MetzMash

Tools For Establishing Your Personal Brand On The Job Hunt

My cousin called me from Boston yesterday; he's in the middle of long job hunt; he's looking for a basic I.T. position (network manager, desktop support), and he's having a lot of trouble. We talked about having him use the strategic method to job hunting and working with a job coach.

Then it hit me - he has no personal brand online. While following all of the steps from "What Color Is Your Parachute" may have been totally adequate for a strategic job hunt back in, say, 2005, the book doesn't totally cover what's needed right now.

A quick scroll through the table of contents of the 2008 edition shows a "How Much Help Is The Internet" chapter, which, undoubtedly, was ten years in the making - good stuff.

On page 11, the author actually puts "Using The Internet" at the top of the list for "Worst Ways To Find A Job." And, as far as I can tell, there's no reference to creating a personal brand online anywhere in the book. And I really hope that Richard Nelson Bolles, the book's author, fixes that next year, because his book has helped millions of people find great jobs, myself included.

So, here's what I would propose including in the chapter, if you're searching for a job in the United States. Setting this stuff up would probably take ten hours, and an ongoing commitment of about two to four hours per week.  But if you've read "What Color Is Your Parachute," you know that a 12-week, full-time job hunt is par for the course; that means that if you started today, you'd have about an 86% change of success by July 4.

I'd stack on the following items to Bolles' advice:

1. LinkedIn  - Take a look at my complete LinkedIn profile. This took me a few hours to set up and while I have a relatively small network (142 connections), it has served me fairly well. If you're operating with under 60 connections, you're probably being underserved by this network, according to their blog. If you want to pursue the informational interviews that Bolles advocates, you're likely going to have to throw down $25/month for the Premium version.
2. Facebook - Make a tasteful Facebook profile, and take down all of the beer bong pictures from college, or at least change the privacy settings on them. Today's employers know how to use Facebook and MySpace quite well; if you doubt this, you may waste a few weeks of your job hunt on a position that didn't pan out because of something stupid you did on a Saturday night in 1999.
3. Blog - For about $10 a month, you can get a killer TypePad blog. That'll take about two hours to set up properly. Write two times a week about the field that you're searching for a job in. This may well be more important than any resume you send out. I know I've read individuals' blogs in painstaking detail before evaluating their resumes. People need to know how well you communicate in writing.
4. Twitter - Take five minutes and set up a Twitter account; do some intelligent link-blogging about your industry. For the ten minutes this takes every week, it shows that you read good info about your job market and you share it.

By the way, if you're noticing that the information on my LinkedIn profile is intentionally vague, that's because I'm in the middle of a transition myself. More news on that in the coming weeks.

Yelping Apologies

I just logged into my Yelp account to write a review of a bakery in my neighborhood, where I'm sitting and chilling, to do some research. I've received two messages in the last month from two restaurants that I gave middling-to-poor reviews to.

One was from another Yelp user, asking me to return to Berkeley's Mokka Cafe, who pooh-pooh'd my request for wireless about 20 months ago. Another was from the owner of Qube, a Seattle-based fusion
restaurant that I gave a middling review to last year. I don't have anything against them; my meal there wasn't bad, but the meal was just okay. But, I've got to give them credit for reaching out to me (full disclosure: they offered me a $25 gift certificate for my next visit, which I'm not going to accept or use). The fact that they reached out, though, is enough to warrant me stopping by for a drink with a friend or a client. The apology alone warrants a second chance. Way to reach out to your community, Qube.

Oh, and Mokka, who in the Bay Area lacks wireless, besides Peets? Wi-fi is a utility, like lights, water and power. If you don't have it, people will not patronize your business, unless they're seeking a data-free environment (which Peets is trying to provide, to their credit). But you can't have it both ways.

Three Reasons Content Companies Need To Embrace Social Media

[Ed's note: What follows is a superb guest post from John Potter, VP of Technology at CNET Networks Business.]

As the World Wide Web is transformed into what Tim Berners-Lee has called the Giant Global Graph, companies whose primary business is producing content need to adjust. If you're working inside a content company, and you're a user of social networking sites, or social media sites like Digg, then you probably already know this. Chances are, though, you'll need to sell this up the chain within the company. To help you, I've put together some of the best arguments for embracing these changes.

