Out of Work? Here's How To Socially Network & Get That Job!

By Robert "Scobleizer" Scoble at Scobleizer.com. Robert is the KING of Twitter, Facebook, All software, and social marketing in general. This article hits so many personal points I discuss with clients that I just had to post it. So let's all lift our glasses - here's to Robert!

I’m getting a LOT of chats from people who have been laid off. Most of the time I find that they just aren’t presenting a good face to me for me to help them find a new job.

If you are laid off, here’s what you need to do:

1. Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for.
2. Remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look. If we see photos of people getting drunk with you that is a bad sign. Get rid of them. They will NOT help you get a job.
3. Demonstrate you are “clued in.” This means removing ANYTHING that says you are a “social media expert” from your Twitter account. There is no such thing and even if there were there’s no job in it for you. Chris Brogan already has that job and he’s not giving it up.
4. Demonstrate you have kids and hobbies, but they should be 1% of your public persona, not 99%. Look at my blog here. You’ll see my son’s photo on Flickr once in a while. But mostly I talk about the tech industry, cause that’s the job I want to have: talking to geeks and innovators.
5. Put what job you want into your blog’s header. Visit Joel Spolsky’s blog. He’s “on software.” That’s a major hint that if he were looking for a job that he is totally, 100%, thinking about software. If you want a job as a chef, you better have a blog that looks like you love cooking.
6. Get rid of any 'smart' name/acronym like "LOLCats". Do not argue me on Twitter about this. Google finds Twitters. Do you want your future potential boss noticing that you post LOLCats all day long? Believe me, you do not. It will NOT help you.
7. Post something that teaches me something about what you want to do every day. If you want to drive a cab, you better go out and take pictures of cabs. Think about cabs. Put suggestions for cabbies up. Interview cabbies. You better have a blog that is nothing but cabs. Cabs. Cabs. Cabs all the time.
8. Do not beg for links. If you did the above, you can Twitter me and say “check out my great software blog” though. Include @scobleizer in the tweet so I’ll see it. I’m an egotistical person so I read all Twitter replies that include my @scobleizer name in them. Hint: I haven’t met a blogger yet who is not an egotistical person. Take advantage of it. But no begging.
9. If you want to be a plumber, look for other plumbers to add to Twitter, friendfeed, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remove all others. Be 100% focused on what you want to do.
10. On Twitter you can tell me what you had for lunch, but only after you posted 20 great items about what you want to do. Look at Tim O’Reilly’s tweet stream. Very little noise. Just great stuff that will make you think (he wants a job as a thinker, so do you get it yet?)
11. IMPORTANT: Invite influentials out to lunch. Getting a job is now your profession. If you were a salesperson, how would you get sales? You would take people out to lunch who can either buy what you’re selling, or influence others who can buy. That means take other bloggers (but only if they cover what you want to do) out to lunch. That means taking lots of industry executives out to lunch.
12. Send out resumes. Make sure yours is up to date and top notch on LinkedIn and other sites where employers look for employees. Craig’s List. Monster. Etc.
13. Go to industry events. I have a list of tech industry events up on Upcoming.org. If you want to be a plumber, go to where contractors go. Etc. Etc. Make sure you have clear business cards. Include your photo. Include your Twitter and LinkedIn addresses. Your cell phone. Your blog address. And the same line that’s at the top of your blog. Joel’s should say “on software.” Yours should say what you love to do. Hand them out, ask for theirs. Make notes on theirs. Email them later with your LinkedIn and blog URLs and say “you’ll find lots of good stuff about xxxxxxxx industry on my blog.”
14. When you meet someone who can hire and who you want to work for - Follow them on Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Their blog. Stalk them without being “creepy.” Learn everything you can about them. Build a friendfeed room with all their stuff. That way when they say on Twitter “I have a job opening” you can be the first one to Tweet back.
15. Tell others where the jobs are. One thing I learned in college is by helping other people get jobs you’ll get remembered. So, retweet jobs messages (if they are relevant to your professional friends and to you). Blog about job openings. Help people get jobs. Hold lunches for people who are jobless. Some of them will get jobs and they’ll remember you and invite you along.
16. Do what you want to do. Let’s assume you’ll be laid off for a year. Are you going to lay around on the couch waiting for a call? No. You will do exactly what you want to do. Want to be an engineer at a great startup? Go and volunteer to work there for free. Make sure you do a blog post about every day you do what you’re doing for free. Say “I could do this for you, call…”
17. Do some work on SEO. Make it possible for people to find you. THINK about how people would search for someone with your expertise and skills. Here’s how, Visit the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Do a search on a word that you think represents best what you want to do. I just did one for “Electrical Engineering” and it brought up a ton of great info about what people are searching for. Include those terms in your blog. And, even better, blog about those things!
18. Remove any hint that you hated your old job from all your online things.

