HR Bloggers news

HRM Today - a group blogging site and the HR Bloggers social network has tied-up together to "discover managerial competencies that are synergistically aligned for value creation of both the entities"

Heh.

Not really. They didn't say that.

What Lance did say was:

In a deal scratched over a couple hours of e-mailing (including a quip about someone’s grandma), I am pleased to announce a sponsorship deal with Laurie Ruettimann’s HR Bloggers group (www.hrbloggers.com).

Interesting thing surely.

We shall be keeping an eye on where this deadly dream team leads to :-)

On other interesting blogs, here's a short lived blog, Recruiter Ramblings, by an Indian recruiter called HR Novice. I wish it was continued.

And then there's the blog I discovered today called the Human Capital Vendor Space authored by J William Tincup. Interesting reviews of the vendor offerings. How many of such vendors are operating in India, I wonder?

Vendor wonder bender.

Sorry, Tuesday Blues.

India Business Feed network on Feedburner

Hey, I've joined this cool experiment that Palin started called the India Business Feed.

The objective is to a) provide the readers the best of business bloggers in India in one master feed, and b) help encourage and support business blogging in India. Readers can subscribe to the feed or subscribe to the latest updates on email (check the Daily Network Digest on sidebar of the Network page). On this note, we would appreciate if the member bloggers can use the network badge or BuzzBoost to help highlight posts of fellow bloggers on their blogs.

Membership is through invitation only, though you can email editor@indiaprblog.com with your blog details for consideration.

If you are someone looking at advertising across the Indian Business Blogger network here is where you should sign up:

Alan Weiss on Consulting and Social Media

Dr. Alan Weiss is of the opinion that blogs are of not much use if you are trying to leverage them to build a consulting brand.

Here are some of the interesting observations:

1. Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand. People come here, or go read Seth Godin, or Marshall Goldsmith, or Jeffrey Gitomer, or David Meister, because we’re all well known in our areas of expertise. That is, a blog follows a brand, not the other way around. You can’t create a brand just with a blog, unless you’re ridiculously lucky, and business can’t be based on luck.
3. You can use up all your time following blogs. Buyers of consulting services don’t visit blogs as a rule, and certainly not to make buying decisions. They may visit a blog AFTER they have a relationship with the consultant, which just proves my point.
4. Twitter is pretty nonsensical. Watching someone wash their hair or walk to their car is irrelevant to marketing consulting services. It is idiosyncratic. I think it’s fine if people want to do this as a hobby, but for solo practitioners and entrepreneurs, it can drain your life away. It is to marketing what text messaging is to writing a novel.
5. YouTube I find useful in that you can access some outstanding resources there, such as the lectures given at TED. But you also find all the schlock in the universe, and there must be a law that, to post comments, you have to have flunked both basic English and civility in primary school, because the proportion of dolts and louts who post things is frightening. It’s like being at a hockey game, but you can’t get a hot dog.
6. Facebook, linked-in, and all the rest of the social crawl space is fine for trying to get a full time job, or finding out who’s divorced, or sharing your latest hairstyle, or flirting. I abhor the linked-in automated messages about “good friends” who have asked me to join their network whom I can’t even recall, and I find it reprehensible to dump your entire contact list into this morass and annoy everyone who’s ever written you an email or sent you an overdue notice. I find linked-in to be the worst kind of spam.

Provocative? Maybe.

Dr Weiss does make some points. Don't make blogs/social media the "only" source for building your consulting brand. Speak at seminars. Network at industry events. Write for journals. Maybe, even publish a book.

Unless you wish you consult only about social media.

I'm kind of ambivalent about his observation that business can't be based on luck. Innovative business, alas is about a lot of luck. How do you ensure that you beat the chance factor. You increase your variety and spread. That's one of the rules of 11 1/2 weird rules of Innovation according to Dr. Bob Sutton. And sometimes you count on luck, to explore:

When you know that you need to head in a new direction, but you don't know which road to take, sometimes the best thing is to do whatever is most ridiculous or random. Thinking up the dumbest and most impractical things that you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. When you get people talking about products, services, and business practices that they believe are misguided, dumb, or even destructive, it can help bring the beliefs of the group into broad relief and crystallize what the company should be doing.

