As social and professional networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn become more popular for connecting with friends and family, more and more people are visiting the sites for more specific reasons, namely the job search.  As the number of unemployed workers continues to grow, job seekers are using these sites to brand themselves to future employers.

LinkedIn has always been touted as the site to network professionally; however, job seekers are now also turning to Facebook and Twitter for job leads, advice and contact building.  Hundreds of recruiters are trolling Twitter, searching for applicants with relevant skills, while job seekers post links to their resumes, websites and examples of their work for previous employers. (more…)

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the General Counsel of Amalgamated Widget, the nation’s largest manufacturer of widgets. One day, you are sitting at your desk when your phone rings. On the other end of the phone is one of the lawyers who works for you; she proceeds to inform you that Amalgamated Widget has just been served with a complaint alleging that your latest model of widget has been negligently designed and caused serious bodily injury to one of your customers.

Acting quickly, you begin working the phones. Within an hour, you have identified all of the relevant people within the company — from the engineers who designed the widget to the factory workers who built it; from the salesmen who sold it to the marketing guys who designed the ad campaign. List of potential data custodians in hand, you call the IT department and instruct them to freeze the e-mail accounts of each of those people. All e-mail as it existed at the time of the complaint will be preserved from deletion. You also copy all of their hard drives and all servers to which they may save documents. Finally, you pull a copy of the relevant corporate databases — everything from the design database that tracks the R&D process to the sales database that catalogs your customers. Then, just for good measure, you make a copy of the company’s web page.

Think you’ve preserved every bit of electronic information that could possibly be relevant? That’s so Web 1.0. (more…)

You may have heard of a Morgan Stanley research piece called “Media & Internet How Teenagers Consume Media.”  If you haven’t, you can pop over to the Financial Times and have a look at the actual research.  This has caused a bit of a stir, partially because it’s based solely on interviewing a 15-year old intern.  Some people agree with it, some people disagree with it, some people merely grouse that nothing coming from a single 15-year old ought to be taken that seriously, but it has gotten some digital ink.

For the last four years, I’ve been teaching a college course on e-Business and while the students coming through my class tend to be 20-22, not 15, I’ve talked to considerably more than one person about many of the topics in this paper.  While observations from classroom discussions aren’t any more scientific than interviewing a lone 15 year-old, I think there’s a case to be made that kids may be kids, where digital media is concerned. (more…)

Twitter seems to have gotten a notch more mainstream in the last few weeks.  Or perhaps Twitter is just getting more exposure with people over 35, in social media circles, that can sometimes amount to the same thing.  In a world where a popular avenue for the unemployed is reinventing themselves as “social media experts” (translation, I’ve been using Twitter and Facebook for 6 months), perhaps it’s time to spell out some of the more unpleasant truths about Twitter for businesses.

Twitter was not invented with business in mind.  Just like blogging was originally more of an online diary or journal (hence “LiveJournal”), Twitter was about sending updates to your friends.  Much like blogging, Twitter has expanded with business stumbling around in the dark, looking for a platform, and your main source of positive anecdotes is the legion of consultants looking to sell you their Twitter services. (more…)