My articles on Social Media - on Chillibreeze

Links to my articles on Chillibreeze

http://chillibreeze.in/career-tips-for-writers/on-the-extraordinary-bandwagon-of-social-networking-authors/


http://chillibreeze.in/career-tips-for-writers/creative-writing-tools-at-the-click-of-a-mouse/

Hate it or love it - Social Media is here to stay!

Recently newspapers were all agog with the story of how a woman lost her job after abusing her boss on Facebook - forgetting that they were friends on the networking website.The woman named "Lindsay" updated her Facebook status with "OMG [oh my God] I HATE MY JOB!!" and went on to accuse her boss. Her boss Brian saw her status and posted a reply. He mocked her for forgetting that they were friends on Facebook and could access everything that she wrote.

Social content website Digg even posted screen shots of the exchange under the headline "Why you shouldn't have your boss on Facebook.

This is one side of the story. Well, here’s the other side of the coin.

Laura Gainor thought creatively and based her job-hunting strategy on a deep understanding of the social websites. Comet Branding, a branding and communications agency, tweeted on Twitter that they were hiring a PR & Social Media Strategist.

Laura tweeted back with her ‘virtual resume’ which she also posted on Slideshare and Twitter. The comments from millions of social media users (who were ‘wow’ed by her creative concept) were so seismic that it forced Comet Branding to sit up and take notice. Laura ended up with a job with the company within three days!

Check out Laura's slideshare presentation that won her her job!

Laura Gainor Utilizing Social Media

Current college students and job seekers have now revamped their resume, modelled on Laura’s presentation.

How then does one harness the ‘strengths’ of social media to get companies to take notice of one among a sea of job seekers? Here are a few tips.

Identify the prospective company/(ies) that you would like to work for.

Focus on the companies that need someone with your skills. If your strengths are what the company is looking for in an employee, brand yourself as someone who would definitely be happy working there.

The new-age approach is to connect and network with people who are current employees of these companies, using social media tools.

The art of presenting your resume in Word format following the rigid template has been a ritual for so long that it has receded into the background. Employers look out for CVs that stand out not only in ‘has the right skills for the job’ department but also its ability to present an ‘out-of the-box visual thinking’ on the part of the job-seeker to build a powerful personal brand of himself/herself.

A VisualCV also lets you stand out from the crowd. You can include charts and graphs, audio, video and images, share your VisualCV via e-mail or your social networks, all this while establishing a privacy control over its visibility. You can even get your own unique URL.

The most successful job searches come from those who already have strong networks, both online (for example on ‘LinkedIn’, ‘pipl’, ‘peek’, ‘you’ and ‘wink’) and offline. There are millions of blogs in Technorati that one can search through to find someone who works at one any of the prospective companies that one is looking to work for. One can even post a video resume on Youtube, or advertise oneself on Google Ads or Facebook Social Ads.

Establish personal contact with the current employee/(es).

Social media has broken down barriers of communication, encouraging strangers to share a common stage. Send ‘message feelers’ to the target employee you wish to contact, without seeming to intrude upon their time and comfort zone. Do not immediately ask for a job. Connect with them as unobtrusively as possible, tailoring your messages to present your profile. Ask about job opportunities only after a few message sessions are over.

Become a content creator

Pull prospective employers into your world by creating a blog on the web that carries content which defines your proficiency, skills, knowledge and zeal. Soon you will find yourself getting job opportunities that are related to your blog content

Narrow down your job search by subscribing to blogs that carry content related to your job skills

Many blogs list jobs on their job boards. Mashable is one such blog offering social media and technology related job opportunities.

Having said all this, one must remember that a CV is simply a hiring tool, and can act as a springboard to opportunities. A person’s latent skills and strengths and the will and eagerness to succeed as a skilled employee is what finally carries him/her through his/her career.

You either hate it or love it, but Social Media’s omniscience has made it the most memorable technology tool of the century, impacting even the workplace.

Follow this link to my article on e-learning

http://www.chillibreeze.com/articles/Getting-your-education-online-210.asp

Gandhi's Tryst with Facebook

From someone who would go into a temporary state of ‘rigor mortis’ whenever she was asked to set up a simple email account, my elder sister, a skilled physician, now talks about ischemic heart conditions and Google Buzz in the same breath.