So if Alan does not believe that blogging can help in bringing in consulting business, why the blog after all? The About page does not give any reasons why.

Maybe he just doesn't want to be left behind by other consultants who are blogging. Like, Tom Peters.

Here a Ning, There a Ning

More and more Ning networks are sprouting up! After the Linking Power Forum, RecruitingBlogs and HR Professionals networks, here's a new one - for HR Bloggers.

You might have heard of Forrester's report on Social Technographics, where in an online community 13% are creators, 19% are critics etc. More here. So what would happen if all creators and critics form a community?

HR Bloggers might be an interesting experiment to see if over communicators like bloggers also fall back into the same ratios and some take the lead and others are content to be joiners and spectators and inactives. I think we will. Let's see how it pans out.

On other news, since I complete six years of blogging tomorrow, here are some interesting reponses I got from my Twitter friends. Shel Israel (who literally wrote the book on Business Blogging) sent me this message:
The other message was by a person who works in a pay-for-performance digital advertising firm, who let me know this:


Heh. I never thought that I would become a pin-up boy for social media :D

On my other blog you would find my book reviews of Yogesh Chabria's book "Invest the Happionaire Way" as well as JAM's Rashmi Bansal's edited book "Engineering Admissions" (I consider it India's first social media created book ;-)

By the way, have you checked out the blogs I follow? They have some great content all the time !

Business Blogs
HR Blogs
Recruiting related Blogs

How IBM uses Social Media

Interesting article in Businessweek

Social networks in the corporate world involve very different dynamics, and scientists at IBM Research's Collaborative User Div. in Cambridge, Mass., are learning all about them. Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. "We're trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business," says Irene Greif, an IBM Fellow who heads up Collaborative User Experience.

So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.

Why would Big Blue want to promote such behavior inside the company?

A couple of reasons. First, in a global company with nearly 400,000 employees, most people are too far away to plop down in a teammate's cubicle or grab a cup of coffee. These social tools, IBM hopes, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams. "People are putting up pictures of their family, the same way they'd put them up in the cubicle," says Joan DiMicco, one of the research scientists.

Adapting these tools, according to IBM, is also important for recruiting. Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard '90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.

Isn't that cool? IBM is really keen on discovering whether knowledge access is faster via social media than traditional KM efforts. In fact one of my online buddies, Luis Suarez, is a community builder in IBM. Check his presentation that he made to Next08 on More Collaboration through less email. On a related note, on my post on HR and web 2.0 someone else from IBM left a comment:

Gautam, Excellent thoughts. We at IBM have done a good amount of work to address the need to manage, innovation, the changing workforce, the globally integrated enterprise, matrixed organizations of work through social networking and other tools.

ROI of Blogging and Twitter

I'm going to share some stuff without going into details. You heard about how blogging can be a source for business? I don't mean stuff like professional blogging, stuff that people like Amit do. To solely live off advertising via the blog would mean I increase my readership 10x. Erm, isn't going to happen in a hurry.

So what is the ROI of blogging and Twitter that I am talking about?

Am going to share with you two instances that happened in the recent past:

Sometime in Feb I got an email from a person whom I had never contacted me. He introduced himself as the head of Talent Development of a manufacturing concern in India and said that he had read my posts and wanted to explore if my firm could help in their competency development efforts. I said sure, and over the next couple of months we communicated via email and phone with the firm's Talent Development team and we have the deal now. We're going to help them in implementing competency development interventions over this year for a significant part of their leadership and management levels.

Oh, and did I tell you that we've never interacted face to face?

The business came in purely because of this blog.

Story No. 2

There's a blogger I've interacted with earlier via both our blogs. Recently when we both started Twittering (find it much easier than saying "micro-blogging") he twittered that he had got an internal transfer into the HR group of his firm and was having trouble with thinking through a HR intervention.

I twittered that if he could pay me enough I could help him with him. I was only half-joking.

He messaged me directly on Twitter that I could call him and his boss on a certain day. The conversation started, we sent a sort of proposal. Then we didn't hear something for a couple of weeks and he messaged me that they were busy with something else.

