Helping people is in my personal core purpose, and assisting people seeking employment provides a source of fulfillment.  In recent years, I’ve presented someone for a VP position at a well-known telecom brand, referred a friend for her first independent project within hours of learning she’d left her job, and recommended another colleague for his initial speaking gig at a national conference.

Each of these people was actually adept at taking advantage of the help. Unfortunately, they have been the exceptions.

Based on numerous other interactions, many experienced people, including marketers, are ill equipped to network for opportunities. Given how job prospects have been in this economy, that’s scary.  From mistakes I’ve most frequently witnessed, here are seven pieces of advice on demonstrating personal marketing skills and improving your networking prospects:

Be Ready to Talk – I may call initially based on someone else’s description of what you’re seeking. After taking the initiative to call, introduce myself, and state that so-and-so asked me to contact you, it would be nice if you were prepared to say “thank you,” exchange a pleasantry, and share your call objective. Too many individuals act as if they’re being disturbed or don’t understand why I’m on the phone. It’s taken three attempts on some occasions to turn it into a two-way conversation. Work with me, people!

Know Your Interests – Have an elevator speech – describe your background, aspirations, and goals in two paragraphs. With someone I know, I can easily probe and get more clarity about options. With a stranger, that’s more difficult. It would be nice if you’ve done it in advance.

Conduct Yourself As If It’s a Job Interview – It’s amazing how casual people are on the phone with total strangers.  A woman once recounted her intense interest in transportation, the industry in which I was working. To make her point, she said a fully loaded rail car was like “pornography” to her. Huh? Instantly, she went from a potential referral to a curiosity; I wondered what other inappropriate things she might say.  Even if I’m not hiring, you want an introduction to someone who might be. That means it’s an interview. Act like it!

Offer Something – I go into calls expecting to offer information, ideas, or referrals that might be of assistance. It would be great if you shared that attitude. Even if you think your near-term need for opportunities is greater, I also appreciate information, ideas, and suggestions for people to meet. A two-way exchange will earn you follow-up conversations.

Do Some Work Yourself – I received an email from someone unknown to me seeking senior marketing candidates. I then forwarded the email to a candidate whom I’d met for a networking lunch. Clarence (not his real name) responded in a stern tone that the employer’s email address was wrong, asking me to get the right one. All this, even though I had to use the same resources available to him (ever heard of Google?) to track it down. Clarence has also asked me to send him direct phone numbers for other people rather than calling himself to get them. Remind me – who is looking for work here?

Make It Easy to Help – An unsolicited email arrived from someone (call him “Clarence #2”) who had been referred by a business acquaintance I hardly know. The email included two separate Word documents. Having to open both (shortening review time), I quickly closed them since a mild virus was attached (eliminating all review time).  When Clarence #2 called, he presumed I’d fully read the resume and asked what questions I had about him, followed by silence (precluding meaningful dialogue).  Important tip – presume I haven’t given a complete stranger’s resume a lot of time; help refresh me.  When later referring him to associates, I created a single PDF of his documents (he couldn’t create PDFs) to spare them the virus (robbing time from pre-selling him).  Clarence #2 could have gotten more valuable help if he’d saved me all this wasted time.

Follow-up – Maybe there’s a reason you’re looking for a job since follow-up is also typically spotty. Remember:

• If I send information or make referrals, let me know if they’re beneficial.
• If we set an appointment, do everything to keep it. When you cancel multiple times, don’t expect much future energy from me on getting together.
• If I invite you into LinkedIn and offer to make connections, include a message for the ultimate target that explains why you want to network. Don’t expect me to compose a message explaining why they should spend time with you.

These are basics any senior person (especially marketers) should know, but invariably, people trip on several of them. If you’re intent on shooting yourself in the foot while networking, I’ll try to help stop you, but don’t expect me to take a bullet for you while trying to wrestle your own gun from your hands

Culture has always fascinated me. In the TalentCulture community we like to think of it in two ways (thanks to www.Dictionary.com): first, as the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent; and second, as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. Clearly culture has many complex dimensions (why it interests me so much), particularly organizational culture, as Chris Jones, our community member who is interested in complexity and change, points out in his interesting series of posts that begin here.

