Been on an extended vacation and consequently so has the Friday 5. It’s good to be back and share some of my favorite social media links from the past month or so.

• XKCD-Inspired Cartoon Maps the World’s Social Networks. Mashable.
• The Ten Secrets of a Successful Social Media Blog. Jeff Bullas Blog.
• What makes a tweet influential? The HP Blog Hub.
• Creative commons and facilitating mashups to spread your ideas. David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now Blog.
• 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online. Sam Rosen, Copyblogger Blog.

After learning about the work of author Clay Shirky recently, it occurred to me that open source and social media have a lot in common; mostly the human desire to help one another with no expectation of a return.

Read my full story on DaniWeb.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Clay Shirky on people power and “cognitive surplus” (e1evation.com)
• Cognitive Surplus: Implications for Social CRM (customerthink.com)
• Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky | Book review (guardian.co.uk)

Social media floods us with so much information. So is it helping us filter the information or contributing to our attention deficit? Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Read my full post on DaniWeb.

A new white paper, Social Media:  Business Benefits and Security, Governance and Assurance Perspectives (downloadable PDF), published by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) does an excellent job of outlining the rewards and risks for companies participating in social networking on the open web. It clearly outlines the benefits of participating in online social networks, while providing straightforward ways to manage possible issues associated with these activities.

I highly encourage any business that wants to learn about the risks and benefits of social networking on the open web to download and read this 10 page white paper.

I stumbled on this excellent video today on YouTube that compares the Punk Rock movement of the 1970s with the current social media revolution going on around us.

What do you think? Is social media like punk rock (or something else)?

With tax day behind us in the US it’s time for another week of the Friday 5, our look at the week’s most interesting social media links (at least in our opinion). If you have other links, feel free to start a debate. We love having a conversation here at socmedia101.

Without further delay, here’s this week’s links:

• Is Social Media Becoming Boring? by Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia Blog.
• Social Media Demographics: An Analysis of the Leading Sites, Panorama Blog.
• When a Stranger Reads Your Blog by Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog.
• Media Relations is Not Public Relations by David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now Blog.
• What is the Speed of Social Media by Jeff Bullas, Jeff Bullas’s Blog.

Photo by Myki Roventine on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Guest post by Val Nelson

If you’re looking for jobs or contract work, take a minute now for a quick look online. Employers definitely search online and they can find out a lot!

Hopefully they can find lots of good stuff about you and nothing bad. How do you rate?

Take these two essential steps.

1. Google Yourself.

Do a Google search of your name and city (as written on your resume) to see what employers are finding about you.

• If there’s good stuff, great.
• If there’s bad stuff, yikes. Read on.
• If nothing, why not? There should be something online if you want work! Get a LinkedIn profile and a Google profile at least. Consider a VisualCV (an in-depth online résumé) or a YouTube video video sample to introduce yourself to employers.

Even after you update a few things online, it may take a week or so for Google search results to catch up.

2. Review Your Facebook Profile in Depth.

Facebook profiles are PUBLIC by default. Yours might be public and you don’t even realize it. Even if you make a lot of it private, employers may be able to get around that if they know some of your Facebook friends.

• Look at your Facebook profile from an employer’s perspective and dig around.
• Surveys have shown that hiring managers and human resource professionals actively use social media sites to research job candidates, and they make positive and negative decisions based on what they find.
• If you see something a smidge questionable, consider removing it or at least make sure you have privacy settings in place. You can even exclude certain “friends” from seeing things. Be sure to consider whether some friends work for your prospective employer.
• Repeat this with other social media communities you have used. Do you still have a MySpace profile out there?

How Much Is Too Much?

Don’t worry about expressing your true self online. I believe in letting people see the real you. Then you’re more likely to draw the right employment situation for you.

But you’ll want to consider removing that drunken frat party photo unless that’s related to who you want to work for.

What you project, you will attract.

Resources for Job Seekers

• How Blogging and Social Networking Can Impact Your Job Search
• Job Search 2.0 – Rise Above the Crowd
• How To Lose a Job Via Facebook In 140 Characters or Less

________

Val Nelson provides career and business coaching for heart-centered individuals and businesses. She has helped hundreds of people clarify and mobilize their unique superpowers, and breathe easier with online and real-life communications, so they can make their mark. She has a gift for matching people to their right path and she offers expert knowledge from a background in communications, marketing, HR, management, and health care.

For more information, see her website and blog at www.valnelson.com .

Photo by Brooks Elliot on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Does your email look like this? donjuan@yahoo.com Feel free to take out ‘Yahoo!’ and insert any of the following:

• AOL
• Hotmail
• Earthlink
• Gmail
• MSN
• Comcast

When you see that my email is julie@walmart.com or julie@nbc.com or julie@burgerking.com, you assume that I work at one of those fine establishments. Why wouldn’t I assume then, if your email was donjuan@comcast.net that you worked at Comcast? Obviously, because most of us do know that Comcast is an ISP – but we also know nothing about YOU.

Here’s my point. When you’re running a business that has an online component (which just about every business at this point really should!), it is best practice to customize your email address.

When your email address is john@yahoo.com or jill@aol.com, it’s generic. When your email is john@vacuumservices.com or jill@edibleflowers.com, then every time you give out the address and every time someone types it in, they’re reminded of your business. If they’re just emailing you for the first time, they will likely even notice the URL and go visit it. It’s yet another easy way to promote your business and plump up your branding. As a consumer, when I see a generic email, I wonder why you haven’t taken that next step.

I know that a lot of people keep these generic email accounts for junk mail or lists, etc. Which is fine…but not the best choice for use as a professional email account. I’ve yet to come across a host (and I work within and around the major-ish brands) that doesn’t offer email with your url when you set up an account.

Do you work at Yahoo! or AOL? No…you work at your own company. Let everyone know all about it.

Image credit: yodel anecdotal

Once again, we have a Twitter epidemic. Spam accounts post tweets asking for action or promoting their links and they include as many twitter handles as they can fit. The pick big name Tweeple and little ones. Their strategy is that we will see them because they included, for instance @writingroads, and so their tweet shows up in my @replies tab.

Here’s what one of these spammer’s Twitter page looks like:

What can we do to stop this? Aside from getting out the pitchforks (and violence is never the answer), we can report them as spam for twitter. Just go to their page and look to your right:

Click on ‘report for spam’ and then Twitter will take care of it and their page will look like this:

Twitter users unite! This is a simple and easy action to take, you know, for the good of Twitterers everywhere!