While the importance of Linked In has been recognized for a long time for recruitment of new talent in the mid-senior levels, very few recruiters would like to admit that they check the Facebook profiles of the potential candidates. A person’s social interaction not only is an indication of his emotional quotient and with whom he can connect through his social networks, it eventually links up to his professional quotient. Business Schools like Harvard, Yale or other premium schools have networks which can help to identify a member uniquely from these institutions. Thus the potential for actually evaluating the claims of candidature and their association with with niche institutions increases manifold, and hence correctness of professional membership is stamped in the social profile.

Not only for checking a candidates professional aptitude, but also to evaluate a candidature’s fit for a particular profile, a professional Social Media profile is of paramount importance. Its often that recruiters check Linked In for suitable candidates for niche roles. Hence a profile with details which can provide greater insight to the recruiters, can actually create a one-off linkage for the perfect skill specific job with a right candidate.

So why is social media increasing in importance in the recruitment scenario? Actually it has to be recognized that the job portals offer paid services to the recruiters while the social media is free for the basic users. Also the job portals are region specific, social media is more global by its very definition. Job portals target only the active job seekers whereas social media potentially has access to both active and passive job seekers. Hence one may just become inquisitive on seeing an advertisement of an opening which may have a high fit with the candidate, although the latter might not be actively searching for openings at the time.Thus the potential reach to the perfect candidates increases manifold, even if the latter are not actively searching for opportunities.

Also, one can observe social interactions of a potential candidate on social media unlike in job portals. However, social media is difficult to use for the recruitment purpose while job portals are highly user friendly and easy to use, being more targeted for the purpose.  But if offers one benefit that cannot be obtained from job portals. The candidates cannot re-organize their profile for a particular opening, since most have a time stamp, which offers ingenuity to profiles with a truthful mapping of candidature with the openings, although the potential information for evaluation may be low.

So what do you think about the importance of social media and professional recruitment? Do let us know your thoughts on this topic.

This looks like Facebook is all geared to take social media to the next big level, targeted online campaigns from the analysis of Big data, collected from social behavior online. What do you think about this new offering from this social media innovator? write to us to tell us your take on this sneak peek..

The option quickly disappeared from pages, but it left speculators wondering if Facebook might be plotting a way for users to opt-in to brand messages or even some sort of discovery engine.

The top social media marketing channel based on our survey results was search engine. It performed extremely well as a channel to improve brand or service or product awareness, as well as a channel to improve conversion rates from potential leads to actual customer engagement.

The results for the best channel for creation of awareness for the service or products are as displayed in the graph below:

As these results indicate, some of the more popular and initially perceived important social media channels like Twitter, Digg, Reditt, Stumbleupon received lesser votes in confidence when it came to actual performance in terms of a channel to increase service or product or brand awareness.

Similarly, the top social media resources to convert potential customers to buyers are as follows:

As is evident from the results of the graph, the top resource, as perceived by the social media marketers in both cases are search engines. This was closely followed by Facebook and Youtube. However, some of the more popular and initially perceived important social media channels like Twitter, Digg, Reditt, Stumbleupon received lesser votes in confidence when it came to actual performance. Maybe since these are perceived as more of a media for capturing interesting sources of stories and / or multimedia, they are losing their importance as channels of social media marketing.

Do let us know what are your feedback about the social media marketing channels. How do YOU draw traffic to your blog? Is that a sustainable source of traffic or does that depend on daily marketing efforts and link exchanges amongst colleagues to promote your content? Do let us know.

The survey was administered through not only our twitter followers but also to numerous followers and subscribers of our mailing list and finally 534 responses were collected on our questionnaire, all of who are marketing experts on social media websites and have their own online marketing venture.

The responses clearly portray the perceived benefits of social media marketing campaigns by the marketers.

From our personal analysis, it appears that today, social media marketing can become even more fruitful to reach out markets for small businesses targeting social consumers and probably investments on marketing through social networks like Facebook are more likely to generate better results. Also targeted advertisements in search engine (since that is where most consumers first turn to for information query) are also more likely to impact sales conversion figures.

However, bigger firms are more likely to benefit from greater brand awareness, greater brand recall and greater brand association from investments in social media marketing. So purely from a Branding Exercise,  social media marketing makes sense to larger consumer focused service providers or product marketers.

By the way, did you read our article on how to attain success in Social Media Viral Marketing?

Cost-based pricing of technology is historically the most popular method since it relies on more readily available information from the cost-accounting system. Since often, information technology post deployment is treated with Activity based costing, while developed in-house for many firms, a cost based pricing strategy becomes extremely lucrative to developers for the simplicity of development. Cost of development of a software product is often calculated based on the COCOMO model or from the COCOMO – II model.

The problems of a cost-driven pricing strategy arise from the assumptions that must be made about product costs. But then, one needs to consider the fact that unit costs are volume dependent while fixed cost per unit is allocated such that it varies with projected volume. The allocation procedures, be they direct labour hours, or some other surrogate metric, are not very precise. Therefore, product costs are not too dependable and offer technology developers lower returns on their investments.

Another pricing strategy for software products and services is based on Function Point analysis and Full Function point analysis. Function Point Analysis is one of the most popular techniques for pricing of technology.  Function Point Analysis has been proven as a reliable method for measuring the size of computer software in terms of Kilo Lines of Code (and more recently, Millions of Lines of Code), based on which and its complexity of development the software is priced. Function Point Analysis has been established as being extremely robust in estimating projects, managing change of scope of implemented engagements, measuring productivity, and communicating functional requirements.

A few other pricing techniques are  MIPS-based pricing, tiered pricing, user based pricing, flat pricing and usage based pricing.

In a MIPS-based pricing strategy, software prices are based on the on the theoretical throughput of the system (MIPS) on which the software is running.

In a flat pricing contract, customers pay a fixed price for unlimited use of the software product. This approach enables customers to more easily predict what they will pay for the use of the software. In a tiered pricing strategy, vendors attempt to package software benefits according to user requirements and their willingness to pay. This approach to pricing is an attempt to link software product costs to perceived customer value.

In an user based pricing strategy, the customer is charged based on the number of users that utilize a collection of software features over a given period of time by assigning costs to a particular number of users or workstations and sum up individual cost allocation.

In an usage based pricing strategy, customers is charged by the vendor firm only for what they actually use on a transaction basis, during a contract period, say in months, but more popularly for larger IT firms and engagements, in years.

Today another popular pricing technique is based on the economic value that a client firm may get from a technology product or service level agreement. Such a pricing strategy is called value based pricing. This is slowly becoming the most popular pricing strategies followed in research labs for emergent technologies, like that of IBM Research, Microsoft Research and SAP labs.

However, which pricing strategy to deploy and at what stage is entirely dependent on multiple factors like whether it is a service level agreement or not, whether it is a product or not, whether it is being licensed as a technology platform to another implementer or not, which stage of the product life cycle is it into, what is its competitive scenario, what is the industry structure of the product or the nature of the industry where it will get implemented (say automobile vs telecom), is it entering a new market or an established one, etc etc.

Do let us know if you have any queries.