Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Archives for Social Media

If I belonged to a football team, a fraternity, or an office of 20-somethings, I’d use Twitter to “tweetup” with my friends. It’s not the place to find a job – is it?

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, an Internet entrepreneur based in Amsterdam, recently posted a job listing on Twitter that caught my eye:

Wanted: CTO type for new secret project. PHP, MySQL, CakePHP knowledge important. Money + shares.

“People always know people and telling it to 450 people makes sure that the word gets out,” explains Boris, who has openings for three ventures at the moment and lots of evangelists among his connections. “And - don’t tell – [Twitter] is a cheap way of finding people too.”

Archives for Social Media

There are endless reasons to build a strong network of professional contacts. But perhaps none is more compelling in 2008 than the goal of establishing a career safety net.

In a recession jobs are last to get hit, yet are the slowest part of business spending to recover. This is the time to develop or revise an escape plan to insulate you from possible downturns or unforeseen changes at work.

“I don’t know if I would go so far as to call social networking a safety net,” says Kelly Krebs, Senior Account Executive at Horn Group, “but it can help if you if you are looking to move into a new career or if you are looking to expand your customer or partner base.”

Even though the economy is slumping that doesn’t mean you should stop expanding your web of contacts. While ultimately you will find & add contacts one at a time, the truth is you can better leverage your resources by joining social network-based communities.

Archives for Social Media

When Groucho Marx famously told the Friars that he “didn’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” he notified them via telegram.

If Groucho were on e-mail today he would be spammed by invitations from friends, acquaintances and total strangers to join dozens of social networking sites. I picture him rolling his eyes at the pointlessness of belonging to clubs that don’t serve cocktails or fat cigars.

Unlike Groucho, I am checking out multiple social networking sites as part of a careers research project. One observation: Social networking sites are often the first place where professionals actively manage relationships that can advance their careers.

It’s no secret that quite often in life who you know is more important than what you know. These sites help automate the former so efficiently that I would unhesitatingly recommend them to everyone.

Choosing the right social networking site to advance your career isn’t a serious problem. If one doesn’t pan out, you can always try another, perhaps more or less specialized one.

Archives for Social Media

The hype about social networks is a bit stifling at times. The social pressure to join them is even worse. Old friends, relatives or contacts who are yet to join Facebook or LinkedIn suffer the slings and arrows of social networking mavens who tell them they’re missing out on something cool.

Beyond the sheer joy of throwing sheep at friends or catching a buzz from virtual cocktails, we wonder how social networks help you personally or professionally. Are they an enormous time sink or a breakthrough in how you manage relationships?

To find out, the editors of Found|READ in conjunction with My Global Career invite you to participate in the groundbreaking State of Social Networking 2008 - a free, fast and confidential study about how people use social networks. Your completed survey enters you into a drawing for an Apple iPhone or equivalent prize from an Apple store. To complete the survey, please go to http://s-kf7uz-25818.sgizmo.com/

We look forward to sharing the results of the study with you and hearing your thoughts about what social networking is getting right - or wrong.

Archives for Social Media

I wander through life empowering experts to deal with chronic problems such as product safety, cancer, poverty and Internet privacy. Like taxes and dry cleaning, I often don’t want to know the nitty gritty of how things get done.

Don’t worry, that still leaves me plenty of issues to wring my hands over, like finding a job, a new client or perfect business partners. Yet when it comes to the Net I’m hands on enough to protect my personal data - and I favor penalties for firms that exploit vulnerable people. Privacy intrusions could lead to regulations that wreck the party for all of us.

Those of us who use social networks to help manage or advance professional relationships have paid rapt attention lately to rapidly evolving privacy policies on Facebook among other social networking sites. Facebook is the wild frontier of cyberspace.

Archives for Social Media

There’s a thin line between mavens and evangelists.

We trust mavens to recommend movies, restaurants or even dry cleaners. We fear incurring the wrath of evangelists who contend that it’s a huge mistake (or worse) not to drive a Volkswagen, buy an iPhone or skip reading The Kite Runner. (It’s on my list of things to do, really.)

Perhaps we’re just a little wary of evangelists (and I don’t mean the religious kind). A case in point: hard-selling corporate recruiters. I can empathize with them, though, because not all jobs or companies are an easy sale.

Mavens tend to feel strongly, even passionately that their advice is ideal for their friends, readers or acquaintances. Speaking as a maven and connector, I can tell you that it’s pretty hard to switch it off. When a friend asks: “Seen any good movies?” We’re not the types who reply, “Who has time?”

Archives for Social Media

When the scientific study hit the wires recently establishing that obesity spreads virally across large “social networks,” I figured that science was simply appropriating a popular cyberspace term.

After all, if obesity could spread across Facebook, or MySpace, science would have a larger problem on its hands than excessive girth. Are my contacts on Facebook really that susceptible to my suggestions? If so, I have a get-rich-slowly scheme to sell them.

Still, it’s obvious that some news and ideas spread virally over the Net; think about how many times you have spammed your friends or associates with jokes, links to articles, blog posts or videos. Before there was e-mail there were fax machines and (lawyer) jokes made the rounds pretty quickly, too.