I help companies build a strong culture through the people they hire, which is a pragmatic approach to building a community of culture that encompasses people, values and ideals. People in our community also discuss culture as a personal topic, investigating ways to align personality and corporate culture to create the ‘fit’ necessary for a positive career experience. And we look at it as a social construct, because I believe strongly in the principles of social entrepreneurship, which combine the sometimes opposing forces of pragmatism and idealism.

When cultures fit, an organization can transcend problems, innovate and flourish. Without culture fit, an organization and its members will fail to thrive and will always be vulnerable in the face of innovative challengers.

Building a corporate and community culture requires several kinds of interaction: transactional, transformational, and tacit. I adopted this model from McKinsey & Company and SandHill.com, which reported on it way back in their Software 2006 Industry Report.

Transactional interactions are repeatable and rules-based. People receive reward and achieve success through these interactions because they have relatively equal and predictable value for the participants. From a culture standpoint this is table stakes: you need to have a level playing field where the rules are well understood for all participants to benefit.

Transformational interactions are also an essential component of business culture. Something is transformed from one state into another; in the McKinsey model this may be one thing being transformed into something else, but from a culture point of view I see it as an interaction where one participant benefits from and is transformed as a result of the interaction. It may not be an equal exchange, but there is value to both parties. As an example, the relationship between a career strategist and a job seeker should be transformational.

Tacit interactions are a bit more difficult to define – Ross Mayfield describes them as “judgment or insight applied to complex communications or problem solving”. Applied to the issue of culture, I view this as a shared trust that enables a deep and more valuable interaction – a sustainable competitive advantage – what I hope to help our participants develop through the efforts of the TalentCulture community.

I have no doubt that creating a social community requires interactions that encompass idealism and pragmatism: idealism because the intent is to do good things socially through the community; pragmatism because there must be some return on investment to the community’s participants or they won’t be engaged in the community. And of course this requires culture.

The TalentCulture business and community model is focused on culture: how it’s developed and how participants in our community benefit. In the TC community we create valuable interactions that can help job seekers find the right company, give career experts a place to discuss workplace and hiring issues, and provide an environment with the resources and depth of thought to add to the many facets an organization’s culture and growth quotient.

A positive culture translates into progress for employer and employee, and it turns out progress is what we crave most. We want to know we completed a task, created a winning strategy, and satisfied a difficult customer. We want to keep moving forward. In the TalentCulture community we will explore culture in both a corporate and social community context. We will give hiring managers the tools and insight to align their company’s cultures, building strong communities of culture between management and employees. We will talk about culture and communication and progress – always progress.

Help us make this a better and useful place. Tell us what progress and culture mean to you. How do you define your culture? What does progress mean to you?

Today’s post is by our guest blogger, and friend, Jeff Wilfong.  Jeff has assisted with web 2.0 and business strategy for a number of large-scale organizations like Conoco-Phillips, the City of Sacramento and a multinational conglomerate based in India.  Jeff is currently earning his PhD in Organization Development with emphasis in Web 2.0 management. Learn more by visiting his site, E2.0 Pros.

I have been pondering lately about how we can measure, quantify, or understand whether we are getting value from a social technology. If we are going to move organizations into networked structures with all the latest and greatest tools (such as Web 2.0, E2.0, SCRM, and much more), then we better know what we are heading into. In my view, business ROI metrics that arise from a linear, cash-oriented productivity model are going to increasingly fade away as the analysis becomes much more sophisticated. Too many business analysts state that ROI is just too hard to measure and often horribly inaccurate.

So, how is ROI currently being measured in the new networked model?

