract the best candidates? Leave a comment and let us know what you think….

The answer, of course, is neither. The answer is the user, the audience, the digital consumer… call them what you will.

Think about it. Content is there for one reason, and one reason only… to attract and deliver value to the consumer. Search engines are also in the business of delivering value to the consumer. Their entire business is built around satisfying the consumer’s need for great content.

In the digital world advertisers and marketers aren’t in control… neither are the search engines, ad networks, social networks or any other body corporate. The user is King, they’re in control… now more than ever.

There’s a positive vibe, and the course material (6MB or so of PDF files) has been provided on a 1GB USB memory stick. It’s a refreshing change to see that sort of added value — a 1GB stick is a genuinely useful little extra, whereas the 64MB or 128MB sticks that often accompany seminars and events just end up cluttering up drawers when you get home.

Well, the seminar is about to start… more later.

For more details check out Getting Results in Online Marketing on the Praxis Now web site.

It’s a scene from The Bourne Ultimatum, and it makes you wonder just how much your usage of mobile devices can reveal about you. It’s fiction… of course. But like all good fiction it’s grounded in reality. Your mobile could be revealing much more about you than you might think: things about your personality, your habits, your movements, your social network, who you meet and when….

I came across and article about Reality Mining, the natural extension of Data Mining, over on the Technology Review website. It cites MIT professor Sandy Pentland, who believes that the increasing sophistication, penetration and connectivity of mobile devices is about to herald a new era of analysing and predicting human behaviour based on the data mobile operators collect about us.

According to Professor Pentland, Reality mining… “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”

Add in the fact that mobile devices are increasingly location aware, and are becoming powerful computers in their own right, and, in theory, the data gleaned from these devices could be used to personalize the information, services, and of course advertising, that we receive in a way that’s simply unprecedented.

But it raises the age old question — just because we can, does that necessarily mean that we should?

Last May, according to the Technology Review article, Pentland and his team demonstrated how cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They even managed to predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week. Powerful… useful… and potentially very intrusive stuff!

But it goes much further than that — data from cell phones could, for example, be used to augment models that predict the spread of contagious diseases, adding data about social relationships into the modelling algorithms. Or perhaps to flag the onset of depression — because a phone could, apparently, pick up the cues more readily than friends or family. Exciting, but at the same time I find it more than a little disturbing.

For marketers, of course, being able to track and predict the behaviour and social interaction of prospects opens up all kinds of doors. It could also open up an enormous can of worms.

“All of the devices that we have are completely ignorant of the things that matter most,” says Pentland. “They may know all sorts of stuff about Web pages and phone numbers. But at the end of the day, we live to interact with other people. Now, with reality mining, you can see how that happens … it’s an interesting God’s-eye view.”

The problem is, I’m not so sure I want people to have a “God’s eye view” of how I interact with other people… however enticing it might be from a marketing perspective. How about you?