Web Business by Ken Burbary

The Long Tail effect on Resume 2.0

We often talk about the benefits of social media participation. Done well, it can help you create new relationships with your customers, peers, and partners. Develop new products and ideas. Improve existing ones. And provide thought leadership in your area of expertise, like these folks here, here, and here. For companies, it has the power to transform your business. For individuals, it has the power to help establish your reputation and professional network(s).

No doubt about it, the social media era has changed how people search for a job. Social Networks like LinkedIn give job seekers direct access to hiring managers within companies, and employers can more easily engage with passive candidates. It is becoming commonplace for individuals to pay greater attention to managing & promoting their various social profiles (a practice called known as personal branding and/or reputation management).

The Social Media Resume arrives

Some individuals, like Chris Penn, have taken it even further by creating a social media resume. On his social media resume site, Chris summarizes his skills and expertise, makes his traditional resume available for download in multiple formats, and links to his social network profiles and the web sites he publishes and maintains. This is a great place to start learning more about him, (he’s well ahead of 99% of individuals who do NOT have a social media resume) but it doesn’t provide a complete picture of his background and experiences. Precisely the kind of depth that a recruiter or hiring manager is looking for to help make a hiring decision.

To get a deeper understanding, companies are relying on search engines to provide a more in-depth view of a candidates online footprint. According to a a recent survey of human resources professionals by About.com, a full 50% of them are using Google and other search engines to find both professional and personal information about candidates. Regardless of how you feel about this, the trend is here to stay. Hiring managers want to know as much as possible about a candidate, and avoid making a bad hiring decision.

Resume 2.0 is here

There is now a new resume. The traditional static document that is carefully crafted to summarize your specific experience and expertise is being replaced. Instead, we have Resume 2.0.  It is the combination of your public profiles, life streaming your social activity, and what the search engines say about you. Much like Google is now your new corporate home page, your social activity and search engine results are your new resume. Resume 2.0

More social activity information available

The combination of these trends creates new challenges for companies and job seekers n the social era. For companies, they face an ever increasing volume of information and content to sift through. As individuals participate in social media, they create new messages, new content, share opinions and media with their network. A significant number of these social media activities are discovered and indexed by search engines.

For example:

• Twitter messages (tweets)
• Friendfeed updates
• Message board posts
• Blog posts/comments

are all found by search engines and stored in their massive web site indexes.

As companies continue to increase their reliance on this form of background checking, it will only become more difficult. I expect to see more services and tools become available to help companies deal with this problem. Imagine a social activity background checking service that allows companies to get a snapshot view of your social participation, categorized by topic, by type, by date/timeframe, with positive/negative sentiment ratings. A holistic view of your social footprint. This is the future of online background checking. It may even become similar to how companies do standard background checks for a criminal history, credit scores, or education verification. It’s already happening now, albeit informally. The trend will only increase in frequency and then evolve to greater efficiency.

The potential dark side of social media

As you particpate in social media, you leave a significant trail of evidence behind you. Forever. You’re creating your own personal long tail (follow this link for a more background on long tail effect). The social era has  created a personal content factory about your participation, and your long tail is being fed by it. This factory specializes in providing the search engines a steady stream of content about where you participate, who you interact with and what you say.

The search engines gladly pick up content you produce and index it. And the engines don’t forget. Ever. They act as a storyteller for companies researching prospective candidates. Social media participation comes at a price. The transparency that we ASK companies for also extends to us as individuals.

It is important to be cognizant of this as you participate in social media. Be authentic, be real, but use common sense. Don’t put yourself in a position that you will later regret. No one wants to follow up a terrific job interview with a phone call from human resources in which they inform you that they are passing because they discovered inappropriate behavior about you online.

Don’t fool yourself into believing that this is far fetched. Recently, the twitter user @theconnor lost a job because of his social media participation. He tweeted:

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

Cisco saw the tweet and responded with:

“Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

No one has confirmed yet if Cisco rescinded the job offer, but immediately set his Twitter account to private and removed his profile information. Other people online have heckled him to no end for his lack of “common sense” when tweeting.

Another famous example of social media participation causing trouble is that of a young professional named Kevin Colvin, who was fired from his job for calling into work with a family emergency, only to be discovered attending a halloween costume party. He uploaded the photo above to his Facebook profile, which his coworkers discovered soon after.

The point is, failure to utilize common sense in your social media participation, can have severe consequences. You can LOSE your job. These are 2 extreme examples, but seemingly innocuous behavior at the time can have devastating consequences down the road because of the personal long tail you create. It will get indexed and saved, waiting for someone to enter the right combination of keywords into Google and discover you.

Less obvious circumstances will still influence the perception that people have of you long after the moment has come and gone. Perhaps a message board post from your college days where you made comments that were considered professionally inappropriate. Or maybe some not so innocent tweets, juvenile Facebook wall posts, or disparaging blog comments. Any one of them can be discovered by a prospective employer researching you online.

