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.
links for 2008-06-06
June 6, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
links for 2008-04-26
April 26, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
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Is Twitter worth $150 million?
links for 2008-04-08
April 8, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-07
April 7, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Trying to tame Apple Mail, let’s see if it can behave with Gmail IMAP, it gets one more chance. #
- retweeting from @acafourek http://www.twitterlocal.net - find "local" tweets #
- Trying out FontStruct, I’m not even sure where to start! #
- Have you imported all of your various email accounts into one Gmail account? I think I can consolidate a lot #
- Yikes! bloggers beware massive heart attacks: http://tinyurl.com/4zpfw2 #
- Good Morning Twitterville, I’m gearing up for a VERY busy week of meetings, projects, then heading to Vegas for the NAB Conference. #
- There were two doves eating the grass seed I put down in the yard yesterday, does that mean I’ll have a peaceful day or week? #
- @jowyang I remember seeing that "review" when it first posted, pretty darn funny, but not for those of us with such horrible allergies! #
- @newmediajim well thank goodness you made it in time! Are you using your fancy new HDcam all the time now? #
- @mufan96 Never heard of that issue before, interesting little problem. #
- @Adpuma @akelatal Hello! (why are we waving?) #
- Reading through the PBS Corp. web site about their BoDs and financials #
- @gapingvoid I’m sure they would, do you have a portfolio online anywhere of past work? #
- @robliberal I’ve used a WordPress plugin for several months to archive Tweets to my blog and am very happy with it #
- @mcompton I only have them for web access (got satellite about a year ago I dislike MediaCom so much) #
- Just finalized my job interview plans for next week while I’m Vegas. #
- ….Yeah even Social Media guys have to do laundry sometimes… #
- @jjprojects what shiny new things do you have now? #
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-01
April 1, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Made it back to Columbia, now comes the hard part, unpacking! #
- @chrisbrogan you seem like an ideal candidate for GrandCentral actually #
- @xphilter welcome to the club! #
- @lavosby I encourage SL to further adopt Twitter posts as a great way to enhance the ‘community’ surrounding your services. #
- @kambei, the real magic is when you hand a youngster an iPhone and they ‘know’ how to use it - it’s that user friendly! - #
- Wow, Blockbuster has now spammed two of my email accounts with "it’s been a while since you’ve rented, come back and try Total Access again" #
- @csamuel what’s your first app going to be? I’m still waiting for my invite #
- @mightykenny I currently have Netflix and love it! #
- @mightykenny I hadn’t realized they did that with the high def content, I’ll have to investigate (although I’m not HD yet) #
- I just successfully upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 - It was mostly painless, took about 15 minutes total #
- Good late morning twitterville, whole slew of errands scheduled today #
- Reading up on the April 1 jokes by Google today #
- @jackieKazil I’m reading coverage of this year’s Jokes on TC: Build Your Very Own Google Airplane <http://tinyurl.com/2pkb4y> #
- ha! Google Calendar "I’m feeling lucky" button got me a date with Paris Hilton tonight… #
- @Scobleizer as does Kansas City International Airport, Free WiFi rocks! #
- @acafourek you mean there is sun in Missouri? or just ‘natural light’
# - Took care of my academic duties by getting a cap and gown for graduation today, only a few weeks late #
- I’m in a class that just had an ambush award of $10k for the professor by University top officials #
- It’s a great day when people who love their jobs and provide such a great public service are thanked in a public way #
- @chrisbrogan, I have to disagree, I vote to get rid of landlines altogether. I haven’t had one for 3.5 years now and won’t look back #
- Just back from going to the grocery store with a friend, I’ve some blogging I need to do tonight! #
- @cimota @chockenberry sure there is, hit the "shift" key twice and it illuminates blue, caps lock #
links for 2008-03-20
March 20, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I’m testing an iPhone Wordpress admin UI
March 17, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
hello world, please bear with me on this post.
I’m testing out a newish WordPress plugin that makes the admin menu look just like a native iPhone application.
It seems to work pretty well, hopefully this post will be live here in a minute.
links for 2008-03-16
March 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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I just joined this NING social network for journalists in the 21st Century.
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Beautiful, Beautiful fonts
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.
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