Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

They want you to build a following for them on Facebook? That is the task at hand? If you are successful at building a following for them - I wouldn't give up your account info (password) - unless they want to buy it off of you. They may be using the group of you to build them a following for free - when building a following takes a lot of effort - it is a full time job and should be good for 3 weeks pay.

I always wonder about these creative "interview challenges". They seem more like "stupid human tricks" than real world deals. Further, I am not certain it makes sense to have their VP's facebook profile created by a potential job candidate.

But, this is all about you getting the job - right? So here would be my steps.
1) Create a profile - put up a picture, and a few generically personal thoughts.
2) Search for your friends and get them to join.
3) Go to their friends and invite as many of them as possible.
4) Create a profile that states you want to get up to 5000 friends in a week. Send bulletins to friends asking them to recommend you.
5) Offer a goofy prize to the person who helps you recruit 100 friends - perfect idea - a family guy sticker

Now, when if you dont get the job... You can create havoc with this guys reputation... But that's a different story.

I would go back and ask if you could do that for a fake company. Sounds like free work to me.

Michael

Since they simply want to see a high friend count, create a bunch of yahoo/gmail email accounts, and create Facebook accounts with each of these. No doubt there are people you could pay to do this grunt work on your behalf (including Amazon's Mechanical Turk). It's an artificial goal they've given you, and didn't give you rules about using social media, real people, etc.

Well, first step is get yourself a Facebook account an spend some time exploring it. Find people you know, etc.

Then set up the account for this VP.

Work it from there.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't help wondering if they're using this as a way to get a full-fledged social media presence for free. Facebook for you, Twitter for someone else, blogging for a third candidate etc.


If they expect you to work for free now, how will they treat you if they hire you?

Jodi

Interesting. I wonder if this VP has given the same task to other candidates. I hope not or he/she is going to have an interesting time cleaning that up.

In addition to the other great suggestions, I'd run through a few webcasts on using facebook for business to get you inspired. Here's a link to a Hubspot webinar to get you started. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/facebook-for-business-webinar-ar...
I'm sure Marketing profs also has a lot of great resources.

Of course, a personal facebook page is going to look a little different than a company page so you could Google phrases like "facebook personal branding" for additional resources.

Finally, don't forget to Tweet that you want to add contacts to this page. If you can Tweet a link to a page explaining what you are doing, all the better as it will make more sense. Obviously we're putting aside for the moment the fact that these irrelevant connections will do the VP no good, but that doesn't seem the be an issue with him/her.

I can't help but wonder why this VP is "unmarketable." I think people are the most marketable "product" of all. And, social portals are the ideal place to do it.

Good luck!

Melissa