Looking For A Job in Web 2.0 Market

Looking for a job? Forget your resume; work on personal branding.


“22% Of Employers Check Your Facebook Profile; 1/3 of which reject candidates because of their FB” (link)


This is a tweet that I sent out early yesterday. Amazingly, a few hours later I had a phone interview with one of the leading companies for voice over IP communication. After we talked about some of my online marketing experience, the interviewer asked me for my Twitter user name. We were following each other before I could say Abra Kadabra! How great is that. Well, it is wonderful if you are projecting a professional image on your twitter or any other social media channel account. If you are not prepared – it could be the point where you lose that job.

You might think, this is not the case for every type of job search and this kind of candidates screening approach is more likely to be relevant for online marketing professionals. I agree this is probably the case most of the time; however, you must be aware of the different purposes people use social media for today. It is no longer just a fun place to play at. Marketers, Recruiters, Employers and Businesses use these channels for marketing research, business development and candidates search.

So how can you change your personal branding?

These are some steps I took myself back in January when I realized the power of personal branding.


- Be Strategic – What kind of image would you like people to see in this specific channel? If you have several desired images (professor/singer), create different accounts on Twitter or YouTube where it is easy to have multiple accounts and keep the content separate. Decide what you would like to project on facebook and be consistent.


- Create separate accounts for yourself and be as active as if it was for your corporate account. Are you using your company twitter account? That is nice, but it doesn’t contribute to your personal branding. Create your own presence, even if you are already engaging under a corporate account.


- Clean Up – once you decided what is it you want to project, clean up any content that does not fit with your image. Un-tag yourself from pictures on facebook, Sort your web albums and delete any pictures that may not give the image you are aspiring to get, edit your community – some people may be get more value from you and contribute to the conversation in your other channel.


- Content – choose your content carefully while you have your personal image in mind - status changes, tweets, sharing information about events you are going to, groups that you belong to – all reflect on you as a person. Share work you have done, provide links to news or information you have in other websites that can reinforce your image.


- Be Yourself – Yes, you have to be strategic, but it doesn’t mean you should pretend to be someone you are not. The different images you are trying to project are all real parts of the whole you. The key to personal branding is to be aware of the different parts of your personality and professional life, be comfortable with them and control where and when you share those with others.

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Social Media Marketing Measurement Tools

While we all agree social media marketing presents many new business opportunities for marketers, the ROI from social media marketing remains unclear. It is especially hard to measure some of the “softer” benefits of marketing through social media channels. In this post I listed a breakdown for some of the measurement tools available sorted by four major marketing objectives. The measurement approach is to collect all the social media channels that are being used and to examine them under one marketing objectives.

Brand Awareness

How many people know about me?

Channel	What to look for	Tool
Blog	Unique visitors	Google Analytics
Twitter	Number of followers	Twitter home page
Facebook	Page/Group views	Page analytics
YouTube	Video views, subscribers#	YouTube Insights

Community Growth

How many new people know about me?

Channel	What to look for	Tool
Blog	Subscribers growth/ new visits	Google Analytics
Twitter	Followers growth	Twitter Counter/ homepage
Facebook	Fans count	Facebook Page
YouTube	New unique visitors/ subscribers/ views growth	YouTube insights

Influence

How many people take action about me or recommend me to others?

Channel	What to look for	Tool
Blog	traffic source (indicates my influence on the other channels)	Google Analytics
Twitter	Number of Retweets and Replies to my content	Retweetrank /tweetdeck
Facebook	iLike	Manually
YouTube	traffic source (indicates my influence on other channels)	Google Analytics

Feedback from clients

Channel	What to look for	Tool
Blog	Comments number
Twitter	Retweets, Replies, Direct messages number	Tweetdeck
Facebook	Wall posts and messages- manually “interaction”	FB Page insights
YouTube	Comments, video views

Another important benefit of social media is sharing information. Trying to measure this benefit is similar to trying to measure the ROI of your education. It is almost impossible yet we all know there is value in it. You get to learn from others’ experiences and save research time. I hope these charts provided an organized way to layout some of the information. There are many more tools out there and I do not presume to know all of them. I would like to invite you to share your experience with tools you have used, measurement approaches or strategies you have developed.