One stream of thought is that you intuitively know when you find value. For instance, when I start meeting many different individuals on Twitter and find their thoughts interesting and creative, I then link up with them on LinkedIn and perhaps schedule an hour-long phone call to get the human-to-human connection going. That tells me that the technology was valuable. By the way, I have had numerous of these happening lately as I have developed my weak-link network. The weak-link network theory, aka “Brokerage and Closure” (see Ronald S. Burt’s book), states that social capital exists in structural holes. People become brokers between the links to get access to new knowledge and spread ideas. However, too much closure creates too much similarity in thinking (aka “group think”).

The tools I like to use for my informal network creation are TweetDeck, Skype, LinkedIn and of course my trusty iPhone.

Another stream of thought about Social ROI is more quantitative: it states that we need to analyze metrics, the mathematical properties of the social networks, and user behavior.

Regarding metrics, we examine:

• the time spent on the site,
• the the click rate (which links are clicked on and which are not,
• the quality of postings on a subjective scale (perhaps through user voting),
• the length of postings, and
• the various words used (i.e., tags).

We analyze the social network itself by looking at:

• the number of connections,
• the density of connections,
• the number of weak links and the number of cliques (or strongly connected groupings),
• and the dispersion, the average length of paths, the hubs or connectors, and the outliers (to name a few).

With respect to user behavior, we look at which social tools are used most and examine the long-tail effect of user participation, the fact that a majority of behavior comes from a small few. Typically, this ratio is 20/80 where 80% of the behavior is accomplished by 20% of the population, and this exponentially tapers off (see Barabasi). Wikipedia follows this as do most other communities. Is the community an 80/20, or are more people engaged than this?

We can compare these metrics to established norms from other studies and cases, and determine how well we are doing. Still, the human in us tells us that we can do more with the networks. For example, we can design a better user-interface (a more human-centered design if you will) and psychologically fit the group to the tool. This is all cutting edge stuff, and we will see more in the immediate future.

We need to start examining a model of ROI in the new, networked organizations. This will get us closer to Org 2.0.

Interesting books:

Wasserman and Faust (1994) Social Network analysis

Clay Shirky (2009) Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations

After some careful research on job growth, happiness, opportunity, and nightlife, I’ve pinned down the top 10 cities for fresh college graduates to live, work and play.

Check out my video and the list, below…

#10 Houston, TX

• Ranked #3 in the country for job growth
• Opportunities for graduates with science and technical degrees
• Lively nightlife

#9 Boston, MA

• Lots of public transportation means no need for a car
• Up-and-coming job market
• Long, cold winters

#8 San Francisco, CA

• Affordable housing
• Growing job market
• Nightlife and rich culture

#7 Austin, TX

• 25% of the population is in their 20s.
• Ranked one of the best upcoming areas in the country

#6 Atlanta, GA

• Home to over 24 major corporation headquarters
• Average starting salary of $40,000
• Happiest suburbs in America

#5 Denver, CO

• Affordable housing
• Home to the happiest single professionals in the country
• Ranked #4 in the U.S. for job growth

#4 Chicago, IL

• Lots of entry-level jobs
• Affordable housing
• Great deep dish pizza

#3 Washington, D.C.

• Great social scene
• Highest concentration of college graduates in the country
• Lots of government and university jobs

#2 Seattle, WA

• Greenest, most sustainable city in America
• High job growth and starting salaries
• Lots of new college graduates

#1 New York, NY

• Great nightlife
• Lots of entry-level jobs
• Possible commuting

Resources:

Best cities for college grads and young single professionals

Top 20 Cities for Entry-Level Job Seekers

America’s Favorite Cities

Best Cities For Young Professionals

The Best Cities to Live and Work In

Meet Mad Man Don Draper at his finest: the pressed suit, the neat hair, the confident gaze. He’s about to pitch an idea to a client. Draper works for an advertising firm; he is the main character in AMC’s Emmy and Golden Globe-winning original series “Mad Men.” In this video clip, he’s at the top of his game recognizing the consumer’s innate needs and finding a way to fill them.

