One of the keys in developing a solid targeted company prospect list is to do your research! One little known trick to researching conversations about a particular company on your list is to use a Twitter Management Tool called Hootsuite. Let’s look at how this can work for you:

First, type your keyword (or company name) in quotation marks in the search box located in the right-hand corner. Beside the word you type is a little circle with lines. This is the way you can geotarget a company in your area that might be a franchised location or have a common name.

When you click that circle, it will bring up a pop-up box that looks like this:

Click on “Share Location.” Once you do this, you will get a pop-up box of the tweet conversations that occurring about that company. Is it positive or negative? If it’s negative, can you think of strategies that might help position the company in a better light? This is part of the SWOT analysis research I encourage people to do (I’m in a Job Search–Now What???: Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as Part of Your Job Search Strategy).

However, what if the company is not local to you and it’s located in another state? Go to Google Maps and type in the name, address, and city/state of the company as shown below:

Go to the Gear icon at the top right-side of the Google Maps. Select “Maps Labs.”

A pop-up box will appear. Click “Enable” by the “LatLng Marker.” Click “Save Changes.”

With this feature enabled, you will just need to hover over the marker of the location to get the exact latitude and longitude numbers by clicking the “shift” key.

Copy these numbers and then go back to HootSuite to set up an advanced search. Click on “Add Stream” on the left-hand upper side of HootSuite. Go to the “Search” tab and enter the information. For my example, I entered: Verizon Communications geocode:40.717,-74.013,50mi

The important step is there can be no spaces after the word “geocode.” You will want to set up a parameter of how many miles you want to see conversations. For this example, I input “50 mi” for 50 miles. Click “Create Stream” and you’ll be able to follow conversations about that company within the parameter you defined.

This post contains an affiliate link that the FTC requires that a disclosure be made. An affiliate link simply means that if you click and purchase the product, the dealer may provide a commission to me.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

In December 2009, research commissioned by Microsoft found that 79% of U.S. hiring managers and job recruiters reviewed online information about potential job candidates. If someone Googled you, are they likely to find information that supports that personal brand for which you want to be known or not? Consider this-in this same study, they found that 70% of U.S. hiring managers have rejected candidates based on what they found online about that person.

Surprisingly, though, as I poll audiences where I speak, people are still quite alarmed to hear these statistics and equally as distressing, have never Googled themselves. I wanted to illustrate a few famous examples of how lapses in judgment on social networks have cost people jobs and opportunities.

• Connor Riley got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted, “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” Tim Levad, a Cisco employee, tweeted back, “Who is the hiring manager? I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the Web.”

• The voice of the Aflac duck, Comedian Gilbert Gottfried, tweeted the following after the Japanese tsunami, “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.” Aflac fired Gottfried following his tweet.

• A student / intern in an educational setting got fired for posting a picture on her MySpace account showing her drinking and a caption saying, “Drunken Pirate.” The university where she was attending also denied her degree just days before graduation. She sued, but a federal district judge rejected the claim saying that because she was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her post was not protected speech.

Be mindful of what you tweet or comment on Facebook: Companies have employed the utilization of social media listening tools like Radian6, TweetBeep, Google Alerts, Company Buzz, and more. The majority will “hear” if you use their name. 

Set Your Privacy Settings: Most social networking sites offer privacy settings. If you are using a social network strictly for personal use, then set high privacy controls. Think about your objective for using the site—is it to establish your thought leadership and expertise? If so, you will not want high privacy settings so that you can be found.

Sign-up for Google Alerts for Your Name: Go to Google.com/alerts and sign-up to receive an email when your name appears on the Internet. Again, put your name in quotation marks to receive clean results.

In conclusion, monitor your online brand so that you can be proactive in managing your reputation.

This article first appeared in YOUnique Personal Branding Newsletter

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

In social media, it’s great to build your Google results by having profiles on social networking sites. I suggest to people that they pick 2-3 that they can update regularly. Which 2-3 should you pick? My general rule of thumb is to find out where your target audience (one we define through the personal branding process) “hangs out.” I am on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for that reason.

