jorgensundberg.net

I got this email from LinkedIn today and was rather surprised to see that 2,188 people in my network changed jobs in 2011. My network is roughly 7.5k strong so this works out at about 30% job hoppers - a very interesting figure.

But before we start thinking about how on earth all these people found new jobs in a recession, we have to remember that this report is generated based on people updating their job titles. Merely updating your profile doesn't necessarily mean you are in a new position. Lots of people tinker with their profiles for various reasons. Not to mention everyone who is a freelancer or business owner, these users certainly change their profiles but don't actually move anywhere.

The purpose of this email from LinkedIn is of course to drive more activity to their network. The idea is that you will a.) want to see who has moved where, b.) compare their profile to yours and look to improve it and c.) think about new opportunities for yourself. It's funny how emails are still the killer app of the Internet, even in this social world that we live in.

And by the way, if you know people looking to move jobs have them check out the LinkedIn Resume Builder which is a very handy tool that automatically generates a neat resume from your LinkedIn profile.

And as if that tool weren't enough, if you want to keep a real time eye on what your network is up to and who's moving jobs when, you can use the Job Change Notifier which scans your connections and tells you when somebody moves on.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of delivering a social media seminar to The Trade Association Forum, part of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in London. We were supposed to do it at our offices but due to a big demand it was moved to Centre Point which is a skyscraper (kind of) in central London. This made the whole experience more interesting for me as my presentation had to compete with a nice view of the royal capital as per my iPhone image above.

This is the first time I have ever trained trade associations and their management teams. Their marketing efforts on social media and online in general aren't that straightforward as you would think. Yes they have to recruit new members and tell existing member about how useful the association is, basically what value they can add to the member companies' business. Then they also want to communicate with the press, basically putting out stories about the industry and hopefully getting some good write-ups in traditional media (which is where most of the end-customers consume news still). Finally, they want to use social media as a lead generation tool for their member companies. This means they can pick up leads and enquiries from social media and distribute to relevant companies perhaps based on location. To sum up, trade associations have a three-pronged approach to social networking and we addressed a number of their challenges and how to overcome these.

When you set up a blog or website you naturally pick a domain name which ends with .com, mainly because it’s become the de facto standard on the internet. I run a few blogs and they all end with .com with the notable exception of this blog, which is jorgensundberg dot net.

Why did I go with .net?

First of all, the reason for setting up this blog was to claim my personal brand on search engines once and for all. There is nothing that gives you more link juice than running your own blog on your own name. And nothing that can steal more Google ranking than your namesake doing it first!

When I did set it up it was natural to go for jorgensundberg.com. This was unfortunately taken already, I was only about 7 years late apparently. After many weeks and months on the fence I had to go with another one out of .net, .info, .org etc. In the end the .net was the best option. More on this terrible ordeal in this post over at Ryan Rancatore’s blog Personal Branding 101.

How's that .net working out for you?

The good news is that blogging on a .net domain name has worked absolutely fine and I haven't encountered any users getting lost looking for me. The only person that got a bit confused in the beginning was myself, I sometimes entered my URL here and there with the .com suffix just out of habit I suppose. So all in all, it’s worked out really well and I forgot about the domain suffix question altogether, until…

I love a short joke, oneliners are to jokes what haiku is to poetry. I like to tweet oneliners every now and then, if you follow me on Twitter you know this. Some of these tweets go down well and others get the tumbleweed response. This list is based on the oneliners that fared best on Twitter for me (most retweets and comments), so they have been tried and tested. Feel free to steal them and use yourself, just like I have stolen them from other people on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and everywhere else on the internet.

Do you remember sending your first email? It was a pretty cool feeling. I am sure you remember receiving your first email as well, an even better feeling. Emails were one of the keys to the success of the internet I would say. Some providers tried to charge their customers for every email sent but in the end it became completely free and it's heavily reduced our reliance on sending post (or snail mail if you will). So far so good, for a while (well 10 years or so) email marketing was the future of the web and building an email list of subscribers was a top priority for savvy online operators.

Then social came along

A few years later we started using social media channels to communicate. It started with blogs (and comments), moved on to social bookmarking and finally social networks like Facebook and thousands of others. Marketeers jumped on the bandwaggon and we now have branded Pages, feeds, profiles and what have you. I must admit that Facebook have done very well in terms of driving traffic, activity and repeat visitors to their social network. They seem to be faring well on social. But what about the others...?

Google Plus (or was it Gmail)

Have you signed up for Google Plus yet? If not, I'm sure you have received numerous emails about it. Do you have a Gmail account? You are probably bombarded with Google Plus messages from your contacts and Google themselves. The big G's whole business model here is built around pimping their email service, and then emailing everyone ad nauseum about it. You could ask whether this is social media or email media. Hopefully Google Plus will grow in to something with a life of its own and not having to rely on 20 year old technology (emails) to promote a cutting edge social network.