Everyone wants to be Don Draper. Maybe you don’t drive a Cadillac or spark fire in the hearts of married women with your dashing, princely looks… No, you can’t be Don Draper, but you can be like him. Except you don’t run an ad firm. You run your life and your career. Draper’s pitches are like job interviews on behalf of the firm. He wants the client to hire his team. When you apply for a job, you’re essentially pitching yourself. You want employers to hire you.

Notice Draper’s strategy. He finds the benefit in a product that people want or need and then packages that benefit into a message people can understand. You can do the same! Find what qualities you possess that employers need or want. Don’t look at your skills or your experience. Look at your benefits. Package those benefits into your resume, cover letter, interview and thank you notes.

You may not be sending grown men out of the room in tears like Draper does. But if you can identify and articulate why potential employers need you, you can convince them that they do need you. Your career will continue seamlessly round and round just like Draper’s Carousel.

The press has been lamenting recent dismal numbers on job satisfaction. Early this year, the Conference Board – which regularly pumps out interesting data on employment, the economy and business trends – issued a report that indicates job satisfaction is at its lowest level in two decades. This fact seems stunning in an economy where one in 10 of us is searching for a job – after all, if you have a job, shouldn’t you be satisfied, by definition? Or should you?

A number of red flags stand out in the report:

• Only 45 percent of those surveyed are happy with their jobs.
• Gen Y – the under-25 crowd – is unhappiest in their work.
• Twenty-two percent of the 5,000 surveyed don’t expect to be in their current jobs in a year.
• The drop in satisfaction extends across four ‘drivers of employee engagement’: job design, organizational health, managerial quality and extrinsic rewards.
• The survey results point to a risk that knowledge transfer will be lost.

Job satisfaction and engagement with your employer’s goals are tightly linked. When your employer doesn’t – or can’t – give you meaningful, fulfilling work, your satisfaction with that job will drop. But with one in 10 unemployed and perhaps another seven or ten percent who have given up or are underemployed, looking for another job is a terrifying prospect.

But there are choices you can make, even in this environment.  Here are just a few: prepare yourself for a new career, take action to make your job more rewarding, or stay dissatisfied and blame it on external factors.

Gen Y may find it easiest to prepare for a new career. They have less invested, are often fresh out of school and are less likely to be encumbered by mortgages and families. You’d think they had the least to lose, but I would argue they have a lot to lose: their faith in the job market, their trust in their employers, and even their belief that careers are worthwhile. Hey, why not be a waiter or a ski bum when a corporate job looks so unrewarding?

Gen X, struggling with mortgages and families, may feel trapped. And baby boomers, aghast at what the markets and the government have made of their retirement prospects, may feel betrayed on all sides and emotionally unable to invest in their jobs. Yet for Gen X and baby boomers the key to satisfaction is action. But what action?

The TalentCulture ‘action’ prescription is culture. If you’re dissatisfied with work, it’s time to look for workplace culture, personality-culture fit, and a culture of work-life balance.

My colleague Mike Ramer argues that culture is the superglue that bonds people to a mission. A smart employer understands this and creates a workplace culture of purpose, shared goals, engagement, and reward.

A smart employee invests his or her energy in a corporation with a culture of success, teamwork, accountability and excellence.

Satisfaction in a job is a shared responsibility, requiring the employer to create a culture of success and engagement, ensure organizational health, demand the best from its managers, and provide extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to committed employees. Career seekers: your responsibilities are to understand what drives you, seek the right culture fit with an employer, and continually invest in skills. Create a balance in the work/life equation by exploring personal interests and maintaining physical and emotional wellness.

Job satisfaction is a shared responsibility, especially in difficult times. We think that with the right mix of attitude, culture and collaboration it’s possible to be satisfied with a job, even to renew satisfaction in a stale job. What do you think?

