Are You Hurting Your Career Prospects By Ignoring Social Media?

Penelope Trunk recently did an online discussion on Washingtonpost.com about online social networking. True, I am obsessed with her so I am biased, but I thought this piece of advice was particularly relevant and important:

Washington, D.C.: I am an ex-government employee, and very concerned about protecting my privacy. Should I be weary of joining Facebook, or Twitter?

-Shy person

Penelope Trunk: Get over your privacy. It's a new world. You are competing against people who are managing their personal brand online as a career management tool. You can't compete with those people if you are concerned about your privacy. ...

(bold mine)

I think this is really important advice and something people who are scared to set up profiles on social networks need to consider. What are you afraid of? What do you have to hide? I work with people all the time who are reluctant to use Twitter or Facebook because they don't want to use their real name or take a chance on "having their head photoshopped onto someone else's body" (my favorite fear quote ever) by posting a photo on an online profile.

Here's the thing: what they need to be more worried about is losing their jobs to people who know how to use these tools for what they are: essential elements of business today and in the future. Maybe not for everyone, but in certain fields I absolutely believe you are crippling your future career prospects and endangering your current job by keeping your head stuck in the sand and refusing to embrace online social networking. Are you in marketing or PR or advertising and think you can just sit this whole social media idiocy craze out? You seriously should think twice about it.

Sometimes It's Ok To Do It Wrong

There are plenty of things you have to do in life. Pay your bills. Take care of your kids (if you have kids). Drive at the correct speed limit. Show up to work on time. You know, the basics.

I have a lot of "have tos" in my life because I'm a parent, a wife and a homeowner. Blogging, for me, is one of the few things in life that I do because I want to, not because I have to. If I never wrote another blog post in this lifetime, very few people would notice and it would be of very little consequence.

People blog for many different reasons--money, recognition, creative outlet. I've blogged several times about why I blog...in short, not for money or recognition, but for the creative outlet. Sometimes I start stressing because I know there are things I should/could be doing to increase my readership: use more photos, re-design my blog template to make it more visually appealing, etc. etc.

I read two great posts lately that serve as good reminders to not stress about doing it "right" when it comes to blogging:

• Danny Brown about the PR Blackout



• Penelope Trunk with the most TMI/off topic blog post I've ever read.

Granted, most of us couldn't parlay recollections about being molested as a child into a relatively on-topic post on a career advice blog--but the point is, that's the beauty of blogging. You can make up your own rules.

Still need more inspiration? How about Dooce being number 26 on Forbes' list of the 30 most influential women in the media world? Not bad for someone who once got fired for blogging at work.

Reverse Disclosure?

If you read this blog you know I'm big on transparency and disclosure--both because it's important to me and also because it's about to become very important to all bloggers when the FTC releases its revised guidelines later this summer.

Last night on Twitter I noticed a conversation between Danny Brown and Chris Brogan about disclosure, then today saw Danny had a good post up "Can You Have Too Much Disclosure?"

It got me thinking about something I've wondered about before: should bloggers have to worry about what I guess you'd call "reverse disclosure"--e.g. when raving about a product or company that they just happen to like should they say "my only incentive for writing this is my genuine enthusiasm for this product/company/service"? It sounds sort of stupid and tiresome but, what with the new regulations coming from the FTC, will it soon be necessary to reverse disclose to avoid being accused of not disclosing?

I find myself thinking about the concept of reverse disclosure a decent amount lately--maybe because I've become more attuned to the concept of blogging for compensation? Before I started reading so much about the whole disclosure thing I never really gave it much thought--call me stupid but I guess I never realized how many people out there were getting free stuff or being paid to post about products or companies.

I know the handful of times I've been given something free to blog about I've been so impressed with myself that I made darn sure to mention that I'd gotten the stuff for free. The fact that I'd gotten the stuff for free was, in fact, basically the gist of both posts. And in both cases, I wasn't exactly raving about the products; certainly nobody would ever accuse me of writing falsely positive posts. In fact, I'm quite sure that if I were to go solicit products to review, companies would probably steer clear of me, given my reputation for telling it like I see it and not sugar coating things.

The thing is, though, that just as I'm fine with being strongly negative about things if I feel it's warranted, I'm also very passionate about things I love. Especially on my other blog, I'm very prone to raving about how much I love certain books, websites, people and products. (Fair warning: I'm also very prone to using the "F" word, so consider yourself forewarned.) Again, nobody would probably accuse me of raving about a product and not disclosing some conflict of interest, mostly because I'm the most TMI person in the world and usually come right out with the reverse disclosure.

