Learn To ‘Social Media’
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Since I work in social-media I see it everyday, some people get it, and some people don’t. Building social-media isn’t a one-time thing. It takes time to find conversations, to build reputation, and learn the best ways to share your knowledge with the world.
Here’s the thing, social media isn’t going anywhere. It’s here to stay. Now it may not always be in the same form that it is right now but it’ll be here.
As one of my final projects at the Missouri School of Journalism in the Convergence Journalism department I wrote up some tip sheets on personal branding, and some of the basics of social-media. Take a look at the Lessons In Social Media series and let me know what other topics you think people who are just beginning to “get it” need to know!
Here are the posts I have up right now:
- The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
- Social Networking Quick Tips
- How To Get Hired Using Social Media
- Google Alerts For Personal Branding Management
- More to come!
The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As social-media spreads and becomes even more ubiquitous you need the tools to manage and control your personal identity and reputation online. Use the the following 10 steps to enhance your toolset.
- Buy yourname.com Even if you don’t plan to start a blog or build a web site immediately, you should own your own domain. Having a single point on the web for authoritative information about yourself is key to managing your online identity. I recommend buying domains from GoDaddy (it’s only $8 a year!)
- Set up Google Alerts for your name.
- Google your name (or for a more proactive approach, set up a Google Alert for your name)
- Make a list of all the places where you have content on the web, discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, news websites, comments, etc. All of this content is traceable back to you, make sure it reflects your online identity goals.
- Decide what social-networking sites you are going to spend more time on than others, also look at what an appropriate amount of conversation and information is acceptable at each site.
- Monitor what images, messages, and spam are hitting your social-networking site profile pages. Have a MySpace? Delete the spam from your wall. Have Facebook? Untag yourself from questionable photographs or ask the poster to take them down. And certainly if you have photos or messages in any of your social-networking sites that don’t fit well with your online identity goals, take them down or delete them.
- Don’t delete your social networking accounts! Having a presence on the web isn’t a bad thing, just make sure that the information available puts you in a positive light.
- Read and comment on blogs. This should probably be higher up in my list, but participating in the numerous conversations happening at any given moment is a huge opportunity to meet new people, gain knowledge, and share knowledge which is what social-media is all about.
- Give back what you take in. If you learn something online, spread it around. Share the love, both in the form of links, emails, instant messages, etc. If you appreciate what someone is doing let them know.
- Each of us has our own set of skills and knowledge, you know things that others don’t. It isn’t difficult to reach out and connect with others who have similar knowledge, or who know more than you. Find those people and connect with them. Social media isn’t social without you.
Managing your online identity takes some time when you’re just starting out, but it’s worth it in the end when you have networks and connections with people you never knew existed. The sharing and the knowledge and the conversations that happen each day are amazing, and if you’re a part of it, your online identity will prosper.
How To Get Hired Using Social Media
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I was lucky enough to know and be on the bleeding edge of social-networking when it began several years ago. I also spent a lot of time cultivating and contributing to my online identity and making connections with people online. The good news is that you don’t have to be an early adopter, or an Internet wiz to get hired using social media.
Looking for a job isn’t easy, and it can be very frustrating. Social media can help, but it’s not a replacement for old fashioned phone calls, emails, and letters. When I graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism I had multiple job offers, and the best of those offers were ones that I came across or was a candidate for because of social media.
For some time, I had been Twittering, Facebooking, and Blogging. I spent money to make sure my blog looked good. I spent hours finding interesting people on Twitter. I stayed up late when I should have been doing other things honing in my online portfolio. And you know what? It all paid off.
One job offer came from a person who followed me on Twitter for two months and noticed that I was talking with increased frequency about finding a job. A couple phone calls and emails later, I was interviewing and had an offer before I got home from visiting.
The other job offer from social-media crossed platforms, I knew the person who knew about a job, but we follow each other on Twitter, and are Facebook friends. Again, my talking about finding a job was seen by this person and I got a Facebook message about openings where she worked. It just so happened that this job was a perfect fit, I got the offer, and took it.
In two paragraphs I just explained how I got a job using social media, but that’s not incredibly useful is it? To help with that, here are my tips and suggestions on finding a job using social-media.
- Put your portfolio and resume online. This is more important than you realize. You’ve just in an instant opened up your resume and portfolio of work to the millions of people online. Now you just need to help people find it.
