You are here: Home / Archives for Career

How to say thank you for good things that happen online

September 30, 2009 By 4 Comments

When someone does something nice for you — and especially when they do without you asking first — it’s appropriate to say thank you. And offline, that’s pretty easy. You can say thank you in person or over the phone, write a thank you note, send a nice gift (a bottle of wine always works for me), or even buy someone lunch (or a drink).

However, online relationships are a bit trickier. Sometimes we don’t really know the people we interact with online, beyond, say, a Twitter account. But with just a Twitter account someone online can do some nice things for you – tweet a blog post you’ve written, include you in a #followfriday recommendation or just say nice things about you. How do you respond? How do you thank people in an appropriate, meaningful way?

Here are three ideas:

  • Return the favor. Retweet, include them in your #followfriday recommendations or publicize a blog post through one or more of your online identities.
  • Thank them offline. Send a handwritten note, make a short phone call or, if you’re feeling really generous, send a gift card or a small card. It may take a little extra time to figure out how to do this. Maybe you look up where the person works and send something to his or her office, maybe you figure out who their literary agent or publisher (for authors) is and send something through that route. Be brief, be nice, be polite – but don’t stalk. The point here is to thank people, not make them nervous.
  • Talk them up offline. If someone is doing good work, recognize it in your real-world conversations. When I talk to people who want to understand better how social media works in marketing and public relations I frequently recommend they check out David Meerman Scott’s blog or get his books. I think he does great, smart, work, so I talk him up. He may never know this, but in exchange for the insight his work has provided me, I think it’s good karma to pass along his name and web site to others.

How do you thank people? Please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Filed Under: Career, Miscellaneous, networking

Why I'm becoming more promiscuous online

July 31, 2008 By 4 Comments

Are you conservative, friendly, open or promiscuous?

People use social media sites to network online in different ways, and you can classify them in roughly four categories.

Conservative: If you’re a conservative networker online, you’ll connect only to people you know in real life. It might even be just the people you know well and like.

Friendly: You’ll connect to people you know or have at least met in real life, even if it was only on a conference call, regardless of how well you know them.

Open: You’ll connect to anybody you’ve had some sort of contact with, online or off, even if the contact was as limited as following their tweets (or them following yours).

Promiscuous: You’ll connect to anybody, even complete strangers. You’re always looking for an excuse to send that invitation to link, always willing to accept one.

Ex-conservative becoming more promiscuous

Over time, I’ve progressed from the conservative end of this spectrum to promiscuous.  Why? Because it’s on that wide-open end of the spectrum that online social networking is so powerful.

Here’s what I mean. On the conservative end of the scale, where you’re connected to a relatively small number of people who you already know pretty well, social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook aren’t that much more useful than Microsoft Outlook. They give you a way to keep in touch electronically with people you already know, but that’s about it.

But as you make your online network wider and deeper, it becomes more and more difficult, and eventually impossible, to have the kind of personal relationship with each individual that you had when you were conservative. The connections in these broader networks are looser, the personal communication increasingly infrequent, the relationships weaker. But they are still connections, still relationships.

You can send out your status updates, pass along a useful link, maybe ask a question. Most of the people in your loose network may not pay a lot of attention, most of the time, but your status update — your ping to your network — is a way of maintaining at least a weak connection, but without being intrusive. Everyone is opted in. Anybody can opt out.

Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter, our blogs and the rest of the social media universe allow you to maintain more relationships at a greater distance, something that wouldn’t be practical for most of us offline.

Why would you want to maintain these weak relationships? Because when you need something (like a job), or want to know something (like an obscure piece of technical information) or have an idea you want to spread (maybe about the value of social networks and ‘weak’ relationships), you can tug the strings in your network and get more feedback than you ever could in your conservative real world network. Even though those connections are weak, if you ask the network for help, at least some people will respond.

So I’m becoming more promiscuous online. Want to follow me on Twitter? Go here. Want to connect to me on LinkedIn? I welcome it, find me here. Feel like friending me on Facebook? I’m friendly – go for it.

What about you? Are you a conservative networker online, or a prolific and promiscuous connector? Tell us about your online networking style, and why you’ve chosen that style, in the comments below.

Update: I’ve tweaked my approach just a bit. Please check out this post about my approach to Facebook. (Feb. 14, 2010)

Filed Under: Career, networking, Social media Tagged With: , , ,

Eight tips to fine-tune your online life

July 29, 2008 By 2 Comments

Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful for living online.

