Webinar Series for Business 03/21/13 1
Webinar Series for Business: Using the Power of Social Media to Attract Talented Workers with Disabilities
Event Date: March 21, 2013Presenter: Debra Ruh, Ruh GlobalFacilitator: Pam Williamson & Jill Houghton
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Pam Williamson: Well good afternoon everyone and welcome to using the power of social media to attract talented workers with disabilities. This is a part of the webinar series for business. My name is Pamela Williamson. And I will serving as the moderator for today's session. I'm the project director for the southeast ADA center. This is hosted by the Burton Blatt center southeast and the southeast TACE region 4. Before we get started today, I want to share some information with you and answer some of the most frequently asked questions about our webinar system. Today's webinar system is being conducted using the Blackboard Collaborate platform. We are unable to troubleshoot any individual technical issues during the session.
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Today's speaker is Debra Ruh. For more information about Debra, please feel free to visit our event page located on the website.
Today's webinar is going to highlight social media tools, trends and best practices. Debra will discuss ways to use social media to develop a tightly managed talent pool and keep ongoing communication with qualified candidates with disabilities.
Debra, let's turn it over to you.
Debra Ruh: Thank you so much. And thank you for inviting me to do this. I was with SSB Bart group. But at the end of the year, I went back out on my own and form add group called Ruh Group, which is focused on enterprise and strategy.
I want to thank Jill for invite me to do this as well. l what I'm going to do is talk about is social media today and obviously about ways that you can attract very talented workers with disabilities.
But I'm also going to talk about some of the tools, but some of the risks associated with doing this, as well. Because I guess like anything else, there's good and there's bad.
And Celestia has said that she would advance the slides with me. So what I'll be doing is I'll make sure that I call out the title of the slide and the slide number so that everybody can follow it. And they've already put a little link in here so that you can get the materials later.
I'm not going to cover every single thing that's in this presentation because it's got a lot of content.
The reason why I developed it this way was so it could be a tool to be used later because there's a lot of information. Some of the information I'll gloss over because it will be more helpful for you to later onto review it.
So I started Ruh Global. Well back up a second. I created Tech Access in 2001. And Tech Access was a technology firm that focused on assuring the internet and communication technology was accessible to everybody. And many of my employees, over 80% were people with disabilities. I merged it was Bart group. I have that entrepreneurial blood in my bloodstream. I came back out on my own and created the strategic marketing firm in 2012, officially starting it in January 1st. But I was doing some stuff for my clients.
So that's it. I also am very proud to be a mother of two grown children. And my oldest daughter Sarah who is 25 has Down's Syndrome. And today is Down's Syndrome Day. So she's been a real blessing in our lives. And a big motivator for the work that I do.
So I'm going to go ahead and move to slide number 5. And here is a lovely picture. If you are looking at the screen or can see the screen of my daughter after a little play that she did. She's in a theater troupe in Richmond, Virginia for adults with disabilities. She just finished her play, so we were hugging on that.
So we'll go ahead and go to slide number six.
So on this slide we talk about consider this. Somebody is very likely tweeting about this. And I will be tweeting about this and you know blogging about this later.
I realize when I gave this presentation at the USBLN conference, I really should have updated that slide. At the USBLN conference, we were encouraging people to tweet and chatter about the conference because it was such an amazing conference.
We created a hash tag USBLN2012. And we'll talk about that as we proceed in the presentation.
We wanted everybody to have a place where they could sort of meet up on Twitter and on other social media forums.
So we probably are not tweeting right now under the hash sign USBLN2012. But there is definitely chatter going on right now about the webinar.
So we'll move to the next slide.
This is slide 7. What is social media?
Social media, some people refer to it as web 2.0. It's a category of sites and user generated information. People sharing information with each other. Telling you what they think and going back and forth. There are thousands and thousands of these sites. Some of the most common ones are Linkedin, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google + are some of the examples.
It's interesting as you watch these different social media tools emerge and some takes on lives as their own like Pinterest. It's so popular it's getting more activity than some of the better known tools, which is fascinating.
