Many educators struggle with networking. Some see networking as something people do in the corporate world, but not in academia. They don’t always understand why they should network, or how to do it if they want to. Mary Vogl-Rauscher has taught Leadership Development and business courses at Moraine Park Technical College in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin for the past 15 years. The Leadership Development program offers training in leadership; human relations; budgeting; quality, legal and safety issues; problem solving and team building; and diversity and change management. MORE INFO ON PROGRAM: (http://bit.ly/q8DMpk )
Prior to Moraine Park, Mary was Director of Executive Staffing and Development at Shopko for ten years and also worked in Human Resources and Operations at Proctor and Gamble and Corporate McDonald’s.
With her experience in higher education, career transitions, human resources and leadership development, Mary was able to offer some great perspectives on networking, how to do it, how to get started, and stumbling blocks to avoid when networking. Vogl-Rauscher credits networking for helping her successfully make the transition from the corporate world to academia.
This edition of the podcast was pre-recorded. The show will return live next week, with an interview of Laurence Shatkin from JIST Publishing. We’ll be discussing how to go about researching and planning a career outside of higher education. Please listen and call in!
What value do you place on free professional development and networking events, like free webinars, hashtag chats on Twitter, and free in-person career events?
We’ll talk about some of these ideas and hopefully share perspectives on free professional development and networking, in contrast to specialized help you pay for, formalized mentoring, short courses, books. etc.
Call in and let me know what you think!
I’ll be talking about a new upcoming hashtag chat I am putting together with #SASearch which will be entirely devoted to job search issues in student affairs. We’re hoping to start next week and have a weekly opportunity to discuss job search issues. We’ll be using the hashtag #sasearch and
Also, I’ll share of my experiences with webinar platforms, especially those that are free, including BigMarker, which I used this week, and others.
And finally, I am going to talk a bit about Hiring for Hope, a great non-profit here in Georgia which I volunteered for recently and about my fundraising campaign on FirstGiving to support this charity.
Greg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 2 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talks about knowing more about your network, and figuring out what’s important, using Social CRM tools.
Obviously, my niche is career coaching, but I am also a small businessman, so I see the utility of Gist in both roles. How do you think Gist could be used by job seekers or small businesses to really gather information about their employers, partners or even their competition?
I think that, for a job seeker, it can really help you to see what is going on out in the marketplace, about either the individual you are dealing with in a hiring process, or to just get a better scope of what goes on in that business, how that brand communicates, and to be more knowledgeable, so you can start acting as if you work at that company already. If you can show them how you can contribute from day one, it is much more likely that they could easily imagine you in that job.
And as far as a small business owner, if you are keeping track of trends in an industry, and you want to tag all the relevant contacts you have in that industry, your competitors, suppliers and your customers, that Gist can definitely help you either to reach out or to them by amplifying them privately, or by amplifying them publicly by sending them out via Facebook and Twitter.
On the flip side of that, social media has done so much to deliver information to us quickly and affordably, but there are definitely days when I feel like I have so much information, it’s like I’m drinking from a fire hose. How do you think users can use Gist to keep from suffering from that information overload?
Well, I think the first thing they can do is go to Gist.Com and sign up for our e-mail digest. And that would allow them to get information about the people they care about once a day or once a week. We talk about sitting down for your morning coffee, that you might take 5 or 10 minutes every morning or maybe a couple of times a week, to go down a tag list or a list of all the people in your network, and try to find one or two or three that you’d like to reach out to personally. It can definitely help you do that.
I encourage my clients (both career clients and small business clients) to use social media for monitoring their presence and their reputation online. How do you see Gist or other Social CRM tools helping someone to do that?
Well, you know when people sign up for a new tool, they want to see “what does that tool know about me,” because I know most about what information is right about myself. So you can go in and actually the first contact that is built in Gist is your personal contact. You can find that at gist.com/people/me and you can go ahead and edit that contact if it is not quite right. It should mostly be right, but if it’s not quite right, you can edit that contact. You can learn more about how to edit the contacts of your friends, and understanding so far what’s out there, it’s really good at being able to scan the horizon and understand that there are mentions they are likely to see of you, and there are mentions they are not likely to see of you.
LinkedIn has passed Myspace to become the second-most popular online social network in the U.S., behind Facebook. According to an article this week on CNN, comScore, an Internet analytics firm reported that LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors in June, approximately 500,000 more than the month before.
By contrast, Myspace experienced a drop of about 1.4 million U.S. visitors from May, and Facebook smashes all of them soundly with 160.8 million unique visitors in June.
This doesn’t really surprise me, because I have been using LinkedIn more and more for professional networking, and have been helping clients understand how to use the network effectively. A couple of months ago, I did my first local seminar here in Athens, a half-day workshop on LinkedIn, coupled with an opportunity to get a professional headshot from one of my local clients, Ann Yarbrough.
The seminar went well, and resulted in a few opportunities for me to get my name out in the area. One of the attendees was the publisher of the Chamber of Commerce magazine for the next county over (Barrow), and she offered me a chance to contribute an article. Two representatives of one of the local phone book publishers and they really enjoyed the seminar, and offered me a free ad in next year’s phonebook. And Ann got a free ad and an offer to possibly have her photos on the cover of the phone book, as well. I’ll be offering an online seminar soon on LinkedIn, based on the format of this presentation. In the meantime, I’ll be running articles this week on how to get the most out of LinkedIn.
Tomorrow: Why you need to “get” LinkedIn.
Don’t forget! If you are still looking for a job, I am running a coaching special until July 15! For $300, participants will get 4 coaching sessions, access to online activities, and brief e-mail and phone check-ins for 6 months. The special price for this offer will expire July 15, or when enrollment reaches 20, whichever comes first.
This is the lowest rate I expect to offer on individual coaching this year, and I am planning to raise my regular rates on August 1st, and to change the structure of packages I offer individual clients.
So, if you are still looking for a job, and could use a strategic partner to help you move forward in your career, act now!
This week, the Student Affairs Twitter Chat (#sachat) passed a milestone. Now one year into its existence, it has changed how many student affairs professionals engage in conversations and professional development. I’ve been a member of the community surrounding this chat and the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog during this formative year, so I’d like to share my thoughts on how being involved in this community changed my life.
What communities are you engaged in online?
Are you using social media to engage other professionals and to network? Is it making you a better professional?
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