Good luck. It sucks. I know that. I was laid off last time and, who knows, might be laid off again, but if you’re doing all this stuff and you aren’t finding a job, let me know. You know where to find me.

How to kill e-mail (before it kills you).

E-mail has become a pandemic disease. Here's the cure. By Mike Elgan at Computerworld

The average executive spends two hours a day on e-mail. That adds up to roughly one day per week.

We probably waste a lot of time every day on phone calls and meetings, too. The difference is that the demands on your time don't grow automatically as they do with e-mail.

E-mail has become a pandemic social disease. The more you get, the more you send. And the more you send, the more you get.

And I'm not just talking about e-mail viruses. The longer you use it, the more of it comes at you. The quantity of e-mail you get grows and never stops growing.

In the 1990s, e-mail was all good. At first, you had to be on the same office system or consumer service to exchange e-mail. But then the Internet made it possible to send messages from AOL to CompuServe, and from CompuServe to MCI. E-mail was wonderful. You could search it. You could send attachments and links.

Slowly, gradually, e-mail became something else. Every communications medium has its own costs and benefits. But with e-mail, the costs grow over time as the benefits shrink.

What's wrong with e-mail? In a nutshell, the medium is perfectly designed for information overload. Both message size and quantity are essentially unlimited. Unfortunately, electronic communication is like a gas: It expands to fill its container. It's way too easy to copy everyone and "Reply All." It's also easy for companies to automate the sending of e-mail. There are almost no barriers to an unlimited number of people sending you an unlimited quantity of random stuff. But your time and attention are truly limited.

Because e-mails tend to be so many and so long, it's not friendly for reading on a cell phone. So, as we become more mobile, e-mail becomes less compatible with how we live and work.

E-mail has always suffered from another flaw: It facilitates miscommunication. When you're typing out words, you're thinking one thing, but the receiver can perceive your intent as something else. You're being funny. They perceive hostile. The reason is that humans are designed to communicate with words, facial expressions, body language and hand gestures all together. When you send only cold, black-and-white words, the other person can easily read into your message inaccurate intent or emotional content.

The experience of using e-mail has become like walking through a bad, big-city neighborhood at night. This person wants to rip you off; that person wants to offer you drugs or some shady sexual service; yet another is trying to infect you with a virus. You're literally dealing with organized crime syndicates every single day. Who needs that?

Everything -- from the most important business communication to love notes from your spouse to software that will damage your computer to bank fraud -- is all dumped into the same in-box in random order. In order to find an important message from your boss, you have to wade through raw sewage.

Meanwhile, the most precious resource you have is your own attention. At the very least, e-mail is a massive, constant distraction. And because you really do live in an attention economy, all that objectionable e-mail you get every day is taking money away from you and your company.

While the signal-to-noise ratio of e-mail has declined, other forms of communication have emerged and improved. Now we have free video messaging, chat, social-network messaging and Twitter.

Those are nice, but that e-mail just keeps coming.