But what about people like Chris Brogan or Penelope Trunk, who companies are willing to pay big bucks to have them mention products or services? (I gasped out loud when I read Penelope Trunk's post about how she used to get paid $5,000 a MONTH to blog about Payscale.) Once the FTC starts peering over bloggers' shoulders a lot more, will people like that need to put reverse disclosures in EVERY post in which they rave about something they weren't somehow compensated for? As much as I'm all for disclosure, I have to say it might get annoying...but will it be a necessary evil?

Looks Matter, Even in the Blogosphere

I read an interesting post a few weeks ago but have been too busy to blog much since then; it was about how female tech bloggers are perceived differently than males. Namely, if a woman is attractive it becomes difficult to find comments that reflect on what she's trying to say rather than how she looks.

My first reaction when I read it? Duh. Welcome to the world. Show me a place in the world--online, in the workplace, in the movies, etc--where a woman isn't judged at least to some degree on her looks. It's just a fact of life as far as I'm concerned--a fortunate one if you're attractive and a not so fortunate one if you're not.

That's not to say that everyone judges women solely on looks; that's not the case at all (thankfully). But yes, there are always some people (sorry guys but I'm talking about you--and no, not all of you so don't get all defensive if you're not the kind who cares about looks) who value women mostly because of the way they look.

Here's the thing, though: don't tell me that women don't know this and don't play to it. Take the blog post, for instance: women in tech either being considered babes if they're attractive or trolls or whatever if they're not. You're telling me that Kim Komando doesn't try to play up her looks? That Marissa Mayer (aka "The Cupcake Princess"--how's that for a demeaning nickname for an executive of one of the most powerful brands in the world?) doesn't enjoy all the press she gets about her looks? That Penelope Trunk doesn't get an awful lot of mileage talking about her, well, girl parts?

I personally like think the blogosphere actually provides a pretty good respite for women as far as being judged by their looks; unless you have a big photo of yourself on your blog, nobody knows what you look like. I personally hate photos and it took me a long time to relent and put one of myself on Twitter. I like it that blogging is about what I have to say and not about what I'm wearing or what color my hair is.

Blogging For A Living...Or Not

For whatever reason, I've come across a lot of posts lately about blogging for money--either for it or against it. I already expressed my thoughts about it; namely that for me, personally, blogging is about my passion for writing. Well, that and being able to share my strong opinions about things that I find fascinating but most people I know couldn't care less about and therefore aren't interested in hearing me talk about.

But I digress. Today, in the course of just a few minutes, I came across two more articles about blogging for money--each the polar opposite of the other. The first was a Wall Street Journal article America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire. The WSJ article starts off "In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers." As you can guess, the article goes on to call blogging "America's Newest Profession."

Then I jumped to Penelope Trunk's blog post for today, Reality check: You're not going to make money from your blog. Obviously there's no guess-work involved in figuring out what her take on the blogging for profit issue is.

The bottom line is that the whole debate may soon become a much more moot point, as the Federal Trade Commission is currently evaluating whether bloggers for hire are violating advertising laws. For all anyone knows, a blogger who is making a living off "America's Newest Profession" today may be having to shell out money for a lawyer tomorrow.

As attractive an idea getting free stuff in exchange for blogging about it is, it's definitely not worth going to jail over.

Gen Whine In The House

Yesterday I made the mistake of watching a video of Penelope Trunk giving a speech about Gen-Yers in the workplace. The same now-cliche stuff about managing 20-somethings: don't expect them to "pay dues" because they'll walk if they have to do grunt work like other generations had to; keep them motivated with treats or special incentives every day or they'll walk; don't hassle them if they seem to be doing nothing but listening to iPods and web-surfing all day or they'll walk. In short, treat them with kid gloves because they are so spectacular that we can't afford to piss them off. The rationale being that they're soon going to be overtaking the workforce so we better just let them have their way.

First of all, bullshit. As far as the whole "soon all the Boomers will be retiring" thing--I think everyone knows that is no longer a valid sentiment, what with the state of the economy. Anyone who was even close to retiring a year ago is now most likely looking at another 10+ years in the workforce before they might be able to even consider retiring. And second of all, bullshit--even if they do retire there are still droves of Gen-Xers who are unemployed and willing--not to mention well-qualified--to do the jobs Gen-Yers scoff at. After all, if you have a mortgage, a car payment, credit card debt, kids, a spouse, etc--you don't have the luxury of hiding out in mom and dad's basement until you find a job that pays six figures and consists of one never-ending brainstorming session while hanging out in a treehouse or some equally cool and laid-back work environment.