So a couple of months passed and last week he Twittered me again. Could we restart the conversation, he asked?

So the story hasn't yet ended and yet both these examples offer a glimpse into what could be a ROI for using blogging and Twitter for business purposes.

Yes there are caveats.

One: Both you and your prospective client would need to be on that social media platform.

That is why, as a prospective rainmaker, I need to be visible across various social media. So, I take care to have a profile every imaginable place. From blogging here, to having pages on Google Pages, the newly launched Google Sites, to trying out Linkedin ( I was amongst the first 20,000 people to sign on), having a profile on Orkut, a page on Facebook (Go ahead, check it out, and become a fan if you want to), Twittering, starting a community on MyBlogLog and now linking my lifestreams on FriendFeed. I also follow tonnes of Business, HR and Recruiting related blogs.

Oh, and did I forget to mention, that building networks virtually is something I have been doing from a long time? From HR and KM related groups to now HR groups on Ning ?

Yes, Blogging and Twittering are just tools. One probably needs to have a mindset to utilise them?

The Ron Paul Effect: Returns on Conversation

That's the term Rob uses to explain why he's not focussing too much on the web. Yes, it can be an echo-chamber. One should be talking and speaking to other non-web-social-media-people too!

I have a hard time focusing on the web these days because of the Ron Paul effect. For those involved heavily in the web and social media, it seemed as if Ron Paul was at least making a dent in the primaries. As it turned out though, most of the rest of the world had no idea who he was. I think about that every time someone tells me about the latest frivolous web tool that is going to be the next big thing. I wonder, “the next big thing to who? A bunch of web novelty seekers that just move on from big thing to big thing?” It only seems like “everyone” is using the latest and greatest tool because we are pulling from the wrong sample.

I’m not one of those people who thinks that web is bad, or that it is useless. I just think it is a time sink and that the return on “being part of the conversation” is negative for most people. That isn’t anything that hasn’t been said many times before. I just wanted to explain why I’ve been missing.

What's your return on "being part of the conversation"? Is it negative? Why do you persist then?

Advorto's guide to Online Recruitment

Advorto, a UK based HR recruiting software company, has put together a free guide to online recruitment and they are making it available on registering some details if you visit http://www.advorto.com/guide.

Some of the areas the guide covers and are usually ignored by organizations are:

• Start with your career site - It's pathetic to see the bad quality of career sites that organizations employ. Marketing and Corporate Communications should be talking to IT and HR to make it a showcase to future employees.
• Consider other sites - Apart from the job sites, are there industry sites where your potential audience hangs out, virtually?
• Use your intranet, it’s free!
• Start a candidate e-newsletter - I gave this idea to a previous employer, got an award for it, but I don't think they have yet implemented it. And today I'd add to offer the newsletter by RSS feed too.
• Create an online referral system
• Consider using social networks
• Add a recruitment blog to your site

Most of these are not heavy on your recruitment budget, but usually HR and Recruiting heads in India are unaware of these new channels to boost the pipeline of candidates. This small pdf guide is sure to be a great resource for them! If you're interested in Recruitment in the new online world you can check their blog out too.

In the company of giants

In an article on the Mail Today I've been put in the company of giants as "our Blogging Stars" meaning Indian "stars". The others in that list are (gulp) Om Malik, Rafat Ali and Amit of Labnol fame.

The article claims Blogging has become serious business in India now.

I'm not really so sure. As this interview between Darren Rowse (known as Problogger) and Guy Kawasaki shows a majority of Bloggers earn less than $15 dollars a year.

So how can blogging become serious business? That will happen when blogging networks take off in India and some bloggers become a part of the larger media businesses. These would be the bloggers who have an audience and a certain 'brand' appeal. Not everyone might want to pursue this and not every 'big' blogger would choose this path.

For example, UTVi which is headed by journo-cum-blogger Govindraj Ethiraj has roped in two prominent bloggers, BombayAddict and Rashmi Bansal for two different TV shows. And popular blogger Sidin Vadukut joined Mint WSJ as a journalist.

That is most likely how blogging will evolve into a business.

P.S. The Recruiting Animal takes me to the cleaners for posting this :-)

Ready for Chief Blogging Officers?

