LinkedIn is a huge network of millions of professionals. They range from IT professionals and corporate CEOs, to urban bakery professionals and auto mechanics. By using search tools and filtering options, you can find people from nearly all of the Fortune 1000 as well as your friendly neighbor down the street.

Virtual networking tools like LinkedIn do not replace regular networking tactics. They are merely magnifiers for reaching new and unique crowds of contacts. The overall function of LinkedIn is to help leverage your contacts to introduce yourself to new associates with similar interests and professional goals.

Some basic fundamentals of using LinkedIn

• Reach out to everyone you run across. Don’t be shy.
• Take time to connect with everyone you can. Think of out-of-the-box reasons to accept a new invitation and cultivate a relation.
• Consider every person in your network to be “you” supporter. Use your personal network to spread your message when you need to.
• Detail yourself as much as possible. The extra information allows other members to figure out ways to network with you.

Once you have 100 connections, begin analyzing individuals who have developed networks and leverage those connections.

• Endorse individuals you have met along the way.
• Ask your friends to endorse your profile and add recommendations.
• Add detailed employment items to remind connections of your history.
• Be real. Be truthful. Offer endorsements and commentary. If a user doesn’t like the exact wording of a statement they won’t put it live.

Take a day each month-

• Do a quick name and e-mail search for new contacts you’ve met in the real world.
• Use new introductions as a way to even more new introductions next week.

Start today. Everyone is waiting. You can find me here.

I almost have to laugh, because I had written this article last week while traveling and today it seems more appropriate then ever. When confronted by the numerous times I’ve encountered various mindsets of individuals on multiple boards, forums, wikis, communities, and blogs – how does one go about networking on a consistent basis without stepping on a few toes? The answer is simple, you don’t.

In real life, I am often referred to as one of the friendliest people you can know. I can talk to anyone on almost any topic, ranging from teen age crisis and legal issues, to politics and business taxes. I rarely (if ever) find someone in the real world that I cannot form a positive relationship with.  Yet without failure, there will occasionally be a personality that seems to beg of being inappropriate or rude. This could be the intoxicated wanderer at an evening get together or it could be a professional who is out of their element. It could be someone you have to work with, or someone you will never see again.
Online networking and conversation holds some of these same real world elements true, but it also creates some amazingly short interactions that are seemingly drawn from a bad day of work or personal episode. Just when you’ve mastered some of the basic skills for interacting with the masses online, a new contributor comes along and breaks the mold of consistency and friendly nature.

Online communities can be amazing tools for making connections for business and personal interests, yet it can also be a detriment to how you are perceived. I’ll take a moment to share some of the tips that I have published over the years for interacting in a potentially volatile environment. This used to be one of my favorite presentations for online communities, as most individuals in the corporate world seem to apply corporate etiquette to blogging. 

• Understand the culture and the community: Every site and community has a different flavor. Myspace is different than FaceBook, Yahoo 360 different than Linked-In. They not only have different technical platforms, they have different personalities on both sides of the controls. One moment you may be having a chat about the latest gadget and political joke on site A, and the other moment you will find insult on answering questions or discussing personal topics.

• Develop who you are: When you get online, don’t try to fake it. There are plenty of people who recognize you from other social circles and environments. What you say on one will be noticed on the other. It may not be written in the text on screen, but the wandering reader will take note of places you have long forgotten.

• Don’t be pushy: If you have an alpha personality or stubborn streak, sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee. The social cues given in the online realm are far less telling than the ones you may receive in the real world.

• Do not take offense: People often get grumpy for all the wrong reasons. In an written environment, bloggers often fall prey to a few words that flavor an entire relationship. One brief statement does not make a relationship, nor does it create one. A relationship is made by a consistent level of interaction over a period of time.

• Do what you say: When you write down a course of action, do it. There is nothing more damaging in the business world (and relationships of all kinds) than declaring a list of actions items and then failing to carry through on them. If you need to change the course of action, declare the intent to do so. The world of online communities presents us with the challenge of never knowing who may be reading our ideas, and a professional will carry through on statements knowing that there may be individuals that are acting upon it.