My sister’s surprisingly brave foray into the world of social media tools set me thinking. How would someone like Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India, also known for his aversion to technology, take to today’s Net-savvy environment? My sister turning a Nelson’s eye to social media till recently of course stemmed from her ‘late media adoption’ related fears. The belief that technology was used at the expense of the poor was of course the well documented reason for Gandhi’s aversion to it.

Every age has a symbolic raw material that defines its historical moment. In pre-independent India, it was Gandhi’s ‘Charkha’. In ours, it is social media.

Gandhi's movement to free India from British rule would have been impossible without the social media of his day- the newspapers. Had he been alive today, would Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India, have embraced Facebook and Twitter?

Well let’s just hypothesize that Gandhi has a Facebook profile. Would his ‘status updates’, ‘links’ and ‘wall-to-walls’ have the same ability to stitch together all of the information he fed into it and weave a worldwide social networking revolution inspiring a passionate brand of pro-democratic ideals as his Charkha had done?

(Click on the snapshots below to view enlarged version)


With his ubiquitous presence on Facebook and Twitter, Gandhiji would be a pre-eminent steward of information, garnering multiple international voices of support for his non-violent fight for independence! Indeed his Satyagraha would have assumed new-age dimension and vigour, making it a monolithic activity, a kind that would spawn multiple blogs and discussions.

I sign out wondering, if only Gandhi knew of the magic of social media , would he have said more........ emphatically?

Human social behaviour is a quality that cannot be quantified by statistics. Yet when evaluating how youth socialize in the real and virtual worlds for a PhD dissertation, I found that the devil is in such details!

Check out my Phd Viva-voce on Youth Social Capital

Social Capital PhD Thesis Defence 26. 3. 2009

View more presentations from suresh.kalyani.

YOUTH SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE REAL AND VIRTUAL WORLDS – A CONGRUENT PARADOX

A decade ago, the social circles of youth were limited by physical proximity. Today, driven by the widespread penetration of new communication technologies such as i-phones, instant messenger and online social networks, the youth are the most socially networked generation, and now have what could be termed ‘ a global DNA’.

Youth now are being increasingly versatile with new social media tools to create a common stage where strangers share a platform with sense of camaraderie, bereft of the hierarchies that have been given to the practice of socialization.

New social media have become the new blue-eyed boys for youth, helping them generate and invest in resources and benefits called social capital through their social networks. These benefits include trust, help, emotional support, wider range of contacts, access to new job opportunities, ability to mobilize solidarity, and a sense of belonging to a community, among others.

Social capital, created through social exchange, has been found to change the way the youth understand themselves, their relationships and the way they communicate with each other.

Given the fact that youth must have their own social capital resources in their (offline) physical world; the question arises of what happens to their existing stock of social capital when they go online, into a virtual world? Is there a gain or loss in their offline social capital?

Since an offline-online dichotomous existence is synonymous with the social fabric of today’s youth, fears emerge out of concern that new media might be harming real world relationships. The popularity of the new medium as a tool for socialization has raised questions of how it relates to offline socialization. How do youth cope when exposed to the so-called ‘surreal’ world where different realities overlap?

For years, critics of the new social media have warned of its ‘displacement’ effects, that through its entertainment and information capabilities, it draws people away from family and friends. Further by facilitating global communication, it reduces interest in local peer community.

But now murmurs about the new media playing a congruent role in the social lives of youth are being heard more strongly, across the globe. The youth today aren’t retreat from the world but engaged in an intense engagement with it. Social media offers youth a quixotic fusion of controlled privacy and a mind- expanding freedom.

Youth use the new social media for avoiding the depreciation of their offline investments in social capital (for e.g. strengthening their friendship by keeping in touch with their offline peers through the e-mail or instant messaging) and also for increasing their existing levels of social capital (e.g. forming new friends online through social networking sites). New forms of social capital resources are formed when youth go online (e.g meeting people from diverse backgrounds, from across the globe). Youth’s online experiences sometimes even translate to offline gains in social capital (e.g. finding help for emotional problems from an online discussion forum).

Globally the trend among media savvy youth is in favour of spending more time socializing online. ‘Virtual’ social capital resources may be the new kids on the block, but the ‘old folks’ (the real world social capital resources) have nothing to fear, for the new media act as a magnifying glass, expanding the communicative environment of youth. New social media do not totally erode what the offline world offers.