Opinion

The following is a guest post by David Strom. Mr. Strom lives and works in the Central West End, is a volunteer mentor with Innovate St. Louis, and the manager of the St. Louis Job Angels group on LinkedIn, sponsored by the RCGA. He is an internationally-known expert on networking and communications technologies and has published thousands of magazine articles and is the author of two computer books. He can be reached at david@strom.com and blogs at strominator.com, where this post was originally published.

Even Conan can’t keep his job, although I am sure many of us would welcome a multi-million dollar payout as he got last week. But as our economy tries to re-start itself, I have seen first-hand how hard it is for people to get new jobs. Over the past seven months, I have been working with our local Regional Chamber and Growth Association in an effort called the St. Louis Job Angels, to help get information about new jobs quickly disseminated to the right people, and also provide self-help and peer networking to job seekers.

The effort was started nationally by consultant Mark Stelzner and has since become very successful here in St. Louis. We have more than 600 people on our LinkedIn group and a new job is posted almost daily. We also send out the postings via Twitter too, although trying to fit an entire job description into 100 or so characters is a challenge. Based on these efforts, I have some advice for employers and job seekers that I want to share.

First off, if you are going to post your opening online, make sure your Web jobs board is both search and Twitter-friendly. Try to have unique and simple URLs that people can email and Tweet to bring job seekers directly to the position at hand. Put all the information about the job on one page, including salary range, prerequisites, and reasonable experiences and skills required. Include a job number or some other identifying string that job applicants can use and reTweet so that others can quickly find the opening. And be specific about how to be contacted and with what information.

You would be surprised (well, maybe not) how many job openings I look at that don’t have this basic information. This isn’t rocket science (and we do have a few openings here in St. Louis for rocket scientists, believe me) and you would think that Al Gore still hasn’t gotten around to inventing the Internet, what with some of the postings that I see.

Some online job boards that are part of individual companies are behind registration walls, so you have to provide all sorts of information about yourself before you can get to see the actual jobs themselves. Bad idea! You want people to browse your board, because they might see something else that they are more qualified or more interested in.

There is a reason not to skimp on descriptions. The more information you can provide the job seeker, the better and more of a match your applicants will be when it comes time to apply.

The unique URL per job makes it easier to reTweet the openings: you use a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly and you can send out the job post quickly without having to worry that Twitter will mangle the URL or that users won’t be able to find it on the Internet someplace.

Some recruiters are told not to divulge the company name for fear that the company will be buried in resumes. Fair enough. But then provide more detail about the job so that applicants can understand what they are getting themselves into.

Also, be fair about telecommuting options. It is time to realize that many of us want to stay put for various reasons. If your management can deal with finding the best candidate in another city, then support this practice. I mean, we are in 2010, people!

Second, spend some time on LinkedIn. Yes, there are still plenty of places where you can post job openings, including Monster, Craigslist, and hundreds of other more specialized sites. And yes, employers should be promiscuous and post openings widely too. But the right use of LinkedIn by both employers and job seekers can be useful.

I keep adjusting my online LinkedIn profile all the time, even though I have had it for many years. I keep forgetting to add particular experiences, or to ask for references from previous bosses. So don’t try to create your entire profile in one sitting, but come back to it frequently. I have some more tips on how to improve your LinkedIn presence here if you want to view my slides.

Most of the people I know are still new at using this service, and some are unaware about the more advanced features such as Groups and Answers that can help augment your job searching and make the service more valuable too. Answers can help build your expertise and demonstrate your knowledge of a topic or niche. Groups can be used, as we do for St. Louis Job Angels group, how to find others who share similar traits and can be quickly scanned for updated information.

LinkedIn can be both a blessing and a curse. Getting groups setup is a slow process, and you have to follow an arcane series of rules if you want to play in their sandbox: for example, as group Admin, I can send out exactly no more than one weekly email to the group. I try not to bury people in emails, but still, sometimes you want to get the word out if we have had a lot of postings or some with very short response times.

Third, become better at marketing yourself. One of my colleagues here and the supervisor of the MissouriCareerSource local office, Frank Alaniz, talks about how to develop a resume that will present your qualifications in a way that a job interviewer or HR screener can quickly see you online. Most employers spend less than three minutes reviewing resumes, which means you have to grab them at hello.

Good luck with your own job search, and maybe you too can host a late-night show in the near future.

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The following post was written by Chris Reimer, CEO of Rizzotees.com and board member of the Social Media Club St. Louis.

Friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Do whatever it is people used to do on MySpace – sorry MySpace, you didn’t deserve that. One of many thrusts of Social Media is networking, and that begs the question, “How can you best network using Social Media?”

In this particular case, I will focus on Twitter. As a purveyor of funny t-shirts, I find Twitter to be an absolute Godsend. Not only do I find customers, but I can publicly interact with them. And all the while, I’m having fun. When was the last time a company found customer service to be fun? Twitter is an amazing customer relationship tool.

