– Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This post is the first in my new series with communications advice and social media tips for college students making the transition from campus to work. I will share the same techniques and principles I use with business leaders to help you learn how to communicate like a professional.

Getting hired is all about presenting yourself well and effectively describing who you are and what you bring to the table over and above other candidates. While you should focus efforts on meaningful and targeted in-person interactions, you also need to be mindful of your online reputation.

Most hiring managers now routinely search job applicants online. This means after they meet you or read your resume, they will type your name into Google. You want to make sure the search returns information that is consistent with your resume, cover letter and how you presented yourself in-person.

Here are 5 common mistakes that you should fix before you begin to network and apply for positions.  Also, make sure to utilize your career center on campus. They can help you with this and are there to advise and guide you through all aspects of planning your career.

1. Search brings up damaging information.
Take time every few weeks to search your name and keywords (like your college) using all the major search engines. Delete anything that would detract from you as a professional or how you want to be perceived. Make sure your Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other media sharing sites are locked down by setting privacy levels appropriately so you shield your personal activities from the search engines.

2. Search brings up nothing.
An online search with no results could leave the impression that (1) you are hiding something or (2) you have done nothing substantial during your college years. At a minimum you should set up a LinkedIn page. Think of this as your own personal website and use it to your advantage! See #3.

3. No LinkedIn page
If you haven’t taken time to set up your LinkedIn page, set aside 30-45 minutes to establish one. Your career center on campus can help you and it’s free. Go to http://www.linkedin.com and click ‘Join Today’. Sign up for the Basic Account. Do NOT click ‘Sign up with Facebook’. You want to keep these accounts separate. Here are the areas you should complete:

• Photo. If you don’t have a head shot in professional attire (dark suit jacket/light colored shirt/tie for men and suit jacket/conservative blouse and jewelry for women), then have a friend take one in decent lighting. You may also be able to use your formal fraternity/sorority photo or school picture.
• Profile. Like your resume, it should be brief and focused on those skills and experiences you are ‘selling’ to employers. You don’t need to list every job and club. Work with your career advisor to select the most meaningful ones. Just as you would with your resume and cover letters, proofread and fix grammatical errors and inconsistencies.
• Connections. Search and find classmates, professors, colleagues, friends and family that you know in person and invite them to join your network. Always, always include a personal message.
• Groups. Search and find Groups that match your interests. These could be professional associations, former employers and topical interest groups. At a minimum you should belong to the LinkedIn Groups for the companies and organizations you applying to, your college and at least one area of career interest.

4. Incomplete or unprofessional LinkedIn.
You took the time to set up a LinkedIn page but your profile picture looks like it’s from spring party weekend, you have no connections and no description in your profile. Fix this now!

5. Too much social media activity.
If you Tweet, make sure it is professional.  If it isn’t, then lock it down as you did with Facebook.  You can also share updates on LinkedIn, but don’t go crazy using this feature.  You don’t want to give the impression you spend all your time online. Follow the same rules as with your Profile, if it supports your career goals, post the status. This can be information about a professional event you are attending, a link to a news story that featured your work or a link to an article you found interesting.

Are those the words of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur? Not even close. Pope Benedict XVI said this in his annual message about the importance of human interaction and relationship-building on social networking platforms. The 85-year-old leader of the Roman Catholic Church now tweets in nine languages and has a YouTube channel. He is in good company with other spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama, who has more than six million Twitter followers, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel.

Business leaders are also visible on social networks; Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson, and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh all have a social media presence.

It’s not just well-known leaders and celebrities who are embracing social media. More and more organizations and companies are empowering employees to use social technologies to make their brand more visible, engage with customers and understand marketplace perceptions.

Interactions on social networking sites can help organizations big and small:

• reinforce and extend their visibility
• uncover new opportunities, customers and talent
• monitor and track conversations to gain intelligence to better serve customers.

For a five step framework on enabling your organization for social, read the full article in CW Bulletin on the International Association of Business Communicators website.

Image courtesy of Mr. Lightman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As companies work to craft ways to extend their visibility in the social space, they are turning more and more to their own staff. The notion of employees as brand evangelists is not new and of course is not limited to social channels. I wrote about this 2 years ago.    

