Life Beyond the Hedges Panel Review

Wednesday I had the great pleasure to speak at Grady IABC's "Life Beyond the Hedges" career workshop. I was on the panel titled "Navigating the Job Market in a Struggling Economy." It was a great experience to discuss various strategies and techniques to use in your job search.

Red & Black article

A few tips from the panelists:
-> Match your skills to the employer & position
-> Develop your brand & portray it
-> Work your networks
-> An interview is two-sided, you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you
-> Don't forget about the phone. E-mail is great, but it helps to follow up on the telephone.
-> Be persistent


Additional Resources for your job search:

4 Skills New Professionals Should Have
Managing Your Online Reputation
Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job
Great Example of a Digital Portfolio

Journalism Interviews

On election day, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture to Geoffrey Graybeal's (one of PhD colleagues) classes. I discussed online political campaign communication. Since the lecture, I've had a few students interview me for their election analysis stories. I thought they had some interesting questions that I thought I would post here to see what your answers would be.

Here are a few of them:

Do you think that young voters were actually influenced by the information available on new media, or did they just use it as a way to publicly support the candidate that they had already decided to vote for?

Did young voters use new media to try and influence their friends to vote for a particular candidate? How did they do it? Did it work?

Do you think the way Obama used new media in his campaign will forever change the way campaigns are run?

Useful and Interesting Links

Here are a few links to various Web sites and blogs that I think are useful and/or interesting (some are older than others).

Politics/Election
Secrets of Election 2008 - Newsweek
Obama's Newest Web Presence - Office of the President-Elect
Fireside Chats in the Digital Age - Personal Democracy Forum
Barack Obama, The Social Web, & The Future of User-Generated Governance - Brian Solis

PR
Tactical Transparency - Paull Young
Public Engagement - Richard Edelman
Understanding Social Media - PRSA
Survey about Online Newsrooms & Social Media - PRSA

Misc
Shuttle Launch by Hyku

Interesting Links

Barbara Nixon's YouTube Links - The first one about Power Point is great. I really wish I had it when I was teaching Public Speaking.

We don't have a job, but what about an internship?

Social Media Jobs

Quamut - "the go to how to"

It's about time.

PRSA, McClellan Book & Ethics

The Week in Technology

Here are some fun links from my RSS feeds as well as other items I've found over the past week or so that I thought were interesting.

Highlights from the SCNR:
Courtesy of Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu:
New Media, New Influencers and Implications for the PR Profession
SNCR Closing keynote: The transformational power of blogging

For Students:
Skills for Young PR Pros (From Voce Communications)

General:
Email - The New Interface
Twitter for Journalists

In Politics:
PoliticsOnline.com Covers the 2008 Election
Search Engine Use in the 08 Election
Web on Candidates

Interesting Blogs of the Week:
Philip Young - Mediations
Fun - Athens Door Guy

Just for Fun:
Student "Tweets" His Way Out of Prison

Upcoming Events: Wish I could participate in this

In other technology news, my laptop is very close to biting the dust and I've been on a search for one over the past few months. Here's my dilemma...I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 and it's served me very well and so has Dell. I have had a couple major service issues including a soda management problem and they've taken care of it through their 'Accidental Damage' coverage. Basically, I need a system that travels well, is affordable and if a PC, has XP (I don't want to deal with Vista).

Note: KS - Yes, I know...get a Mac.

Follow-up on the EDB

I spent way too much time yesterday attempting to format the picture post for the EDB. Now, I'd like to write a more comprehensive report of my experience. First of all, the Campaigns team (under the direction of Connie & Dr. Sweetser) and Edelman did a great job putting a fantastic job putting this together is 43 days. Also, the Word of Mouth class (under the direction of Sue & Dr. Russell) did a wonderful job at covering it.

In an effort to spend less time explaining the whole event, here's some information on the format and background.

I participated in the educator's track along with professors and instructors from UGA, University of West Florida, Clemson, Georgia Southern and Auburn. We had a great group and we covered a lot of ground in discussing the various forms of social media available, how to incorporate it in the classroom as well as specific lesson plans to implement within our curriculum.

Phil Gomes discussed his work with intense social media training that he runs out of Edelman's Chicago office. We discussed the various aspects and uses for many social media formats. Emphasis was placed on incorporating the instruction within the curriculum because students will be expected to know it when they go into their entry-level positions. Gomes also shared what he looks for in new hires...so we can take that back to the students.

Robert French, Karen Russell, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, and Kaye Sweetser also went through several specific assignments, how they've used them, what worked (and didn't) as well as how to grade them. This portion was probably the most beneficial because it provided very specific assignment sheets with examples. These were included in the booklet given out to all educators who attended as well, making it easy to adapt them.

One thing I wish we had had more time for was talking with students about what they learned from their workshops. I spoke to a couple of students about what they were doing, but I would have liked to see their suggestions. Just from what I heard from the few I spoke to, they were very creative.

