One morning several weeks ago—after brewing my coffee, of course—I skipped over to my computer, fired it up and gleefully opened my email.

OK, that’s not exactly true.

That same morning several weeks ago I woke up at 4 o’clock and lay there very much enjoying my horizontal-ness and the cocooning aspects of my blanket. About an hour later, I finally got vertical, brewed the coffee, shuffled over to my computer, powered it on and logged into my email program. There, at the top of my inbox, was a curious message from LinkedIn displaying the following subject header:

Brent, congratulations! You have one of the top 5% most viewed

LinkedIn profiles for 2012!

Huh.

“Wow,” I thought to myself. “Well, I do I have more than 500 connections there. But I rarely post in groups. So what’s the deal? Heck, I rarely post there. When was the last time I logged into LinkedIn?”

The next thing I wondered was, “How do I cash in on this?” And I immediately posted a snarky status update to Facebook, where I spend much more time, mostly for comic and other relief during the course of a typical workday.

Then, reality reared its ugly head: You don’t cash in on social media presence; you make it work for you.

Actually, reality’s head isn’t ugly. That’s a sidebar we’ll cover some other time. In the meantime, here’s the point and paradox of my apparent success in LinkedIn:

Social networks won’t work for you unless you work them, yet they may grow with little or no proper care and feeding. That’s the story with my LinkedIn presence. I don’t really work it there. Some people work the LinkedIn scene like a dance floor, but I don’t. Most of my professional-related social media activity is concentrated on Twitter.

If you’re flying solo, by the way, you may want to fly your professional freak flag mostly on just one of the three major social media networks. I’ve seen plenty of highly successful people jump into the deep end of more than one, but if you want to stay sane and have a life outside your work life, choose just one. And choose LinkedIn.

Yes, choose LinkedIn. Truth be told, yeah, I’m a Twitter guy. That’s so largely because of #HRTechChat, which is fine. I’m happy on Twitter, and I get by; people there know who I am. But I’m kinda thinkin’ about shifting focus to LinkedIn. A late-February article in The Wall Street Journal rifles through the reasons behind the interest in and success of LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s steadily impressive stock numbers of late fly counter to the story from Mark Zuckerberg’s world and force us to take note. I sure as heck have, and LinkedIn’s friendly email message to me, bearing the good news, sure did help.

Trust me: If someone who tends to LinkedIn like I do can enter the pantheon of that social network’s top 5 percent of users, someone like you can definitely see results there. The trick is to work LinkedIn so LinkedIn works for you. That means joining and commenting regularly in groups there pertinent to your career goals. It means regularly posting status updates to LinkedIn. It means keeping your profile current and easily accessible. Endorse people. Recommend them. Connect with everyone you meet in real life, at networking events. There’s a bevy of stuff  you can do. LinkedIn works.

The post So You’re among the Top 5% on LinkedIn. Now What? appeared first on #CareerGravity.

The book’s website explains it this way:

Welcome To Permanent Beta

We are all works in progress. It doesn’t matter whether you are a recent graduate, a seasoned professional, or a reinventing yourself mid-career. Great people, like great companies, are always evolving. They’re never finished and never fully developed. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, grow more. Permanent beta is a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. It is the mindset of every entrepreneur of life.

Their solution has two parts.

1. First, they insist that we all need to be in permanent beta mode. This refers to the initial launch phases of a startup company, then they launch in a limited, admittedly unfinished state. This means thinking of yourself as a work in progress and investing in yourself every single day.
2. Second, they suggest developing an entrepreneurial, adaptive skill set. The rest of the presentation defines these skills.

Take a look at the embedded presentation below and grab yourself a copy of their book.

The post Your Career as a Startup appeared first on #CareerGravity.

“My intent with this project is showing both the two sides of my professionality in digital: a good technological understanding and an online marketing knowledge,” Fortunini says. “Trying to analyse my professional path like a ‘web site performance’ has been hard, but helpful to get an objective point of view about current achievements and future goals.”

Well, I’ve seen a couple more examples of really creative résumés in the past couple of weeks and thought I’d show you an updated list of the world’s best résumés.

The Amazon Résumé

This first example is very similar to the Simone Fortunini résumé. It’s another online résumé that mimicked the look and feel of a website that is relevant and complimentary to the person’s career. In the case of web product manager Philippe Dubost, what better way to showcase his e-commerce skills than to build his own Amazon product page?

As Chris Taylor from Mashable put it, “We don’t actually know if Philippe Dubost is any good at his job. But boy, can he throw together a resume.”

