In a comment via Linkedin in response to my post on getting ahead in digital, journalist Clive Couldwell noted that it isn’t just graduates that are using social media to promote their career.
“Even 30-year veterans who haven’t rethought their CV in 10 years have to get their act in gear and be seen to be doing it. With the tools now at their disposal, the medium is fast approaching the content specialists. So we’ll be back on top very soon,” he said.
Individuals that want to get ahead in digital PR should use social media to build their personal reputation. At least that was the conclusion of the CIPR Summer Social workshop that I led last week on getting ahead and getting hired in digital.
I included examples from recent graduates such as Ben Cotton, Jed Hallam, Laura Tosney and Matt Watson that have used digital techniques to build their personal reputation during the last two to three years.
Their experiences getting hired into some of the UK’s leading PR and social media agencies are inspirational and worth sharing more widely. Each story shows that irrespective of the economy there is always a market for smart, proactive and motivated individuals.
It’s traditionally been tough for individuals to break into careers in journalism and PR because it took time to build networks and opportunities were limited to the number of pages of newsprint published each day. Networking relied on being invited to the right parties or getting in front of people at conferences and events.
But the web has removed all constraints to content and truly democratised personal networks. Anyone with internet access can become a publisher via a blog, Flickr or YouTube and build a network of followers on a network such as Twitter.
Video job application: Laura Tosney
Laura Tosney developed a beautiful video job application in order to get the attention of 33 Digital managing director Drew Benvie. I challenge you to watch it and be anything but utterly charmed. She got the job.
“Social media allowed me to show a future employer a lot more about my personality and work attitude than I felt I could with a traditional CV. [...] It presents you with so many ways to show people who you are and what you can do, if you’re willing to go after the opportunities,” said Tosney.
Facebook campaign: Jed Hallam
Woflstar’s Jed Hallam created a Facebook page to get the attention of his future employee and persuaded people in his network to leave recommendations. And of course Wolfstar managing director Stuart Bruce invited him for an interview and he got the job.
“[…] the key to starting out in social media was finding platforms that I was comfortable on. For some people this will be podcasting or shooting videos but for me I found Twitter and blogging gave me a comfortable outlet full of supportive and generous people,” said Hallam.
Building reputation through networks: Ben Cotton and Matt Watson
Ben Cotton works in the digital team at Edelman UK. He studied personal online reputation as part of his degree at Leeds Metropolitian University and so you could say that he had a head start.
“Whilst social media may seem daunting at first, providing you are authentic, which means being open, honest and transparent in your conversations, there is a host of opportunities and knowledge out there ready to be tapped into,” said Cotton.
“I’m constantly surprised by the tremendous level of goodwill I’ve encountered from people, who I’m yet to meet in person, but have been willing to answer questions, offer advice and let me know about potential openings,” he added.
Matt Watson used this tactic to build relationships with PR agencies including my own when he was looking for a job two years ago. During his final months at Huddersfield University he reached out to PR agencies that were working in online and social media. Three weeks later we hired him. The rest of the story, as they’ll say in the future, is searchable via Google.
22-months is a long time in this industry. That’s how long it has been since the CIPR reviewed its social media guidelines.
The CIPR’s Social Media panel is addressing the issues by inviting contributions to the guidelines from across the PR industry and other disciplines. You’re invited to make contributions direct on a wiki.
Much of the content from the last edition remains valid but since the last draft we’ve seen the rise of location based marketing, privacy issues and Twitter is now a mainstream tool for the profession. And lots more.
It’s another example of how the CIPR is modernising and I’m delighted to be helping out by spearheading the review process.
Please consider making a contribution.
Related articles:
If you’re working in PR and social media you might be interested in helping out two post graduate students that are working on research projects.
Laurence Baken (@PR_Social_Media) at Sheffield Hallam is taking a look at the importance of social media in the PR industry.
“I aim to find out how well PR practitioners are familiar and up-to-date with social media tools and how it enhances the PR practitioners’ power within their organizations in terms of decision-making power,” he says.
Weijia Qiu (@weijiaqui) at Newcastle University is exploring whether social media is a more cost effective channel to communicate with an audience in a downturn and whether its growth can be attributed to the recent downturn.
I ran a workshop last tonight as part of the CIPR Summer Social series on building your personal reputation online. It’s never been easier to manage your personal reputation by building networks and publishing your work.
Here’s the deck.
It kicks with an audit of your online reputation or web footprint and then describes how to create profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter, build networks and publish content. It includes case studies from people that have used social media to build their personal profile and secure jobs and concludes with a discussion about dealing with less favourable content.
