I recently got asked a great question in my Windmill Networking LinkedIn Group:

Neal, what is one of the most recent insights you have learned about LinkedIn that can help us?

Since I wrote the book on LinkedIn, although 90% of the functionality of the site is still the same, I am finding the “Follow” features that LinkedIn have introduced to be of value for some.  While this “feature” may still be a mystery to many, here is my advice on how you can strategically use it by thinking outside of the box.  For instance:

1) FOLLOW COMPANIES

When I wrote my book, I said that the only thing I disliked about LinkedIn Jobs was that they didn’t have an email alert system for informing you of new jobs like those that are available at Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs.  That now exists, on a company-by-company basis, if you follow your Target Companies AND they post on Jobs. And following companies is not just for jobseekers: Read more in my blog post on the 6 people who should be following companies.

What about following other people and not companies?  This is a little tricky because when LinkedIn introduced the new follow feature, they automatically started following all of your connections on your behalf.  The idea was that when you went to a LinkedIn Group, you could keep tabs on a “group within the group.”  I suppose this would be appropriate if several members of an organization were all part of the same group to ensure that your discussions did not overlap.

If you want to do as I advise below, I would almost suggest that you start unfollowing everyone and start with a clean slate.  This will make it easier to find the information that you can glean from doing the following:

2) FOLLOW THOUGHT LEADERS

What if you are keen to try to create a relationship with someone that you consider a thought leader in hopes that you can someday get to know them better?  Start following them on LinkedIn!  The beauty of this feature is that you can follow anyone regardless of your connections status, there is no restriction that I know about in terms of maximum numbers of people that you can follow, and you just may see them engaging in a LinkedIn Group discussion that gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with them.  One note of caution here: You cannot follow someone just by finding them in the search results.  You need to be a member of the same group that they are.  But once you’re both members of the same group you can follow them after finding them in the “Members” section of your common group.

3) FOLLOW YOUR COMPETITION

There is no one way to find a job, perform sales, or do anything else in life.  Aren’t there some professionals on LinkedIn that you would consider your competition or people that you think are ahead of their game that you’d like to learn from?  Follow them, check their activity, and see if you might be missing out on something by looking at the way they engage with others on LinkedIn.  It’s almost like following those that you believe you can learn from will give you access to a “virtual mentor” on LinkedIn.

By “Following” the activities of others as well as Companies, you can learn a great deal that can help you initiate conversations, grow professionally and potentially accelerate your job search.

Are you using the Follow feature?  Do you use it differently?  Please chime in!

There is no doubt that the current recession continues to have an impact on the growth of social media.  Job seekers are now looking for networking opportunities by embracing social media and joining and then becoming active on sites like LinkedIn as part of their job search strategy.  This make sense because social media is also where recruiters may find you and where companies may perform background checks on you and your personality.  Don’t you want to put your best food forward in your job search and show off your talents to the best of your ability since everybody’s watching?

Unfortunately, I don’t see enough of this happening.  Just like many Internet marketers, who only see social media as another “channel” to start broadcasting their advertisements and self-promoting messages, I see some job seekers doing the same thing by blasting the message that they are unemployed in their LinkedIn profile name and status update or mass sending of their resumes to everyone in their network.  The most important concept behind social media is about sharing, and job seekers can also share their experiences with others and actually start contributing and providing value to the community. In doing so, not only will your expertise be publicly displayed for all of those recruiters to see and help establish a stronger personal brand, effective networking with other professionals can now be done on a scale that reaches far beyond your own network.

Here’s another way to look at it: You can’t force recruiters and companies to look at your LinkedIn profile, but you can use social media in becoming more active in a pool of talent so that you can stand out.  You have to be “productively active”—share your knowledge, expertise and experience to the world and don’t boil the ocean with your resumes.

Here’s how to use social media as part of your job search strategy:

Start Blogging

Blogging is the best way to share your expertise the world, and your blog posts now become things that you can share through social media.  You need to build out the business of company YOU, and a completely customizable blog can now become your “company” website instead of your static LinkedIn profile.  Because you’re sharing knowledge and experience for all to learn by, you are not broadcasting nor blatantly self-promoting.  More people will start visiting your social media profiles because they are interested in you for your ideas.  They will start to seek you out!

Still not convinced?  Here are 7 more reasons why you should start blogging, and here’s advice on what you should blog about if you are looking for a job.

Get Active on LinkedIn Answers

Providing one answer a day in your category of expertise is all it takes to share your knowledge with those who need it most.  Find your category, “own” it, and make it  a part of your daily routine.  You never know what may come out of it!  Here’s some etiquette advice on utilizing LinkedIn Answers.

