– Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This post is the first in my new series with communications advice and social media tips for college students making the transition from campus to work. I will share the same techniques and principles I use with business leaders to help you learn how to communicate like a professional.

Getting hired is all about presenting yourself well and effectively describing who you are and what you bring to the table over and above other candidates. While you should focus efforts on meaningful and targeted in-person interactions, you also need to be mindful of your online reputation.

Most hiring managers now routinely search job applicants online. This means after they meet you or read your resume, they will type your name into Google. You want to make sure the search returns information that is consistent with your resume, cover letter and how you presented yourself in-person.

Here are 5 common mistakes that you should fix before you begin to network and apply for positions. Also, make sure to utilize your career center on campus. They are there to advise and guide you through all aspects of planning your career.

1. Search brings up damaging information.
Take time every few weeks to search your name and keywords (like your college) using all the major search engines. Delete anything that would detract from you as a professional or how you want to be perceived. Make sure your Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other media sharing sites are locked down by setting privacy levels appropriately so you shield your personal activities from the search engines.

2. Search brings up nothing.
An online search with no results could leave the impression that (1) you are hiding something or (2) you have done nothing substantial during your college years. At a minimum you should set up a LinkedIn page. Think of this as your own personal website and use it to your advantage! See #3.

3. No LinkedIn page
If you haven’t taken time to set up your LinkedIn page, set aside 30-45 minutes to establish one. Your career center on campus can help you and it’s free. Go to http://www.linkedin.com and click ‘Join Today’. Sign up for the Basic Account. Do NOT click ‘Sign up with Facebook’. You want to keep these accounts separate. Here are the areas you should complete:

• Photo. If you don’t have a head shot in professional attire (dark suit jacket/light colored shirt/tie for men and suit jacket/conservative blouse and jewelry for women), then have a friend take one in decent lighting. You may also be able to use your formal fraternity/sorority photo or school picture.
• Profile. Like your resume, it should be brief and focused on those skills and experiences you are ‘selling’ to employers. This means you do not list every club or job you ever had. Work with your career advisor to select the most meaningful ones. Just as you would with your resume and cover letters, proofread and fix grammatical errors and inconsistencies.
• Connections. Search and find classmates, professors, colleagues, friends and family that you know in person and invite them to join your network. Always, always include a personal message.
• Groups. Search and find Groups that match your interests. These could be professional associations, former employers and topical interest groups. At a minimum you should belong to the LinkedIn Groups for the companies and organizations you applying to, your college and at least one area of career interest.

4. Incomplete or unprofessional LinkedIn.
You took the time to set up a LinkedIn page but your profile picture looks like it’s from spring party weekend, you have no connections and no description in your profile. Fix this now!

5. Too much social media activity.
If you Tweet, make sure it is professional. If it isn’t, then reset the privacy settings. You can also share updates on LinkedIn, but don’t go crazy using this feature. You don’t want to give the impression you spend all your time online. Follow the same rules as with your Profile, if it supports your career goals, post the status. This can be information about a professional event you are attending, a link to a news story that featured your work or a link to an article you found interesting.

Image courtesy of Frame Angel / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s that time of the year for lists so here’s mine for the most used, and sometimes confused, social media marketing terms. But first, let’s stick them into one simple sentence:

Digital natives are naturals at social communication and understand the power of inbound marketing and content marketing as techniques to engage customers.

For those who make a living in marketing, you of course can explain what this means. For those who can’t, here’s a glossary along with a few links for further study.

Happy 2013 and good luck with all your social initiatives this year.

1. Digital native – This is what we call individuals who have grown up using social technology, aka the Facebook Generation. They live a portion of their lives online, naturally, and are the reason why companies are investing heavily in social media marketing.

2. Social communication – Isn’t all communication social? Of course, but we like to distinguish that which occurs using social technologies and networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, blogging, online communities, etc.

3. Inbound marketing – Traditional outbound tactics like advertising, cold calls, and direct mail overtly promote the business to target customers. Inbound marketing is different; it makes customers find you, by drawing them into your website through search (via SEO), content marketing, (see #4), email marketing and analytics.

4. Content marketing – When non-promotional material is published and shared by your business through blogs, micro-blogs, e-books and news stories, this is called content marketing. Of course the content must relate to your business but it does not push a particular product. This can be called thought leadership and is designed to showcase the expertise of your employees and of course to drive traffic to your website (inbound marketing).

5. Engage – To engage is to communicate with other users or companies online through social platforms. Examples are sharing content, liking Facebook posts, commenting on blogs, and writing reviews. The ultimate goal of engagement is to convert the engaging person into a real customer. There is an entire social analytics industry that offers products and services to measure how effective your social media marketing efforts are at doing this and how to adjust campaigns to engage the right prospects.

Here’s a few links if you are interested in more vocabulary. What are your top social media words for 2013?

Social media A to Z : A glossary of terms for 2013 (Social Media Today)
Glossary of social media terms (IBM)
26 Social media marketing terms you need to know (Social Strand Media)

As part of my job, I help individuals learn how to use social media to define and manage their online professional reputations. Most people know what they need to do, but have not invested the time and ongoing effort to establish and nurture a good online image. I’ve found there are common mistakes being made that with a little extra effort and focus are easy to overcome. Here are five I see frequently that can detract from a professional image, along with ways to address them.