I’ve pulled examples and case studies from around the social web and am grateful (pause for breath) to Ben Cotton, Carolyn Mendelsohn, Jed Hallam, Josh Halliday, Laura Tosney, Matt Watson, Mike Litman, Neville Hobson, Phil Sheldrake, Shel Holtz and Stephen Davies.
I’ll follow with a blog post next week with personal recommendations from some of this gang about how they’ve used social media to build their personal reputation.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further I recommend you check out Antony Mayfield’s Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online.
Steve’s up next week at the CIPR Summer Social series on word of mouth.
The ABC Multi-Platform report plopped into my inbox yesterday. It continues the narrative of a decline in print and the shift to online. Some web properties such as Mail Online are enjoying incredible growth (up 4 per cent month-on-month to 42 million).
The third IPA TouchPoints Survey reported last week that social media penetration in the UK was 37 per cent with Facebook the most popular platform. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it should be much higher.
This is the ongoing story of media fragmentation. We’re at an inflection point and for the moment at least PR agencies need to be able to help brands navigate traditional, online and social media.
At least that’s our view at Speed. Media planning tools are taking an increasingly important role helping us identify audiences and their media habits.
At the CIPR Social Summer event next Thursday, 5 August, we’ll explore why it’s never been easier for PR professionals to build relationships or personal reputation.
Social media provides the opportunity for an individual to build a personal network liker never before. It used to take a graduate several years of lunching journalists and late night drinking sessions to build up a network of contacts.
But no longer: face-to-face meeting remain invaluable but now armed with Twitter anyone can build a network of journalists and over the course of a few weeks learn about their likes and dislikes. That’s one small step away from engagement and developing a relationship.
Social media is also enabling savvy individuals to build their personal reputation by showcasing their work whether that’s words, photos or video. It takes no more than 15 minutes to create a blog or an account on Flickr or YouTube to share with your network and peers.
Professional networks such as LinkedIn and personal web sites have become the modern portfolio. They’re almost certainly the first place that an employer, potential business partner or prospect will go to check you out.
Come along and share your ideas for building personal networks and reputation. Let us know you coming on Linkedin. You can check out my profile at the same time.
The CIPR Social Summer events take place each Thursday from 5pm to 7pm at CIPR, Russell Square.
It didn’t need a High Court judgement to remind us that media law applies in social media as in any other aspect of the media.
But a judgement handed down by Mr Justice Tugendhat yesterday saw a plaintiff awarded £10,000 for being defamed on Facebook.
The case concerns Jeremiah Barber who, posted child porn on the Facebook page of Raymond Bryce, after falling out, along with a defamatory comment.
Inevitably we’ll see more of these types of judgements. Its a booming business for media lawyers.
Here’s a related article that I wrote in March for Reputation Online about copyright and privacy in social networks.
Series 4, the new season of Mad Men, the cult drama about life in a 1960s New York ad agency, premiers on US TV broadcast networks tonight.
There’s not a lot that a 50-year old creative agency could teach about social media you’d have thought. But you’d be wrong.
Characters from the show have been tweeting in the run up to the launch of the new series. Its a delightful social media execution that is completely on-message for Mad Men.
Here are a couple of tweets that I’ve exchanged with the show’s Don Draper and Peggy Olson.
Unfortunately the show’s promotional strategy doesn’t extend to its digital rights management. Anyone outside the US is blocked from viewing trailers for the new show via the Mad Men web site.
In the UK, Mad Men which won a BAFTA for best international show this year, is broadcast on BBC3, but there’s no news yet of when the new series will air.
Update: Thanks to CorpComm’s Helen Dunne for straightening me out this story. The Mad Men Twitter feeds are independent of the TV show and have been in existence for a couple of years. Peggy Olsen’s tweets won their author a Shorty award last year.
There’s a flaw it would seem in Facebook’s network algorithms. Yesterday it urged me to get back in touch with my wife.
I know that I spend a lot of time away from home but I am fairly confident that there isn’t much that Facebook could bring to our relationship of 16 or so years.
Its not uncommon it seems for people to be prompted to connect with their nearest and dearest. Here’s comment from my Twitter networks.
Facebook clearly hasn’t realised that the people with whom you interact least online can be those closest to you.
Two-days after the standoff between the police and Raoul Moat in Rothbury the police presence has diminished but the media presence remains almost as strong as ever.
Attention has now turned to the role of the media in reporting on the Rothbury story and its influence on the unfolding events.
The past seven days have seen journalists from national and international radio, TV and print outlets descend on the small Northumberland town and its 1,700 residents. Mobile studios were set up around the village to report minute-by-minute on the search for Moat.
