The Wayward Celt

We are in the midst of a global corporate culture change being driven by social tools and behaviours. One of the many ways this is occurring is within the hiring/recruiting processes.

No longer will a simple resume suffice to land you that dream job, or any job for that matter. Today, hiring practices have turned to Google as the defacto research tool; sometimes prior to an interview, sometimes even during the interview to vet the details you’ve provided on the spot. Imagine, for a moment, that nothing comes up in that search…. how likely are you to get the interview, or job if your knowledge and experience can’t be corroborated digitally? And what are your chances if the search returns no results for you, but does return results for another candidate?

Let us not kid ourselves: there is no such thing as “even footing” or fair playing fields when it comes to job searching and landing that right position. We all must do whatever we can in order to stand out as the right candidate for any job we may go after. In this new fluid world of corporate culture change, we have an amazing amount of tools at our disposal to help with that. Here’s a smattering of the easiest and most effective which can aid you as a buoy in your online presence:

• LinkedIn: For professionals, this is a simple must-have these days. More than a resume, it is a network of opportunity that goes well beyond just job-seeking. Build your profile and join in some group discussion and you’ll begin to see the deep professional value both during the hiring process and within your day-to-day activities after you’ve been hired. While you are working on your profile, make sure you avoid these 14 mistakes and ensure you are putting your best foot forward.
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• About.me: Some may call it a virtual business card, but this site is more than a simple card. It allows you to connect your other internet properties and act as a jumping off point, while also letting you stand out creatively with visual interest. Like LinkedIn, however, there are mistakes that can be made. Take the same advice above and apply it to this site as well to make sure you have a professional presentation and have the right text added to help with search engine optimization (SEO).
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• GooglePlus and Google Authorship: If you blog or write articles you are doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t setup/connected your Google Authorship to your GooglePlus profile. I’ve blogged about how to claim your authorship before, and I’ll say it again: this is the single best way to improve your search ranking/results when people look for you. Setting up your GooglePlus profile with relevant bits of information will help your Google Authorship show more robustly and help you stand out even further in search results.
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• Twitter: Yes, there is solid business value to Twitter. It’s not just a bunch of tweens speaking in acronymic code. Twitter is a great way to build a robust network of quick and easy shares pointing to even better content around the web. Links shared via Twitter and other networks also work to improve the SEO of that content, so when you share your blog posts or articles, you are increasing not only your reach but also your search results.
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• Facebook: My advice here is going to differ from the above (and from what I actually do)- lock down your publicly visible content to provide only a professional image to anyone whom you’ve not added as a friend. This will help you keep in lock-step with your about.me and LinkedIn profiles so you present a consistent and professional image. This will also let you use Facebook for your more personal/casual use with friends behind the security of a more tightly controlled public profile. But don’t lock it down too tightly, having a little bit of content publicly visible will help give people a sense that you are indeed there and active.
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All of these channels will work to improve your search-ability and allow you to focus and drive the right content found about you. Call it building a personal brand, or just managing your digital persona; making sure the right content is available and searchable will go a long ways to helping you land that next job. If you still think it is okay to ignore social media channels, think again: it could be the difference between extended unemployment and that next six-figure-income job. Sharing your expertise and knowledge to help others is the new paradigm of corporate culture.

I can’t say it more simply than this:  if you don’t have a social presence, you don’t exist. That job you want? It will go to someone else who does share their knowledge socially.

I blogged in December 2012 about how 2013 would be the year of influence. More so than influence, however, I think now it is simply the year of social.

The past few months have proven that true, but no more than in this past week while I was out in Orlando at Innovate, IBM’s new Technical Summit. Not only were there a ton of great sessions in the social business track, but I was able to connect with a huge number of colleagues also working in the space and share not only some of our difficulties and frustrations, but also the huge wins we’ve seen in our own areas.