1. Not searching your name on a regular basis. How can you control your image if you don’t know what people see when they Google you? Google your name on a regular basis, start with once a month.
2. A poorly written bio. Take the time, or ask a good writer, to write a succinct, summary biography, aka personal branding statement. There are countless books and online resources to help you. I found this article nets it out well – 3 Steps to an Outstanding Personal Branding Statement.
3. An unprofessional photo. Aim for a good headshot that looks like you now, not 10 years ago. You should look professional and approachable.
4. Inconsistency. Strive for consistency across all of your web properties (Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn, company website, etc.). Use the same bio / summary paragraph and photo.
5. Setting up a Twitter account or blog and not posting to it. This is hard work. If you are not inclined to create content and engage with people through blogging or microblogging, then don’t do it.

We have an innate interest in our fellow human beings. This is why Facebook is now a daily behavior for so many of us and has made Zuckerberg: The world’s richest primatologist, according to Lionel Tiger.

The corporate intranet is still the mainstay for large organizational communications, albeit shrinking due to the advent of enterprise social media. Featuring real people and their individual stories and views is a great way to liven up the intranet storyline and generate goodwill across the organization, especially those with many virtual workers.

We recently launched two series that star employees which have taken off better than expected. The first, titled “Get to know” features an individual each week through a Q&A format where they respond to questions including “What was your first day at IBM like? and “Do you have any hidden talents?”. The other called “Perspectives” features a person who shares a unique work experience and what they learned.

These are easy to produce using a set interview template. Here’s the two we use for our series. You can modify them to suit the culture and message strategy for your organization.

Template-Get to know

Template-Perspectives

Our employees look forward to seeing their colleagues in the limelight. What other tactics have you used to weave the employee story into your communications strategy?

Margaret Thatcher

I saw The Iron Lady last night and was truly amazed by Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher and particularly inspired by the scenes where Streep was reenacting Thatcher’s speeches. The movie shows how Thatcher’s speaking style was carefully practiced to maximize the impact of her words. In particular, she was coached to lower the pitch of her voice and fine tune her physical presence. It’s an understatement to say Thatcher did turn out to be one of the most powerful woman speakers, and leaders, of our times.

What can we learn from this? We learn that carefully chosen words, spoken clearly and with conviction can inform, inspire and move people to action. We learn that we should spend as much time honing our delivery as creating our content. We do this by practicing in front of a friend, colleague or spouse and being open to suggestions. We should also pay careful attention to speakers who inspire us to get ideas how to take our skills to the next level.

Here are a few pointers I’ve picked up that have helped me along the way. I hope they help you too.

• Stand up tall
• Be calm
• Use the ‘presidential pause’ for effect
• Control the emotion in your voice
• Control the cadence of your speech, not too fast or slow, but lively enough to hold attention

How do you prepare to make sure you perform your best?

I recently went through an exercise with a team of digital media colleagues to describe social media tools a professional may encounter on the job. This is a part of a broader project to define what skills workers need to stay competitive in the digitally enabled workplace.

We categorized them based on what the tool is used for because with any social media effort, you first have to define goals, map out which activities will help you achieve those goals and select tools accordingly.

We came up with 14 categories coupled with examples of some of the most widely used tools in each category. Many tools cross over multiple categories so we did our best to slot it into its ‘main’ function.

We know social technologies are advancing rapidly along with new business applications. At this point in time, what do you think of our list? What would you add?

1. Social networking (Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Ning)
2. Private social networking/ enterprise social platforms (Microsoft Sharepoint, Yammer, IBM Lotus Connections, Adobe Connect, Basecamp, Jive, SocialCast)
3. Blogging (Blogger, Typepad, WordPress)
4. Microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr)
5. Media sharing:
   Video (YouTube, Vimeo)
   Audio (Soundcloud, Audioboo, iTunes)
   Photos (Flicker, Instragram, DeviantART, Posterous)
   Documents (Google docs, SlideShare, Issu)
   Multimedia (Tumblr, Posterous)
6. News/ Bookmarking/ Content Aggregators/ RSS Feeds (Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Quora, Reddit, Slashdot, Feedburner, Technorati, Google Alerts, Google Reader)
7. Social media productivity tools (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Evernote)
8. Social Q&A/ Customer reviews/ Forums/ Surveys (Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, Quora, Zaga, Yelp, Angies List, Survey Monkey, Doodle)
9. Geo Location (FourSquare, Oink)
10. Social living/ E Commerce (Living Social, Groupon, Meetup.com, EBay, Etsy, Virb, Cafepress)
11. Livecasting/ Online conferencing (WebMeeting, GoToMeeting, Skype, UStream.tv, QIK.com, Livestream.com)
12. Email campaigns/ Marketing (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response)
13. Social media monitoring/Analytics (Radian6, Google Analytics, Klout, Grader.com)
14. Wikis (PBWorks, MediaWiki, Wikispaces, SocialText, WetPaint)

Part marketing, part PR and part customer service, the community manager serves as the online voice for your brand on those social networks you’ve selected to have a presence. Their purpose is to not only broaden awareness and interest in what you offer but to cultivate the brand-customer relationship. They offer information and interact with customers. Responsiblities will vary from job to job, but here’s the core set.

• Cultivate a strong community and manage interaction around the brand using select social properties (Facebook, Twitter, company blog, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Write content to post to social accounts maintaining a regular cadence of posts to keep readers engaged.
• Coordinate with marketing, PR, and customer service colleagues to support their respective missions, ensuring consistency in voice.
• Investigate and create social campaigns as needed to support targeted initiatives.
• Monitor metrics to gauge the growth of the community.
• Analyze and report on the effectiveness of social campaigns.

What else would you add?