July 27th, 2009

Job-seeking college grads may require an extreme social networking makeover

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:01 am

Categories: Career Development, Hiring, Personal Branding, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Job, Facebook, Network, CDW Corp., Candidate, Social Networking, Recruitment & Selection, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

Congratulations, graduates. You’ve been out of school for a bit now and, if you haven’t yet lined up an internship or a job, you’re frantically looking. You have all of your ducks in a row: résumé, references, portfolio, etc. However, what you’ve neglected to do is take down those keg stand pictures you have up on your public Facebook page.

Will this keep you from getting a job? Maybe.

According to a survey conducted late last year by CareerBuilder.com, more than one in five employers search social networking sites to screen potential hires. And, if your social network presence isn’t in tiptop condition, it might hinder you from getting the job of your dreams in an already tough market.

CDW, a provider of technology products and services, is one such company that seriously considers the social network presence of all hires. After a slow-down in hiring earlier this year, the company re-focused its recruitment efforts in the social networking realm and is steadily building a pipeline of talent by looking at Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to recruit college graduates seeking careers in IT, sales and/or engineering.

“More than 30 percent of CDW’s coworkers are made up of Gen Y, which means paying attention to social networking is critical to finding and retaining the right talent,” said Charles Bretz, CDW senior recruiter. “Specifically, CDW is looking for candidates that have the same values as the company - respect for colleagues, customers, partners and communities as well as working everyday with passion and integrity. As such, social networking, as one of CDW’s main sources of sourcing talent, plays a large role in pairing down a large group of candidates to find the right ones for the job.”

For this reason, Bretz cautions job candidates and reminds them of the “grandmother rule of thumb” when it comes to social networking.

“If you would not want your grandmother to read or see it, then take it down,” he said. “Candidates who want to be considered seriously by CDW should have a professional profile on Facebook or Twitter and on LinkedIn they should have recommendations from past jobs, friends, etc., to illustrate their professional and personal commitment.”

CDW takes the more conservative approach when it comes to the social networking presence of its potential hires, however other companies are a little more open.

“While reviewing social networking sites can reveal certain things about a candidate’s behaviour, interviewers should realize that much of what a candidate puts on these sites is for fun, and does not necessarily reflect an applicant’s ability to be successful at your company or their on-the-job demeanour,” said Thomas Morselli, director of human resources at Mindspark Interactive, Inc. “Smart interviewers understand that these sites are not key decision makers in the overall process, and are simply part of a well-planned and conducted selection process that is designed to uncover relevant information about candidates’ ability to do the job and fit in well within our company’s culture.”

Responsible Outgoing College Students (ROCS) is a company that helps college students and recent grads find jobs in Maryland, Washington D.C. and Virginia. Matt Smith says his company believes that Facebook profiles should not determine whether a candidate should receive a job or not.

“Frankly, we do not check their Facebook profiles and feel that students should have the right to their own personal lives,” Smith said. “In our five-year history, we’ve never had a complaint from our clients about a Facebook profile.”

Next: Are we being too tough on students? –>

July 22nd, 2009

SecurityBSides 'unconference' takes on Las Vegas during Black Hat, Defcon

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:57 am

Categories: Black Hat, Conference News, Security, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media and Security, Twitter

Tags: Black Hat, Event, Speaker, Jennifer Leggio

Next week in Las Vegas, there’s a new conference in town. “Unconference,” that is. Security BSides will coincide with the popular Black Hat and Defcon conferences, and take place at a location off of the strip. It is a free, two-day event made up of 65 attendees (so far), 15 presenters, and six organizers.

The concept of SecurityBSides resulted from reaction to a number of rejections to the call for papers (CFP) for Black Hat USA 2009. According to the organizers:

A number of quality speakers were rejected, not due to lack of quality but lack of space and time.  Any constrained system must operate within the bounds to which it has defined itself.  Conferences are constrained to the eight hours a day for however many days they run.  Our goal is to provide people with options by removing those barriers and providing more options of speakers, topics, and events.

The idea, according to the event’s mission, is not to compete with Black Hat and Defcon, but to complement it with an additional roster of speakers. It was launched in the same fashion as the popular Barcamp series, which expands expertise and speakers to new audiences, with the philosophy behind Noisebridge and other hacker spaces, which promote “doing” in addition to talking. While the first event will happen in conjunction with Black Hat and Defcon, the goal is to make SecurityBSides a global community with coinciding with multiple events worldwide.

