Podcast - Recruiting With Coach Witte

 Joe Clarkson and I met with ONU's very own Coach Witte to discuss the ins and outs of the recruiting process for D3 volleyball programs. Coach Witte does an excellent job of incorporating social media tactics that are involved in recruitment into our discussion. She gives advice to high school athletes looking to play sports in college and how they can be marketable. Coach told Joe and I how the recruiting process has evolved and how the process will change even more for the future. We end this podcast with an outlook for the 2011 Polar Bear Volleyball Season.

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Social Media and Small Businesses

This week, our social media class was assigned chapters from New Influencers, by Paul Gillin. Chapter six definitely struck a chord with me because the chapter talks about why social media is so well-turned to smaller businesses. My family owns a small flag manufacturer on the outside of downtown Cincinnati. The National Flag Company has been in my family for years. My dad is the President and CEO and employees about 30 people. National Flag recently created a Facebook page, but the flag company does not know how to utilize other social media sites.

Gillin states several reasons as to why social media can be helpful to small businesses: 

1) It’s all about the search – Sites like Google are the best thing that ever happened to small businesses. Companies, like National Flag, that can’t afford much advertising can achieve international visibility in vertical disciplines through search performance. National Flag recently hired someone to optimize their search engine so when consumers search for flags in our area, National Flag will show up first on Google search results or be at the top of the page.

2) Get personal – One of the main reasons people do business with a small company is to get personal service. Although National Flag has not yet tapped into podcasts or blogs, they are certainly something to consider because they bring a distinctive voice and a sense of humor.

3) The voice of authority – Google favors content over commerce. This is more cost efficient for small businesses than using advertising.

4) You can’t beat the cost – The real investment is the time. Most social media sites are completely free of cost. This is definitely helpful for National Flag. Two summers ago, I organized a marketing project that included mailing magnets with our name, logo and phone number on them and mailed them out to past customers. This took a lot of my time, wasted envelopes and the magnets cost money. Social media will help National Flag keep costs for advertising way down.

The chapter goes on to discuss some small business blogging successes. The National Flag Company has tapped into the social media world, all they need is to do is figure out which sites will work for them and how to gain followers and fans to get our name out to the public.

How Fast is Social Media Growing?

It’s so crazy to me how far social media has come in the past year. The number of social media sites seems to be increasing at such a fast rate, as I hear about new sites almost every month. Also, the number of users on these sites is increasingly drastically. Social media users today range anywhere from celebrities and professionals, to our peers, parents, grandparents and even our cousins still in grade school! To prove this point, Steven White researched how fast social media grew from 2006 to 2010. Click here to visit his Web site that can clue you in on how fast Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and Tumblr are growing with detailed graphs and charts. To identify the main facts, Facebook grew from 12,000,000 users in 2006 to 500,000,000 in 2010. That's crazy! Twitter started with 1,000 users in 2006 and gained up to 145,000,000 in 2010 (White).
From personal experience, I interned at Greater Cincinnati Water Works during the summer of 2009, and when I came back for the next summer, some of my duties and assignments totally changed from researching how to utilize social media to being in charge of our Facebook page, YouTube Channel and Twitter account. Having experience with social media has given me a leg up on other candidates as I search for jobs. I was able to land two social media spring internships, one for the Ada Area Chamber of Commerce and one for the Eisen Agency. During job interviews, the interviewers seem so interested in what social media is, how it can be effective for their company, and what I know and like about it. Social media alone is beginning to create full-time jobs for people, i.e. social media specialists. Crazyness. Social media is continuing to grow and I’m very interested to see how far it goes in the next year.