Posts Tagged ‘social media’
Fired Now what? A Social Job Hunt beginning.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 October 2009 04:56 Written by Mike Wednesday, 21 October 2009 12:51
So you have been fired. You are not alone and unless you have been working under a rock; you already know that in the last 2 years America has shed a record numbers of jobs. Thousands are being “fired” by the month. A number even larger than the Great Depression. The largest decrease since the end of WWII. With more losses looming on the horizon, many people are wondering when will it end. Will I get fired too?
Well it does appear to be getting somewhat better as signs of hiring are being reported by the media. I threw this guide together to help some people that have been asking me how to “do the twitter thing”. Good luck to all of you 
It takes some time to build and develop a solid social network. There is no 30 second quick fix networking class that actually works. Here are a few tips and some solid advice. Please share this by passing this along to your peers, friends, family members, or anyone else affected by the current employment downturn.
Tags: Job Search, social media | Posted under Geek Tech | No Comments
Izeafest 2009 in review
Last Updated on Thursday, 12 November 2009 10:32 Written by Mike Monday, 5 October 2009 01:23
Izeafest is a tech savvy blogger & social media evangelists convention that I had the pleasure of attending recently. Ted Murphy kicks off the event, well actually it was Ted’s look alike brother that came out screaming and insanely intense. He got everyone going and must have yelled “WWWOOOOOOOOO” at least 10 times with his tongue sticking out. He finally introduced Ted and the ‘fest’ was underway. Ted talked a bit about what izea was and how it came to be. He talked about his building of his personal brand and designing sites like the launch of sponzai for sponsored tweets. I am not really sure what to make of Ted, I can’t really tell if he is sincere or just in it to win it. marketing guys are a lot about image, Teds no different.
@copyblogger, is up next and opens with a video address from @problogger who was supposed to be there, but do to scheduling conflicts well Brian apparently took his place. Brian does a great job discussing how he made his way to the digg front page, and his subsequent auto-ban. apparently digg users are a strange brew. He talks about how digg is irrelevant to him and how the traffic pretty much sucked anyway. Does a nice long series of Q/A with audience. Interesting questions about blogging, and marketing your content.
Some guitarist comes out after lunch, playing some smoking leads from a lot of popular rock songs. Sea World VP cuts him short. Poor guy. Sea World precedes to talk about brand and their 10 properties for 30 minutes. I liked the guitar dude better.
Panel discussion with @brettbum moderating. A marketing session for blogger’s. Guess what? A-listers are snobby! yeah no kidding? Disclosure and transparency issues discussed in detail. Consensus seems to agree that if disclosure is made then paid posts are acceptable. Survey of audience re: how many bloggers have been paid to blog. Crowds hands indicate around 40% or so. How much marketing dollars spent have you been in charge of? Not much from this group.
- crowd sourcing questions
- transparency and authenticity are cited repeatedly.
SugarRae conducts several site evaluations Xomba, a cancer social community, and I offer up jobshouts.com to be ripped apart. I am grateful for the expert advice. It will surely come in handy later in jobshouts development path. Greywolf discusses building back links from quality sites, Rae also talks about correcting our 302 redirects to 301 redirects to a category page. Interesting one that I had not thought of thanks for that. She tells me to buy the domain name jobshout.com because people will mistype it.
I have to say I was a tad alienated with the session with @pop17, and that other blonde chick. the crowd was lets just say a little unimpressed. Some rather funny tweets were flying around the room despite the severe shortage of wireless access.
Friday Night there was an event at the @icebar, on International drive. Lot’s of bloggers and media personalities on hand for a Karaoke contest. One amazing performance of Journey’s “Don’t stop believing” by Trevor the geek that ran the izeafest show.
Saturday’ s opening Keynote by @technosailor was a bang. Personal brands don’t mean squat. “No one cares about you”, really. He made a point immediately then outlined what it takes to be an influencer, a community builder. Smart Guy and the only one I gave props to after they spoke. Way to mix it up Aaron!
