Why take the flak for the politicians?

By Neil Patrick

Politicians won't like this post. At all.

Whether its Trump vs. Clinton, Brexit or Remain, gender politics, millions of people every day are busy making themselves enemies online by taking a stand for their political beliefs.

Do we really want to lose friends and make more enemies by doing politicians' dirty work for them? If you do, that’s fine. Stop reading this right now, because you’ll probably hate me when you have. And I really don’t want that to happen. Honestly.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is good to stand up for what you believe in. UNLESS it’s your political views AND you are doing it in public. Then we make ourselves targets for everyone who doesn’t agree with us.

And in the online world, one thing is a sad fact of life; many more are quick to attack than are quick to praise.

But I’m not talking about the morons who troll people. If we are adults, we should be able to take trolls in our stride, regardless of how venomous and threatening they appear.

No, I am talking about others we are connected to online who just like us are good, decent, honest people who mean well. They just don’t share our political views. That’s all.

If your social media presence in any way involves anything other than chatting with family and close friends, there are lots of things which could go on a list of don’ts. And we’ve mostly seen these many times before:

Don’t abuse others. Don’t criticize people. Don’t be a bigot. Don’t be racist, sexist, ageist or anything else which ends with ‘ist’.

Don’t be cruel. Don’t endlessly advertise yourself. Don’t share junk.

Don’t ignore others. Don’t be unkind.

Basically, don’t be an ass.

If you have intelligence and integrity these things are pretty obvious. And they are as much sensible rules for life as online behaviour.

But there is one thing that isn’t on this list which I think should be:

Unless it’s your job, don’t discuss your political opinions in public online.

We all have our political views. And I know some very fine people on social media who do this a great deal and have a lot of followers.

But the problem is that when we discuss politics online, for every person who agrees with us there will be most likely one or more, who doesn’t.

Do you wish to alienate yourself from them just because you have different political views? Some of my best friends over the years have completely different political opinions to myself. And we have enjoyed many fierce debates together.

But these are people I am close too. People whose opinion of me is based on long-standing relationships based on mutual trust and respect. People we have these close relationships with will not suddenly spurn us because we don’t agree on a political point.

These people have a multi-dimensional relationship with us. That relationship is usually a rich and mature tapestry of intermingled life events. They are based on much more than a single online post, comment or tweet.

By contrast, many of our online contacts are brief and fleeting. Often people who will see our social media content know little or nothing about us. But the moment we share something political, we risk alienating ourselves from almost everyone who has a different opinion.

Yet in every other respect, these people may very well be good, decent, folk with whom we would otherwise have a positive and productive relationship with.

If you really cannot resist expressing your political opinions online, then do it through DMs with those who you trust. There you can freely express your views without the world seeing and judging you.

As the US elections approach their conclusion, I see many tweets supporting or condemning one or other candidate. Some I agree with. Some I do not.

But if I express my opinions on social media and in public, I am pretty sure that at least some of the people I am connected with will disagree with me. And for many, such disagreements are terminal to the relationship.

And it never needed to be like that.

Have your political views. Pursue your political causes. Vote and support the politicians you think deserve it.

Just don’t do their dirty work for them and risk your friendships for a political cause.

Because ultimately our friends are more valuable to us than any politician.

Why we shouldn’t pay to listen to gurus

By Neil Patrick

Yes I know what the title of my blog is.

I am not an expert, thought leader, influencer, innovator, disrupter or hacker. I am just a bloke in Cardiff with a blog where I record and share my thoughts about the world of work and business.

Understandably though, a few folk have challenged me because of the title of this blog and my Twitter handle. I’m okay with that. And my answer is this:

Richard Branson isn’t a Virgin. Probably.

But this post isn’t about me. It’s about why I think paying to hear a few minutes of anyone's opinions and ideas is not something they should charge for or we should pay for.

Yet this idea has spawned a huge industry which at least at the edges has become devoid of value.

It was my mailbox which led me to write this post. In my emails today was yet another “invitation”. It was a big local business event being advertised with numerous “expert” speakers who in exchange for some of my money would apparently inspire, inform and motivate me to become a success. By attending, I could be transformed!

Hmm.

Now I am the first to admit I don’t know everything. I never did and never will. And the experience, ideas and knowledge of others is something I place great value on. So I network widely AND closely. I read a great deal. I write almost as much. I consume quite a few TEDx talks. I receive and try to answer numerous emails and messages every day. I have often very long discussions with people all around the world via Skype. I get involved in LinkedIn discussions. I try and help others in any way I can.

Hopefully we all benefit. If someone wants my opinion on something, they can have it. For free.

I don’t work for anyone for free. But if you want a few minutes of my time or even a couple of hours and I think I can help, I will. You’re more than welcome. No charge.

I often do talks at business schools, forums and conferences. And these are nearly always completely unpaid. It’s my investment in my profile and reputation not my cashcow.

Yet I believe that a 30 minute chat with someone delivers more value to us both than if we listen to each other’s conference spiels. Whilst any one of us can get insight and inspiration from learning about someone else’s experience, I think it is fairly unlikely we will get it from a business conference speech.

Here in the UK, we have just finished the pains of the political party conference season. During this, I watched David Cameron deliver his speech to the Conservative party conference, to rapturous applause.

Depending on your politics, and media preferences, Dave’s speech was either a triumph or a catastrophe. His carefully scripted words may have thrilled or appalled you.

But they almost certainly didn’t transform you or your future. They didn’t make you a better person than you were before you heard his speech. He didn’t learn anything about you and you learned little more about him. Neither of you increased your goodwill towards each other.

Conference speeches are an extension of the cult of personality which is why politicians love them and take them so seriously.

Critically they are one way communication. The speaker speaks and the audience listens – if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they heckle. If you are very unlucky, they may as the HR boss of Air France discovered this week, rip the shirt from your back.

But rarely does the communication of valuable know-how happen via the medium of a conference speech.

This is understandable because as any smart person in business knows, it’s more or less impossible to share valuable ideas in depth with any audience, unless that audience shares a common set of problems and the communication vehicle is a two way dialogue.

Unless the speaker knows exactly what your problems are and exactly how they can be solved, it is frankly impossible and unrealistic for anything of true value to every member of the audience to be communicated.

And the bigger and more diverse a conference audience is, the more likely it is that this communication breakdown will occur.

You simply cannot communicate transformations for people through the vehicle of a conference speech. Because you cannot possibly know what each person’s unique needs really are.

This is why I will continue to network closely. Continue to have meaningful conversations with people. Continue to try and help people any way I can. And continue to engage with people with no money changing hands.

And it’s why I will not be buying a ticket for this conference or probably any other soon.

I have more important people to spend my time with. Like you.

Why a viral Tweet might not be what you really want

By Neil Patrick

For a change, this post is not about jobs, the economy, recruitment or work. It's about social media and specifically, Twitter.

I discovered something this week which initially caused me a jolt. With over 19,000 followers on Twitter, apparently I am in the top 1% most followed people on that social media platform.

I am not trying to brag about this. It’s nothing to brag about anyway when I also mention that since Twitter has 302 million active accounts, this means the top 1% comprise over 3 million people!

So that fact immediately stopped me getting an over-inflated sense of my own importance. If I needed any more reminder of my insignificance on the internet, I will just mention that just about everyone who has any sort of fame or mainstream media profile has at least a million or so Twitter followers and Katy Perry has over 66 million. Yikes - that must take some managing everyday...

Nonetheless if you follow me on Twitter, I would like to express my unreserved appreciation, especially since there are millions of more exciting people you could be following instead of me. You wonderful people enrich and educate me, inspire and intrigue me and motivate and moderate me - all in your own unique way.

