I had an interesting chat with Sidney Eve Matrix, a professor of film, media and mass communications at Queen’s University. We 
got to talking about Facebook in the workplace and the pressure students are under to accept friendships from near strangers, business acquaintances or bosses. She mentioned, many of her students are in an absolute panic over what to do.
The founder of Facebook, has suggested we all lighten up and share with the world our entire digital life. It turns out, some of his pictures are private. Regardless of the trials and tribulations of such a high profile character, let’s explore social norms and the topic of openness and social media peer pressure. Here are some key points to consider and debate, if you start getting friend requests from potential employers, work colleagues or bosses:
- Was your company recently valued at 8 Billion dollars? If so, then you really don’t care about future employers poking around your party photos and updates. Congratulations – you are loaded and you don’t care what people think. Don’t let celebrities influence your decision. They live on another planet.
- Social versus professional content. Think about the interview process. Would you bring a photo album of your trips, parties and social outings to a career fair or interview? The answer is no, since this violates an established business norm. As you head into the working world, you will discover there are boundaries in the professional world. Work colleagues can become friends, but in the interim, one does not offer up a photo album to professional colleagues. Its just weird and creepy.
- Content out of context. If your sarcastic wit is well established, your true online friends will understand the humor behind an update you make. A friend at work would say “I am not taking enough pills and alcohol today” when things were stressful at the office. It was part of his wit. If I came across this post, I could very easily assume the person had a drug problem. Context matters!
We have espoused a simple rule for managing your Facebook privacy and friendships. Consider applying this simple rule before you accept Facebook friends. Friend people you would invite in for dinner, or include in a group invitation for a night of karaoke. Sharing a meal in your home suggests you have a personal connection, and joint karaoke suggests you don’t mind making an ass of yourself in front of this person.
This simple filtering rule will help you create a line between your professional and social lives. It is simple and easy to apply.
What happens if a business associated or boss wants to friend you? If they don’t pass the filter, ignore their request and move on. If need be, drop them a polite note suggesting your Facebook space is an extension of your personal life. I have turned WhyHire.me students down with a polite response along these lines. No harm, no foul.
If you do have a boss that continues to pester you, consider your options carefully. They are in effect asking to enter your personal world. My suspicion is, Facebook social pressure at work will start creeping into lawsuits, since one could argue there is a line an employer should not cross. Pestering someone repeatedly is likely grounds for harassment. Check out this story filed by Erin Geiger. In time, HR departments will start clamping down on bosses who friend employees or prospects being considered for positions.
Your life need not be an open book.
Recruiting practices are evolving very quickly. Kristi Stubbs, a recruiter for Starbucks Canada use all kinds of social media to narrow in on candidates. In her words, it is a better use of her time. The ROI associated with finding like-minded groups of people online, interacting with them, looking for referrals and posting jobs via Twitter is simply higher. The alternative model of posting a position on Monster or Workopolis simply takes much longer to weed through candidates that have relevant education or experience.
Dawn Mullar, from the Helping Friends Career Network, is a huge advocate of using the web and networks of people that share their experience and requirements online.
The two page resume is a nice leave behind…but it won’t help you market your potential, skills you have learned and experiences you have picked up through your education. As future graduates coming to the work force, you need to think about how you can create opportunities or solve business problems for your future employers. Use the web to your advantage and get engaged with people and industry issues (opportunities and threats) around your course of study and future career interests.
For those of you enrolled in WhyHire.me, I hope you will dive into the program feet first and build your brand with our program.
We cross into the 1000 user territory this week. Its going to be interestin
g to watch students learn from each other and start cross-connecting across schools. Into the breach!
Be it personal branding or getting people to move on an agenda, a great story can draw in your audience and compel them to act. A story that can draw on emotion, sentiment or critical thinking can have a much greater impact.
Check out this production on the benefits of banking locally. My bet is, George Bailey is someone that 98% of North Americans can identity with. Someone did a great job linking the underlying storyline of Its a Wonderful Life to the merits of community banking.
In September of 2009, the WhyHire.me learning resources and software were incorporated into a third term course called Career Explorations at Centennial College in Toronto. In November, I dropped in on David Johnson, Dean of the School of Business, for a post mid-term update. This short video covers the background on why the materials and learning platform were used and it offers David’s views on the feedback from students and faculty.
The most interest part of getting WhyHire.me incorporated into a course or entire program is curriculum mapping. Life-to-date, we have incorporated WhyHire.me materials and software into public relations, e-commerce, technology in business, transition to professional and business skills courses. Stay tuned for a detailed blog post from Patti Church, our Chief Learning Architect. Patti will layout several alternative ways to leverage the software, offline and online course materials, worksheets and additional learning resources.
The Story:
Thomas Lynn was a student of mine three years ago in my Marketing 1 class at Algonquin College. I remember that Thomas was a mature (returning to school after having a careering in social work) from PEI, with 2 boys and he was an excellent student that asked questions, participated and had a keen interest in Marketing. Turns out that he has majored in Marketing at Algonquin.
Last summer, we briefly ran into each other in a hallway and swapped ‘hey how are yas’. At the time, Thomas was working on a project for the business school.
I recently stumbled upon Thomas on Twitter a few weeks ago when I was looking for an update from the Ontario Colleges Marketing Competition which was held at Mohawk College on the weekend of November 19th. I went to Twitter Search and was looking for anyone commenting on what was happening at the competition. That’s when Thomas and I reconnected. These were the Tweets I was following that night:
With Twitter you read from bottom to top. You can follow Thomas on Twitter @thomaslynn.
