Category: Social Media
July 6th, 2013 by matthias
Today I am at a local employability fair, organised by our local council. I volunteered, after finding out about it in a newsletter. So I called them up, and offered giving advice for young job seekers on how to – and how not to – use social media in their job hunt.
As I don’t like handing out paper handouts, I’ve decided to use my blog (and Twitter) as a way to summarise my hints and tips – and comment on any results. I’ll be using the hashtag #cipdl2w for this, as I’m supporting the CIPD’s Learning to Work initiative – and this day is spent with our key stakeholder group – those young people…
I will update the blog throughout the day, from about 10.30 t0 13.30 (hoping someone will actually ask me any questions…)
Update 11:25: Things are going slow, as it’s sunny and shoppers are passing us by rushing their Saturday shopping. So I took to the opportunity to have a chat with the stand next to me, where youth work apprentice Katie is representing www.action4youth.org, an organisation that helps young people realise their potential by providing Summer activities, such as the National Citizen Service, and local community projects. Katie is on a one-year apprenticeship after finishing school. We talked about the challenges of choosing not to go to university, but to pursue what is clearly a professional vocation – helping young people learn new skills and gaining qualifications. Having worked with HE students all of my professional life, it was both refreshing and very interesting to see the world of work in a new light. With the current generation of young people having been given the impression that the only way to professional success is higher education, I found Katie’s perspective, and choice not only interesting, but also admirable – by not choosing the path tread by virtually everyone else, but to focus on what is important to her. And as my lesson for today so far, it’s nice to have a reminder what’s actually really important in the world of career decision making – and that is to do what you believe in.
Update 11:50: Interview with the organiser of today’s fair
Mel, who works for the local council, has organised this fair, because she wants to do something about youth unemployment, bringing together local partners and providers. It’s part of the local child poverty strategy – and Mel has organised similar events before, and will do so again. The fair makes excellent use of the footfall in a busy shopping mall, trying to access young people ‘hanging about town’ on a sunny Saturday. The aim is to get young people registering with the national apprenticeship service (www.apprenticeships.org.uk), sign up for workshops and training. And it’s great to see Mel at work, helping – often parents, thinking of their children – bridge that chasm between school, and the world of work. I join her on the now busy front desk, where requests from all demographics of the local community are coming in. What I really like about her and the fair she has organised, is the obvious enthusiasm and genuine passion Mel shows for this endeavour. What I’ve learnt from this is, is that opportunities to engage with – and help – the employability agenda are sometimes just around the corner.
For the final update, from the morning after go here.
Posted in Education & Employability, Social Media Tagged with: CIPD, employability, Learning to work, social media, young people
July 1st, 2013 by matthias
I’m fascinated by this Edward Snowden business: yet another whistle blower gives us a glimpse of what our ‘free’ western governments are up to, namely collecting data (and I pretty much mean all data) to protect us from all sorts of evils – and how this somehow turned into a mechanistic collection of literally all available data. On everyone. You. Me. My cats. Nietzsche talks about how staring at an abyss ends up with the abyss staring back at you. Besides the obvious HP Lovecraft association, this raises an interesting point, often raised by people sceptical of modern technology, especially social media: what if someone uses all this knowledge against us? Should we not try to minimise our engagement, be careful what we post – and hope no one ever interprets what we do in some way that will look suspicious, even though we’re perfectly innocent? Well, I have to say: too late. What’s suspicious lies in the eye of the beholder, and whatever our level of engagement with social media, or the Internets in general – we have created a world in which we are surrounded by technology that observes us on a constant basis. Hell, I have a smartphone that decides not to darken its screen by using its front facing camera to check if I’m still looking at it! Talk about spooky. But, surprisingly, it doesn’t freak me out – I don’t expect anything else than that technology which can observe us, will be used for that very purpose; and if not by the state, then by commercially interested parties. I find it fascinating to see that our ‘modern’ and ‘free’ societies resemble the dystopian visions of 1970s sci-fi more than we would have thought possible then. Am I worried – yes, but I’ve been worried since then. But I must admit, I’m mostly fascinated, given that I have no control over this anyway – I have been probably staring at that abyss for just a bit too long.