• Do not abuse the community: We all hate spammers or unsolicited sales calls. Members of a community also dislike it when the culture of the community is being abused for other motives. When joining a new group, the purpose of joining should be to participate in the conversation of the group. It should not be to pursue personal agendas, until it is known whether or not those personal goals fit in with the culture of the community.

• 
• Treat people like you were having a face to face meeting: So many people become rude or negative online when they would never do so in the real world. There is a tendency in new bloggers (or any online forum) to make hasty statements or jump to conclusions about being treated unfairly. They lack the experience or the understanding of the community environment, and blunder into social situations simply because they don’t know any better. This could be easily compared to someone walking into a courtroom for the first time and failing to pay the judge the appropriate respect.

• Offer your assistance: With any sizable group, there will be varying levels of skills and experience through-out it. Everyone will have a strength and everyone will have a weakness. Most of us will know what our strengths are, while few of us will know our weakness. Offer assistance, friendly guidance, and helpful mentoring to your fellow community members. If they react poorly, give them room and step back. Not everyone takes kindly to having someone know more than they do in a specific field.

• Remember “do unto others” and “what goes around, comes around”: Online communities are chalk full of karmic balance. Both good and bad things come back to you months and years after the fact. Even when someone treats you poorly, take a moment to gather your thoughts, provide a respectful exit, and move on. You will find that being the better person in an online conflict is far better than being known as a negative personality.

• If you do step across someone’s line, apologize: Treat everyone online as if you are dealing with someone of another nationality. Do not take your preconceptions into the conversation. If they say they are offended, offer an apology and move on. Do not attempt to move past a simple apology, if someone chooses to be offended with a simple interaction there is often little you can do to change their opinion. Accept that some individuals either have thin-skin or are seeking conflict.

The lessons of online community are simple. Give people the benefit of the doubt and don’t jump to conclusions about who they are or what they are saying. If you don’t understand a question or comment, ask for clarification and move on. There a millions of people to interact with on the net and in real life, making a decision from the beginning to be a positive influence on the people around you will earn you the respect of other individual and of the community.

If all else fails, enjoy a cup of coffee: There are bigger issues in life. Don’t fret one bad apple. Every community is full of friendly members who are seeking your expertise and knowledge. Share yourself with other like-minded souls and enjoy another conversation tomorrow.

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I woke up to an e-mail saying “Web video is a powerful recruiting tool.”

This has been a topic addressed by several members of the recruiting community, but this time it was more of a great note to see our own Blogging Systems video listed as a “Video of the Week”.

Our piece isn’t about recruiting specifically, but it does detail how our community publisher platform can be used as a social tool to build relationships and community, we all know that a good relationship leads to referrals, and strong referrals produce great candidates.

This whole “word of mouth” technique is great. I personally love it. Our model has proven successful in having Radio shows, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and technical summits giving honorable mention to what we are doing at Blogging Systems. Our team is working day and night to enhance our community products and build real value for our clients, and I’m very happy to say that our team rocks.

I also have to add that Paul and Richard’s Realty Blogging book is receiving great reviews from the real estate industry. It has become a top seller in the blogging and marketing categories on Amazon, and is a benchmark for any professional looking to maximize the benefits of blogging (it may be real estate focused, but the lessons within apply to almost any consultative industry.)

You can read more about some of our daily coverage at www.bloggingsystemsblog.com 

Why would I use a job board? More importantly, why would one go through the effort of putting anything on a board unless it was laying flat in front of you so that the board was now a table?

The difference is between a career board and a career community.

If it was a board with five users: you could post something to it, watch the statement be interpreted, then wait for a response statement to occur. This is an advertisement.

If it was a table with five users: you could speak across it, hold a conversation, adapt to the way people react to your statements, and nurture a relationship. This is a conversation.

In the table option, consider this- just like a good cocktail party the best conversational size for a table is four to six people. Too few, you don’t have enough members. Too many, you lose people in the conversation.

