Social media fuels the face-to-face fire. Feel the burn.

If you could have 5 leads or 500, which would you choose?

Duh, right?

Now, what if you could have 5 qualified prospects versus 500 cold unqualified leads, which would you choose?

Or for that matter, 5 qualified influencers in your court versus 500 cold leads?

Rita Jackson and I spent that last two days at the Onrec/Kennedy Expo, and if I've gotten anything through my thick skull this year, relationship building is the sum total of all marketing and sales growth. Not sourcing applicants from a job board or sending an email campaign to thousands of people. Part of the equation but not the sum total.

Social media fuels the face-to-face fire. Feel the burn.

That burn is growth. The relationships we take the time to build online via social media (marketing) foster real-time gatherings in coffee shops, on golf courses, at HR Happy Hours, at Fail Spectacularly's, at dinners, at conferences and expos, in airports, in trains stations, at bus stops - you name the physical and we're there.

Think about what that does to drive business across the local and global economies. Interesting related related research that @danschawbel tweeted about this about how social media encourages community interaction, not social isolation.

Get out and build. Onrec was the perfect intimate setting to do that. We exhibited as HRVendors.com and had many quality conversations with recruiters and suppliers.

I'll highlight my highlights in below, but first:

Social media fuels the face-to-face fire. Feel the burn.

So many parallels between recruiting, marketing and sales. Get out and build and woo.

Yes, I said woo.

During Don Ramer's fabulous presentation based on Arbita's The Recruitment Genome Project, he said that the word recruit comes from the French word for "to woo".

And besides saying woo, I also tweeted that Don was rad, something I haven't said for two decades.

Get out and build and woo. Eric Winegardner (@ewmonster) from Monster sought out specific influencers at the show to talk about the cool new things Monster is doing (more on that in a future post).

The bees knees of the Expo was the launch of Tweetajob. Carmen Hudson's (@peopleshark) leverage of social media and networking really shined a light on this cool new company (more on that in a future post as well).

The world of marketing and recruiting has changed dramatically, but most of us haven't changed with it. The kids who grew up "connected" online are turning the tables on everything under the sun and so many marketers and recruiters still don't get it.

Afraid to connect. Afraid to get out and build and woo.

Social media fuels the face-to-face fire. Feel the burn.

Here are some other highlights and comments as I tweeted them during the sessions I sat in on:

• Steve Lowisz from Qualigence says stop the recruiting insanity. Challenges remain the same, even though tools have changed.
• Recruiting is about people. Recruitment mediums are only enablers.
• HR/recruiting suppliers make your email marketing campaigns mobile friendly with readable text versions.
• In 2008 over 90K employment discrimination complaints, 290 lawsuits and $102 mil paid out from employers. Average pay out- $250K (from InterviewStudio's Colleen Alyward).
• Sitting in the applicant video session. Social media to source, but don't be a hater discriminater when hiring.
• Positive "interruption marketing" strategies in recruitng parallel content marketing in product/service sales (via Peter Weddle's presentation)
• Recruitment entering the era of the strategist and the specialist.
• "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Proverbs 29:18 (via rad Don Ramer)
• Arbita's Genome Project - the recruitment industry transition is upon us. "None of us is more important than all of us."
• We rely on next best "silver bullet" instead of leveraging it in HR, recruiting, marketing. Add a werewolf to your gun rack.

Get out, build and woo your prospects and influencers. Get to them and let them get to know you.

These are the relationships that create community, grow business and retain it. (Just like recruiting.)

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now joinHRmarketer on Twitter!)