Anyway, since we are on the topic of Twitter, I wanted to share my thoughts on following and follow backs. There seems to be an unwritten rule on Twitter that if we follow someone and they don't follow us back, then after a while we should unfollow them or withdraw our offer of online friendship.

I feel that this idea misses the point. I follow plenty of people on Twitter who I am pretty sure will never follow me back. But I keep on following them because I want to hear what they have to say.

Yet I often find that if I chime in with my thoughts on something they have posted, THEN they will follow me back. When you think about it in this way, theirs is a shrewd attitude. Having zillions of followers isn't (or shouldn't be) the goal of being on Twitter. Having real connections and a real and active network of like minded people with whom we have all sorts of relationships seems like a healthier and much more valuable goal to me.

Which leads me to try and explain why I don’t follow back everyone that follows me.

You can easily find plenty of viewpoints on this question. First there is the camp which argues that if someone follows you on Twitter and since this is SOCIAL media, it's anti-social not to reciprocate. That viewpoint makes sense ONLY if everyone that follows you shares your interests and values. And plenty of people with a few hundred connections on Twitter do exactly this.

But the Twitter experience changes if our account grows to many thousands. Everyday I get new followers where I can see absolutely no reason why they would follow me or be in anyway interested in what I do. Some new followers see I am a man and seem to work on the rather disrespectful assumption that therefore I must be interested in following pornographic accounts. Sorry but I will block you.

Then there are millions of promotional twitter accounts offering free followers and a ton of other spammy stuff. You guys will never be followed back!

But if you are just a normal Twitter user who kindly follows me I also may not follow you back. I do actually feel rather bad about this, but there's a simple reason for this decision. Once we are following more than a couple of thousand people on Twitter, our Twitter streams get very, VERY busy. I just watched mine for one minute. In that time, 50 new tweets landed in my Twitter feed.

That’s one every second give or take – and even if I spent every waking minute looking at them, I could never keep up.

So I have to apply some rules about who I follow back. The essence of these rules is I follow back people who have even the slightest overlapping interest with the things I am interested in. And that's quite broad. It includes business, economics, government, HR, jobs, education, leadership, media, tech, recruitment, coaching, and rock music (for a bit of variety and flavour).

It doesn't matter to me if someone has 10 followers or 10,000. If our interests co-incide and they are engaged members of the Twittersphere, I follow back.

If you are mostly sharing your favourite photos and music on Twitter and chatting about entertainment, that’s fine and it's none of my business, but generally speaking, I won’t follow you back. In order to do what I do, I need to see tweets about jobs, careers, the economy etc. If these are drowned in a sea of other things, I can’t see what I need to see.

In essence, my approach is not to follow more and more people endlessly chasing some vanity number of followers like a mirage, but fewer people so I can actually hear more of what I want to hear above the noise.

And this is why I hope I never have a tweet which goes viral. Like old newspapers, today's fad is tomorrow's trash. Going viral might be great for some people. But for me it's a distracting illusion. Personally, I'd rather be more like the moon than a shooting star.

All that said, if you send me a personal tweet on Twitter I will always try and get back to you. Better still communicate with me via LinkedIn in and you will always get my attention.

You may have an entirely different set of principles you apply. But for whatever it's worth, these are mine and I hope that my thoughts are at least helpful when you think about what yours should be.

How to get to love networking

By Neil Patrick

I always hated networking.

All those awkward conversations with strangers thinking, “I hope this is over soon and I can go and do some real work”.

But today I have completely changed my attitude. I network all the time and without it, I’d never achieve anything in my work.

Networking isn’t optional, or a chore, it’s a joy because I learned to change how I think about it entirely. And if you dread networking, or feel awkward, I hope these tips will get you out of the pain zone and into the gain zone.

Rather than thinking of networking as an "event", consider it an ongoing, lifelong process of building new relationships with people you actually like and want to be connected to.

Being a good networker gains you control of your life in ways which many people just don’t appreciate. I realised after many years of getting it wrong that networking means I can choose who I develop relationships with. And by the same token I can get away from those who for any reason I don’t like.

So lets’ get on with the eight tips that changed my whole experience of networking.

1. Focus on giving not getting

Golden rule number one, is that you are not there to get things from others. You are there to try and find out more about them and see if you can get along. Showing an interest in them makes it easier for others to talk to you. After all most people love talking about themselves. People do business with people they like, so let them do it. Relationships don’t materialise in a few minutes. They mature over time. Usually months or even years. So approach networking as a fact finding mission. Ask questions, be friendly and likeable and offer to help people out anyway you can. Never ask for anything from them in return.

2. Be visible

This was always a big problem for me. I always had a desk full of urgent things that I needed to get done. I thought that every networking event was robbing me of precious hours that I needed to do my real work.

But today there’s a great solution. I don’t go to many physical events. I probably do 80% of my networking from my desk. I connect with people on Twitter and Linkedin. But I also move dialogues offline as soon as possible. I Skype with people and we exchange emails.

This has a couple of huge advantages. First my network is global so I can connect with a lot of people, I’d never meet in the real world. And since I live in a forest in Wales, I’m not exactly surrounded by movers and shakers in business. Second, this is much more time efficient. There are no long drives to venues. No protracted schedules. I just fit things into my schedule when it suits me and save the face to face meetings for the times when the real business is being done.

3. Listen more than you talk

There’s a very old saying attributed to Greek philosopher Epictetus which goes something like “I have two ears and one mouth and I use them in that proportion”. This is great news if like me you tend to introversion. It has the great benefit that provided you ask good questions, the other person will do all the work AND you’ll be perceived as more empathetic and interested in others. Both great foundations for a good relationship in the future.


4. Think long term vs. short term

Relationships don’t just magically happen. They take time. Trust is earned slowly and consequently many people just don’t have the patience to nurture business relationships over time. But just as you can pick up instantly again with an old friend you’ve maybe not spoken to for six months, you can do the same with business relationships…provided you’ve already followed the first three points above. Moreover, I find that people I’ve maybe not had contact with for several months are often more pleased to hear from me than if we’d been in more regular contact.


5. Don't over commit or feel guilty

Never promise to do something you have doubts about delivering. This is serious trust-melter. But if you don’t have to the desire or capability to deliver what someone is asking for, you don’t have to give them a blunt refusal. Just tell them that your schedule won’t allow you to do what they’d like. This has the bonus of letting them know in a kind way that you are in demand and it may well prompt them to reconsider their request and reframe it in a way which makes it more palatable or attractive for you. Likewise, meeting someone does not commit you to keeping in touch. Never feel obligated to keep up a contact if for any reason, you feel it’s not right for you.


6. Be honest

Tell the truth. Always. If someone asks you if you know about something, don’t be tempted to say “yes” just to avoid feeling dumb. No-one expects anyone to know everything. And if I don’t know an answer to a question, I am quite upfront and say, “I don’t know”….often followed by something like, “But that’s a really interesting question, I’ll find out and get back to you”. And I always keep that promise. Not knowing something isn’t a problem – it’s an opportunity to learn and prove your worth and reliability to someone else.


7. Take action immediately

Everyone is busy these days. So look for ways to execute tasks immediately, rather than adding another job to your to do list. For example, just the other day I was on a Skype call and the other person said, “Oh you really should connect with my friend, you two would really have lots to talk about.” I agreed and the introduction was made via Twitter. In about 30 seconds flat! And it was true we did have a lot to talk about and have already scheduled a face to face meeting to do just that.