Contribute to LinkedIn Groups

Join LinkedIn Groups for your industry and profession, engage in discussion, and share your expertise for all to see.  Just by spending a few minutes a day looking for relevant discussions to participate on and engaging in them, you are displaying your expertise for a lot of people to see and truly Windmill Networking.  Here’s some additional advice on what LinkedIn Groups are and their value, which LinkedIn Groups to join and the etiquette of LinkedIn Group participation.

Upload Your Work to SlideShare

SlideShare is quickly becoming the preferred destination for professionals to seek out information that is in a PowerPoint or presentation format.  If you’ve done professional presentations, all you need to do is upload them for everyone to see.  If you have expertise to share, all you need to do is create a PowerPoint and now it’s there for the world to see.  There are many stories of small businesses who have found business from SlideShare…it wouldn’t surprise me to hear of a job seeker who landed because they utilized SlideShare as part of their job search strategy.

I will be honest that I am still a relatively newbie at SlideShare, but I plan to start uploading presentations in the near future.  Please follow me on SlideShare to get my updates!

Create a You Tube Channel

Social media provides a lot of opportunities to learn because many companies and professionals are sharing lots of information.  Many people prefer the video format over a written one, so why not take out that Flip Camera or your iPhone 4 and take a video of yourself speaking about your experiences and sharing your expertise?  If you have a chance to speak at an association or meeting, bring your video camera to capture yourself and upload highlights of it to YouTube.  By creating a YouTube channel and simply favoriting the videos that you recommend to others in your industry or profession, you are curating content and displaying your expertise.  Become the “channel,” literally, on YouTube!  Here are 5 more reasons why every professional should have a YouTube channel.

By doing any or all of the above, not only will you have reached many more people as part of your job search than through your traditional broadcasting of your message, people will also see you as a person with expertise, not someone who is merely using social media as part of their job search.  This social media strategy for your job search is bound to lead to greater opportunities and attract more people who respect your knowledge and will be there to help you on your journey.

Any additional advice or experience in using social media as part of your job search strategy?  Please share!

Whenever I speak about social media and the job search to those that are unemployed, I always have a few attendees who “see the light” and get excited about blogging.  They see the advantages of blogging to start sharing information through social media and establishing their personal brand as part of their job search strategy.  The problem is that they don’t know what to blog about!

If you are unemployed or soon to be in career transition, there are lots of things that you can be blogging about.  I don’t mean blogging about your job search experience, either.  I’m speaking of things that will help you strengthen your personal brand, appear more attractive to potential hiring managers, and help you get found in social media.

Before I even talk about what to blog about for the unemployed, let’s review the 7 benefits of blogging:

• Blogging is the best way to build and showcase your personal brand
• Blogging helps differentiate you from everyone else
• Blogging brings you new opportunities
• Blogging is the ultimate Pay It Forward
• You’re Already Tweeting…Why Not Add Your Own Original Views in More Depth?
• You Can Start to Monetize Your Knowledge
• Because You Can

By now you are hopefully bought in to the fact that blogging is beneficial not just to those in a job search but to any professional.

Next we should talk about my Golden rule of Blogging: Blog about topics that your target audience is interested in.

If you are looking for a job, your target audience will naturally be the hiring managers at your target companies within a particular industry or profession.  What use is your blog, no matter how useful it may actually be to someone, if it does not stimulate your target audience?   By blogging about your expertise, hiring managers who find your blog will have a solid hold of who you are, what you can do, and how important you can be when part of their company.

So what exactly do you blog about?  If you’re targeting hiring managers, your most natural blogging content should come from your own expertise and experience:

1) Blog About Your Work Experience

The best thing that you can do if you are unemployed is to show off your expertise.  You have probably already prepared for interviews and created SAR (Situation-Action-Result) paragraphs in your resume and LinkedIn profile.  If this is the case, why not use a SAR and create a blog post around it?  Or maybe talk about some of your career accomplishments and takeaways that other professionals can learn from?  Offer insight that will help other professionals in the same situation.  But remember that because of NDAs with previous employers, make sure you do not reveal any information that would violate agreements that you have already concluded with past companies you have worked for!

2) Blog About The Latest News

Another strategy is to blog reactively to news about your industry and/or profession.  If you don’t know them by now, get to know the websites and blogs which feature news and current events about your field of expertise.  More than just offering your own insights to all of these happenings and giving the public your own opinion, why not take it a step further and back up your claims with projects you have done in the past?  This way, you hit two birds with one post: providing your own views and opinions on the matter while leveraging your expertise.  Just like that, you’ll be able to create thought-leadership blog posts that are authentic because you can back it up with your actual experience.  It will also show that you are up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry.

