Lynda Gratton, London Business School professor, suggests ways to stay connected in an increasingly mobile world.
Category: First To Know
People may go online to goof off but before long, they talk shop. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Quora, and even Pinterest can be valuable job-hunting tools. Here are two things social media can do to aid your job search:
• Build a better contact list. Lots of recruiters, hiring managers, and industry networkers are swapping job leads and industry updates on Twitter. Follow decision makers in your field. Publish links to interesting articles. Some of the people you follow may start to reciprocate.
• Share your work portfolio. High-traffic sites such as YouTube and Pinterest can showcase great work in any field. Recruiters are increasingly prowling these networks for the best candidates — even if it means poaching people from their current jobs. By displaying a strong internet portfolio of your work, you increase your chances of getting noticed and hired.
Today’s Management Tip was adapted from the HBR Guide to Networking.
It’s no secret that employers are incorporating social media into their recruiting plans to find top talent. For job seekers looking to stay current, you know the opportunities exist. But, knowing how to properly reach out may be the barrier between you and your dream job.
Job candidates commonly struggle when it comes to effectively leveraging social media platforms to connect with employers. Out of fear of being a nuisance and making an awful first impression, many refrain from getting themselves a step ahead in the job search.
Deciding what is appropriate in the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers online can be a daunting process to sort through. Below, we outline two very important elements of reaching out to employers on social media properly.
Find People for Informational Interviews
Informational interviews are your way of gaining a more in-depth look at a potential employer by gathering first-hand knowledge from past or current employees; a casual, coffee-shop conversation can yield a lot of insights. Social media gives you the opportunity to add two-way communication to the research you have already conducted regarding the company. You can network with alumni, new hires and former employees with the following:
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the professional online network most used by employers. First, make sure you have at least 150 connections prior to utilizing it as an asset to your job search. When you visit your desired company’s page, review “Your College Alumni.” These individuals are great candidates for informational interviews.
- Twitter: Twitter is a level playing field that enables you to reach out to company employees with a likely chance of getting a response. Since many employees mention their employers in their bios, take advantage of Twitter directories such as Twellow to help you find profiles mentioning your desired company. You can also @reply to the company’s personal Twitter account inquiring about an informational interview source.
- Facebook: There are many Facebook applications, such as BranchOut, intended to ease the process of finding connections to companies within in your own network. These applications will help you effectively incorporate the largest social network in your job search.
How to Ask for Their Time
The catch with reaching out to employers online is that they are not obligated to respond to your requests. Therefore, it is your responsibility to make their contribution as simple as possible. Here is how:
- Have a plan: Before ever sending your LinkedIn inMail, direct message or Facebook message to their inbox, be sure you have put some thought behind it.
- Get to the point: Don’t throw your resume and your life story on them from the get-go. Be clear of what you want from the start and leave all the fluff for later.
- Express your commonalities: Having something in common with the person sparks their interest. If you have a shared interest, their ears may open.
- Be specific, avoid generalities: There is a difference between wanting just any job and wanting to work for that specific company. Let the employer know why you are pursuing them.
Social media places our future employers within arm’s length. Although it simplifies the process for us, remember to remain professional and polite when reaching out to employers online. Believe me, your online network works. You just have to use it properly.
Have you utilized social media in your job search? Have you found success in reaching out to potential employers via social media? Share with us below!
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
- Community Manager at WeWork in New York
- Product Manager at Yelp in San Francisco
- Senior Director, Finance at NASCAR in Charlotte, NC
Adapted from Joshua Waldman, author of the Jobjuice Social Media Job Search App, which is now available for download for iPad and iPhone in the App Store. Connect with Joshua and Jobjuice on Twitter and Facebook.
With companies being much more careful about hiring the right talent at the right price in this sluggish economy, are you sure your moves are keeping you in the game? Some common job hunting myths might be sabotaging your big play.
Before you send out another resume or fill out another application, take a breather and look at the biggest misconceptions in the hiring world:
1. There are no jobs out there.
“The truth is that there are plenty of available jobs, but there are simply more people vying for them than in the past,” said author, speaker and recruiter Abby Kohut. ”To stand out, use your network to help you and also try some old-fashioned techniques. Faxing or mailing your resume will absolutely get you noticed because all the other job seekers are applying online.”
2. All the good jobs are online.
Matt Youngquist, president of Career Horizons, recently told NPR that 70 to 80 percent of available jobs are not published. That means that the vast majority of available positions will be found through networking, not online applications.
3. Temporary jobs aren’t worth it.
Savvy employers will look at their temporary positions as a proving ground, and often hire full-time from the temporary staff pool. At the very least, a temporary job gives you the chance to build relevant skills and knowledge while searching for something permanent, and it prevents a big hole of unemployment in your resume.