8. Only go to things that excite you

If you have a choice, don’t ever go to things that you think you should attend, just because of who else will be there. If the event doesn’t ignite your passion, you’ll not be on your top form and the event will sap you of the energy and spark you need to make a positive impression on others. In fact I have taken this mantra one step further and created my own local networking event with a couple of business friends. We all agreed there would be no agenda, no speakers, no rules. But it would be exclusive. Exclusive in as much as we’d only invite people we thought could add value and even more importantly that we liked and who we thought would welcome an informal business environment.

I used to hate networking, but today, I spend more time doing it than ever before. And it’s a genuine pleasure because I apply these rules. If you hate networking I hope they help you too.

How to make LinkedIn deliver what YOU want

By Neil Patrick

Linkedin holds the key to a world of opportunity for all of us, if we can just learn to accept one simple truth...

I discuss LinkedIn a lot with my offline network.

I also chastise many of my professional friends for their failures to take it seriously. The main reason I do this is that they only think about it when it is too late. Like when they lose their job, or are struggling to progress some aspect of their career or business.

LinkedIn cannot and will not deliver benefits for you if you only turn to it when you desperately need help…unless you have invested already for months and years beforehand.

But if you have already made that investment, then you’ll have a network of relevant connections that can you can turn to. People who know something or someone that you need.

And if you have paid it forward, investing in helping others in your network, with absolutely no demand for anything in return, you’ll have their goodwill too.

But it’s not a mechanical process. It has an element of randomness about it for sure.

A few months ago I happened to see a particularly erudite and insightful comment posted on LinkedIn. I wasn't in any way connected to the poster. So I simply clicked ‘like’ and wrote one sentence of praise.

Total time invested? About 60 seconds.

The poster happened to be a very senior investment banker. He invited me to connect which I did. Several emails and phone calls flowed from this over the following weeks. We had an easy rapport. We got to know each other properly. We discovered how we could collaborate and be of value to each other.

We now have a very productive business relationship, where we provide real value to each other.

In the real world, our paths would never have crossed.

Today, I know I can pick up the phone to him at any time and discuss anything where I think he can be of help.

That’s just one example. I have dozens more similar stories I could tell you. Every relationship is different, but they all started in the same way…a more or less random encounter on social media.

And this is why I think people struggle with seeing the value of social media for their careers. If you’re in manufacturing, you think in term of raw materials, processes and the value of goods you can sell. If you are more financially focussed, you want to see the return on every investment you make. If I spend this…what do I get back?

But this misses the point entirely. I accept that 90% of the connections I make on LinkedIn will never create any value directly beyond some friendly exchanges and perhaps a tip off here and there. But by the same token, 10% of them will be priceless. I just don’t know which ones. And I never will.

Pharmaceutical firms view their businesses in a similar way. They invest billions every year in research and development of new drugs. And they know that 90% or more of them will never get to market, let alone earn them any revenues.

But they also know that they only have to have one which does make it through to generate millions or even billions of revenues in the future. And so they continue to invest steadily in potential new treatments, in the full knowledge that most will fail.

It’s exactly the same with LinkedIn. You only need one job, one person, one exchange to transform everything and change your prospects. One change to your profile can transform how others see you. One comment can lead to a world of opportunity.

And the only way that will happen is if you invest steadily every day in a way which makes sense for the outcomes you are seeking.

If you are mindful and focussed, you will achieve the outcomes you seek.

Just don’t expect LinkedIn to deliver unless you have committed to it with a purpose from the start. And paid your dues.

How to get people to say ‘yes’ – the science of persuasion

By Neil Patrick

Whether you are applying for a job, pitching a sale, negotiating with a customer or even just going about your day to day work, how much is it worth to you to get more people to say ‘yes’?

There are scientifically proven methods that have a massive impact on this. Better still, they are simple, ethical and almost completely free.

The interesting thing is that these methods are especially relevant in the online world. Whether it’s how we engage with people on social media, how we set up a website, or what we say on our Linkedin profiles, the applications of this knowledge are endless and astonishingly powerful.

These tips are also short-cuts. Success is found by working smarter not harder. Knowing these principles you’ll find dozens of applications whatever kind of work you do.

If you want to know the 6 principles of persuasion so you can apply them, this simple and insightful explanation from an RSI Animate video will give you all you need to start to benefit straight away.

The video is presented by Dr. Robert Cialdini and Steve Martin, co-authors of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week International Bestseller “Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive”.

Totally recommended viewing!

Forget work-life balance - we're all crazybusy

By David Hunt, PE

It is perfectly understandable in hard economic times that companies ask for more effort from fewer people. But there are numerous, unquantifiable costs to this time-austerity.

I recently had lunch with someone I’ve been trying to meet for months; a C-level executive, he also had an extended period of unemployment and thus was sympathetic to my situation. Not only that but we shared two deep outside-of-work commonalities. The issue was getting onto his schedule.

During that conversation he mentioned this was the third time he had managed to get away from his office for a lunch outside the company… in almost three years of having been there. He said that he routinely is putting in 10-12 hour days, that his employer is running incredibly lean, and that most of the time lunch is eaten while working at his desk.

This months-long pursuit is similar to the dismal results of my other attempts to even have “cups of coffee” with people to create the beginnings of a face-to-face relationship which is so essential in networking. I finally had lunch with the CTO of a local company after half a year of trying. Too busy. I’ve stayed in touch with two people at a local company where I’d actually gone in for a face-to-face interview, only to learn later the position I wanted –and still want! – had been closed without hiring anyone for budget reasons. These two people know of my standing invitation to take them to lunch… and have recently put me off, yet again, until the end of the quarter. Why? Too busy. (Please note that I don’t blame them; work has priority over networking, and when things need doing, they need to be done – I just hope that things settle down enough for them to have time to take me up on my offer even if there is no open position.)

To be fair, I understand that if people indulged all the requests for their time, they’d never get their own jobs done… but my success rate, even with a warm referral from a person known to them, or knowing them already from prior face-to-face conversations, is staggeringly and depressingly low.

The hidden costs of crazybusy

So if you’ll indulge me… it is perfectly understandable in hard economic times that companies ask for more effort from fewer people. But there are several costs associated with this hyper-lean way of doing business that should, in the view of senior managers with perspective, be considered. Here are some of these unquantifiable costs to this time-austerity:

First, health

People need “down time”; between the commute, 10-12 hour days, chores, other obligations (e.g., family), and the need for sleep, working people this hard takes a physical toll. Add to this always being “connected” and the stress 24/7 access can create. Wringing people for more and more hours at work is a short-term payoff only.

Second, work-life balance

Many people, especially as they get older, have families, friends, and outside interests. It’s one thing to have a crisis at work, and need to put in extra hours – no white collar employee I know objects to this. Families understand. But when overtime becomes SOP children wonder why daddy or mommy can’t be there. And I guarantee you that there is not a person who, on their death bed, will think back and wish they’d spent more time at work rather than with their family.

Third, loyalty and retention

The internet is abuzz these days with increasing numbers of articles discussing employee loyalty and retention. One of the fears voiced by many such articles is that as the economy improves, people will seek to jump. Why would they want to jump? Among reasons given, like challenge and career growth, is a better balance between work and a life outside work.

Fourth, hiring

Yes, I said hiring. One of the things I and others have noticed is that job descriptions are getting ever-more-specific. Why? Because running lean means that roles overlap. In order to get things done, people take up responsibilities caused by things needing doing that are not done because of running so lean. This creates aggregate positions for which nobody can prepare, because each position is unique to the company. Along that line, when a person is in a position over time the role becomes customized to their responsibilities and preferences. When they leave, a hiring manager often views this as a need to find a replacement, not a successor. Not a mere semantic different, it means writing a job description based on the person who just left, a person who had grown into and customized that job.