It's time for you to reboot your entire communication strategy and start over. The goal is to transition to better forms of communication, and stop using e-mail altogether -- at least stop using it the way you have been doing. Here's how:

1. Set up a Twitter account. You can use your account as a way for people you don't know to contact you.

2. Set up a "public" e-mail account as a data repository. Use an online e-mail service. I prefer Gmail because it has better spam filtering and better search than other services.

Use the public address for whenever you set up an account with any service and it requires an e-mail address, and give it out as your one e-mail address. In most cases, you can just use your existing e-mail account for this.

Set up an autoreply message informing e-mail senders that you do not check this e-mail. If they would like to contact you, they should call you on the phone, message you on Facebook or send you a direct message on Twitter. But here's the trick: Give them only your Twitter name, not your phone number or Facebook profile address. (People you know should already have your phone number or Facebook profile. If they don't, they can ask on Twitter.)

(If you want to explain what you're doing, just link to this article in your autoreply and let me explain it for you.)

The purpose of all this is to set up a barrier or a filter. If people want your attention, they'll have to earn it. Only real, motivated people will be able to contact you, not automated message servers, not Nigerian scammers. When they do, they're forced by the system to keep it short. If you don't want to hear from them again, you can block them on Twitter with one click.

If you have to send long-winded e-mails for whatever reason, you can use this public account to do so. If others have to send long-winded e-mails to you, they can use this address, too. But they'll have to inform you on Twitter, and you can decide whether it's worth the trouble.

Whenever you need to access the stuff that flows into this e-mail address, you use Gmail's search feature to find it. It works just like Google itself.

3. Set up a "secret" e-mail account for content. This second account is for content, namely e-mail newsletters. Use whatever service you want for this. Move all your subscriptions to this account. Now, whenever you want to read your newsletters, you can do so without spam or all the other clutter and junk that normally accompany e-mail.

4. Set up a Facebook account. I recommend doing all messaging with people you actually know well (friends, family and co-workers) on Facebook because people need your permission in advance to send you messages.

5. Set up a Skype account and get a webcam. When you get in the habit of using Skype video calls instead of certain types of e-mail, you'll skip all the needless miscommunication that happens with e-mail. Let's say you need to discuss a personnel issue with a subordinate working in another city, or discuss a personal matter with a relative. Do yourself a favor and do videoconferencing. It will be faster, and you'll communicate without misunderstandings.

The idea here is to take all that stuff you're getting via e-mail and separate it into an appropriate place. Each type of communication is directed into a vastly more effective process based on who's sending it.

Random information is autofiled into a searchable system in case you need it. Newsletter content is all put in one place so you can read it with concentration. Strangers are forced to contact you on Twitter in a short message. Friends, family and co-workers that you approve send you messages on Facebook. And video Skype is for any conversation prone to miscommunication.

Once you've set this up, you've eliminated e-mail from your life, and with it, the spam, scams, junk, long-winded messages and other massively time-wasting garbage. Meanwhile, you're forcing anyone who wants to consume your most precious of resources -- your time and attention -- to get permission in advance and keep it short. And it's all mobile-friendly, too.

If killing e-mail is proscribed by company policy, you'll have to modify these instructions. A typical scenario is that an employee is required to give the corporate e-mail address to business contacts and to reply to e-mail on the company system. But you can still redirect all Web site sign-up traffic, e-mail newsletters and other stuff to the "public" and "private" Gmail accounts. You can urge colleagues or contacts to call you, or use chat. In other words, you can minimize, rather than kill, your company e-mail. And, of course, you can kill your personal e-mail.

E-mail is a disease. By taking strong action to cure yourself, you'll radically reduce the quantity of messaging in your life, while improving its quality.

The Secret of 'The New Marketing' by Seth Godin.

This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing. Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you...

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they'll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don't love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They're not anonymous and they're not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

The timing means that the idea of a 'launch' and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.

Three years from now, this advice will be so common as to be boring. Today, it's almost certainly the opposite of what you're doing.

Catch Seth at his blog.