OK, this article on the Workforce site (hat-tip Kaushik) seems to be the perfect example of a link bait, and I'm biting it :-).

I personally don't think companies should rush into blogging or go about embracing web2.0 tools indiscriminately, unless they are clear on what they are trying to accomplish by doing so. Having objectives for blogging and usage of other social communication tools is a much better idea, otherwise people would feel that "these folks have a fun job". Blogging is definitely not only fun (for professional bloggers there might be a huge cost also attached!).

Blogging and other tools (like Twitter etc) are inherently more suited for the human voice, hence a corporate tool must reflect a human voice of the organization. Something that Mario Sundar does so well on Twitter as well as the Linkedin blog. His real success comes from getting others within the organization to showcase the organization and its success.

And no, I don't think Chief Blogging Officer as a designation is going to catch up in India. Ok, maybe a manager of communications who looks at "social media" (but the term itself is so outdated now - and before you point out - yeah I know, I have a label on the right hand sidebar called Social media!), and that too would be confined to the digital and online world for the next 2-3 years at least!

However, I would admit to one thing. Hiring a blogger to augment your PR/Communication team is a great idea, since a blogger knows that bloggers are not journalists and you don't pitch them stories like you do traditionally. PR people might not change their behavior and hence it's a good point to have a blogger to connect with external bloggers. Chris Brogan has a great post on how to do that BTW.

By the way, here's an excerpt from the article:

For better or worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.

“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger,” said Mack Collier, a social-media consultant and blogger at the Viral Garden, citing Dell’s Lionel Menchaca and LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar as examples of a personality positively affecting a brand.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March, “[Menchaca and Sundar] were getting hugged in the hallway,” Collier said. “And that popularity is bleeding over into Dell and LinkedIn.”

Today, just more than 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs, according to SocialText, and only a handful have a designated chief blogger.

Featured in the Hindustan Times today

On an article on how blogging has changed people's lives!

When Riddhi Shah of Hindustan Times called me and said that she was doing a feature on how blogging has changed some blogger's lives, I was flattered. Gaurav Mishra is the one who referred her to me. Thanks, Gaurav.

Others featured in the article are Kiruba, Akshay Mahajan and Suman Kumar.

Another thing, the article makes me a couple of years older than I actually am! I hope that helps to get some consulting clients ;-) !

Image on top is how it appears in the HT Mumbai edition and the one on the right is how it appears in the HT edition in New Delhi

Abhijit Bhaduri leaves PepsiCo to join Microsoft

Ok, here's a disclaimer: I am a big fan of Abhijit Bhaduri. As one of India's leading HR leaders, he's surprisingly open to learning and trying out new things like blogging and being on facebook !  The  reason, IMHO is that Abhijit is not just a HR professional - he's an author, a cartoonist, a theater person, has hosted radio shows in the US and has even acted in a Hindi film - and having a lot of interests and hobbies and passions is one of the things that makes a person ready for new experiences and to be creative.

Abhijit was also the moving force behind India's first large mainstream corporate Blog focused on showcasing it as an employer. In his final post at the Frito-Lay India blog Abhijit posts about the challenges of corporate blogging and social media:

To get it going there was a short 3 min video of What is it Like to Work for FritoLay? That video uploaded on Youtube (click here to watch it) got us a lot of eyeballs. Research (basically that means all the people I spoke to) showed us that it was the first place for candidates to get a feel of the culture of PepsiCo's Snack division in India. Candid confession: When I saw that a lot of people were using that to decide on whether they would fit in to this culture or not, I did feel a tad bit inhibited and stopped doing videos of giggling employees on candid camera kind of stuff. Thats was truly tempting given the number of applicants who wanted to come into work in a giggly environment! Honestly - someone did say that to me.Thereafter the focus was more on describing all the fun moments at work. The innovative people that we have here inspired us to do more. The media and other bloggers took notice and we got a gazillion suggestions on what to put into the blog. That made me realize that the challenge in having an unofficial corporate blog are two. One is to avoid sounding like a commercial for the company. More than that is the challenge of getting more than a few enthu guys to post. How do we update the blog continuously and frequently?