Most peoples’ careers have grown at least semi-organically; the majority of my own changes have been involuntary, not planned. There is no “candidate factory” out there, yet job descriptions are written razor-sharp as though there were. Thus the Goldilocks syndrome is born. No wonder employers can’t find perfect fit employees, and leave jobs open for month after quarter after year – further creating the need for even more overtime. Which causes more stress. Which drives people to want to find a new job. Whose openings after people jump create more openings with Goldilocks job descriptions. And so it goes.

Fifth, most companies expect to grow sooner or later

While there are concessions necessary in hard times, when employees – and especially managers – have time to cultivate relationships with people outside, this reduces the risk factor in hiring by establishing relationships with potential candidates. Managers can thus, over the development of a relationship, vet possible employees over time. By working people so hard they have no time to do this, senior management actually increases the risk of making a bad hire when an opening is created and nobody internally has relationships with suitable people on the outside… because they’ve been too busy.

“What can’t go on forever, won’t.” – Glenn Reynolds

When things improve, company leaders need to make it up to those who sacrificed for the company’s sake – the “employment continuation award” is not sufficient. And one of the things those leaders need to do is to lighten the work load when economics allow it, and to make it clear they intend to do this as soon as feasible.

The harder companies squeeze to wring more productivity out of their people, the more resentment that squeezing will breed. Is this really the emotional state employers want their people in?

Update 3-3-2014: Thanks to Al Quadros, who commented on my essay when I posted it to a group; his post got me to realize there is another cost to crazybusy. Specifically, when one is judged by the hours one spends at the office, there is every incentive to be inefficient, thus generating the need to be at the office more. Aside from the obvious concern ofactivity vs. progress, this creates the habit of being inefficient… and if/when things return to a more normal pace, that habit will remain.

© 2014, David Hunt, PE

David Hunt is a Mechanical Design Engineer in southern New Hampshire looking for his "next opportunity" that allows him to design new products and shepherd them to stable production. His LinkedIn profile is: www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntmecheng/; he blogs at davidhuntpe.wordpress.com and tweets at @davidhuntpe.

How to grow your LinkedIn network without going to jail

By Neil Patrick

Building your network on social media and especially LinkedIn is a great way to increase your career opportunities as I described here. But if you send out invitations to connect without enough care, you’ll not see much return on the investment. In fact, if you are really careless, you could even end up in LinkedIn jail!

The ever insightful Stacy Donovan Zapar has provided some very helpful pointers here into the various types of LinkedIn jail and how to get out.

But I am sure you’d much rather never go to jail in the first place, so here are my tips on one key aspect.

How can you make new connections without risking the dreaded IDK (I don’t know this person) response?

The current assessment is that gaining just 5 IDK responses to your invitations to connect will result in your LinkedIn account being ‘restricted’, meaning that for all future invitations you send, you’ll have to include the person’s email address.

So here are my thoughts on how to send invitations to connect safely.

I get an increasing number of invitations to connect. That’s great, but there are a few that I pass over. I never hit the IDK button, but not everyone can be trusted to do that.

Like anyone would, when I receive an invitation to connect from someone I don’t already know, I make judgements about them based on what I can see on their LinkedIn profile.

Reading various other posts about how to set up a great LinkedIn profile, in practice I apply some different criteria to who I connect with.

Here’re the things I don’t worry about:

Some profiles are so packed with information that it would take me too long to read it all. But that’s not a reason to decline an invitation in my view. It just means I simply skim read it. And too much info is better than too little. Once we get more engaged, this stuff will all be dealt with as needed.

Some don’t have a personal photograph - just the bubble head or a company logo. Not best practice agreed but neither is it a reason to decline. I have quite a few great contacts who usually through shyness don’t include a personal photo.

Some people are at an early stage in their careers. So they don’t have a lot of accomplishments yet and I understand that. So that’s not a reason to decline them either. In fact, I interpret this as a great opportunity to be of help to that person and build our relationship.

So what are the reasons I do decline invitations to connect?

There’s never a single reason, but almost always, it’s a combination of some or all of the following:

No recommendations

I don’t care if you’ve got 20,000 Linkedin connections. I care what they think about you. And if only one or two people think enough of you to provide a recommendation, I only have what you say about yourself to go on when I make that judgement. And some people are let’s say extremely “creative” with the descriptions they apply to themselves.

More often than not, such connections immediately bombard me with spammy updates which just fill my homepage with junk. No thanks.

In my view, someone who boasts about thousands of connections, but has no recommendations, is just collecting connections at a frantic pace in the belief that this will give them status and kudos on LinkedIn. If they are not engaged with the community, neither are they likely to engage with me.

On the other hand, if a dozen or more people who are clearly professionals say some good things about you, I will take you much more seriously. 

You say you are a LION

In case you’re not yet familiar with this acronym, it stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. This is a tricky one. I consider myself an open networker. In other words, I am happy to connect with MOST people even if I’ve never met them before.

And this includes LIONS.

But even so, I still apply some filtering. If someone's headline shouts, “I’m a LION and I’ve got 50,000 connections”, I am likely to look much more closely at them before deciding whether to accept or move on. Especially if they have very little on their profile to suggest why they deserve and are engaged with so many connections.

 
They don’t include a personal message as to why they wish to connect with me

This doesn’t have to be much. Just including my name in the message and an explanation as to how you found me would suffice. But still at least half the invitations I receive show no such courtesy or interest. How can I be expected to think you are someone who is likely to engage with me or anyone else if you can’t even invest the effort to write a single sentence? 

We have no shared interests at all

I apply very generous criteria to this. I think one of the great things about LinkedIn is how it can broaden our network beyond our normal sphere of influence. So if someone has a different industry background, that’s great. If they are at a different career stage, no problem.

On the other hand, if we appear to have nothing in common and no shared interests, then I wonder why the invitation was sent? Especially if any of points 1,2 or 3 above also apply.


So these are the criteria I apply in accepting or declining invitations to connect on Linkedin with people I’ve never met or engaged with on other social media platforms.

And I am sure that I’m not alone in applying such criteria. If that is the case, then it is really very simple to build a great network with new connections on LinkedIn.

Just avoid the traps above.

So: 

Make sure you've got some recommendations on your profile

These don’t have to be amazing or long. Just someone else’s positive comments about you. And you’ll find most people you already know will be happy to provide you with a recommendation if you help them out by providing a draft of the sort of thing you’d like them to say. This makes it easy and quick for them to just do any editing they’d like and post it. So a big task is reduced to a couple of minutes. 

Don’ t assume that someone will choose to connect with you just because lots of others have

I think if the most interesting thing about you is how many connections you’ve got, then something’s adrift somewhere.

I also have a feeling that as the number of LIONS grows and we all get bit tired of the game, the folk who just build huge numbers of connections and do nothing else will become more and more sidelined. We'll see...

Show everyone you invite to connect the courtesy of telling them why you’d like to connect

It doesn’t have to be anything world changing. Just be open and honest about why you'd like to connect, show that you know a little about them and compliment them a bit. Flattery works wonders with most of us! 

Especially if the person has a different area of professional interests to yourself, then the reason for the invitation really does need some justification. So this point is especially important in such cases. 

Finally avoid overt self promotion on LinkedIn

Networking and marketing are not the same thing and in an understandable drive to control spamming, the Linkedin police are getting more and more sensitive to promotional posts. So save your marketing and promotional efforts for discussions one to one with your contacts not on LinkedIn.

Do you agree with my criteria? Or do you apply different ones? I’d love to hear what criteria you apply and will be happy to post them here. Please share your thoughts below!