- Sign up for Twitter and find some people with similar interests to tweet back and forth with. You’ll quickly understand by looking at some of the so called Twitterati how useful and powerful this service is. After you sign up for an account “follow” @chrisbrogan, @guykawasaki, and @scobleizer the three of them have thousands of followers already and actively tweet throughout the day and night. A lot can be learned by example.
- Start a blog. This is a GREAT way to show off your knowledge and skills. This doesn’t have to be complex, start it off on Blogger or Wordpress.com if you want (although I would highly suggest putting wherever you portfolio and resume is). Write one or twice a week at first about what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about (that relates to your job ambitions), and your goals. Some of the best job related feedback I got was on my blog by people emailing and commenting when I wrote a post about “My Ideal Job”.
- Drive traffic to your online portfolio and resume. Do this by putting links on your Facebook page, in your Twitter profile, putting it in big type at the top of your paper resume, and by having it on ALL correspondence online and off. You never know where emails or resumes may get forwarded, and if your online portfolio is linked right there for easy access it makes a world of difference.
- Make It Personal. This is your job hunt, and it’s not going to be easy, but by taking advantage of the basics of social-media your job hunt can expand beyond the traditional into the extraordinary. Social media doesn’t work unless you’re human and make it personal. Being professional and sharing ideas is going to increase your credibility, but not including personal moments will exclude you from the conversation.
A Personal Update
April 19, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Today’s post has two different themes, 1) a change in blog format and 2) my job search.
I wanted to start out by saying that I’ve changed the way things work on here a little. After getting several emails, I re-evaluated having my Twitter updates archive to my blog. I’ve decided that there isn’t very much value derived from having those posts reposted here.
This blog and my Tweets fill very different needs and have very different value. I have decided that while having a searchable archive of my Tweets here was nice for me, it really wasn’t providing very much value to you, my valued readers. I’ve disabled the cross-posting of Tweets on this blog until a better solution crops up.
In the meantime, be sure to Follow me on Twitter. About two weeks ago I hit 300 followers on Twitter and am now proud to be followed by nearly 350 people. Thank you so much for your support and I hope that you enjoy the insight and knowledge that I share with the community.
On another personal note, you may have noticed that my blogging has been inconsistent as of late. This is a short-term situation and I hope to resume normal daily posting very soon. As you know, I’ve been actively seeking full-time employment, and looking is nearly a full-time job. Normally I would be writing daily and scheduling posts a day or two ahead of schedule about ideas, thoughts, and conversations happening. However, I don’t want to jeopardize any of the opportunities coming down the pipe.
I’ve already had to make some tough decisions, and there will be no shortage of more difficult decisions for at least the next several weeks. As I make those decisions and finalize plans, I will post some information from the numerous conversations I’ve been having with wonderful people across the country on the future of information and knowledge distribution (formerly known as the news business).
If you haven’t already, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to my blog via email by using the form in the right-side column or by adding my RSS feed to your feed reader.
Journalists and Blogging
March 17, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
“Blogging is only as good as you make it”
This statement couldn’t me more true, today when I find a truly engaging and interesting news story you know what format it’s in? a BLOG. A blog with personal insight and knowledge.
The reporters of the world all have knowledge of what they’re covering but they don’t share that knowledge with the readers in a print or broadcast form, with blogs they should be able to tell us the ‘truth’ of the matters related to the story, not just what their sources say is the truth. Share the knowledge!
This isn’t to say that filters and editing is bad, just that transparency is a very positive thing, especially since the web has democratized and freed information storage and retrieval.
“It isn’t the journalism of your cranky old city editor or your sainted j-school prof. Neither of those old farts would approve of blogging in any form, even though blogging is now part of the legitimate media mix.”
I quote this only because I have first hand knowledge of the way journalism is now being taught. And granted my experiences may not reflect that of the other students who aren’t as knowledgeable about the world surrounding the Internet, but nonetheless…
I know of several journalism professors who embrace blogs (and blog themselves), and many of the current classes at the Missouri School of Journalism require students to blog on a weekly basis, however what is often required is a reflection post on the work they did this week.
