It’s Spring Cleaning time! Is your LinkedIn profile tattered and covered in dust? 

Turn to Social Media 1-2-3 and we’ll help you get it fixed up and sparkling clean to stand out to potential employers. Contact us today and mention our “Spring Cleaning Special” — For $50, we’ll give you our best practice recommendations for you to implement on your own or for $100 we’ll do it all for you (writing, editing and set up)!

Hurry! Offer expires April 30, 2010.

Contact us at jennifer@socialmedia123.org or brian@socialmedia123.org to schedule your LinkedIn profile review.

If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, then you need Social Media 1-2-3 for Job Seekers.

• You are in job transition or exploring new career opportunities.
• You need help articulating, and then presenting, your professional “brand”—the skills and experience you have that set you apart from your peers
• You have no idea what information on the Internet will appear when a potential employer uses the Internet to research your background, experience and reputation—or you need help proactively pointing employers to positive information on the Internet about your professional achievements.
• You want to know how your competitors are presenting themselves to potential employers.
• You have a resume but it would benefit from a “facelift” to make it more attention-getting and compelling to prospective employers.
• You know you should be using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogging to raise your profile, but you just don’t know where to begin—or how to make sense of it all.
• You know you should have a LinkedIn profile, but you need help getting started, preparing the content, keeping your profile updated, and putting it to work for you in your job search.
• You are concerned about being passed over for a new job because you may be perceived as being not technology savvy or on top of the trends.
• You want to use social media tools to raise your profile as an expert in your field.

We would love to help you achieve your professional goals by helping you harnessing the power of social media and tapping into the tools to give you every advantage in the job search process.

With the proliferation of social media as part of our professional and personal lives, we are often asked by job seekers how they should be using social media to leverage their job search efforts.

While it’s important for job seekers to cover the basics (such as having a robust LinkedIn profile or a professional Facebook page), here are 10 innovative things you can do, using the tools of social media, to shine a spotlight on your unique expertise so future employers will take note.

1. Create an online portfolio of writing samples, creative projects or professional achievements. As you meet new contacts or interview with potential employers, point them to this section of your web site for real-life examples of your best work.

2. Develop a blog and publish articles offering solutions to business problems that you have personally helped solve. Share your best tips based on lessons you learned in the process–i.e., what went well and what you would do differently next time.

3. Host a LinkedIn discussion on a professional topic of interest. Invite your LinkedIn contacts to participate. Not only will they benefit from your expertise, but they will also be grateful to make new professional contacts through you.

4. Use the status update feature of your Facebook profile to pose professional questions to friends and colleagues. See what kinds of themes emerge.

5. Use your digital camera or web cam—and enlist a trusted friend or colleague—to create a series of short video clips featuring Q&A interviews. Your friend’s role is to “interview” you about a variety of professional topics and challenges where you have special expertise. Post the clips to YouTube and showcase them prominently on your web page.

6. Create an electronic newsletter to share noteworthy developments and emerging trends relating to your profession. Make the content valuable and practical. Reference your experience as a leader in these areas. Add to the distribution list employers you would like to work for.

 7. Post an interactive calendar that shows your professional activities (even if you’re currently unemployed). List the programs, networking events and meetings that you’ll be attending and what you’ll be doing there. This shows that you are proactive and energetic, even while you’re in transition.

8. Publish your current reading list—both nonfiction and fiction selections. Make notes and comments on each book once you’ve completed it. Add a few thoughts about what you learned from the book, the author, the style in which it was written. Invite your contacts to share their comments, too.

9. Develop case studies featuring real-life business problems and how you have (or would have) solved them. Draw from current events, your own past experience or trends you anticipate facing businesses in the future.

10. Use a poll feature to survey your contacts on their perspectives on a particular business issue.  Use the findings to write an article for your professional blog.

For more information about how you can incorporate these or other innovations into your professional social media portfolio, or for help developing a social media portfolio for your job search, contact Social Media 1-2-3 for Job Seekers.  

