There is Lazy and there is LinkedIn Lazy
LinkedIn is a great tool, but it has also facilitated a new era of laziness in terms of meeting people and making connections.
My favourite email that I receive from LinkedIn is the following;
"So and so has listed you as a colleague and wants to connect with you". No, I'm pretty sure you don't work here (doing a quick look around the office I don't see your face anywhere) and I'm doing a quick run through in my head... and yeah I've never met you either.
Being a colleague is the first option in the "How do you know this person?" options list. So everyone picks it AND they all leave the default message in there without giving any context as to why this person might be contacting you. Think about it, if I met you at a party, we both had a beer in hand and I went up to you and said - "Hey, Jeff, we've worked together, let's connect." - Jeff's first response would probably be - "WTF? And no". And it should be, because you wouldn't do that in person, it would be more like - "Hey Jeff, oh you work at Intertrode Inc and you do C#. Are you happy there because I have some blah, blah, blah" - you get the idea. And remember this is a limit on how much you can write so its not like you're going to write a novel, all you need is a sentence of two.
Sorry recruiters but you guys are the worst for this, not all, but unfortunately a significant majority. By far the worst invite I have received is one addressed to someone else, when I responding saying I'm not that person the response back was - "No, that was meant for you", not even a sorry or oops for the mistake... why yes... I would love to work with someone who can't even write down my name.
The sad thing is that there are so many other options below this this option which would provide so much more value to their cause - we share the same groups (I use this one a lot when introducing myself to people to give some context to the request - i.e., this is how I found you, I'm not some crazy stalker), classmate (never used it), done business together, friend or just plain old I don't know you, but I have your email address. Its really not that hard to do.
If we break this out with some simple Math;
The Lazy Way
Estimated Time to change a drop-down menu 5s
Estimated Time to write a custom message 0s
Total 5s
The New Way
Estimated Time to change a drop-down menu 5s
Estimated Time to write a custom message 60s
Total 65s
So using my keen skills in mathematics, it looks like writing a custom message would take approximately 60s more than not writing one. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa - yes I know you might be sending out a hundred of these types of invites on a daily basis and that could equate to an additional 1 hour and 40 minutes of extra work you'd have to do? Well put it this way, when I receive an invite (or an InMail) from someone wanting to connect and giving me some additional context to why they want to connect, this piques my interest greatly, they go to the top of the list and I'm more likely to respond immediately to their request.
So really, the question becomes - are you willing to invest an extra 20s - 60s to really meet someone and get put to the top of their list? Or are you happy with rolling the dice?
How Social Media has changed the Interview Process
I'm not big on interviewing people, this isn't a secret, and its quite common for me to hire someone, spend a few weeks getting to know them and then have them come up to me and say - "Wow, working with you is totally not what I thought it would be when we first interviewed". This is true, I can count the number of really great, knock my socks off interviews that I have been a part of where I have left the room saying - "Need to get them".
By far and large my biggest complaint is the answer to the first question I always ask;
"Do you know what we do?"
The correct answer to this question is "Yes, this is what I think you are doing...", even if they are wrong or make a misstep along the way, their stock has just gone up because they came prepared. They took the time to research the company, our products and our culture before they got to the interview. That says they care about being in front of me trying to get a job. Now we can move onto the more important part of the interview (which is where I really want to spend my time).
I'd say easily 85% of the time, people answer no to this question while some fall into the elusive 5% category - "I can BS my way through this" category where they always fail... horribly and miserably but in some cases admirably and oddly entertaining. Since I graduated from University, I've had the benefit of the Internet (going back to 2000) as a research tool, but in the past 11 years the amount of information available as a prospective job candidate has grown by leaps and bounds.
Take my own experience (as of a few months ago);
First Job
- Company website (brochureware)
Current Job
With all this information to you (at your fingertips) there is no excuse for someone to come into an interview without knowing anything about your company. Look at that list again, I only listed the heavy hitters but I can simply search for a company and I might find postings on customer forum sites and newsgroups (how do they interact with their customers?). Before you even have the interview you can be following their tweets (to see if they have a strategy and/or to garner information on them). And maybe they will start following you?
By far and large, LinkedIn is the big winner here and why not, it offers company profiles, feeds on what its doing and it lists all associated people to this company on their profile page. Never have I been able to do a profile lookup on the guy that was interviewing me and had the opportunity to know their professional background before I entered the room. And if they've posted their photo to their profile you can put the name to the face when you enter the building. How amazing is that? And how relaxing is it to know what you're going into before you even get there. Isn't that where all the stress in an interview comes from?
As an Interviewee you have no excuse to not be armed with the most current information on what company and position you are interviewing for. As the Interviewer do you really want to settle for someone who spent ZERO effort getting up to speed on your organization? What does that say to them as a candidate? Is this how they'll operate when you throw a new task at them?
The only excuse I would accept to someone not being able to tell me what my company is about is if their dog ate their computer AND only if they had pictures.
In case you are curious, the following account is by and large the best interview I have ever had. The candidate sitting across from me knew our business inside and out, came armed with some great ideas for our product line and had taken each required technology that we listed on our application (that he did not have) and put together some small a demo showing what he did with it before the interview. He had about a week to prepare give or take a day. I was sold in 5 minutes, everything else was gravy - I left the room needing to get him... that's how each and every interview should go.
