Would you have thought for a moment that you could use an integrated social media strategy to promote local food? It is possible and the Taste of Huron (TOH) program is doing just that. Taste of Huron is a program that has been around for over 10 years. It has encountered it’s up and downs over the years, but not because of lack of interest. It is more about lack of funding and lack staff resources to dedicate to program development and administration. The program started out being managed by Huron Tourism Association (HTA) and Huron County Economic Development. Over the years the program has made some remarkable gains in the marketplace. The lack of resources and the closure of the Huron Tourism Association could have been the death of the program, but thankfully with the insight of the Huron Community Futures Development Corporation (CFDC) and the final board of HTA, the Taste of Huron program was not to fall through the cracks and be forgotten. “It’s not surprising that Community Futures Huron continues to invest in our local food system. It’s one of the fastest growing components of the Huron County economy, with great prospects for business and job growth”. – Paul Nichol General Manager Community Futures Huron Taste Of Huron was resurrected in 2017 through government grants and the sheer desire to make the program work. You might ask yourself why not let it end with a painless death; the simple truth is there is too much to lose. Huron County is one of the most agricultural productive counties in Ontario.  The work that has been done in the past has proven that with the proper social media tactics and a strong, event-driven, marketing plan, the brand can prosper and grow.

Nestled in Waterloo’s tech park, surrounded by beautiful nature lies one of Canada’s biggest software companies – opentext. It  started with three University students in 1991 – and has now transformed into a multibillion $ corporation with offices worldwide. It is no surprise that opentext, a company driven by commitment to technological innovations, jumped on the social media train right after the invention of Facebook in 2004. And with the growing access to WIFI and social networking services, the social media landscape of opentext just became broader. A massive website, accounts with Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest – you name it, the company surely has a presence. None of those accounts created millions of followers, but considering that the social media approach is specifically about enterprise information and content management, opentext is doing quite well to get their message out. When the company discovered the power of social media for promoting their services and products to the world, it didn’t take long to find out that it can also be used to motivate and engage employees. With the goal to make it as easy as possible to connect with team members, who potentially work in three different countries across the globe and need to solve problems quickly, even when one just started his day when it’s almost bedtime for the other, opentext encouraged employees to use traditional social media outlets before implementing internal equivalents.   While opentext’s social media team conveys the company’s messages to external audiences, the corporate employee communicators look after the internal audience. This includes writing emails to announce company news, employee stories and the management of the company’s Intranet, internal blogs and of course, social media channels.

Is it really necessary in 2018 to teach your staff and colleagues to be more socially engaged in social media? The quick answer is yes it is necessary, but it can also be risky at times. Social media is one of the strongest most powerful tools we have at our fingertips. It is the way that we now do business. 20 years ago it was mostly being used as an internal tool and many didn’t dream that it would become a part of everyday life for business in general.

Data collection and artificial intelligence can be very disconcerting to social media users. Regardless of how consumers feel about the common availability of their personal information, it is often unavoidable when one chooses to participate in online activity. There are many well-know negative impacts of the publication of personal information; however, there is an almost endless list of positives available to consumers when their information is made available to technology. Google’s ability to reroute drivers proactively in the case of an upcoming incident helps drivers get from A to B as quickly as possible. how does it work? It relies on Google’s ability to monitor the location, speed, and direction of travel of almost all drivers, anywhere in North America, by tracking drivers’ cell phones in a passive, undetectable manor. This is a great example of how personal information being made public, and it’s combination with powerful artificial intelligence software networks, can provide major benefits to those who can tolerate the risk.

Graduate business school recruiting is a high-stakes game, considering students may easily pay $100,000+ for an executive MBA program. And with 6,000 business programs around the world vying for top candidates, higher ed marketers need every advantage to reach prospects. Until fairly recently, marketers have concentrated on email campaigns to generate leads among known prospects – a hit-and-miss strategy since many prospects either don’t share their email address or don’t open the messages they receive. Social media has provided business schools with new ways to reach potential candidates. According to GMAC’s 2016 mba.com Prospective Students Survey Report, 96% of prospective students use social media and 67% use it to learn about graduate education opportunities. LinkedIn is proving to be marketers’ digital platform of choice for reaching high-quality candidates. With its emphasis on professional connections and career advancement, it’s a natural gathering place for those who might be most interested in prestigious business programs. In addition, a recent study showed that for half of the respondents “friends, family and peers were most influential when considering further education — second only to the institution’s website. And professional networks were twice as influential as personal social networks.” And as candidates look to their LinkedIn connections for guidance, marketers are able to engage prospective students through relevant content and gradually encourage them to move through the enrolment funnel.

Any organization, despite the industry, is tracking metrics day in and day out. These metrics play a significant role in the organizations overall performance, and every organization tracks and monitor some type of performance metric, these areas could include: sales, finance, social media, marketing, lead generation, consumer data, and the list goes on. These metrics are vital for the organization to improve in those areas and their overall performance and can also be used to increase customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue and employee performance. Without metrics, these organizations would be left without key consumer data, have a challenging time marketing their products or services, understanding their consumers, tracking sales and revenue, and their research and development would slow down tremendously. Metrics support and improve the overall performance of organizations, that is why Metroland Media remains one of the media industry leaders in Canada, due to their strong metric management.