After I read the post, I congratulated him, connected online and proposed that talk more about social media marketing and networking in Ottawa. We ended up meeting at the first ever Gen Y Ottawa event at the Mercury Lounge along with close to 100 motivated Gen Yers.
At the Gen Y event Thomas and I talked at length about his experience with social networking tools, his win at OCMC and what his WhyHire.me experience would be like next term in his Transition to Marketing Professional class. We also talked about my upcoming speaking engagement in his Integrated Marketing Communication class. I needed to understand what level of knowledge the students had prior to my talk.
Our discussions have continued and Thomas is recently started a WordPress blog which we will help him attach to his WhyHire.me profile next term. The story will continue as the pieces of Thomas’ social media marketing strategy for his personal brand evolve. The icing on the cake will be pulling the pieces together and further explaining the potential next term.
The Experiment:
This post is legitimate post but also a test of SEO for student Thomas Lynn, Business/Marketing student at Algonquin College in Ottawa. I will reveal the story as the experiment progresses.
Phase I – I googled Thomas Lynn and Algonquin College and in 1 minute after completing the post I found Thomas on the first page of Google in our blog. I then googled Thomas Lynn and Ottawa and I found him in 1 minute on the second page of Google. I tried Thomas Lynn and checked 10 pages and couldn’t find my blog entry.
Phase II – I added tags to the post including Algonquin College, Thomas Lynn, and marketing student. I also added the first phase of our story, the past. The results were that in 5 minutes Thomas Lynn and Algonquin College was the first entry on the first page of Google. When I searched Thomas Lynn and Ottawa the blog post showed up on the first page as the 5th entry. I still can’t find the post on the first 10 pages of when I just include his Thomas Lynn. I guess I should point out now that my Thomas Lynn is fighting for search with a man that is on death row which makes this experiment more interesting. Now to add to the story above; the present.
Phase III – I added the Twitter connection to the story which which included links and some new tags. The results of the search did not change in 5 minutes but I will check again later this afternoon. Google bots need some time to find your story. Phase IV will come tomorrow.
Phase IV – Results are the same. Phase V will occur as part of his WhyHire.me profile next term.
Over the past week, Andy and I have spoken at a variety events including:
- a professional development session on social media tools for staff and faculty at Algonquin College;
- a presentation on personal branding for the Algonquin Alumni Association:
- a case study presentation on WhyHire.me at McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s What Really Works: Strategies to Improve Teaching and Learning Conference at UOIT in Oshawa;
- a presentation to Women in Science and Engineering at Ottawa University; and
- an introduction to personal branding to the Queen’s MBA program while on tour in Toronto.
The audiences have been very different, yet the theme of ‘fear’ keeps rearing its head. We are in a period of great change and to many, change is scary. Social media is changing the way we can and are communicating. This in turn will change the way we teach and market ourselves in a competitive market place.
When we present the concept of putting yourself out there by blogging, using Twitter or even possibly producing video, we are often greeted with shock, horror and disbelief. But the power of these tools for communicating and connecting can’t be denied. The hard part is putting yourself out there and giving it a try.
I have noticed over the last week that students are getting their profiles ready for grading. They are changing photos to be more professional, blogging about more mature topics, and altering their positioning pitches to articulate the essence of their personal brands. In other words, they are experimenting and learning. In WhyHire.me our students can face their fears and discomfort in a safe environment. They need to learn about exposing themselves, articulating their offering, and defining their experiences with different forms of media. The program along with help and guidance from their professors, provides them with a place to learn and become comfortable with these new communication tools and trends (blogging, Twitter, photos, video, Delicious, linking, transparency, documenting experiences).
When they are ready to launch themselves into the working world, they simply change their profile setting, and the search engines will do the rest. Until then, they can experiment and become more comfortable with some of the latest communication tools and trends and convert their fears into confidence.
The StarTribune offered up some future perspective on the growth of e-Book readers – purpose build machines for novels and textbook materials. Despite the rosy growth outlook by the quoted analyst, I am hesitant to think this is going to work in higher education.
Students today are sporting cell phones, netBooks and laptops that are redefining themselves every 6 months. When I visit a campus, it’s not unusual to see someone with an iPhone, switching to a laptop, then back to their phone. This generation of students likes to multi-task between music, Facebook and assignments. The challenge with introducing (or forcing) these students to buy purpose-built machines is they already have considerable computing power that gets cheaper and looks better each time a semester changes. A brand new HP Laptop now costs $650!
Will students want to switch to a purpose specific device they will need to care for, charge and maintain? Their teachers are posting LINKS, Powerpoints and PDFs to Blackboard or WebCT. Students today, are accustom to using industry standard browsers and school supplied desktop software in their labs. Unless Sony (Kindle) is a PC in waiting, then I for one think the likelihood of eBook readers going mainstream in higher ed is very low.
If I were making such decisions at a publishing company, I would consider user/buyer psychographics, the ubiquity of existing consumer devices, support issues and the total cost of equipping a student.
The Apple iPhone was a device that converged several products into one. Imagine if they had produced a purpose built text reader, so consumers or students could have books read to them?
One of our students, who is privately developing her online personal brand within WhyHire.me, elected to poke something onto Youtube. I have to admit, I was impressed with the message, visuals and authenticity. It was fun to watch!
We were so thrilled to find this piece and see proof that our teachers are igniting passion within their classrooms. Keep up the great work – we truly do look forward to seeing more profiles turned public and shared across the web!
