Joining Meetup

I’ve been using meetup.com as part of my networking efforts. The site has a lot of really good features. Being able to search by interest, locality (by zip code), distance from that zipcode.

Registering for an account is quick, free and easy and the link to register is here: Register for meetup.com.

My profile can be found here: My meetup.com profile.

For those of you in the Phoenix metro area looking for work I would recommend these groups to  join,  Business Networking Classified  and Face Time Friday™ . The experience I’ve had with these groups, has been very positive, and I’ve attended several of their events in the north east valley.

Meetup site Features

Calendar Export:

One of the best site features I like is the export to calendar feature. On the  main meetup page there is a calendar, and you can export the calendar into various formats, Outlook, iCal, Google, RSS, and Atom.  Either All your meetup events, or just the ones you’ve RSVP’d yes or maybe to. 

While I haven’t found a way to utilize the RSS feed yet, it is something that can be exported and used in another web page as I have my Networking Calendar feed from a calendar I own.

On individual event pages such as Face Time Friday – East Valley the calendar options are a bit different since it’s an individual event, you have Outlook, iCal, Google and Yahoo!.

Searching for a local meetup group:

The Find Meetup page is where you begin your search, entering your location by zip code,  and entering a keyword such as “small business” or “networking” for example.

It will bring up a list of results, once you find a group to join, you can join the group, and more than likely will be prompted with a short questionaire from the group owner which will be part of that groups profile when someone looks at your profile in that group.

Some groups are private and membership will need to be approved by the owner before you’ll be allowed to join.

Group Message boards:

The message boards are individual for each group you’re a member of, and you can choose to ‘track’ the message board where you will recieve notification of new messages in a threaded discussion by email, or not.  I watch the message boards for upcomming events, or if someone has a comment or suggestion for an event it can be posted there by the membership of the group.

Facebook Integration:

Another very cool feature I’ve utilized a few times is the facebook integration, when you RSVP Yes or Maybe for an event there is a checkbox to add it to facebook, this will post the event details to your wall and friends feed.  This allows me to show my facebook connections that I’ll be attending the event.

The “What’s Happening?” feed

While I haven’t had much of a chance to utilize this feature, or even tune it to my liking, it is a feed showing all activity across all your subscribed meetup groups, when someone joins the group, when a message is posted, an event is added, someone RSVP’s or changes an RSVP for an event they are attending, and activity on your profile, such as  someone sends a greeting, tags you in a photo (much like facebook tagging).

Overall thoughts:

I like the design and layout of the meetup site, it is easy to navigate, and finding groups you’re interested in is relatively easy.  Depending on your location, there may be more or less meetup groups available. 

I’ve found it a useful tool in my job search and networking efforts, as well as just generallly being a social outlet as I belong to a couple of local hiking groups through the meetup site, and hiking is one of my other interests. Even in the other groups, networking comes just from talking and letting someone know what you’re looking for and what you have to offer.

Happy Reading!

-Martin

In response to a post I read this morning by Frank Angelone, I would have to agree with his assessment on posting photos on Facebook, or any social media site for that matter, especially if you are currently in career transition, and seeking employment, or currently working and looking to change jobs.

Its really important,  not just with photographs, but almost any online content, you should think before you post, who may see it, and how they may view it, especially if it is a prospective employer.

Keep it private if you need to.  I wrote a post on my blog and made password protected, and shared with few people who I trusted, and have since made it private.  It was an issue I had with copyright infringement that at the time was appropriate, but since I’ve been blogging for a while, I’ve learned to lighten up a bit and not take that issue as serious as I had.

I have chosen at this time to keep my Facebook profile public, I do have a Myspace page, but haven’t updated it in over a year, and don’t intend on doing so at this time, it is set to private so that only my friends can see it.  Nothing to worry about there, just that I’ve chosen not to update or use myspace at this time, and made it private.

Two things I’ve done actually are matching up my online profiles across the sites with the same picture, for brand recognition mainly, so people know it’s me and what I’ve written.  Secondly, when I change the photo one one site, I chage it across the board, even on sites that I would consider more social than professional.

I do have links to various social networking sites on my contact page. I do have a Youtube channel, I do have Picasa, and other photo sharing accounts which can be shared on different social media networks, but I have not and will not post inappropriate photos or videos of myself or others because on some sites such as Facebook you can Tag a photo with another users name, and it will be attached to their account, and can be looked up as well.

In my job search and in person networking, even meeting someone for the first time, I generally dress up than down, unless it’s stated prior to the meeting that it is casual.

Coming from a background in IT, the places I’ve worked in recent past have been business casual, allowing for polo shirts instead of dress shirts, and at times jeans instead of slacks.

I had an assignment through a staffing firm recently, and asked the recruiter about how I should dress for the assignment, and was asked to wear slacks, but when I showed up, almost everyone else was wearing jeans, I felt a bit out of place, but it was ok.

