Social Media Principles Apply to Blogs and Job Hunters Alike

Happy Saturday everyone.   I wasn’t going to write today but down here at the Lake of the Ozarks, all is calm and peaceful and the children have gone away to play some where.  So, I am cruising the internet trying to make sense of it all.  I’ve learned a few things about Social Media, remembered more and thought it might be a good summary to share with all of you.

Social media for marketing and job hunting are to incredibly similar not to see the obvious connections.  Both are trying to sell a product and both promote a brand (you have started your brand building right?)  They are both designed to make their way through the thunderous noise of the internet.  This landscape has become ever shifting and ever changing.  Everyone has become a content creator where Technorati indexes about 60 million blogs and Google searches for most terms produce millions of results.  The result is too much noise that has seemingly undone the purpose of searching the Internet and has produced a resurgence of human filtered search results that generalize those results and causes a homogenous crowd wisdom.

Marketing yourself, your blog, your site follows roughly the same pattern: Branding -> Positioning -> Integrating -> Claiming -> Syndication.  It is the pattern that I am in right now with my own job search.  Branding in this first week was job one with me.  Revising my own look and feel.  Updating my own credentials and making sure that I understand my own needs and picture of self.  Positioning that brand is also underway along with integrating that brand with my own content and claiming those results.  Syndication will come later as my reputation as a marketer in this space grows.  But lets talk about some ways to make these things happen.

So here are some steps that I have gleaned from around the Internet.  As I develop my own plan for using social networking for job hunting, here are some thing things I will be looking at:

To get started with your own blog and the message of you, it’s worth looking at about 5 steps.  You have seen these before, but lets examine them in terms of job hunting:

1. Increase linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help content travel
5. Encourage Mashup

Linkability

Focus on the sticky.  Well there is that all too annoying buzz phrase that has been passed around the Internet like a gift to give that no one can find someone to hate enough to give it to them.  What is should say is make it likable.  Make it enjoyable.  Make it useful.  Hrm…sounds just like a job candidate.  If you are the product and the brand, I must like you to hire you.  I must want to come to work and enjoy being with you.  You must not be a pain in the ass and you should probably have some talent.  Please note that unless your talent is what friends might call “uber”  a monkey beating on a keyboard can replace you.   I like you and am attracted to you.

Case in point here.  My friend Andrew at KP has got to be the most genuine guy I know.  He loves, he has passion, he’s easy with a smile.  He is kind and understanding and is loyal to his friends.  I met him at a Cardinals game in the box and instantly liked him.  He just “had it all together.”  But he is some kind accountant and there is no way our paths would cross in work.  That is until the RBI program was announced and was looking for leadership.  As you will see, baseball and I share a long and happy relationship and so I wrote an in depth letter to him applying for the manager spot.  I got the job and according to him mine was the note that stood out heads and tails above the others.  My passion showed through.  He hired me, because of it and I agreed to hit because I like him.  Our yin and yang relationship is easy and will easily transcend KPMG.  But I had no special talent for what he was asking for.  He liked me.  I got the job.

It applies to the job market and to selling anything.  I have to like it first.  How do we do that with the written word in blogs and other social media?  A few things come to mind:

• Updated content often
• Create sticky features like downloads, lists and rules
• Use catchy headlines and branding
• Follow permalink conventions

I think if you look at most of these you have in part described a very complete resume.  However, its all about the people liking you.
Tagging

In the 80′s I was first introduced to writing a resume for keywords.  The colleague advised that I should just have a list of keywords at the top of the resume that descibred what I wanted to and could do.  I did that and had a few control words in there that appeared no where else in the resume.  Wouldn’t you know that recruiters kept calling about the keywords only?  They hadn’t even read the rest of the resume as proven by them constantly asking me about Cobol.  I don’t program in it but Lawson Software is made with it.  They didn’t ask about Lawson just Cobol.  The other oddity is that I still get calls on this.  Some 20 years later.  Keywords just hang around.

The lesson is easy.  Make it easy to tag.  Here are some suggestions:

• Use quick buttons to let people save your blog to any social bookmarking tool they wish
• Add relevant tages to each blog post so these posts can appear in aggregations listed by keywords in sites like technorati
• “Claim” your posts first by bookmarking them in del.icio.us

Reward inbound links

Once a year in my neighborhood they kids, in costume, come to my door and beg for food.  I reward them candy.  It is easily the highlight of my year.  When you go on a job hunt, the ultimate reward is to come back again for a followup and eventually a job.  Reward those coming to see your abilities with a goodies too.  Here are a few things you can do:

• Display trackbacks and comments on the blog automatically
• Add a list of “blogs that link here” or “recent comments” to feature contributors to your blog more highly
• Offer thanks by adding a comment to a linking blog post or directly thanking linkers
• Add links to further thoughts as updates on your original post.

Help it travel

My dad used to tell me that if I wanted to hold public office or get a job that worked, I had to do the hard work of meeting people.  Your content has to do that for you on the Internet so help it out.  Consider it a personal extention of your expertise and your personality.  Help it along.  Here are a few ideas:

• Syndicate your content in RSS and provide direct links for visitors to subscribe
• Offer email subscriptions to content through services like Feedburner
• Dont be afraid to submit your own posts to sites like Digg or Marktd, assuming relevant content.
• Tell other bloggers about the blog or a recent post – esp. bloggers yo like.
• Sources:
  • RSS
  • Feedburner
  • Technorati
  • Digg
  • Del.ici.ous
  • Makrtd

Mashing

Finally is the idea mashing.  If you have a good idea, let it run free.  It will grow, multiply and come back to you 20 times over.  You then enjoy the benefit of non stop quoting and being perceived as an expert.  And that my friends is what you want if you want a job from all this silliness.  Here is some ideas for letting your ideas run free:

• Choose Creative Commons license for your content
• Find blog networks that can help you distribute content and fit it to the premise of your blog
• Pursue guest author or contributor arrangements with blogs in your industry to spread the word about your blog.
• Sources:
  • Creative Commons
  • Blog Burst
  • 9 Rules

Conclusions

Since I am in need of new employment, my read on these subjects might be influenced by that fact.  However, I think the comparison is valid, whether you sell product or the product of you, the same social media principles apply.  I feel they apply to social media tools and to metrics.  Subjects we’ll cover as we go.

As always, your comments are welcome.