On Tuesday morning July 27, 2010, I had the privilege of presenting on the topic of social networking  for the job search at the weekly meeting of the Watermark Community Church Careers in Motion Job Transition Ministry. Over 130 people attended – the largest audience to which I’ve ever spoken.

When I offered to speak to the group a couple of months back, my proposal was to focus the presentation on ways to use social media and related technologies to make the job search process more efficient.buy viagra But at last week’s meeting, the group’s moderator asked those present some basic questions about social networking to ascertain their comfort level. It was obvious from their responses that I needed to change my plan for the pitch because too many in the group clearly were neither comfortable nor confident about the tools available.

In effect, I gave two presentations at Watermark merged together as a single enity. I concluded the session with the talk about Automating the Job Search, as originally planned. But the first half of the discussion (embedded below) focused on the importance – for most people – of using social networking for most people in the process of finding a job.

Those in attendance asked many excellent questions and based on personal and e-mail feedback, the presentation was well-received.

I hope that you find it valuable as well. I welcome your feedback on it in the comments section below, along with any suggestions for improvement that you may have.

Good luck in your job search!

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Compete.com has released its normalized metrics for June 2010, a month in which both Twitter and Facebook showed mixed results.

In June, Facebook.com had 124,708,005 unique visitors, an increase of 0.75% over May, while Twitter.com experienced a comparable percentage decrease with 28,026,876 unique visitors, down 0.74% from the prior month.

Things were different in the Total Visits metric, however.

For the first time since March, visits to Twitter.com rose in comparison to the prior month, increasing by 0.48% to 230,305,268. In contrast, Facebook.com visits dipped in June by 1.42% to 3,038,822,617.

Statistics for access via third party applications (e.g., TweetDeck, HootSuite) and mobile devices are not reflected in the Compete metrics data.

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As discussed in Why IS Social Networking So Important to the Job Search?, the original purpose of my July 27, 2010 presentation to the Watermark Community Church Careers in Motion Job Transition Ministry was to discuss how social media and related technologies can be leveraged to make the job search process more efficient.

The slide deck from the second half of the meeting (embedded below) is entitled Automating the Job Search and addresses that goal. It focuses on the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Google Reader to more efficiently monitor the information stream from job boards, Twitter, LinkedIn, and numerous other online resources.

It’s my belief that RSS is both the best-kept secret and most under-utilized technology on the web today. If you’re searching for a job and not using it to automate your job board search queries, blog reading, and company research – among other activities – you are wasting time unnecessarily.

Job seekers are told that looking for a new job is a full-time activity. That being the case, why wouldn’t you try to increase your efficiency where possible?

Take a look at the presentation deck and see if you can’t find a way to gain back a little bit of time in your very busy day. Remember to use registry cleaner to keep your PC safe and up-to-date.

I welcome your feedback on it in the comments section below, along with any suggestions for improvement that you may have.

Good luck in your job search!

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