Rothbury residents were polarised in their response to the manhunt choosing either to stay indoors or going about their lives as normal. Those that did venture out were sought out by journalists to comment on the story.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter spawned discussions as the search for Moat progressed. Every aspect of the story was debated and discussed online.
Here’s the issue in my view: in an era were the media has an almost limitless capacity to publish content on the internet and almost anyone can create that content whether it be words, pictures or video, inevitably editorial boundaries are pushed far beyond any public interest claim.
And so a questionable phone interview with Paul Gascoigne was played live on air by local radio stations in Newcastle. User generated eye witness video footage showing the standoff between Moat and the police was published by the BBC.
Journalists themselves used Twitter to communicate with each other and their audience crossing a line, possibly for the first time on a major news story, between personal comment, speculation and reporting.
Media blogger Enemies of Reason has played out some of the possible scenarios that could have resulted from a heavy-handed media approach:
“There was the rush to the riverbank by photographers keen to get a key photo of Moat – maybe the deadly money shot, who knows? And those pictures of cops with guns, almost certainly telling the army of snappers to get away, for their own safety, and maybe so they didn’t by their presence provoke him into shooting anyone, even himself. If Moat had done something because he’d seen the advancing photographers, what then? Anything for a picture? Would it not matter? But what if a police officer had been shot dead because a photographer in the bush had looked like a sniper? Who knows. Luckily it didn’t happen. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.”
The relentless round-the-clock reporting from Rothbury has led to the media being accused of becoming part of the story.
At one point on Friday evening Northumberia Police took the unusual step of directly asking the media to back-off, claiming that its presence was “impacting the ongoing operation.”
Rothbury is beginning to get back to normal.
But for the media the question remains. Do social media and round-the-clock news reporting threaten editorial integrity?
Have you checked out the CIPR’s Social Summer 2010 series of social media workshops?
No? You really should. The two-hour sessions are being run each Thursday evening at the CIPR HQ in London from 5pm. The cost is £10 on the door to cover beers and nibbles.
Throughout the summer members of the CIPR Social Media panel and other social media doers will cover topics from social media basics to social TV and from SEO to social media etiquette.
I’m up on 5 August with a session entitled ‘How to get ahead in social’ that will explore how to build your own social networks and reputation online.
The workshops are the brainchild of Phil Sheldrake and have been pulled together openly on a wiki. Experts have been given free reign over their content.
A better and broader introduction to social media you will not find. Check out the schedule on the wiki and register your interest in any of the events by following the links.
The Daily Mail yesterday had social media types spluttering into their cornflakes with its article by Jason Lewis criticising the use of social media analytics for customer service.
Andrew Grill and Will Sturgeon have both discussed all that is wrong with the article at length.
But Lewis could have found an example much closer to home of a company that uses web analytics to track and monitor visits online. A quick discussion with my Twitter network finds that The Daily Mail itself is a hardcore user of web analytics.
Thanks to Andrew Smith and Tim Hoang for their insight.
Update: More here from Smith.
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Gabba’s Paul Fabretti hosted a lunch at Thinking Digital in Gateshead today where author and social media marketing expert Brian Solis talked about his new book Engage.
Solis says that he wrote Engage as a means of explaining to his wife how he earns his living. He said that he intended it to be a handbook for anyone working in new media.
It’s an audacious challenge that led Solis to over shoot his publisher’s brief by 300-pages.
In a Q&A session after his talk Solis was asked how agencies and brands should measure the success of social media campaigns.
He said that it’s very easy to track cause and effect digitally – and that metrics should always be tied to objectives but also recognise intangible and serendipitous benefits.
But Solis cautioned companies to get their online housekeeping in order to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.
“We’ve one click to get it right. We’re taking people from a rich social experience to web sites that are stuck in the nineties,” he said.
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Alterian has published evidence that scrutinises how brands are engaging with consumers. Its based on qualitative and quantitative research in the UK and US.
The headline reports that 95 per cent of advertising spend in the 2009 had no impact on its intended audience.
By contrast the report finds that a third of consumers are actively engaged in social media and report a positive connection with brands.
According to David Eldridge, CEO, Alterian:
”We are witnessing is an era of individualisation. It is no longer adequate to adopt a strategy of mass broadcast and one-way conversation.”
Surveys are surveys that are typically used a tool to support a company’s own PR agenda. But this report is written by Professor Michael Hulme, an academic at Lancaster University, and speaks to a trend that cannot escape anyone in the communication, marketing or PR industries.
The risk, Alterian claims, is that brands will become irrelevant if they fail to engage with their audiences using relevant channels.
I’ll return to this report in future blog posts as it contains some great insight. Its only failing is that it stops short of describing how quickly these changes are taking place.
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