3) Book Reviews

What are the latest must-read books for your industry and/or profession?  Why not talk about the most popular books in your industry or profession, not only showing that you are keeping ahead of the curve but also sharing information and displaying your expertise?  There is nothing as compelling as a convincing book review about your line of profession.  Not many can even find the time to start or even finish reading a book these days (blame it on social media, right? .  Being able to have finished one, understand it and share a certain degree of directed information towards your target audience will obviously help you be seen in a positive light.

4) Industry Exhibitions or Professional Association Meeting Reports

You are still attending these despite your job search, right?  Then write about them and share your experiences and expertise to those that were not able to attend!

If you remember the golden rule of blogging, you can see that there really is never a lack of things to blog about, even for those that are in a job search.   The Internet itself provides a huge pool of opportunities for you to find something to reactively blog about.  That being said, if you run out of things to blog about, you may want to start slow.  I suggest starting to blog once a week, and if you run out of content to blog about, then that may be a sign that you need to be reading more books or attending more professional events!!!

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What is #JobChat?  JobChat was created by Perri Gorman (@BeTheButterfly) and Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer) to serve the need of professionals and job seekers looking for advice on professional networking as well as how professionals can better utilize social media as part of their career management, personal branding and job search. Perri and Neal bring a unique combination of contrasting yet similar skills to the table to host the live chat sessions on Twitter: Perri is a former financial services recruiter and Neal a former technology sales and business development executive who also played the role of a hiring manager. Both are currently social media consultants helping both professionals and businesses on their strategies and implementation of marketing activities through social media channels. Perri is organizer of the Hong Kong Twestival and is known in Hong Kong for her Twitter workshops. Neal is the author of the award-winning and best-selling book on LinkedIn, “Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn.” The two bring a wealth of diverse and rich experiences to the table to help facilitate real-time conversations through Twitter to help answer questions and generate discussions between professionals, including job seeker participants and thought leaders in the world of recruitment, personal branding, job seeking, and social media.

Part of what I preach about Windmill Networking is Paying It Forward to others in the belief that something, some piece of very trivial information or experience to you could be a godsend to others.  It is also about connecting with others and helping them because you never know when you may be able to help each other out in the future.  Even though my business takes me down the road of working more with businesses and helping them utilize social media, I always try to find time to help others in transition through blogging and speaking to local churches, groups and associations.  How can I help more people in transition that want to use social media as part of their job search strategy?

Meet Perri Gorman, also known as Be The Butterfly on Twitter.  I met her over Twitter, the way I have met many incredible people that have enriched my life, and although she was living in Hong Kong at the time we had a chance to meet recently in Orange County, California.  We realized that we both had similar views on the importance of social media in our lives and set out to collaborate to do something that would provide value to people on a global basis.  Our answer: #JobChat!

Perri is not only extremely active on the social media scene on Twitter and blogging, she is also the organizer of the Hong Kong Twestival as well as the creator of many Twitter workshops for professionals.  She is also a former recruiter, so she can see things from the recruiting side.  I bring a lot of experience of using sites like LinkedIn and blogging and speaking about social media as a strategic tool for your job search.  Why don’t we come together and offer a weekly chat on Twitter to help as many people as we can with their job search?  And so #JobChat was born!

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter and #s (called “hashtags”), by placing “#JobChat” somewhere in a tweet, it will be trackable by those searching for #JobChat.  So long as we are all on Twitter at the same time and include “#JobChat” in all of our tweets, an open and global chat room has been formed!  If you haven’t started using Twitter, please read my post on getting started on Twitter.  If you’re already on Twitter and have never joined a #Chat, do not fear!  It is really easy to do, and I plan to create a video to show you soon.  In the meantime, check out TweetGrid, a service that allows you to create a grid of tweets to follow and also provides a way for you to tweet directly from the site.  If you create a 1×2 grid, placing “@yourname” as a search term on one column and “#JobChat” as the search term on the second column, you will be able to keep track of all public and private conversations.  It’s that simple!

JobChat, hosted by Perri Gorman and Neal Schaffer, will be held every Tuesday from 5 to 6 P.M. PST or 8 to 9 P.M. EST.  The first JobChat will be held on Tuesday, June 22 in coordination with the Gravity Summit Social Media for Executives summit at UCLA.  If you’d like to be a special guest on a future #JobChat, please contact Neal or Perri on Twitter.  If you have any questions that you’d like us to cover on future #JobChats, please list them in the comments below!  If you are a career expert, recruiter, or have other advice for job seekers, I hope that you will also join us and help in the conversation.  We want to make JobChat as inclusive as possible for everyone to share their expertise and help as many as possible!