What no-one tells you about the true power of networking

By Neil Patrick

How and why personal networks actually work has not been widely discussed outside of academic theories. Much of the available research is also too old to reflect the critical impact of social media.

So this weekend I have been reviewing the research evidence to try and produce some insights which I hope are helpful.

Most of the material I found talks about the benefits and tactics of effective networking, but very few writers discuss exactly HOW and WHY it works from the perspective of growing our career opportunities.

Many of my own professional contacts misunderstand the value because they don’t grasp the mathematical and social forces that they can unleash. Yes that’s right, I said mathematical.

If you understand this aspect, I guarantee your thinking about networking will be transformed.

Networking is largely misunderstood

Most people think of networking as a heavy investment of their time and energy. And since we have too little of both usually, it gets deprioritised as a task. This is a mistake and it reflects a misunderstanding of what networking is, what is involved and how it creates value.

The critical thing to understand is the power and value of weak ties

A strong tie (or link) is someone who knows a lot about you and who you are in frequent contact with (say at least once a month). A weak tie is someone who doesn’t know you that well, but knows a little about you and has an interaction with you say every 6 months or so.

Most people think that only strong ties can be of value to them in their careers. After all, if someone is only vaguely aware of you, how much value can that relationship really have?

Big mistake.

Now the math bit

This is where it gets interesting. No-one can have a very large number of strong ties. Around 200-250 or so is probably the maximum. There are just not enough hours in the day to manage much more than that.

Weak ties however are a different matter. You can quite easily maintain thousands of these. And social media is a powerful tool that helps you do exactly that.

So unlike strong ties, with weak ties and social media, you can easily grow your network to many thousands.

Now of course, only a small fraction of these might be of benefit to you.

But because you are just one person and with a little effort, your weak ties can be grown steadily, the number of potential opportunities available to you expands in proportion with the growth of your network of weak ties.

And of course the most valuable of your weak ties may well mature into strong ties over time.

But that’s not all

I like to think of what I call the “snowball analogy” when I think about weak ties. Imagine you are standing at the top of snow covered hill. You pick up a handful of snow. This is your current network. The rest of the snow on the ground is all those people you are not yet connected with.

You compact the snow into a ball and place it on the ground. Now you start to push it down the slope. At first not much happens. The ball slowly gets a bit larger and as it does so, its circumference increases. This increased circumference means that with each full turn, the ball picks up much more snow.

Once the ball gets to a certain size and depending on the degree of the slope, it reaches a critical mass. At this point, the ball’s own weight propels it down the hill faster and faster with you doing absolutely nothing at all.

Now with each rotation, the ball is picking up many times more snow than the original handful you held in your hands.

Exactly the same thing happens with social media networks

Most of us have a core of strong ties that we rely upon for our professional network. But this is a huge error.

Strong ties might seem instinctively to be more valuable than weak ties. In some ways they are. But they have limitations too:

• Typically, they are a subset of the people you have encountered in your day to day life. This means they tend to be restricted to your own social and professional areas of activity. And that means they are not only limited, they also will have significant duplications of knowledge and contacts with yourself and each other.

• They carry a degree of obligation which can be counterproductive. For example, if your employer is looking to fill a new more senior position, would they attach much weight to a colleague’s opinion about you that they knew you had a friendship with?

• But most of all, they are finite as mentioned at the start of this post. There’s not too much space left in your life to add many more strong ties, unless they are really valuable to you.

And that’s the magic of understanding network mathematics.

If you devote a proportion of your networking efforts to continually expanding your number of weak ties, your network will grow increasingly quickly. And you'll need to invest much less time.

And whilst these may be weak ties that individually only deliver a small return for you, that return is more or less constant, whether your number of weak ties is 100 or 10,000.

So 1% of a hundred weak ties will not deliver many opportunities for you. But 1% of 10,000? Now that’s a very different matter…

How to use LinkedIn to power up your job search – and it’s not the way you think

By Neil Patrick

I have read a great deal recently about why some people think Linkedin is a bad place to find your next job.

And I think there’s some truth in these criticisms. Why do I say this?

• Jobs on LinkedIn are advertised because it’s a really low cost way for recruiters and hiring companies to reach a lot of people. Advertising on LinkedIn starts at $2 a click. So getting your job in front of 500 targeted candidates costs from $1000. That’s cheap in advertising terms.

• This is good news for recruiters but bad news for candidates. For candidates, the old problem of being a small fish in a big pond hasn’t gone away. In June 2013, LinkedIn reported it had 259 million registered users worldwide… 

• LinkedIn’s revenues depend heavily on recruitment advertising. In 2012 this was $84.9m. I don’t yet have the 2013 figures, but growth forecasts are in the 25% - 45% range. The point is that LinkedIn will for sure be focussing hard on further growth in this sector and we’ll see more initiatives in this area of activity by LinkedIn. 

• Many jobs I have seen advertised on LinkedIn have a list of required qualities and experience that are so great, you’d need to have at least 50 years of experience to get close to what is being asked for. And typically the salary range is rarely shown… 

So, just like jobs boards and all online recruitment, you are forced to play a numbers game, and the odds are stacked against you right from the start.


LinkedIn is facing some business challenges

In essence, LinkedIn is a highly attractive medium for recruiters, but overcomes few of the hurdles faced by jobseekers. Result - more and more jobs are being posted on LinkedIn. And growth of the LinkedIn user base means competition for jobs advertised there must grow too. This isn’t good news if you are job hunting.

But there’re some headwinds for LinkedIn as a business too. Many analysts on Wall Street believe that we are witnessing the development of a social media bubble, citing for example the near doubling of Twitter’s equity value on the first day following its IPO.

Linkedin has a key weakness too in its user base. It isn’t getting much use by the real captains of industry. In fact there’s an argument that the more senior you are, the less you will use Linkedin. Like all social media, Linkedin also faces a challenge to grow its revenues. As it progressively introduces more and more initiatives that help achieve this, the positive user experience is difficult to maintain.


But it’s still really valuable for job hunting

Having said all of that, I still think LinkedIn is a key tool for job hunting and this goes back to two things which were part of its founding principles:

1. The fostering of networking between professionals across the globe. 
2. It’s ability to facilitate the sharing of information between people who would probably never meet in the real world. 

Baby Boomers need to understand a whole new world

Baby boomers grew up and built their careers in a time where there was no social media. The whole world operated on hierarchical structures – from heads of state to voters, from media owners to readers, from archbishops to congregations.

And of course in the business world from CEOs to workers and consumers.

Power and influence was exercised generally in a top down fashion with just the occasional acquiescence to taking up ideas and wishes from the bottom up.

The world of digital media has demolished this model. Social media scales laterally. Influence spreads from peer to peer. It fosters collaboration.

It’s a genuine social revolution. Just look at how the Arab Spring gained momentum – people in repressive dictatorships found that they could spread their influence to their peers rapidly and almost for free. And critically they could do this with absolutely no approval from their hierarchical superiors.

This characteristic of the social web is difficult to come to terms with for a generation that has grown up in a hierarchical world. I think many baby boomers like the communication tools of the social web. They see it as convenient and cheap, but they haven’t really grasped that its biggest change isn’t a technological one, it’s a societal one.

For Gen Y who have grown up with social media and digital technologies, this isn’t a change at all. For them, it’s always been this way. And for Gen X, it’s a change that they’ve been part of during most of their adult lives.

So baby boomers have a double disadvantage, the most obvious is of course that they are not as savvy with the technology as younger generations. But this can be overcome with a bit of application and persistence. The bigger problem in my view is that it requires a whole different world view. The shift from a hierarchical frame of reference to a lateral and peer to peer one requires a 90 degree rotation of your perspective.


