• Have a voice and stay on message (themes)
• Be authentic, honest & ethical
• Get ready for a long-term commitment
• Provide value, not noise
• Aim for quality, not quantity
• Share & play nice in the social media sandbox
• Bring online relationships offline
• Measure, tweak, repeat

To learn more, read the full article here.

1. Clean Up Your Online Image – First and foremost, make sure that your online image is Google-ready. Most hiring managers will Google a job candidate at some point in the hiring process – sometimes before an interview. Google yourself and find out what happens. Is your LinkedIn profile up to date? Has your personal blog been dormant for months? Do photos from a night of over indulging in Cancun come up in search results? Take a good inventory of how you appear online and prepare the groundwork. Make sure that content that a potential employer can access is appropriate. Use privacy settings whenever possible. Untag yourself in photos if you can’t remove them from the public eye. Ask people to recommend you on sites that allow reviews such as LinkedIn and Guru.com. Create new ‘favorable’ content to hit the top of the search results (see next tip).

2. Make Yourself ‘Findable’ – If you don’t have an online presence, you need one. Social media is a great way to quickly create an online reputation for yourself and build out your resume and profile. Most of the tools are free. Create a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, join Twitter and any relevant professional networks or communities in your field. Even adding your name to a directory or commenting on a high profile blog can create new content for a prospect employer to find when searching for information on you. You can create a YouTube video of yourself (but make sure it’s industry/job appropriate) or a a full website resume.

3. Be an Expert – In addition to looking for job opportunities, you should be looking for opportunities to put your skills into action. Consider starting a blog, or at least, a guest blog to highlight your field of knowledge. Create an online portfolio of your work with a Flickr account. If you are a marketer, answer questions on LinkedIn pertaining to marketing (this also puts your name  and business smarts in front of all of your connections.) Participate in message boards and forums that are frequented by prospective employers and be a helpful presence – answer questions, post articles, start discussions, etc. Focus your ‘tweets’ on Twitter to build a following in your field. Share your ideas, best practices, relevant articles and other information that ‘prove’ you are in the know and have up to date skills to share. Post PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare to show off your handiwork.

4. Join the Group – Groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms offer more opportunities to connect with potential employers and colleagues. When you join a group on LinkedIn, you are often able to direct message members. This can be a direct line of communication to a hiring manager or executive at the firm of your desire.When appropriate, you can also post message to the entire group to help in your job search. In addition to groups, a single connection may be your gateway to the right job opportunity. Leverage individual connections to facilitate introductions to hiring managers.

5. Actively Listen – Don’t just rely on the traditional job boards to find your next position. Set up RSS feeds and Google Alerts to notify you when new jobs have been posted in your field. Check out non-traditional job boards. For example, LinkedIn also has job boards inside group settings where only group members can post job opportunities. If you ‘fan’ a company on Facebook, you might be the first to find out about job openings. Seek out and follow recruiters (professional recruiters and internal hiring managers) on Twitter. Many often post job opportunities on Twitter first before sending out mass communications to their network. In addition, responding via Twitter may separate you from the ‘death by inbox’ syndrome that plunges many resumes into the email abyss.

6. Turn Online Connections Into Offline Connections – Social media offers us opportunities to expand our Dunbar Number (theoretical number of sustainable social relationships that one person can maintain) from 150 to hundreds of thousands. However, when it comes to getting a job, candidates are usually only hired after they’ve met the hiring manager in person. And, influencers still tend to recommend candidates that they know and have met directly. So, take your online relationships offline. Participate in networking events, organize a MeetUp, take a connection out to lunch and ask for informational interviews to get some face-time with potential employers.

Additional Resources:

7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media (Mashable)

How to Find a Job on Twitter (Mashable)

Finding a Job Using Social Media (SlideShare)

Photo by My TwiStEd wOrLd

I have had so many discussions lately with marketers and PR folks that are practically in a panic about how to engage in social media. Suddenly, their CEO or their clients are adamant that they need to be on YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogging…. and a host of other activities. They want them to go from zero to 100 miles an hour by Friday. With budgets shrinking and appetites increasing for customer engagement and revenue generation, executives are right to turn their attention to social media. But, it can’t ALL be done overnight if you want it done right. So, here are a few tips:

1. Pick one medium – one form of social media – and do it right. You don’t have to be on every channel. Pick one, commit to it, own it.

2. Incorporate social media into what you are already doing. Can you add widgets to your website to allow people to save, share or discuss topics? Can you expand your profile on LinkedIn or add a button that says ‘Follow Us’ on Twitter to your existing web campaigns?

3. Set Expectations. You’ve read about the runaway successess that companies have had with social media campaigns – you might not. Set realistic expectations and work towards those goals. Once you meet them, raise the bar again.

4. Get some ROI. Make sure you are picking a platform to invest in that is going to give you some tangible ROI (to show your boss). Will it increase web traffic? Sales? Downloads? Registrations? It’s good to listen, engage, and keep the customers happy, but usually the person paying the bills wants something a little more hard core to budget dollars and time against it.