Regardless of the size of the table, a critical element of holding a great conversation is a coordinator. You need someone to ask the right questions, throw out the occasional piece of humor, and keep a positive yet neutral tone to help recover from those accidental statements that offend someone.

Now move onto the web.

Blogging is a conversation. Small and direct, yet benefiting from being able to be heard at a moments notice. The best bloggers define personal community not only by having the best cocktail party conversation, but by also coordinating the members of the gathering.

Blogging Systems has been developing community blogging platforms for a while now, trying to help different people nurture a sense of community and share common ideas. It seems our team is way ahead of the bell curve on the official 2007 findings of the University of Southern California’s Annenburg Digital Future Project.

Some great bullet points-

“Online communities are the future of our economic, political, and social lives.”

”Development and leadership of online communities is critical to the future success of a wide array of industries, including communications, marketing, political campaigning, advocacy, social networking, professional networking, intellectual property, entertainment law and management, nonprofit management, social support and illness support, and healthcare, to name just a few.”

• 43% of online community members say that they feel “as strongly” about virtual community as real-world community.
  
  
• 20.3% of online community members say that they take action on behalf of online communities that they belong to.
• 64.9 % of online community members in a “social cause” indicate that they were unaware of the social cause before they began participating on the net. (meaning they were recruited through the net!)
  
• Over half of online community members log in once a day and 70.4 % say they sometimes or always interact with other members while logged on.
• Internet users report having met an average of 4.65 friends on line whom they have never met in person; they report they actually meet 1.6 online friends in person.
• 42.8% of Internet users say that going online has increased the number of people they regularly stay in contact with; this number has decreased slightly from the 46.6% who said the same thing in 2002.

So the question we further define as we design dynamic community portals is how to draw visitors into the user-centric experience that defines a relationship. It takes repeated motivational, intellectual, and emotional cues before a visitor feels they are part of a “community” either in the real world or online.

The essence of our online communities seems to be touching deeper and deeper. Over the next few years I suspect that we will see exceptional growth in all of the above areas, and we will also see that our geographic communities redefine themselves using informational connectivity rather than spatial connectivity.

I was browsing through cyberspace and had to highlight something that just drove the marketing and graphic designer in me bonky. I was looking at the career section of a fairly well known company in the recruiting space, and found the below graphic there. Keep in mind, that the description going along with this is “a fun, energetic startup company with a passion for building great technology”

If I was a candidate, is the brutal honesty that I’ll be living my life in a 72 square foot space that looks like a sterilized cage something that I want to highlight on the career section of my company?

More importantly, this was on the Simply-Hired site. A modern, Web 2.0, tech company who should know not to highlight the bad points of working in a corporate office setting. It could be a joke taken in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, but the theme and general design of the site indicates that it is probably the cold hard truth. In any case, it probably shouldn’t be the graphic of choice for a company claiming to be “fun & energetic”.

As social networking online becomes more invasive, I’m seeing good amounts of data about individuals I’m considering working with that are key indicators that open the door for an experienced recruiter to reach out and contact them. This is a good thing for the recruiting world as a tool for reaching out to passive candidates, but what happens when the ‘evil’ of technology goes down the dark side?

What if, a major corporation used the same exact services to track employees satisfaction with a current role? While sites like Myspace and Livejournal may not have a specific employment theme, places liked Linked-in and Jobster do. As a manager, if I come across your profile that indicates you are passively wandering around the jobscape, what does that tell me about you? would it be in my best interest to keep my top producers from posting “I’ll take an offer” sign on a profile?

What are the methods a company could retaliate against job seekers, both active and passive? Will there be a point that a legal or HR team will be implemented to monitor and track current employees in the major systems? Will it identify them for replacement or potential downsizing?

I could definitely see some competitive companies entering recruiting wars, with HR teams designated to recruit and to defend employees. As job markets tighten in specific industries, maybe we’ll see some of this fighting in the trenches…

I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

Laughingly, I’ll have to go to the trademark office and think up some terms like ‘headkeeper’ and register them now.