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Twitter Marketing Plan 101

Target your twitter followers and build up your community.

You have signed up for twitter, so now what? In this post I would like to share some of the tools and strategies I found to be useful in building your business Twitter presence and reach a 100 targeted followers in about two months.

Build Your Community

• Invite your friends by importing your connections
• Use tweetlater to automatically follow your new followers
• Find your clients on Twitter and follow them
• Search for contacts or companies you lost connection with but still have in your CRM database
• Follow your competitors. This will help you get ideas and keep yourself updated with what is going on in the market
• Use TwittGrid to search for keywords related to your target market. This will help you not only build your community but also get to your specific target market.
• Use TwittGrid search to update on the latest trending topics

• Use TwitterGrid search to find out what people are talking about

• Use Twilert to get your search results automatically sent to you daily.

Build Your Content

• Use twitterfeed to integrate your blog, facebook and linkedIn content using RSS.
• Use tweetlater to create automated scheduled tweets. You can come up with a list of tips or topics for your tweets in the beginning of the month and schedule them to post.
• Use tweetlater to set your automated welcome response. Make it a nice personal welcome instead of a sales pitch.
• Don’t tweet on your own, eventually you’ll run out of things to say.Get people in your company to join the tweeting. Each one of them has valuable knowledge to share.
  
  Step 3: Measure Your Results

• Community growth – you will soon find that as you tweet valuable information, your followers’ number will grow.
• Influence growth - Twitalayzer is a tool which evaluates your activity on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
• Response rate – Just like an email marketing campaign, count the number of responses you got right after your tweets. If you posted a video on YouTube or a link to your website, count the number of unique visitors.
  
  

Businesses today realize that Twitter is a big part of the social media family. However, some marketers are still concerned about having to constantly update their Twitter account with new information. The smart approach would be to use Twitter’s automated applications. Leverage your existing content which you have already invested in. Use Twitter as another channel to send out your message and be everywhere your clients are.

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How To Integrate Your Blog With Twitter Video

One of the great things about Twitter is that it has many automated tools that help you leverage existing content by re-using it in a new channel.

Twitterfeed is an application that integrates RSS feeds with Twitter. Once you set up your RSS feeds, your twitter will automatically display and tweet updates that were posted on your blog. This is a great tool for twitter beginners since there is no need to create any new content just yet. You can use your articles, blog, youtube videos channel or any other content that you have with RSS feed.

1. Sign up for twitterfeed and login using your open ID account. If you don’t have an open ID, sign up for one. It may take a while to sign up for open ID but you only have to do it once. Be sure to check first, you might already have open ID if you are using the services in this link.

I used “my Vidoop” service. When you sign up for open ID, you will be requested to choose 3 images from categories (like - flowers, houses, trees). Those same categories will be used for identification every time you log into open ID while changing the specific images (small tree/large tree). So don’t worry about remembering the activation code, just remember the categories. When you sign in to open ID, you will be asked for a password. Type in the LETTERS that are correlated with your image categories.

2. Activation code - The first time you sign in to twitterfeed , the system will send you an email notification with a code to activate your browser . Plug in the code and continue.

3. We are IN!

4. Go to “my feeds” and create a new feed.

5. Fill in your user name and password. I found that it is easier to just use your twitter login details. Plug in your RSS address by copying and pasting. Remember – you’re RSS feed is not the same as the link to your blog.

6. To find your RSS feed – go to the right side of your internet address bar. Look for the RSS icon (Orange with rounded white stripes) and press it. Choose “automated RSS”. The internet address on your bar should be changed to the RSS feed. Copy and paste this to Twitterfeed.

7. Customize - The hard part is over. Now you just have to customize your RSS update interval time and set up any prefix to your posts. I find it helpful to add prefix like: “new blog post” or “new video” according to the RSS channel.

8. That’s it! You can add up to 5 RSS feeds to every account. Go test it.

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