On occasion, I do get people asking to be friends on Facebook that I don’t know socially. The test I apply is, if I would go out for drinks or have the person in for dinner, then they are likely a friend I would confide in, tell a self-depreciating story or offer support during a tough time.
If I ignore a friend request from you, please don’t take it personally. Link to me in WhyHire.me and in Linkedin once you establish yourself and we have done some work together. Over time, we may very well become friend in life and online.
For those that collect friends like vendors collect business cards at trade shows, remember, you are making a social contract with these people. If you post items of a truly personal nature – a goofy photo, a self-depreciating comment or anything not professional, these posts can be misunderstood, or taken out of context, since your new “friend” does not really know you. Case in point, if you use sarcasm online and the friend does not really know about your sarcastic humor…they will misinterpret your post.
An extreme oh-o, is when someone copies and pastes your Facebook items and puts them in a blog entry for the world to see. Check out this story on Audra Sigler Shea and what happened to her racist remarks she posted in Facebook alongside her trusted friends. In this case, her nasty remarks were simply copied and shared with the world.
Keep your personal and professional world separate. This way you can keep up your sarcastic humor with your buddies and not worry about wierding people out.
I submitted an article to Career Options Magazine early this week and now I have been asked to send a ‘call out box’ that could be a part of the article. At the same time, I have been reviewing a blogging ebook by Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger. My article needs a list and the second step of ‘31 Days to Build a Better Blog’ was to create a list post. Here I go, killing two birds with one post.
Creating Your Personal Brand Using Social Media Tools, title of article
1) Manage Your FaceBook Account. Be conscientious of your privacy setting and what you are using FaceBook for. What’s your objective and strategy? Mine is just pure play and socializing with close friends.
2) Grab Your Digital Real Estate. Grab your name in the popular social media sites including; Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin, Technorati, YouTube, Vimeo, and even FaceBook, I suppose. And if you know you are a natural entrepreneur or moving in the direction of independent consultant, check into buying your domain name. Your name is your brand.
3) Develop Your Positioning Pitch – What makes you different and what can you offer future employers?
4) Tell Your Story. And make it dynamic like you are. Use text, photos and video but also include blog posts, Twitter and social commentary. Make yourself 3 dimentional.
A quick reminder that my audience is college and university students and that there is a complete 2 page article that this list is attached to, not to mention, 8 hours of training plus a software portal.
I will post the article when it is published.
Seth Godin stepped into the education ring with a recent post about the textbook model and how overdue for change it is. He rightly points out the fact that books are expensive and in the case of some subjects, quickly out of date.
Books are bulky, need to be stored, shipped and managed by several parties in the production and supply chain. Add the fact that a textbook run is going to be smaller than a mainstream novel, and you have a perfect storm – a $250 book at the retail level.
His suggestion of having profs build textbooks online does present some interesting possibilities. I think the challenge to that model is the balance of risk and reward. College and University professors are facing considerable change they need to work into the curriculum. Will a full-time college professor be willing to take the risk in terms of their precious time and reputation? I could see part-time instructors doing this – my partner and I are a living example with the development of WhyHire.Me.
The challenge in stitching together chapterettes is just that. Instructors are going to need additional time to properly stitch them into something meaningul. Imagine hundreds or thousands of chapterettes on a web site. A teacher will simply become an editor in order to pull something together that is useful, meaningful and helpful. What percent of profs will do this? Don’t know.
There is value in someone taking an editorial perspective on lots of content. If this was not the case, then new services such as Twitter or the Huffington Post would not be so popular. I think today’s publishers are well positioned to do this. They simply need to rethink how they broker content into its final, bound form that ends up on a desk or computer screen.