Get more out of your web surfing

  1. Use delicious or a similar utility for your bookmarks. Then you have them available to you at any computer – with the power of tagging.
  2. Use delicious to tag what you intend to do with a bookmark – to_read, to_blog, etc. Also use delicious tags to record what you did with a bookmark. I tag blog posts of others that I’ve commented on with icommented.

Email like a pro

  1. Most email programs (even the one on my BlackBerry) have a spell-checker that you can set to automatically run before the email is sent. Make sure that option is activated. It prevents you from forgetting to spell-check a message and making a mistake that makes you look dumb, or at least unprofessional.
  2. Entering email addresses in the To:, CC: and BCC: fields should be the last thing you do when composing an email. Write it, review it, revise it. Entering email addresses last ensures you don’t accidentally send off a half-written email.
  3. If you don’t need a reply, say so in the message. If you can get your message across clearly in the subject line, do so, and add <eom> for “end of message” to the subject line.

Be a better online publisher

  1. If you’re going to write anything about sex, politics, religion, personal relationships, using illegal drugs or drinking heavily on any web site – your blog, Facebook, whatever – think twice. Then think a third time. I’m not saying not to post it, just consider it carefully. Current and future employers, customers, investors and others may see it. You have the right to say whatever you want, but you also can’t escape the repercussions of doing so.
  2. If you publish a blog, subscribe to your own feeds, via both RSS and email. This allows you to get the same experience many of your readers will, and when the experience isn’t very good you, you’ll know it. Then you can fix it.
  3. Also, if you publish a blog make sure you have your comment options set so that when you get a new comment on your blog, you get an email about the comment. In my early days of blogging I failed to do it and discovered only after several days that enormous amounts of comment spam were being published on my blog.
  4. Buy your own domain name, as in “JoeSixpack.com.” If you don’t, someone else might, and you might not like what they do. Heck, it’ll only run you $10 or $15 a year, depending on what registrar you use.

What are your top tips for making life online a little easier? Please let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: Blogging, Career, Email, Productivity Tagged With: ,

Eight links on marketing, social media, blogging and more

July 23, 2008 By 1 Comment

I’ve got a whole bunch of good links for your mid-week browsing. Here we go:

1. Blogging: Add TwitterCounter to your blog to display how many people are following you on Twitter. I’ve added it over on the left, under the “Connect to Me” section.

2. Marketing: Price vs. customer service, which is more important? MarketingSherpa has a great chart that shows that companies often care more about customer service than price from their vendors. Losing customers? Maybe your pricing isn’t the problem. Maybe you need to take a good long look at your customer service. By the way, think about the implications for blogs, which are free to readers: The quality of what you provide to your readers, how you treat them, and how responsive you are to any comments or emails they send you may well determine how loyal they are.

3. Social media: Angela Connor is the community manager at WRAL.com here in North Carolina. She’s got a really cool blog foused on managing online communities, an increasingly important topic. Check it out.

4. Online marketing: Chris Brogan takes a look at how we can define the spectrum of social media marketing efforts, from banner ads at one end to dialogue between businesses and their customers. This helps to frame the slippery question of what should we do if we want to use social media marketing.

5. Writing: Copyblogger has links to two free teleclasses on copywriting and marketing. Free — so go forth and learn.

6. Social media: The Caffeinated Blog has eight tips for using StumbledUpon effectively. By the way, I love this blog’s name and wish I had thought of it first. But the blogger, Kari Rippetoe, has great content and is worth subscribing to. (And you can Stumble this post if you like — there’s a link at the bottom to make it easy.)

7. Management and career: Jeremiah points out that when you hire someone, you also get their network, including their online network. That can pose challenges for businesses, but it also brings opportunities. This is not a new idea, and applies to offline networks as well as online networks. In The Tom Peters Seminar, Peters describes the modern corporation as a Rolodex (the book was published in ’94, in the early days of the consumer Internet). The more experienced I get as a professional, the more I think that a greater and greater portion of my value as an employee comes from my existing network and my ability to nurture and grow that network. How are you working on your network?

8. Values: Christopher Penn reminds us that, to quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben, “with great power comes great responsibility.” What are you using your powers of marketing and communications for?

Filed Under: Blogging, Career, Marketing & public relations, Online marketing, Social media, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

4 tips on online branding from Julia Allison

July 22, 2008 By 3 Comments

Wired magazine’s cover story this month is about Julia Allison, an Internet celebrity who is famous for, well, umm … being famous, at least online. And one of the bedrock truths in our modern, media-saturated economy is that fame has a dollar value.