Job seekers and businesses alike are increasingly turning to the tools of social media to raise their visibility, showcase their unique expertise, and build and foster connections with peers and prospects. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, there’s also bad news—and a lot of it. While many well-intentioned job seekers are sinking time and energy into developing their online professional presence, they are making some fundamental mistakes that are destroying their credibility and ultimately hampering their job search efforts.

In other words, what good is a social media platform if, in creating one, you actually are shooting yourself in the foot?

As social media strategists, we review hundreds of web sites and blogs on a regular basis.  We see these mistakes made over and over and over again, and we want to share them with you so you will not be doomed to repeat them. Specifically:

1. Content is old and outdated.
We see it time and time again. A job seeker goes to the time and, presumably, expense of creating and launching an attractive online portfolio, only to forget about it, leaving it to collect cyber-cobwebs. This creates several problems. The first and most obvious is that the content gets stale and out of date quickly when it’s not being well managed. In addition, employers want to see the latest and best version of you — not the version of you from eight months or two years ago. And, with today’s workplace emphasis on advanced technology, you will likely want to leave a potential employer with the perception that you are a master of social media—not merely a “dabbler” who gave up too quickly. 

One of the simplest solutions? Schedule time on your calendar to update your social media portfolio. It  matters less whether you do this daily, weekly or monthly; what matters most is that you are consistent.

2. Content is rife with typos and a general lack of grammatical correctness.
Today’s social media tools make publishing an art that practically anyone can do from anywhere. But just because you can post anything your heart desires doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Make sure your content is professional and concise and free of embarrassing typos and grammatical errors. Stay on point — If your social media platform is for professional purposes, keep the content professional in tone and focus. When in doubt, ask a trusted friend or colleague to proofread every single piece of content before you post it.

3. Social media tools are unmemorable and boring.
WordPress, one of the leading blog software products currently in use today, offers more than 1,000 templates that can be used to establish a new web site and blog. But it’s important to customize your site so it doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter version of what everyone else is already doing. Use that template as a starting point, but be sure to customize the site with images, photos, illustrations, colors and content that is unique to you and that reflects your personal “brand.”

For more information about how you can avoid these mistakes in your professional social media portfolio, or for help developing a social media portfolio for your job search, contact Social Media 1-2-3 for Job Seekers.  

No matter what your circumstances, you are likely facing increasing competition as you pursue that next great career opportunity.

What you know, and what many of your competitors don’t, is that a strong social media portfolio can make a big difference in your job search efforts. Here’s why.

1. Social media gives you all the tools you need to create a “Resume 2.0″ — a contemporary, interactive professional portfolio that showcases your skills, your experience and your personality. Remember when the only tool you needed was a nice-looking resume printed on parchment paper? Well, those days are long gone. Today’s sophisticated job seeker relies on all the tools of the trade—a personalized web site, a blog to share your professional expertise, a well-crafted LinkedIn profile, to name just a few—to raise your visibility and make potential employers take note.

2. Social media allows you to tell the “whole story” about your skills and experience. Have you ever sat through a job interview, only to walk away feeling disappointed because you didn’t have the opportunity to talk about certain aspects of your experience? It happens all the time — either because the interviewer runs out of time or because maybe you just didn’t know how to interject. When you have a social media portfolio, you can point potential employers to it so they can see (in more detail than a traditional two-page resume) your skills, accomplishments and distinguishing features.

3. Social media shows potential employers that you’re on top of the trends.  Employers will hire the candidate who has the experience from yesterday, full engagement today, and a strategic eye to the future. You need to show that you can walk the talk. A robust social media portfolio demonstrates that you are on top of the trends, not just as an observer but also as a participant. Ageism is alive and well in the workplace today; don’t let technology leave you behind in the dust.

For more information about how you can incorporate these or other innovations into your professional social media portfolio, or for help developing a social media portfolio for your job search, contact Social Media 1-2-3 for Job Seekers.