So, what do we all think of the new website Unvarnished? Described as a cross between LinkedIn and Yelp it allows anonymous reviews of your personal professional reputation.

For those who have decided to keep their ‘personal’ social networking profiles (Facebook, MySpace etc) separate from their professional profiles (LinkedIn, Xing etc) this will make it increasingly hard.

What’s interesting is that anyone can add a profile about themselves or anyone else (you can go in and ‘claim’ your profile if one already exists).

We’ve had quite a bit of debate on this blog in the past about how potential and current employers use Facebook but this throws up so many more issues.

I’d love to know your opinion.

Would you use this to create your own profile?

How would you respond if someone posted something negative about you?

Would you post comments about people you’ve worked with in the past?

Would you use it to research a potential employee?

Prompted by the good people at Chinwag, we are now recruiting our very own twintern for the Summer. Graduates,  start sending your CVs to Adelaide@carveconsulting.com . We can’t wait to have the next social media expert on board for a few weeks!

Here is what our offer looks like:

You are passionate about all things social media, and are actively participating in a wide variety of web 2.0 activities such as blogging, social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You would like to learn how to translate your passion into coherent and cutting-edge strategies for corporate organisations.

Carve Consulting is a digital engagement practice specialising in Corporate Social Networks, Online PR, Social Media Monitoring and Search Engine Marketing. With offices in the UK and Australia, the practice has developed corporate social networking strategies, social media marketing and social recruiting programmes for a range of private, public and not-for-profit organisations, including VisitBritain, Yell Adworks, The Audit Commission, Fairtrade, Wine Australia, Hays, ANZ Bank, and the NHS.  The practice offers strategy, advisory, research, training and managed services.

We can offer you a two month-internship in July and August where you’ll be thrown into the deep end to work on accounts with our consultants. Your day-to-day tasks will vary but will definitely include the following at some point:

-    Account management (including “whatever needs to be done to service the accounts”)
-    Client training
-    Client research
-    Report writing
-    Proactively participating in social media events

Our ideal intern looks a bit like this:
-    Passionate about social media with an appetite to learn
-    Up to date web 2.0 industry knowledge
-    Exceptional traditional writing and grammatical skills
-    Excellent verbal communication skills with ability to present  complex ideas clearly
-    Attention to detail and outstanding organisation skills
-    Ability to work to tight deadlines and be calm under pressure

We can’t offer you a full salary but will cover your travel and lunch expenses, as well as a discretionary bonus at the end of the internship. We are currently looking at expanding so there is potentially scope for developing this internship into a permanent paid position.

I look forward to hearing from you!

I was researching something else when I came across the below  employee guide  explaining why employers might want to use Facebook - certainly one of the clearest and right-headed descriptions I’ve come across:

Before discussing how to use Facebook to find a job, you need to be aware of how and why employers are using it as a source for finding potential employees. Once you know, you’ll be better able to use it to your advantage. Below are just a few of the reasons why employers are using Facebook to find and get to know you.

• Facebook offers employers specific search opportunities and parameters.
• A person’s profile provides an accurate depiction of their personality and interests.
• People who are new to the workforce don’t have an employment history to show potential employers. Facebook gives these companies a new way to get to know young workers.

Facebook has the potential to become what could be called a “personal branding tool.” Instead of having a private profile, try making yours public but use it strategically…

Well put TD Bank - full content here on the TD Bank careers site , including a guide for candidates to using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn - all of which is good stuff.   (And no we are not working for them)

Great little film this,  put together by the  Career Player team, looking at “Careers 3.0″ (with a rare sighting of me wearing a suit near the end).

I would have loved to have this to hand at the recent KNOWHOW Graduates  skills event we organised with London Borough of Tower Hamlets.  What was really quite scary was how little the attendees (all recent graduates) knew about job seeking online  -  very very few had heard of LinkedIn, and none that I spoke to were aware of sites like WikiJob.