Today’s post is by our guest blogger, and friend, Jeff Wilfong.  Jeff has assisted with web 2.0 and business strategy for a number of large-scale organizations like Conoco-Phillips, the City of Sacramento and a multinational conglomerate based in India.  Jeff is currently earning his PhD in Organization Development with emphasis in Web 2.0 management. Learn more by visiting his site, E2.0 Pros.

The old adage: “If you build it, they will come,” does not seem to work as a strategy for the roll-out of social media tools in organizations. A vast majority of users will simply go about working the same way they always have. Case studies exist describing successful implementations which lead with technology (see Bill Ives’s consulting engagement with Booz Allen), most data shows that many technology-led efforts are in vain. Simply put, many managers complain that employees do not use the tools once they are designed.

One study indicates that worldwide, IT projects consistently fail, and a record $6.2 trillion dollars were wasted on them, various other studies show only about 40-50% of projects succeeding. This data on IT failure rates is not new, and McKinsey consultants have found this rate to be consistent over the last decade or two. Many reasons are given for the large failure in technology. For this article I wish to focus on two reasons of the failure of enterprise solutions, the lack of a collaborative culture and ignoring the end-user.

Designing a wiki, requires that people will want to work in collaborative ways. People will not collaboratively work together if the culture does not reward them to. In the book, Collaboration 2.0, David Coleman and Stewart Levine, successfully argue that any collaborative culture will need to balance 1) technology, 2) people, and 3) process. Many times, IT designs a tool and does not communicate successfully with the business user. Often, the business user ends up not using the tool or side-stepping by using a product from another vendor. In a collaborative culture, IT would work hand-in-hand with the business user, gathering all the necessary data, designing the tools with the end-user in mind. This is working with the people. Next, a process would need to be designed by change management to focus on encouraging users to adopt and use the tool. One method would be to work with champions, encouraging the important people within the organization to work collaboratively together. This may start with them simply using the tools and adding content to the wiki or blog. Another method would be for managers to change their reward structures and begin to examine ways of assessing collaborative work for employee performance reviews. This is focusing on the process.

The people and process are often neglected. It is my belief, that unless companies move towards designing, encouraging and rewarding collaborative cultures, that social media tools will be limited. Either employees will not use them or they will not be used to their fullest potential. The power of 2.0 technology, social media being one of them, is in the social network effects. We learn more when we reach out to others, we can build great things when we work together. After all, the reason why we create organizations is that the power that comes from ‘many’ is much greater than the power of ‘one.’

Simply proving new tools does not mean people will

1. want to use the tools
2. have the time to use the tools
3. know how to use the tools
4. develop any expertise or find new knowledge from the tools if the culture is not collaborative

In my future posts, I will write on ‘Org 2.0,’ the new evolving cultures of participation, collaboration, and innovation that is potential when leadership, structure, culture, and processes are aligned with technology and the core knowledge that exists within the organization. We are in a new era of business thought and I would like to explore this area.

Finding a job is a job. But what kind of job is it? When you think about it, the job search is actually a public relations job.

On the job hunt, you’re advocating for yourself. If you want to finally land that dream position, you’ve got to practice good personal PR. So treat your job search the same way a public relations practitioner would treat a PR campaign.

In PR, we love catchy acronyms. If you jobhunt long enough, you’ll come to love this one: RPIE. It’s pronounced “R-Pie”…okay, maybe not so catchy. It stands for Research, Planning, Implementation, Evaluation.

Research

This first stage of a campaign is too often overlooked by PR folks and jobseekers alike. Solid knowledge of yourself and your future employer will be the foundation for your job search. Here’s how to begin:

1. Start with a brainstorm. What are your skills? What tools do you possess? What makes you a valuable asset to employers?

2. Then hit the web. Where do those skills and tools fit? What companies are looking for a valuable asset like you? Where will you be a good match?