The Candy Bar Résumé

The most recent viral résumé wasn’t an online version: It was a candy bar. That’s right, it was a real, crunch bar. Actually, Nick Begley made 12 of these bars and submitted them to job openings. It captured the attention of one employer, who hired him in the marketing department at sports site Sportsvite. Reportedly, it was not simply the idea that landed him the job, but the level of detail put into the stunt. Check out the image below and look at the ingredients and nutritional details. Even the UPC code contained his favorite number (32).

The job market still hasn’t improved nearly five years into a recession, so you need every edge you can get. You’ve seen the competition… What’s your plan to get the career you deserve?

The post The World’s Best Résumés appeared first on #CareerGravity.

Brent: Hey, Jon, how’s it going?

Jon: Great, how are you?

Brent: I’m good. Hey, I got a question for ya.

Jon: Lay it on me.

Brent: Um, what? I’m confused. I have a question and thought you might know the answer.

Jon: That’s a figure of speech, Brent. It means to tell me.

Brent: Oh.

Jon: …

Brent: OK, so, anyway, I just created a brand new Google account for that thing we were talking about, and I then created a YouTube channel for it, using the new Google account. THEN, I logged into Google+ under my own, personal Google account and created a business page there for it.

Jon: So what’s the problem? Sounds great.

Brent: Well, yeah, but now I don’t know if we’ll be able to simulcast Google Hangouts from the business page on my own Google+ to the YouTube page that’s under a different Google account. I didn’t even think of that until after I’d created everything. Do you know? Can we do that?

Jon: Sorry, but I don’t know off the top of my head. Google keeps changing all of this stuff every other week.

See? With so many ch ch ch ch changes to social media happening literally daily, sometimes even we at #CareerGravity don’t know the answer. Or, we do, but the answer doesn’t matter, because it could be a different answer tomorrow. Yes, it can be that crazy.

The Song Remains the Same

…but Google+ doesn’t. And neither does Facebook, for that matter. To a lesser extent, but still, most social media destination are continually changing the ways you can do things on them. It’s all the more reason for you to heed the free #CareerGravity Blueprint‘s advice to own your domain and only expect to keep the stuff you own. After you’ve taken this precaution, the trick is to remain abreast and ahead of all those changes in social media, at your online footprint’s many outposts. Following are a few quick tips. …

China Grovo

You don’t need to grovel for information on the light-speed changes to social media sites. Grovo, a free service I just learned about last week, emails you updates on the frequent changes to any social media outpost you want. Go to Grovo.com and you’ll encounter a bevy of videos all about all those destinations. There’s a lot of information at Grovo. Grovo even has an exceedingly low-cost service for business users. Check it out.

Where Do We Go Now?

Grovo isn’t the only place where the experts stay on top of the ever-changing nature of our favorite social media sites. Information-rich blogs and sites such as Mashable, CNET, Social Media Examiner, TechCrunch and others provide their readers with near-constant updates on the near-constantly evolving landscape of social media. Sign up for their RSS feeds and stay informed.

image credit: David Bowie, by Thuany Gabriela

The post Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes in Social Media appeared first on #CareerGravity.

Career Matchmaking

Systems are leveraging social and contextual information to help better match companies and talent for deeper connections that create lasting value. Human resource departments and recruiters refer to people who apply for jobs using job boards as “Homers,” as in Homer Simpson. The reason is that the talent level of those candidates is generally poorer than those that come through referrals. With the convenience of social media, companies are now able to scale this process and find candidates who are better matches.

Lesson: If your digital footprint is too small to be seen, you’ll be missing out on many of those opportunities. Don’t be a “Homer.”

The Quantified Employee

Talent management tools that leverage big data are revealing hidden metrics tied to employee value. For example, they discussed tools used by workers rank their peers to reveal company value. Also, companies are using tools that will generate social metric scores for existing employees. So it’s not just about using social media to find a job, companies are now beginning to use these tools to figure out who they’re going to promote.

Lesson: Your success is not just about how you perform but to whom you’re connected.

Telepresence

Technologies are helping employees interact remotely with co-workers and objects stationed anywhere in the world. This means outsourcing will be easier and competition will be stiffer. Tehnophobes need not apply! Successful employees are going to be the ones that are more comfortable with technology and collaboration tools.

Lesson: Get to know (and stay informed) about the latest digital technologies for networking and collaboration.

Freelancing

With the advent of mobile technology and cloud computing, more and more companies will be relying on freelance workers in place of full timers. This means that more and more people are going to have to think of themselves as entrepreneurs and business owners in order to get the jobs they need to meet their income goals. Marketing and social media are keys for success in this realm.

Lesson: You future workplace may be your home office and require you to work for multiple companies instead of one!

You can view the entire report here:

The post The Future of Work appeared first on #CareerGravity.

• Talent Solutions revenue increased 90% to $161M.
• Marketing Solutions revenue increased 68% to $83M.
• Premium subscription revenue increased 79% to $59M.

