BeKnown and Google + - Are we at the end of Social 1.0

Monster have entered the professional networking world with a quasi LinkedIn Branch Out facebook app.

Here's some interesting commentarty from John Bersin.

Check out the videos!

I wonder how many people will give it go!?! Get ready for Google's Plus in the social world in the coming hours!?! I'm on the white list for their new Google Plus one offering and I'm looking forward to playing with it. The social netowork era is firmly upon us, just in case any of you doubted it! Who can create the glue though - who can create social 2.0! Who will provide insights to the new data curves and graphs being compiled? Will we see an Irish job board come out with a similar facebook app to create an Irish professional network of choice on the FB platform?! What about more specific skill set variants. You should come to the next Irish Recruiters Tuesday Club on the 26th of July where we will discuss all the above?

How to use Facebook Places anywhere in the world and LlinkedIn share buttons

Also, some more innovation out of LinkedIn, check it out here!

LinkedIn makes its second acquisition: Choice Vendor

Yesterday, LinkedIn acquired ChoiceVendor, a start-up that provides real-world ratings and reviews of business-to-business service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States.

Here's what they had to say on the ChoiceVendor website:

"Today, LinkedIn announced that it has completed its acquisition of ChoiceVendor.

The ChoiceVendor and LinkedIn teams are equally passionate about helping professionals make the best decisions. As part of LinkedIn, we’ll contribute our knowledge and ideas to the products and services that reach LinkedIn’s network of more than 75 million professionals.

Effective immediately, we’ll be ceasing operations at choicevendor.com. We’re very grateful for your support, and we look forward to connecting with you on LinkedIn!"

ChoiceVendor is a San Francisco Bay-based startup company that launched just months ago, in May of 2010. They are described as a Yelp-like review service aimed at the B2B space.

In addition, Garret Kearney of GKR wanted me to let you know he is looking for an internal recruitment manager: http://www.gkr.ie/JobDetails.aspx?JobID=36024 garretk@gkr.ie

When you hear the word "talent" which company do you immediately think of?

When you think of search you naturally think Google. When you think of coffee, Starbucks rolls off the tongue. When you think of stout it's Arthur but when it comes to talent, who is the company that you automatically tassociate the word with??? That's the answer Jeff Weiner, the young talented CEO of LinkedIn tries to answer.

LinkedIn Groups have additional functionality

Following on from the recent video posted by LinkedIn below here is a little more detail on the changes:

LinkedIn Groups allow you to:

* Quickly discover the most popular discussions in your professional groups.
* Have an active part in determining the top discussions by liking and commenting.
* Follow the most influential people in your groups by checking the Top Influencers board or clicking their profile image to see all their group activity.
* See both member-generated discussions and news in one setting.
* Easily browse previews of the last three comments in a discussion.
* Find interesting discussions by seeing who liked a discussion and how many people commented.

Group Managers

Manage your Group with new moderation tools.

LinkedIn’s new moderation toolkit helps you keep the quality level high within group discussions.

* Managers and moderators can now delete inappropriate posts right from their email box using the new option “Send me an email for each new discussion” in More > My Settings.
* Managers and moderators can now delete inappropriate comments right from their email box by clicking “Delete” within any followed-discussion email alert.
* We are introducing the ability for members to flag items as inappropriate – initially this is a way for us to gather important data and in a few weeks, this capability will enable members to flag items into the moderation queue or, if you choose, delete the content outright after an adjustable number of flags.
* The moderation queue will allow group managers to decide how many member flags can delete a thread or a comment.
* Managers can now restrict the move-to-Jobs capability to themselves. Users still will be able to “Flag-as-job” to move an item into the moderation queue.
* Very-low-connection users will now be flagged as such in groups’ request-to-join queues.
* Very-low-connection users will no longer be admitted directly to open-access groups but routed to the groups’ request-to-join queues.

Featured Discussions

Feature your top discussions as a Manager’s Choice

LinkedIn’s new Groups introduces the first of several changes to featured discussions:

* “Featured Discussions” are now called “Manager’s Choice” in response to user confusion about whether group managers or LinkedIn featured the discussion.
* Original user discussions, user-submitted articles, and RSS items can all be featured by clicking “Add to Manager’s Choice” from the top of any item’s detail page.
* The top Manager’s Choice will be visible in a module on the right side of the most visited page within groups: the discussion detail page.
* The top Manager’s Choice, rather than the top five, appears on the group homepage in a module on the right side of the page.
* Managers can re-order up to 10 Manager’s Choice discussions from the “See All” link in the Manager’s Choice module.
* Manager’s Choice discussions will soon see top billing in the group digest email.

LinkedIn brings out new group functionality and adopts the Facebook Like Button

New LinkedIn Features

Facebook says "Social is at the center of the web"

Facebook is making an audacious ambitious shift on the web. At F8 this week, Mark Zuckerburg went through his vision of where search and the net is going. I've put a condensed version of the video down below. I completely agree. This is just not and over hyped advertising evagelisation. This time Facebook or showing us how they are going to make it a reality. Social will be at the center of the web - simple, get used to it and start thinking of how you can bend your business to it. Facebook is now going to offer a number of multiple connectors and widgets to get a new semantic socially centered new index in place. At the heart of this will be a new open API social graph. This is absolutely brillant. Facebook connecters and social graphs are going to start spreading hugely in the coming months. It's important to know that Facebook are not trying to own the web their cleverlly trying to create a new web that is more personalised, more smarter and more semantically aware. Facebook is begining to grow up. This is brillant and for me a huge shift in the evolution of search and the web.

