I have been reading quite a bit lately about creating a personal brand online. The subject fascinates me, not least because I see so many people making a total hash of it by the inane things they post on Facebook, Twitter, blog replies, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn.

But recently I had such a powerful personal example happen to me, that I feel compelled to share it with you. This small Twitter exchange taught me a huge lesson in how quickly “Brand You” can be harmed by inappropriate online behaviour.

You see recentlyI was shocked to read a Tweet which, frankly, made a very disparaging remark, directed at me!

TweetDeck advised me I had several “mentions” overnight, and I glanced through them, smiling at some banter with followers, until I struck the Tweet that, for reasons still unknown to me, took a personal shot at me, by name. Look, it wasn’t a vicious remark. But it was personal, it was negative, it was totally unprovoked and of course, it was very public.

Now if this has not happened to you, I can confirm it is an unpleasant experience. The comment was untrue, and I hope it is not how anyone views me. So it rankled! I obviously clicked on the perpetrators’ Twitter page and found that I had never even heard of the guy! Never had anything to do with him in the real world or the online world, although I did work out he is a Twitter follower of mine (or was!). Nor was his comment in response to any Tweet of mine. It was not even directed to me, but to a third party, about me.

I searched for his LinkedIn page and found he holds a nothing-job in a widely unrespected company. I was not sure if this made me feel better or worse! I racked my brain as to why this stranger would attack me, publicly. I won’t lie to you. It stung. However after about 10 minutes I started to lose interest and decided not to respond in any public way. I resolved to forget about it.

But that’s when it got really interesting. Over the next few hours my Twitter DM inbox (Direct Message) began to fill up with fellow Tweeters who took great umbrage at the remark this guy had made. I had at least 10 in a single day, and the theme was “who is this guy?” and “Who does he think he is” and more specifically “What a rude jerk”, and interestingly “I will never use him or his company again.”

One follower –who I do not know personally at all, and only vaguely remember as an online friend, had done his research on the “offender” and Direct Messaged me to say that he was amazed this guy was in the advertising industry “because he has no idea of how to manage his personal brand”

And it was that remark that struck me hard. In a flash, I realised that it was not MY reputation that had suffered as a result of this online rudeness. It was the reputation and brand of the person who made the remark that had taken a huge hit. Just one Tweet and provoked such an active response from my followers, all echoing disapproval. The question is, how many people read that Tweet and thought “idiot”?

And so the lesson was learned. By me, if not by the person who chose to hurl cyber-insults. Online, we are what we write. In real life we can make a risqué joke to close friends because they “know” us and take the joke in context. In real interpersonal situations we can pass the odd sarcastic comment, accompanied by a smile, and the receiver feels no hurt because there is context and history, which makes it ok and appropriate. Dropping in the odd swear word while chatting with like-minded buddies does not raise an eyebrow because it conforms with the group culture.

Online we have no such protection.

All this got me thinking about my own online “brand”. I have 5,200 plus Twitter followers and get thousands of visitors to my blog each month, but a tiny percentage of those people are known to me personally. Yet many of the rest I have what I consider to be a great relationship with. We reply to each other’s Tweets, we DM, we offer advice, and we share good-humoured banter as well as seriously useful data. We pass on knowledge freely, and even do business together.

I thought about how I viewed these people. I have an image of them, they have a “brand “ with me based on their tweets, their humour, the quality of their information and their online generosity. And that ‘brand’ or ‘reputation’ is as real as if I had met them. And I will make decisions to trust them and buy their services based on the brand they have built up with me online, over time.

So the lesson is this. Consider “Brand You” before you Tweet how many beers you sank on Saturday night. Consider ‘Brand You’ before you use gratuitous profanities online. Consider “Brand You” before you post that heavily politicised or semi-pornographic video on your blog spot, after months of building up credibility as a professional recruiter.

And of course, consider “Brand You” before you hurl insults at people who might actually have a stronger online brand than your own.

I was walking down the street the other day when I ran into an old colleague, an ex-employee actually, from my days as the owner of accounting and finance recruiter, Recruitment Solutions.

We talked for a while, and as we parted she said with a huge smile, ” Still following that old success formula, Greg. It has made me millions!” At first I could not for the life of me work out what she was talking about. But then it slowly came back to me. Years ago I coached all our staff on a very simple but powerful way to keep focussed on the things that drive success in our business. All our managers ran their business to this formula, and it was our foremost diagnostic tool when an individual or a business unit was failing to deliver. I spoke about it at recruitment conferences all over Australia, and indeed many other parts of the world, and it always brought the same response

“So simple… yet so true!”

I went back to my office and dug up the old notes. And there it was. But what struck me was how valid that same little formula is today. No amount of technology has changed the key drivers of success in recruitment and staffing. If you want “fun and money” from this job…and who does not…then this is your holy grail.