Abhijit now moves on to Microsoft India - and hopefully will continue blogging - there are lots of other HR folks in Microsoft in the US who blog - and I guess he will be the first in MS India :-) !

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Penelope and Joel talk jobs and other stuff

OK, this is an amazing video interview that Joel Cheesman (the Cheezhead) took of Penelope Trunk a.k.a the Brazen Careerist.

It's amazing because two of my fave bloggers are talking.

Hear Penelope talk about how men and women can get away by saying controversial things in different contexts, how organizations should blog and how millenials (or Gen Y) don't really need job boards. Penelope also says how job boards should move with the times.

Listen. Laugh. Learn.

Am still not sure if Joel was actually wearing pants. He writes he was, but we don't have video proof ;-)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

On Alltop and list of 100 freelancer blogs

While I have been off the net I didn't realise that the blog has made it two two lists, the careers page on Guy Kawasaki's new venture - Alltop. I actually mailed and tweeted Guy and begged him to consider the blog for the Alltop Career page. Alltop.com is a site which helps its users explore their passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web.
It was a total surprise to me however, to see this blog on the list of the 100 freelancer sites compiled by Bootstrapper.
Thanks folks!

The story of two bloggers and blogs as businesses

I guess this is where things are headed.

Businesspundit which was one of the first business related blogs I started reading in 2001 and was written by Rob May was recently sold to Ryan Caldwell's firm and so now Businesspundit will have a group of bloggers at its helm.

Isn't this the way forward from businesses when they scale up. As Larry Griener stated in his seminal paper on organizational growth and development, when an entrepreneurial organization scales up it needs to pass through a period of change from being entrepreneurial to growth through direction.

On Twitter I was having a conversation with him that knowing when to quit when you're ahead is a tough one and even great people mess it up, so it was amazing for someone like him to do it so gracefully. He admitted it wasn't so easy. Rob will now be blogging at Coconut Headsets and I have already subscribed, because while he says he won't match the volume that he set at BP, I'll be looking forward to his irreverent and sceptical take on business issues.

What does this mean on how I will engage with Businesspundit? Well I will read the feed and make up my mind about whether to continue with it for sometime or to unsubscribe from it. The blog will come with not one but a diverse perspective of many bloggers. That can be a good thing, but for me Businesspundit was Rob May and his individualistic "voice" and perspective. It's a classical positioning issue that organizations face when trying to vary their products or diversify.


On the other hand there's Penelope Trunk (author of Brazen Careerist) who has announced that she has just started her own business- a site with 50 bloggers called (what else) Brazen Careerist.com

Penelope's approach is different. She'll continue to blog at her individual blog post, while launching a new site which is closely connected with her identity also. It's a different approach and ties up with her passion for writing which she's converting to a business while what Rob really wants to do an entrepreneurship and blogging for him is not so central.

Best of luck to these folks and the other new bloggers I haven't read on both BP and BC. Wish them all the very best !

BlogsJam lists this blog in the Business and Management Channel

Ashish from citipals mailed me to let me know that they are launching a blog reader (not a web based RSS reader) called blogsJam.

In his email he wrote:

We are planning to announce the launch of blogsJam: (http://blogsjam.citipals.com/top-business-management)

• blogsJam is a fast web based blog reader.
• It categorizes blogs (and blog posts) by channels/topics.
• Your blog has been posted in the above category by virtue of the wonderful posts you have on your website. Congrats!!
• The customizable blogsJam widget will provide increased distribution for your posts.
• You could also use the blogsJam widget to showcase fresh, relevant articles on your blog.

So if you want, you could grab the widget here.

Some other channels they have that are worth a dekko are:

• India Technology & Startups
• Indian Finance & Business
• Bollywood News & Gossip
• U.S. Technology & Startups
• Gizmos & Gadgets
• Green Energy
• Indian Cooking & Recipes
• Beauty & MakeUp
• Fashion & Style
• Alternative Medicines
• Travel & Tourism in India
• Mumbai Life
• Bangalore Life
• Chennai Life
• Delhi Life
• Hyderabad Life

Twittering or Microblogging and HR

Of what good is Twittering or Microblogging? A few months ago even I did not understand. Much the same way as I did not "get" the concept of blogging in 2002 (I'm a slow learner, you see ;-)

What is Twitter, you ask?