LinkedIn launch new recruitment product for recruitment agencies and executive search recruiters

Signaling its ever increasing shift from social network to being the Monster of "passive candidates" LinkedIn is now targeting the recruitment agency and executive search industry with a new offering. As far as I know 40% of all LinkedIn's revenues comes from the recruitment industry this should increase this percentage to closer the 50% market or more in the next 6 months.

You can learn more about the product here.

Will be interesting to see how many agencies in Ireland and around the world purchase the product and if so what kind of other recruitment products/services they decide not to pay for as a result. My guess is a lot of recruitment agencies in FY10 may decide to increase their spend on LinkedIn and reduce their spend on job boards. Would be interested to hear what others think.

LinkedIn's new Profile Organiser

Ever come across a LinkedIn profile and wanted to save it to a location to review afterwards. I used to just use the built in pdf function when I wanted to save a profile but now LinkedIn is offering a new feature that lets you save profiles, organize them into folders, and add notes. Anytime you find an interesting profile, simply click “Save Profile” and the profile is bookmarked for you within LinkedIn.

You can learn more here.

The gloves are off: Facebook offically takes on Twitter with @mentions

Looks like the world of Twitter has now got a littler more interesting with Facebook's recent announcment to launch a very similar service itself called @mentions on their own platform.

Here is Facebook engineer Tom Occhino’s explanation of the new feature:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.
Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.

You can learn more here and here.

Is social media a revolution or evolution - let me know what you think at @irishrecruiters

We'll be discussing a lot more about this at Part 2 of the Future of Recruitment conference on the 7th of October. I'm looking forward to hear what some of Ireland's brightest recruitment thought leaders have to say.

Two interesting polls being run on LinkedIn at the moment

One poll asked whether respondents plan to use social and professional sites more to recruit - 86% said Yes, 8% said No, and 5% said Unclear. The second questions asks: which social sites have you used most successfully to hire? I wonder would we see a similar result if the polls were run in Ireland!

 

 

LinkedIn launches new search technology

LinkedIn, has been working hard of late to improve its LinkedIn Recruiter product and as an enhancement has launched a new offering called Dynamic Refinements which is a service that helps recruiters source for passive and active candidates in the network’s database.

The new Dynamic Refinements provides recruiters filters to refine candidate searches and drill down results to the expertise, geography, education and industry background.

It makes searching for candidate faster and allows recruiters to source passive candidates in fewer clicks and less time than before. It also provides guided navigation throughout the search and eliminates the need to construct complex boolean queries.

“The new search technology and capabilities come at a time when recruiters are fully recognizing the value of passive candidates,” said Francois Dufour, LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Enterprise Marketing. “Our recent research shows that 60% of recruiters believe they get better hires when hiring passive talent and an overwhelming majority of recruiters are using LinkedIn to find passive candidates for job opportunities.”

Did you register your URL on Facebook? Massive "land grab" taking place

Have you managed to get your personal or business URL registered on Facebook. To learn more read here or here.

Owners of Facebook Pages - public profiles for companies, organizations, or public figures must have been registered before May 31 in order to be eligible for a custom URL. Additionally, the Facebook Page must have had at least 1,000 fans as of May 31 in order to get a username now.

World Map of Social Networks

I tried to embed it as an image but it didn't look great, but check it out for yourself here.

Will Monster go the way of Newspapers and Korn Ferry still on top

Very interesting blog post on Harvard Business Published discussing some of the threats that agegator companies like Indeed.com are having on Monster, here, make sure to read some of the comments.

Once again Korn Ferry are recognised again as world's largest executive search firm, here

A new member joining LinkedIn every second - listen to Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn talking about the recession and future functionality

Is LinkedIn becoming the Monster of passive candidates?

Twitter Adding New Search Functionality

Twitter is now offering a way that you can go and search for other twits or twitters without leaving your own page without leaving the page they are on, as well as seeing what the most topical subjects being tweeted are.

Check out the update on the twitter blog, here.

Co founder Biz Stone stated that:

"We've added a few other features to this design. If there's a search you want to do on a regular basis, you can "save" the search. That will place the word or term permanently in your sidebar for easy access. So if you want to know what people are saying about the city you live in, the products you use, or just something weird, it becomes a link on your home page.

Twitter Search is an engine for discovering what is happening right now but it doesn't always have to be a box and a button. Trends are words or phrases being referenced with more frequency suggesting that something interesting might be happening. When you click on a trend link, you can read the tweets and find out what's up. Trends is in beta—but it has potential."

Facebook Connect and an interesting new API

The App Wars continue and today I came across an interesting article about the new Facebook Connect App which connects with the iPhone.

This is an interesting move as App Store developers will now have access to a new Facebook API which will be a big win for Facebook and help it expand into the expanding social network mobile world.

Job Boards are already beginning to see the advantages of using the API. While I don't know of any job boards in Ireland that have tried this yet it is happening in other parts of the world. Take for example:
 Tribehq, LawEnforcementJobs, HealthJobsNationWide.

So if you manage a career site or a job board should you integrate this into your site?

Possibly. I'd give it serious thought - especially if you have a niche job board and still want to build up its brand. Most people will probably baulk at not having people register on their own site -  but how many people if they see any for of registration form simply decide to leave the site straight away. I know I've done it many a time but with this App you simply hit the Facebook logo and you have one click authentication and your in. So by allowing easier access you may catch some extra users that you otherwise may have lost. Once in you can see how many of your friends are already in the site. You can allow people post comments to others walls which will drive traffic to your site, you can pull basic profile, change avator images, etc. If you have a Facebook account click on one of the example companies above to see what it's all about and check out the video.