4. Being unemployed for several months hurts job prospects.
That depends entirely on what you do with your time away from the office. ”Whether you’re a twenty-something graduating from college or a homemaker returning to the professional market, make sure your resume stresses all your leadership responsibilities and achievements,” said Alex Sukhoy, a career coach and adjunct professor at Monte Ahuja College of Business at Cleveland State University. ”Were you president of a fraternity that raised money for an important cause? Did you spearhead a local initiative that resulted in the improvement of the local kids’ school experience? How did you make a difference? Show this on your resume.”
5. Employers want to see a standard resume.
“Resumes are the same, but what is different is how recruiters find candidates,” Kohut said. “In order to be found, you need to have the exact keywords on your resume that are in the recruiter’s brain at the time that they are searching for you. So, nowadays, the content of the resume is far more important than what the resume looks like. ” How you introduce your resume matters, too. ”The cover letter continues to be as important as the method you use to differentiate yourself from all the other candidates who have similar work experience,” Kohut said.
6. Social media isn’t taken seriously by employers.
On the contrary, social media is a vehicle for hiring that can make a big difference if you know how to use it. ”Job seekers at all levels should be using LinkedIn to connect to people that they currently know,” Kohut advised. “Rather than simply applying for positions in the traditional way, they should use LinkedIn to figure out who the hiring manager might be, and then should send a resume directly to them in addition to applying the normal route.” Another point to ponder is how social media could hurt you. ”As for Facebook, since most job seekers are already on there, they should be careful to avoid cursing, negativity, and opinions about controversial topics such as sports, politics and religion,” Kohut said.
7. Take what you can get.
In a really tough economy, it can be tempting to jump on that first offer. However, keep in mind that taking a job you hate means you will be hunting for another job in just a few years. It is often better to go with freelancing, consulting or temporary jobs until you find the right fit.
8. Follow up with a phone call.
Following up is a good idea, but how you do it can make or break your chances of landing the job. Rather than sending an email or calling to remind them of your continued interest, send a handwritten thank you card to every person you met during the interview process. ”Most importantly, be positive and be passionate, ” Sukhoy said. “Companies can train skills. They won’t train attitudes.”
Adapted from Shannon Dauphin
Name: Korrio
Quick Pitch: An all-in-one planning and organizing solution for parents or coaches of youth athletes
Genius Idea: Korrio offer a comprehensive platform where parents or team organizers can schedule games, communicate with parents, share team information and more, in one safe online location.
Your hustle should be on the field, not when it comes to planning the game. That’s why Seattle-based startup Korrio created a web tool for busy parents of young athletes or youth sports team organizers. The site is basically a sports administrator in your pocket: communicate with parents, schedule games, register for teams, host club and team websites and more — all in one platform.
“More Sport, Less Hassle” is Korrio’s slogan.
Steve Goldman, CEO and Founder of Korrio, says “Korrio offers an end-to-end unified platform which combines all the sophisticated administrative functionality needed to run a successful youth sports program — combined with family-facing benefits, including auto generated personal dashboards for every Korrio user to manage their sports life.”
Goldman founded Korrio in 2009 and launched the site’s Playflow platform in January 2011. Youth sports organizations using Korrio pay $8-$10 per player for an annual license.
Korrio says parents have no need to fear putting their children’s names on the web tool. Even though they can access Korrio from any computer, smartphone or mobile device, the information is kept safe and secure using top-notch privacy technology and full SSL encryption on every web page. Korrio also complies with COPPA and other state and federal laws requiring protection of the information of minors.
“Korrio decides what a visitor can see based on his role (i.e. parent, coach, team manager, registrar or teammate),” Goldman said. “We know who everyone is and how they are connected to the player. Protecting the player is our top goal.”
Even children that don’t have access to email can use Korrio to hold pre- and post-game discussions, share photos, compare game notes and plan events through the site, which is only accessible by teammates and parents.
Currently, Korrio is in the youth soccer market, but this year Goldman says the company plans to expand to include other major youth sports including football, baseball, basketball and lacrosse.
Do you have children in team sports? Would you use Korrio? Tell us in the comments.
Adapted from The Spark of Genius series ~ Kate Freeman
Facebook has frequently changed the way it displays photos. Now Facebook is rolling out its greatest photo update 
yet.
Facebook will display photos in high-resolution and allow full-screen viewing of images. The pictures will be crisper, higher quality and can be up to four times larger than before, Facebook announced Thursday.
Chrome users, as well as those on the latest version of Firefox, can view full screen photos by clicking the arrow in the top right corner.
