On 27th January 2011 Social Media Strategy practice Carve and consultancy firm BLT will be hosting a free breakfast seminar in London. Entitled Employer Reputation 2.0, Paul Harrison from Carve will be exploring the impact of influencers, reviews and the social graph on our traditional understanding of employer branding.

Please find an introduction to some of the topics that will be covered below. To attend please email JCF@blt.co.uk Hope you can make it.

Paul Harrison, Managing Partner of social media strategy house Carve Consulting keynoted at the SMART Recruiter conference in September 2010, presenting what it means to be a “Social Company” and what this means for employer brands and in house recruiters. This is the presentation looking at everything from Glassdoor.com and employer reviews, to Employee Advocacy and new pure-plays such as BranchOut for Facebook.

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….