In true unconference fashion, SecurityBSides is largely relying on community input to determine final topics. Presenters add their proposed talks to the speaker list and participants vote on what they want to hear via Twitter.  Those talks that garner the most conversation get added to the agenda

While the event is technically “invite-only” anyone can add themselves to the invite list up until the day of the event.  There’s already a pretty solid list of panelists on the roster, including Luis Corrons, H.D. Moore, Jennifer Jabbusch, David Rook and Val Smith.

The event is still open to individual and corporate sponsors. Details on the voting, panels attendees and so on can be found on the Web site or on the Twitter feed.

July 19th, 2009

The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Career Development, Personal Branding, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks

Tags: Employee, Brand, Boss, Relationship, Social Media, Life, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

I read a lot about social media. Partly because I am interested, partly because I have to in order to write this blog. In all of my reading, there is one implied thought I run across more than others: “Social media is powerful.” It gives any average person who has access to the Internet and a bit of ingenuity the opportunity to create a more vivid, accessible “personal brand” and, if done right, that person can spend 15 minutes in the Internet spotlight. But at what cost?

We’ve all read the stories about people stupidly posting Facebook status messages about ditching work, only to have their bosses read it. We’ve also heard the stories about the guy who gets caught cheating because he was sloppy with his social networking. I’m not talking about those costs - that kind of human error deserves grief.

I’m talking about the side effects of creating a successful personal brand and, even if you make all of the apparent right decisions along the way, how it can create upheaval in both professional and private lives. The savvy engineer who creates a presence for himself via a blog or social network, only to make his boss feel threatened and then hamper his internal visibility. Or the rock star entrepreneur who feels she can’t get a moment to herself without the world watching, including her boyfriend.

“In business settings, the impact-for better or worse-of social media activities on relationships will be determined by a company’s culture,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Center. “In personal relationships, social media will expose insecurity and a lack of transparency (aka honesty). Social media amplifies information and behaviors. If we value authenticity, this is a good thing… The good news is that social media exposes inauthenticity and selfishness very quickly, so it’s easier to see them.”

Next: Workplace Impact –>

July 9th, 2009

Snake oil at its slickest: A social media spam story

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:56 am

Categories: Marketing, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Uncategorized

Tags: Social Media, E-mail, Jennifer Leggio

I’ll tell you a little secret: I love spam. No, not that icky meat-like stuff in a can. The email kind. I’m not silly enough to click on most of it but I love reading the headlines and intros. The ridiculousness of it all makes me laugh most of the time, and then I can continue my laughter when I learn of people clicking on these things as if they are real. So yes, I scan my spam filter folder every day, just hoping for hidden gems of hilarity.

Since I’m so on top of my spam I can pretty much mentally catalog which ones I get and how often (I used to keep a running tab on “v1agra” ads, just for kicks). I noticed the following spam from “trusocialguru” a few times within a week:

No kidding? Social media snake oil is becoming so rampant that potential scammers have taken to spamming out emails like this in the hopes of what? Making money, of course. I couldn’t let this go. It wasn’t even amusing this time; it was more of a reality check on the state of our industry. My friends at Web security company Purewire helped pave the way for me to dig into the situation by checking out the Internet trail for malicious code:

“The link in the email took me through a series of redirects that ended at a (benign) site advertising a “make money on the Internet via social media” program, which is unlikely to make people anywhere near the amount of money it claims,” said Paul Royal, principle researcher for Purewire. “It’s a 2009 analogue to the early 1990s commercials with Don Lapre selling a program that enabled people to get rich by placing “tiny classified ads’.”

Next: Who is this “trusocialguru”? –>

July 7th, 2009

Is Twitter making us all self-centered?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:58 am

Categories: Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter, Networking, Jennifer Leggio

I made a comment on Twitter this morning about how I don’t feel as if I fit in anymore. That wasn’t some “woe is me” decree implying that I was going to leave Twitter. Perish the thought. It was more of an observation on the way that Twitter has impacted the way people are using it.

