Hawaii Five O deserves an award for some of the most narrative-integrated, yet hit-you-over-the-head obvious, product placement advertising on TV this side of infomercials. Here are five things I’ve learned that can be applied to recruitment marketing since the series began:

1. Make your core brand identity clear and highlight it often.

Five O is an action-driven police procedural, and the  regular car chases, as well as the show’s trademark McGarrett/Danno car-guements provide ample opportunity to highlight the show’s sponsorship dollars from GM. Everyone (good guys at least) drives a Chevy. It doesn’t matter how brutal the car chase or how rugged and dirty the terrain, the show’s ubiquitous 2010 Chevrolet Camaro 2LT Coupe (and co-starring Traverse and Cruze) are spotless, waxed and buffed and ready for their close-up. It’s like an extended weekly version of the BMW ‘driver’ mini-films that brought Clive Owen his first real exposure in the US. Only with Chevys. And without the A-list movie stars and directors. Otherwise – just like it.

Can you spot the real star of this scene?

The Chevy ‘bowtie’ emblem probably gets as much screen time as the lead actors on the show – similarly you should make sure your brand identity is in front of your prospect audience frequently so that your name is synonymous with career opportunities – just like Chevy Camaro is synonymous with Five O-style pulse pounding, adrenaline rush action.

2. Show employees engaging with each other to show your culture.

A few episodes into season one some Five O members revealed that they are a tech-savvy group and firmly in the Microsoft camp. In episode 8, Daniel Dae Kim tells co-star Grace Park to look up a piece of art on her smartphone – a totally believable ‘real life’ activity – unfortunately ruined by some off-tone, branding. Dae Kim doesn’t just tell Park to look something up, he tells her: “You don’t believe me? Bing it!”

Microsoft must have been hoping that they could somehow use pop culture to raise ‘Bing’ to the status of ‘Google’ as a synonym for looking something up on the internet. Google didn’t try to make that happen – it just happened and you can’t force it. That Grace Park then uses a Windows 7 phone to ‘Bing It’ didn’t help – it was like salt in the wound.

Prospects want to know what they can expect as an employee – an environment where everyone take mobile technology for granted (like the Five O crew), or are you a suit and tie environment or t-shirt and flip-flops? Does your culture run on after-hours, Starbucks fueled, team collaborations or relaxed morning meetings? How do your employees interact? Most of all, are you authentic or do you come across as stilted and awkward as asking someone to ‘Bing it’?

3. Teach your prospects something new / give them something of value.

As the last example shows, the bad ass, tech oriented, name-dropping members of the Five O prefer Microsoft technology (and web platforms). But the Microsoft product placement didn’t end with attempts to create a new catch phrase – they want to introduce you to technology and teach you how to use it. First, the introduction: The Windows 7 phone was everywhere in the show. Cast members were regularly using their Windows phones with incredibly distinct close-ups showing the smart phone in use – like a video training manual. You couldn’t escape the Windows phone during commercial breaks, either. Just in case you didn’t notice it in the show, a Windows phone ad was placed in just about every commercial block.

The ultimate Windows product placement moment however came from another Daniel Dae Kim/Grace Park moment (it appears that auto product placement is primarily handled by  Alex O’Loughlin (McGarrett) and Scott Caan (Danno) while tech product placements go to Dae Kim and Park).Once you begin to get the idea that Microsoft has a smartphone for sale, the Five O techies kick it up a notch: Daniel Dae Kim actually takes time from a crime investigation to teach Grace Park how to check her email on her Windows phone. You get step by step instructions along with close-ups on the phone’s screen showing you just how quick and easy it is to check your email on the Windows 7 phone. I get it – skillful product placement involves integrating the product into the show. Thanks Five O crime-fighters, I’m headed to the store right now that my fear of complicated technology has been resolved! (If anyone knows where I can find this video clip so I can add it to this post, please let me know)

Just Sit Back and Watch As Hollywood Stars Teach You How to Use Your Smartphone!

