ResearchGoddess

Today, I’m going to enlighten you as to why so many recruiters think that social media is just a time suck, a waste of your precious hours, and worthless as recruiting tools.

It’s because the majority of recruiting professionals are extroverts.

Yes, this is a widely believed theory, that the best recruiters possess extroverted personalities. Well I’m here to tell you that this is why you poo-poo social media so much. Because you’re an extrovert, and you just don’t get it.

My friend Tac Anderson, who blogs at NewCommBiz and is the Digital Consulting Director at Waggener Edstrom (and an extrovert himself) wrote a thoughtful post earlier this week on why introverts make better networkers. Here are his own words on the topic:

“…what I’ve noticed is that extroverts turn social networking into a popularity contest. We think success in networking means having the most connections. This approach can work but after a while this approach doesn’t scale anymore.”

Oh yes you extroverts, everything to you is about who has the most friends. But for those of us who are more introverted (yes, I STILL claim that, I just have extroverted tendencies) know that the friendship quality outweighs the quantity! And that’s why we rock at finding the usefulness of social media. While you’re out hawking for more followers, we’re busy figuring out how to add value to our networks and develop our relationships. We’re occupied with sharing, rather than bullhorning. As Tac says,

“Simply put they are more deliberate. Introverts are more likely to look for relationships that are mutually beneficial. They don’t want to waste their time or the other persons time. The relationships they do build are more sincere and more likely to result in something meaningful.”

You can take this stuff to the bank because it’s pure gold. Just because you’ve found no value in all your wild arm flailing and jumping up and down to scream “Look at me! Look at my jobs! I’m awesome!” doesn’t mean there is no value to be found. You just have to be cooler. You know, be an introvert. Because quite simply, we rock

Check out Tac’s post in its entirety. It’s great.

In February, I enjoyed watching the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and was surprised and pleased to see a fellow alum from the University of Florida, Steve Mesler, competing in the 4-man bobsleigh team. Even cooler is that I discovered we had actually graduated from the same program, Exercise and Sports Science, and in the same year (2000). It was awesome to watch Steve and his teammates go on to win a gold medal in the bobsleigh event, and I went to Steve’s website to read up on how he became involved with bobsledding. What I read was so interesting, and so applicable to what a lot of you who are getting ready to graduate from college and start a new chapter in your lives are preparing for. I saw many actions that Steve took to realize his Olympic dream that would also work for a student preparing to start his or her career following graduation.

I took a shot at reaching out to Steve to see if he would talk with me a little about how he got to the Olympics, and I was pleasantly surprised at his rapid response and enthusiasm to share with me. (There’s lesson #1 to you, students: you’ll never know what is possible until you ask.) We spoke on the phone for about 30 minutes and I got to know a man who is quite dedicated to his work as well as very determined to pay it forward and do a lot of good with what he has accomplished. But he didn’t get to where he is by sheer luck… he was focused, he worked hard, and he was very proactive about getting to where he wanted to be.

Whether you are getting ready to graduate from college or you still have a year or two left before you need to start thinking about post-graduation plans, there are some key points to keep in mind as you look toward your future. Chances are any number of the following questions have been racing through your mind:

• What’s next? I have no idea what I want to do…
• Will I be able to find a job that fits what I’ve studied in school?
• Who to I need to contact to find a job?
• What do I need to say or do to make myself stand out from the crowd?

Much of Steve’s history deals with these very questions, and as an Olympic gold medalist as well as a 2009 World Champion, Steve is certainly someone from whom you can learn a great deal about hard work, determination, and focus. For example, Steve actually spent most of his early athletic career as a decathlete. Only toward the end of his senior year in college did he contemplate bobsledding. This was a result of multiple injuries during his college career. Steve realized that if he wanted to continue to live his dream of becoming a professional athlete, he would have to make a change in direction in order to do so.

Lesson: You may not end up working in a position that is completely aligned with what you studied. Be flexible and willing to bend with the winds of change.

Steve referenced the book Good To Great by Jim Collins – to succeed you have to be able to move on, make changes, and have confidence in your abilities… but you also need to look at your current realities and accept what needs to be changed.

Steve began doing research on bobsledding before he graduated. In fact, he knew long before graduation that he wanted to continue to pursue professional athletics as a career. He started figuring out what he would need to do to make this happen the summer of his senior year. In the meantime, he worked internships and continued to workout and improve his strength and conditioning in preparation for his desired career path.

Lesson: Don’t wait until the last minute to start scheduling interviews, and keep up with your studies while you’re figuring out your post-graduation plans.

