Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Why should a company use social media as part of the recruiting process? There are at least three good reasons that are valid both for small businesses and large organizations. Probably the most common way that companies use social media is simply to r aise awareness of job opportunities. Since social media has, in theory, global coverage by posting to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter you reach a much greater population than traditional job advertising. If you craft the post so that it is very appealing random people will also share it to their network, making it even more visible. That's the reason why a job ad should never be boring. But there are two obstacles to this: there are no truly global social media -- you might need to use multiple channels to reach your target demographics -- and some people spend very little time reading content, they just post their links then move on. Where social media really helps companies to find better talent is in  social network data mi...

In popular forums like the Q&A site Quora one question that appears regularly is How do you prepare for a presentation? Quite what they are looking for I am not always certain, but when people write that they need help preparing for a presentation coming up in a day or two I realize that many people are leaving the preparation until it is too late. But while it might be late for this time it's probably a good idea to start sooner the next time you need to create a presentation. Assuming that you do have enough time, how exactly can you prepare more effectively for a presentation if you have the basic speaking skills mastered already? There are two key areas where many people could usefully apply more effort -- and they need to start earlier to be most effective. Consider the influencing context . One very common mistake is to focus simply on making slides and practicing what to say, without considering the context of the presentation. The classic Hollywood-style bu...

Every so often I meet someone who doesn't like social media. There is nothing wrong with that. But then sometimes people go further than that and decide that they will not use social media at all. For most people this is a bad idea for several reasons, mostly related to search engines. Any presence on a web site will show up on a Google search eventually, but for most people the highest ranking sites that they will be on are usually social media sites, making these critically important. Until about ten years ago a private person -- then the norm -- could have no presence on the world wide web and this would not be a problem. People using search engines would not be specially surprised if they searched for a person and found nothing. But today this doesn't happen. Having a digital footprint has become more common than not so a lack of presence is interpreted differently. Even worse: the rise of content scrapers and fake profiles have undermined the option of opting out of t...

Looking up into the sky recently, I could just see an airliner starting its descent towards Arlanda airport, Stockholm. It was too far away to see it clearly, or recognize the aircraft type, but it obviously belonged to Norwegian Airlines. Why? Because in a world where airliners are either painted a uniform color, or with horizontal stripes, it is the only airline I know of that chose a radically different paint scheme that is instantly recognizable. This is effectively a "blue ocean" approach to branding and it can be very effective. Most brands try to look somewhat like existing brands in the same space. Wine bottles, for example, don't need to be labelled "wine" because that is generally obvious from the shape of the bottle and the style of the label. In much the same way, other products try to not distance themselves from rivals, so that customers can tell what the product is without looking very closely. But there have been many cases where a highly ...