By the end of the day, I think there were countless ah-ha moments, lots of new relationships started and a lot of comfort zone expansion. The Edelman folks were a great group of people who provided not only great information, but were also a blast to hang out with after the event :)

Here are some of the attendees share their thoughts:

Robert French of Auburn

Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu of Clemson

Brett Pohlman of Auburn

William Wickey of UGA

Dr. Kaye Sweetser of UGA

Barbara Nixon for Georgia Southern

Pics from the EDB (Sorry about the formatting)

Here are a few select pictures from yesterday's Edelman Digital Bootcamp (EDB). There are many more pictures available at the EDB Flickr account.

The educators were hanging on every word and tweeting the highlights.












Professional & academic educators interact (L-Phil Gomes of Edleman, R-Robert French of Auburn)










We learned from the Ninja...oh and Phil Gomes of Edelman












Ruthann Lariscy (UGA), Eileen Perrigo (UofWestFl), & Bryan Reber (UGA) learning how to teach social media in the classroom.













The students worked hard on their campaigns...one of my students, Diem (forefront) works with his team.




















Evidence of the students' hard work








Cindy asks me some very important questions












Sweetser in action...show the educators how to teach social media


















The Word of Mouth class served as our coverage team for the day by recording podcasts, videos, blogging, snapping pictures & tweeting. Sue (on far left) lead the team.










Connie (Campaigns team leader)


















Sweetser & Me at the end of the day...
Her caption: Ready to rock some social media in politics research!

Bootcamp Day!

Follow the Edelman Digital Bootcamp at UGA:

General Website & Blog

Pics

Tweets

Also, I'll be updating over the course of the day!

MTV Street Team Quote

I forgot to post this earlier, but I thought it was great to meet Shelby Highsmith at SoCon08. He then interviewed me for his weekly post for the MTV Street Team 08. Highsmith is the Georgia state representative for the Street Team.

Quoted (it's towards the bottom)...

http://think.mtv.com/044FDFFFF0098A04C00080098D195/User/Blog/BlogPostDetail.aspx

Hope everyone is having a great week!

SoCon08

This post is way too late I know, but it's been a rough week.

SoCon08 was great this weekend. I met a bunch of great folks in various industries, doubled my Twitter followers, and got some research ideas. It is always interesting to talk to people who are just as excited about technology, especially social media as I am. Sometimes when I'm talking to someone who's not as interested, I find myself feeling a little crazy.

Friday night was a great dinner at Maggiano's (wonderful eggplant parm), where I sat with the political people and were told we were the most engaged in our conversation compared other tables. We made a couple of predictions, analyzed the Super Tuesday results, and pondered the influence of technology on the Presidential election. We also discussed the voting procedures in Georgia, using DieBold machines, and not having a paper trail when voting. I'm generally a proponent of a paperless systems because it's better for the environment and more convenient. However, we agreed that it would be nice to have some sort of receipt would make us feel more comfortable about the process. Mainly, the receipt would be for auditing purposes.

On Saturday, we had a full day of activities starting with breakfast in the morning. With my bagel, I got a sales pitch from a entrepreneur talking about his new website with small education modules for people to learn at their own pace. After that we headed into the auditorium for a discussion of the trends over the past year, important factors to consider in social media's evolution, as well as comments from the participants about their success using technology. The whole time, they were switching between the conference's Twitter page, the websites of participants, blogs, and Power Point up on the big screen. It was great because I picked up a laundry list of new links to explore...in all of my free time :)

When we took a break, we signed up for our afternoon breakout sessions. At lunch, I found myself again discussing politics, but also about Utterz and some other sites I had not heard of before. After lunch we went into our breakout sessions. I choose to go to an effective writing session and one about incorporating social media in the classroom. The most interesting parts about the sessions was just talking with other people about their perspectives and experiences with social media.

After we finished with the conference, Connie and I decided to stay another night. So we secured a room and then went over to the after conference drinks and pizza. Ok, first of all, Mellow Mushroom pizza is awesome & so are their soft pretzels. With that out of the way, we started to talk about non-business items and the beer flowed freely. It was a lot of relaxed.

Once we had our fill of pizza and beer, Connie and I headed over to our hotel. We got an awesome room (after being upgraded for free) with plenty of room, a big bed, and amazing TV. After saying we were going to work before going to bed, I think we pretty much vegged out before passing out.

All in all, the conference took a lot more energy than I had anticipated, but it also yielded more than I thought it would.

Great Links From Today

Jobs in SM: http://www.socialmediajobs.com/

Entertaining Blog: http://www.dooce.com/

Atlanta Business Reviews: http://www.kudzu.com/

Discovering the Internet: http://favebot.com/

Quilting Network: http://www.qnntv.com/aspx/qnn/default.aspx#

YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/wallstrip

Multitasking Women: http://multi-taskingwoman.com/

I want this: http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=products,n95_8gb

SoCon 08

Greetings,

I'm blogging from SoCon 08 at Kennesaw State University at Marietta, Ga. Last night we had a wonderful experience of networking with many social media folks, including politics.

Listening to a presentation:

5 Big Events that changed our lives in the last 12 months - in technology of course

<- A pic of me from last night


Watch for updates as the day goes on!