Understand the power of networks and you’re halfway there

So to get back to the title of this post, the power of Linkedin for job search isn’t that it’s a new medium for finding job adverts. As I outlined at the start, this is really an illusion anyway and it helps recruiters and hiring organisations much more than it helps applicants.

No the real power of Linkedin is how it allows us to build powerful personal networks.

Network theorists identified the power of networks as early as the 1970s. Mark Granovetter and his paper “The Strength of Weak Ties,” and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi were pioneers in the understanding of network theory. Long before Linkedin was even set up, they identified why social networks have such tremendous reach and power.

Granovetter showed that people were more likely to get jobs from friends of friends, rather than immediate friends. The logic is that we know the same people our friends know and therefore if they know about a career opportunity, we probably already know about it, too. But your friend’s friends are more likely to know people you don’t know who know about career opportunities you haven’t heard about.

Let’s say you have ten close friends. That’s not much of a network, but if we also assume that each of your ten friends also has ten friends, your accessible network is now 100 people. If each of those ‘second degree’ friends also knows ten people, your reach is now 1,000…

But critically LinkedIn can multiply this reach many times over. If you have say 600 LinkedIn connections and these people all know a little about who you are and what you do, suddenly your reach is at least 6,000 people and probably much more.

The open sharing of information about ourselves, peer endorsement and shared community of online networks builds a sense of camaraderie and trust between members. Because LinkedIn focuses on people, it not only expands the scope of your search, it creates a network with trust created between members. Someone who is referred by someone you know (or someone who knows someone you know) is much more likely to be a helpful and valuable connection. This creates a connection that is psychologically more conducive to positive interaction.

Why it pays to be a ‘weak’ link

Most of us are or can easily become members of several different networks. The people who connect the unconnected are called “weak links.” This isn’t the same thing as “The Weakest Link” on TV. The weak link in network theory is where you start to get really powerful information flows because weak links connect previously unconnected people. LinkedIn has an extraordinary ability to enable you to be your own weak link, connecting you to people and potential career opportunities beyond your immediate network.

Looked at in this way, it’s an extraordinarily effective resource for career change, industry information, and employment opportunities.

So the real power of Linkedin for your job search isn’t the job ads it carries. It’s its extraordinary ability to empower you to build your network faster and more easily than ever before. Across countries. Across continents.

Once we start to think about our personal networks as being lateral not hierarchical and scaling them laterally, suddenly the way we think about and carry out our career development activities is transformed.

It’s a genuinely new age…thankfully without the need to buy crystals.

Best ways to connect on LinkedIn – one tip you’ve not heard a million times before

By Neil Patrick

Whether you are job hunting or just looking to improve your network, there’s no escaping the fact that today LinkedIn is the number one most powerful tool at your disposal.

And it’s almost certain that there are some really key people you’d like to have in your LinkedIn network that have no idea who you are.

I had a discussion recently with a friend who asked me how he could connect with people he’d never met, but who were really high profile experts in his field. He was worried that if he just approached them cold, they’d decline his invitation to connect.

And his fears were justified. The highest profile people in every field get dozens of invitations every week to connect with people they don’t know. And probably don’t even want to know. If you start to get too many declined invitations on LinkedIn, you risk being downgraded by LinkedIn or worse being classed as a spammer.

This morning I spent an hour or so looking at the tips and advice being given on how to overcome this hurdle.

There were lots of ideas about how to make your LinkedIn invitation appealing to the recipient, such as flattery and researching their work so you could comment intelligently. Joining groups and joining in conversations where they were present.

That’s all fine, but guess what, many of the world’s top professionals do not spend much if any time on LinkedIn group discussions. They quite probably only ever look at their LinkedIn messages once a week or so. They are too busy being successful to spend their time this way - they don’t need or want more connections or more online messages.

And if you approach them cold, chances are they’ll ignore you or decline your invitation, because they just don’t need it.

And that’s a problem if they are potentially a really valuable connection for you.

But there’s a way round this.

What many people don’t appreciate is that LinkedIn may be social media, but it’s not a free for all like Facebook or Twitter. And because people share much more personal information about themselves on their LinkedIn profiles, many treat invitations to connect with caution. I class LinkedIn as high stakes social media.

But most people also have a Twitter account. This is low stakes social media. And you can usually discover this on their LinkedIn profile too. Just click on the contact info button and you’ll often find their Twitter account link. Here’s the button you need:

Click this button, see if they provide their Twitter handle and you can go straight to their Twitter account and follow them. Then you can develop a relationship with them on Twitter even if they don’t follow you back. You can retweet them. Send them a friendly tweet in response to something they tweeted about. In a little while, you’ll have a relationship where they know who you are. And more importantly like you at least a little.

Now if you send them an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, (and don’t forget of course to personalise it by mentioning that you are already connected on Twitter), it’s highly likely they’ll accept. To be extra sure, you could even be super courteous and ask them on Twitter first if they’d be happy to connect on LinkedIn.

I have used this method of connecting with key people dozens of times and it’s never failed yet. Moreover, it means that when we do connect on LinkedIn, we already have a basic relationship in place, that’s a great jumping off point for more dialogue.

Sometimes, it really does make sense to knock at the back door, not the front!

Tips to turbo charge your social media for job hunting

By Neil Patrick and Axel Kőster

Several people have approached me asking about the best way to grow their social media presence to help with their job search. So I thought I’d team up with my good friend Axel Kőster at the Manhattan Group and share a few quick tips that we hope will be of help.

1. You cannot buy social media success!

Our first piece of advice is don’t ever be tempted into taking up offers to buy Twitter followers, Linkedin network or Facebook likes. This is a breach of the terms of service of Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook and it can easily get your account suspended. So don’t waste your money or risk your reputation! It’s also a wasted effort as the type of followers you’ll get are unlikely to be the type you want.

Like attracts like too, so if you follow people too randomly, you may for example start attracting a following of Romanian wrestling fans (or worse!) And once this happens, you can be sure more of the same will follow! Of course, the same thing happens if you follow the right people - you’ll attract more of the right people.

Whilst quantity is not a bad thing, quality trumps quantity every time. The people you should be connecting with are for example recruiters, job search experts, other people in your profession or what you are all about, news media and target employers in your own region/country (assuming you’re aren't planning on emigrating) not teenage Transformers fans in Tokyo! You will find many useful Twitter connections if you search the #Hashtags relevant to their field...for example #Job #Recruitment #AxelJob etc

2. Feel free to use my Twitter lists and set up your own!

Twitter can be a difficult thing to get comfortable with at first. As someone once remarked, ‘Twitter doesn’t come with an instruction book.’ Neither does it have much in the way of useful tools within it (more on this shortly) and the ‘Help desk’ is non-existent. So it’s down to you to be creative and develop your Twitter account in a way that works for you and helps you achieve your goals.

Our view is quite simple - you should 'run your own race, not someone’s else’s' and make it one which you are comfortable with. Setting up your own Twitter lists before you get too many followers is a wise idea to help you find people again when you may have forgotten their name or company!

So, my second tip is to take advantage of the Twitter lists I have set up to help you on my Twitter account. Here, I’ve placed the most helpful people in my Twitter following and organised the key ones like recruiters by location, so you can quickly and easily find and follow the ones which are most relevant to you.

Please feel free to subscribe to any of my lists you like and as I update them, they’ll be automatically updated for you too!

I have also set up lists of other useful people for you like coaches, resume writers and the most exciting firms that are hiring.

And for beginners on social media, it is a great idea to network with experts and more experienced people in this field. Their blogs and tips will usually be free and can get you off to a faster and more confident start.

We are both more than happy to help beginners for free and steer you in the right direction. So if you think we could help you, please just ask!