How I increased my Online Presence in 1 Year
Tomorrow, is the last day at my current employer and I start on a new path of starting my own company (see blog.openjive.com for more information on this endeavour). One question I have received a lot over the past couple of weeks is how I increased my presence over the last year... and coincidentally this does correspond with the "Year In Review" I have been wanting to do on my RaceCondition... so voila... two birds... one stone.
So here's what I did.
RaceCondition Blog
It all starts with the blog. I started this blog in June 2010, mainly because my brain was starting to feel like Johnny Mnemonic when he had that brain overload thing going on. And I had waaay too much empty time in airports, hotels and on planes as I was travelling the US so it felt like the perfect time to get it going. I initially started off slow, just writing when I had an idea, not pushing it and then work would get in the way so I would start doing it about once a month. In January 2011, I turned this around and started writing down ideas wherever I was, even if they were one line snippets, I'd email them to myself for later. From there I would work on a schedule of trying to get out one entry a week. I've been holding pretty true to this schedule and sometimes even throw out the random thought that might be a paragraph. To watch my performance I have found tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot's BlogGrader to be insanely useful. Right now my SEO rating is in the toilet so that is something I am still/always working on and trying to figure out. One thing I will say, that other bloggers have started to pick up on as well - StumbleUpon is an unbelievably fantastic source for traffic. Most of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon and when I post a blog, I immediately share it across all the relevant channels for traffic - Twitter, Facebook (sometimes), LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google +/Buzz and Digg.
A great example of consistently smart, well-timed and often very short blogs is Seth Godin's blog, it's a great read. I subscribe to his blogs so I get them daily to my phone and rarely do I read them via my RSS feed. In addition, it's a great blog and a great way to start your day and get you thinking.
So now you've got the ball rolling and people are starting to subscribe to your feeds, read your writings, maybe you're getting some comment SPAM (they all don't love you that much) and you want some more?
LinkedIn
I placed my focus on LinkedIn at the beginning, someone in one of the groups referred to this as Platforming - whereby you don't do a shotgun approach to all social media but focus on one or two first, get really good at it and move on. If you are on LinkedIn and don't belong to any groups you are missing out, there is so much content coming from that channel it is utterly amazing. Not too mention the ongoing active discussions going on within those groups will help you learn a lot and will also build up your credibility in your area of expertise. When you start interacting with people, make a connection with them so they can continue to see what you are doing on an ongoing basis, you never know where opportunity will spring from. People will see you providing answers and will go to your profile, on your profile they will see what you do, when they see you do they will see your blog.
When you add your blog to your profile, make it a custom URL (instead of the default - My Company or My Blog - this will allow you to call it like it is - RaceCondition Blog. Get your profile to 100% completeness. Why? Because the last part is the hardest, sometimes you need to ask people for recommendations, and yes it is better to receive and sometimes by giving out really good, valuable recommendations to your peers they will reciprocate without you asking (most of the time). Last but definitely not least, create a good title that explains what you do, these are your keywords to how people can find you via the LinkedIn Search Engine. Don't make it a collection of buzzwords that don't fit together, take the time and do it right and you will reap the rewards. I recently changed my title 2 weeks ago and saw a surge in my profile stats. Lastly (again), watch your profile stats, see who is coming to look at your profile? Are they worth making a connection with and getting to talk to more? You decide, but now you know and the decision is in your hands.
I only recently upgraded my account to a LinkedIn Premium Plus account (about 3 months ago), up until then I was running in free mode and was able to do all of the above with the free version. The paid version of LinkedIn just gave me more access to my profile stats as well as being able to join the OpenLink network.
Twitter
After I had a good handle on LinkedIn, I moved onto Twitter (as of Nov 2010). I don't know everything about Twitter and am still trying to figure it out. Right now I see little traffic coming from my twitter feed when I post by blogs to there. However, I like to think I am getting reach to people that are interested in similar topics of mine and I'm always on the lookout for the ReTweet where one of my followers likes my most recent blog post so much that they retweet it to their followers, instead of going out to my 130+ followers, it might have been retweeted to another 400+ users. That is reach and that is immediate. Key things I have learned about twitter, it drives content so go read it. People are constantly promoting their own content, if you are following them, take some time to read it, if it's great retweet it - do unto others remember - but always, always be sincere about it. I hate empty retweets and always try and throw a comment in about someone's blog to give it some personal context as to what I did and did not like. Twitter is more about your blog postings though, it is about what you are reading and what you are doing. I try to post questions to my followers (or some subject matter experts) on topics of interest - use the hash tags, those are key to drilling down into your areas of interest - it shows people that you are actively working in these areas and gives you some more street cred. I use Klout as my Data Analytics tool for Twitter, I don't get all the algorithmic heuristics but for the most part it shows me how I'm doing, and where I need to improve on.
So in a nutshell, this has been me over the last year, I haven't had to sacrifice any goats or go through in any crazy rituals, I just worked at it, I wrote content, I put myself out there and I kept trying to keep things fresh and tie it to what is going on in the world and my fields of interest. I'm not done yet, I still see myself as being on the launchpad but now my fuel tanks are filled to capacity and we're ready to launch.
My current stats today stand at;
LinkedIn Connections: 181
Twitter Followers: 132
Overall Klout: 40
Most Hits on one blog: 202
All those stats aside, this was fun, I love to write and this gives me a great outlet to do it in. I also like to talk to people about technology so meeting people on Twitter and LinkedIn that I might not have normally talked to...yeah that's awesome in of itself.