Half of our clients are in the recruiting and staffing world, and since my experience lies in headhunting, I've really been getting in touch with my recruiting roots in the last six months.  After a series of successful webinars introducing social media tools to staffing firm owners, I've decided to launch a series of webinars on specific methods of recruiting using individual tools.

Most advice on line consists of platitudes like, build a Facebook profile, or learn a Boolean search string, but my webinars are going to be live walkthroughs of recruiting using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIN, and blogs.  We're going to use actual screenshots and real job searches to demonstrate how recruiters should be attacking the social network space.

The first is May 21st, and it's open to everyone.  It's $89 and it will be run through Hireability.  It's simple.  My goals are 200 people for the conference, a pretty big number, and the only way it's going to happen is if my social media skills are up to the task.

Any help is appreciated - if I've given you some info or written something you've used, I'd truly appreciate it if you helped me pitch this webinar to your corporate recruiters.  If you're a Facebook user, you've been on the end of some bad pitches.  My job is to make recruiters Facebook-friendly.  And it just may get you ajob.

As always - links promoting my stuff are always met with links promoting yours (as long as you're not a spammer). 

I've been hearing lots of grumbles about Facebook on the Interweb.  What started as grumblings about privacy has since moved on to a general discontent with a site that is primarily used for social purposes.  Facebook is big now, second only to MySpace, but while it's still growing, it's need to change into a revenue bearing entity is affecting the user experience.

Some people are starting to take notice.

Is Facebook over?  Of course not.  But it definitely has reached its media peak, and the talk of Facebook becoming the application platform can now be safely laughed out of the room.  Expect growth to continue, but be wary of the numbers.  I'm on Facebook, and I use it purely as a benchmark.  There are a lot of people like me.  We are Legion.

Last year, I popped into the Best Buy to pick up an iDock for some condo music - Franki gave me a price and sent me in. I called her when I got there, and checked on the price in the store. She checked online, and found it was cheaper online. I went to the front desk, and negotiated a cheaper deal with what was shown on the online store.

To make it better, Franki found another store selling the iDock for the same price, but with a $24 iTunes card. I shared this with the manager, who looked it up, verified it, and promptly gave me A $25 iTunes card to go with my reduced-price iDock.

I felt pretty cool, but now that we have smart phones and the iPhone and web access with cheap data plans, the possibility of doing live shopping without the help of someone at home is really going to take off. In addition to shopping at retail stores, we can comparison shop with friends, setting location against location, and pitting both against online versions.

Automobile dealers often complain about customers that come in with calculators. Calculators mean they can't trick you with the complex payments, making negotiation easy for them, and hard for the person who doesn't do complex math in their head.

I've been preaching that social media is going to change the way we shop, interact, and buy. Most people don't go to the lengths that Franki and I do, but I imagine good times are coming when Mom turns to her six year old to text Dad the price of a new Honda Accord.

Jason Goldberg's new venure, Socialthing.com (which has nothing to do with Jason Goldberg), is launching in Beta, and I got invited to try out this new social media dashboard.  I'm taking it through the paces, but I did get two more invites to send out.  I've been on Twitter, under the moniker smheadhunter (it's for the social media headhunter blog), and have been learning how to use Twitter for recruiting.

Wanting to be a good social media type, I offered up the invitations to two of my followers, and the first responses came from two new bloggers -

Media Philosopher - this is the weblog of Marcel Le Brun, who runs the online monitoring company, Radian 6.  Online monitoring is a big passion of mine (though I wish I had more time and money to play with it), and this blog just got added to my RSS.

Speaking of which - if you want the definitive guide to online monitoring services, Nathan Gilliatt has it - He has the Guide To Social Media Analysis for sale, but he did spend six months researching it.

Hiring Technology:  Todd Nilson is a recruiter in Chicago, writing about, well, technology issues in recruiting.  His blog could use more entries, but that's okay because he's involved in other social media.