Managing Millennials
Dr. John G. Drozdal

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Why Would an Upwardly Mobile Professional Get on Facebook?

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Why Would an Upwardly Mobile Professional Get on Facebook? By Jack Speer

Do Your Professional Colleagues "Get You"? Social Networking Can Be an Opportunity

At this Point in My Career, Is Social Networking Worth the Time and Effort?

Why Would an Upwardly Mobile Professional Get on Facebook?

Have you ever said to yourself, “If my boss, company, friends, prospective clients, the guy or gal I just met knew me better, they would get me?  More than that they’d like me and admire me.  They’d discover I’m a person they want in their corner, in their world.”

With Social Networking, People Have
the Opportunity to “Get You”

Social Networking?  If people don’t know you, they have no reason to hire you, promote you, retain you in a layoff, call you, include or invite you.

Check out the Dream Come True, taking people on the edge of success from poverty to possibility.

Social networks provide the opportunity for key people to know you as you have lacked the opportunity to be known. 

Does this sound egotistical and self-serving?  It could sound that way.  But if people don’t know you, they have no reason to hire you, promote you, retain you in the layoff process, call on you, include or invite you.

Social media such as Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Communities like my neighborhood listserve, databases and emails, blogs, personal websites, and a myriad of new media emerging are useful and bewildering tools for you to tell your story and present yourself all day, every day, 24/7 to 6 billion people on the planet.  

For readers of BizWatchOnline.com, the "big three are Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.  In a recent survey of BizWatchOnline.com readers, 75.4% have Facebook accounts, 65.9% used Linkedin, and 28.3% are using Twitter

With Traditional Networking, You Can Only Be One Place at One Time 

With the traditional networking that people have told you for years you have to do, you can only be one place at one time, with the limited time you have. 

Traditional networking includes attending your local professional group, updating your resume, keeping a current set of business cards, attending conferences, targeting people you’d like to know, and getting involved in volunteer organizations. 

Traditional networking includes all the things that: a) you’ve been too busy with a 24/7 job where there is little to no chance to network or b) you presently spend huge amounts of time doing and find that you have only scratched the surface. The opportunity to network traditionally is to be one place and to need to be somewhere else.  

Make no mistake.  Traditional networking is still the gold standard.  You can never beat face-to-face contact.  Online social networking, however, gives you the opportunity to give a full picture of yourself in a format that it would take years to convey in traditional networking.

We’re All in the Broadcast Business Now 

Before the Internet, the traditional media controlled publicity about people’s ideas, initiatives, thoughts, and plans.  A newspaper could make a person or break them.  The saying was, “Never argue with the people who buy ink by the boxcar.”  The same principle was true for radio and TV.

The print and electronic media, principally TV and newspapers, still have the ability to break you, and one positive article is worth many times its weight in gold.  Newspapers such as our hometown Austin American Statesman are reconnecting with their readers with a wealth of local and regional coverage and regaining clout.  

Yet for the first time in history, you can broadcast the news about yourself in a way that will interest other people. 

Get-‘em Now--The Skills of Social Networking 

Like so many things today, to take advantage of the goldmine of social networking, you’ll need some of the following skills: 

1. Don’t be Boring—Develop Your Social Networking Broadcast Skills.  You can get past the general criticism of social networking that is embodied in the boring reciting of what I just did, on the level of, “I just brushed my teeth.  Ain’t that grand?” 
   
   What would be boring to say in person will even be more boring if it’s blogged, tweeted, or splattered onto your Facebook page.   People are interested in what you’ve discovered, learned, or experienced if it is presented in an entertaining way. 
   
   Blogs based on what just drifted through my mind, rather than a well researched and thought out statement, are asking me to give you minutes of my life that you don’t have the right to rip me off for.
    

2. Decide What Tools and Messages You’re Sending, and to Whom.  75.4% percent of BizWatchOnline readers have a Facebook account.  65.9%  number are on Linkedin, and 28.3%  are using Twitter.  These are the “Big Three” of the BizWatch Community.   
   
   Many of us became interested in Facebook to keep up with our family and friends.  I think, however, after the first joy of finding college friends I hadn’t heard from in decades, I found after a few Facebook exchanges that we have little in common for any ongoing relationship. 
   
   What I’ve found about Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter that is truly valuable are the professional groups that are searchable on each of these media.  I have already formed friendships and alliances that are invaluable and ongoing.  These groups are like self-
   organizing professional groups and will be the central part of my ongoing professional strategy.
   
    

3. Choose Your Social Networking Tools and Learn to Use Them.  If you are Gen X or Y, these tools are probably already natural to you, but Boomers may have to play some serious catch-up.  Here are some skills and strategies you’ll need to succeed:
   
   Learn to Sign-up, Set-up, Post, Upload, Download, Send and Respond.  Learning to sign up, set up your homepages, upload, and download, send and respond is a sequence you’ll have to learn and practice.   In the beginning it’s like my first biology lab.  I thought I saw a microbe in the microscope, but it was my eyelash.  It gets easier if you don’t drop out. 
   
   Develop Digital Photography.  There are so many ways to take good photos, and photos are really important in social networking.  Digital phone photos don’t have the pixels per inch to be great, but they can do the job.  A simple digital camera is the best solution.  Then uploading them to your computer and sizing them for the web is essential.  Then there’s the step that gets them to Facebook, the blog, or to the places you want to tell your story.  If you’re not comfortable doing this, find someone under 25 to help you.  
   
   Commit to Update.  I go back to my websites and Facebook entries and find what I’ve posted is old.  I have unanswered emails.  It’s important to commit to keep up.  After a time, its fun.  

Social Networks Will Take You Where You Need to Go—and That’s a Lot Further than Where you Are

I had a professional friend in the ‘80s in the audio visual business who told me he and his partner had made a commitment to do only 35 mm slide shows for the rest of their careers.  If you’re under 40, you probably think slides are what goes under microscopes to view germs, but it was the cutting edge of audio visuals then.  If you have a significant professional life ahead of you, you’ll need social networking as a part of it.  I’m waiting for you on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.  Let’s go. 

MBTI Hits the "Big Time" on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

If you want a community for your profession, there are incredible new resources on the social network. 

Social networking websites are the ideal environment for interest groups such as professionals interested in MBTI--and it's big. 

Unlike your professional organization there are no meetings or dues and you can check out what's happening anytime. 

You find yourself linked by a common interest to people all over the globe

Check out this article in the online ( to check it out click) New York Post  on personality "tests" on social media, sent to us by MBTI professional, Katherine Hirsh.  Check out Hirshworks at  http://www.hirshworks.com/

There is also a Facebook MBTI Group that has 399 members.  I just signed up and became friends with people from Argentina to Saudi Arabia. 

There are unknown thousands Twittering about MBTI.  Sign up for Twitter http://twitter.com/ and search for #MBTI.