I had asked about dress code prior to the assignment, and done the work that was asked of me. I talked with one of the recruiters yesterday when I went to pick up my paycheck, asking him if there was any feedback from the client on the work performed, he said there were no issues, the work was performed quickly and correctly, and his comment was ‘no news is good news’.  I hope to work again for that client, because it was an enjoyable work experience, and I learned a few things in the process I hadn’t done before.

Another good idea is to google yourself, or set up a google alert, which I wrote about here,  because it can give you an idea of what employers can find about you online.

Happy Friday and Happy reading!

-Martin

I’ve made the acquaintance  of Rachel Levy through Twitter, we’ve been talking back and forth on twitter, and bouncing ideas off each other. I have the utmost respect for her and her ideas regarding social media and I’ve gained valuable insight in reading her material.  I was able to help her the other day with a formatting problem she had with a post as well, the text was not going where she was expecting it to, so I explained the <BR> </BR> to her would force a line feed where she needed it to get the text where she wanted.

We are both currently looking for work. She made a new post to her blog regarding how to syndicate your blog/website that I found interesting, and wanted to add my own ideas here as well.

Her post is located here: How do you Syndicate a blog or website?

The first thing she mentions is posting it on Twitter 3 times in a 24 hour period at different times of the day.  Her blog also has a list of applications for twitter. I’ve used some of them on the list, it is extensive, and something I’d recommend taking a look at to help make your Twitter experience a little easier.

One of the applications is called TweetLater, which I have utilized to spread out messages during the day on Twitter, even when I’m not at the computer. With as busy as I have been lately, it has been something I’ve used a bit more often.  I compose messages I want to send, even referencing older blog posts I’ve written to get people to read content that may be helpful or related to my most recent post, and also a couple just saying “Check out my new blog post @ http://martinpiraino.com/” without making reference to the specific permalink to the new post, and I’ve noticed this gets people to read more of the site than just the new post.

Along with this, I also send direct messages to new followers I get on Twitter, thanking them for following me, and just making a simple statement as above, and the response to that has been positive as well.

Her second point is to post on Ping-o-matic, I actually utilize this through Google’s feedburner,  and go into further detail about that later in this post.

I have also used Digg on my own post before, I don’t think it it something you should do too often as she also states in her blog post.

There are plug-ins for WordPress where you can add links for readers to click on to help them syndicate your posts for you, if you look at the bottom of my posts, there is a section that says “Share and Enjoy” where you can click on those links and share it on the sites I’ve selected to share it on.

She also says that you should update status on your social networking sites, and I do this regularly, with LinkedIn, even adding a short comment about what I may be doing for that day (networking, interviews, meetings, etc.)

On Facebook I also added my own blog to my profile there, you can see it following this link: http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/martin_pirainos_blog/ I then invite users in my network on Facebook to come to my blog, I have 6 followers there (including myself).  For now have to manually update and add a notice that I posted something, but if I get enough followers there, it will be following my blog feed automatically, I only need a few more users to follow it to do that.

One thing that I did add was a RSS feed from Twitter on Facebook, so when I do send a message on Twitter, it actually gets posted to my Facebook, and Friendfeed sites as well, basically making it easy for me to post in one place and it to be syndicated to other social networking sites that other contacts read.

It helps if you can use an RSS feed from one site to feed into another, or use applications on those sites that offer syndication, two sites I don’t utilize often but do pull my Twitter feed to are Plaxo, and Friendfeed. On LinkedIn they have a WordPress application and Bloglink appliction, so my network can see when I’ve either sent a twitter message or written a new blog post, even if I forget to update my status there.

Some people I know including Rachel and myself have also been in the news media in some form (News Print/TV) as some news media outlets turn to job searchers/bloggers to showcase their stories in regards to the current state of the economy.

I was actually contacted by the reporter for ABC15 a week after I wrote an email to him asking if I could link to a story he had on the job fair I attended. I never imagined that one email would get me the exposure I’d gotten, but I’m glad it happened.

I have links to the ABC15 story on my sidebar on my blog so that users don’t have to search for the blog post I wrote about it, and even now three weeks later I continue to get hits off that story directly, but for people reading my blog for the first time, I also direct traffic to the video interview and story on the ABC15 site, my being on a taped/televised interview, it gives people an idea of who I am and what I am passionate about with my blog as well.

When Rachel and I were speaking on Twitter on Monday March 9th, she asked for other ideas for syndication, Along with some of the ones I’d mentioned previously here, I thought of one that she hadn’t mentioned and that was to create a sitemap if she hadn’t already, I utilize the tools on my web hosting account to do just that, created in XML markup, and update it at least once a week, letting it find new URLs by my server logs or by what I post, update it, and push it out to Google.