Next, you need to develop your OWN guidelines / policies on accepting invitations from people. I know people on LinkedIn who only accept invitations from people that they have met and spent time with in person. On the other end of the spectrum, I know people who accept all LinkedIn invitations. Then, there are people who are open to accepting invitations from people they don’t know as long as the person includes a personal note and not the standard, “I’d like to include you on my LinkedIn network. ~ Kristen”

Facebook is the same–develop a policy and stick with it. I have created a business page to redirect people to where I post items of interest related to social media, job searching, blogging, etc. However, my personal Facebook account is one I reserve for my personal friends, family, and close colleagues. My personal page is where I share about my kids and other tidbits of my life that I want to remain private.

My personal Facebook page still is a great networking opportunity and as I have discussed in other blog posts, gave me a chance to reconnect with people from high school and college whom I might have never seen again. People there are able to read my profile and know what I do, however, I don’t “sell” and generally don’t promote things on my personal page unless I think that those people in my network would be interested.

Remember when you are “friending” someone on these websites to always include a personal note and let them know why you want to connect. If you don’t, chances are greater that the person will ignore the request. Develop your policies on social networking sites and use them in a way that best expresses your brand in the social media environments.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

Are you wanting to find an automation tool to manage all your social networks. I’m going to discuss five such tools to help you streamline your time on social media.

1. Hellotxt (http://hellotxt.com/) is what I term as a social networking aggregator. Hellotxt posts your status updates from web, mobile, SMS, email, or other 3rd party applications through their API to more than 50 social networks. So, when I feel there is something I’d like to post to my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts, I’ll update my status at this one website. It only takes me a few seconds to do and I’ve pinged all three of my networking websites.
2. Ping.fm (http://ping.fm/) works much the same way as HelloTxt, posting your messages wherever you want to more than 30 social networking sites.
3. You can also add this application (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2231777543) to your Facebook page so when you update your Twitter status, you’ll update your Facebook status. You will want to decide, though, if the people who are Facebook will want to read your tweets-especially if you tweet several times per day. I personally do not use this application anymore because my Facebook personal page is for friends and family. My Twitter account is more for expressing my personal brand for my business. To install it, you will click the “Go to Application” button and follow the instructions.
4. If you are on Twitter and want to ping Facebook and LinkedIn, simply use the hashtag #fb (Facebook) and #li (LinkedIn) at the end of your tweet. You can also check the Twitter box by your status update on LinkedIn so you can ping your Twitter account with the same status update (see picture to the right).
5. Hootsuite is another tool I use to schedule tweets (adding the #li and #fb hashtags) – see my previous blog post on Hootsuite for more information.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

On Twitter, you want to make sure that you are providing value to your target audience (your followers) by giving them links to articles, blogs, etc. that give good, useful information. Tweeting is not about self-promotion (although you can use it this way from time to time). Most people agree that you want to tweet useful, helpful information 80%-90% of the time. Consider why you are on Twitter and the strategy you need to employ.

One of my favorite tools is Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts). You can also set up TweetBeeps (similar to Google Alerts). You can set up Google alerts for once a day, as it happens, or once per week. You will then get all the news about that topic via your email. I can glance through the titles of the articles in my email and decide which ones to click through to read. If I feel like it’s valuable information, I’ll share it.

Here’s a recent example of one of my Google alert emails:

Most articles and blog posts give you the ability to share on Twitter or other social networks. Just click on the icon of the social network you want to share the information and voila—it’s sent.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

Today, I wanted to share with you a Twitter Management Tool called HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com). I’ve had many people ask how to manage and tweet from multiple Twitter accounts, and HootSuite is designed to handle this well. I personally don’t have multiple Twitter accounts, but I do know people who do and they say that using HootSuite’s dashboard makes tweeting from different accounts a breeze. Let me highlight just a few of the features:

I placed a red arrow on the dashboard area for the Twitter accounts. If I had multiple Twitter accounts, they would appear here. I could simply check from which account I wanted to tweet or select “all” accounts. You can tweet now or later. As you see in the picture, if you click on the link “send later” by the little clock icon, you will have the ability to schedule your posts. You can also be alerted by email when your scheduled tweet is sent.

