List of Social Media Interview Questions

Over on the StlRecruiting.com blog, I've been carrying on a short e-mail conversation with Betsy Beard, the inhouse recruiter for Fleishman Hillard, a major PR firm looking for a new media/social networks account executive in St Louis.

So I saw the job description, but decided to create my own list of interview questions for social media consultants. This is a bit more involved than just blogging, but if want a job like this, or are hiring for a job like this, you could do a lot worse then to add these to your job description:

List of New Media Interview Questions

The Basic Job Description:

1. In Plain English, tell me what I’m actually going to be doing for Fleishman, or if I get to create the position. How much flexibility is there on what needs to be done?
2. What is my manager like. Do they understand social media, or am I going to be managing my manager for the first few months?
3. Has anyone else done this position for Fleishman Hillard before?
4. I’m going to rattle off a few names here – do they sound familiar? Twitter, Flikr, Typepad, Wink, Photobucket, Techcrunch, ValleyWag, Technorati. Does anyone at Fleishman know what these are and use them?
5. What is the salary range? Do I get bonuses for bringing new projects or billing extra hours?
6. How much travel is involved?
7. Do my duties as a social media expert consist of doing the job, or training clients to do so?

The Tough Questions:

1. What kind of internet access does Fleishman have? Are there any blocked feeds or websites?
2. What is the work from home policy?
3. Will I be asked to create or post on fake blogs or leave fake comments?
4. Do you have a corporate blogging policy in place?
5. What about my personal activities? What happens to current blogs and current properties I have a stake in?
6. Will I be signing a non-compete or a document that says Fleishman will own anything I create while I work there?
7. Do you have other social media and Web 2.0 types there that I can learn from?

The important details:

1. Do I get a cool laptop? Mac or PC?
2. What is the dress code?
3. Which IM client do we use?
4. How far away is the nearest Starbuck’s? Is there a local coffee shop I will be able to visit?
5. What about parking?
6. Any cool perks? Awards – trips to other cities?

Update: Jeremiah Owyang has some additional questions and comments on community managers. Cameron Olthius has more.

I've sent this list to Betsy asking her for her responses. I hope she will be able to answer them all, and if she does, well, one of you better come through. At the very least, link this post if you like the questions.

Fleishman isn't the only one looking - IBM is looking for a social media guru who wants to travel 100%. If either of these positions suits you, shoot me an e-mail and I'll pass your name along, if you have the chops. No resumes - Let your url's do the talking.

Yahoo Ask Ad: TiVo-Proof

We always admire spots that are TiVo-proof. For the uninitiated, that means we find ourselves rewinding just to see the commercial. Sometimes twice. And this spot for Yahoo Ask definitely did the trick.

How To Pitch A Blogger: Be One

Geoff Livingston really hits the mark on how to market to bloggers.

I still get pitches from PR agents with little understanding of what I'm writing about or what impact I have on a particular community.

They're stuck in tracking numbers (if they're good), or tracking Search Engine Rank (if they're lazy). The idea that Google knows best has gone way too far into the marketing mindset.

But Geoff gives an excellent overall description of what you should be doing to work with bloggers to market your product at Buzz Bin.

Specific tactics will continue to evolve in this realm as bloggers and social networks determine how they want to be communicated to… But the major issue with pitching towards bloggers is that when this occurs, a company’s community participation tactics are not strong enough to command respect without having to push. When strong social network relationships are not in play, news that may be of interest to a community cannot be communicated naturally and virally. This puts an organization or company in a position of weakness as it forces marketing to promote initiatives rather than to attract attention. Social media is not conducive towards this kind of promotion.

Basically, if your first interaction with a blogger is your product pitch or press release, you're not doing it right. Throwing pitches to bloggers gives them either 1) an inflated sense of self-importance, or 2) reduces them to the level of paid shills like the PPP dupes who lease out their blogspace for a few measly dollars.

To be effective, a blogger must be trusted. To be trusted, they must be part of a community.
For a company to be trusted, they have to join that community, discover who is important in that community, and then determine if they are open to helping pitch products openly.

