The inspiration for this blog post comes from someone I consider to be a true thought leader in social media, someone who I had a chance to finally meet in person recently: Jeremiah Owyang.  He wrote a blog post back in 2008 entitled “Stop Fondling the Hammer, and Focus on the House,” and I didn’t even read this obscure post until my friend who has taught me a great deal about social media, Roderick (@Fogfish), recently mentioned in a Twitter Direct Message that he “was fondling the hammer too much” and followed that with a link to Jeremiah’s blog post.

At first, when reading the article, I was confused as to the correlation between Jeremiah’s blog post and @Fogfish’s comment.  But then it hit me: a lot of the job seekers in transition that I meet at networking events, just like a lot of people in web marketing that Jeremiah is referring to, are infatuated by the latest tools in social media.  Instead of building the house, or using these tools to help themselves find a job, they instead concentrate on learning more about the tools themselves.  And I fear that in doing so, they sometimes forget why they are using the tools in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong: I continue to blog and evangelize that job seekers should be leveraging and maximizing their use of social media tools, including but not limited to LinkedIn.  But the fact of the matter is that I see some people spending so much time in learning, reading about, and talking about the tools themselves that I wonder if they are better spending their time more effectively in other ways.

Let me give you an example.  Being a sales professional, there are many classic sales books that a lot of my colleagues and myself read.  But we don’t spend hours talking about these books with each other when we meet, reading blog posts about these books, and joining multiple free webinars week after week to learn the latest secret revelations about these books.  What do we do?  We read these books, internalize their teachings, figure out what tools will help us sell more, implement these new ideas as part of our sales techniques moving forward, and then move on.  And I wonder whether or not professionals in transition should be doing the same with social media: Make your LinkedIn Profile, establish your connections, make your recommendations, and move on to using LinkedIn to actually help you find and/or network your way to your next job.

I breathe, eat, drink, blog, tweet, write, and dream about social media everyday.  But that is my job.  I provide social media consulting services.  Unless you are getting paid for your expertise, you need to consider creating your own “social media boundaries.”

I mentioned at the beginning of the year that we all need to start creating boundaries for our usage of social media because it is very easy to waste a lot of time using these sites.  And because of the complexity of some of these social networking sites, combined with the fact that they are social (and sometimes fun!), it’s easy to see how we can spend a lot of time engaging with them and the people using them.  And guess what?  Anyone in transition will tell you that they can be busier now looking for a job than they were when they were full-time employees!  That is why establishing and maintaining a schedule or time budget is all the more important.

I have created a simple 3-step plan to help you create your own social media boundaries, including more details on how I would spend time on LinkedIn as an example:

1) Determine how long you will spend on each site and stick to your plan.  If it is so important to your job searching activities that you want to devote 1 to 2 hours a day to it that is fine.  But anything over 2 hours and you are investing more than 25% of your work time into social media, so beware.  At the same time, you should be confirming how many hours a week you want to spend actually meeting people, which I hope is the same if not higher than your time spent in social media!

2) Now, for each social media site, determine a game plan for what you will do on it daily, weekly, and/or monthly.  For instance, a LinkedIn plan could look something like this: (obviously you can and will use LinkedIn for more than this, but this is an example of a time-efficient routine I would generally recommend)

• (Daily) – view Network Updates and communicate where appropriate,  check LinkedIn Jobs [you could do LinkedIn Jobs searches on a weekly basis as well]
• (Weekly) – read relevant Groups Updates and News, browse the latest questions on the Answers board in which you have expertise, search the Events for relevant networking meetings
• (Monthly) – update your LinkedIn Profile (if applicable), review your LinkedIn Profile Optimization (LIPO) keywords, send out invites to new contacts you have met over the past month

3) Spending some of your time in keeping up-to-date on how you can use social media for your job search is no problem.  But make sure you budget this time as well and try to stick to this plan.  If you spend a mere 4 hours a week attending webinars and reading blog posts to learn more about the social media tools, that is 10% of your time in a 40-hour workweek.  Pick the % you want to invest in your education and stick to it.