In the marketing profession, companies, like IBM, are investing in retraining staff to engage with customers and prospects in the social space. As Ed Abrams, IBM midmarkets vice president discusses in this post, IBM has been training the marketing team to use social technology to not just fuel demand but to gain insights from dialogues occurring on social channels. “We have changed our marketing and communication team,” Abrams said. “We had to learn how and where to most effectively leverage all this social media capability. For example, we had people who were direct mail specialists but now are specialists in how best to use Twitter. It’s the evolution of marketing.”

Nike too decided it was time to have their own employees run with social campaigns and made headlines last week with its decision to bring social media in-house. It’s expected more companies will follow suit.

It will be interesting to watch how the agency relationship adapts to the increased confidence companies have with social technologies and their desire to own the conversation.

Image courtesy of Frame Angel / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

It’s that time of the year for lists so here’s mine for the most used, and sometimes confused, social media marketing terms. But first, let’s stick them into one simple sentence:

Digital natives are naturals at social communication and understand the power of inbound marketing and content marketing as techniques to engage customers.

For those who make a living in marketing, you of course can explain what this means. For those who can’t, here’s a glossary along with a few links for further study.

Happy 2013 and good luck with all your social initiatives this year.

1. Digital native – This is what we call individuals who have grown up using social technology, aka the Facebook Generation. They live a portion of their lives online, naturally, and are the reason why companies are investing heavily in social media marketing.

2. Social communication – Isn’t all communication social? Of course, but we like to distinguish that which occurs using social technologies and networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, blogging, online communities, etc.

3. Inbound marketing – Traditional outbound tactics like advertising, cold calls, and direct mail overtly promote the business to target customers. Inbound marketing is different; it makes customers find you, by drawing them into your website through search (via SEO), content marketing, (see #4), email marketing and analytics.

4. Content marketing – When non-promotional material is published and shared by your business through blogs, micro-blogs, e-books and news stories, this is called content marketing. Of course the content must relate to your business but it does not push a particular product. This can be called thought leadership and is designed to showcase the expertise of your employees and of course to drive traffic to your website (inbound marketing).

5. Engage – To engage is to communicate with other users or companies online through social platforms. Examples are sharing content, liking Facebook posts, commenting on blogs, and writing reviews. The ultimate goal of engagement is to convert the engaging person into a real customer. There is an entire social analytics industry that offers products and services to measure how effective your social media marketing efforts are at doing this and how to adjust campaigns to engage the right prospects.

Here’s a few links if you are interested in more vocabulary. What are your top social media words for 2013?

Social media A to Z : A glossary of terms for 2013 (Social Media Today)
Glossary of social media terms (IBM)
26 Social media marketing terms you need to know (Social Strand Media)

Questions like these are at the heart of a new project I’m working on with a team of business professionals and educators. Funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Education Development Center (EDC), our ultimate goal is to provide tools and materials that will aid educators in developing effective curriculum and training programs to prepare future professionals for the ‘social business’ workplace. 

Join me in providing your expert opinion on what it takes to be a social technology enabled professional by sharing your knowledge in this short survey. 

Your comments will help us refine this document before we share it with educators.  As a token of our appreciation, if you are among the first 100 individuals to complete the survey, EDC will send you a Starbucks eGift card. 

Launch the survey now!

As part of my job, I help individuals learn how to use social media to define and manage their online professional reputations. Most people know what they need to do, but have not invested the time and ongoing effort to establish and nurture a good online image. I’ve found there are common mistakes being made that with a little extra effort and focus are easy to overcome. Here are five I see frequently that can detract from a professional image, along with ways to address them.  

1. Not searching your name on a regular basis. How can you control your image if you don’t know what people see when they Google you? Google your name on a regular basis, start with once a month.
2. A poorly written bio. Take the time, or ask a good writer, to write a succinct, summary biography, aka personal branding statement. There are countless books and online resources to help you. I found this article nets it out well – 3 Steps to an Outstanding Personal Branding Statement.
3. An unprofessional photo. Aim for a good headshot that looks like you now, not 10 years ago. You should look professional and approachable.
4. Inconsistency.  Strive for consistency across all of your web properties (Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn, company website, etc.). Use the same bio / summary paragraph and photo.  
5. Setting up a Twitter account or blog and not posting to it. This is hard work. If you are not inclined to create content and engage with people through blogging or microblogging, then don’t do it.