While it’s easy to make fun of the ham-handed email lesson, the Hawaii Five O marketers are onto something: you want to educate your audience. Microsoft wanted to demonstrate easy-to-use technology. You might want to use case studies, white papers, blog posts or short videos to show your accomplishments or highlight tools or resources that they would find useful.

4. Show your work environment.

Hawaii Five O’s product placement even goes beyond traditional ‘products’ – the producers recognize that location is a huge part of the shows’ appeal. Their local-friendly filming schedule clearly incorporates real local destinations and businesses as part of their tropical travel guide vibe – including an appearance by chef Masaharu Morimoto and his destination restaurant in Waikiki. The inclusion of real-life locations and personalities does more than localize the product placement vibe on Hawaii Five O – it roots the show in the real world. As this video clip shows, there is even be the opportunity to show another side of Morimoto Waikiki: we get to see the restaurant’s location, the kitchen and dining room, prep cooks and chefs at work, the fresh seafood, and even Chef Morimoto performing karaoke. All we need for a full-fledged recruitment video is pull one or two waiters aside and ask them about their benefits and what they like most about working for Morimoto Waikiki.

Chef Morimoto and the kitchen crew dealing with a tricky workman's comp situation.

5. Don’t go overboard.

Recently the show featured a product placement scene so over the top that The New York Times described the sequence as “jarring, disruptive and insulting.”  The action stops completely for this 50-second long in-show commercial, in which the show’s overweight shrimp food truck owner (played by amateur  sumo wrestler Taylor Wily) waxes poetic about losing weight by eating Subway sandwiches amid an array of prominent logos: “The best thing about it,  they make it anyway you want it…It’s some serious culinary fusion.” This doesn’t even qualify as humorous – it’s just cringe-inducing dialogue designed to promote Subway. Even the actors look embarrassed to be taking part in the scene. The take-away: promote your brand authentically and don’t force the message where it doesn’t belong.

 (All images and video are (C) CBS Broadcasting Inc. All RightsReserved. and used for editorial purposes only)

In a message that resonates with his book ‘Lynchpin’ – Godin recented stated in an interview:

• If you’re the average person out there doing average work, there’s going to be someone else out there doing the exact same thing as you, but cheaper. Now that the industrial economy is over, you should forget about doing things just because it’s assigned to you, or “never mind the race to the top, you’ll be racing to the bottom.”

This philosophy resonates in spirit with my Demotivator coffee mug from Despair, Inc.

Average is for robots – aim higher.

So here we are, 6 months later, and as 2012 starts I am finally giving in to Google+. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. Google+ continues to become more business friendly.

It took a while for Google to ‘allow’ business/brand pages in their system, but have no doubt they were planned for from the very beginning. Now Google+ Business Pages are growing up, and Google has begun to distinguish companies from users by providing additional features and requiring brands/businesses to apply Google to get a dedicated brand page. On one hand, small businesses and entrepreneurs may see this as obstructionist, this will help keep the white noise down a bit. I think this is an administrative ‘Panda’-inspired move intended to prevent Google+ abuse and hold off a glut of business page creation by the same marketers who helped flood Google’s search engine with content farm spam. The ability to assign up to 50 administrators to a business page is an important nod to ‘big brand’ business management requirements where it is unlikely (and undesirable) for just one person to have sole administrative rights for an important social brand environment.

2. Google gives you an SEO boost.

Google+ pages are built to be Search Optimization friendly and seem to be getting page one ranking preference. This is one of Google+’s savviest counters to Facebook’s  decision to actively prevent Google from crawling much of their content. Much of what you do on Facebook is not search engine accessible – and that’s fine for a lot of their pages and profiles where people have privacy concerns. But a lot of businesses and people are actively looking for a social-search boost, and by tailoring the Google+ format to the Google ranking algorithms (and allowing for more content than, say some places that limit you to 140 characters) Google+ increases your ability to own your own name or brand-space in search results.  Google has essentially trumped Facebook and other social platforms like Twitter for search optimization – another signal that Google+ is an ‘open’ business and brand friendly environment rather than a gated community. This is in line with the brand-friendly aspects of the Panda update, about which Matt Cutts has stated: “…we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.” To find out more about Google+ search optimization, take a look at this post about Google+ optimization from Kristi Hines at Search Engine Watch.