Julia Allison from http://juliaallisonphotos.tumblr.com/

Source: NonSociety.com, Julia photos (http://juliaallisonphotos.tumblr.com/)

So, if you’re seeking fame, you might be able to learn a thing or two from Julia, right?

But perhaps you don’t care to read all about how she first got exposure in Gawker by going to a Nick Denton Halloween party dressed as a “condom fairy.” No problem. I have read the article, and have extracted all the parts that are relevant to those of us who (1) don’t live in New York City and/or (2) are not a “hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.”

1. Crash parties. Go to the channels where you have the least competition. With email, blogs and Tweets online, there’s lots and lots of competition. In person, there’s a lot less.

2. Think of yourself as a subject in a magazine profile (for example, in Wired). Everything you post online should add to your character. And keep it coming – Julia says it’s like adding wood to a fire to keep it burning. Needless to say, multiple channels (blog, Twitter, You Tube, etc.) are helpful here. Marketers call this branding.

3. Cultivate your fans. Interact with them online, answer their emails, respond to their comments on your blog, leave comments on their blogs.

4. Extend your brand to others. Once you’ve established Brand You, recruit others – Brand You Juniors – and help them build their brand by linking to them, advising them and providing them some of your legitimacy. Multiple platforms (i.e. people) will strengthen and expand your brand.

By the way, in case you think this all too snarky or tongue in cheek, I should mention that Julia has launched her own Web portal and has signed a deal with Bravo to develop her own reality TV show. Really.

And if you do want to read the whole Wired story, click here.

Got some more tips on branding online? Please share them in the comments.

Sponsor: Branding your name or company requires hard work, using custom promotional items can do nothing but help to build that brand — cheap promotional items.

Filed Under: Blogging, Career, Media, Online marketing, Personal branding Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Guidelines for personal branding at work

July 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Todd Defren at SHIFT Communications has a great post about balancing the needs of ‘personalities’ — people with their own online brands — and the companies they work for.

It’s an oft-cited maxim at SHIFT that “we run a talent agency, not a PR agency” – so Chris’s words rang true for me.  Think about some of our most recent hires: Doug Haslam (@DougH, with 4,000 Twitter followers), Chris Lynn (rockstar blogger), Amanda Gravel (blogger), Sandy Kalik (tweeter), et al.

We’ve made many more hires than this handful, of course, and expect great things of all of them – but, specific to these “well-known” people and their personal brands?  We consider them to be “on loan” to SHIFT for the duration of their tenure.  And I expect more and more of our employees (and future employees) will have their own personal brands either well-established or on the rise.

Might we see the rise of formal policies that not only address things like blogging, but also the whole gamut of “personal branding” activities? Maybe.

Where do you think the line should be drawn? How do balance the potential that someone with a strong personal brand brings with the needs of a company that has its own brand?

Filed Under: Career, Marketing & public relations, Online marketing

Virtual résumés

July 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

New York Times career blogger Marci Alboher writes about the trend of more résumés going online. In particular, she links to VisualCV, a site that allows you to create a virtual résumé. The site looks interesting.

As compared to a profile on LinkedIn, it allows you to post much more detail about your work history, including work samples.

The VisualCV makes a traditional resume come alive with video, pictures and a portfolio of your best work samples and other supporting documents. Informational pop-ups provide background data on the companies you’ve worked at and the colleges you’ve attended. You can securely share different versions with your own network of employers, colleagues and friends, and control who sees what.

You can create a very basic VisualCV quickly — this took me less than 5 minutes — but it looks to me like there is room for a lot more information.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: ,

You can become more talented

July 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Are you able to learn new things, benefit from new experiences and add new skills? Or are you stuck with whatever natural talents you might have been born with? The answer, apparently, depends simply on which you believe.

If you believe you can learn new things, you will. If you believe you’re stuck with you “natural talents,” you will be. Fortunately for me, I’ve always believed I can learn new things (which is fortunate, because my ‘natural talents’ are few and far between).

More details on this idea, and the research behind it that looked, in this New York Times article. The article is based on a 2006 book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Stanford University psychologist. Wikipedia says the book “provides steps or ideas that the reader can follow to achieve the growth mindset.”

So what do you do if you believe you’re stuck with just your natural talents? You’re wrong. Change your mind, change your beliefs, change your mindset, and grow.

(Need help? Order “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” from Amazon.)

Filed Under: Career, Self improvement
Newer Posts »