ResearchGoddess

I checked out this post by Karen Russell, who teaches a Word of Mouth Communications class at the University of Georgia. This list was compiled by her class regarding the “social media tools that ad/PR students should know how to use, as well as the skills and characteristics that they should cultivate, in order to be prepared for 21st-century jobs.” I think it’s great that students are thinking about this stuff before entering the workplace! Even though made for PR students, both of these lists are good things for internet researchers and sourcers to note when thinking about the skills needed and the resources that will be helpful in developing a successful research/sourcing career. Check out the list of social media tools they came up with here; do YOU use all these resources?

Social Media Tools

• Blogging
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Podcasting
• Flickr
• Facebook, MySpace (social networks)
• Wikipedia
• Google docs, chat, groups, etc.
• RSS feeds and aggregators
• Social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
• Search engines including blog searches
• Second Life
• LinkedIn
• VoIP, such as Skype
• Mobile media
• Interactive gaming

I’m so excited – my first quote in a major publication! I interviewed with Erik Sherman a little over a month ago for an article he was writing on how to get a job through networking. The article was just published in AdvertisingAge a couple days ago, titled The New Way To Network For A Job. An interesting article for all social networkers outlining some stories on how people are using social media to find new employment today, as well as how companies are using social media to seek potential candidates. My boss’s boss, Claire Lematta, was also quoted in the article. Check it out!

All this week, I decided to run a little (secret) mini-experiment on my blog traffic that came from Twitter, just to see what kind of traffic would come from my Twitter account. For those of you who don’t know, I own both www.amybethhale.com and www.researchgoddess.com, and both point here to my blog. However, I don’t use researchgoddess.com as my primary URL (yet). In knowing this, I decided to change my website listed on Twitter to www.researchgoddess.com, and I also noted on a couple of tweets references to posts I made by directing people to www.researchgoddess.com. I wanted to see who would visit based on my tweets and hits from my Twitter account. Here’s what I found:

1. I signed up for Twitter months ago. I had exactly 0 people following me as of March 8th (one week before I started my experiment). To date, I have 144 followers.
2. In the last 7 days, I have had 49 referrals to my website from Twitter (coming from researchgoddess.com and/or clicks on my Twitter page)
3. Of the 265 referral clicks to my website, referrals coming from Twitter accounted for about 19% of those clicks

Understanding that I’m not throwing up huge numbers here, my site has also had direct hits in the past 7 days, but these are referral clicks which would be where my Twitter clicks came from. I think it’s pretty neat that in the course of 7 days, almost 1/5 of the referrals to my blog came from Twitter, when only 2 weeks ago I had zero activity on it! I am excited to have it in my research arsenal.

LinkedIn now has a LinkedIn Recruiter corporate solutions product. That’s old news to most of us. But… according to Mark Hendrickson’s post tonight on TechCrunch, LinkedIn is rolling out company profile pages on Friday morning:

“On Friday morning they [LinkedIn] will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them…The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.”

Think they’ll eventually incorporate something like CogMap to tie it in with individual’s profiles? That might be cool…

LinkedIn has finally given in to its heavy population of recruiters and become a recruiter-friendly job board/social network powerhouse combo I see this being a huge pain in the rear end for the Monsters and CareerBuilders of the world…

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