Looking forward to seeing you on #JobChat!

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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In 2010, the landscape for jobseekers continues to change as the world around us changes.  As social media begins to envelop almost every part of a corporate organization, and as more corporate employees are required to use it as part of their professional jobs, the impact it has on the jobseeker is tremendous.  However, most companies are still trying to figure out how to use social media, and initial planning usually starts with the social media marketing strategy.  What hints for the jobseeker might social media strategies that businesses implement have?  A lot.

First of all, think about why companies are now starting to show up on Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter: because that’s where you are.  Just as companies decided back in the early ’90s to create a “Home Page” on the Internet (and there was debate about the need of it back them), companies are currently struggling with not so much the “why” but the “how” to engage in social media.  And for their strategic planning, they are often hiring social media strategists like myself to do the planning and potential implementation.

Do you have your own social media plan for your job search?

Up until now, the tools for your job search were simple:

• Get your resume ready
• Contact your references
• Practice for interviews
• Look for jobs, often entailing registering with and looking at various job search sites

Of course, when we look for jobs now, it is less in the newspaper and more on Internet sites.  In 2009, many jobseekers became savvy and realized that, since most of the jobs never get advertised in the first place, they needed to Windmill Network and build up a large network that could help them navigate through their target company list and provide other invaluable advice.  As a part of that, and in order to network outside of their network, which is where the value of networking lies, most have already created a LinkedIn profile and are using the site in one way or another.

But guess what?

Social media marketing is not just about networking and it is not just about LinkedIn.  It requires a mindset, a mindset that says that you become a resource for others instead of broadcasting your requests to others.  It also means there are a plethora of other social media channels out there that you need to explore, not just LinkedIn.  Facebook.  Twitter.  Blogs.  YouTube.  StumbleUpon.  And more.

Why is it important?  Because that’s where your customers (i.e. hiring managers and recruiters) are, and it requires you to engage with them in a way that attracts them into wanting to contact you for your expertise.  The more channels that you cover, the greater the chance that you will be found.

I know many who joined LinkedIn in hopes of getting found.  Guess what?  Tens of millions of your competitors are doing the same.  What to do?  Differentiate yourself by 1) utilizing LinkedIn better (which my LinkedIn book is perfect on advice for) and 2) utilize other social media channels in a sophisticated way.

As I work more and more with corporations on their social media strategy, I look forward to paying it forward and sharing more and more information that jobseekers and professionals interested in proactive personal branding can utilize.  As I wrote in the beginning of my LinkedIn book, job seeking is just another sale, the product this time being yourself.  All of what I do for businesses is 100% applicable to professionals.

I have a few webinars scheduled for the near future to begin to roll out this information to professionals worldwide.  Join me for my first one, which will be a FREE webinar on February 16 entitled “Social Media and Your Job Search: How to Get More Hiring Managers and Recruiters to Find YOU”.  If you can’t make that webinar and want to be informed of future webinars, make sure you:

Looking forward to your comments and to virtually speaking at you at a future webinar!

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As you probably already know, I am very active on LinkedIn as a LinkedIn Open Networker or LION.  I accept all invitations, and I respond to each invitation with asking my new connections how I might be able to help them.  I often get the following response, which I again received just this week:

Hi Neal,

I do have a question you may be able to help with. I’m attaching my resume so you can get an idea about my skills and experience, but if you were in my shoes, what would you do in finding an opportunity in the XXX metropolitan area? You have any contacts I might get in touch with here in XXX? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

I would like to devote this blog post to all of those who are using LinkedIn while in transition and looking for a way to make networking work for you by reaching out to people like myself.  I hope it gives you enough information to allow myself, as part of your extended network, to help you find your next job!  And I hope that this blog post also makes you understand how and why I respond to you when you ask the above question the way I do!

So here are my suggestions as to how I, and your network, can help you find a job on LinkedIn:

1) Consider Purchasing My LinkedIn Book

Look, I am not here to sell you my book.  But, as a former active jobseeker who used LinkedIn as my primary job searching and networking tool, I do give the potential jobseeker 300+ pages (more pages than LinkedIn for Dummies!), more content devoted to helping you leverage and maximize your presence on the social networking site than any other book on the market.  Plus, I wrote the book with personal branding in mind; in other words, if you follow the advice in my book, you’ll be able to create a heavily branded Rockstar LinkedIn Profile that will help you attract recruiters.  You can also read reviews on my Books page from others that have read it as well as the Windmill Networking success story of my editor who found a job on LinkedIn using my advice before the book was ready for publishing!  I’ll stop here.