Enter the blog post that set me off on this rant. Penelope Trunk has a guest poster on her blog today--a 23 year old writing about why it's smart to quit a job after just two weeks of work. The crux of her rationale being, of course, the tenet upon which the entire Gen-Y work philosophy is based: living with mom n' dad. After all, 65% of new grads do it--so of course it's a good idea.

I digress about the rest of the post; you can read it yourself. And don't miss the comments--those are some of the best parts. Here's one of my favorites:

"I quit a job after two weeks too, but I don't believe the company felt I was doing them a favor. (I was, as indicated in the post.) They are not contemplative enough to consider the possibility that they did something - actually, many things - wrong."

Like forgetting the daily reward or making you spend time at the copier?

Wait--there's more:

"Companies are no more likely than individual people to improve their attitudes or practices when something negative happens."

The "something negative" of course being that the lazy, self-centered entry level person left of his own free will, thereby sparing the company the considerable time, money and hassle it would have taken to fire that person had they and their bad attitude stayed in the job.

Call me a bitter Gen-Xer if you want--I have no problem owning that. And I'm not even one to talk about sticking it out in jobs--I'm the first to admit my resume is filled with jobs that I stayed in for a year before deciding I couldn't stand it and found something better. However, one thing I can say is that I always found a better job, always had health-insurance paid for by me--not my parents--and moving back in with them was never an option.

I've asked this in previous posts: where has the stereotype of the adult loser who lives in his parents' house gone? Have 20-somethings never seen Wedding Crashers? Stepbrothers? Failure to Launch? Call it what you will: saving money, being prudent, giving yourself the opportunity to wait for the perfect job--the fact remains that being 20- or--god-forbid--30-something and living with your parents is nothing to brag about.

Bootleg* Volunteerism

(*bootleg in the urban dictionary sense; e.g. lame or lazy)

Maddie Grant tagged me to answer the question posed by Peggy Hoffman's volunteerism meme: "How can we create volunteer jobs that don’t require being on a committee, a long-term commitment or gobs of time? So, share five short-term, ad-hoc volunteer jobs you’d love to have."

The word that stands out to me in this question is "commitment." I am notoriously bad about commitment...strictly in the volunteer sense, that is! ;) I am horrible at PTA and feel pinned down by the mere thought of having my name on a committee roster. However, like Ben Affleck in He's Just Not That Into You, it's the idea of commitment that freaks me out, not the actual reality if it. **Warning: SPOILER!!** As soon as Jennifer Anniston tells him she's ok with never getting married, he proposes.

Ok, sorry for the sidebar...my point is I love to help and be involved, but I need to know it's ok that sometimes I won't be able to participate and I won't be disappointing anyone if I have to disappear for a while.

Therefore "short-term" and "ad-hoc" are the perfect kind of volunteer jobs for me. Five examples?

1. Question-answerer. I can tear through vast amounts of information like nobody's business, and love to learn new things. Do I want to organize an entire event or track RSVPs? No. Would I be willing to spend hours gathering information for the organizers? Yes.


2. WOM information disseminator. I have a big mouth--both online and in real life. Need to spread information about something--plug an event, spread the word about a cause, etc? I will tweet it, blog about it, email my friends about it and ask them to spread the word about it, tell my kids to tell their friends to tell their parents about it, etc. Ask me to pass something on or get the word out about something and I'll glady do it.


3. Brainstormer. Need to think of a tagline or a a theme? I love to be asked my opinion and offer suggestions.


4. Blogger. I love to write and am always flattered when someone wants me to guest blog. I'm really excited to have been picked to blog from/about Great Ideas.


5. Matchmaker. I am a firm believer in it's all about who you know and doing things the easy way. If I can help someone via an inside track of some sort--whether it be hooking a job-hunter up with a potential employer or just helping someone circumvent a ton of red tape to get to a person they need to reach for whatever reason, I'm happy to do it. If I don't personally know someone who can help you, I can at least try to find someone who can facilitate that relationship. An example of this might be volunteering to hook students up with mentors, or steering someone to the right person to find out about an internship, job or scholarship.

Ok, so now I have to tag 5 more bloggers (apologies in advance if you've already been tagged):

1. Lynn Morton of SNAP fame.


2. Chris Condayan (he doesn't have a blog, but Twitter is a micro-blog, right? Maybe this will inspire him to start a blog ;)


3. Kemetia Foley Fellow Mary Washington College student from back in the day, I recently "re-met" her on Facebook and just now discovered her blog.