When Steve set his mind on joining the Olympic bobsleigh team, he knew he had something of value to offer, but he didn’t know whom he would need to speak with in order to prove it. He began doing some research to find the correct channels. Since this was in 2000, Internet search was not what it is today so he had to work hard to find the right people to connect with. Once he found the right people with whom to connect, he wrote to the Olympic committee and shared his attributes, strengths, and testing numbers, and he ended his email with, “If this is something I can do, please let me know…if this is something that I have no chance with, just let me know and you’ll never hear from me again.” While recognizing and showcasing his value, he did so without a sense of entitlement and with a request for an answer, even if it wasn’t one he wanted to hear.

Lesson: Do due diligence in researching the companies in which you are interested, and make sure you are reaching out to the right person/people. Personalize your outreach.

Lesson: Be confident in your abilities without coming across as entitled. Be receptive to whatever response you may receive from potential employers. Learn from their feedback and make appropriate adjustments in your search.

While Steve did receive a positive response from the Olympic committee, he was told that he had some areas that needed improvement first. It was almost a year before he qualified and was invited to compete on the national level – June 2001 was his first invite to a national event. In the meantime, he was working part-time at the university and coaching high school athletes. He had to figure out his own training regiment to prepare to compete as a bobsledder. He sought out a strength coach and together they sat down and determined what goals he would need to achieve in order to make the team.

Lesson: be proactive about your own career development. Don’t expect everything to be handed to you. Seek out a mentor or coach. Working hard toward a goal makes achieving it much more satisfying.

With a World Championship and an Olympic gold medal in his possession, Steve now has a huge platform from which to speak. He has chosen to take his fame and use it to pay it forward by starting the Back To School Project. This project helps to personalize the Olympic experience for young students by giving them a direct connection to Steve and his travels and competitions. As a young athlete, Steve remembers getting to go watch the Atlanta 1996 Summer Games in person and the experience that he had doing so. He remembers coming back from the Games pumped up about the experience and wondering, “What’s next?” With the Back To School Project, along with his sister, they invite teachers to sign up and send videos, letters, etc. and he in turn sends messages back to the classrooms taking them through his own competition experiences, helping them to feel more involved and connected.  Steve says it is a neat feeling for him to receive a letter from a seven-year-old telling him to ‘eat his vegetables and be safe’. His desire with the project is to get better technology into the classrooms that he is working with and to encourage more athletes to do the same and bring their own experiences into the classrooms for kids to enjoy.

Lesson: Remember where you came from, and always reach back.

A final thought from Steve: “Being an Olympic athlete is a selfish endeavor that not many people will pursue. You can’t lead a normal life. But what you’re training for is so worth it. Many times I’ve thought about how my life might have been without pursuing this. But over the last year, winning world championships and all, I wouldn’t give those up in a million years.”

Lesson: Pursue your dreams. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do. Know that it will take hard work, focus, and determination to achieve anything worthwhile. Be flexible to change along the way. But always enjoy the journey and learn from every experience.

You can follow Steve on Twitter at @SteveMesler and learn more about what he is doing with the Back To School Project.

With the availability of so much information these days via social media, I feel that if you’re not constantly putting yourself in front of your audiences, you take a chance on them forgetting about you. In about three weeks, I am doing a presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis on how recruiting professionals can do this without being annoying to their audiences.

Since I tend to be a bit of an over-sharer on Twitter, last week I decided to take the entire week off from tweeting via @researchgoddess, just to see what would happen. I also didn’t write any new blog posts.

My guess is that most of you did not notice, which is what I expected to happen. However, even though I wasn’t actively posting new content, I still gained a couple new Twitter followers, and my blog continued to be visited. The volume to my blog went down only slightly, and the search terms with which people found my blog were a little different:

2 weeks ago

last week

Twitter was a different story. I stopped tweeting on Sunday the 18th. Over the course of the week I had a total of only 13 tweets to me…a significant change. The first tweet to me wasn’t even until 3 days after I stopped. There were no tweets for previous blog posts or links that I had shared in the past. Only one person, @mosy311, made an observation that I hadn’t tweeted in awhile. I had 5,141 followers last Saturday, and as of Sunday evening, I had 5,143 followers. Over the course of the week I gained and lost quite a bit but I netted only 1 new follower. Basically – I was forgotten. I used Twitalyzer to check out some metrics over the course of the week:

My conclusion? The search-ability of my blog and the keywords I use on it kept it active and visited. The terms with which people found my blog changed, some for the better. (I love the fact that search for “AT&T sourcing” brought traffic to my blog!)  Twitter however, appears to require more updating and attentive interaction in order to stay relevant. Even though search engines like Bing and Google now pick up tweets and other social traffic, it’s still important to be in front of your audience’s eyes and continue to update. I suspect that if I went another 1-2 weeks without blogging, these numbers would change and get lower. But it would seem that occasional neglect of a blog is less impactful to one’s online identity than neglect of your Twitter account – if you’ve got an established audience as I do.