The social network last updated its photo viewer in February. That photo interface appears in a pop-out box with the caption information and ads displayed in the right sidebar. Facebook Timeline was illuminated in the backdrop.
Facebook knew the photos on its site weren’t the best quality, however. Ryan Mack, a Facebook engineer, said in a blog post he started working on the photo updates after he noticed the coloring was off in his photos.
“Inside the Sydney Opera house I took a photo that I just couldn’t wait to share with my friends,” Mack said. “But when I uploaded it to Facebook the seats ended up looking way too red. It was a subtle change, but it bothered me enough to investigate.”
Internet photos display in sRBG, but Mack explains that turning RGB display on can slow the site down. Standard definition photos can slow load time on Facebook by 30%. To make sure high definition photos won’t slow down the site, image scientist Apostolos “Toli” Lerios found and removed the parts of the color profile that aren’t needed to display an image.
What do you think of Facebook’s photo update? Is it loading faster for you? Do we really need photos that are up to four times larger? Tell us in the comments.
Adapted from Mashable
Women’s health and fitness magazine Selfis upping its investment in Facebook. The publication is launching a social game and diet program on the social network next week. 
The “Self Workout in the Park Social Game” developed by the magazine’s VP and publisher Laura McEwen is inspired by the exercise-themed events Self throws in major cities every year. The “Drop 10 Diet Together” is one of many diet programs the magazine has developed in conjunction with health and fitness experts over the years.
Facebook is where Self readers are already connecting with each other, says editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger.
“We created an app for Facebook, so you can create a micro-community where you and, let’s say, five best friends who are going to be bridesmaids can drop weight,” Danziger told Mashable. “By supporting each other you will lose more weight.”
The Drop 10 program will live on Facebook as an application. Customizable settings including team names, member invites and page privacy.
Individuals are encouraged to try the diet and exercise plans designed to help users drop 10 pounds in ideally five weeks. Friends and family can send out invites to anyone on Facebook to share eating plans, card calendar, exercises and logs to track calories and daily meals. The full plan of eating plans and workouts will be available on the magazine’s main page.
Danziger, who has been Self‘s editor-in-chief for more than a decade, spoke of the importance of the web to the brand’s future.
“The old way of ‘create a magazine once a month, put it out there and then you move on’ is no longer valid,” she said. “Now you have a 24/7 relationship with your readers who give you feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.”
The magazine believes it’s time for the print publishers to engage with readers who are feverishly tweeting, pinning and liking.
“The world of technology holds hands with print,” she said. “When you are reading a story you enjoy the experience of reading. But when you go on line you are in a user head space — you need tools interactive functionality.”
The magazine hopes to engage with old and new readers online. Those interested in the diet will need to like the Facebook Self page, create a group, invite members and choose to share progress on social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Foursquare — or choose to keep the group diet a secret. A weight loss goal is the sum of pounds each individual’s goal. Personal weight ups and downs are always private.
The weight loss app and the new social game targets women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, although anyone can install the app.
The Facebook game will feature personalized avatars that tone up just as players would with regular exercise. There are virtual prizes and puzzles to keep Facebook gamers happy. Think Cityville or The Sims Social with yoga and Zumba.
With these new Facebook initiatives, the company is hoping double their current 180,000-plus Facebook fanbase.
Adapted from Mashable
Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.
Apple Unveils New iPad 
The story of the day (week, month?) is definitely Apple’s launch of the new iPad. We’ve got you covered from all angles: check out our initial coverage, a recap of all the important announcements and details from Apple’s event and our review of the new iPhoto app.
Apple Launches new Apple TV and iOS 5.1
With all the iPad-related news flying around, it’s easy to forget that Apple also announced a new version of Apple TV, now capable of playing 1080p video, at the same price: $99. A new version of iOS 5.1 is also available with Siri for Japan, camera enhancements and several other fixes and improvements.
Google Updates Search App for Windows Phone 7.5 Devices
Google has released a revamped version of its Search app for Windows Phone 7.5 devices. It now accepts voice input as well as auto-complete, and it can find places near the user without them actually typing in the location. You can get it here.
Reprinted from Mashable
Facebook introduced a new tool Thursday that allows you to organize your newsfeed into a personalized newspaper. 
The feature, which will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks, lets you create and subscribe to topical feeds such as “Recipes” or “Fashion.” Under a list for “Sports,” for instance, you could add the public Facebook pages of all of your favorite teams, athletes, publications and pundits.
It functions much like Twitter lists, which allows you to create and follow lists of users who tweet about the same topics, and Google Reader, which lets you subscribe to folders containing different sources about a single subject.
Adapted from Lauren Indvik
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in South-of-Market San Francisco is a warm, intimate, high-tech venue, which is probably why Apple keeps coming back here for its iPad launches. Far smaller than the neighboring Moscone Center, the YCBA theater boasts a mere 755 seats.
