The article is written by Ross Kimbarovsky, the co-founder of crowdSPRING, a community of 43,000+ graphic designers that helps small businesses from around the world with graphic design needs. His article is published on Mashable.com.

Read the article here.

Have a great weekend.

When you’re thinking of hiring, you want several things: the best candidate, the least amount of time spent sifting through totally unqualified applicants and reasonable expense. How do you do that now?

I’m not going to get into the whole assessment process. This blog is about social media for business and that is the focus here. Let me talk about a couple of examples of using social media for hiring; one unique and one fairly mundane.

The news this morning reported that Sun Peaks, a ski resort near Kamloops, British Columbia, is launching a contest for a Twittering Snowbum (my terminology). They want someone who, over a period of three months, will attract some of the attention that Whistler is getting over to their resort. The job? The “snowbum” as they call him or her, is to ski, snowboard, engage in all the activities the resort has to offer and even test out its restaurants and then blog, tweet, facebook and youtube about it. Pay? As the resort puts it, they’ll be paid in snow dollars. They have a three month, all expenses paid vacation in exchange for their social media activities. If this excites your fantasies, you can visit the “I Want to Be the Snowbum” competition site.

Okay, that was the unique opportunity. Now, the less exciting but no less necessary. I friend of mine needs to hire a part-time research person for a business publication. My advice was, rather than advertise job postings on Craigslist, where, undoubtedly she’ll receive lots of exposure and lots of unqualified applicants, she should consider a job posting on LinkedIn. If you’re registered there (membership is free) you can post a job. You can also network with people about the job opportunity. The site is much more business oriented than Facebook or Craigslist. You may miss the outreach but you may also avoid the thundering hordes.

According to an article entitled, Build a Social Media Hiring Strategy, by Chris Penttila in Entrepreneur.com,

A June Jump Start Social Media survey of 100 hiring managers at small, mid-size and large companies found 75 percent go to LinkedIn to research job candidates before making a job offer, while 48 percent check out Facebook and 26 percent go to Twitter. When asked where they find talent for job openings, 66 percent said LinkedIn, 23 percent said Facebook and 16 percent said Twitter.

If you’ve had an experience using social media for recruiting and hiring, I’d love to hear from you.

Social media marketing requires slow steady effort

What does this have to do with social media and marketing? I expect you’ve already guessed. Social media marketing requires a slow steady effort to achieve results. You have to begin to schedule time for social media—time for reading and learning, time for adding to the discussions already underway and time for creating your own content. I would suggest a minimum of an hour a day, at least three days a week. More is better.

Success Stories via social media

A member of my new social group at Linkedin.com is asking other members to comment on their success with social media for marketing. The results vary from modest—getting better known, to amazing —booking over a 1000 people to a seminar in a couple of days. Of course, if you haven’t developed a network, then no one will be reading your material and those amazing results will not happen.

Sometimes social media success is quick

On the other hand, there can often be some pretty quick results. My ad class students and I set up a blog just two weeks ago, to showcase their work. Since that time we’ve had over a 1100 visitors to our blog. The students were challenged to get traffic to the site by using their usual channels of communication – email, text messaging, Facebook, Orkut, Cyworld (Korean site). In the days after the challenge, our visits increased dramatically, with a high of 222 visits the day after the challenge. It didn’t hurt that there were ten people out there talking about the blog and inviting people to visit.

Google purgatory: get out quick

An added bonus to social networking: google finds you! If you’ve built a garden-variety website and you are in google ‘purgatory’—yes, there really is such a place—you know about being invisible on the web. Well, our blog is already indexed on google. Yup, you can find us on google right now—only two weeks after we built the site.

30% say LinkedIn their most valuable network

A study  by Anderson Analytics reports that 30% of a 5000 person sample said that LinkedIn was their most valuable network.

The idea of an online professional networking site is not new. I was shown  a site by some German students at least four years ago called, Wer Kennt Wen? (translation: Who knows who?) I was amazed by the capabilities of the site and the seriousness with which is was used.

Here is a situation outside of cyberspace (Doesn’t that word seem dated these days?) You want to make a contact in a particular organization. You talk to some friends to see if they know anyone in that company. Perhaps they would be willing to make a recommendation. If they don’t know someone, perhaps they know someone who knows someone who they have enough of a connection to that they are able to give you a name and number to call.

We all know how much easier it is to get someone’s ear when we have a common colleague or acquaintance.

Setting up on LinkedIn.com

So, to set up a profile on LinkedIn, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to http://www.linkedin.com
2. Click on the Join Today link at the top right of the main page.
3. I suggest you immediately go over to the left hand column to Profile> Edit My Profile.
4. Editing your profile can be done over a number of visits but it would be wise to have something reasonably impressive before starting to search for contacts.
5. Your profile includes such things as: your work experience, you education, you current work, your websites and blogs, photos and so on. In addition, you can create a summary.
6. After completing your profile, you can look at connecting with people using the Contacts section.
7. You can also go to Groups and find and join groups or set up your own group. In a few minutes, I found a Chamber of Commerce group in my local area to join. Tomorrow, if approved for the group, I’ll let you know how it goes.

That’s only a start on LinkedIn but with about half an hour of time, you can being making some professional connections. Visit LinkedIn.com and take a look around.

Thanks for joining me here. Tomorrow I plan to look a bit further at LinkedIn and hopefully, to report on my new group.