You can also set up your RSS feed within HootSuite if you blog. I actually use a plug-in for my WordPress website to do this automatically, but for people who don’t have that functionality within their blog/website, this is a great tool. Simply scroll down and select “Settings,” click on the tab “RSS/Atom,” and click on the button “RSS/ATOM.”

If you are not sure how to find out your RSS feed’s URL, simply find the RSS button (the orange or blue button) within your blog / website URL (address bar):

Click on this button and subscribe to your feed. Then, select it within your bookmarks and right click on it. When you right click, select “Properties.” When you do this, you will be given your RSS feed’s URL address. You can copy and paste it within HootSuite and have your blog posts automatically fed to your Twitter account.

Are you interested in seeing the analytics of a link you have posted? HootSuite has a tool called a “Hootlet” that you can drag and drop on your bookmark toolbar. When you find something of interest that you want to tweet on another website, you can simply click on your Hootlet icon in your bookmark toolbar and it will shorten your URL with the Ow.ly URL shortner. Then, at the bottom of your HootSuite page, you can select “Stats,” click on the tab “Summary Statistics,” select which Twitter account you used, and find out the analytics of that tweet.

Finally, like TweetDeck, you have the opportunity to create groupings; however, HootSuite has integrated the power of the Twitter Lists for your columns. You will simply click the icon that says “Add Stream.” When you click on “Add Stream,” you will see this pop-up window:

Select “Twitter Lists” and name your list in the space where it says “Create a New List.” You can create several lists and divide people into groups (i.e., social media experts, career coaches, recruiters, personal branding, and so on). Separating people whom you follow into groups helps you to engage and participate in the Twitter conversation.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

Twitter is a growing platform for recruiters and employers to identify and recruit potential employees. Twitter is a great place to increase personal brand awareness by following these simple steps:

1. Complete your profile thoroughly! I cannot stress this point enough because, many times, I run across profiles with just the Twitter name and worse, no picture. Your profile should be filled with keywords that are applicable to your background and experience. Also, upload a nice headshot of yourself—people like to see a picture of the person with whom they are connecting.

2. Use keywords. One useful tool to locate keywords that employers and recruiters might be using in their search parameters is job postings in your career track. Go through several postings with a highlighter and highlight noun and noun phrases. What are commonly used keywords? If they apply to you, make sure to use the most important in your Twitter profile (remember your profile, also sometimes referred to a twesume’, only allows 160 characters at this writing).

3. Claim your own name on Twitter. If possible, this will help to produce more results for online identity building. What if you have a common name, such as Bob Smith? You might possibly use a middle name (and then build your personal brand around Bob Jacoway Smith). You could also attach a phrase for which you are known following your name (i.e. Bob Smith, HR).

4. Post tweets that demonstrate your thought leadership. A rule of thumb is to provide more helpful information than self-promoting. You could tweet inspirational quotes (always give credit to the author), links to helpful resources, answers to other Twitter users’ questions, and more. You want to be sure to tweet relevant, on-brand information. Using hashtags (like we discussed in a previous article) will also help people find you who are interested in what you have to offer.

5. Find networking contacts and engage. One of my favorite tools for identifying companies and employees of a particular company with a Twitter account is a service called Twellow. If you sign up for an account, you can follow people directly from the Twellow directory. Twellow allows you to search by industry (i.e. healthcare), thus making it an ideal tool for someone in a job search.