We have an innate interest in our fellow human beings. This is why Facebook is now a daily behavior for so many of us and has made Mark Zuckerberg the world’s richest primatologist, according to Lionel Tiger in a recent WSJ article.  

The corporate intranet is still the mainstay for large organizational  communications, albeit shrinking due to the advent of enterprise social media. Featuring real people and their individual stories and views is a great way to liven up the intranet storyline and generate goodwill across the organization, especially those with many virtual workers.  

We recently launched two series that star employees which have taken off better than expected. The first, titled “Get to know” features an individual each week through a Q&A format where they respond to questions including “What was your first day at IBM like? and “Do you have any hidden talents?”. The other called “Perspectives” features a person who shares a unique work experience and what they learned.

These are easy to produce using a set interview template. Here’s the two we use for our series. You can modify them to suit the culture and message strategy for your organization.

Template-Get to know

Template-Perspectives

Our employees look forward to seeing their colleagues in the limelight. What other tactics have you used to weave the employee story into your communications strategy?

“Pay attention to what I’m saying not how I’m saying it”, said Margaret Thatcher to one of her detractors after he accused her of being shrill and emotional. But style is as important as substance.

Margaret Thatcher

I saw The Iron Lady last night and was truly amazed by Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher and particularly inspired by the scenes where Streep was reenacting Thatcher’s speeches. The movie shows how Thatcher’s speaking style was carefully practiced to maximize the impact of her words.  In particular, she was coached to lower the pitch of her voice and fine tune her physical presence. It’s an understatement to say Thatcher did turn out to be one of the most powerful woman speakers, and leaders, of our times.

What can we learn from this?  We learn that carefully chosen words, spoken clearly and with conviction can inform, inspire and move people to action. We learn that we should spend as much time honing our delivery as creating our content.  We do this by practicing in front of a friend, colleague or spouse and being open to suggestions. We should also pay careful attention to speakers who inspire us to get ideas how to take our skills to the next level.

Here are a few pointers I’ve picked up that have helped me along the way. I hope they help you too.  

• Stand up tall
• Be calm
• Use the ‘presidential pause’ for effect
• Control the emotion in your voice
• Control the cadence of your speech, not too fast or slow, but lively enough to hold attention

How do you prepare to make sure you perform your best?

Screen grabs - Intuit, Bain and IBM

   

Here’s few companies that have powerful employee brand messages. Like candidates vying for votes, these brands know how to generate a positive emotional reaction and translate that into potential employees. 

• Bain – People. Passion. Results.
• Google – Let’s work together.
• IBM Global Business Services – Be part of something special.
• REI –  People really (really) like working at REI.
• Intuit – Innovate. Connect. Grow.

Google blackout 18Jan2012

Major websites including Wikipedia, Google, Wired and Flickr are taking a stand today against anti-piracy legislation on the table in the US Senate- PROTECT IP Act (PIPA); and US House –  Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). 

In short, the original intent of SOPA and PIPA is to stop people from illegally downloading TV shows and movies, (primarily from foreign web sites) but the language in the legislation is so broad, it could impact sites like this WordPress blog and many others including Wikipedia, Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr and Google. 

I support this protest and believe that if made into law this legislation would disrupt free and open sharing of content. It puts power into the hands of the US Attorney General to police and shutdown sites. 

Wikipedia blackout 18Jan2012

I do support current US law, which will not shut down sites but require them to remove copyright-infringing content upon the request of copyright holders. 

Measures by governments and big media to regulate the Internet need to be carefully crafted so that they do not damage free and open conversations and restrict online freedoms.   

To learn more see -  Sopa and Pipa anti-piracy bills controversy explained (BBC Online) and Protest on web uses shutdown to take on two piracy bills (NY Times).