On a final note, when I first started writing my LinkedIn book, I devoted the first few chapters to teaching about social networking as well as helping my readers understand what LinkedIn was about in this perspective.  I followed that by helping my readers craft their own objective for using LinkedIn.  I wrote my book in that way because so many would just ask me, “How do I use LinkedIn?” to which I would always answer back, “What is your objective?”  If you don’t have an objective for using social media tools, you shouldn’t be wasting your time.  In the same light, if you forget your objective and do not strategize your time on social media sites like LinkedIn, I fear that it may negatively affect the time you could be spending more wisely.

So, for job seekers in transition, my best advice to you is…stop fondling the hammer and start building your future house!

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Come on, I don’t really want you to write me one, but there has been unprecedented chatter about LinkedIn recommendations in blogging circles these days.  And I want to put everything in perspective to confirm whether or not LinkedIn recommendations really have value.

It was Jeremiah Owyang who started the debate.  Jeremiah is a renowned web strategist, but he is also one of the early adopters and biggest fans of LinkedIn.  If you check out the archives of his blog, you will see some gems of articles about utilizing LinkedIn for social networking and tips for job hunting.  I consider Jeremiah a thought leader and thus his blog is on my blogroll.  Needless to say, if I was going to request someone to write a preface for a book on LinkedIn, he’d be the first person I contact

On July 17th, Jeremiah posted an entry to his blog titled “Requested Recommendations on Social Networks: Why I Won’t Do It“.  And he makes the important point that LinkedIn Recommendations can never be 100% objective.  He goes out of his way not to knock LinkedIn or references in general, but states that, because LinkedIn is a public platform, people in general are not going to write negative recommendations.  Plus, the person receiving the recommendation can make requests to edit those recommendations as well as not even display them in the first place.  It is this process that Jeremiah is lamenting.

I actually wrote about the same subject more than three months ago in my post “Are LinkedIn Recommendations for Real?”  And I specifically mentioned that you need to apply filters when reading them: who wrote them (i.e. what is the qualityof that person), what was their relationship, and what specific qualities were mentioned that mesh with that person’s profile.  I also made the important point that recommendations, versus looking at a profile without one, can and should make a person look more “real,” a point I echoed in my post “Is Your LinkedIn Profile More Accurate Than Your Resume?”  So, because this is Web 2.0, I agree wholeheartedly with some of the points that Jeremiah makes in the need to filter these recommendations, but even with their inherent limitations in objectivity, I still think they play an important role on LinkedIn.

Russ Somers made an interesting point in a blog post entitled “Evaluating LinkedIn Recommendations” that he did the same day as Jeremiah’s: wouldn’t the recommendations mean more if there was an element of scarcity involved, if you were limited to how many LinkedIn recommendations you can give?  To that I say, sure, but doesn’t LinkedIn already have enough restrictions?  And how can you put a limit on how many recommendations a college graduate has versus a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who has worked for a few different companies over his 30+ year career and has thousands of people that he knows?  I do not believe that this is the answer.

And I think more people feel that there is value in LinkedIn Recommendations.  Shortly thereafter Jacob Share, the job search expert, appeared on Dan Schawbel‘s excellent personal branding blog with the post “Why LinkedIn Recommendations Really Are Valuable.”  Now, Jacob is looking at this from the perspective of the job seeker, but he makes some excellent points: 1) the job search is a sales process and thus you’re just putting on your profile the references that you would already be receiving, 2) the relationship of the recommender is most important, and 3) LinkedIn is a reliable platform where it is difficult to post fake recommendations.  I agree with all points!

I think the most brilliant blog post to come out of reaction to Jeremiah’s is the one on the official LinkedIn Blog entitled “Recommendations and the Reputation Economy” and written by LinkedIn’s own Product Director Adam Nash.  He went further to talk about how transparency is the new objectivity and that not only are recommendations often mutual, but that requesting recommendations is absolutely normal.  In fact, he ends his post asking you to write three recommendations for people unsolicited.  Exactly!  That line could have been taken out of my upcoming book!

Look, no one is saying that you have to believe LinkedIn Recommendations that you see word-for-word.  But as the above conversation notes, there are still plenty of positive aspects of recommendations if you put them in the correct perspective.  I hope that you all agree that there is value in them and will continue to utilize them.

That is why I won’t be asking you to write me one, but I’m glad that the title caught your eye and you read to the end!  Thank you!