The Twit Pitch

If you were on Twitter last year, you know that Stowe Boyd from /Message coined the term Twit Pitch and launched the idea of elevator pitches now being too long. This concept of having a Twitter-ready elevator pitch for your business is solid. As Search.Twitter becomes the search tool of choice for many, with semantic searches of your trusted network frequently supplanting even the mighty Google, now is the time to figure out how to fit everything you offer into 140 characters (or less, to take advantage of the powerful retweet, or RT network).

It sounds daunting, but I assure you it can be done. Once you have your Twit Pitch tweet formulated, go ahead and tweet it out. Even if you aren’t looking for staff, investors or customers, it can’t hurt to get your message out there. Then click the date stamp on it to open the tweet in its own window. Bookmark that page. Save it, and use it whenever you need to answer the question “What is it you or your company does, exactly?” via Twitter.

The Twitter Resumé

For individuals seeking work in this web world we live in, having a Twitter resumé is essential. It is searchable, succinct and a powerful way to convey how you can help businesses looking to hire via online tools. Stuart C Foster took this advice to heart today in response to my suggestion that a Twitter resumé would be easier for me to pass on to my network. He promptly provided a Twitter resumé that was powerful, and short enough for me to immediately share with my network (see the RT here).

My own Twitter resumé can be found on my bio page. It is a more literal interpretation, covering the major points found in my CV. However yours looks, make sure you take the extra time to whittle it down to its sharpest, most functional form.

Hashtags For Jobs

Hashtags have become a key tool to job seekers and companies looking to hire, as well as networks of people who use hashtags to direct their networks to jobs they come across but may not be interested in themselves. If you are a job seeker, adding the job related hashtags as they come up to your Search.Twitter arsenal is key to locating the best opportunities out there, as determined by your trusted network. You can add such hashtags as #jobangels, #RTJobs, #jobseekers, and more now, and keep you eyes peeled – more crop up daily.

If you are truly a social media whiz, you can not only make your Twitter resumé short enough to RT, you can hashtag it so you can see who forwards it on for you, or to fine tune it to a specific job. For example, a PHP whiz might end their Twitter resumé with #php to come up in searches about the topic. Keep in mind that you aren’t just showing up on Twitter with hashtags – Google indexes Twitter also, so you show up in Google searches for your keyword (hashtag) as well.

Happy hunting!

Triston touched briefly on this from a Millennial perspective over on Tech.Blorge, as well. In light of the changing job market and emerging new economy, I wanted to go into a bit more detail for those of you who are coming in to the job market. Following some of the pointers will help you if you are already in the market for a job, but these tips will most benefit the Millennials and Digital Natives out there who will be entering the future work space.

Your Online Presence Is Part of Your Searchable Personal Resume From The First Day You Participate on the Internet

Whether you first log on to MySpace or a school network in your teens, or start using Disney’s closed social networks from the age of three with parental supervision, know that your online presence is recorded somewhere, in some way, from the first time you participate. Levels of privacy vary, but it is safe to assume that a determined person can find our online history, all or in part. Thanks to sites like the Wayback Machine you can even find data from the early days of the Internet as we know it, pre social media.

The up and coming digital natives are much more in tune with this lack of separation between personal and private identity. Even so, job seekers should be prepared to either monitor what their friends say about them online, or be prepared to address it when interviewing for a job. Quite a few employers already include Google, FaceBook, Flickr and MySpace in their pre-employment screening of you, making that MySpace ‘photo shoot’ have implications beyond fun and games. The number of employers who search your background online will only increase as the social internet becomes more and more mainstream.

In the eyes of some employers, and some clients for the self employed or entrepreneurs, simply untagging photos and notes mentioning you is not going to be enough. These potential employers and clients want you to be more careful in even choosing your free time activities and friends. Luckily, these employers that don’t fully grasp the connectivity of the web and real world and the necessity for having a life in addition to a career will all have digital natives managing their Human Resources department in a few years, so that should ease up a bit. The rest of the companies out there are often satisfied by keeping photos of you socializing untagged and other basic reputation management precautions.

You Are Your Brand

Reputation management goes farther than making sure those photos and videos of you with the donkey doing tequila shots down in Cancun on Spring Break stay untagged. It also applies to positive reputation enforcement. Realizing that you, and your name, are going to be forever associated with your actions and making sure positive, well-rounded actions are tagged to you is just as important as keeping tabs on your slip-ups.

Positioning yourself as an expert in an interest or field early on is key. Have more than one interest? Find ways to associate yourself with them all, in a reliable, visible way. Two shining examples of reputation management and positioning in a field of expertise at two different stages of life and career are Ben Grossman and Chris Brogan. Ben, a digital native, has already worked on national campaigns in social media, started a consulting business and launched a career as a speaker. If you look for Ben online, listen to him online, then meet him in person, what you see is what you get because of his innate awareness of online presence. Chris Brogan also translates well from online ‘persona’ and image to offline person. At a much more advanced stage of his career than Ben, Gen Xer Chris has been keeping his personal brand “real” since before the concept of personal brand even existed, participating in the social media space since it first took flight. Chris’s approach involves a great deal of involvement with and transparency of his on and offline brand.

Managing your personal brand as well as Chris and Ben do takes quite a bit more time than most of us have to spend. By setting up tools like Google Alerts, TweetBeep reports, and other monitoring services you can find ways to check in on how you are presented online more efficiently. Periodically do vanity searches on your name to make sure you are confortable with the content that shows up, and be prepared to handle it if you aren’t. By keeping track of how you appear to the world, you make yourself more hirable in the age of the social resume and hyper connectivity.

If you look around the social media universe and the internet, you start to notice that the people that are talking and the people that are also listening are standing out. These people are getting the job offers, the offers of collaborative projects, the referrals. They have used the social web via tools like FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more to be seen and heard, to help people out, to showcase their knowledge, to learn from others and to interact. When you are job hunting, this network and authority building online is key to your success.

Building Authority and Trusted Networks

Building authority is part of the equation, as is presence, brand and reputation management and building your trusted network. The key component to this is the element of trust. In order to become trusted (and hirable) you have to prove yourself trustworthy. There are plenty of people online who are authorities in their field who aren’t trustworthy. Online leeches, they gain reputations for stealing content, horning in on clients or potential bosses, being creepy in general (usually when you meet them in person the creep factor is high) and doing nothing but take. To be hirable, you want to avoid becoming an online leech.

To become valued, you have to listen as well as talk. Please tell us about your area of expertise, but also listen when we respond to you, when we ask questions, when we offer suggestions. Authority without compassion and listening is hollow, and will get you nowhere. Success in hiring 2.0 is a two way street. Your next employer or client is looking for you, even as you are looking for them. You never know how you will find each other, so make sure you have been keeping your ducks in row and working toward your own bright future since day one. Innovate, participate, and actively listen and see how you can give back a part of your recipe for success in creating your social resume.