3. Make a list of places you will apply, and read everything you can about those places.

Planning

Here is where you craft your strategy. Make a plan for how you will write cover letters that boldly declare, “I know your company, and I know you need me!” Use that research to find the keywords your potential employers are looking for, and thread those keywords into your resume. Draft a step-by-step task list of how you will handle each follow-up letter, each phone call and each interview. Remember that research? It’s still your foundation.

Implementation

You’ve got your game plan, now hit the ground like a wound up matchbox car. Build that personal brand. Send your letters and resumes; follow them up to show you’re eager; interview with confidence, backed by the knowledge you’ve gained in Research and Planning.

Evaluation

When it’s all over, review what happened. What did you do right that you will repeat next time? What potholes will you avoid on your next journey? How can you improve your job searching skills? Get ready to wash, rinse, and repeat.

The job search is a PR campaign, and like a PR pro, you bill by the hour. The more you put in, the more you get out. Campaigns don’t last a few days; they’re ongoing. The job search is a full-time job…until you find a full-time job.

For a long time, a large corporation provided the context for my career.  Even amid dramatic change and outright chaos, relationships between me and just about everything in the big company – work variety, pace, people, meetings, surroundings, interpersonal interaction, moral support, etc. – remained very familiar. Now though, having ventured out to build my own business, I find that I’ve taken myself almost completely out of that familiar (and thus, comfortable) context.

I’m sure I felt similarly when I moved from a two-person research company to the Fortune 500 world many years ago, yet I don’t recall the changes being quite so stark. Now, instead of coming in and adapting to circumstances created by others, I am responsible for shaping the new environment.

It’s an unfamiliar and uneasy situation at times, leading me to develop and share my top ten list of unanticipated insights about working from home:

10. Not every phone number begins with a 9!

9. It’s possible, with a new address, to go hours without receiving any work-related emails.

8. Creative diversions while in a corporate job (such as blog writing) now induce guilt since they get in the way of 24/7 business development.

7. There are no conference rooms in which to hide meet.

6. Taking a nap during the day isn’t frowned upon.

5. Even though I’m in what looks like an office, it functions like a cube, because my wife listens and critiques my phone conversations.

4. There’s much less talk of downsizing.

3. It’s difficult to tell a “vacation” day or the weekend since I’m still at “work,” no matter what.

2. My work posture must not suggest “working” since doing a household chore is expected to receive immediate top priority.

1. After more than 9 weeks, we’ve yet to have a Monday morning staff meeting!

Despite trying to anticipate and plan for everything, all these things surprised me!

I don’t view being taken out of context as being bad though. It’s simply an interesting wrinkle and a cool opportunity: I can determine – with my wife’s input, of course – a totally new context!

I start companies.  About every seven years or so, I get another one started.  Truth: I have not had a ‘win’ the scale of a Facebook, but I have not had a loser yet, either.  Two went public and initial investors have always made money, how much depended on when they exited.

Over the last 25 years or so, I have learned some painful and expensive lessons.  Now that I have gray hair and some experience, I see more clearly now why many VC firms like to have an experienced venture leader inside the company.

It is not so much that I now have all the answers, far, far from it.  It is more that now, I have a realistic view of what is happening and what the market and each stakeholder is telling you. In other words, I can recognize when the new company is in the minefield. That is the first step in solving any business problem.  Knowing that one exists.

There is one thing completely in my control, and that is the reason why I am excited about TalentCulture.  It’s all about the people on your team and the culture you create.  What I mean is this: while I believe I have greatly influenced the cultures in my previous companies, it turns out that it is more about the people inside than about me making some sort of blanket statement about what the culture should be.

That is what makes it so interesting to reflect on culture.  What are those things that the CEO and his team do that makes the culture either good or bad?  And who defines it?  Is it because everyone is singing Kumbaya at lunch, or is it because people love working at the company?

What I hope to accomplish with TalentCulture is simply to explore these and more cultural questions.  Maybe my experiences will create some more conversations here about this topic.