ResearchGoddess

The Pay It Forward Project is the continuation of a series of articles I started here in 2010 spotlighting some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote on Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, was to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

The 2011 Pay It Forward profiles will consist of the 2nd generation of spotlights — individuals recommended by those who were featured in the 2010 series.

Spotlight: Jason Peck
Title: Social Media Manager
Employer: eWayDirect
Who paid it forward: DJ Waldow

Jason Peck is a Social Media Manager for eWayDirect, a full-service emarketing service provider. He is also the founder of Highway 24 Media, LLC, a social media consultancy. He attended UNC Chapel Hill where he studied Journalism with a focus on Advertising. His love for creative writing helped him land an internship for a media agency. But his first love was sports, and he was always interested in the marketing side of athletics.

Continue reading “#PayItForward 2011 Profile: Jason Peck” »

As I step into my new role with ERE as Editor of The Fordyce Letter and continuing my duties as Editor of The Source Newsletter, I wanted to flesh out a couple of observations I have made in recent months regarding the sourcing world. I have heard several people, including a number of sourcers, express concern for the future of our function. These concerns have ranged from automation to irrelevance due to the vast number of social technologies at our fingertips. While I do agree that our roles are certainly changing, I would like to offer up a couple of predictions I’ve been rolling around in my mind regarding these concerns. Continue reading “Two Predictions For The Future of Sourcing” »

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!