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]

In Part 1, I explored how individuals could leverage screencasting. Here in Part 2, I want to explore some uncommon uses for screencasting in a business environment.

One point that I want to elaborate on here is this concept of tribal knowledge.

I think a lot of businesses just avoided a disaster. Baby boomers were nearing retirement age in such a great number and so fast, that I believe businesses were really going to feel it. However, they were saved by the Great Recession because this delays the boomers from retiring. However, it doesn’t diminish the need to capture what’s in their heads.

In days long gone, we used to sit around camp fires and tell stories. Elders passed their experience to younger generations. From this, traditions were established and more importantly, knowledge was transferred. In more modern times, we used to have apprentice and mentoring programs. Those too are long gone. But how do we transfer today’s knowledge?

I believe screencasting is one of the techniques we can use to capture and disseminate key information. It’s easy enough for most authors to develop and now with broadband internet, it’s easy to distribute.

You’ll have to let me know in the comments if you see additional uses for screencasting. In the meantime, here is Part 2 of the video.

[View iPhone version]

While leading an e-learning workshop last week, I shared with the class some tips for increasing their narrating effectiveness. This is because I’ve seen too many e-learning modules really fall apart because of poor narration. Nothing will erode your credibility like poor speaking skills.

Now these tips aren’t just limited to e-learning though. These are also great for screencasts and videos too.

This importance was highlighted this week when my Screenr video received a lot of Twitter re-tweets due to the quality of the narration. If there is one thing I can say about that piece it’s the fact that it’s coming from the heart. I didn’t polish that delivery up at all. Perhaps that’s why it’s so effective – it’s authentic.

The 2:30 minute video below shares the 5 P’s of presenting. (If you’re RSS feed doesn’t show the video, head on over to the actual site to see it embedded in the page.)

If you want to get great feedback on your next narration, apply these 5 tips.

[View iPhone version]