3. Real ‘Social’ Interaction 

Video conferencing in ‘hangouts’ allow you to move from threaded ‘comment discussions’ to an actual dialogue. You can even join a hangout from a mobile-phone with a front-facing camera. This is great for team meetings, customer support, small training sessions, product demonstrations, etc. However the real power, still in limited testing, is the On Air feature. On Air turns a Hangout into a video broadcast. On Air broadcasts can be recorded and uploaded to your YouTube account. With some thoughtful use, you can easily grow a library of on demand video content.  Video ‘just happens’ to be a powerful SEO content strategy element in it’s own right – and with a few educated tweaks On Air can become another key Google+ SEO signal element.

4. Circles rock.

Circles were one of the first touted features of Google+ – the ability to meaningfully segment your social world into different buckets: friends, family, co-workers, people you can drop the f-bomb around, people you can’t, customers/clients, special interest groups, etc. Finally you can control which group gets which message. Your mom doesn’t have to get every random link about a new SEO tactic, your co-workers don’t need to know where you went to dinner on vacation, you don’t have to run every social post through the filter of: ‘do I want my mom, boss, client, kids, co-workers, etc, etc, etc to see this?’ Yes Facebook does allow you to create different ‘groups’ but frankly, using them is a pain.

5. Google+ is not going away.

Like I said before – my experiences with Google’s previous experiments like Wave and Buzz, Sidewiki and even with ‘lab’ experiments like Google Social Search left me with a bad taste in my mouth. They were dead ends – explorations that may have provided Google with some actionable intelligence to be used in future projects and products (like Google+) but for me as an end-user were ultimately a waste of my time. While there are those who argue the value of Google+, noting that as of late November even MySpace still has more traffic than Google+, Google has simply put too much effort and promotion into Google+ to terminate it. Google+ appears to be more than just a social media environment – it’s an important component of how Google wants search to perform. Also, big brands and social media pundits didn’t flock to any of Google’s previous social efforts in the same way they have taken to Google+ – with 61% of the world’s Top 100 brands establishing Google+ business pages in less than a week after the search company allowed ‘official’ business pages. Business integration of Google+ is still in it’s infancy – look how long it’s taken many businesses to integrate Facebook – but this kind of mass adoption shows that the business world is hungry and ready for more social solutions even if they are slow to evolve how they are integrated and utilized. If Google were to shut down Google+ after all the press, marketing and business efforts towards adoption, they leave with egg on their face and businesses will be more cautious and less likely to gravitate towards future Google platforms. Google+ is here to stay.

Requests for measurable effectiveness of social media recruiting are often met with remarks that redirect the topic instead of directly addressing effectiveness. A request or challenge asking ‘Can Social Recruiting fill positions x, y and z?’ frequently lead to lectures that social media is about community, dialogue, transparency, etc. Would we accept similar arguments saying that asking for results from Pay Per Click is misguided because it’s about the user’s post-click experience?  No. We simply need to get to the point where best practices are an assumed part of any such challenge or request for results. Asking for results is never misguided.

Maybe I’m tired of running into arguments saying that asking for results from social media recruitment efforts is misguided because it’s all about community-building. Or maybe I’m just too close to the issue.

While Social Recruiting is not a one-off campaign tactic and community building is crucial, at some point you have to determine your core performance metric. This is recruitment and ultimately core performance metrics have to include: number of viable candidates found through a social media channel, successful hires of candidates found through a social media channel. No amount of best practice caveats can side-step this ultimate goal.

If I am properly building a social media strategy will I be able to generate an on-demand stream of qualified candidates when positions are open? Will the results of my social recruiting efforts reap the rewards for which I am going through this effort and will they be of an appropriate volume and effectiveness to justify the content development and labor costs associated — because saying social recruiting is free is only true if your time, talent and expertise is free as well.

Should you expect to get these results right off the bat through the social media ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality? No, not at all. You still have to build community, diversify your social media footprint, engage with your audience and build value — all the standard best practices of social media marketing.