The primary reason for embracing social media is that you need to be where your audience is. I mean this both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense, you need to promote your content on the social media and networking sites that users are spending their time on. One of the most common objections to putting effort into doing this is that your current audience doesn't use these sites: "our users don't even know what Digg is." On the surface, this is a hard objection to overcome, because obviously a company tends to focus their efforts on their existing users. In reality, it' a trivial objection, because it is incredibly short-sighted. Even if there is not a lot of audience overlap now, chances are the demographics of users of social media match well with those of your existing users.

Right now, I guarantee you there are large numbers of users on social networks and media sites, who would love your content, but who will probably never hear of your web site unless you reach out to them. Your need to reach these users is even higher if your existing audience demographics don't match those of the social networks. In the 1990s, people in the newspaper industry used to joke that "our audience is dying every day," because young people weren't reading papers, and the elderly people who did were steadily disappearing. It was a joke, because, at the time, their business was still relatively healthy.

It's not a joke anymore: the newspaper business is imploding. Similarly, by rejecting new methods of distribution, the record companies put themselves on the same path of decline. If you work for a web content company, you need to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to you. To do that, you need to be where your future audience is already, and social media and networking sites are where they are. Moreover, even if you ignore this large potential audience, you can be sure your advertisers won't. Advertising spending is quickly shifting from TV and print magazines to the web. Where it goes on the web depends where the audience is. Increasingly, your advertisers will be asking how they can use you to reach the users of social networking and media sites. In the figurative sense, the idea of being where your audience is means you need to provide your users with a site that has all the interactivity that they have come to expect. Today, users are not willing to just passively consume your content. They expect to not only be able to comment on your content, but to rate it, to share it, embed it on their own blogs and social network profiles, and to receive credit if they link to it through trackbacks. If you don't provide these tools, your users will gravitate to other sites that do provide them.

A second reason reason for embracing social media is that you expand the reach of your existing community. Whether you publicly acknowledge it or not, your site already has a community of users. At a minimum, that community is shaped by the content you produce. However, if you allow comments, you have already taken the further step of letting your users interact with each other. As your users interact, they build a community, and individual users build a reputation within that community. The more tools you provide for users to interact with your site, the stronger this community will become. Adding the ability to rate content, to submit your content to social media sites, or to embed your content on blogs or MySpace profiles will increase a user's identification with your site. That's important, because in many ways, social media is about the users' branding of themselves, and you want your brand to be part of the individual user's brand.

One of the largest sources of advice or information that people turn to is their peers. So, if someone sees that a friend is participating on your site, they are more likely to do so themselves.  If you then expand your community's reach onto social networks, you provide your most active users with an additional way to leverage the reputation they have built through their contributions to your site. That makes their contributions more valuable to them, and encourages them to continue to participate. By providing a convenient way for users to show their affiliation with your site on social networking sites, or submit them to social media sites, you give your users another way to evangelize your brand. Even if you never gain any direct traffic through this (and you will), you increase your brand recognition. This makes it more likely that users who encounter your site on Google, or other search engines, will recognize you and click through. 

Lastly, by embracing social media, you will more quickly optimize your content production.  Web properties learn what's popular, and hone their programming, based on their knowledge of what people are consuming and talking about. Traditionally, you can only measure site activity by page views and on-site comments. Now, social media provides you with many more tools to assess how you are doing. By seeing who is linking to your content, who is rating that content, and how often that content is being submitted to social media sites, you can more quickly assess how you are doing. The more open you are, the speedier your programming optimization will be.

In conclusion, it can help to think of social media as the new blogs. Not that social media are the same, but it's instructive to look at the fear publishers had about blogging a few years ago, and how far they have come. As time has gone by, content companies have come to embrace the openness that characterizes blogs. Publishers have to be brave enough to take the next step and embrace social media. The internet is about connections between people and content, and content providers have to recognize that and leverage it by opening up their sites to those connections.

The Kind of Stuff To Show Legal When They Ask About UGC

My client Gretchen (at Mediazone) had the opportunity to check out a really cool talk given by Kaye Scholer last week in L.A.: Web 2.0: Social Networking, User Generated Content and Digital Advertising - Evolving Legal Issues. She loaned me the reader from the event, and, inside it, I happened upon a really cool piece by Alan Friel, which led me back to the legal technology section of law.com.

Finally, some comprehensive and clear stuff to show the legal department when they ask about UGC! Alan, welcome to the blogroll.