It takes work to do this. You have to spend time reading blogs, and commenting, and hopefully blogging yourself. It's hard to measure. It's hard to get clients to pay for it. But ultimately, it's the only sure-fire way to get results that have any real impact.

If your goal is simply to create false metrics (like number of fake comments you can leave), then go ahead - bill your clients and tell them how much buzz you generated. If you want to truly make an impact a brand, put in the hard work.

What does that mean for agencies? It means that most won't be able to use social media marketing to pitch their product. It requires more interaction from the client (read: the client has to do much of the work for it to be authentic). This has been the difficult thing to teach - social media marketing is relationship-building on a one-to-one basis. It's at its most effective when you get other people to help pitch your product for free.

If you are an agency getting paid to produce results, how can you convince the unpaid evangelists that they shouldn't be paid, when they are doing the majority of the work? And what do you do when they figure out you were using them?

This is why social media marketing has been ineffective and expensive. You have to learn what makes bloggers get involved, and to learn that, you have to be one.

Join the Brandstorming Revolution

We admit it. We can't do this all on our own. We need help.

Specifically - your help. Durbin Media Group is an interactive marketing firm. I left my job as a staffing salesman to join Franki's interactive marketing firm in January of last year. We rebranded, and I brought my skills in social media and blogging to her design, development and marketing expertise.

Since then, we have been busier than a one-armed paper hanger, working on projects for product, marketing, staffing firms, PR firms, corporate blogs, and social communities. Our real strength has emerged in concepting, designing and executing targeted communities of interest.

If you want to build a loyal group of online evangelists for your product, service, or employment brand, we're the people to turn to, not just in St Louis, but nationwide. Our clients in the last year have been in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Jose, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, and New Zealand.

So why am I writing this? We need some help. We've been scheduling work out as far as four months, and in many cases, have been passing on work for current clients to competitors because we just can't get it all done.

We've decided to move from a two-person consulting firm focused on quality to a full-fledged interactive agency focused on quality. Our goal is to find talented web designers, social media consultants, and copywriters who want to work with two cutting edge talents on fresh projects.

Our process is simple. We want dependable, creative, and fabulous Web 2.0 people to work with us, initially as project based, but eventually as full-fledged contractors or employees. We will be heavily involved with the work, and can either bring you projects you work on independently, or farm out web work as it comes in.

To ensure quality for our clients, we will be monitoring and signing off on all projects - but if your quality is good (clean code, beautiful design), we can serve as your selling and accounts payable (and collections) arm. Basically, we're going to build an agency from the ground up. Initially, we need a CSS 2.0 designer or two, but if you're talented, we can find work for you.

So why would you work with us? Because we can make you better at what you do. Working with us means joining a team of creative people - our goal is to make you better, work hard, and deliver a great product. All of our business is referral based, and we live off our reputation.

If you're interested, forward us an e-mail with a list of your skills (don't bother with a resume), some url's of projects you've worked on, and what you're looking for in an hourly corp-to-corp or 1099 rate to info [at]durbinmedia{dot}com.

For examples of what we do, check out http://www.shakadoo.com and http://www.lifeinaventicup.com

Content Sites Buying Up Bloggers

An interesting story in the news, as the Travel Channel acquires a Travel Blog for the editorial content.

from Mashup:

The online component for the Travel Channel announces today that it has acquired World Hum, an online travel magazine blog, for an undisclosed amount.

As part of the deal, Travel Channel visitors will be able to access exclusive content from World Hum’s editors and contributors. The founders of World Hum, Jim Benning and Michael Yessis, will also be regular contributors to Travel Channel’s website.

Having your blog bought by a big site is the blog equivalent of having your startup purchased by Google - it's nice when it happens, but there's always the concern about losing what made your blog unique. The torrents of money usually sweep that away.

What we need, is a system for people who are natural bloggers, able to start up blogs, build audiences, and then transition them over to larger companies who need that help.

Recruiting.com was purchased by Jobster last year, and since then I've been focused on my local recruiting sites and Durbin Media. But what do you do with a blog when you're ready to move on? It seems a shame to end it, but you've put so much of yourself into it, it's often easier to hold on to then it is to let go.