Just saying ‘you need to do it right’ doesn’t remove the need to ultimately determine that a well-run recruiting effort/tactic/strategy/whatever actually works and is financially viable. However, given the mind-set of most companies, we will probably all have to get used to repeating variations of this phrase and the attendant details since many seem determined to view social recruiting as a simple ‘plug-it-in’ tactic that will produce immediate results. Yes it will produce results, but…

Yes, I know, you’re tired of hearing the S-word – it’s everywhere.  The S-word is ubiquitous and almost annoyingly showing up in every media source you encounter from blogs to TV news stories. Even the line-cook at Denny’s is talking about it – heck, he moon-lights as a social marketer. Haven’t you heard? EVERYONE’S promoting their personal brand in social media these days.

Whether you think times are ripe for a social backlash or not, social media spaces are only becoming more and more important to any online marketing and recruitment strategy. Let me tell you why social media is the next big thing for SEO.

You see, first of all search engines are very clique-conscious. The more popular and authoritative a site is, the more reputation it has to share. When one of those sites links to another site it passes a bit of credibility to the new site, making the search engines say: “Hey, if Amazon links to that site it MUST be worthwhile. I’m going to give it a better search results ranking.” In SEO this is called sharing ‘link juice.’

How powerful is link juice? Let’s just say that 1 link from a site with a lot of link juice can do more for your search engine results position than 20 links from sites with no link juice.

Who’s got the juice?

Right now, social media sites have a LOT of link juice. Google, for instance, isn’t stupid. They know that a lot of people are busy sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media sites. These are real people sharing information they find valuable in real time. If you’re a search engine, it’s like being able to tap into the internet’s stream of consciousness and find out what site’s people really think are the most valuable about any given topic.

Google already gives certain social media sites extra exposure and the links from these sites carry the juice to prove it. In real-time news search, you can already watch topic-related tweets and Facebook status updates emerge among blog and news story updates on Google. Just click on the ‘options’ link on your Google search results and then click the ‘Latest’ link to let Google know you want the ‘latest news results.’

Google's Real Time Search Already Tracks Tweets in Real Time

How to get social link juice

Taking advantage of the new social-search phenomena isn’t as easy as just setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook page and linking to your career website or job listings. Nobody ever said anything worthwhile is easy. Your destination pages have to be optimized; your social sources need to be diverse and populated with worthwhile, interesting content; your use of keywords has to be selective but not spammy.

Really, the first steps to getting good social link juice are recommended best practices in their own right:

1)      Develop good content on your career website

2)      Build branded social media presences that provide interesting information to your candidate audience. (FYI: ‘Interesting information’ doesn’t mean job listings or blatant self-promotion.)

As attendees of the NAS Social Networking Boot Camp learn in our hands-on sessions, developing a effective social presence means you become an asset to your audience by giving them information and tools that help meet their goals – not necessarily yours. This alone transforms you from a suspect source of self-serving advertising into a valuable resource. And that’s an important key to building an audience…and ultimately a stream of link juice you can direct through your branded social media properties.

1. YouTube.com

2. Wikipedia.org

3. Craigslist.org

4. Twitter

5. photobucket.com

6. flickr.com

7. WordPress.com

8. IMDB.com

9. digg.com

10. eHow.com

11. TypePad.com

12. topix.com

13. LiveJournal.com

14. deviantART.com

15. Technorati.com

5MPREYKQTTDV

In Forrester’s research they show little overlap between the “big 5″ agency types–advertising, direct, media buying, interactive, and PR. This, to date, has been leading towards a splintering of agency relationships for clients where no one agency can provide all solutions. The race, it would seem will go to the swift — those who are more agile, grow new skill-sets internally and form long-term relationships with valuable solution providers.

What do you think? is the answer growing strong multi-disciplinary digital skills in one agency organization, eventually resolving this cross-vendor dilemma through service and skill consolidation? What do you see as the role of agencies in the ‘Adaptive Marketing’ future?

‘…not real friends just Facebook friends’. Is FB devaluing the term Friend? Should they have called them something else?

