Building a Professional LinkedIn

Develop Your Brand w / Social Media

CASH tips: HOW-TO use Twitter to find a job

CASH tips: Blogging and your personal brand

CASH TIPS: Tips for blogging

HOW-TO: Use LinkedIn to Find a Job

View more videos from Brett Kopf

How To: Market Yourself on Twitter

HOW TO: Use Twitter in your Job Search

Facebook Dilemma: Recruiters & Future Employers – “Add as Friend”?

Social networking sites are clearly the latest craze, everything from Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn to Twitter. Everyone seems to ‘plugged in’ somehow…maybe even your boss? Which is exactly why you should be extremely content conscious with what you post!

It also poses the question should you friend request your recruiter in the first place? Answer: NO. We all love to post photos from that wacky party the other night or tweet about how much we abhor or obsess over one thing or another, but is the constant censoring worth it?

BUT there are ways you can use Social Media to further your career search. Find that company you’re interested on Facebook and become a fan of their page. Find them and follow them on Twitter.

Even if you don’t add recruiters as a friends, doesn’t mean they can’t find you. Make sure you adjust your privacy settings so your profile is closed to those who aren’t your friends. (Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile) & that includes hiding even your profile picture if it’s going to be unprofessional!

The risk of losing or not getting a job based on your Facebook profile is a major bummer. Who wants the stress!?

For more, check out our CASHtip clip from Nestle recruiter on Networking.

CASHtips – Networking

OK, what is the deal with Twitter?

Who would even follow me? I don’t need to update everyone on my every move! Sound familiar? I hear it all the time.  But here’s the thing – don’t look at twitter as a way to give out your personal information (unless you want to), instead think of it as a way of getting information from others.  One thing is for sure, Twitter is blowing up…at a rate of 1,382% to be exact (as of March).  One thing is for sure, it doesn’t seam to be going anywhere anytime soon.  So it’s time to stop wondering, and start utilizing twitter for everything it can do for you.  And yes – there’s lots it can do.

Don’t know where to start? Well you’re in luck – mashable (a great resource for online social media) has just released a Twitter Guide Book for those who are new to Twitter.

The best part about Twitter? The external sites that people have developed to utilize the information flowing through tweets…even for your jobs search: www.TwitterJobSearch.com a job search engine for twitter.

There are tons of twitter’s you can follow that strictly post job postings. How to find them?  Once you make your twitter account click “find people” search “[city] jobs” [replace city with the city of your choice] and see what job twitterers are out there.  For example, want to live in Chicago? I just searched Chicago jobs & these are just the first 5 that came up: chicagowebjobs, jobschicago,  jobchicago, Chicagocareers, GreenJobChicago all posting job openings.  Think about it – instead of you searching everywhere for jobs, all you have to click is “follow” and a constant flow of job postings will come to you!

Leave it up to our generation to come up with the most lazy way possible to have information come directly to us! But hey, who’s complaining?

& for those of you who still want to hate on twitter…enjoy….

Social Networking and the Death of The King of Pop

Singer, songwriter, entertainer, and businessman Michael Jackson died suddenly in the afternoon of June 25, 2009.  Jackson, who has been dubbed as the “King of Pop”, began his professional career at the age of 11 singing with the Jackson 5.  Following a successful career with 4 of his siblings, Jackson went solo and released numerous hits for several decades.  Jackson had a significant impact on popular culture and music.

Jackson’s death has shocked and saddened many around the world.  News of his death has traveled like wildfire.  The latest networking trends in Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, to name a few, are responsible for the rapid spread of mournful commentary regarding the deceased pop-icon.  These sites, as well as many news article pages, have been receiving astronomical amounts of traffic and have even logged record breaking statistics.   Hitwise, an internet monitoring site, has shown that Twitter had its biggest day on the day of Jackson’s death and has predicted higher numbers for the days following.  Jackson’s Facebook page has transformed into a cyber-memorial, attracting approximately 20 fans a second.  Google’s trend page, which is rated on a scale of “hotness”, reported that searches for Michael Jackson reached the “Volcanic” level.  The BBC News page reported a 72 percent increase in traffic at the time of Jackson’s death.

So what does this all mean?  I guess the most obvious comment to make is that people are getting their news much faster due to the ever growing popularity and usage of social networking sites.  In addition to the increased speed at which people receive their news, social networking has also opened the door for personal opinion.  People are “tweeting” or updating their statuses to express personal thoughts or reflections on current events.   This also occurred on a massive scale following the death of Jackson.   Twitter, for example, recorded message volumes up to 5,000 per minute regarding Michael Jackson’s death.

While the news of Michael Jackson’s death sped across high-bandwidth cables, it seemed as though television news failed to keep up.  Many users noticed that TMZ was the first to report that Michael had passed–via their website.  Twitter followers of Ryan Seacrest noticed that he had “tweeted” confirmation of Jackson’s death while television news reported that Jackson was being rushed to hospital care after a heart attack.

So has the internet finally overtaken television as a faster means of obtaining breaking news?

That remains argumentative due to the legitimacy of most internet news sites vs television news networks.  Regardless, media coverage surrounding Jackson’s death is that this incident has shown that entertainment news seems to travel much faster than news relevant to our everyday lives.  To elaborate a bit further, I ask these questions: how quickly do we hear developments regarding our failing auto industry, economic recession, and job growth in this country?  Now, how does the speed at which we learn of these developments compare to the news of Michael Jackson’s recent death?

The world lost an important figure in pop culture.  Michael Jackson’s music and his performances will live on through the many available formats of media today.  However, “The King of Pop” will live on through the billions of voices that are carried at ridiculous speeds through cyberspace.  All with the help of the recent social networking mania.