Simple steps to let your best shine through, for the record

All of this doesn’t mean you have to be a robot, always on, reading from a predefined script of “approved” social activity. It’s social media, so be SOCIAL! Just be you, and use common sense. You can participate responsibly by:

• Assume a Search Engine knows - Google isn’t perfect, and doesn’t pickup every social activity you do, but it picks up enough to paint a picture of you for anyone willing to put in the time to search. Assume there will be enough information available about you
• Do your homework – Perform ego searches on yourself. Setup Google Alerts to notify you when new content is available. If any of it is unflattering, be prepared to explain yourself or try and have it removed (This is difficult to do, although there are services like Reputation Defender that attempt to do this for you)
• Bury the Bad with a Mountain of Good – Provide the search engines with plenty of “positive” content about your social participation. Share some insights by commenting on a blog, share interesting links or articles via Twitter, complete and make your LinkedIn profile public, make sure your blog posts are getting indexed. There are many ways, just make sure the good content is getting picked up by periodically ego searching
• Keep the Unflattering Stuff Private – Face it, most of us have moments and joke, forward funny emails, things we find amusement in but wouldn’t necessarily share with a prospective employer. You don’t have to stop doing this, just do it responsibly. Email may be boring but it sure beats a public tweet, blog comment or message board reply. Keep the private stuff PRIVATE!

I hope this post highlights how easily social media participation can hurt you, if done carelessly. For individuals, it means being in the internet spotlight, constantly. For companies, it means taking a new view of candidates, and realizing that they are human beings, with flaws and imperfections. Have some understanding and be sure to take context into consideration when/if you find something in a candidates background that pops up on your radar as a warning. In the end, we’ve all made a mistake or two. Just don’t let your social media usage make the BIG one for you.

Social Media Business Cards

Is Social Media redefining how we exchange contact information? Will it push traditional business cards out of the picture? Contxts hopes so. Contxts is a new service that uses text messages to share your contact information with others. I learned about this service while chatting with fellow speaker Shannon Paul at Automation Alley’s Social Media Boot Camp.  Shannon recently began using the Contxts service and suggested I give it a try (word of mouth marketing at work!). While not perfect (Contxts is still an alpha service), it is a useful and very convenient way to share info via your mobile device if you are away from your computer.

Basically, Contxts works two ways. You can PUSH info directly to someone, or they can PULL your info through an SMS request.

The PUSH method works like so:

You send a text message to Contxt service in this format:

send *recipient_phone_number* 50500

So, if I want to send my contact info to friend Adam Cohen, assuming his phone number is 555-555-1234, the text message to Contxts would look like:

send 5555551234 50500

This would trigger Contxts to send the info, which I provided during the account setup earlier, and Adam would receive a text message that contains:

The PULL method works similarly.  Anyone can send a request to 50500 and retrieve your contact info, as long as they supply the correct username. The format for a PULL text message is:

username 50500

So, if I wanted to pull down the contact info of someone I met at a conference, Tweetup, etc.. but didn’t get to exchange business cards with, and I knew his/her username on Contxt, I would send:

johndoe 50500

This type of Digital exchange could be extremely handy if you’ve run out of business cards, at an event where you meet a large number of people, or simply prefer to manage your contacts info digitally like I do.

The recipient ONLY gets the info that you want them to. You can control this using the edit info screen after you register.

There is a potential down side that I see already. Like many popular social media services out there,  someone can request your info without prior approval. There is an option that you can check to alert you when someone does pull your info, but there isn’t anything you can do to filter who can/can’t or protect it. For many people this won’t be a concern, but for others, it may make them uncomfortable. I suggest being careful what information you make available via Contxts if you’re in the latter category. Remember, it is a free, public public service, so treat it as such when it comes to privacy.

That said, it’s fast, convienent, eco-friendly (no paper) and could ultimately be the beginning of another change in our Digital behavior.  Goodbye business cards. Hello Contxts!

If you need my info, feel free to retrieve it by sending this SMS message: kenburbary 50500

Twitter Hidden Gems: 50 People You Should Follow but Have Never Heard of

Earlier this month, David Mullen had a great idea to create a Twitter starter pack on his blog (click here to go read the orignal post), that listed 50 people to start following in the areas of marketing, advertising, PR, and social media. Whether you’re new to Twitter or have been there awhile, you will benefit by following the people in his starter pack.

Afterwards, Dave Murray, David Mullen and I were chatting (via Twitter of course!) about how even the best list, leaves off so many interesting and unique personalities on Twitter. So without further explanation, we have put together a Twitter Hidden Gems list. This list is unique because it is full of incredible people from the Twitter commnity that are off the beaten path. Some of the best individuals one can hope to find.  We hope you find following them as valuable as we do.

Don’t forget to visit the blogs of the other 2 contributors to this post. You can find them at:

David Mullen – Communications Catalyst – http://davidwmullen.com

Dave Murray – The Way of TheMurr - http://www.themurr.com/