2) Connect with Me as well as Some Other Super Connectors

If we’re not yet connected, please send me an invitation to connect from my LinkedIn Profile.  Here are ten other LinkedIn super connectors that you should connect to.  Why?  They will help you increase your visibility in the LinkedIn database, and thus there will be a greater chance that you will actually be able to find the Hiring Manager for a particular company when you search for them.  And, I am sure many of the people on the list, in addition to myself, will help you get connected through Introductions should you need them.  Finally, as a result of this, you will also be more easily found by others using the reverse logic!  Brilliant!  Yet so few people realize this…

3) Use LinkedIn Companies to Create Your Target List of Companies You Want to Work For

Without a target list of who you want to sell your product to, how I can help advertise for you?  Without knowing what specific companies you might be interested in, how can I help you?  You know the industries and types of companies that you are interested in working at.  Use LinkedIn Companies to find companies where you want to work at close to where you live that are in your target industry and look like they will be a good fit.  Create a list to send on to your network.  Anything from a few companies to 30 or even 50 companies is fair game, but it will be an important resource that will allow your network to more easily help you.  If you don’t like using this Companies application for whatever reason, fine, go ahead and use Hoovers.com.  Doesn’t matter: you just want to create a target list of companies out of the exercise.

4) Search for the Hiring Manager for the Position You are Looking for at Each of Those Target Companies

Now that you know who your target companies are, search the LinkedIn database using Advanced People Search for people at those companies that you may be able to meet for an informational interview.  These would be people that you are already connected to that may have landed jobs at these companies without you knowing it!  1st degree connections that work at companies on your target list should always be your first line of offense when trying to attack your target companies.  From there, you may be able to get a nice introduction to the Hiring Manager or find out you may not want to work at that company after all!

What if you know no one at the target company?  Do a search for who the Hiring Manager may be for the role that you are seeking.  But even if you are in the same LinkedIn Group, don’t send them a message yet…

5) Contact Me or Whoever in Your Network that is Directly Connected to That Person and Ask for an Introduction

The golden rule in professional networking is that a “warm lead” or introduction from a trusted associate of your target person will always be more effective than a cold call.  LinkedIn tells you who connects you with the Hiring Manager.  All you need to do now is ask for the Introduction.

And keep in mind another golden rule, this one from sales: You won’t get the order (or the Introduction…or the Job!) unless you ask for it!  Start thinking more like a sales hunter and go out there and engage.  At least you will gain some valuable networking experience, find out more about potential companies to work at, and you may even make some friends Windmill Networking along the way.  I know I have!

Make sense?  Anything else that you would recommend I do to help you find a job?  The microphone is now yours!  Please let me know!

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I have given many presentations on social media and your job search.  Everybody is finally “getting” LinkedIn, but few are looking at Twitter or even Facebook as platforms which could aid those in transition in their job search.  Today I want to talk about one strategy that I discuss on Twitter and your job search, and a story of how one Windmill Networker found success through thinking outside of the box and integrating the people he meets on Twitter with LinkedIn with real-life!

Personal branding is important in your job search to help differentiate yourself from all the other job seekers. But in social media, personal branding is more than just a differentiator: it can help you be perceived as a thought leader and get found by more relevant people sooner.  And Twitter is the perfect platform for this: just by tweeting about interesting reads from your industry that you’re already perusing anyway, you start building up your personal brand and people start to follow you.  Opportunities appear.

Rather than my speaking more about this, I am going to hand the pen over to today’s guest, Ken Nicholas. Ken Nicholas is a dynamic Sales leader and powerful Sales talent, with acclaimed successes in Social Media, Digital & Print. He has been the driving sales force behind leading ad programs that have resulted in winning Print Media Plan of the Year from AdWeek as well as creating a core part of the social media ad program that recently won the “Best in Social Media” Catalyst Award from JD Power & Associates. He writes an Industry blog, MindOnMedia[Sales] that has been linked on the AOL Autos blog family to date. He has also recently consulted with a Top-15 Ad Network and a WebTV/Video trade site, as he continues his look at new opportunities in 2010. Please feel free to reach out to Ken by connecting with him on LinkedIn.

Ken Nicholas

[This Post is dedicated to Neal Schaffer, visionary leader of SoCal Sushi Lunch events & social media expert/author of Windmill Networking.]

Almost by accident recently, I came across [yet] another way to utilize Twitter, one that I personally had not seen or heard of anywhere else until I inadvertently, well, used it. The technique is actually quite simple, can create new Interview/Job Lead oppty’s for each of us, AND demonstrate your expertise in the Career area you are pursuing…all at the same time. Really.