Franki and I face that now. We have so many ideas, but can't get them started because our successful blogs need attention to stay fresh. Kudus for the bloggers at World Hum.

And a cautionary note. These weren't neophytes writing - the two writers of World Hum were established writers who used their blogs to generate more attention. Sometimes the blog is not enough - the personality and connections behind it makes a big difference also.

AG Edwards Egg Commercials

Someone was kind enough to search the AG Edwards site to find the code for the Nest Egg Commericals and now we have the videos to go with the story.

I could have I missed it the first time, but it now appears in the national advertising section of the AG Edwards site. Anyway - this blog is the first in the search results for AG Edwards Egg Commercials, so maybe I'll flatter myself to say it was my doing - but regardless, here it is.

http://www.agedwards.com/public/content/sc/aboutage/advertising/advertising.html

I'm not as good at pulling video code out of links, but Franki is going to teach me, and then we'll embed it for your enjoyment.

Thank you to the anonymous commenter for their work - and once we save it, we'll post it.

Joost Invitations

Okay, I'll bite. Joost looks really cool, and I'd love an invitation. If you have one, please send it my way. if you don't know what it is, here's the link.

About Joost.

Hotels Begin Selling Fun

For me, a good hotel bed is judged by its 'squish factor'. I look for comfort, softness and what I call sleepability. But GeekSugar points us to a new site where globetrotters can showcase the ideal hotel chains and beds for bouncing. That's right hipsters, jumping on the bed is en vogue.

The culmination of this global bounce-a-thon takes place at BedJump.com, a site showcasing bouncy hotel beds across the world. The site is certainly getting enough buzz, but it's really HotelsbyCity.net, a vacation packaging site savvy enough to use its blog to attract customers to their site.

Clever approach. And not a bad marketing idea for the destinations. What better way to promote a hotel than by showing how much fun it was to stay there? Each entry comes with a brief description of the traveler, a link to the hotel and the featured city. My favourite so far? Fernando, the hotel bed jumping aficionado vamping it at the 5-star Dharmawangsa Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Much fun.

Online Monitoring Cyborg Style

The magical formula for online monitoring is determining who has "influence." If you want to advertise on a blog, do you go for traffic, or do you look for someone who will "influence" the way other bloggers and the audience to take action? Traffic is easy to measure - you decide on uniques, pageviews, length of visit, and demographics, and buy an ad.

Influence is harder to measure. You have to really do the homework, trust your instincts, and filter the link-baiters from the loyal, trusting audience builders.

So far, no one has done it. The problem is one of complexity. Considering the size of the web, and the structure of websites, and the lack of proper data, it's near impossible to write an algorithm that can shuffle through the internet and define the variables that equal influence.

Many companies sell this a pitch, but an overload of data and a lack of comprehension of what that data means leads the smart companies to mix the human ability of pattern recognition with the hard number crunching of computers.

Nathan Gilliatt, who is composing a guide to the online monitoring softwares around the world, writes about the different levels of human-computer interaction in the field, and, he even provides a nifty illustration. A commenter on his post asks the following instructive question.

What is the real signal-to-noise ratio out there in these consumer exchanges, and how is that being addressed? Where does the automation start and stop with regard to this source identification process? And then of course, the larger question, what is the current state of the balance between Automation and Accuracy in digitally-directed research?

The answer, is its being addressed poorly. There are three stages to gathering information effectively, and I'll label them as initial data, detailing, and analysis.

The human factor in each of these stages is necessary to prevent bad data from corrupting the entire process, and so far, it's my belief that a human brain is better at determining what is influential and what is garbage.

• Influential: Good writing, positive conversation flows, high-interaction communities
• Garbage: Splogs, blatantly commercial sites, untargeted sites, dangerous sites (NSFW, language, or charged political sites).