If you are seeing this blog post on the web then you might have noticed some text on the right hand sidebar under the heading "Twitter Updates" with some text under it.

Twitter is the tool that helps make this possible and people are using it differently from what it was started for. In a very simple form, it asks you to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. People can choose to follow your updates, if they choose to become your "followers". Here's a more in depth article by Jeff Jarvis on the Twitter phenomenon.

Then like Technorati for blogs, there's a specific search engine for Twitter called Terraminds. I am such a Twitter newbie that I discovered it today. I searched for HR and Human Resources and found lots of people to follow.

The biggest advantage of twitter is that it enables you to get away from the computer as you can choose to receive the tweets on your cell phone. So imagine that you are doing an informal salary survey for accounting professionals, and you tweet your question to your followers if any of them know how much accountants are making, you can receive real time data.

That's not all, tweeter tracking is another killer feature for you to track specific phrases and have them delivered to your phone/IM. So imagine you are hiring Strategy Consultants, you can set up a track for "Strategy Consultant" and whenever anyone publicly mentions that phrase in their Tweet, you get an update and can contact the person directly. Adding an @ before the username of a person on Tweeter makes the person see it as a reply.

Since Twitter has opened up their API lots of applications are being built around it. My personal favourite is Twitterfox, a Firefox extension that enables me to twitter without going to the website.

Then for the bloggers amongst you, there's Twitterfeed that enables you to send a link to your blog posts to your twitter followers. Some 9 ways Twitter can add to your blogging depth and richness is described in this article.

Oh yes, did I mention how you can use Twitter for recruiting?

Anyway, if you are on twitter, or have decided to convert to a Twitterer (or is it Tweeter?) you can find me here! And other HR folks and Recruiters on Twitter too.

Blogs getting indexed differently on Google

Ever tried searching for IBM or Tata Group on Google? One gets a search result that looks like this:

Today I did a search for my name on Google and saw something similar.
Doing a search for prominent bloggers like Rashmi Bansal I came across a similar results.

So that means for google at least, if it is certain you are looking for a particular site it will showcase the blog posts that people have visited the most. Another reason to turn to blogging :-)

Why Enterprise 2.0 will not happen without culture change

Bill Ives posted on a social software platform that wants organizations to be able to build communities of practice.

While a part of me wants to celebrate that such tools are available and people are investing time and money to build them, another part of me dreads the hype-hoopla and disillusionment cycle it might take organizations through.

Enterprise 2.0 will remain a buzzword until it is backed by cultural change in organizations. And changing a culture is not easy at all.

Otherwise Enterprise 2.0 will go through the same phase as KM went through when organizations implemented software solutions that promised lots of sharing and collaboration and when that didn't work out, firms blamed KM (equating them to the tools).

So I'm sticking my neck out and saying what I said about KM - Enterprise 2.0 is about Organizational Development.

Related posts:
Organizational Development and Knowledge Management
OD and KM - More thoughts
OD and Web 2.0

How small business can leverage the Web

I was talking to a friend who offers marketing and branding services to the Small and Medium Enterprises sector in Delhi and I told her that she should start a facebook page for her firm, and that it's free to do so.

I then realised that sharing it here could help a lot more people. So if you go to the Facebook Business page and then click on Business Pages, you come to this page

Click on the button "Create a Facebook Page" highlighted below

You can then create a page either for local businesses, brand or product or artists, bands or public figures.

You can then get a page like this and people can write about your business and become its fans. It's great for SEO also as the page gets indexed and ranks fairly high on search engines.

Another way to build a good search engine rank for your blog page or firm is through Linkedin.

Most people put in links to their blogs using the generic Linkedin defaults, like this:However, one can instead name these links by going to "edit my profile" and then clicking the edit next to the websites. In the drop down menu choose "other" and then name the keyword you would want the search engine to track.
Since Facebook and Linkedin have very high page rank of 8 and 7 (in Google) and overall credibility across all search engines the link passes on the credibility for your blog and website too (that's what my SEO friends tell me)

So apart from SEM small businesses can use such measures to build their visibility.