This could be taken as great practice for the young journalist, or a way to show how important it is to control what you say and how you say it. There are plenty of ‘cranky old city editors’ around in the real world, and in the Jschool world, and those are the people I think we really need to be careful about. They are the ones who wouldn’t trust a blog, wouldn’t trust a person’s opinions, and think grammar is the end-all be-all of “good news”.
That just isn’t the case anymore. Period.
Blogging is where journalists need to be writing and peddling their wares. The traditional newspaper is old news, and so is the traditional newspaper web site.
Content doesn’t have to free, but it does have to open and accessible.
Personal Branding Knowledge Is Still Just Beginning…
March 16, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
UMass Students Are Sucked Into the World of Personal Branding « Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel: “Blog About Dan Schawbel Publications Press
I often read Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog for insight and tips on how to improve my own personal branding. You did realize that I have a personal brand didn’t you? 
I do in fact have a brand that is pretty apparent right here on JonathanCoffman.com. It’s one that encompasses my abilities to take new and in-the-pipe technologies and make them work in the real world, right now.
In the blog post that I’m linking to, Dan tells the story of a recent visit to the University of Massachusetts and how the student he talked to almost all were on Facebook, but very few had even heard of LinkedIn.
This really exemplifies the need for personal branding and social-media strategy to be a part of the final curriculum at our nation’s universities. These students know and understand how viral messages get spread, how to network online, and how to control how they look, but they don’t understand quite yet how to apply those skills to multiple outlets across the web.
For the last 2 years I’ve offered extremely cheap web hosting to my peers at the Missouri School of Journalism. What I offer them is 10 gigs of storage space, email, etc all for $20 per year. $28 if they want me to buy and manage their domain name as well.
It provides plenty of space and help for building a personal portfolio (which every grad needs) and it’s not going anywhere, I have too many personal and professional sites to just walk away from the web.
But here’s the real story: I’ve gotten several signups lately and I setup times to meet with each student who wants the deal to talk to them one-on-oine about how they want to use it and how I can help.
One actually emailed me last week saying she was going to have to wait to get a portfolio because ‘I’m saving up for Spring Break and I didn’t realize I could move my files around so easily.”
Well I’m sorry folks, but if you can spend $20 for a full year of online personal web presence, (2 or 3 drinks in Cancun for Spring Break of your senior year in college), you probably don’t need to be trying to get any job that would require an online portfolio or web presence.
Let’s just hope this particular person is smart enough to not post all of those crazy Cancun pictures to Facebook after the vacation.
This is just yet another example of why we need proactive education on social-networking and identity management. Firms like Google, Facebook, etc all have enormous amounts of data about US, and if you’re managing that information yourself, you’ve left yourself open to all kinds of abuse and inaccuracies.
Five Mistakes I Have Made With Personal Development Information
March 2, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Five Mistakes I Have Made With Personal Development Information: “”
(Via Positivity Blog.)
With all of the social media tools out there, it can get very daunting very fast if you’re not careful about planning, organizing, and actually getting things done. I came across this post a while back and thought I’d share it with you today.
Essentially it has some quick tips on how not to get sucked into ‘personal development’ books, etc. But I think it applies equally as well to managing your online life and making sure things don’t get too out of hand.
The main tips are:
- Don’t take in too much information (it’s easy to get sidetracked and confused)
- Just reading things once (you gain additional insight and knowledge by reading things more than once)
- Not applying or testing the information (don’t take ‘their’ word for it, go out and try these things out)
- Go looking for magic pills (they don’t exist so don’t waste your time)
Pie In The Sky - Where We Are Now
February 18, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Where We Are Now
The pulse of the Internet is in a constant flux and we in the new and social media fields are no different. As the first post in my Pie In The Sky series I thought I’d provide you with some links and resources to get familiar with the latest advances and information having to do with web hosting.
While we can talk about Cloud computing, grid hosting, etc, the foundation of the Internet is being threatened right now by what’s called Net Neutrality. Now I have my opinions and ideas about it, but I don’t feel confident enough in my own knowledge so I give you some links to learn more. And you DO need to learn more about Net Neutrality
- Wikipedia Net Neutrality Page and US Network Neutrality
- Save The Internet: fighting for Internet Freedom
Of course the topic of the Pie In The Sky series is cloud computing/hosting. Here’s some quick links to more information about cloud hosting:
- An Outline of how Cloud Computing Should Work - (by Jonathan Coffman)
- Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing
Cloud or Utility computing is still in its infancy at this point but all signs lead to heavy adoption in the coming years. The technology behind stringing a bunch of servers together to share the load of processing billions of web pages at the same time keeps getting better, more reliable, and less expensive.