It’s sad. Some of us early adopters of the service have been screaming for a couple years now about the value of Twitter. It’s been recognized, welcomed into the mainstream with open arms, and now almost every company out there is trying to determine how to center Twitter as part of its social media strategy (I am not saying it’s right, just saying that it’s happening).

The problem with that is… well, my greatest Twitter fear has come true. Twitter is slowly becoming a broadcast vehicle more than an engagement vehicle. It’s true that Twitter is great as a news distribution outlet, but really, the first use should be conversational. Sharing information and ideas. If a link comes along, fantastic. If you regularly engage with your network and post out your blogs (I do that), great. But don’t use it as only that. And don’t use it as a vehicle only to promote your stuff or just talk about your day without asking about what’s going on with those in your network. And don’t just ask questions and then not engage when your network, answers, either. I could go on… my grandmother (a “Miss Manners” of sorts) would be so proud.

So no, I don’t feel like I fit in on Twitter anymore. And it appears based on some of the replies and direct messages I received after I commented whined, I’m not alone.

Don’t talk to us. Speak with us. It doesn’t matter if you follow back 100 people or 1,000 people, you should genuinely engage. No one — not even Ashton Kutcher — should be too far above engaging with his or her network. So why are you?

What do you think? Tell me here or on Twitter.

July 7th, 2009

Why it is crucial to make sense of 'Twitter speak'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:55 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Twitter, Sentiment Measurement, Marketing Research, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

Guest editorial by Jeff Catlin

We often get asked what the next step in analyzing social media will be, so it seems appropriate that with Twitter being the “it” micro-blogging and messaging service these days, Twitter sentiment analysis is the natural selection.  Twitter has seen its user base grow dramatically over the last 24 months, far outstripping the growth numbers for the established social media players, like MySpace and Facebook.  Text and sentiment analysis naturally play into anything that contains words and text – and Twitter is no exception.

The interesting thing in the growth numbers of Twitter is that it is growing across a wide age range, which means that it’s starting to garner some seasoned business users (our “over 35” VP of Marketing is certainly an avid business user).  One undeniable effect of this change is that Twitter is becoming the incubator of opinion for a whole host of consumer products.  Companies certainly realize this and are trying to monitor Twitter, but technologically-speaking Twitter is a tough thing to monitor.  Sentiment measurement is at the forefront of much business analysis these days, but in some ways Twitter seems as if it was designed from the ground up to defeat any automated sentiment engine.

For instance, there isn’t much sentence structure in tweets, and what’s there is often wrong. And many of the tweets are just tinyurl or bit.ly links with absolutely no content contained in the URL itself.

Given these challenges, is monitoring and measuring sentiment in Twitter a hopeless chore?  Fortunately the answer is No. Even though there are some challenges to automated scoring of Twitter content,  there are also some advantages to processing  tweets and in particular the tone within Twitter.

The beauty of Twitter is that there is very little grey area in tweets.  You’re either posting some source of information, posting an opinion you have, or replying to another informative or opinion-oriented tweet.  Clearly, opinion can easily bleed into information (“Great sale on laptops at @BestBuy”), but even in these cases the tone is clear.  When people put out an opinion on Twitter it’s not a muted, polite, and carefully written opinion, it’s pretty much stream of consciousness, and typically includes strongly toned words.  This was made more evident than ever in the Motrin mom’s ad campaign controversy last year as well as Skittle’s Twitter campaign.  These controversial advertising and marketing campaigns, among others, are solid proof of the need for companies to be actively monitoring and engaging with consumers in the myriad of social networks and platforms, like Twitter, where conversations are living and changing right before their very eyes.

With Twitter for example, the concise use of words in tweets lends itself to automated sentiment scoring very nicely, so if you can learn the outlying terminology (essentially trendy ways of keeping tweets to 140 characters) and filter out the factual posts, then sentiment analysis will, in fact, work well with Twitter.  The key to this is putting in the time to understand how tone is expressed in these short, “conversational” posts.

Lexalytics has put two of our summer interns on this very task with the goal of enhancing our ability to measure the tone of tweets.  A number of other vendors appear to be doing similar work, so in the very near future the accurate measurement of sentiment in Twitter will be a reality.

Jeff Catlin is the CEO of Lexalytics and has over 15 years of experience in the fields of search, classification and text analytics products and services.