Take a look at how this restaurant is using Foursquare to create a social media-driven event to create sales.

It might seem small fry in terms of numbers, but these kinds of activities can create an influential online buzz and there seems to be something building through using these types of location-based sites/tools.

Nielsen has just produced a report looking into advertising on Facebook, and makes the distinction between paid- for media and earned media. The report argues that a combination of the two is most effective.

Earned media refers to the more natural online community sharing of content. It’s a bit like a classic combination of PR supporting advertising. Only that traditional PR techniques don’t really apply to the world of social media. It’s more a case of giving your audiences genuinely relevant information they are very interested in and likely to share. Rather than bombarding them with news you think they should be interested in!

Microsoft has just launched a social media platform for politicians called TownHall.

Will they use it? It took MPs ages to embrace TV for debates…We’ll see.

Personnel Today’s website has been running a series of articles on HR and social media by Jon Ingham, a former HR director at Ernst & Young. In the latest piece, Ingham flags up the opportunities for HR managers to use social media or Web 2.0 in recruitment and training, in the process more or less remoulding their whole approach to people management.

It’s not just about using a site like LinkedIn as a giant jobs board for accessing potential recruits – although that’s certainly a starting point. It’s about exploiting its social nature to increase effectiveness. As well as trying to fill seats in the short term a savvy organisation will be developing long-term relationships with potential candidates – ‘head farming’ as opposed to ‘head hunting’ – so that it has a pool of people it can tap when the need arises. As an example he cites Goldman Sachs, which globally invests over 100,000 hours each year in conversations with prospective employees.

Creating a community on LinkedIn, Facebook or the company’s own social network is an ideal way to do this, Ingham suggests.   This ‘social recruiting’ can also be used to socialise the workplace, creating better connections, relationships and conversations through the recruitment process.

See the full article here.