It begs the question - what the heck are university careers officers playing at? The answer, one supposes, is that careers offices are now (like everything else) ‘profit centres’ - meaning lots of sponsored emails from fee paying corporates to select students, very little grounding in the core online networking and brand building capabilities 21C Graduates will need to survive and thrive.

Paul Harrison, Managing Partner of Carve Consulting, will be speaking at the ONREC Kennedy Recruiting HR Summit on Wednesday, Nov 4: 9:30 AM - 10:15 AM in Concurrent 3.

Paul, one of just a handful of international speakers at the event and a regular participant in European Social Media conferences, is delighted to be able to present on the recently launched Google Social Search.

As part of his broader look at the characteristics and top 10 take aways of an effective corproate social networking strategy, Paul will take a specific look at the implications of social search, realtime search and user generated content on social recruiting.

We will update this page with the presentation, but in the interim, please find some background on Google Social Search, plus dynamic Google insights.

LinkedIn Recommendations & Jeremiah Owyang is an interesting (and comic) article by Jason Alba looking at why you should consider requesting/giving recommendations via your LinkedIn profile.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about LinkedIn in Australia, and it hasn’t perhaps yet proved itself here. Social network strategist Laurel Papworth recently suggested to a packed theatre full of marketing people at Marketing Now! to that perhaps Twitter was more effective/useful at this point.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how you view the value of these recommendations and if they replace/take place of the trusted old written reference.

Quick podcast below on the Asda Fulwood store story.

In a nutshell:  How would you deal with an employee misbehaving and putting everything up on the social web  (think Domino’s Pizza, etc )?

Well Asda decided to fight fire with fire, giving a voice to some of their team to see what they thought about it. Three cheers to Asda for a smart / savvy response.

The original “Store Trashing” film below,  and the response bottom.  Revolution’s take on the story here

The film that came to light this week by the perp, Adeel Ayub

The Asda response.

Dominic Burch (head of corporate comms and new media at Asda) told PR Media Blog: “There was a chance people would think this was still happening in that store or that we’d turned a blind eye at the time it happened. But once we’d seen it, we were quick to say how disgusted we were and then worked fast to find out who the person was and whether he was still part of the business. Colleagues at the store, aware of the vandalism from the first incident, were glad the perpetrator was now out in the open.”

So another cautionary tale from the Facebook in the Workplace front line.  Anyone recognise these people? It feels authentic to me….

I recently spoke at the British Library on the subject of developing a social media strategy with a focus on social recruiting for the social media in recruitment event

Thanks to those of you who attended the event and participated in the debate afterward.

For those who didn’t I include a copy of the pres below, outlining our 10 x point plan.

It doesn’t mean a great deal without the accompanying commentary, so here is are the key points of nos 1-5.  The rest will follow next week….

1. Are you ready?

In his excellent blog, The CounterIntuitive CEO (a must read for anyone in management) Colony (Forrester CEO) equates social media to sex : i.e. you can read about it as much as you want, but it’s only when you start doing it that you actually get it.

This is sound advice.  Taking it one step further, for us, social media isn’t about having a Facebook fan page or a twitter account; there is way too much tokenism / box ticking right now in this space.  The organisations that are really benefiting from web 2.0/ social utilities are embracing the values that underpin them - transparency, openness, authenticity, conversation. If your organisation isn’t really ready to act in this way, then you’re not really ready.

2. Listening

We’ve written lots of post on this before, and indeed social media monitoring / online reputation management is a key part of the Carve proposition.  We basically used a slide showing 2 ears and 1 mouth as a reminder that it’s critical to listen first. Who is saying what (customers, employees, past employees, potential employees, partners, etc), Where are they saying it (Facebook, forums, blogs, niche communities, etc) and What are they saying? Typically we recommend a full social media audit (about which Jeremiah Owyang blogged recently) if you’re serious about understanding you and your competitors corporate social networking environment.