How Social Media Saves Lives: An Interview with Sundeep Ahuja

It was an all-too-familiar story to me; a young person, Sameer Bhatia, is diagnosed with AML (acute myelogenous leukemia). The same thing happened to one of my students three years ago, back when I was a high school English teacher by day (social media guru by night).

It's a life-and-death situation, and if you're member of a minority ethnic group (African-American, Indian-American), it's a hell of a lot harder to find bone marrow donors.

When I heard Sundeep Ahuja (also a Kiva board member) talking about his efforts to save the lives of his friends Sameer and Vinay at the >Play Conference at UC-Berkeley back in November, I knew I had to get an interview to see how he used social media as part of the effort to find bone marrow donors for his friends.

Ahuja's not taking all of the credit here; he gives an huge hats-off to Vinay's best friend, Priti Radhakrishnan, the driving force behind Team Vinay, and her partner-in-philanthropy, Robert Chatwani (Sameer's best friend). The team's actions in creating these two life-saving  campaigns are sure to have a ripple effect throughout the entire Indian-American community, as thousands more people are registered in bone marrow registries.

Hopefully, this interview can serve as a social media and PR template for people looking to emulate their efforts, and start saving lives on a low budget.

Is there a strategic document for persons wanting to emulate you in doing
non-profit (life-saving) type outreach?

Great question.  Though I haven't looked, I have to imagine that a document like this is somewhere out there on the web.  The Team did develop a short playbook on how to launch and manage corporate bone marrow registration drives, and this guide has been very helpful in getting programs launched within companies (particularly in Silicon Valley).   More generally speaking, I wrote a small post some time ago on the power of "empowerment marketing" and how we leveraged that at Kiva.org as well as for this campaign;  it can be read here. 

In your work with Priti Radhakrishnan, Robert Chatwani and others to find marrow donors for Sameer and Vinay, do you feel that social media really enabled your outreach, or that this could have been done as well in a Web 1.0 (circa 1997) kind of environment?

First off, I have to give credit where credit is due: Team Vinay and Team Sameer were both sizable operations of family and friends that mobilized their friends and eventually a whole community to drive bone marrow donor registrations to save the lives of Vinay Chakravarthy and Sameer Bhatia, both of whom had been diagnosed with Leukemia.  Vinay and Sameer, as South Asians, each had a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a donor match given the relatively small number of registered bone marrow donors in the community.  The amazing efforts of Teams Vinay and Sameer have driven over 25,000 registrations since the summer -- one of which was a match for Vinay, and another for Sameer, and they are both doing well post-transplant (and at least three other patients have found matches as well!) 

As one of the folks working specifically on the communications side through the summer, I can say that the "social media" effort played a sizable (though fragmented, as much of it was decentralized) role in driving these registrations, largely because social pressure from friends (implicit and explicit) was a strong motivator.  Interestingly, though, given that the action was an off-line event (a cheek swab) usually held at specific times/places (registration drives), the helpvinay.org website, eVites, and emails drove more registrations than "Web 2.0" social networking groups and profiles.  The one unique "Web 2.0" contributor worth mentioning was a collaborative video application powered by RapOuts which was used to distribute messages from celebrities and community supporters alike encouraging registration and participation (disclaimer: I've since become an Advisor to RapOuts). I guess the best way to summarize is that "Web 1.0" (and pre-web technologies like the phone!) drove action, and "Web 2.0" supported with awareness.

How much did conventional press releases help in the outreach?

I don't believe there were any conventional press releases, per se, but we did engage a couple of individuals at PR agencies to help us get radio announcements, local televsion coverage, newspaper mentions, and the like.  Again, given the off-line nature of the action it's tough to quantify how much the PR actually motivated people to type in HelpVinay.org or HelpSameer.org, find a drive, and get registered -- but as a motivator for the Teams and the community, and as a method of raising general awareness, PR was quite helpful.

Do you feel that these press releases had a direct link to people of South Asian descent joining the bone marrow registry?

Though the outreach efforts described above were more broad stroke across neighborhoods and cities of varying ethnic makeup (even if targeted at neighborhoods and cities with large South Asian populations), there were also more focused outreach efforts to the South Asian community through community blogs, newsletters, and popular South Asian websites.  It's probably worth noting here that the biggest source of registrations were drives set up at community events, religious establishments, and workplaces; on location at these places with large South Asian populations, drive teams were able to tell people as they walked by about Vinay and Sameer, and then get them registered right there.