When we think of social media, we often envision the curved necks, hunched shoulders and bent elbows of mobile phone users. These active, engaged audiences are liking, following, tweeting, and pinning their way through the day with ease. Social media provides incredible opportunities to create engaged communities. And companies are increasingly considering how to leverage these technologies to strengthen, widen and deepen their reach among a key stakeholder group: their own employees. Would it be possible for employees to feel as engaged using social media at their place of work as they do on their mobile devices during leisure time? If so, how can companies develop a robust, successful employee involvement strategy around social media; the kind of strategy that could be a game-changer when it comes to reaching the highest heights of internal collaboration and external recruitment? Exchange Solutions, a software solutions company  in Massachusetts and Toronto, has discovered some novel ways to promote the use of social media and technology tools to improve talent attraction, and increase collaboration across their organization.

Nowadays, social media is part of our daily life. People want to share their everyday experiences with others: they study and work in different cities, they fall in love and relocate to different countries, traveling becomes the normality for leisure and for business, a quiet month in your hometown is an exception. Social media allows us to stay connected with our families and friends; it allows to share our experiences, no matter where we are. Social media also serves as a platform for new opportunities. Businesses advertise new positions and promote their products, employees of the companies re-post and share information with their peers. The best insights for the business of an organization are gained from the inside of that very same organization. Many companies understand this and try to use social media to tap this potential. For global companies with different offices around the world, social media is also an opportunity to connect and engage with current employees. Booking.com is one such international company that uses public Social Media in different ways: it (1) engages with current and future employees by posting the latest news about the company, (2) promotes new positions, (3) engages current employees to share their experiences about the roles, the cities they live and work in, and their experience of relocating to a different country or a new city for a new position, (4) share their passion for traveling.

Accor Hotels  is a world leader in hotel management, with more than 3500 hotels in the world, their well-known brands include Sofitel, Fairmont, Novotel, Ibis Hotel, Pullman, and more. When it comes to customer engagement, Accor is strongly committed to providing individualized, memorable customer experiences that fully integrate the use of social media to engage the customer. Accor understands that through heightened customer engagement comes heighted customer loyalty and ultimately, heightened corporate revenues.  Accor is continuously looking for innovative ways to further engage their customers in order to provide the  ultimate customer experience that will have them returning again and again. Given the ever increasing competition for customer attention, Accor has embraced social media and has become a global leader in digital presence focusing on multi device engagement with emphasis towards the management of its on-line reputation.      

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most disruptive professional network with over 467 million members in over 200 countries and territories. When I tell people I work at LinkedIn, one of the most popular questions I receive is whether our environment is like Google… then I get asked whether we’re hiring. (The answer to both questions, I would say, is yes.) We are a dynamic company that is fiercely proud of our culture. One of the easiest ways for us to show who we are – beyond the company that sends out connection requests – is by using our hashtag #linkedinlife. Created in early 2015, #linkedinlife has moved beyond LinkedIn into other social platforms, and is being used by employees all over the world to demonstrate the breadth of our culture and our humanity beyond the work we do.    

In our age of digital marketing where there are so many social media options to choose from, one community library is finding success through their development and use of videos.  In addition to using Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, the Pickering Public Library is including short, in-house created videos in their Facebook Page, YouTube channel and website to communicate upcoming events, new programs and services, fun facts and promote client engagement.  These videos have become quite popular in their community and beyond. Donna Moritz of Social Media Examiner attributes the rise in popularity of short video social media content to how “snackable” they are, as a quick visual method that grabs our attention, “Short videos suit our busy lives, brief attention spans and the need to consume content easily and quickly. Because fans are consuming content via their mobile devices while they’re on the go, the shorter the content is, the better.”  

Even if you’re not in the market to buy or sell a home, you’ve likely had your eye caught by a realtor’s face on a bench sign, bus stop ad or other billboard-type promotion.  It has been a successful exposure-gaining method used for decades by people in the real estate industry, one that has often been a strong step to gaining contacts for potential deals.  But did you know that according to Realtor Social Marketing, 90% of home buyers begin their search online? Nicole Bafaro, Sales Representative with Sutton Group Heritage Realty in Ontario’s Durham Region, has successfully built her real estate career by venturing beyond the goal of simply making contacts; she is building and strengthening relationships through online client engagement within her community through her use of social media.

DB Schenker supports industry and trade in the global exchange of goods: in land transport, worldwide air and ocean freight, contract logistics and supply chain management.1 Globally they employ over 66,000 employees at over 2000 locations.  Their Canadian operations account for over 1600 employees at over 40 locations.  Roughly 3 years ago, DB Schenker started to utilize social media as part of their marketing strategy.  

  Social Media screening of candidates has become common practice in today’s fast passed recruiting process. Is it ethical, or does this behavior infringe on ones freedom of speech, and how efficient is it really?