3. Use Twitter to find and engage with the people that are important to you

Compared to Linkedin, Twitter is an informal and relaxed environment. And in every field, there are ‘stars’ who everyone would like to have in their network. But asking strangers to connect with you on Linkedin may result in a decline. So don’t risk it.

Connect with them first on Twitter by making some positive comments on or regularly retweeting their tweets for example and they will be likely to reciprocate your follow. Once you've established a connection in this way, it’s then relatively easy to connect with them also on Linkedin.

4. Have a plan and stick to it

Our fourth tip is to make your social media activity a regular part of your daily routine. It’s very easy to get sucked into spending hours and hours every day, reading posts, commenting, sending out Tweets etc. etc. Don’t! Have a strategy and a plan for a reasonable amount of time each day to devote to your social media activity and stick to it. Prioritise the tasks you will do each day and focus on hitting those targets.

Developing a successful dialogue with one or two key people each day is a much better use of your time than spreading yourself too thinly across dozens of discussions and Groups. A single well-constructed comment or response to a key person is more valuable than clicking a hundred ‘like’ buttons. So stay focussed!

5. Make use of social media tools to help you

The next tip is to make use of some of the fantastic free tools that are available to help you manage your social media presence and get much more efficient at it.

As I said earlier, Twitter doesn’t have many useful tools within it, so you need to make use of separate tools to help you develop your social media profile in an informed and focused way.

Two of the most useful are Kred and SocialBro and here’s Axel’s take on these and how they can be of help to you.




Last but not least, if you’d like more help from Axel or myself, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll do our best to help.

Why it’s good to be promiscuous

By Neil Patrick

Last week I sent out a link to my LinkedIn profile via Twitter. It was accompanied with an open invitation to connect for anyone who wished to.

I had an unexpected reply tweet.

The exact words escape me now, but the essence was ‘ Why do this…surely you don’t want to connect with just anyone?’

My reply was unequivocal. Sure I do. Why would I not? I can always say 'No' (but I rarely do).

I had a similar conversation with a professional friend a couple of weeks ago. He has been a (very) late comer to Linkedin and only has about a dozen connections. He recognises the importance of building his network, but he was paranoid that if any of his connections were with anyone that wasn’t an absolute superstar, this might harm his reputation. But of course the people he wanted to connect with that didn’t know him or have any connection with him would be unlikely to accept an invitation from a stranger with only a dozen connections.

Catch 22.

Now if I think for a moment about all the work I am engaged on right now, I have about half a dozen professional projects on the go. How did these come to be? Well every single one bar just one, came about from relationships I have developed with other professionals through social media. That’s right about 83% of them.

And did I carefully target these people? Nope. They came about naturally through them choosing to work with me because they felt I was the right person that could help them out. And they made this choice of their own free will, not because I had targeted them as a ‘prospect’.

Sure I have had plenty of other approaches which I have turned down, but not because they were necessarily a waste of my time or unattractive, more because I have to prioritise and I’m in the fortunate position of being able to choose which proposals I take up and which I politely turn down.

But I have absolutely no way of knowing which connections I make through social media will turn into business relationships and which will not. And more importantly, if I wasted my time trying to second guess this, I suspect I’d nearly always get it wrong.

So I network freely and openly. And despite this ‘promiscuity’ I have not once had a problem with any of my social media connections.

Quite the contrary in fact. I am constantly amazed and humbled at how many people in my network help me out of sheer kindness and generosity of spirit.

All this social media interaction drives more attention. It’s like power to an electronic magnet. The more power, the stronger the attraction field becomes.

Exactly the same principles apply when you are looking to find a new job. If your attraction field is weak, you’ll get found by fewer prospective opportunities.

This principal and much more which it seems is counter-instinctive to many professional people is talked about here by the ever excellent Jill Konrath, who it seems is just as promiscuous as I am!

My Twitter Lists - please take advantage of them!

By Neil Patrick

As I have been developing this blog, I have built in some useful features which I thought I’d just take a little time to remind you about.

One of these is my Twitter lists.

I've set these up so they can be as useful to others as I can make them.Whether you are networking, job hunting, or building your own Twitter following, one of the things you need to do is find the right people. Like recruiters, hiring companies, resume writers, coaches or even just good people to connect with on Twitter.

As you may have discovered, simple Twitter searches are not too helpful in this respect. Because of this fact and to help me keep track of the ever growing number of people I am connected with through Twitter, I use Twitter lists.

I am surprised that so few people on Twitter do this. But these are a great tool which will help you no end if you are trying to get more out of Twitter.

So whilst I’d recommend that you make use of this method to organise your own Twitter followers, I’m also offering you mine.

It’s really easy to do, in just a couple of clicks!

1.Go to the lists section on my Twitter profile page and click on it. 

This will bring up my lists which I've tried to organise so that you can easily find the right people for your individual needs. I have organised recruiters by region for example. There are also coaches, resume writers, my favourite followers etc. 

2.Click to subscribe to any list you think is relevant or may be useful to you and it will be imported straight into your own lists. That’s it! 

These lists are updated daily, so as I continue to build these lists, you’ll get my updates automatically too! You can then connect easily with anyone that you like the look of on that list just by following them.

Hope this helps and let me know if it’s useful!

Oh and if you do set up your own Twitter lists, I’ll be happy if you include me!

The value of blogging and my favourite Twitter people in the world!

By Neil Patrick

Happy birthday to US!

I am writing this at the first anniversary of starting this blog.

I thought that it would be useful to share what I've discovered so that you can see for yourself what anyone could achieve in 12 months starting from scratch. I have absolutely nothing to brag about, but strangely few bloggers seem willing to share this stuff. Many people extol the benefits of blogging, but few talk about the numbers side of it. So, I thought it might be helpful to share my data and experience for anyone who is curious about the potential that blogs and social media offer for mature professionals.

Why did I do this?

I put up my first post here on 24 September 2012. I was a total rookie and had never blogged before. My blog posts came from three sources. About one third were written by guest posters, a further third were curated from mainstream and online media and all the rest I wrote myself. Since my first post, I have followed up with 263 more. That’s quite a lot compared to most bloggers it seems, but I am in a hurry; I’m driven by two main motivations:

1. A desire to urgently inform mature professionals about how the career world has transformed without many of them really noticing and what they could do about it to protect their futures. 
2. An intense curiosity to discover for myself if and how I could harness the power of social media to assist me achieve 1. above. 

What happened?

Well it’s now one year on and I have some answers.

I’ll start by sharing some headline numbers.

Total all-time hits on this blog are around 60,000 according to Blogger. Monthly hits on this blog are currently around 10,000. However, the biggest chunk (around 70%) of these ‘hits’ are not in fact reader views, they are hits by various ‘bots’ from Google, Twitter, Kred, Klout etc. The ‘real’ figures according to Google Analytics are currently around 2,500 - 3,000 human visits a month. Big difference huh? So the first point is do not trust the numbers of hits that are recorded by Blogger or Wordpress etc. Most of these are not human reader views.

At the same time I set up the blog, I also set up a Twitter account to support it and get the message out to anyone who might be interested in what I was doing. Currently, my Twitter following is around 6,200 followers. So on average, I'm getting roughly one blog view every two months per Twitter follower.

According to Beevolve, the average Twitter following is 208. So if you have more than that, you can give yourself a pat on the back! Interestingly, less than 0.5% of Twitter users have more than 5,000 followers. 