How? Over the holidays, I did a Tweet about a certain topic in the field I am in [and hope to find my next job in], Media Sales. In so doing, a firm that I had never heard of apparently does an ongoing ‘Auto-Search’ for keywords on Twitter that were exactly on the topic I had written about, and a day or so later, they started to Follow me.

Curious [as I had never heard of this firm], I clicked from the Notify email that they were now following me, through to their Website. Obviously, they were following me for a reason [the Tweet on that topic], so why not check them out? I did…and then clicked their ‘Careers’ button.

It turns out, this firm that I had never heard of…that found me from a Tweet that I had done…had a job opening; a Sales spot at the exact level I was looking for.

So, I of course applied. But I wasn’t done. I then went to LinkedIn [here is where I thank Neal Schaffer for his tireless evangelizing], found the C-Level person that I needed to find, sent HIM a note, and told him that I had applied, and they basically would be crazy not to look at me…since they were already following ME on Twitter! The logic works: they can’t question your expertise [they searched by keywords that YOU used], and can’t question your relevance [they are following YOU on Twitter.]

And, in my case on the Sales side, they can’t question my Sales skills, as my effort describes here, including asking the C-Level guy ‘for the order’; in this case, an interview.

Does this work? Well, I created a Job Lead from a company I had never heard of. And I have the first phone interview with them next week. I’ll take it! As I am my own Sales Mgr here, I am adding this to my own sales Career ‘pipeline’.

This is just one more example of how Social Media is & will be used, that could never have been predicted, or really created, in any other way. If you want to find out more about how I did this, get in touch~! Good Luck & Good Selling.

Have you had similar experiences in gaining new job leads from Twitter or social media?  Please do share for all of us to learn from!  Thanks!

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It’s no surprise that jobseekers flocked to LinkedIn with this past recession after realizing that most recruiters were already heavy LinkedIn users and were using the social networking platform to find new talent.  So many jobseekers are utilizing LinkedIn that some are calling it less of a professional networking site and more of a jobseeker’s networking site.  It is unfortunate that some professionals are turned away from LinkedIn because of this as they miss out on a lot of professional networking opportunities.

Windmill Networking on LinkedIn as part of your job search strategy is obviously important.  But many jobseekers are still spending time on other Internet job boards such as Monster, Career Builder, and HotJobs.  In 2010 you may not need to anymore; just as social media is shaking up many industries, LinkedIn is well-positioned to become the new website for job listing aggregation.  Here’s why: (and the claims below come straight from an email I received from LinkedIn)

It is Cheaper (and More Effective) to List a Job on LinkedIn Than on CareerBuilder

LinkedIn grew its membership because recruiters realized that they could find potential candidates for employment freely and easily.  There was no doubt an economic reason for this: they could do this for free!  The same economic reason makes sense if you want to list a job: Why list your jobs on CareerBuilder when it can be done in a cheaper and more effective way on LinkedIn?  The social networking site gives the potential employer the ability to see each candidate’s profile, complete with peer recommendations, together with their resume, so it is without a doubt an effective way to recruit.  And at a cheaper price?  Expect the LI Jobs boards to continue to grow with opportunities for jobseekers.

LinkedIn is Easier to Use and More Preferred by Jobseekers When Compared to Craigslist

While not quite free like Twitter, businesses can post advertisements on Craigslist for a very low price.  But, from the jobseeker’s perspective, what a pain of having to sift through Craigslist looking for that perfect job.  LinkedIn’s strength is it’s database and the functionality to search within that database, and LI Jobs is no different.

LinkedIn is the Only “Network-Enabled” Hiring Solution

If you post a job on one of the other Internet job sites, it is a one-to-one relationship with the applicant and that’s it.  Sure, the applicant could potentially forward that job posting over to another unemployed friend, but they need to know their email address.  But for anyone who has ever searched a LinkedIn Job, the beauty in the “network-enabled” piece for the jobseeker is:

• You can see the hiring manager and who connects you to them
• You can see who in your network works at the hiring company
• LinkedIn will automatically look for people in your network that may be suitable for the job and allows you to easily forward the job posting to them

The power of the “network-enabled” solution is it has the potential to allow job postings on LinkedIn, and conversations about those job postings, to go viral.  All of the other Internet job board sites are still stuck in Web 1.0 mode.  This is an extremely attractive benefit for employers.

What does all of this mean for you, the jobseeker?  It means to make sure you keep using LI Jobs as your primary “Job Board” and spend less time on the other sites.  Remember, if the job is not posted on LinkedIn, information is being imported from the other job sites with its Simply Hired plugin, so you can still get the best of both worlds all in the same platform that you are already using for your professional networking.  As recruiters come to LinkedIn and the jobseekers follow, it is only a matter of time before the companies looking to hire start following the jobseekers, especially if they are looking to hire people of the calibre that are on LinkedIn.