This got me thinking…for a few years there has been a lot of talk about Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number refers to a theory that there is a limit to the amount of relationships we can maintain. Beyond that number, you simply cannot maintain a meaningful relationship. Dunbar sets that number at a maximum of 150 people

In October of 2009, Seth Godin proclaimed that: Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law. He makes a good argument that once you reach beyond your Dunbar number your message effectiveness changes as a side-effect of the intimacy of your relationship changing.

Supporting this, Switched.com explored How Many Facebook Friends Do We Have, For Real? I urge you to look at the eye-opening research they performed to explore ‘friend’ engagement.

But not everyone agrees with the relevance of Dunbar’s number to social media. Contrary to Seth Godin’s take that you must have ‘strong ties’ to your audience to be effective, Morten Hansen puts forward in his book Collaboration that the real value of collaboration and networks comes from weak relationships rather than from strong relationships and networks.  One of Morten’s network rules is “build weak ties, not strong ones.”

According to Morten: “…research shows that weak ties can prove much more helpful in networking, because they form bridges to worlds we do not walk within.  Strong ties, on the other hand, tend to be worlds we already know; a good friends often knows many of the same people and things we know.  They are not the best when it comes to searching for new jobs, ideas, experts, and knowledge.  Weak ties re also good because they take less time.  It’s less time consuming to talk to someone once a month (weak tie) than twice a week (a strong tie).  People can keep up quite a few weak ties without them being a burden.”

At first blush I would agree. Especially when we are looking at making a social media brand relationship. I do not have a ‘strong tie’ to any of the brands I engage with on Facebook or Twitter, we do not have regular lengthy conversations nor have I found myself buying a round of drinks for either author Christopher Moore, or Hyatt Hotels and Resorts Careers. But, I have found that I can engage with them on a semi-regular basis very easily.

I get information from each which I would otherwise have no way of knowing and, if I so desire, I can have a micro-engagement with little effort. From a brand perspective, whether engaging me as a would-be book reader/buyer or a possible job applicant, that level of engagement is enough — they open me up for deeper engagement according to my needs in response to the value I am exposed to by my ‘weak connection’. The same ‘weak tie’ value can be seen by anyone who is ann of a consumer brand and yet takes advantage of an online coupon or special promoted through a social media channel.

So what do we call these ‘weak connections’ in our networks, specifically Facebook? My proposed answer: they are a Facequaintance.

Someone who you have ‘friended’ on Facebook but don’t really know or keep in touch with. You generally don’t know anyone who ever comments on their Wall and wouldn’t know them even if they walked right up to you and slapped you.

Usage: “Yea, I’m friends with her but we’ve only met, like, once. She’s just a Facequaintance.”

Anyway, this video was on the post and it’s simply amazing. It’s about a mouse…and a mouse-trap. And if you’re like me, you’re going to spend a few moments cringing, waiting for the inevitable ‘CRACK!’ of the trap…but then something magical happens. Something entirely about having the right attitude in the face of circumstances beyond your control. Enjoy!

You can view the video here if the embedded video below doesn’t work.

Starbucks has just started using Foursquare as part of a new customer rewards program. To take part in this program, all you have to do is use foursquare to ‘checkin’ at your Starbucks location (I use the Foursquare app on my Droid).

While Starbucks has no official prizes associated with Foursquare activity (such as free coffee), after five checkins customers unlock the new “Barista badge.” The first specifically business branded badge on Foursquare, although almost certainly not the last.

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg for an organization that has already leveraged multiple presences on both Facebook and Twitter. If nothing else, Starbucks is hyper-activate about finding ways to leverage the groundswell and social media.

While both Twitter and Foursquare are looking to offer more business analytics tools (Foursquare plans to introduce free statistics and engagement tools for businesses) Starbucks is apparantly hoping to use Foursquare to provide more meaningful prizes. Some possibilities incluse invitations to special events, photo sharing or online reputation scores.

Already I’ve begun to hear people discussing ways to possibly use Foursquare in recruitment. Is it possible? Is it advised? How would it work? Would candidates get to unlock some special ’2nd Interview!’ Badge? Or are mobile-based geo-location tools simply not relevant?