So the bottom line is that LinkedIn continues to kick @$$ and take names.We spend a lot of time here at #CareerGravity talking about LinkedIn because it is such an important part of your personal branding and online professional footprint.

And yesterday they upped the ante again. In a call with investors and analysts, CEO Jeff Weiner said, “One of the things that we’re increasingly focused on in 2013 is going to be the opportunity to support content marketing.”

Content Marketing

So what does Weiner mean by “content marketing?” Well, in order to understand this you need to understand the concept of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing turns traditional marketing on its ear by reversing the typical process. In the past, the key to getting your message out out to people was finding channels where you could interrupt people from doing something and shove a message under their nose. These options primarily included commercials and advertisements.

The problem with that approach is that it’s not working nearly well enough anymore. Disruptive technologies are making it much, much easier for people to avoid those ads. And so what many companies are realizing is that they need to offer people a reason to listen to them by providing valuable content and resources to their prospective customers. The process of creating this remarkable content and promoting it for the purposes of generating new business leads is called “content marketing.”

What does this mean to you? Well, as a job seeker you’re marketing yourself and content marketing is a great way to implement your personal branding strategy. By publishing your own presentations, white papers, blog posts, etc., you establish yourself as a thought leader and have the opportunity to demonstrate your skills and personal value proposition.

LinkedIn As a Publishing Platform

“One of the areas where we’re making strong traction in is LinkedIn as a professional publishing platform. You see with the momentum we’re generating now in Influencers, LinkedIn Groups, Slideshare, people are increasingly turning to LinkedIn to publish professionally relevant content,” Weiner said. “We think that’s going to create a very strong platform and very valuable context for large enterprises, for small-medium businesses who want to target [and] engage with professionals.”

It’s apparent that they have their eyes set on something similar to Facebook’s Sponsored Posts advertising model. They’ll open up their platform and its 200M+ members to companies who want to market their content to you. But this means that they’ll be developing a content ecosystem that will be available for everyone to use; including you.

Eggs and Baskets

While LinkedIn is certainly the Big Kahuna of career websites right now, it’s not infallible and nothing lasts forever. Just like you want to keep your investment portfolio diversified in order to minimize your risk exposure, you’ll want to keep your online personal branding strategies diversified. This means being sure you use property that you own (like your domain, website, email list, etc.) and property that you rent (like LinkedIn, Slideshare, Facebook, etc.). LinkedIn is a great tool but just make sure it isn’t your only tool!

How can you take advantage of this opportunity? Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will provide some guidelines for a content marketing strategy for your career!

Oh, and if you haven’t already, be sure to download a free copy of our #CareerGravity Blueprint.

The post LinkedIn Wants Your Professional Content [Personal Branding] appeared first on #CareerGravity.

We at #CareerGravity wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving (or happy Thanksgiving). What are you thankful for, in your career? What do you like to think that you, and only you, have come up with as a clever differentiation for yourself amid the sea of professionals out there differentiating themselves from their competition, in their careers? How are you using #CareerGravity to advance, own and solidify that differentiation?

Differentiation takes patience and time, just like alternative names for holidays, to gain acceptance and take hold. Our advice? Start dreaming. Start planning your career development today to achieve by T-Day of 2013 the level of #CareerGravity you can be thankful for.

image credit: eattt fanksgiving, by Jelene Morris

The post Thanksgiving Meets Your Career Development appeared first on #CareerGravity.

When it comes to most of those complaints, I get it. It’s a common issue for people who aren’t familiar with the tools and tricks inside Facebook that allow you to hide and filter some of the nonsense. But it’s a shame because Facebook really is a powerful personal branding tool and is increasingly becoming both a hiring and job seekers goldmine.

Social Recruitment

According to statistics from recruitment platform iCims, 14.4 million people used social media to find their last jobs. Additionally, 33 percent of recruiters and 50 percent of companies use Facebook. Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer of iCims says that more people are tying their Social Apply application to their Facebook pages than their LinkedIn profiles. Surprisingly, she claims that Facebook has actually been more popular than LinkedIn for these job seekers:

As much as people think of LinkedIn for hiring — they’re obviously popular with white-collar hiring, and most corporate employees are familiar with LinkedIn — the reality is that there are tons of tons of submissions where candidates are not on LinkedIn. Health care and retail are two of our strongest verticals. If you think of retail associates, part-time workers, they’re not on LinkedIn, but they’re definitely on Facebook.

Additionally, you’ve probably heard us quote the statistics from the annual Jobvite survey before:  89% of companies surveyed said that they were either actively recruiting via social media or planned to do so in the near term. Of those, 55% said that they use Facebook and 63% of them said they had successfully hired a candidate through social media. When rating the quality of candidates by source, job boards came it at the bottom of the list while referrals came in at the top. HR technology companies have seen this coming and are providing solutions to companies that allow them to use social networks as a way to find quality referrals at scale.