Posted in Commentary, Social Media Tagged with: social media, thoughts
June 10th, 2013 by matthias
Readers of this blog will know that I’m a great fan of RSS feeds. I’ve experimented over the last few months with alternatives to Google Reader, which will rest in peace at the end of this month. I’ve tried to wean myself from it, but I still do my daily reading (and the resulting sharing) via Google Reader. I had installed and then de-installed Feedly, because it was constantly crashing on my tablet (with an old version of Android) – so I used WordPress’s Reader. That wasn’t too smooth either, but got me to share more directly, and blog more. With a new mobile, and a new version of Android, I’m now back to Feedly, which offers a nice user interface, somewhere between Flipboard (too flashy for me) and Google Reader (nice lists). What they also offer is a direct syncing service to your Google Reader account, and this works very well for me. So come time for the Reader, I’ll read my RSS feeds there – like hundreds of thousands of other reader users. But that’s not my lesson for today – while looking into my feeds, and spending more time on LinkedIn again (I’m currently doing an experiment with it), I’ve found that I can flow my LinkedIn feed into my RSS feeds. Now that is awesome. Why? Because I want all my feeds in one place, and don’t want to have to check different applications at the same the time and at the same place – I’m a neat kinda guy, and very procedural. I’ve done this for a few days now (check it out in your LinkedIn settings), and I’m amazed how much I was overlooking by not always scrolling down my LinkedIn feed. Pretty much every day, I’ve picked up what I would call a ‘social news story’ relevant to me (contacts of mine finding new contacs, jobs – or posting info they are not sharing in other ways), and they are making me feel more connecting – and LinkedIn less just like a glorified address book. Yes, my feeds have now pretty much doubled, but I was running out of stories half way through my train commute – and I read much more about my actual audience. And that really interests me.
Posted in Social Media
April 16th, 2013 by matthias
I know I’m late to the party bemoaning the looming demise of Google Reader. To me, the world is full of people, who ‘get’ RSS feeds (and who therefore stay informed), and the many who don’t (and thus leading poorer lives for it). So much for the patronising comment of the week, but for me, as for many others Google Reader’s farewell is life changing, while for (apparently too) many others, it’s ‘Google what?’. I decided to move on swiftly emotionally (it’s not ‘our’ product after all), and service-wise, slowly: yes, I’ve got Feedly, Flipboard and Pulse accounts, but I don’t like their flashy graphic interfaces – those who’ve been to my office (or my home) know that I consider accessories and beautiful things – at times this included furniture – frilly and exuberant. So far then, no alternative service has made me open any other apps regularly during my daily commute. With one exception: as some of you may have noticed, I’m far more active on my WordPress blog than usual. WordPress has this Reader function, which so far I’ve ignored, as I had, well Google Reader and Twitter – but it does drag me in surprisingly often now, as it enables me to read many of my usual blogs (RSS feed style), and both gives me an opportunity to support them by ‘liking’ them (Facebook style) – and also share their content by ‘re-blogging’ (Twitter style). It’s GUI is clean (even the web version), and it invites me to blog more. What’s not to like? WordPress coming out as a contender for my reading needs was completely unexpected, and a bit like my countr(ies) getting more than nil points in the upcoming Eurovision song contest, but hey, this is one I’ll be playing with for a while.
Posted in Social Media, Work life
February 7th, 2013 by matthias
I’ll try to keep this ode to a corporate service from being too gushing – but recent events (a parliamentary debate, and a short training for a colleague struggling with the evils of overflowing email inboxes) have yet again driven home my appreciation of Twitter as the most interesting social media platform around. I regularly hold talks about social media in front of students and professionals – normally in the context on how they can be utilised to help them ‘get a job’. This is a ploy by me though, because I am interested in getting people engaged with social media much more than just for their job hunt – I want them to become more engaged with society, current affairs, while at the same time declutter their inboxes. And Twitter is still IMHO the most versatile and flexible tool – especially if combined with hootsuite, and RSS feeds. It’s versatile, as tweets can be channelled into other social networks, so one update can go a long way reaching out to your diverse audiences – helping you keep in touch. From a mobile device, it becomes a real-time engagement tool, not only for sharing thoughts and opinions (yes, even in those areas where many an academic colleague has told me “my subject area doesn’t do social media” – there’s none I haven’t been able to find yet), but also to find information – often directly from the original source. Often, I use it to physically meet people in real life – enabling to network significantly beyond my traditional reach as a suit sitting in an office and going to internal meetings. An excellent example of public engagement though was delivered by the British lower house yesterday, when live commentary on #equalmarriage on Twitter was as so often more timely than conventional media – and at the same time gave you an opportunity to engage directly with the MPs who were in the progress of voting. When the news about the vote came through, I was on a train with limited connectivity – but trusty old Twitter delivered still, even though something like 20 messages came in between every refresh click. This is where Twitter’s flexibility comes to the fore – it’s better on mobile than on a PC, and allows you to engage with the topics that interest you instantly. As with any media source, you have to filter the noise from real information – but there was plenty of the latter. I have written about how my times on the train are often the most productive in the day (for both me and indirectly at least, my employer) and that it’s vital for any professional (and student aspiring to be one) to be up to date on current affairs at any time – with Twitter being currently the best one. I do get the occasional push back on this point during my talks, against the alleged tyranny of having to stay ‘connected’ at all times, and ‘check yet another inbox’. And my answer is – yes, I think we have no choice about that. It’s a key factor if we want to be effective as professionals – and employable. Twitter (combined with use of RSS feeds) is currently the best tool to achieve this – and to simplify the constant streams of information we are now required to process. And if used effectively, it’s even less stressful than dealing with the deluge of emails most of us have to handle day in day out. I’m ending the fan boy mode for now – and look forward to my next seminars to students on the topic coming up soon. Hopefully, I’ll get some to see what I see in Twitter.
