I have several hundred true blog followers to my website and they have been thirsty for knowledge on social media, search engine optimization and anything metrics – 30,000 page views to be exact.  

Therefore, I feel it necessary to provide the following links that represent the most clicked, viewed and downloaded blogs from my website for 2010 – just in case anyone needs these resources again. 

Top 2010 Blogs (ranked in order by page views) 

Staying Nimble: Social Media 2010 - According to several leading experts, social media has been the number one priority in 2010. Social media will be used by organizations to lift their brand, stay connected to customers while using networks to grow their lead-gen pipelines. To learn how your organization can capitalize on what others are doing, check out these ‘top’ resources, articles and blogs from leading subject matter experts.  

Don’t Miss This One: Connecting Social Media and Email - I find it interesting that most organizations don’t realize that e-mail marketing is the original ‘backbone’ of social interaction and should always be part of the social mix.  Simply adding some ‘integrated’ content will aid in elevating your brand – not to mention ROI for your social campaigns. 

Get it here: Search Engine Optimization Blogs - Great post by Hubspot on a few dozen SEO blogs everyone should read or minimally have in your arsenal.

Social Media Resources You Can’t Live Without - Whether it’s starting a social media campaign, integrating social media into your advertising or simply setting up a Facebook fan page, it is always wise to seek out experts who have proven experience (and metrics) to help guide you in your social media initiatives. 

Social Analytics: The Next Frontier - Let’s face it folks, social analytics is a new frontier – not anything like the analytics and metrics tracking we’ve used for advertising, direct mail or other one-way channel marketing.

Get It Right The First Time: Web Metrics - Many organizations are obsessed with volume – measuring their web metrics strategy by how many web pages that were viewed or by how many people that have visited. In many cases, this type of information is meaningless as it is not directly linked to a web plan or strategy.  

Writing for Social Media - If you want consistent social media success, you have to understand what social media users crave. For social media content, that means understanding the type of content social media users want.

Your Entire Organization Benefits From Web Analytics - You finally launched a much-anticipated Web 2.0+ web site and you can’t wait to hunker down and review your analytics. How do you gauge if your analytics for your site are appropriate, measurable and definable? And most importantly, who in your organization would benefit?    

As we move forward in 2011, it will be fun to watch the exploding world of social media and how it will affect all channels in the marketing mix.  

Happy New Year to all my blog fans and a hearty welcome to all new visitors. 

Best

Denice MacDonald

Social recruitment is the practice of leveraging social and professional networks, online and offline, to acquire talent -- and Jobvite is leading the way.

Jobvite, a native SaaS application built on Web 2.0 technologies. is a recruitment application built to involve all employees in the hiring process, leverage their social and professional networks, and manage all aspects of hiring in an easy to use platform that’s effortless to get up and running.

To learn more about Jobvite and what 115 human resources and recruiting professionals said about how they use social recruitment now and the changes they see ahead -- click here.

Report Highlights:

• What social networking sites are used now for recruiting
• What social networking methods recruiters plan to use more this year
• Percentage of hires companies get from employee referrals
• Spending on referral bonuses

This is a very impressive tool built by a very impressive company – Jobvite!

More Resources:

Wanna Job? How many friends do you have on Facebook? by Stephen Baker, BusinessWeek 

Beyond Job Boards: Targeting the Source by Joseph De Avila of the Wall Street Journal

Best

Denice MacDonald

It is imperative that all departments, disciplines and vested shareholders collaborate on the daily feeding and overall strategy of the organization's web site initiative - or else the web site will fail.

Why? Web sites are no longer ancillary; they are mission critical - adding substantially to the organization's bottom-line. Moreover, the combined needs of various departments or disciplines actually enhance the dynamic strategy behind the on-going transition of an organization's web site by offering various views and points of entry to clients, customers, employees and shareholders.

How? Collabration does not begin by ordering various departments into a conference room for a strategy meeting. It begins with defining needs, strategies and business goals. In most cases, what the sales department requires is not much different than what the HR department may need. Each is looking to communicate the organizations value and offerings while providing easy call-to-action scenarios for visitors and on-going interaction to the organization's web site.

Where to begin? Start with simple site goals that require collaboration against business needs from various departments. Begin the process of determining how the needs intertwine or can be repurposed to satisfy many needs.

SCENARIO 

HR is trying to hire high end sales professionals in a very tight market. The Sales department is trying to get a new product to market. Marketing has a tight budget but would welcome PR exposure relative to company growth.

SUGGESTIONS

Use web video to create employee profiles for HR enticing 'like' recruits. Use the same web video but add additional footage to introduce and e-mail video newsletter to targeted customers and leads that may benefit from the new product. Have marketing dove-tail the e-mail video newsletter AND web video components to the web site thereby increasing interaction to the site through video news releases. What will this take? It will take two or three days of shooting, various formatting of the web video, simple permission-granted e-mail program and some high end content. Using a create it once, use many ways concept has leveraged the collaboration of various department initiatives while safeguarding a cohesive web brand strategy.

Best

Denice MacDonald

Common Craft came out with another great explanatory YouTube video vignette – this time for Twitter. In plain English, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets) in 140 characters or less. The key to Twitter is not about asking "what are you doing?" It’s more about “what would everyone like to know, discover or share.”  

It’s everywhere

Twitter has become so popular that social networks such as Facebook have developed applications to support Twitter. Once a Twitter status is written, the ‘tweet’ is posted on Facebook on the individual’s profile feed. I get a kick out of reading everyone’s tweets – especially post political events or during the holidays.   

Ready for business

There are a lot of blogs discussing the eventual monetizing of Twitter. In one respect, Twitter will have to do something to move from an application to a true business model – the ability to support future growth – without losing the fundamental free philosphy around its mantra 'free tweets'. Some have said that Twitter would be an awesome tool for recruiting – not only for potential ad revenue – but for the viral nature of user's referring. Based on the posts I've listed below, I would agree.

Let’s watch and see

I’ll be anxious to see how Twitter evolves and if I’ll be able to take the Twitter plunge like everyone else. I’ll keep you posted! In the meantime, get up to speed on Twitter through these great posts: 

Why Are Brands Unsuccessful in Twitter by Jeremiah Owyang  

Twitter Hiring Product Manager to Bring in the Revenue by TechCrunch  

Why Recruiters Should Use Twitter by Jessica Mehrer posted on Recruitingblogs.com

(Source: YouTube: Common Craft Twitter in Plain English)

Best

Denice MacDonald

Recent video metrics are showing that visitors or users of YouTube are no longer geeks, nerds or techno’s.  In fact, recent statistics are showing that YouTube video downloads are being viewed by varying demographics, including an older crowd and business professionals. 

How can you tell who's watching your videos? YouTube now offers a free tool (YouTube Insight) that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload.  

For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.

You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.  For now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the "About this Video" button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.

YouTube Resources:

Businesses are now realizing the potential of social networking sites like YouTube in using digital formats to engage prospects and customers and elevate recruitment efforts. 

Learn more at these links below. 

• How to get yourself on YouTube, for business or pleasure
• Cisco pumps out some emerging tech products: YouTube for business 
• View YouTube Video: Cisco: The Business Solutions Provider
• YouTube Example Recruitment Video - Recruiting at Aerotek