Organization: M.E.R. (McDaniel Executive Recruiters); JustCareers.com

Background: M.E.R. provides recruitment services for a variety of companies at the management level, for professional services, and for the outsourcing industry.

Business Need: To integrate the recruiting industry’s fragmented social media presence into a single entity.

Social Media Solution: Create and develop a LinkedIn networking group dedicated to call center professionals.

Business Result: As of 2009, the LinkedIn group has over 17,000 members and is well known throughout the industry.

What actually happened: The recruiting industry is a large and diverse set of industry professionals whose main focus is to recruit talent and place these professionals in an appropriate company. In order to do this effectively, recruiting companies must ensure that their clients (the hiring company) are satisfied with the placements; customer satisfaction is evaluated using several different channels (i.e., email, web, phone, social media response, etc.).

The industry itself is a very active group with a dynamic need to communicate frequently for answers and solutions. Thus, the “networking” nature of this industry demands active management in regard to customer relationships.

In the past, call center professionals have also used blogs, websites and other social media tools to connect, network and manage their customers and handle related customer service issues. However, many of these tools were often fragmented, scattered and ineffective. It was decided that LinkedIn, a powerful networking website, would be the ideal platform for unifying McDaniel Executive Recruiting with its customer base. During this time, LinkedIn was not host to a dynamically large “Call Center Professionals” group that would bring people together in a new dramatic way.

By recognizing this void, in 2008 M.E.R. created a call center networking group on LinkedIn. Since its establishment has not only become the largest group of this type on LinkedIn for call center professionals (http://bit.ly/abvMGS), but more importantly, has enabled a large community of call center professionals to interact, socialize and help one another solve common business problems, bringing the community closer together through discussions about various customer response strategies. Today, this group has over 17,000 members and is well known throughout the industry.

“I believe our +10-year history of building and developing a ‘global community’ of CRM/BPO talent has positioned M.E.R. to recognize the power of social networking tools,” says Chad McDaniel, President of M.E.R.

“Social media has made reaching out to this community much more efficient. Moreover, we’ve also been able to offer a “return” for those involved by answering their questions, and inquiries with a relatively instant response and sharing of information.”