For me, the biggest part of being able to attend was to build an in-person connection with so many of my coworkers whom I’ve only previously worked with in socially collaborative spaces online. I called this out in our kickoff meeting on site as my favourite Innovate moment, and after flying home, It still holds true. To me, that is one of the greatest benefits of social media: already having built a relationship through online networks allowed us to dig right in to wonderful discussion as if we’d met years ago. The reality of this is, of course, that we did meet years ago… just not in person.

This is the new world of business. One where professional networks are built and curated in social channels on-line, then strengthened and supported in gatherings like conferences or periodic on-site meetings. It allows for global collaboration to occur 24×7 in effective and meaningful ways, and then reinvigorates passion for our work. In fact, that was one of the great realizations I had this week:

Watching so many people passionately discuss topics, I realized that so many of us work in such specific industries or have expertise so focused that we tend to bore most others in our lives. So when you gather people of like mind, skill, and passion in one place, the conversations flow freely, as we now are able to talk with others who are as passionate as we are and understand not only what we are talking about, but the importance of it all as well. I rarely see people’s faces light up like they do when they can share with someone else who really “gets it”.

But there really isn’t anything new under the sun. Just like cloud computing, social business isn’t anything new either; just the tools (and subtle changes in etiquette) have evolved in innovative ways to do it all better. (Yes, I just said cloud is nothing new. Remember dumb terminals? That was cloud computing before the name.) Now, things have evolved and cloud is absolutely a critical piece of business today, but the core hasn’t changed. Social is in the same boat. Business has ALWAYS been done socially. But today, we can use new tools and innovative thinking to build those business relationships and maintain them in a scalable fashion, so when we meet in person we aren’t spending time learning about each other before we know enough to begin accomplishing anything, but rather spend our time on deeper conversations based on that online social connection.

All we need to do as social business professionals is to help break down the preconceived notions that this newfangled thing is just for kids, show people that it isn’t as unfamiliar as it seems, and really can prove to have huge business impacts from the measurable to the esoteric and un-quantifiable.

The power of social isn’t just in sharing knowledge on-line though. It is in the networks of trusted people we bring together, to surrounds us with amazing and wicked smart peeps who can agilely pivot and attack problems to not only succeed with their business goals, but blow them out of the water and rebuild the entire understanding of success. We’re seeing that from the top down and bottom up. Yes, 2013 is indeed the year of social.

I was challenged this week to use the word “errant” in something I wrote. This challenge, not surprisingly, came from a friend’s off-handed comment about an errant pickle on my sandwich, meant to poke fun at my own strict sense of what a Cuban sandwich should be and how it should be presented. (I’ll say right now that it was a fabulous meal that I’d order time and time again, but didn’t quite meet the definition of what a Cuban sandwich is. Yes, I’m pedantic, but I can still appreciate a great meal even when it doesn’t quite fit.) She enjoyed the idea, and the word, so much she challenged me to use it…

While I contemplated how to work the word in to my daily writing, I realized that the word itself tied directly in to my work in social business at a strategic and conceptual level, as the connotation of “errant” implies a negative while the denotation can actually become a positive.

Let me explain: Trying to be a change agent is hard. Changing culture is hard. But, what is often perceived as errant behaviour is one of the most critical pieces to accomplishing any success in changing a culture or being truly innovative. It is the dissent, the disruption, that many see as problematic but is critically necessary to break the culture out of its comfort zone and become more open to new ideas; ideas that may initially seem errant, but grow to become better methods or ideologies and ultimately change culture with positive effect.

Errant ideas or behaviour are simply that which stray from what is considered proper or standard. While this can indeed be negative or harmful in some ways, can also be positive and beneficial when thought and consideration is applied with informed intent. By way of example I point to the disruptive technology we know as Twitter: when used with informed intent the service can be an amazing agent for change by allowing perceived errant behaviour and ideas to be organized into an effective force for revolution.

Be it toppling ineffective governments or organizing against corporate greed, disruptive technology and the people who use them are on the forefront of culture change. Without our ability to stray from the standards, we doom ourselves to a stagnant and unsuccessful existence.