On slide eight, we're talking about understanding the terms. Social media or emerging media. Some people call it "new media." All the same thing.
Using telecommunications. So the internet, the communications aspect of it. So that we can interact with each other in an on line format. We can share words, pictures, video, audio. It's using all these different mediums so we can chatter with each other. And chatter is a very common term. Nfl it always begins with a virtual representation of a user. And that can be actually the picture of the user or sometimes people select different cartoon characters or they put pictures of their kids or their dog or their chickens or whatever.
You get to decide what is going to be your personal representation.
The personal connections are really allowing group to come together and people who share the same values or the same interests all come together to spread and gather information and to talk about information as well.
So we're going to move to the next slide.
This is slide nine. And the title is social media ten years old and growing.
It's sort of amazing to think that social media is only 10 years old. It seems like we've had it forever, especially if you're a social media nerd like me and you just love it.
I love that I have the ability to share so much information with people from all over the world. I got a Twitter, a tweet last night from a woman in New Zealand who took a survey that I'm doing on travelers with disabilities.
She said oh I didn't know about your work. I would love to get newsletter and be connected with you on social media and I'm doing it here in New Zealand. It's amazing to talk with you about the people who share the same interest with you. But she's not my next door neighborhood in Virginia.
The numbers on social media are staggering. Facebook had over a billion users by the end of 2012.
Youtube, there were 2 billion videos that were being watched every day. Twitter had 400 million users as of September, 2012. Linkedin 100 + million users. Mostly these are business related and professional interests.
Pinterest, one of my favorites. As of February 2012. This is updated tremendously. There was 10.4 million users, mostly women. About 60% of them were women. And we'll talk about that a little bit more as well.
But Pinterest is being used more for business and having some interesting results.
Next slide.
So one thing that I did. This is slide ten. Social media terms. And one thing that I did is I was preparing I've spoken about social media several times at the USBLN different events. I would have people asking me questions about things that I was just glossing over.
We use all these terms. And then people would and, "What's PWD"? There were terms people weren't familiar with.
On the next few slides I talk about the most common terms. Most of the definitions I took from Wikipedia.
The first one was blog. To me, it's like an article. Somebody has written out some information that could be about anything.
And people are using blogs now sometimes instead of doing a press release, they'll do a blog and write something.
It's just information usually at least several paragraphs. And then there's a lot of different ways that you can post blogs.
So next slide.
As we move to the next slide, it's also interesting that books have been written from blogs. There are different blogs that people will start blogging about. Something in their lives or something they care about.
And it will wind up getting a lot of following and the person will take this blog sometimes and turn them into books or actually television shows.
There was one about Julia Childs. The woman that every single day she cooked a different recipe in Julia Childs cookbook. She started off blogging about it. And then turned it into a book and then into a movie.
When we're talking about a blogger, that is somebody who is writing a blog. Typically writing a blog frequently. It doesn't have to be every day. But they've done it more than once.
They're doing it frequently. And there are all kinds of free tools out there that you can use like Blogger or Tumbler or Blogspot. There's a whole lot of different ones.
This is social media terms blogger, page 11. So next slide?
This is slide 12. And this is social media terms for friends.
So when you're talking about "friends" as far as social media goes, these are people who are connected with you. Facebook for example uses friends. But a lot of other mediums do as well. A friend is somebody who is connected with you. It might be somebody who you have never met before.
I have a huge following on all these platforms. About 16,000 people. I haven't met every single one of these people. But I do consider them my social media friends.
Next slide?
This is slide 13. And it's social media terms.
A hashtag. A hashtag is something that is put in front of a word that so that the search engines can find that information. So if you put for example a hashtag or a pound sign in front of "disability" or a hashtag in front of USBLN2012, it allows people who are searching on those words to find your information.
So instead of just having access to the followers, the people or my friends who are following me, if I put in hashtag disability or hashtag USBLN2012, anybody who is tracking that. And there are a lot of different ways you can track specific words, if you are tracking that, even if you are not connected with me, you're going to get my posts. It's a way to get a much broader audience to get your message.
