SkillCasting

I recently spoke at the New Landings Job Club about “Social Credit Scores.” Now lets be honest, there isn’t a formal score per se, but increasing ones online visibility and influence, helps drive employers to want to hire you. This four part video series summarizes my presentation from the other night. Here’s the one-page PDF job aid that I handed out as well.

Part One – What is a Social Credit Score?

Outside of your cubicle, who knows you? All too often, we don’t have any exposure outside of our companies. If we can leverage traditional media like tv, radio or newspapers, that’s great. But it’s not always an option because well, we don’t get selected. These days though we can leverage the new tools like blogs and social networks to create our own publicity.

There isn’t a formal body of knowledge around Social Credit Scores. Probably the closest thing is Personal Branding. When it comes to this subject, I think Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog is the best resource. His post, 10 Reasons Why You Should Care About Personal Branding sums it up nicely too. Our goal should be to build a distinguished web presence and to build our online reputation. For example on eBay, who would you buy from, someone with zero feedback ratings or someone with 6500 feedback submissions where 99.7% of them are positive? Who would you hire? That’s why it’s important to establish your online expertise, reputation, and notoriety.

And don’t bother trying to create a false impression. A ruse is too difficult to maintain.

I think there are 5 key factors that make up your Social Credit Score:

1. Networks – What online groups do you belong to? Are they fringe paramilitary groups or professional ones? What do your group memberships say about you?
2. Participation – Do you consistently participate in the groups? Do you have a history of contributing or are you just a flash in the pan until something better comes along?
3. Character – What do your comments say about you? Are you positive, a leader, or do you just bitch and complain?
4. Social Proof – What do others say about you? Similar to LinkedIn recommendations, the more people recommend you, the more they link to you, the more others look to you as an expert, the better your standing becomes.
5. Authority – Are you an authority in your field? What does your background and brand say about you? The more you can be the go to person in your field, the more likely you are to be employable.

[View part 1 iPhone version]

Part Two – Six Key Principles of Influence for Job Seekers

In his ground breaking book Influence-The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini outlines 6 key principles of influence. As job seekers, these principles can be leveraged. The six principles are:

1. Liking – We like to hire and do business with people we like. However, be authentic and true to yourself. Don’t use unethical means of manipulation like neuro-linguistic programming just to get people to like you. Be real.
2. Scarcity – In this job market, there is no scarcity of job applicants. There is however a scarcity of experts. If you can share your knowledge and position yourself as the expert, employers will want you.
3. Reciprocity – We need to give. And if we do give, statistically speaking when we ask for something in return, it will be far greater than had we not given first.
4. Commitment & Consistency – Don’t be a flash in the pan. Have a track record of outstanding results, contributions, and feedback.
5. Social Proof – The more OTHER people say about you, the better. Create content that others will link to, refer to, and that position you as an expert.
6. Authority – If you become the expert in your field, you’ll be far better off and people will want you.

[View part 2 iPhone version]

Part Three – How to Monitor Your Social Credit Score

There are two free tools that make it really easy to monitor your feedback. Google Alerts pushes information to you via email or RSS feeds whenever it comes across your name. Google Reader makes it easy to follow these alerts. In addition, Google Reader allows you to follow blogs and news items in your specialty so you can be notified when they have new content. When you see these updates, you can visit the site and then comment on the various stories. This is a great way to keep yourself visible and to continue feeding Google with links to your name.

But how do you handle negative feedback? There have been two high profile cases of how NOT to handle it that’s for sure. But perhaps the best defense is a strong offense of lots of positive comments and value-added content out there.

[View part 3 iPhone version]

Part Four – Ten Ways to Increase Your Social Credit Score

There are 10 things you can do to increase your social credit score. But before you do these, make sure you “expose” your professional side. Use your real name for professional things and if you want to participate on polarizing topics, you might want to consider a nickname that can’t be linked to you. Ten things you can do right now to increase your profile are:

1. Comment on other blogs in your industry.
2. Join groups on LinkedIn and answer questions on LinkedIn Answers.
3. Use Twitter applications like Seesmic, TweetDeck, or HootSuite to create custom searches on key words and topics on Twitter. Answer peoples questions, contribute to the discussion, and re-tweet others content.
4. On Facebook, be careful of the groups you join, the posts you “Like”, and the things you say.
5. Create a YouTube channel and produce video how-to’s. YouTube is the second largest search engine out there. Use your real name and your video results will appear in Google search results.
6. Write guest blog posts for other blogs in your industry. This helps the blog author because writing valuable blog posts is time consuming. If you write the post though, you help them. In return, the increased visibility helps you.
7. Write articles and put them on article directories. In the articles, link back to your other blogs, fan pages and Twitter pages so you can get more followers and exposure.
8. Conduct webinars and record them. Even if nobody shows, it’s okay. Nobody will know that you didn’t have any participants. But this provides a platform to record your presentations, ideas, and delivery. You can put your presentations on SlideShare too.
9. Write whitepapers and create job aids and give them away for free. These are great ways to articulate your thoughts and explain how you do things. Job aids are useful to you’d be surprised how often people keep these.
10. Create screencasts with Jing or Screenr as a way to show what’s happening on your computer.

Finally, share your ideas with the world. Put them out there. As Seth Godin says, ideas are easy, it’s the doing that’s hard.

[View part 4 iPhone version]

I help people put together interactive training modules. When we begin talking about marketing the product, I always mention Twitter. I’ve had several people tell me they don’t “get” Twitter. I share with them that the real power of Twitter comes from using the right tools.

This short (4:40) video shows the 3 leading “dashboards” in my opinion. After you use one of these tools, you’ll never go back to your Twitter screen again. And I think then you’ll see the value of Twitter.

If you’re involved with any social media, you’re probably hearing about the re-launch of Teaching Sells

And with all the hype, you’re probably wondering, is it worth the investment. I put together this quick 3 minute movie to share my experience and to help you decide for yourself.

If your a consultant, trainer, or displaced corporate worker, you owe it to yourself to take a hard look at Teaching Sells.

I stand by my commitment. If you have any questions on the program, your welcome to call me at 913-735-7063. I’ll answer or return your call to share my personal experiences. Of course if you’d like to learn more about Teaching Sells from the main site you can click on the banner link below.

After being in the training industry for 20 years, I work with a lot of trainers. One of my new clients is just starting out. I helped her move her existing website over to a WordPress.com blog. Her next set of questions revolved around how we could drive traffic to it.

I shared with her 5 simple social media techniques she could use to help drive traffic to it. I thought I’d share them with you to in this little tutorial. [If you can't see the Flash tutorial in your RSS reader, please visit the site.]

I’ll create a lot more tutorials like this because the questions she’s asking me, I believe, represent a much larger audience of experts. If you find this useful, or have a question of your own, don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments.