How to?

As I said last week looking at new media technologies from the outside is a somewhat scary; where do you jump in and how do you even start to get yourself up to speed? It’s not like I didn’t know social media was an unparalleled networking tool, but I’ve been putting off signing on as my true self. I’m really concerned about privacy, (this is a middle aged person's hang-up apparently; teenagers and twenty-somethings barely give it a second thought.) I’ve come to realize I’m deluded about the number of people who will actually be looking at what I post. It will likely be only a few friends, family and classmates who have their arms twisted into reading my stuff. Nevertheless, what people see on the net could potentially be their first impression of me and when I’m looking for a job that impression has to be a good one. My goal is to present the best possible, most realistic vision of myself while maintaining some semblance of privacy and my uncertainty about exactly how to do that has prevented me from trying. Which media do I use? What should I put up? What is too much? How do I organize it all? The following proposals make good sense to me so far.

How to Use Social Media to Find a Job in 7 Not-Overwhelming Steps: 

• Clean up your profile on all the social media sites that you already use…no boozy photos of you at a party Saturday night  
• Work on your profile, your personal description…use lots of key words, searchable descriptors
• Twitter…follow and tweet to relevant recruiters and firms you’re interested in, you’ll hear immediately when they are looking for someone
• Subscribe to RSS feeds within your industry
• Get LinkedIn, cultivate connections and ask for recommendations
• Use facebook judiciously, it’s still mainly a personal networking site not necessarily a business one. Consider a facebook ad.
• Keep in mind, whatever you post is searchable and could potentially be seen by hundreds of people…including potential employers

(adapted from a report by social media consultant Dan Rutherford and recruiter Liam Morgan at Videojug and MDIA 1045 course work)

By now I’ve come to realize blogging and tweeting and linking-in are not brain surgery. Once you get started you discover there are lots of great resources to help along the way (for example, my all time favourite YouTube has a how-to-video for everything!) Yes, social media puts out a lot of information, but there are tools to help you sift through it, manage it and, if need be, delete it. I don’t have to know every little dot and dash to be social media literate I just have to be willing to watch carefully, dive in and, of course, know how to do a proper boolean search.

Stay tuned, next time I’ll talk about some of the useful connections I’ve made. Someone I didn’t know replied to one of my tweets with an intelligent comment, yeah!