Part of meeting with success on Twitter is kindness. I have found the kindness and generosity of the people on Twitter to be bottomless. I try to give back as much as I get. To that end, part of kindness is giving people what they desire, and I have noticed that people on Twitter desire two things:

1. They like to be interacted with.
2. They like to be followed.

Number 1 is pretty self-explanatory. Unless you’re an introvert that’s inexplicably using Twitter anyway, it’s fun to engage in conversation. Exchange funny and interesting links. Trade ideas. Help your fellow man. Learn something you didn’t know yesterday. Or just goof off with “friends,” many of which you’ve never even met in person. The breadth and depth of interaction on Twitter is second to none.

Number 2 is a bit more complicated. How important is it to gain followers, to follow back, to not unfollow? etc etc. I would argue that a plurality of Twitter users really want followers, and the more the better. Why would anyone desire more followers than they currently have? In short, for many people, gaining a follower is a vindication of how interesting you are. It means someone else thinks you’ve got something to offer. Someone finds you interesting. To gain a follower, selfishly and egotistically, has real meaning for many Tweeps, as well it should. Save for the bots that sometimes clog the arteries of Twitter, we are human – we have emotions, we want to be loved. Why would Qwitter even exist, except to catch those people that don’t love you anymore, and then try to figure out why.

I have been giving my fellow Tweep @joeldrapper some lighthearted trouble for his decision to unfollow all 13,000 of his followers, and then follow back a select few. Since he mass unfollowed everyone, his list of followers has dropped from over 13,000 to a little over 9,000. He talks about his decision here, and then clarifies a bit more here .

Let me preface this by saying that I like Joel alot, and that he is free to do what he wishes with his Twitter account. We all are. It is no mystery that he is a 15 year old boy from the U.K., and I would say that he is highly accomplished for his age, and is really highly accomplished, period. I don’t know about you, but I was blowing up plastic toy armymen with firecrackers when I was 15. When interacting with him, he gives you no indication of his age, and it plays no part in how I feel about this particular issue. I am merely offering a different take on the Twitter following/follower issue.

In his blog post, he states several reasons for mass unfollowing everyone:

1. He was missing tweets. It is true, with no filter to aid you, one could not possibly read the missives of 13,000 people. I recommend Tweetdeck or Seesmic to alleviate the pressure here. Create groups of your favorite Tweeps and you’ve honed your Twitter information intake.

2. He says that he didn’t want people following him just because he followed them. Along those lines, he says that the fact that 4,000 people have unfollowed him proves that he had some of the wrong people following him. Those people were not following him because they liked what he had to say. I would argue that anyone that cared enough to unfollow him actually noticed that he unfollowed them, and they took it personally.

3. He wanted to make better connections on Twitter. He is right, this is not a numbers game – it’s an interaction game. You can interact with whomever you like, regardless of following/follower counts. A hundred followers or 100,000 followers – always interact with whom you want (and use tools like Tweetdeck to make it easier).

4. This one is key – he says he realized that his “follow” was worthless. He says his sister was tickled pink when she realized she was being followed by @DowningStreet , home to Prime Minister Brown. Upon realizing that @DowningStreet followed almost 475,000 people, it no longer felt like an accomplishment to have that follow from them.

And that’s where this mass unfollow thing goes completely wrong. He says that if @DowningStreet was only following a few hundred Tweeps, having them follow you would be a great accomplishment. A-HAA! So gaining a following from someone is an accomplishment? Of course it is! I felt quite special when @garyvee followed me. I wish to god @The_Real_Shaq would follow me. Hell yes I want @KevinRose to follow me! It would be proof to me that my 11,000 Tweets have amounted to something special. The ego is therefore stroked.

Don’t lie – you have felt this way too! If you are so strong emotionally that you’ve never yearned to be followed on Twitter, then you’re a better person than I am. Therefore, it is an amazing Twitterverse accomplishment to gain yourself followers.

Turning that logic 180 degrees, by mass unfollowing 13,000 people, you have just slapped 13,000 people in the face, telling them “You have accomplished NOTHING! And I find you highly uninteresting, so goodbye.” Whoops, I’m not sure that’s the message you want to send on Twitter. Who knows, maybe it’s true – maybe you do find most people uninteresting. That is OK. But like momma taught us, if you can’t find something nice to say to someone, don’t say anything at all. And mass unfollowing all of your followers is unequivocally saying something to them.

If you’re now following 100 people instead of 13,000 people, are you more efficient in any way? What part of your Twitter life has improved? I don’t mean to fan the flames, but I suspect that one motivation is to appear to be one of the gurus… the people that have tons of followers but that follow very few – a Twitter rock-n-roll star, so to speak.

Tweeps, the moral of the story is to be kind and giving to others, and realize that your follow does mean something to other people. And I do want you to follow me!

Chris
Founder
http://www.rizzotees.com
@RizzoTees

p.s. Full disclosure: I do unfollow people, but only those that are not following me.

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