Liz Strauss talks about who she is, where she has been, how she is sure of herself. How she started out shy and not comfortable in front of people, and about how she offers value to the community. Her outlook is impressive and the shyness bit really struck a chord with Robin.
Chris Brogan was one of the main reasons I wanted to attend this event, I know everyone knows that Chris is a master of building communities and presence. He speech was good, candid, informative, educational, funny! Just about any adverb you could use, Chris has it covered. I look forward to attending other events like this one. I learned a lot about which way the marketing trends are moving, personal branding, technology, trends and the human social interaction methods that are evolving the way we communicate.
Tags: events, networkings, social media | Posted under Social Networks | 5 Comments
How JobShouts will help change the job board landscape.
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:00 Written by Mike Monday, 6 April 2009 11:35
It’s been just over 2 months since we launched jobshouts.com. In that short amount of time we have learned quite a lot about how the job & employment sectors are evolving. The job boards/print media businesses are in flux. Newspapers are filing bankruptcy protection. Social media and the interwebs are forcing huge companies to evolve. How much longer before the job boards (that are owned by large media conglomerates) are affected as well?
We have talked to several fortune 500 HR professionals. Employers are looking to shave expenses in the recruitment sector. There is a lot of competition for the job advertising dollar. The traditional pay to post job boards are taking a huge financial hit. How long will they continue to deliver an abundance of candidates that are under-qualified for your jobs?
Interesting companies are taking the lead and bringing cost effective solutions to HR departments and recruiters. From job boards and search engines; to applicant tracking systems. A new breed of job site scrapers, spiders, and applications are indeed changing the landscape.
Companies like Jobshouts & Linkup.com will be leading the way by offering cost effective solutions.
Jobshouts job listings are placed into the twitter stream. This makes your job instantly visible via search.twitter.com, twitterjobsearch.com or to candidates using a 3rd party client like tweetdeck or twhirl. Real-time search? perfect for the job market.
Linkup.com pulls jobs from employer only job sites. A fresh new idea, one that will probably be imitated by many in the near future. Linkup is unlike the aggregate sites like indeed & simply hired. Those sites are mostly scraping the big boards, crap in, crap out.
Getting job search results in Google is not effective. Unless you are using a large board, the challenge of finding candidates is difficult to say the least. Even if you are a Fortune 500 company with a highly visible, expensive web site. The chances of your job listings showing up in organic results is slim to none. This only works for candidates that are highly intelligent, and familiar with Boolean search algorithms, and people looking to work for your company directly.
Social media is changing that. Did someone say Twitter search? Twitter is quickly gaining ground as a tool to search what is happening right now. Real time search is the new search industry buzzword. What better place to have your jobs exposed? At jobshouts we feel that twitter’s search engine is a perfect medium to broadcast job openings. Fresh relevant content that will deliver highly focused candidates.
Twitter has gained immense traction as a networking tool. One that is highly effective at finding information that is relevant and pertinent to its users. That is if you know how to use it effectively. I wonder how many affiliate marketing deals we will see. Twitter 101 anyone?
Google is a great search engine, however for job seekers it is often, confusing and difficult. It is highly biased to the industry veterans, the career builder and monster.com sites. They have bought and paid for every single search keyword related to employment, effectively blocking the competition from delivering real jobs to the average job seeker.
Watch what Google says about twitter closely. First was the public downplay “twitter is the poor man’s email”, then comes the rumors of negotiations to purchase (that’s happening now). Then a likely buy offer, countered by Microsoft’s anti-trust bandwagon in an attempt to block Google’s monopolization of real-time search traffic. Personally I would like to see twitter remain its own entity.
Quit rambling Mike! You said how can jobshouts change this?
We have given thought to releasing our platform as Open Source to further development. Our aim is to improve the job board industry. Exposing our platform as open source is a logical step as our code is based on another open source product called jobberbase. Re-releasing the twitter integration and user profiles that we added to the US development community would improve the product immensely. While making it very simple to integrate within a corporate web space.