3. Identify objectives

What do you want to achieve? Get more customers? Get closer to your customers? Give them a better service [think crowd-sourced CRM. If you've no idea what that means look at http://twitter.com/comcastcares then get in contact] In corporate recruitment it might be to attract the top graduates, develop external talent communities for your pipeline;  for recruiters it might mean finding new ways of engaging passive talent,  offering new services to your clients, etc.
Sounds obvious, but without it you’re not building a strategy.

4. Choose your platforms; Decide what you’re going to say

Often your business might want to do everything:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing,  (Europe’s leading business network if you’re not in the know) YouTube,  a private Ning community… all, you know, like, yesterday.  We advise that (following points 2 and 3) you identify the key platforms for your audiences and make them fly first.

Equally important is - seriously - what the heck are you going to say? There must be a million blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups all set up - and all saying nothing. What is going to be your USP? What reason are people going to want to read you / retweet you / quote you / engage you in conversation?
Your organisations thing might be perhaps thought leadership… or the best insight into the market.. or using these tools to encourage peer to peer communities... or to give the deepest insight to the latest jobs… or to help your customers become prosumers and engage in your R&D process… or.. well you get the idea.

A good touch point is the 3C’s - community, content and conversation (as picked up by Recruiter in fact who covered our presentation )

5. Develop a Roadmap, build a team

Having chosen your platform, you need a roadmap for that platform, which a beginning, an end and attendant milestones / KPIs along the way. Here for nothing is a version we’ve developed for LinkedIn from the perspective of  a corporate recruiting environment.

Then build a team.
Do you know the first thing we strive to do when engaged to help an organisation or recruitment firm develop a social media /  corporate social networking strategy? Its to identify an internal champion - someone who really is passionate about dialogue, your customers.  They don’t need to be an expert on Facebook - but they do need to be able to enthuse their co-workers about the whys / wheres / hows of doing this. Secondly, you’ll need someone from your management team involved.   Get corporate comms on board, HR, legal.  And (perhaps) hire yourself a Twinten.

Points 6-10will follow next week. Please find the embedded presentation below.

With many of the 2.2 million people out of work in the UK relying solely on the internet to find a job*, a new web TV channel will offer expert advice to jobseekers to help them find a job online, where a labyrinth of over 10,000 job boards and social networking sites dominate.

The CareersCast (www.careersiteadvisor.com), will launch on Wednesday June 3rd at 12:30pm, with its inaugural live videocast featuring experts from the recruitment, internet and social networking industries.

Following on from the success of the innovative website, Career Site Advisor, CareersCast will offer jobseekers a chance to learn directly from experts such as Luke McKend from Google about how to find a job online says Career Site Advisor co-founder Keith Robinson.

�The recruitment industry has undergone a revolution since the first job board launched in 1994, but many jobseekers are in this market for the first time and may never have looked online for a job before,� Mr. Robinson says.

Experts participating in the Career Site Advisor livecast include:

� Luke Mckend � Google: Finding the right job when searching on Google
� Andy Headworth - Sirona Consulting: Manage finding a job through networking
� Don Leslie � BLT: How to best approach a recruitment firm � what should you know
� Dave King - Shares his experience of being unemployed and online job seeking.
� Elaine Hewens - FinelyBalanced, providing advice on career development

Special thanks to JobsGoPublic.com who are sponsoring the first livecast.

The website, Career Site Advisor launched in March and offers a single reference point for online jobseekers to search job sites, company career sites and recruitment consultancies in one directory as well as advice and links to online resources.

*National Online Recruitment Survey 2008

- Ends -
Issued by Carve Consulting
For further information, case studies or interviews please contact: Keith Robinson, on 0779-652-3355 or keith@careersiteadvisor.com http://www.careersiteadvisor.com/contact.php

About Career Site Advisor
The company was founded by Keith Robinson formerly COO of Totaljobs.com and Publisher of Personnel Today, and Simon Goddard formerly of Yahoo HotJobs & News International. Headquartered in London, Site Advisor Ltd is a privately held company, offering the United Kingdom�s first web based Careers comparison Site with the latest job seeker news and advice from across the web.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1538881 - Link to Ustream trailer video.