4. Penelope Trunk Granted, she is not an association person and also doesn't do memes, but I love her and bet she'd have some great ideas about this. She's already written many posts about volunteering so maybe she'll be inspired to write another.


5. Cassie Soofi Again, not an association staffer, but she is an ASHA member--and also my sister. Not to mention her blog is called Cute and Evil--best blog name possibly ever.

5 Fun Facts

Susan Murphy aka SuzeMuse, an awesome Canadian blogger, somehow found me worthy of being memed. The concept of being memed--or tagged--is you tell 5 things about yourself, then tag (e.g. link) to 5 other people asking them to do the same. You get to shock the world with your shameful secrets and spread some link love. Even if you couldn't care less about my 5 fun facts, scroll down and check out the people I tag because you might discover some cool new blogs.

Ok--let me see if I can scrape together 5 fun things about myself.


1) I bought my wedding dress for $9.99 on eBay. We were eloping in Vegas, so nobody was going to see it anyway, but I wanted to at least look "bridey" in the pictures. I combed eBay and found some girl selling her prom dress, took a chance and ordered it and it was perfect. We got married at the Wynn (in our suite--how cool is that?) and when we walked around the hotel for the photos a million people all told me how gorgeous the dress was. (Yes, that is a photo of us.)

In fact, the whole outfit--dress, veil, tiara (I was determined to wear a tiara even though I was almost 40), shoes--cost under $50. Ok, well I already had the shoes, but still.

2) I once wore the same pair of socks for an entire semester without washing them.I got to college and promptly took up with the hippies--something nobody who knew me would have ever called. Don't ask me why, but I just decided to see how long I could wear the same pair of ragg wool socks (worn, of course, with Birkenstocks) without washing them. It was also, coincidentally, the semester I had a 1.54 GPA and almost got kicked out.

3) I had a radio show in college. You'd never know it now, but once upon a time I was a cool DJ. I even had Dave Wakeling, by that point of General Public fame, as a guest. He dubbed me "Ranking Maggie" and gave me a tambourine signed by him and Ranking Roger.

4) I was one of the original PayPal users. This fact is probably not fun to anyone but me, but I remember when PayPal started they offered $5 to open an account and $5 for each person you got to sign up. Talk about a brilliant exercise in social media--guess it panned out for PayPal pretty well. That was also back when I used to sell stuff on eBay all the time and friends told me I should start a business selling other people's stuff on eBay. If I had taken that advice I'd probably be a millionaire by now.

5) I was a guest on the Oprah Show. This is my fun fact trump card. I was one of the "real life desperate housewives" on the episode featuring the cast of the then-new show, Desperate Housewives. An Oprah producer and a camera crew came to my house, followed me around and filmed me for 9 hours, all to make the 2 minute clip they featured on the show. They totally scripted me too--told me what to do, how to look, what to say, etc. I figured, whatever, I just want to meet Oprah and who's going to see it anyway--everyone's at work at 4 pm on a weekday, right?

Wrong. Every single person I've ever known happened to be watching Oprah that day. Friends from high school, friends from college, neighbors, friend's moms, teachers at my kids' school, coworkers...everyone. Oh well, the adventure was well worth the stigma of forever being known as "Maggie from Oprah" and being shunned by most of the moms in my community.

Ok--now it's someone elses' turn:

1) My sister, Cassie of Cute and Evil fame.

2) Lindy Dreyer, association social media blogger/starlet and her counterpart

3) Maddie Grant. They just launched a new company, SocialFish, to help associations dive into social media. Sorry ladies--I'm sure you've been memed before but you're the first two people who came to mind!

4) Penelope Trunk. I'm going to pull a Tim Ferriss and go out on a limb here. Penelope Trunk is a superstar and doesn't know me from Adam, but hey, she's big on sharing fun facts about herself.

Ok, poor Patrick is going to kill me if I don't sign off now, so I'm going to have to sleep on who to pick for #5.

If People Could Hear the Twitter About Twitter, We'd All Be Deaf

Have you gone to the movies lately? I am obsessed with going to movies and go pretty much once a week, if not more often. Anyway, if you go as often as I do you've probably been subjected to many different versions of the "Don't talk during the movie!" message. How about the one where the screen is black except for those jumping soundwave lines and there are a bunch of loud noises going on at once: a baby screaming, people talking, cellphone ringing, etc. Do you know the one I'm talking about?

If so, you know how that commercial makes you want to pull your hair out because it's so annoying? Well, take that feeling but replace those noises--baby crying, talking, etc--with Twitters. Imagine that instead of reading everyone's "tweets" or incessant chatter about Twitter you can actually hear them. Lately that's what it feels like inside my head.