Perhaps the biggest success story of them all when it comes to cloud hosting is Google, they use tens (hundreds?) of thousands of commodity web servers to serve up the most popular site on the web to people of every country.
While many would love to hear Google offer such a service (and they may), we do have a few options right now. In fact, this site is hosted by MediaTemple on their (gs) GridService platform. It works quite well actually, my site is stored in a large Storage Area Network device and lots of servers have access to it at any given time. This allows my site to remain live and speedy in the event of a flood of readers coming all at once.
I’ll look at more of these services in the coming week but here are the major cloud/utility hosting providers right now:
- Amazon EC2/S3 is perhaps the most widely known and popular, they have fully adopted the utility computing but face problems with availability, speed, and a general lack of usability by all but the most experienced web developers.
- MediaTemple is the least expensive provider I’ve encountered and they provide a great grid hosting service.
- 3Tera offers enterprise level application hosting across a grid of servers.
- SoftLayer while not a ‘grid’ or ‘cloud’ hosting provider does offer many dedicated server options and load balancers so you could create your own Pie In the Sky. I’ve had servers with them in the past and they are my all-time favorite hosting company.
- ServePath offers grids of servers although I have no experience with them.
- Concentric also offers load balanced clustered servers for cloud computing
Stay tuned throughout the week for my blog series Pie In The Sky - Cloud Computing and the future of web hosting!
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Gannett Interviews
February 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Earlier in the week I attended two interview sessions with recruiting representatives from the Gannett company. I feel like they went really well and I must say that it’s comforting to know that ‘my job’ actually does exist now, when I began studying social and new media with a journalism concentration it was a little worrisome for my family not knowing whether or not I could get a job.
In speaking with the people from Gannett it’s pretty clear that they need people with skill sets similar to mine and the demand will only go up. Looking at the signup list for interviews from that day, there were fewer than 5 convergence journalism people, the rest were traditional media folk from television or newspaper.
It’s always nice to know that what you’ve worked so hard to achieve, an understanding and working professional knowledge of a field, may actually pay off in the form of a full-time position somewhere.
Of course it’s not wait and see if they call time, and hopefully they will. From the conversations I had with the recruiters it sounds like there are openings out there, and future openings that I would be qualified for and interested in.
Wish me luck and if you have any advice for me as I continue down the journey of my job search please let me know.
Make it a wonderful day and enjoy your weekend!
How I Want To Use Twitter
February 8, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, and my usage just keeps climbing, I really feel like a part of the community and want to share not only my knowledge with Twitter, but others as well. Twitter works for me in several ways, it provides a way for me to share my thoughts and ideas, a way to communicate and share with others, and a way to keep abreast on information no matter the topic.
I make generous use of the ‘Track’ command on Twitter for my cell phone. Although I sometimes get carried away and Track too many, or too hot a topic. During the Macworld 2008 Keynote a few short weeks ago, I tracked ‘MacWorld’ and ‘Steve jobs’ so yes, I’m partially responsible for the crash of Twitter during the keynote.
The information that I gained from hearing what others has to say about the product launches and the Reality Distortion Field was very interesting and useful. Getting that kind of insight into public opinion and thinking should prove extremely useful for the modern marketer.
Granted, I got over 1,100 text messages that morning alone, basically 1 every second, as fast as my iPhone could process them and print them on screen.
It’s times like that when Twitter really shines, it truly is an aggregator of infinite knowledge. I now have almost 200 followers on Twitter and I’m very proud for getting to that point, but the thing is this, I’m not doing enough to engage the minds of those who follow me. That’s the problem I’m currently working through, how do I motivate them to interact and ask and answer questions.
Some people like Chris Brogan and Jim Long have been on Twitter much longer than I have, but they have that special mix of followers (listeners) and true audience (interacters).
I’ll cut this particular post off at this point, but I think that I continue to use Twitter, that’s my goal, to interact more without loosing more time to using the web/txt interfaces, I need more interaction and networking within Twitter that I can integrate into my existing workflows.
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