Social Media has become the new buzzword in recruiting, along with Web 2.0. What do these terms mean, what do they incorporate, and how can any of this help you in your recruiting efforts?According to Wikipedia, social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

(See Attachment A: Darren Barefoot created this starfish based on a video where Robert Scoble explained it. http://conniebensen.com/blog/2007/11/03/scobles-social-media-starfish/ ).

In other words, social media incorporates social networks, blogs, podcasting, user generated videos, chats and mobile media, to name a few.

What’s the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

The term Web 1.0 actually came out after the introduction of Web 2.0 and includes the time span 1994-2004 which featured the development of the World Wide Web.

Information and career sites that were launched during that time all had static verbiage. There was not any interaction between individuals. (If you recall, many of us actually used dial-up during those years.)

In 2004, the term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference.

According to Tim O’Reilly:
“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Web 2.0 is sharing information and collaborating on the Net. Attachment B demonstrates different media, services and software used in order to enhance interaction between two individuals on the Internet (A Tag cloud constructed by Markus Angermeier presenting some of the themes of Web 2.0.).

In upcoming posts we will talk about some of these tools and how you can utilize them to attract your hard-to-fill health care candidates.

In the next posting, we will first look at Social Networking sites, particularly because there is so much hype over these sites and so much discussion about them these days.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 8:10 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.