(LinkedIn, if you are listening, you are still missing one critical piece: an email alert system for new jobs.  Once that piece is in place, jobseekers will be very happy!)

How has your experience with LI Jobs been compared to the other Internet job boards?  How about Indeed.com and Simply Hired?  Please do share your experience with us so that we can all learn!  Thank you!

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Although I recently blogged that 2009 was, without doubt, the year of Twitter, Facebook had a similarly impressive year where we can say it became a truly mainstream social networking platform boasting over 350 million members.  It seems that every business now has a Facebook Fan Page, and it becomes harder and harder for us to avoid spending too much time on Facebook.  After all, we now spend more time on Facebook than on any other website!

Facebook will become an even more important place for businesses in 2010, and because of this I have placed an emphasis on finding resources from 2009 to help businesses with establishing and strategically managing their Fan Page.  If you are looking for social media marketing information in utilizing Facebook, I believe you are in for a pleasant surprise with my list of Facebook for Business best posts of 2009 below.

For professionals, I placed an emphasis on selecting blog posts that first of all paint a picture of the true demographics of Facebook today.  Facebook, as you have probably already figured out, is no longer the exclusive playground of high school and college students.  It is important for all of us to realize the present demographics and feel comfortable utilizing it as a social networking platform for professionals.

There were also some great blog posts with advice on anything from Professional Networking, Personal Branding, as well as utilizing applications on Facebook.  Hopefully you will begin to see the potential for Windmill Networking on Facebook as you would do on Twitter or LinkedIn.  And, yes, there is even an article on how to use Facebook Apps to help you find your next job!

Finally, as privacy is a major issue with Facebook, I included some articles that I felt best describe your privacy options as well as the recent changes that Facebook implemented.

As with my similar Top 25 Most Useful LinkedIn Blog Posts of 2009 and Top 35 Most Useful Twitter Blog Posts of 2009, I used a number of factors when considering which were the best blog posts to recommend to you all. Within each section I have ordered the listing in descending order by most retweets on Twitter at the time of this post, which are indicated in parentheses.

On a final note, although the main emphasis of my blog up until now has been LinkedIn and Twitter, I was surprised by the lack of great Facebook articles on personal branding, professional networking, and job search.  I hope to add more Facebook blog posts to my arsenal in 2010 and help you all better understand how to best utilize this most complex yet increasingly ubiquitous social networking platform.

Understanding the Present Facebook Demographics

Sharing on Facebook Now More Popular Than Sharing by Email by Adam Ostrow (1,071)

Statistics which prove what we all knew was coming: people share more information via Facebook than email these days.  This has significant implications for all of us and how we communicate with each other moving forward.

Why Facebook is for Old Fogies by Lev Grossman (497)

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the demographic of Facebook is now older, much older than it used to be.  If you are Gen X or a Baby Boomer and are feeling embarrassed about joining or remaining active on Facebook, please read this article!

Facebook Users are Getting Older.  Much Older. by Stan Schroeder (252)

Excellent statistics on Facebook demographics to help any professional or business understand the potential that is Facebook.

Facebook Top Trends of 2009 by Brian Solis (?)

An excellent article looking at top Facebook trends of 2009.  The most important contribution of this article are the stats that give us a great snapshot as to how many people are doing what on Facebook.

Facebook Usage Statistics by Country – December 31st, 2009 by Nick Burcher (?)

If you’re wondering how many Facebook users there are in each of the top 30 countries combined with their recent growth rates, this chart is for you.  Some pretty convincing stats on the global popularity of Facebook.

Facebook General Advice & Tips

HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking by Boris Epstein (1,296)

Since you are reading this blog and have an interest in Windmill Networking, this is the one MUST READ article to give you some ideas of how you can start to use Facebook for professional networking as you do with LinkedIn and Twitter.  Excellent post.

HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook by Dan Schawbel (580)

Good list of common-sense ideas to establish and build upon your Facebook presence.

25 Great Facebook Tips and Tricks by Tehseen (389)

Good collection of Facebook tips including some Facebook applications and browser plug-ins that you might not have known about.

20 Facebook Desktop Apps to Try by Don Reisinger (239)

Twitter has loads of desktop applications that you can use such as HootSuite and TweetDeck.  Were you aware that there are many similar 3rd party applications available for Facebook?  A great list…as to whether they are more convenient than going to Facebook.com, you will have to be the judge…

The 20 Best Facebook Apps for Job Search by Tawny Labrum (111)

Yes, you can use Facebook as part of your job search strategy!  Check out this great list of apps for some ideas!