So it’s time to dust it off

Success = Activity x Quality x Target Market

I believe that activity is key to the ongoing success of any commercial recruiter. It’s not all about activity, but activity counts. You just have to do a certain amount of ’stuff’ to get the results you want. Now, those activities might vary a little depending on your sector, your experience, and the depth of your customer relationships, but they are likely to include all the usual suspects such as client visits, client calls and talent interviews. But these days we are going to want to add new activities; networking events, and maybe even tweets and connections, if we have a well-evolved social networking component to our work. The point is I have never seen a successful recruiter who does not consistently churn out activities that drive the outcomes we seek. It just comes with the territory.

But it’s not all about activity is it? In fact too much activity, of the wrong kind, and of inferior quality, will be counter-productive. Hundreds of low quality, ill thought-through cold calls, for example, asking “got any jobs?” is not going to enhance your billings or your reputation. No, the second component of the success formula is quality. We have got to have lots of activity to be successful, but it needs to be activity of the highest quality. And by quality I mean quality through every step of the process. The quality of your advertisement or your head hunt call, the quality of your screening call, the quality of candidate interviewing, the skill with which you take a qualified order, the way you brief your talent prior to interview, your post interview client debrief. It goes on and on, because in fact our job is made up of thousands of tiny little interactions. And our success is driven by the volume of those interactions(activity), but also crucially, the quality of those interactions. And that is where a skilled recruiter will display her well-honed questioning skills, influencing skills, counseling skills, persuasion skills and negotiation skills. That is the quality I am referring to.

So success is about activity, and success is about the quality of that activity. But there is a third leg to the equation. One most recruiters fail to spot. We have to do lots of activity. Yes! We have to maintain high quality. Yes! But we have to do that high quality activity……with the right people!

If you do 15 client visits a week, and the quality of those visits is superb, you can still fail if you are meeting with two- bit companies that have no hiring plans, or if you meet people who are not decision makers. If you conduct the best candidate interviews in recruiting history, and you do 15 such interviews a week, you can still fail if you don’t interview in-demand talent who have the skill-sets your clients will pay for.

And I know what you’re thinking now. You are thinking “but this is so obvious”. I know. Isn’t it just?

BUT DO YOU DO IT?

In 30 years of coaching recruiters and running teams of recruiters, whenever I have seen someone go off track or a team start to fail, I have always found the answer by applying this formula.

• Are we doing enough activity?
• Is that activity of the right quality?
• Are we doing it with the right people?

It has never let me down. The reason for the failure will be found in one or more of these areas.

And the funny thing is, that the explosion in technology impacting our industry makes applying this formula even more pertinent. We all know people who pump out lots of activity. Check out some recruiters onTwitter for a day if you want a modern example of dubious productivity. But is it quality stuff? Is it targeted to the right audience?

So there it is . The holy grail of how to be great at this job

Activity x quality x target market

Please remember me when it makes you rich and famous

Increasingly it’s becoming clear that a real recovery in recruitment demand is looming over the horizon. In Australia we are seeing little surges of temp demand, and in Asia our job order flow at Aquent is strengthening slowly but surely. Europe is more problematical for the moment, but certainly the RCSA (Recruitment industry body in Australia and New Zealand) must believe an upswing is probable, as they have asked me to speak on that very topic over the coming months right across the country.

http://www.rcsa.com.au/event/month/2009?title=Riding+the+recovery&event_start=&event_end=&tid_1=All

Perhaps one of the most important things we need to understand is that when the recovery comes, it’s going to be a different market. In the boom it was a ‘delivery market’. Orders came to us freely. Referring candidates fast was the decider. Recruiters were able to horse-trade talent around town, and secure placements almost in spite of their consulting skills, rather than because of them Many recruiters lost the hunting and sales mentality during the protracted recruitment market boom, which by my estimation lasted at least from 2002 till 2008, but if you take a longer view and count the 2002 slowdown as merely a blip, then probably it lasted a 15 years or more!

And of course that lack of business development and relationship-building acumen is what has hurt many consultants in the downturn, and forced lots of them out of the business all together. But we lost something else in the boom market and I believe it’s going to hurt us even more as demand returns. Many recruiters have totally lost skills in client and talent control. And what I really mean by ‘control,’ is the ability to influence outcomes, to manage expectations, to negotiate compromise and to broker deals. It’s these skills that the successful consultants will need as things pick up.

You see, I am convinced that we fell into bad habits during the years of plenty. We must be careful that we don’t become married to yesterday’s tools and techniques, because we might be in for a nasty shock if we complacently believe that we can simply revert to methods we used pre-recession. “Phone-jockey” tactics, like cold calling as well as relentless job board advertising and email blasting of resumes, for example, are methods that may have become outdated. The future is not so much cold calling, but more niche networking.

Recruiters will need to be skilled with building online relationships. But there is a catch. Online is not enough. The fully rounded recruiter will have the smarts to integrate their online activities with real world relationship building, via live networking and referrals. When all is said and done, the ability to impress and influence, personally, will be the key.

So get ready for the switch. Yesterday’s ‘delivery market’ becomes tomorrow ‘relationship market’.

Are you ready to cope?