One thing I did discover while being silent this week is that life DOES go on when you’re not twittering, and I enjoyed the break. But don’t be too sad – I am going to start tweeting again now!

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What Elisa had to say about Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha: “…when Lisa, Jory and I launched the very first BlogHer Conference in 2005, it was because we decided to *do something* about people saying it was hard to find women who blog, instead of only talking about it on our blogs (which we did plenty of too). Similarly, I believe the Blogalicious team saw that conferences like BlogHer and SXSW were spotlighting issues and perspectives about people of color in individual panels, but they wanted more. So they, too, had the chutzpah to simply decide to do a full conference by and about women of color who blog themselves. And then when they did it, they did it with a bang. We sponsored, and our company representative came back with tons of ideas and praise for how well they executed. They’ve also expanded to introduce B-Link, a service to create opportunities for women of color to engage with marketers who want to reach them.

“To me, they are rising stars because they saw a need; they took the reins and didn’t wait for anyone else to fill it; they are building community, and they are seeking to create opportunities for their community.”

Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha met each other at Howard University’s School of Law while they were pursuing their J.D.’s. Nyasha went on to become a legistlative attorney, Stacey a government attorney, and Nadia was a commercial litigator and later became a law professor. As they each got married and started having children, they remained in touch and discovered that they all had similar questions about parenting, motherhood, marriage, and work. Their correspondence became long email chains that were really helpful. They soon discovered blogs and how they were the same interaction as their email but that they could share the helpful advice they had shared with each other with a broader audience – mostly about how to achieve a good work-life balance. This was the start of MamaLaw. This was approximately three years ago, and since then MamaLaw.com has blossomed and became a catalyst for the establishment of Blogalicious, a conference designed to encourage diversity in blogging, specifically women of color, inviting them to come learn and socialize. This was a one-of-a-kind conference, and as a result of its success, Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha also launched B-Link, which is designed to create and foster engaging conversation between marketers and influential women of color consumers. They also launched MamaLaw Media Group which now serves as the parent company of the three ventures and is largely devoted to raising the profile of women of color online, all while networking, building relationships, and promoting inspiration and success for the blogging community.

Why they feel Elisa recommended them: their story is similar to that of Elisa’s. Through MamaLaw, they created a network of women bloggers of color and decided to put on a conference to promote diversity. The first Blogalicious was in October 2009 and they invited women of all backgrounds to come, learn, and socalize. Due to the groundbreaking nature of the conference, they believe Elisa saw a bit of herself in them, forging a new path for women, particularly women of color. They called her early on to get advice and to help answer some questions. BlogHer became one of the first sponsors.

What instigated the idea of Blogalicious: Stacey said that as much as the three of them connect on the blog, they obviously still needed to connect in person. Nothing can replace that. She believes it is important to nurture the in-person relationships, especially as we become more tech savvy. According to Nadia, she is glad she took the leap of faith to do Blogalicious. It was a dream of theirs and she fully supports going after your dreams without being intimidated. Nyasha stated that the partnership they’ve formed as friends was strengthened in the process of taking on a new endeavor. As women, being able to rely on friends as you embark on this is priceless. One wouldn’t have been able to do this without the other. One lesson that came out of the conference was the immense power that women of color have in the marketplace in terms of their ability to control household spending. After the conference, the hope was that companies will recognize their buying power and develop marketing campaigns designed to reach their demographic more aggressively.

Where they see social media going over the next 12 months: in the next 12 months we will see more diversity in social media. More people are getting into Twitter even though lots of people do one or the other right now. As we progress, more people are going to be multi-tasking with using social media. We will also see more integration of social media technologies into our everyday lives. Things like Google search will change the way people view information, and people are going to get more engaged in the conversation because of it. It will become more accessible too – the ease and accessibility of the tools will encourage more people to use them.

Connect with Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha on:

• Twitter: Stacey (@JusticeFergie), Nadia (@JusticeJonesie), and Nyasha (@JusticeNy)
• Blog

We all have room to improve. The person who feels he has arrived in actuality has the longest journey still ahead of him. That’s why I’m asking you to tell me how I can improve as a blogger.

This is not a rhetorical question – I am putting this question out there to get some feedback from you – those who read my blog and find some value in it. By now you know I write on a wide variety of topics that I think all tie back to doing some good in the world – whether it be helping people improve their job search, helping other sourcers with techniques, providing advice on networking or using social media tools, or just paying it forward. I want to make sure you’re getting what you need and/or what you’re looking for here, so please take a moment and leave a comment with some suggestions. And don’t leave a comment saying “It’s great! I wouldn’t change a thing!” I hate asking for feedback and getting that response because there’s always something that could be improved upon

Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment and share your thoughts!