There’s an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter — really by Maria Puente (?)

While not specifically on Facebook, this insightful article talks about the art of writing an interesting Facebook Status Update.  Great food for thought!

Facebook and Your Privacy

10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy by Mahendra Palsule (829)

Excellent advice on general privacy settings that you have at your disposal on Facebook.

10 New Privacy Settings that Every Facebook User Should Know by Nick O’Neill (?)

An excellent article that hand-holds you through establishing your Facebook privacy settings in the new paradigm that was recently introduced to the world.  No more reason to be afraid of privacy issues on Facebook after reading this post.

Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly by Kevin Bankston (?)

This in-depth article looks at the new Facebook Privacy Settings.  If you really want to know the potential privacy dangers lurking in Facebook, this article is the most informative that I have found.

Facebook for Business

How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro: An Insider’s Confession by Dennis Yu (2,008)

This is an excellent article to understand how Facebook advertising works.  The first 3/4 of this article is a behind-the-scenes and brutal look into the early days of Facebook advertisers and their spammy methods, which in itself is extremely eye-opening.  The last few paragraphs, though, deal with the potential goldmine for Facebook advertisers by being able to target Facebook demographics.  If you’re thinking of advertising on Facebook, you must read this article!

HOW TO: Set Up a Winning Facebook Fan Page by Susan Payton (1,396)

While basic in details compared to some of the other similar posts in this list, this is comprehensive in scope and goes over areas which you want to make sure you cover in creating your Facebook Fan Page.

5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page by Samir Balwani (1,159)

An excellent analysis of 5 strategies for a successful Facebook Fan Page.  Highly recommended.

HOW TO: Make Facebook Your Company Newsroom by Josh Peters (987)

An excellent look at a reason to establish a Facebook Fan Page for any company, with step-by-step instructions with how to automate it through pulling in content from your other company sources such as blogs, photos, and videos.  If you’re looking to start a Facebook Fan Page, you should read this article first.

Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? by Howard Greenstein (841)

This question comes up at almost every Social Media for Business 101 workshop that I present at.  This article explains the difference in details.

32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business by Meryl Evans (709)

Meryl Evans wrote similar blog posts which made my best of LinkedIn as well as Twitter blog posts for 2009, and she repeats here successful formula here with a similar list of ideas for businesses to make use of Facebook.

How to Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page by Jesse Stay (648)

When Jesse Stay, the CEO of SocialToo.com does a guest post on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, you know it is something special.  This blog post does not disappoint, as Jesse, an FBML expert in his own right, gives excellent advice, both technical and non-technical, on creating that perfect Facebook Fan Page.

30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook by Josh Peters (401)

Excellent compilation of Applications that will help any business.  There are a lot of applications that you might not have known of that appear here in the following categories: Blog Promotion, Business Promotion, Communication, Networking, Collaboration, Audio/Visual, and Miscellaneous.

Five Facebook-Only Strategies for Business Success by Jason Falls (324)

A good overview of how businesses can utilize Facebook-specific functionalities.

New Studies Show Marketing Powers of Facebook by Amy Porterfield (240)

Very recent information based on a ComScore as well as a Morgan Stanley report on the sheer reach of the popular social networking platform from a marketing perspective.  A must read to understand the marketing potential of Facebook.

Top 50 Branded Facebook Pages of 2009 by Jim Tobin (85)

A great post which includes stats on number of fans as well as best practices advice for Fan Pages.  A good place to start if you’re looking to emulate the successful case studies of Fan Pages that presently exist.

8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page by Alison Driscoll (58)

If you haven’t installed any applications on your company’s Fan Page, you haven’t even started to realize the potential.  Read this article for starters.

5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence by Steve Coulson (31)

Great tips for optimizing Fan Pages…although some of the tips are technical and may require you to understand some FBML.

10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know by Justin Smith (?)

If your company has a Fan Page, you should be utilizing it to also help with your corporate home page’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This article will show you how.

How to Develop a Facebook Page that Attracts Millions of Fans by Nick O’Neill (?)

An amazing article with lots of strategic advice on developing a successful Fan Page.

10 Ways a Facebook Fan Page Helps Your Business by Mikal E. Belicove (?)

If you are unsure as to why your business needs a Fan Page, you definitely need to read this article.  It is also a great checklist to ensure that your company is properly utilizing their own existing Fan Page as well.

Also be sure to check out my own 5 Reasons Why Businesses Should Like Birthdays on Facebook (10).

Hope you found this list informative.  Tell me which blog posts you liked the most as well as any others that you might like to recommend and why!  Thanks!