Many people you follow will follow you back, but keep in mind that to maintain this network you want to be interesting, thoughtful, post regularly, and engage. Sometimes, I’ll visit the websites of a new Twitter follower and will comment on something that I’ve found interesting about that person.

As the picture above illustrates, though, you need to put this theory into a consistent practice. Creating a Twitter profile and then never doing anything to facilitate growing a strong network will yield no results. In my next article, we’ll look at some of the commonly used ways to engage with others on Twitter and some Twitter management tools that will streamline your efforts.

This article first appeared in Classroom to Cubicle

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

According to the 2010 JobVite Study, Twitter is one of the Top 3 social media sites for employers and recruiters to use to identify and source potential job candidates. Twitter is also a platform for someone in a job search to find job advice and job openings. My Top 3 Twitter Tools for a person in career transition are as follows:

1) Hashtags: Hashtags has the # sign preceding the words. Most commonly seen is the #FF / #FollowFriday where people on Twitter recommend some of their favorite people with whom they follow on Twitter.

Essentially, hashtags create a filing cabinet. Type a hashtag in the Twitter search box and you will arrive on a page that is filled with tweets containing that hashtag. I recommend for people to find the most commonly used hashtags at a website called hashtags.org. You can type in your keyword and find the most commonly used hashtag for that keyword. If you are looking for an IT job, you could type #ITjobs in the Twitter search box and yield job postings for that particular career track.

2) TweetMyJobs: This website is a  job board for Twitter.  TweetMyJobs reports that they have had 1.6 million+ job postings from Twitter in the last 30 days. Pretty overwhelming, right? The beauty of this job board is that you are able to enter in your search parameters and zone in on jobs within a certain geographic location or even a company. While hashtags are good to understand and use, Twitter job boards such as TweetMyJobs makes locating jobs of interest on Twitter a snap.

3) Joining Chats: When you are launching a job search, many people have questions – i.e. best formats for resumes, what is personal branding, how to prepare for an interview, etc. Twitter has career professionals who have chats that occur on a scheduled basis. Some of the most common include #brandchat, #jobhuntchat, #careerchat, and #hirefriday. Go to Twitter and enter in the hashtag, i.e. #jobhuntchat, on the scheduled time it meets. You will need to enter this hashtag at the end of your question or comment for it to appear real-time in the Twitter chat.

Additionally, you can type in hashtags, such as #jobseekers, #jobsearch, #resume, #resumewriting, and more to see tweets that contain advice, links to articles, blog posts, resources, and more.

Twitter is a fertile ground for forging networking connections through chats and identifying potential job opportunities. Learning how to utilize the tools available through Twitter will facilitate your job searching efforts and may be the door to open for new possibilities. In my next article, I will show you how to set up for your Twitter profile on the new Twitter platform that has recently launched, giving you critical information that you need to fast-track your success with Twitter.

This article first appeared on Classroom to Cubicle.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

One of my colleagues, Maria Duron, posted information on Facebook about Wisestamp. You can go to http://www.wisestamp.com and download a free version for your Firefox browser. At this writing, it is not supported on all email platforms, but is supported on many of the major platforms (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Hotmail).

3 Reasons to Use WiseStamp in Your Email Signatures

1.     You can include links to your social media platforms where you are active (they have 40+ social media platforms) and IM profiles.

2.     You can enter your blog’s RSS feed. As you see below, my signature includes the four social media platforms where I have an active presence. The “Career Design Coach’s Blog” includes a link to read the most current blog post. When I publish a new blog post, the link is automatically changed to the new URL and title.

3.     WiseStamp now offers an Email Apps Gallery that includes Twitter, StumbleUpon, Disclaimer, and more. The Twitter app shows your latest tweet, StumbleUpon lets you share your recent stumbled web page, and the Disclaimer app lets you add a disclaimer at the bottom of your sent emails.