Don't get me wrong, I love to twitter (I prefer to refer to it as twittering, not tweeting). Nothing more entertaining than constantly spitting out 140 word witty insights or random thoughts. Ditto reading other people's twitters. The twittering itself is not the problem.

The thing that's gnawing at me is reading a million blog posts ABOUT twittering. It's one thing to read someone's actual twitters; it's another to read blog after blog after blog after blog about Twitter this, Twitter that, Twitter as a business tool, Twitter shaping social media, etc, etc. Enough already--we get it.

It's like Twitter is a new religion or something--people discover it and feel like they've uncovered a new frontier or something. Not like I'm a veteran myself or anything--I've only been doing it for a few weeks--but I don't feel it's so revolutionary that it warrants constant "Hey--look at me--I'm twittering!" blog posts or conversations.

Imagine if it were the phone--fine, everyone's talking on the phone. But what if everyone then started blogging about how they're talking on the phone, analyzing every little shred of why they're talking, what they're talking about, why it's good to talk on the phone, etc, etc. Probably wouldn't be all that interesting to read about, right? Ditto writing about Twitter.

There are only so many ways you can analyze Twitter. Granted, I myself am guilty of exactly what I'm criticizing others for: blogging about Twitter so I'm one to talk.

The Expert's New Clothes

I was trying to explain something to my daughter in terms of the classic tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." Having not read it in many a year, I was improvising, telling her it's a story about an Emperor who's not wearing any clothes but announces that he's wearing some really fancy suit or something. Everyone fears him and wants his approval so they all tell him how great he looks. I told her the moral of the story is that some people are stupid--they just want to be like everyone else and have everyone like them so they automatically buy into whatever the masses are saying is cool. Or something like that.

Anyway, I was just visiting one my new favorite sites, The Brazen Careerist--an "online career center" and compilation of blogs written exclusively by Gen-Yers. The brain child behind the Brazen Careerist is Penelope Trunk, my role model. Read her blog if you want to know why. Basically because she rocks and is smart and has "balls the size of church bells," to steal a phrase from some email joke I received the other day.

One of the featured articles was Reminder: Your Job Title is Not Your Personal Brand by resident blogger, Dan Schawbel.

Here is the first paragraph of his post:

When I ask college students “what do you want to do when you graduate,” they always respond the same way. They dictate a job title that is somewhat reflective of their current interest area or topic of study. A job title is what corporations want you to be, not what you want you to be. “I want to be an account executive at an advertising age” is not forward thinking, nor differentiates you from thousands of others who have the same short-term aspirations. Please take a step back and realize that you will just become a number if you promote yourself and set your objective on your resume to a job title.

Um, excuse me: "...“I want to be an account executive at an advertising age” is not forward thinking, nor differentiates you from thousands of others who have the same short-term aspirations"--wtf kind of sentence is that? Is he trying to say "...an account executive at Advertising Age is not forward-thinking, nor does it differentiate you from..."?

I was thinking maybe I should drop Penelope Trunk a line recommending that she not feature bloggers who can't write worth shit because it's a bad reflection on her. I then check out the guy's bio:

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for the Gen Y audience, with an award winning and world recognized blog by AdAge, a TV podcast series that he directs, awards that he judges, and a magazine that he publishes. He has written over 40 published articles in major magazines and online resources such as MarketingProfs, About.com and The American Marketing Association and has been featured in Fast Company Magazine, BrandWeek Magazine, Boston.com, Providence Business News, Brand Strategy Magazine (UK) and Yahoo! Finance. He is also a columnist for JobWeb.com and TheLadders.com. Dan has 7 years of experience in marketing, working at Reebok, Lycos, LoJack, TechTarget and EMC to name a few. Dan is also a frequent speaker at colleges and a mentor to students looking to establish their personal brand. He's is on the board of advisor's for a new geo-social startup called ((Echo)) Myplace and graduated magna cum laude from Bentley College in 2006.

You're telling me that the guy who wrote the horrible article above is very successful and, in fact, the "leading personal branding expert for the Gen Y audience"? Obviously this guy is a genius at selling his personal brand because he has apparently convinced the likes of Reebok, Lycos, Yahoo and even my idol, Penelope Trunk, that he is a good writer when he clearly is not. I mean, let an editor re-write his articles and I'm sure they're fine, but isn't that pretty much true of anything that anyone writes?

So back to my original parallel: Penelope Trunk must either be asleep at the wheel or drinking the proverbial Kool Aid because she's obviously bought into the idea that this guy can write and is worth featuring on her site.