You can see these stats and more here:

http://www.beevolve.com/twitter-statistics/

According to statisticbrain, there were 554m Twitter users in July 2013, so the top 0.5% of Twitter users ranked by following is a whopping 2.8m people! Suddenly being in the top 0.5% doesn’t sound too impressive, but given this is hardly the sexiest or most entertaining blog in the world I’m totally amazed to have got so far so fast.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/

But the numbers alone don’t really tell the whole story. I am not chasing numbers for numbers’ sake. I think engagement is much more important. What’s the point of having hundreds of thousands or even millions of social media connections if you are not interacting with them?

This is where Klout and Kred come in. These both purport to measure online influence. My Klout score has reached 61 out of 100 and my Kred score is 785 out of 1000 for influence and 8 out of 12 for outreach. Before I started this blog, these were both zero or as close as makes no difference. If you want to know more about Kred and Klout and what they mean, I have written a post about it here:

http://40pluscareerguru.blogspot.com/2013/04/klout-and-kred-are-they-relevant-to.html

And then there’s Linkedin. A year ago I had about 360 connections on Linkedin. Every single one was someone that I’d met at least once (and usually much more) face to face. People I’d worked with and done business with over the last 20 years or so. About six or seven of them had been kind enough to give me recommendations.

In all honesty, I used LinkedIn pretty much like many do…rather like a self-updating address book of all my real world business connections. And since I worked mostly inside that little bubble, my network was growing very slowly. I would receive about one invitation a month to connect if I was lucky…and most of these were from people I'd met face to face.

Fast forward to today. Every day now I get a new invitation to connect with someone new on Linkedin. Most days it’s several. And most of these are from the sort of people anyone would love to have in their network. Apart from creating lots of exciting new opportunities, this has also massively boosted my search ranking on Linkedin. Today if I search against the keywords for the type of work I do, I come out on page one of a Linkedin search within a radius of about 50 miles. This in turn means I am approached more and more frequently with great new opportunities. 

But numbers are not the most important thing…people are

But these numbers don’t reveal the reality of the situation. People and relationships are what this is all about, not statistics.

I want to share insights, information and knowledge that is relevant and that I hope will help people. I want to engage with people. I want to help them avoid the growing threats to their futures and achieve their goals.

Which brings me to what I think is the most incredible outcome of these last 12 months. It’s the sheer number and quality of people that who’ve chosen to connect with me with and who have responded positively to what I am doing.

They are as diverse as they are numerous. There are so many that I couldn’t possibly recount all the details of all the emails, DMs, tweets, phone calls, Skype and Google hangouts that have gone on. But I want here to publicly thank every single one of them that has inspired me, helped me, encouraged me, enlightened me and even just been nice to me.

Here they are. Every single one of these people is just wonderful and I have provided their Twitter handles too so if you wish, you can easily follow them on Twitter and engage with them yourself.

Awesome Recruiters:

Axel Koster @AxelKoster

Barbara Adams @CareerProGlobal

HRIS Jobs @hrisjobs

Ibro Palic @Ibro_Palic

Intellego Jobs @intellegojobs

Randstad USA @RandstadUSPros



Career and resume experts:

Debra Wheatman @DebraWheatman

Kerry Hannon @KerryHannon

Kim Marino @CareerCoachKim

Michelle Lopez @One2OneResumes

Tony Restell @tonyrestell



World class coaches:

Donna Svei @AvidCareerist

Fernado Ratkoczy @JobSearchCenter

Jacob Share @jacobshare

Jane Anderson @jane_anderson__



Awesome HR pros:

Anne Marinis @AnneMarinis

Jeremy Scrivens @JeremyScrivens

Karalyn Brown @InterviewIQ

Lisa Orrell @GenerationsGuru

Nicole Le Maire @NicoleLeMaire



Linkedin experts:

Koka Sexton @kokasexton

Stacy Donovan Zapar @StacyZapar



Great guest post writers:

Anna Pitts @annaepitts

Anthony Juliano @ajuliano

David Hunt @davidhuntpe

Jim Langendorf @jplang43

Ron Thomas @ronald_thomas



Brilliant bloggers:

Andrew Ginsburg @GinsburgJobs

David K Waltz @davidkwaltz

Deb Briceland-Betts @DBricelandBetts

Jason Poquette @jasonpoquette

Jesse Colombo @TheBubbleBubble

John Baldino @jbalive

Karen Austin @TheGenAboveMe

Leo Woodhead @thecareersblog

Marc Miller @CareerPivot

Marcia La Reau @ForwardMotionUS

Mary Eileen Williams @FeistySideFifty



The lifetime achievement award goes to:

Everald Compton @EVERALDATLARGE



Social media and tech experts:

The one and only…Gary Hyman! @GaryHyman



Special mention for support above and beyond the call of duty:

Yittah Lawrence @ITISAGR8DAY



And last but not least all these super kind people who have supported and encouraged me:

Abby Kohut @Absolutely_Abby

Angel Torres @angeltorres

Anke Gosch @ueberfliegernet

Anne Sachs @TheatreSmart

Anthony Sider @BudgetDude

Biggleswade JCP @BiggleswadeJCP

Buzz Brindle @BrindleMedia

Caroline Fabian @fabe_recruits

Corrina Wade @wade_corrina

Dave Kushan @DavidKushan

David Nicola @Capt_Careerist

Deepak Sharma @deepakmandi

Diana Schniedman @DianaSchneidman

Diane McWade @dianemcwade

Dionne Lew @DionneLew

Dr. Heather Dix @HeatherChizz

Elzbieta Jaworska @edjaworska

Fotis Tsoumanis @fotispersisting

Getrude Sawadye @getrudesawadye

Gul Nur Bilek @GulNurBilek

Hanna Hurley @hanna_hurley

Helen Fisher @HelenJFisher

Jacqueline Ktita @JacquelineKtita

Jeanette Barrowcliffe @J_Barrowcliffe

Jerome Holland @JeromeHolland1

John Hanna @johnhannagdp

John Siracusa @john_siracusa

Karen Julius @karenjulius

Karla Crawford @kklm7

Kimberlee Lockhart @Kimba_67

Les Floyd @Lesism

Luis Carlos de Paula @lcdepaula

Margie Miklas @MargieMiklas

Mark Affleck @markaffleck

Mark Seaden @MarkSeaden

Projectme @projectmeuk

Sonja Vukadin @SONJAVUKADIN

Steve Leuck @AudibleRx

Wayne Miller @Affilipede

William Carrington @ColCarrington 

I only knew just one of these brilliant people one year ago (yes that's you John!). Today I am proud and flattered to count every one of them as a valued friend and supporter. My sincere thanks and appreciation goes out to each and every one of you. You are all awesome!

Which brings me to the most important point of all. When I started out just one year ago, I had no idea of where I’d be today. I had no clue if anyone was interested in what I thought or had to say.

The last year has shown me that social media can help anyone not only get their message out, it can connect you with people that not only share your beliefs, but also who are willing to share their valuable time, which is why I wanted to express my gratitude in this way.

And that’s the whole point, none of us knows everything. We never can and we never will. But through teamwork and helping others before ourselves, it’s possible to achieve extraordinary things. And that’s the power of social media. Finding and connecting us with the people that share our beliefs and values so we can create amazing things together.

I’m not promising that I can solve everyone’s problems, although I’ll try to help wherever I can and payback all the people who have helped me on my journey. I started out with a very simple idea. I just thought that too many mature professionals were blind to the career revolution that has swept away almost everything that we all grew up believing about work and careers. And this was a big threat to them. And I hoped that my modest insights could help make peoples’ futures a bit more secure and successful.

My work is far from done. But thanks to all of you, my commitment and belief in my mission has been cemented and will drive us forward to…who knows where?

Thank you all and I am now wondering where things will be a year from now. Personally I can’t wait to find out!

Happy birthday to US!