As you are building your personal brand across social media, Wisestamp provides an excellent tool to brand your email signature. It supports HTML, so you can use a tool such as www.mylivesignature.com and “sign” your email with either your own signature (fee for this option) or with a font that you choose that most closely resembles your signature. I also use the “My Live Signature” to “sign” my blog posts. You can see in the picture below how my email signature currently appears. I use the signature HTML at the end of my blog posts on Career Design Coach to sign my name.

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.

The overwhelming majority of employers and recruiters Google potential candidates and the more I poll audiences to see if they realize this possibility, the more I find that at least half of the attendees never considered this probability. Have you Googled your name? If not, put your name in quotations (e.g.  “Kristen Jacoway”) and see the results you obtain on the first 3 pages. Why only 3 pages? iProspect did a study that found that 92% of respondents do not click past page 3 of a Google search result.

Three Tools for Evaluating Your Own Online Brand

1.     Online ID Calculator: The online identity calculator was developed by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson who wrote Career Distinction. You will enter some data about yourself plus the results you receive when you Google your name. The calculator will score this information and rank you as Digitally Disguised, Digitally Dissed (means you have unfavorable results), Digitally Dabbling, and Digitally Distinct.

2.     Addictomatic: You can search many different types of platforms to get a clearer picture of what the Internet says about you. Addictomatic shows tweets, posts through FriendFeed, videos on YouTube, Truveo Video Search, blogs, Wikio, Bing, Yahoo, Flickr, and more.

3.     Klout: Klout is becoming a standard to measure your social influence online. Scores range from 1 to 100 using more than 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure the following factors: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

In December 2009, research commissioned by Microsoft found that 79% of U.S. hiring managers and job recruiters reviewed online information about potential job candidates. If someone Googled you, are they likely to find information that supports that personal brand for which you want to be known or not? Consider this-in this same study, they found that 70% of U.S. hiring managers have rejected candidates based on what they found online about that person.

Tips to Protect Your Online Reputation

• Be mindful of what you tweet or comment on Facebook: Companies have employed the utilization of social media listening tools like Radian6, TweetBeep, Google Alerts, Company Buzz, and more. The majority will “hear” if you use their name.  Likewise, be careful of what you say in general. I had a client that made a negative comment on a Facebook Fan Page and the comment ended up being on page 1 of her Google results. If you wouldn’t want a potential employer to read it, then don’t type it!

• Set Your Privacy Settings: Most social networking sites offer privacy settings. If you are using a social network strictly for personal use, then set high privacy controls. Think about your objective for using the site—is it to establish your thought leadership and expertise? If so, you will not want high privacy settings so that you can be found.

• Be careful of what you are doing AT ALL TIMES: Not to increase paranoia, but be mindful of what you are doing. With the rise of people having cameras and video cameras on their phones, all it takes is a couple of clicks for a compromising picture or video to be uploaded to the Internet with your name tagged (making it a searchable result). The very nature of the Internet is viral and can be spread very quickly causing it to be difficult to remove.

• Sign-up for Google Alerts for Your Name: Go to Google.com/alerts and sign-up to receive an email when your name appears on the Internet. Again, put your name in quotation marks to receive clean results. Monitor your online brand so that you can be proactive in managing your reputation.

How to Deal with Digital Dirt

• Contact the owner of the website or administrator of the page and ask nicely for the content to be removed.

• Contract with a company such as Reputation Defender if your attempts to get content removed are not successful.

• Hire an Online Identity Strategist who can consult with you on ways to build a stellar online presence. Reach Communications certifies people worldwide as online identity strategists.

• Develop relevant, on-brand results for the Internet via articles, book reviews, blogging, and more to try to push the results past page 3 of a Google search.

To summarize, be proactive about your personal brand both offline and online. At one point statistics showed that for every job opening, there were approximately seven qualified people on the candidate list. Monitoring your online brand is more critical today than ever in this tight job market.

This article first appeared on Career Rocketeer

©2012 Kristen Jacoway | Career Design Coach. All Rights Reserved.