Have you ever wondered how some people could get some much opportunities or move up so fast in Organizations? Do you know of friends who get job offers even without putting up any online resumes?
Networking is key for success. If you know more people, you get more opportunities. Have you every realized that even when you have lots of resumes on every job site online, you still cannot search for them on Google?
The Internet opens up so much more opportunities if you know how to use it. Social Media is a tool which you can use to brand yourself as a competent individual who is an expert in various fields. However, if you unaware about your digital footprint and do not take steps to limit bad information about yourself, it may impact your progress, and affect your career.
Just remember, you may have a lot of talents, but if nobody knows about it, how can they discover you and hire you?
Aventis School of Management is running a course on Unleash your Brand, and this course will unlock your expertise and let you understand the various social media tools to leverage upon to build your brand and get you more opportunities.
Don't be afraid, empower yourself with the knowledge to market your skills and talents. Engage!
For the past few years, The Singapore Government has been trying to get on social media. However, they do not welcome feedback and censor comments.
“The Singapore government, as a whole, is not averse to using new media. We’re not ruling out the opportunities it presents us. But we’re not completely sure how to use it yet.”
– Goh Yam Song, Deputy Director, Emergency Preparedness, Land Transport Authority, Singapore –
Even when more ministers are getting on social media, I still feel that they don't get it.
A Facebook user, Abdul Malik Ghazali, was arrested few weeks ago on charges related to incitement of violence due to comments he made on Facebook. The 27-year-old had urged other users on the social networking site to “burn” Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister for community development, youth and sports.
Does he sound serious or frustrated?
On Facebook, even Singapore's Broadcast Media -- Mediacorp is on Facebook, but they do not invite any comments, and they only allow comments on the posts they make. Furthermore, active moderation is also seen.
I feel that if any nation, company or individuals is interested in Social Media, they need to be prepared to engage -- accept both positive and negative feedback, and willingly resolve the issues transparently.
With the coming elections, there are more ministers with blogs and Facebook pages, but the engagement is heavily moderated, and they types of posts does not seem genuine and engaging as well.
It was originally started by the government, heavily moderated, and eventually nobody cared. It now serves as a page where people complain and nothing seems to be resolved.
I hope things change as social media can be a cheap and effective way to engage with the public, and together, we can shape the country together. The government should be inclusive and the public, empowered to share their ideas and comments freely.
Recently, I've suggested some friends on Flickr who is from the police department to try to put up wanted posters as well, with as much information as possible.
As he has a number of supporters, crowd-sourcing can be done to leverage his network for additional eyes and ears, especially for an End of Watch, where a police officer has been killed.
And it actually worked. adding details and other information led to the suspect being arrested.
Perhaps local law enforcement can do the same as well.
If you have not noticed, most news sites allows comments. Unlike in the past where newspapers only exist in print format, you now can influence stories as they are breaking.
This means that the story never ends as it is published, it can still be updated, corrected, followed up upon, and added to.
In the real time PR world, the PR team can no longer hang around and wait for bosses and lawyers to sign off. Rules of engagement should be shoot on sight!
The end of the year is coming, and many people are doing their annual clean up of their apartments. As you know, it does get increasingly hard to clean up as more things pile up. This is also very true for your social networks.
As you know, many problems are easily solved when they are small. They take much less time, and are pretty easy to get to. This is true for car maintenance, maintaining your weight, and also social media.
So what is there to do for your social media?
1) Prune your Twitter Followers.
There are many deadbeats that you may have previously followed and some who just stopped tweeting. To maintain a good follower / following ratio, it is essential to remove people whom you do not need to follow anymore and follow some more interesting people.
There may also be some people following you that may be interesting, so make sure you follow some of them as well.
A good tool to use to prune your followers is Tweepi. Tweepi allows you to clean up your Twitter account from spammers and deadbeat users, as well as make sure you follow tweeps who deserve to be followed.
There are also interesting stats for Tweepi, and like Follower / Following Ratio, and Last Tweeted which may be helpful to manage your Tweeps.
2) Backup your Facebook.
There are so much information people put on Facebook now. I know many friends who solely keep their photos of themselves and their friends on Facebook. What happens when your Facebook account go down when people try to hack in? In the world of data portability, Facebook has allowed us to download our profile, so why not do it?
The process is really too simple to forgo. Here’s how you can stow away your social life for safekeeping:
1). Go to Account Settings,
2). Click on “Download Your Information” and allow Facebook (Facebook) to download your info,
3). Wait for an e-mail that will let you know your info is ready (it takes a while, what with all the stuff you probably have on Facebook),
4). Go through the security test that allows you to download your info (kudos on that one, Facebook), and, voila, your profile is ported to your desktop in a nifty folder.
3) Backup Your Tweets
Have you shared some great links which you wish to keep? As twitter search only go back a few weeks, sometimes whatever you tweeted is lost forever. But have no fear, there are tools that can allow you to back up every single tweet that you have previously tweeted -- Your Tweets may be backed up!
TweetScan will track your data back to 2007, and, using OAuth, will even grab your timeline, tweets from friends and direct messages. It is pretty fantastic and easy to use.
4) Backup Your Photos
Many people upload their photos on photo sharing sites, and sometimes forget their passwords. I own several devices which can upload photos themselves in the camera. The Eye-fi memory card allows you to upload photos directly from your camera to the Internet. So what if you have lost all your photos on your harddrive and every photo you have is on Flickr? Don't worry, you can download them all with tools of course.
Lots of apps and tools let you back up your Flickr photo stream, but a quick, fuss-free way to unload years of photo uploads is the Adobe Air (adobe AIR) app Flump. The app works on Mac, Windows (Windows) and Linux (Linux) and downloads a copy of each photo in your stream to a folder of your choice.
4) Backup Your Blogs
Wordpress and many other blogging sites allow you to backup your blogs with a click of a button.. (Sometimes a little more) It allows you to transfer the information from one blog to another, making it portable. Just in case the server crashes, why not back these information up?
Well, the year is about to be over soon, and if you have sometime this weekend and you are taking a break from physical cleaning of your apartment, maybe you can do some social media maintenance as well.