Was YouTube central in your project's outreach, or was it merely parenthetical?

Though a few of the videos were uploaded to YouTube and somewhat promoted, the Teams primarily leveraged the RapOuts platform for its video efforts, largely because it's built to power campaigns such as ours.

Have any similar drives been organized in your wake?

Though there are several patients I'm aware of currently in need of transplants--and so if you're reading this, are South Asian and are still not registered, please visit samarinfo.org/drives  to find a drive near you--I'm only aware of one other team that's coming together in a Team Vinay/Team Sameer type fashion; you can learn more at swab4bevin.com .

In the last week, some of the core folks involved with Team Vinay and Team Sameer soft-launched a campaign called "I-Believe".  At its core, the message of the campaign is that everyone has the power to save a life--the question is do you believe, and the answer is of course "I-Believe". 

The campaign is primarily targeted at college students and there are representatives on several campuses raising awareness for the campaign in an effort to drive Bone Marrow Donor registrations.  Core to the campaign is a video featuring several prominent and relevant South Asians, viewable at helpvinay.org and on Facebook as part of the "Help Vinay" application.  Earlier this week Sameer blogged about the need to continue the campaign for Bone Marrow Donor registrations in the South Asian community; you can read his post at helpsameer.org.

Thanks for this opportunity, Adam!   

I recognize that this is a "social media" blog; according to Wikipedia, " social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other." 

That definition encompasses Web 1.0 tools such as the helpvinay.org  website, making it very safe to say that social media played a PIVOTAL role in the Help Vinay and Help Sameer campaigns--and so in saving lives.   As Web 2.0 tools come into maturity over the next couple of years I hope they'll help in not only spreading awareness but in driving action, making similar campaigns in the future that much more effective!

When Showing Up Isn't Enough

About three years ago, I was a teacher at a small charter school in San Carlos, California. One of my 14-year-old students was diagnosed with leukemia. Her family's battle to find bone marrow donors was really gut-wrenching. A few weeks ago, local tech events guru Christian Perry wrote a posting on this blog about how to get people to show up at events. Well, if it's just a party or a networking event, then showing up is good enough.

But sometimes, people and organizations need to use social media to do really important things, like save lives. As profiled in Now Is Gone, the Red Cross has been using social media for nearly a year now to do this. And we have a special interview on Thursday with an individual in San Francisco who  used social media to do just that - to help save the lives of two friends, one of whom invented something that many of our readers use every day. Stay tuned. It's a busy week on MetzMash.

Guest Post: Instant Crowded Room - Just Add Social Media

[The following is a guest post from SF BETA organizer and Zaptix CEO Christian Perry.]

One of the fascinating parts of Silicon Valley -- and an aspect that most people outside the culture miss -- is that the center of the digital world still does plenty of meeting and mingling in the meatspace.

I've been putting together tech events for more than a year -- some of them, including SF Beta and geekSessions, are among the most popular in the Bay Area. While I like to think that the quality of the events has a lot to do with their success, we owe a huge amount to the way we've used social media to spread the word and boost attendance.

For other enterprising event organizers, I present to you seven ways of using social media to build successful events.

1. Create Facebook Events: Every time someone says they're attending an event on Facebook, all their friends hear about it in the news feed. One of our recent events, a small chat on OpenSocial, got 131 RSVPs for a 50-person room, and we used NOTHING but a Facebook Event page to promote it.

2. Use Facebook Groups: A Facebook group gives you an installed base of fans who are eager to hear about your events. Unlike Events, your membership keeps growing; you don't need to start over each time.

3. Post on Upcoming.org: With the rising prominence of Facebook, Upcoming isn't the force that it used to be. Still, it's a great way to share your event with more people.

4. Build a web presence, preferably as a blog: We've  seen consistent traffic to all three of our major sites. I suggest using a blog format for your site -- it makes it easier to add updates and keep people engaged.

5. Incorporate social media: Did someone make a video of your event? Embed it! What about all those photos on Flickr? How about a Twitter stream? It's pretty easy to integrate all these things into your site, and it makes your events seem a lot more vibrant than just a static page with text.