You also see "@" signs being used. That's for proper names. I'm @ debraruh. So if you want an organize or a person to be noted or this person to know that you're chattering about them, as a courtesy, you put in the @ Debraruh, and whoever owns that account will get notified.
And as far as a "like,," "like" is really big with Facebook. When Facebook came up with the "like" it thrust them out there as a premium social media site.
It allowed people to "like" something like a comment. When you say "like," anybody who is following that person has access to that information. In some ways it does the same thing as a hashtag. When anybody puts a hashtag or a like out there, it broadens the number of people who are going to be able to see that information, which is really important in social media.
Next page.
So on page 14, we continue to talk about social media terms. When we talk about platform, we're just talking about a platform is sort of the system that you're using. So Facebook is a platform for example.
A post is something that you posted. For example, if you did a tweet. If you post something on Twitter, it's called a tweet.
If you post something out on Facebook it's called post it just means that you're putting data out on social media. So you're posting it.
Retweet is something has seen your post or your Twitter out on Twitter. I'm confusing my mouth. And somebody is retweeting it.
Sharing is sort of the same thing as retweet, except that it's broader and you can share on a variety of different platforms. You can share on Twitter by retweeting. So sharing is just sharing your data.
Next slide.
Social media networking sites are places where people come together and they share information and they tag different things and they put out all the videos. And there's a lot of different social networking sites.
Some of them, Facebook, and Pinterest are considered social networking sites.
And tags, what we talked about hashtagging, they're key words that attract people to your content.
Next slide. On slide 16, social media terms. This is the last term page. Trend or trending is something when there is a lot of different people are chattering or tweeting about the same topic.
The other day I noticed when I went out on social media that Sarah Palin was trending. And I was curious why. Because we're not in the middle of an election.
She was trending because she had spoken at a political event and she had a big gulp drink and she was drinking it sort of to make fun of the New York Bloomburg mayor about his policy on trying to help us be less obese. That is what we were trying to do at the USBLN2012, too. We wanted people chattering about employing people with disabilities and we wanted that to trend.
If enough people are out there tweeting about the same information, it will start trending, and there a lot of people who track the trends. And the URL is referring to a web page.
Ruhglobal is the address of my home page. And a lot of times we will embed that into the chatter or the tweet or the post, which in a lot of ways are the same thing.
Next slide.
I just saw that they tweeted about the spotlight on Deb Dagget, a board member of the USBLN. This stuff happens instantaneously. This slide, slide 17, is the future.
Despite there being opportunities and obstacles, people with disabilities are extremely involved in this information. In this information sharing and in social media.
But there are some concerns because a lot if efforts are not made by the users to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in social media.
For example, they don't take time that Youtube that you post out there is captioned or transcribed, then people with disabilities are being left out.
So there's a lot of, there's a growing awareness. But there's still quite a bit of barriers for people with disabilities. And yet, people with disabilities are definitely on social media and finding their voice.
Next slide.
So slide 18 says here comes the big boom. And it says this is clearly not your father's Oldsmobile. If you know what I mean by that statement, you're probably like me, a baby boomer. More than 60% of Baby Boomers are on social media and it's growing. There are 76 million Baby Boomers, and it's a very social bunch. The expectation of the Baby Boomers is they're going to remain involved and plugged in.
I say that because also at the same time Baby Boomers are starting to experience disabilities. And there are estimates that 46% people of people over the age of 65 will acquire a disability.
It's impacting disability and social media tremendously.
next slide.
Yesterday I was looking at a study that just came about out about Baby Boomers. And the different market and who the employees are going to be in the labor pool.
It's predicted that the baby boomers will work as late as their 80s. Some can't afford to retire. Some because they don't want to retire, or a combination of it.
And the report I was reading was it was sort of scary because the work force showed like 60. I forget the exact numbers. But it was like 2% of the work force was going to be from 18 to 35. And I thought wow.