Computer Assisted Human Filtering is still the best bet for accuracy, but it's difficult to price correctly. Online Monitoring can be as expensive as a $20,000 setup fee and $10,000 a month for reports. If the technology exist to knock this report down to a few hours of work, do you charge just for the computer time, or do you separate the costs like the larger vendors do, charging extra for analysis of the data?

The real question is a simple one. Who do I need to engage to promote, defend and enhance my brand? And what are you going to charge me to do the work for me?

Do you base the fee on the hours it would take a human to compile the information, o

Interactive Media Planning Primer

Rohit Bhargava, who writes an excellent, excellent blog on interactive marketing, has a primer on what not to do when planning an media campaign.

The two that strike home for me are Number 1, ignore the small sites, and Number 4, ignore blog and social media.

Number 1: Ignore the small sites. This is the easiest and most common method used to avoid doing any real work with interactive media planning. Simply decide on a demographic (say, women 25-34), and buy ad units on the top four sites for this demographic based on easily accessible data, and you're done. Smaller sites often seem like too much effort to plan and require that you might actually have to contact someone to get pricing and units rather than just cutting and pasting from a plan used for a previous project or client. Yet the benefits are a much larger share of voice on the site and possibly connecting with more of your target consumer. Smaller sites can pay off big.

The problem with small sites is the amount of work that goes into them. If you sit down at your computer with the intention of finding advertising and publishing partners, and just move down the list, you're going to waste a lot of time.

At the same time, simply purchasing large blocks of advertising on the big traffic sites is not effective. When I look at ESPN or CNN or most of the other big sites, I don't see the ads - I've trained myself not to, even before I got into social media.

Smaller sites have less clutter, and the potential to target your advertising is much greater. But how do you find them? I'll be writing a post on this later in the week, on trying to find that "secret sauce" that determines who is influential, but for now, I would suggest you consider creating a industry map of the top 200 sites in your space.

Spending your money on the bottom 195 could be just as effective, and cost less than advertising in the top 5. To do that - you have to know what makes a site important, which means someone has to do the work.

As for Number 4, Blogs and Social Media - this only works if you are actively involved in that space. The high-touch, one-to-one interaction required to be effective in this space doesn't fit well into the agency budgets. How do you pay someone $150/hour to search blogs?

Chicken Police

Some things are just too funny not to share. I found this on Flektor.com. At the every end, watch how the officera at the top of the screen intimidates the "perp."

Automotive Dealers and Social Media

It's long been my contention that the key to unlocking the value of Web 2.0 in the marketing space is to get car dealers in on the deal. I learned a long time ago that car dealers in the US are hands down the best pure marketers around.

From the product to the price point to the sales pitch, car dealers are always on the cutting edge, and if there's anyone who can make the transition from social media dabblers to social media marketers, it's your local dealership.

So far, they've done nothing to prove me right, but more and more people are recognizing that the word-of-mouth dynamic in social media combined with the local aspect of selling cars eventually will lead to some use of these platforms by the auto dealers.

Rohit from Influential Interactive Marketing captures the idea and suggests that real customers giving real comments might persuade him to buy a Volvo.

The missing link mentioned in the title of this post is the incentive for current owners who are happy with their cars to share this opinion widely and vocally. Word of mouth marketing is not just about hoping people tell their friends and family about something and attributing a category and name to the phenomenon when it happens by accident. It's about finding the satisfied customers that are willing to broadcast (or microcast) their opinions and giving them the tools to do it. Imagine if a fraction of the marketing spend automotive advertisers poured into TV advertising was spent on this. John (and I and many others) might at least be far more likely to consider the Volvo C30 for our next car purchase ...

Too often, the push marketing mindset - that of creating a community of new prospects is the focus of agencies and owners. If you already have a list of contacts, prospects, and former customers, the former customers are the ones most likely to participate, but only if asked and persuaded that what they are doing will benefit them.

We're not talking abotu giveaways and discounts, but rather a sense that taking time out of our days would yield some kind of benefit, whether that's emotional, psychological, or financial.

Currently, twice as many people go to a dealer's website as go to the classifieds to look for cars. What would happen if a tiny portion of the money dealers use to pay for ads in the local paper were put into a social media program for their website? I'm guessing you dealers would sell more cars with less time and effort.