If Jobshouts is released as OS, you can bet you will see a change in the job board market. Employers will be able run their own boards. Job boards will shift from the pay to post model to a pay per click, or free model. It’s exciting to be part of a huge market that is ripe for change.
A centralized database could provide millions of jobs to thousands of boards, localized, specialized, niche, sales, IT, medical, HR you name it the sky is the limit. This is my vision of how the job board market could take shape. There are many others that feel this way. We have talked to quite a few and will likely align ourselves with some key players in the very near future. Stay tuned for further developments.
I would love to see high quality, fresh relevant jobs delivered right in front of the eyeballs of those who need it most. The jobseeker. That and of course our original goal of delivering a cost effective solution to employers.
What do you think? How can we improve on this? What do you bring to the table? D you want to work with us to build a better mousetrap?
Tags: job board, Job Search, social media | Posted under Geek Tech | No Comments
Why is social networking not working?
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:01 Written by Mike Monday, 23 March 2009 06:19
I read a blog post earlier today, that got me to thinking. In today’s climate a lot of people are out of work, and scrambling to social media sites to connect with peers in hopes of finding employment. However a lot of them are finding something a little different.
Networking is not something new, that is something humans have done for ages. What is new are sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, & the army of copycats that are rushing to cash in on the social media craze.
So what are you supposed to do? Well each person will take a different approach to social media. I don’t really think that there is a tried and true 100% successful method to putting social media to work for you. What I can tell you is that you will get out of it what you put into it.
Rushing in setting up profiles on every site you can will get you nowhere, you have to participate. You have to take part. You have to give something to receive. Networking is two-way communications. If you’re out of work and looking to connect with someone to gain employment here are some tips from Stephen Van Vreede at No Stone Unturned and his recent blog post.
1. Networking is a two-way street. Unfortunately too often we wait until we are in desperate need of something, like a job, to start building an effective network. And once that happens, then we scramble to tap into all of our resources. The problem, however, is that we forget the basic tenet of networking: Give and Take. People who understand that do well at networking in general and especially at social networking in particular. So don’t get on these social networking sites and be a taker only.
2. Don’t miss your chance to be generous to someone else. The main plea we hear at NoddlePlace.com from job seekers is that they don’t have a large network. However, when we encourage them to meet other job seekers and start networking with them, they don’t want to speak to them unless that person “has something for them.” Although it is certainly understandable, after all networking is a long, arduous process, it is also pretty short sighted. So along the same lines as #1, search out people on these sites that you might be able to offer some advice to or throw a job lead to. You don’t have to promise anyone a job, but maybe you could pass along their resume or recommend a headhunter you’ve worked with?
3. Don’t wait around to be noticed. Too often people sign up for social networking sites and then sit around and wait for someone to notice them. Or they simply fail to get involved. It’s kind of like attending a face-to-face event and then standing in the corner refusing to speak with anyone. It won’t be very effective for you. Look for forum areas or groups you can join and participate in. How does that lead to a job, you might ask? Most people on these sites are just like you, eager to meet other people, and they understand the “give and take” principle of networking. You will be surprised at how many people are willing to give you leads, recommend resources/recruiters, and help in any way they can.
4. Fill in your profile. Many people neglect their profiles on social media sites. If you aren’t willing to fill in the profile, then I am not sure you can expect these sites to work for you. Be sure to state clearly the position you are seeking, where, and in what industry.
Here is why I think you should take this to heart. I never claimed to be a social networking guru, but I do know people, and making one on one connections. Would you want to be friends with the overbearing, Hey! listen to me I’m important jerk that just won’t shut-up? Or with someone that just helped you figure out a printer driver issue that has been bugging you for a week?
It makes much more sense to me. I would certainly want to help someone that has already helped me in some way. Could this just happen to you. YES! Will it? Well that is going to be up to you. Can Social media land you that next job? Sure it can help you connect, but you still have to sell yourself. What do you think, are you up to the task?
Tags: Networking, social media | Posted under Life | 1 Comment