I may be a little crazy. I know the average job seeker isn’t going to go through job boards, recruitment sites, and various HR sources and think about the ramifications of all the ‘behind the scenes’ things… but I do.
Where does my resume go? Who to? How many people see it? Will I see recruiting spam? Is the database I’m working in properly searchable for my key search terms? What SEO system is the recruiter using to filter 100,000 resumes?

I’ll admit it, I tend to think a few layers down, a few steps sideways, and sometimes even question the basic preface of the recruiting system I’m working in. From a candidate perspective I’m amazed with some of the real world junk mail I’ve received from the marketing arm of companies I’ve shown an interest in, and more specifically I’m amused that I know what ones they are because of the wording of my name and address.

Even in the interview process, I’m amazed by the number of people who are clueless about the process of wasted energy they have. Recruiters who fail to network with someone who is close to a skillset, or even inquire about other likely candidates they may be searching for. In the past week alone I’ve ran into at least three recruiters where I told them I wasn’t the man they were looking for, but gave them a referral to someone who is probably right on target.

In the past few weeks I’ve taken a different perspective in the recruiting process. It has been a long time, but now I’m looking at things from the candidate perspective and updating my resume to explore the possibilities out there.

I have always been a proud support and innovator on any project I have been a part of, but actually ‘being in the trenches’ provides a level of desire and honesty that is hard to adopt. – Browsing through contacts, taking a look at interesting positions, pondering whether Company A or Organization B would be a better cultural fit…

The data is complex not only because there is a variety of information, but that information is for the most part poorly organized, badly presented, and tweaked with a marketing spin that has been rolled flat by a dozen lawyers. Starting at the employer level, the structure of presenting an online recruiting presence is typically under-funded and sometimes even contradicts the branding of the company.

As you take a step into the recruiting process, the first step is to figure out what the position actually is. The writing for a majority of open positions leaves you asking if the entire purpose of the job posting was to leave you asking more questions, rather than actually telling you anything pertinent about the position or the company.

Whether finely written or abruptly slapped together, the next step is to get the ‘word’ out there about an open position. Most often that includes an online method of advertising, that is again broken into a horrible conglomeration of make-shift job advertisements that have been corrupted by unknown numbers of scams.

Once a position reaches the online world, it quickly finds it’s way into a variety of databases and job forums it was never intended to go. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad, but it happens regardless.

As a candidate begins to search for the ‘ideal position’, they are dumb-founded by user interfaces and e-mail marketing options that seem to be designed to be obstacles rather than user benefits. Upon entering even the most advanced Boolean search phrase, candidates are still inundated by search results for work-at-home offers and insurance companies resorting to e-mail spamming to find people who will believe the marketing hype.

So…

My recruiting ideas are definitely wrapping themselves around the solution end of the candidate problem. There are so many sections of the puzzle that can be modified to create streamlined and functional online recruiting improvements that I’m going to dedicate some of my writing specifically with that in mind.

Over the years the left and right sides of my brain have been invaded by thinking about the way recruiting online has evolved along a parallel path with other online technologies. In general recruiting as a whole has been a few steps behind other industries in applying various marketing and networking strategies to the online model. As blogging and social interaction software evolves, I foresee a push to establish recruiting campaigns past a product level and further into a public relations level.

In essence, companies are slowly evolving into a reverse ‘candidate reference’ idea. Instead of candidates providing references, the Web 2.0 and blogging culture is providing candidates a method of requesting references from the employer.

As top candidates enter the market, they will spot companies boasting things like “energetic and relaxed work atmosphere” and then they will look for employee references to back it up. Heather Hamilton and several Microsoft employees provide this type of PR related referral for the region’s top software company, but how long will it be before companies realize the benefit of having an employee group that serves as both evangelist and recruiter for the company?

This line of thinking is one of the greatest fears of any corporation’s legal department. Any business attorney cringes at the idea of having 500 company employees with a green light to talk about business and daily life online. Many organizations will attempt to move in a different direction, but with blog groups like Myspace and Livejournal reaching into the tens of millions, it is only time before they realize employees are already talking about the company and they just don’t know it.