Apple to Vista: The Party Is Over

Competition-crushing advertising used to be so subtle. "Our competitor" this or "the other guys" that. Such is not the case these days. Case in point: Apple's latest direct attack on Vista's myriad complications and delays. The spot is a blatant, uncompromised assault on Microsoft's latest OS.



Still have the stomach for more? Give this ad a spin.

HTML/CSS Developer Needed: St Louis

We're in need of a front-end web developer with experience in HTML and CSS to convert a design we produced into readable format for another software.

The design is finished - all ready to go - and what we need is someone who can look at the design and convert it from the comps to a developed website. You can work onsite or freelance, but we'd like you to have experience designing corporate websites, and will require references and url's of your actual work.

You'll be working with the client directly, and working your billing through him (it's okay, they pay). You will be required to interface with the IT staff, with minimal direction from us (we're not getting paid for this).

Requirements:
Clean code. If you have to ask, or want us to judge your code, then you're not the right person.
Customer-centric. This work is for one of our clients, and we're not passing over anyone who doesn't finish projects or who doesn't play well with others.
Urls: links to three sites you've built in the last year, and references to two of the people you built the site for. If this is freelance for you, someone you work with will be fine.
Rate: This is easy work, and we're passing it on because we lack the bandwidth to do it in the timeframe necessary. Include your rate in the e-mail.

Not required:
Resume
print portfolios
url's of sites you did from 1997
url's you didn't actually work on yourself.

Contact us at info@durbinmedia.com if you're interested. We actually have a lot of this work come our way, and sometimes can't handle it.

Projects We're Working On

Just a few notes - some things we're working on.

There's a new video editing software we're just signed up to market. It's called Flektor, and it's brings an easy drag-and-drop usability to photo, video, mash-ups, music, and slideshows.

For those of a political persuasion, there's always 24thstate, a new weblog on politics in Missouri. 24th state, named because Missouri was the 24th state admitted to the union, is a side project I (Jim) started for the fun of it. It's not affiliated with any party and it's not strictly speaking, a business, but we all love a little Google juice now and then.

Storkcalling is still going strong. We're working on the site redesign, which we will use as launching pad for a larger campaign, and the site will be a mixture of the blog and the software to purchase the phone birth announcements. Storkcalling the blog is also serving as the area where Franki and I talk about our plans to start a family, and the rollercoaster ride we are expecting (no pun intended).

If you're curious as to what Franki is up to, check out LifeInAVentiCup, her style and fashion blog.

We have other projects running, and if you are interested, please feel free to drop us a line. We're always interested in hearing from people interested in building or finding online communities, and if you want to use a blog for business, we're the people to turn to.

Lighten Up

For reasons I'd rather not address (lest our cat suddenly learns to read), I wonder if Iams makes a similar formula for cats.

This Iams ad was created by Saatchi & Saatchi, NY. Simple. Memorable. Excellent.

[via Ad Goodness]

Reason Numner 8,765,142 I Love My Wife

My wife was sitting there, working on her computer, and suddenly she lets out a excited little cry, and tears come to her eyes.

I'm thinking there was a cute picture of somekind, or an e-mail that touched her, but as she does every day, she surprises me with what moved her.

It's these doors, known as the Gates of Paradise.
We were married on a Mediterranean cruise, and for our honeymoon, we go to Pompeii, Rome, Florence, Monaco, Nice and Barcelona (not bad, eh?). Franki had to see these doors at the Duomo, and though they were replicas, they were still incredible.

Among the many treasures of Grace Cathedral, the ones most visible to visitors are the great east doors, replicas of the famed Doors of Paradise. Their shimmering gold surfaces beckon the pilgrim up the great stairway to look in awe at the intricately sculpted and nearly three-dimensional panels. The original doors, by master sculptor and craftsman Lorenzo Ghiberti, stood at the east entry of the ancient Baptistry of the Duomo (Cathedral) in Florence, Italy. Now in the Duomo museum (replaced by a replica), they are considered by many art historians to mark the beginning of the Renaissance. Their popular name- Doors of Paradise- is based on a tradition that the young Michelangelo, greatly impressed by the doors, described them as worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.