The following is from a Google press release “Major Search Engines Unite to Support a Common Mechanism for Website Submission”

How Sitemaps Work
A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

There are also other things I’ve noticed in how traffic has come to my site through searches, people searching for particular tags or people I’ve mentioned in my blog posts. I’ve made it a habit to tag the names of people I talk about in my posts, and that too has brought some traffic to my site as well.  One of my last posts was indexed rather quickly on Google when I mentioned “Sean Connery” at “Austin’s Who’s Who in Arizona”, which pushed it to the top 2 pages in a search on Google.  It is worth it to pay attention to what search terms are bringing visitors to your site, and to work on different words to tag to help in that.

Another way to help syndicate your blog/website is to participate in other blogs, commenting on them, providing trackbacks to posts you reference in your own writing, as I’ve done here with two of Rachel’s posts.

I’ve also added google feedburner links on my site for the RSS feed, and the ability to subscribe to my feed by email, as someone had asked me about that recently, they preferred to be subscribed by email to my blog.

Another option in feedburner is under Publicize is called PingShot, where you can have it notify other services when you post a new message, the following is my list:

When I publish new content in my feed, notify these services…

• Technorati — Technorati is the authority on what is going on in the world of weblogs
• My Yahoo — a customizable web page with news stock quotes weather and many other features
• Bloglines — helps you subscribe to and manage lots of web information
• Ping-o-matic — Pinging lets dozens of services know you have updated your site and increases traffic to your blog
• Newsgator — tracks it all and brings the web pages to you

… plus up to five additional services.

• TailRank
• Blog Buzz Machine
• FeedBlitz
• Google Blog Search Pinging Service
• Alexa

Lastly, one other thing you can do to help get the word out, is to add your blog/website to your email signature, and have it on every message you send, my email signature consists of my name, email address, web site (this blog) and my LinkedIn public profile page.

While I’ve discussed ways to syndicate your blog online in this post, word of mouth is another very simple way to get more readership, adding your blog/website to a business or networking card is another way to get the word out with people you meet and network with face to face.

Happy Reading!

-Martin

My tips for the day

1. Get out and get noticed, a great local resource in Phoenix for networking events is networkingphoenix.com search the internet for local network groups for your own area
2. Set daily, weekly and monthly goals in your job search, make them realistic, not unattainable, you don’t want to set yourself up for defeat
3. Take constructive criticism gracefully.  I’ve learned from some very helpful people that if someone tells you something about how you handle an issue, that more than one person likely has seen the same thing, so don’t over-react.
   • These are more than likely people in your ‘inner-circle’ and noticed something, whatever it is.  Pause a moment and listen, they care and want to help you succeed in your life.
   • Use it to your advantage
   • Take time to reflect on it
   • Grow and learn from it
   • Thank the person for bringing it to your attention later
4. Find someone else who shares your story, and bounce ideas off each other.  Remember the saying, ‘there is no I in team’, and teamwork is something that will help out in the long run, so don’t try to go it alone, here are  some resources you can utilize:
   • Alumni association and/or career services office of colleges you attended
   • Your LinkedIn Network
   • People you previously worked with in your field

I came across the following message on twitter this morning from a buddy of mine who runs jobshouts.com, Mike Quale that was Retweeted from another couple of people.

So I had to go look at it, and just a quick overview of that article, I am doing 5 of these things, I will go over them here. The full article is located here if you don’t click on the short link above: http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/career-experts-8_little_known_tricks_for_the_job_hunt-79

1. Add a signature to your outgoing email messages
   • While I have almost always included my name and email address, since I’ve been searching for a job and since starting this blog, I have added a bit of additional information to my email signature, to include name, email address, blog site and LinkedIn profile URL and I do recommend everyone not currently doing something like this to add one, most webmail providers also include an option to add a signature.
2. Include your LinkedIn profile URL in that signature
   • This is something I started doing once I had my LinkedIn profile up and running, my LinkedIn profile mirrors my resume for the most part, but still does need some tweaking
3. Use Twitter to keep your fans in the loop
   • I’m making a point to connect with people, and I send relevant messages, also letting people know when I’ve made a new post here so they can read it and follow what I’m doing, not only do I do that but I have my twitter feed pulled in to facebook, and I utilize the LinkedIn “What are you working on?” status update as well
4. Make your Facebook page work for you – not against you
   • This one is the one that I’m not doing, I just need to figure out how to work this, if there is anyone out there that can help me with this, I’d appreciate it
5. Add a qoute to your resume
   • This is another that I’m not doing, I can think of several things, but if anyone has a format or idea on where and how to place it on the resume, I’d like some suggestions
6. Get a Moo card
   • I have a ‘network’ card, listing my contact information, this Moo card idea is a bit different and something I will be looking into
7. Put a voice on your job search profile
   • This is one that I plan on implementing in a different way, currently my ‘voice’ was the short news interview I had on ABC15 which there are links to from my sidebar here on my site, but I need to expand on that a bit more in my own video or audio
8. Rewrite your resume so it sounds human
   • Currently working on my resume with Christian Kaijser of Career Evolutions to retool my resume and take it to the next level.

Happy Reading!

Martin