Posted in Social Media
December 10th, 2012 by matthias
I was recently asked to provide a few short comments on how I see job seekers using Twitter by security firm AVG. You can read the result here. It’s also worth checking out their digital diaries series on how technology affects children.
Posted in Education & Employability, Reblogged, Social Media
September 24th, 2012 by matthias
As part of social media week, I will be talking about using Twitter as a job search tool. I have written – actually tweeted about this – when John Lees asked me to contribute to his relaunched book ‘How To Get A Job You’ll Love’. I set myself a challenge then – keeping to no more than 1400 characters, I wrote 10 tweets on the topic. To stay in keeping with the purpose of this blog, I will map out what I’ve learnt so far about Twitter as a tool for job hunters. Here it goes: Firstly, Twitter is an excellent search engine – job hunters have to be constantly informed about their sector, potential employers and news that could affect them – see my recent blog post on that – Twitter gives you this in real time, and often from the horse’s mouth via people who talk about just there current experiences. Secondly, it helps you build an online presence with relatively little effort – via retweets and mentions – pushing yourself up in search results on relevant topics. Thirdly – while doing one and two above – Twitter helps you get in touch with people who may be relevant to your search – or those who may interview you shortly. Not a week goes past when social media – but specifically Twitter – does not give me or someone I know a significant benefit which goes far beyond that cup of green tea. Can you find a job using Twitter? I work with someone who did. Can you find a job using Twitter? Yes, there are enough jobs accessible via Twitter to replace any job board. Can you find a job using Twitter? It won’t give it to you, but using it certainly helps you a lot along the way.
Posted in Education & Employability, Social Media
December 19th, 2011 by matthias
… at least mine: I’ve been wondering why I’ve been so lazy at updating my blog. It doesn’t require much maintenance and by its definition posts are to be short and concise. Just recently I have started to understand why I hardly use it – I now tweet all the time. Microblogging enables me to share what I have to say, and given that I’m quite the talker in real life it keeps me really short and concise. When I look at my bloggin/tweeting behaviour in retrospect, I see that as soon as I started tweeting seriously, my blogging went down. I always thought that I would use the blog for those longer messages (like this one), but actually, I really don’t. I’ll have to think about this – finding other ways to use WordPress.
Posted in Social Media
February 3rd, 2011 by matthias
I’ve had an experience of receiving an immeditate benefit from using social media. When attending the recent Rate My Placement Awards (by the way an excellent example for the usage of technology and social media), I decided that I wanted to cover the events on Twitter. It was a bit of a lonely experience at first, as the room itself was a bit of a wifi black hole with only few people tweeting. Hooking into a BTFon hotspot though enabled me to be online and I got going. A student panel was telling the assembled employers that if they wanted to get their attention, freebees were still the way to go. I tweeted on that and got into a bit of banter with one of the RmP guys about the value of freebees – and how much students like them. Having just finished my green tea – which in my world means an urgent need to get the next one immediately – I tweeted that I would be very pleased about a free green tea. And as soon as there was a break – they guy whom I was exchanging tweets with walked up to me (we never met before), and handed me one! What’s the lesson? Social media can indeed help connect you to real people, pretty instantly. They don’t replace interactions in the real world – but they might help to establish them. The offline world still rules the online world – and a cup of green tea is an artefact of the offline world. Yet the gesture – and the gratitude for the act of kindness bridged both.
Posted in Social Media, Uncategorized