Well, it turns out the Ghiberti doors are now touring the US, starting in Atlanta, and moving on to Chicago and finally New York.

When Franki saw this bit of news, she teared up, because the idea of seeing the real Ghiberti doors has always been a dream to her, and the thought of doing so was overwhelming. We will be going to see them in Chicago.

The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece will premiere in Atlanta on 28 April 2007 and remain on view through 15 July 2007. The exhibition is tentatively scheduled to travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Once returned to Florence, the three Gates of Paradise panels will be reassembled in their original framework and placed in a specially designed, hermetically sealed case in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo—never to travel again.

Yep - that's my wife - the Renaissance art lover.

I'm Addicted

If this doesn't sell Nike+, I'm not sure what will. I'm certainly sold. The Ed Norton voice-over is a nice touch.



[source: ComputerLove]

MTV Goes Old School

MTV just redesigned their web site. The entertainment giant launched an all-Flash web site in October of '06 resulting in frustrated users, slow load times and loss of traffic. The new site is lightening fast and HTML-based. Smart move if they hope to maintain their "engagement" strategy.

According to MTV Labs:

"At MTV, experimenting is just something we do. We've got more than two decades of that under our belt. So, about nine months ago, we went all Flash with our Web site. It was a technical marvel and it was indeed flashy. But, it was also something of a headache for a lot of users, so we were told."

The response from bloggers and fans has been enormous. Although most web users resist change of any kind, this group seems to be relieved by the simplicity of the new site:

"Very little flash makes the pages super fast to load. I remember not visiting specifically because the pages loaded so slow. The bigger news might be that they got rid of full page interstitials… my god I hope that becomes a trend."

I hope this is a sign of things to come. Flash is only useful in some instances. Rare instances. It is rarely amusing or helful to the viewing audience, and often the brainchild of a creative talent with too much time on his (or her) hands.

Simplicity is key when your goal is brand engagement. Make it easy. Make it fast. Make it fun. Sometimes going old school is actually a step forward. I'd say that's the case here.

The Limits of Blogebrity

We're proud of our blog. Some 12,000 people have dropped by the site in the first year that we wrote Brandstorming, and with a Google Page Rank 4 and improving, we are on the front page of search engines for a lot of the material we come up with.

This blog is more about fun and branding, but it has served the purpose of communicating what we are like as people and as a company, and we thank our readers for that.

In St Louis, the thriving blog community we had hoped for is still a little small, and awareness of the use of blogs for retail promotion are almost nonexistent, so we often describe our experiences, in the hopes that companies searching their name will get that a new way to communicate with customers has opened to them - but a new source of complaints is also available.

So when Bacana, a new Brazilian Steakhouse started construction out in Chesterfield, we thought we would grace the place with out presence and help them get their name out for the grand opening. In fact, we were hoping to be invited to their pre-grand opening, where we could talk about the restaurant, and serve as a type of local restaurant critic. It worked for Chipotle, why wouldn't it work for another restaurant?

So we popped in the other day to talk to the General Manager, who of course was as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. When we introduced ourselves as bloggers, a blank look came across his face, and when we suggested we would write a review, he said "great." There was a beat of awkwardness, and we realized that we were coming across like two people begging for a meal instead of local residents hoping to help out his opening.

The pre-opening had already happened, so luckily we had a quick out, but it certainly came across as funny as we got in the car. Yes - writing about Bacana would help them if people searched their name, but when companies have no clue who we are, trying to explain what blogging is and how it affects company reputation is not so easy.

Also, we come across as shills begging for food - which is absolutely not the image we wanted to project.

Beware the false impression that blogs give you of worth. You might find yourself beating a hasty retreat.

Bacana - Brazilian Style Barbecue opens today in Chesterfield next to Aqua Vin in the old KC Masterpiece building on the back side of the parkway, and the first 100 people get 30% off their bill. This deal also happens Thursday and Friday.