Here’s what we can guarantee about Wednesday morning: every last one of those seats will be filled. Two of them will be occupied by your ever-loving Mashable crew.
Beyond that, very little is certain. As you know by now, Apple’s obsessive secrecy about their product launches makes Fort Knox look like a shopping mall on Christmas Eve. And let’s post this clear caveat one more time: every last rumor about this event could well be wrong.
But there is a pattern to these launch events, and if you’ve been to enough of them — as editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff and I have — you get a sense of how it’s going to go. The process was honed over the years by the maestro, Steve Jobs, so incumbent CEO Tim Cook is standing on the shoulders of a keynote-loving giant. Here’s how we expect it to go:
1) Cook will take the stage. Unassuming as he is, at this point there simply isn’t anyone else at Apple with his stature. Look for assists from old hands, such as marketing chief Phil Schiller, but Cook will be the main attraction. (Design guru Jonny Ive tends to show up on video rather than on stage.)
2) Let’s start with some numbers. As with any good entertainer, Apple knows not to hit the crowd with the performance they’re expecting straight away. No doubt we’ll see some updated stats on iPhone and Mac sales; almost certainly, we’ll be reminded that the App store just hit its 25 billionth download.
In short, the numbers will be dazzling, and it’s all part of the act. Applause will be widespread and frequent in the non-press seats. A salesperson would call this “pumping the buying temperature.”
3) Two words: Mountain Lion. Apple has a captive audience and a new Mac OS in the works — one that isn’t going on sale until this summer. Expect to see its main features (Messages, Reminders, Twitter et al) recounted in loving detail, while the tech press shift uncomfortably in their seats.
4) A short history of the iPad. Talk of Mountain Lion, with all its iOS integration, should naturally pivot to the tablet we’re here to celebrate. This is Cook’s opportunity to take us back to early 2010, when Jobs unveiled the original iPad to an extremely skeptical press corps. It would be a good time for a few jokes — remember how we all thought it just looked like a large iPhone? — as well as more eye-popping stats on sales since then.
If Apple is going to get in a few digs at tablet competitors who have been taking pot-shots of their own — hello, Samsung — now would be the time.
5) iOS6, is that you? Here’s the first big unknown. Will Cook tease us with news of Apple’s next generation mobile operating system (which someone at Apple is apparently already using to read Mashable)? Or will that wait until the iPhone 5 unveiling this fall?
6) What’s next. The windup to the big pitch. Expect Cook to talk about the retina display on the iPhone 4 and 4S; how clean and crisp it looks at that resolution. Now, wouldn’t it be great to see that on a larger screen?
SEE ALSO: Is a Retina Screen on the iPad Overkill?
7) The big reveal. Here we are at the moment of truth. What is this new device? What is its focus? Is it the iPad 3 or, as practically everyone in the blogging world now expects, the iPad HD? Is it bulkier, slimmer or the exact same size as its predecessor? Will it be allowed to run Siri? How’s its battery life? Will its data service models use 3G or 4G? How good are the front and back cameras? Will we get stereo speakers? When can we get our hands on one?
In short, pretty much all the fanboy questions of the last six months will be answered in five minutes or less. The rest is icing.
8. Demos, demos, demos. Time to wheel out the heads of this and that product group, followed by the makers of this and that app, as the main features of the new device get taken for a spin. Undoubtedly we’ll see a lot of what games look like on a tablet with ridiculously high resolution — perhaps a game or two in development that no one has seen yet. Infinity Blade 3, anyone?
9. Let’s watch some videos. Here’s where we’ll see how Apple intends to market the new tablet. Indeed, if Cook’s launch of the iPhone 4S is any indication, videos will be shown throughout.
10. One more thing? A staple of Jobs keynotes, the last-minute surprise was lacking in Cook’s unveiling of the iPhone 4S. Perhaps this is a permanent change, a recognition that no one could carry it off like Steve. But if there is one more thing, it might be the ideal moment to reveal the new Apple TV box — or maybe, just maybe, the fabled iTV — and showcase its ability to connect seamlessly with the new iPad.
SEE ALSO: The iPad HD — Is This How Apple Will Own the Living Room?
11. The aftershow. The press wraps up its liveblogs and begins analyzing every detail of the new device. If we’re lucky, there will be hands-on demos somewhere inside YBCA. If not, we’ll be out on the street, jostling for cabs, our heads spinning, our minds writing headlines.
In short, another unforgettable morning at YBCA. How close is this to the mark? We’ll find out in a few short hours. Our liveblog starts at 12am ET, 9am Pacific. See you then!
Reprinted from Mashable