6. Reach out to other social media creators: All those bloggers, photographers, and videographers need material to write about, photograph, and shoot. By reaching out to the social media community, you're almost guaranteed to start a conversation and raise awareness of your events.

7. Create events that don't suck:[ed. My fave!] Perhaps this goes without saying, but the better the event, the more likely all those blog posts and RSVPs will translate into warm bodies. Good weather doesn't hurt, either.

7 Types of Social Media For Your Wall

I was reading the introduction to Now Is Gone yesterday and decided to make a little diagram (using Skitch) diagramming Kami Watson Huyse's "7 Categories of Social Media." After looking it over, though, one of LaunchSquad's partners, Jason Mandell, suggested that it was really more like the "7 Categories of Consumer-Facing Social Media." I noticed that the list did omit social media application platforms (SNAPs) like Awareness, as well as their competitors like Ning. There are probably even 15 more SNAPs that I'm not mentioning here.

So, without further ado, here's the graphic. This is something that's totally iterative, and, in fact, I'm unsure  how many people know about sites like Todd And's Power 150 (sort of a marketing blog Techmeme), but here goes nothing.

If nothing else, this is something to laminate and put up on the wall when you want to think about social media, from the top down. To download it, just right-click and save the graphic. It looks cut-off here, but this is the best way to share it such that all of the text is large enough to be legible.

Back In The Saddle With Now Is Gone

Well, I just got back from Baja del Sur with Alie. We stayed at an amazing little place called Marina Sol. It's definitely worth a look if you're down that way. I came back to two cool packages on my desk: my new noise-canceling headphones and a copy of Geoff Livingston (and Brian Solis's) Now Is Gone.

Even though I have plenty of emails and client work to catch up on, I'm looking forward to tearing my way through Kami Watson Huyse's introduction, "Seven Categories of Social Media." The rest of my team at LaunchSquad would probably love to see a little graphical representation of this on our wall. Maybe your office could use one?

I'll post a full review of the book once I get through the whole thing over the next week or so. Congratulations to Brian and Geoff!

Managing a Corporate Blog, Like HP's

[The following is a guest post from HP's Tac Anderson.]

I recently joined HP as the Web 2.0 Strategic Lead for HP's LaserJet business group. When joining HP I had a lot of free reign to scope out the initiatives I thought we should be engaging in. My only predefined initiative was to figure out how to build on the success of Vince's blog.

Vince has been blogging for nearly a year at The LaserJet blog by Vince Ferraro. As the VP of Marketing for LaserJet we feel it is valuable having an executive speak on our business and industry. The target audience is actually existing LaserJet customers and industry analysts. Using site traffic numbers it is consistently the most successful HP blog.

To build on this success we're having Vince post more frequently - ideally once per week - and we're launching additional blogs and assisting other HP blogs with relevant LaserJet content.  All of this will be possible without adding additional resources by using the following tactics:

Have a calendar

• The number one thing I recommend to every person who is tasked with managing an executive's blog is to have a calendar of upcoming posts.
• This will help you manage content and it will help the executive start thinking about what to say in the post.
• There are topics that the exec will want to blog about as well as topic ideas that you collaboratively come up with. Your PR team (agency or in-house) can also be a good source of topic ideas.
• The calendar needs to be flexible. Topics will arise that need to be addressed immediately. It's a good thing when the exec throws off the calendar with unplanned topics.

Have a process

• We have a process where Vince initiates the content, usually by just writing out a post in a quick email, we then give it a quick edit and search engine optimize the content. (For tips on how to do this for corporate blog postings and to make this dovetail with future press releases read MetzMash next week - Adam)
  
• If it’s deemed necessary, because of the subject mater, we will quickly run the post through legal. At HP this has been a very painless process to date.
• After Vince gives one final approval we have a more technically adept person post the content because our blog software requires some HTML editing.
• All of this can all be done in a few hours if needed but we usually schedule one week for all the back and forth, especially if legal is involved.

Over the summer I dedicated a post to my friends on "the inside" where I gave 6 tips for implementing new media inside your organization. I had no idea at the time that I would soon be on "the inside" managing new media initiatives for a company like HP. While those tips were geared toward internal uses of new media they are just as applicable to external tactics as well.

If you have questions about specifics leave them in the comments. I'll chime in to answer as best I can. I'd like to thank Adam for inviting me to guest post. If you liked this post, check out my blog www.newcommbiz.com.