For jobs be aware of social media rather than beware

For some time now there have been stories about people, particularly youngsters, being identified in embarrassing social media entries ( videos on YouTube, pictures on Facebook or Flickr, blog posts on WordPress or Blogger, tweets on Twitter) which causes problems with their employers or, if they are still teenagers, could cause problems when they come to look for their first job. My wife and I have been telling our children for a while that they need to careful what they publish even when they are young, since it might come to the surface and count against them in five or ten years time.

But this article in imedia made me think again. It talks about employers starting to look at Klout scores and favouring those who score highly. Those who are active and engaged on social media are demonstrating their ability to communicate and to influence others, which can be important characteristics for some jobs such as marketing. This leads to the conclusion that it might be useful to be active in social media to give yourself an edge when applying for jobs.

Also the fear of embarrassing incidents from the past being visible on social media and being a major disadvantage in finding employment may reduce over time. We have all had embarrassing episodes in our past, but until recently they have only been seen by a few people. Yet the younger generation are growing up with a more open idea of what can or should be shared. In a few years, those hiring may well think it as normal that the embarrassing incidents can be viewed online as we now think it is normal that they happened at all.

So instead of telling people to beware of their social media profile and to keep it low, we should be telling people to be aware of their profile and raise it in the right way

Building a website yourself

I have not blogged recently because I have been very busy building a new website for the AIB (Association for International Broadcasting) alongside defining and starting to implement an associated social media campaign. But I realise that I have a lot to say about my experiences of with website and social media tools.

The new website, www.theaibs.tv, is designed to highlight the AIB's international media excellence awards - The 2010 AIBs. The awards are for those in the broadcasting industry : content producers, broadcasting companies, transmission companies, technology providers and others in associated fields.

The idea for a separate website came about only just over a month ago and it needed to be in place for the launch of entries for the awards on the 12th April, so tools that allowed rapid development were vital. There were also limited resources and budget so it seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the seeemingly rich possibilities available with open source software.

I decided to use WordPress for the website, having played around with it a little beforehand. It may seem ironic to use WordPress which is a rival to Blogger, where this blog (currently) resides but WordPress has a few real advantages : firstly, althought it is a blogging platform by origin, it allows you to create a whole series of linked pages, including those without any comments (static pages), so that you can set up a proper website structure; secondly, it has a vibrant community of developers who offer thousands of plugins, widgets and other tools which add to the basic features a vast range of simple and sophisticated add-ons (including different visual appearances, SEO optimisation, links to social media to name just a few); and thirdly, WordPress can be run on your own website and is supported as standard by many hosting companies.

It took a lot of effort, but the site was up and running on time and is being constantly updated. Now I am reasonably technical (I used to do programming 30 years ago) but I think anyone with a modest technical capability could manage the same as I did. To start with, I bought the book WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. I did not read it all but as I started using WordPress, I dipped into it to understand particular concepts or for tips on how to make the best use of certain features. I still do use it and can recommend it.

A basic Wordpress site is easily recognised by the format of the pages (top title block, right or left hand column with list of entries, categories, favourite blogs, links etc). But there are thousands of "themes" available, which provide different visual identities that you can apply to your site. I chose the Sliding Doors theme by Wayne Connor because I really like the way the images expand to show the menu option chosen. Since installing it, I have found that I will need to do some more work to show sub-menu options in an attractive way. That is on my to-do list.

The last add-on that I want to talk about at the moment, is cForms II which is a powerful plugin that allows you to design forms for site visitors to fill in. It is very powerful but be aware that it takes some time to master. Currently I have a simple form on the website homepage for visitors to register for further news. But I plan to have more complicated forms for registration particularly for the People's Choice award and to gather feedback.

The People's Choice award will be decided by votes from those viewing online shortlisted programmes on the subject of Climate Change. Between now and September, the challenge is to build up an audience of tens of thousands who are interested and will vote. This is where the social media campaign is planned and starting to take effect. I will talk more about other WordPress tools and the social media ones in future posts.