If you’re not part of those social circles, you’re missing out. It’s that simple.

Generation Gaps

Generation gap by Quinn Anya on Flickr

I’ve done a lot of public speaking and workshops over the last four years on the subject of social media. Most of my audiences have skewed toward the older end of the age demographic. More recently, I’ve been involved with colleges and young professionals. My observations are that there are challenges at both ends of this spectrum.

Professionals in their 40′s and up tend to look at social media with great skepticism. Sometimes, even with great hostility. In some cases, it’s because they simply don’t understand it. In others, they are extremely uncomfortable with the entire concept of sharing information. When they do embrace Facebook, they tend to do so in a very private manner with family and friends. They also tend to lurk more than engage, being overly cautious in many cases.

High school and college students, and even young professionals, tend to engage – often with reckless abandon. They’ve grown up in this age of sharing and since they have never been in the professional world, they tend not think about the professional ramifications of their posts and interactions. They don’t think very strategically about their personal brand or their use of these networks.

And so what I see are two mirror images. An older generation too uncomfortable with social media to use it for professional development believes that it’s inappropriate to ask them to mix personal and professional interactions. And a younger generation too unfamiliar with professional development to take advantage of social media believes that it’s inappropriate to ask them to mix personal and professional interactions. Both groups have the same basic issue for opposite reasons.

Both groups need to come to grips with it because it’s the reality of today’s job market.

The post Why Do Job Seekers “Dislike” Facebook? appeared first on #CareerGravity.

Labor Day is a U.S. federal holiday that celebrates the contributions of workers. It was signed into law in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland in hopes to end a growing trend of unrest and violence associated with the labor movement in the U.S. As economies of the world transitioned from agrarian to industrial economies, many jobs were lost and unfair labor practices were common. This led to the organization of labor unions and educational institutions to help people learn the new skills required for a new economic landscape.

Back to the Future

A hundred years after the beginning of the labor movement, the employment paradigm is shifting again. Seth Godin examines this shift in his book Linchpin. America’s factories needed workers with skills that were very different from those required in an agrarian economy. And so we developed institutions designed to create factory workers. He calls these workers “cogs”: They show up on time, do as they’re told, follow a script, don’t speak up and get paid an honest wage for an honest day’s work.

Unfortunately, they also get replaced.

This model worked well for over a hundred years, but as we transition from an industrial economy to an information economy a different type of employee is required. These, Godin calls “linchpins.” A linchpin doesn’t need a map because they blaze their own trail. They create art, which means doing their job in a way such that it is a gift to those around them. They defeat the lizard brain (which is constantly telling us to conform and not be different). And finally, a Linchpin ships (i.e. delivers). Instead of being replaceable, linchpins are indispensable.

#CareerGravity Day

As much as many of us would like to return to the comfortable days where we worked at one company for 40 years and retired with a reasonable pension, those days are gone. If you’ve been following our Charts of the Week, you’ve seen how the labor market is shifting. Full time work is giving way to part time work. Even more significant is the tendency to outsource tasks as we shift toward a freelance economy. This means that cogs are going to find it harder and harder to get ahead. Linchpins are going to reap the rewards.

That’s where #CareerGravity comes in. The Internet gives us the personal power to adapt and overcome. We are all fully empowered by free and low-cost Web 2.0 tools to take greater control over our own destinies, conduct our own educations and shape our environment. #CareerGravity is all about using that power to give your career some weight.

Our hope is that you take a moment on this Labor Day to consider the past and future of labor. The holiday was founded because of the stress and strain associated with the disruptive shift from one economy to another. We’re living through another shift that is probably larger and more disruptive than the industrial revolution.

Think about your own career and formulate a plan that will position you for this revolution.

The post Happy #CareerGravity Day (formerly Labor Day) appeared first on #CareerGravity.

Business Insider published an article this week titled The US Labor Market Is a Long Way From Being Back to Normal. They presented a series of sobering charts showing that the employment situation in the US may have stabilized and slightly improved, but still has a very long way to go to return to levels most of us would consider “normal.”

U.S. labor markets have recovered 4 million of the nearly 9 million net job losses from the early 2008 peak. …  Yet looking at the overall labor market, millions of unemployed individuals appear to fall in between these extremes. By our estimate, nearly 3 ½ million more workers were employed in 2008 than in 2012 in U.S. industries far removed from the housing bubble.

For the rest of the article and more charts illustrating the labor market challenges, read the article on Business Insider.

The post The Labor Market Still Has a Long Way to Go [Chart of the Week] appeared first on #CareerGravity.