This year’s first pork media blitz came from J&D’s where “everything should taste like bacon”. I remember seeing articles in January about it as well as TV spots featuring their award winning bacon-flavored lip-balm. They also have bacon-flavored salt, mayonnaise and other tasty products.

Funny as it may seem, the second news entry of “the other white meat” came up in the headlines of the Financial section. Millions upon millions of dollars in pork-barrel spending was being made by congress in their fast-track budget appropriations for this year. It was voted upon so quickly, no one could even tell what was in it until it was law. I think that should probably be considered a greased pig.

Of course, the third newsworthy item was the introduction of the Swine Flu epidemic. Twitter users were fired up about this subject, tweeting over 10,000 times an hour about it. Some were providing guidance to their followers to not eat pork, others were recommending the purchase of Tamiflu medication by the case. At the end of the day, the “puerco flu” appears to be strongly growing in Spain and Mexico for some reason.

I applaud the stalwart support that the guys over at J&D have been providing to this much maligned species this year. It has been hard to put a good face on piggies what with them being associated with US deficit spending and nasty cases of respiratory disease. I also applaud President Obama for renaming this epidemic to H1-N1. This new name is much less detrimental to the long term online reputation of our favorite breakfast meat.

If the National Pork Producers Council would be interested in other ways we can positively impact swine online reputation, they can contact me at 937-573-8535

It is 2:22AM EST and Ashton Kutcher hit 1.000,000 Twitter followers before CNN. This competition was tracked live and Twitter even helped by blocking any attempts to “unfollow” either Ashton or CNN as the race to one million got closer. Seriously though, beyond the sort of moronic competition, Ashton actually carried himself well as he described social media networks and the fact that individuals matter now more than ever in this social media context. CNN and Ted Turner with all of their money, resources and power could not beat a single man in an honest contest.I never thought a guy like that would understand the democratization of media. Maybe straight-up guys like P-Diddy are rubbing off on AK..

Tomorrow (today) Oprah will be broadcasting live and will send out her first “tweet” during her show. Ashton as well as Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be there for the “historic” event. I am very glad about the opportunity that this media spotlight will bring, and am hopeful that Twitter and their ilk are emboldened to grow their technologies as well as their dreams as to where this can go.

First off, I promised to elaborate on how to use Twitter to post jobs and recruit talent. My “Tweeps” who know how to use Twitter can move on down to the Bold N below.

For those uninitiated, I continue:

1. First off, create an account at Twitter. It is a pretty simple affair, and it will leave you with a homepage from which to Tweet. (Tweeting is the act of sending messages to people)
My URL is http://twitter.com/delta40

2. Second, build your Twitter Profile. On the Account tab, complete all areas. Areas like your URL and one line Bio are CRUCIAL. Think of using keyword-rich bios like: “Experienced executive headhunter and sourcing specialist. Jobs available in healthcare, technology, business and C-level management” When Tweeps (Twitter-using people) perform searches, your keywords help you gain “eyes to page”… Then your URL tells them where to go.

3. On the Picture Tab, add your photo, no one wants to communicate with a ghost avatar. They want to see you as you are. You can also bail out with the use of a corporate logo.

4. On the Design tab you can pick how your page will look. Leaving a default page is very indicative of someone who is new at this. And no one wants to be a NEWB. You can add a background image and change the color scheme. This is where a Community Manager comes in handy.. To do this sort of social-site branding.

5. OK, now start using Twitter! Pretty easy.

Now on to the fun part. Finding and recruiting talent!

The first thing you can do is start to search for talent who have posted their stuff on Twitter for you to find. Go to the Twitter Search Page and type in some search criteria. This is where you will start to use the unique “code” within Twitter. Community Managers use the jargon all day.

Say you want to look for a Program Manager near Dayton, Ohio within 50 miles?
In the search field type in:    “program manager” near:Dayton within:50mi

You will come up with one hit! Me! Now how fun was that??

While searching for a candidate you can also use “Hashtags” represented by a “#” sign. Adding this to your search criteria narrows results. For example #jobangels provides you only candidates that have posted their availability to JobAngels.

Because you can only type in 140 characters, Twitter-users, also known as Tweeps, use lots of concatenation and substitution. Twitter also has some unique “codes”.

@ delta40  – Starting off a tweet like this will send a general message that others can see, but your intended recipient will be delta40
D delta40 – Starting off a tweet like this will send a private message to delta40, no one can see this but him. You cannot send D or Direct messages unless that person is “following” you.

OTHER RESOURCES

You can also find sites like Twellow that build out more enhanced profiles and work to categorize individuals by their talents. (like a Yellow Pages)
I mentioned #jobangels above. This is a non-profit organization that helps place candidates with jobs. You would be silly to not use Job Angels as a resource.

My feelings about recruiting new talent via Twitter is that it engages a young and vibrant demographic in a way that is meaningful and supportive of them. Twitter as a platform provides a robust 140 character messaging system so that you can say what you need to say, but hold on to what you don’t.
You can also build onto Twitter various tools like TweetDeck that help to enhance your Twitter experience. And if you don’t have the time or the inclination to recruit via Twitter, consider hiring a Community Manager or Social Media Consultant. Keep an eye on this blog for more tips on how to use the other forms of social media (MySpace, Facebook, etc) for advertising your brand and your business.

Have a wonderful day!

Either by API call, the rendering of a messaging service (such as XMPP) or even the use of asynchronous email these service providers such as Facebook/LinkedIn, and this WordPress blog all rely on the system independence of each other, as well as the loose coupling of the integration modules that bind them.

So, this is to inform my LinkedIn followers that you will begin to see feeds from my personal blog entitled Bash Foo for the Soul at http://bashfoo.com. I’ll only be throwing over self-authored professional material to LinkedIn while continuing to share my brief rants, even briefer Tweets, and multimedia extravaganzas with my supportive “Foo” audience.