5. Find an expert  – in or outside of your organization. If you aren’t sure where/how to begin, find an expert that can help you. You can hire a big gun at a pricey agency, or small guns (like us!) that can be affordable and efficient. Surprisingly, you might just have one in your organization as well – an employee with an active blog, a master networker on your sales team with 1000 Facebook friends, a Twitter addict on your IT team. If you don’t have the budget for outside counsel, use your internal resources or search for free ones on the Web.

6. Collaborate. Putting together any successful social media program usually requires interactivity – with customers and influencers on the outside as well as on the inside of your organization. Check in with legal, take the pulse in IT, talk to marketing and see if you can pool resources and brain power to make it work.

On a final note – don’t let the fear of making a mistake paralyze you from making any progress. If you have good intentions, you’ve done your research and you’ve thought out your strategy, you’ll probably be in good shape. As the wise Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, once said on a panel with me regarding what your social media usage policy should be – “Just Don’t Be Stupid.”

Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

I thought it was a great gathering: The keynote speaker was Ray Kerins, VP Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. The panel that followed was moderated by Melanie Milstein, author of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution with Dave Armon, President PR Newswire, David Sacks, Founder of Yammer, Paul Gennaro, Chief Communication Officer, AECOM, Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications Manager, JetBlue, and Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson

The forum then broke out into roundtable sessions moderated by professionals in PR and Marketing who are involved and active in social media and real-time communications.

It was exciting to actually meet and talk to all of these good people that are the front-runners in embracing and using social media and real-time communications to strengthen their brand and connect and communicate with their customers.

I must say, it was mostly in a B2C context, but the forum tried to cover B2B as well.

Everyone was fired up; the room was abuzz with talk, questions, and networking. All the social media buzzwords you could find were flying around: Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, tweeting, video, RSS, IM, email, wikis and on and on…

I felt that people could not get enough information. Everybody was thirsty to learn more.

The questions seemed to be unanimous and ubiquitous:
How do I start?
What does it take from a tactical point of view? One person or a team of 10?
What are the risks?
What are the benefits?
Can I calculate ROI?
How do I get executive management on board?
How do I manage a crisis?
What is a fast response? Two days, two hours, 2 minutes or 2 seconds?
How do I control what’s out there?
How do I manage and aggregate all the different platforms for RTC?
What about traditional media?
How do I get buzz going for a small company that’s not a JetBlue or J&J?

Some questions were tackled and answered, some were not, some got an honest “we don’t know the answer to that yet”.

My key takeaways – and I hope this helps all of us – were:
- Start by discovering what conversations are going on in the social media space like Twitter, YouTube and blogs
- Monitor these everyday by getting RSS feeds through Google RSS or Google Alerts
- Make sure you understand and define your goals and what your communications strategy is
- Don’t be afraid to dip your toe into this fast-flowing social media river.
- Conversations are happening about your company anyway, so get involved
- Depending on your corporation or business, you should decide how to become part of these conversations and who should be answering
- Key: BE HONEST, BE TRANSPARENT
- Employees are spokespeople for the company – they are out there using Twitter and the likes, so they should be brought up to speed
- To do this, and do this right, in a big corporation, there needs to be a mind shift from the top down. Changes in the organization need to be made. Processes need to be streamlined. The social media spokespeople need to be empowered to reply quickly
- To quote Morgan Jonston from JefBlue, “This is about humanization of the brand!”
- Be careful not to seem like the overbearing “big brother”, don’t be intimidating
- Open up, LISTEN to your customers, be committed to change
- Remember and be aware: The line is thinning between traditional media and social media – many journalists have left traditional media and are now influential bloggers/tweeters

Lots of *stuff* to take in…

I look forward to a follow up event, which, in my opinion, could be a full day event, instead of half a day.

If you’d like to hear the two main sessions they are available here.

*Please* add your comments – I would love to hear your opinion and additions!

Excuse the pun, but LinkedIn will now allow you to ‘link in’ all of your other social networks and online applications to create tentacles to your real life and your broader digital life. For example:

• Link your blog to your profile for auto-updates of your latest posts with WordPress or Blog Link by SixApart
• Post your presentations through SlideShare or Google Presentation
• Promote your readling list with Reading List by Amazon
• Map your travel to connect with your connections in other cities with MyTravel by TripIt

Plus a host of other applications…..

I also manage/co-manage two groups on LinkedIn; PRSA-NY and PRSA Technology Section. Until recently, other than posting the logo like a lapel pin on your profile, being in the group didn’t give members any benefits. Now there are many more ways to interact, including:

• Contact group members directly
• Posting questions (discussions) and comments to the group
• Adding news articles of relevance to the group

Hopefully there will be more ‘social’ elements to LinkedIn. Might I suggest a Twitter app and link to your Flickr account for starters.

According to Pileus, “a user can take photos with a camera on the umbrella, and pictures are uploaded to Flickr in two minutes with context tags via a wireless Internet connection. User can also enjoy theirselves watching photo-streams downloaded from Flickr with simple operation of wrist snapping.” Yes, this is ridiculous, but I am sure it would be alot of fun.

Apparently the first prototype was built back in 2006. A few outlets reported on it at that time. I just stumbled upon it today and thought it deserved a new post. Here is a video of an experiment with it in Tokyo.

The Internet Umbrella: Pileus (Full)
Uploaded by ma22n