Gemma Worrall's now infamous tweet

Gemma shared a woeful lack of political, geographic and spelling knowledge by misspelling Barack Obama’s name as ‘barraco barner’ and mistakenly thinking he’s was the British president (let’s not even go there) in reference to him getting involved in the Russia/Ukraine affair.

Though Gemma’s story is extreme it does highlight how people don’t realise the potential size and breadth of their audience, the effect of their words and the potential fall out on themselves should the reception be negative. I feel for poor Gemma and her comments about some of the responses she has received as a result are a sad testament of our times.

Tips for Maintaing a Healthy Social Media Profile

Here’s a few things to keep in mind before you commit your thoughts to your favourite social media.

• Remember, social media is not the same as having a chat with a friend in the pub, round the dinner table or over a cuppa of your favourite beverage.
• By putting something in writing you are creating a record that can be referred to and shared and re-shared beyond your scope of control and influence, rather than a throw away comment to a limited audience that may be forgiven and forgotten.
• If your writing is public, such as tweets on Twitter, your blog/website entries and public posts of Facebook/Google+ then it is published in a legal sense. This means you are then opening yourself to defamation and libel laws should your words be construed as unlawful.
• Remember that when you write something people can’t perceive your facial expressions and body language, they have no cues from your tone of voice, so it is that much easier to misconstrue the meaning of your words.
• Make sure you read over your words before you click send/publish, think about the way people will potentially take it. Replace any ambiguity with clear meaning where possible.
• If you think what you are intending to write is controversial then weigh up whether your desire to express your opinion outweighs your ability to deal with any fall out. If not then don’t write it, save it for a private chat with a trusted individual/group.
• We all have bad days at work and we’ve probably all had a bad boss, work situation that we need to vent about, but there’s a time and a place for it and putting it in writing is rarely the answer. Never write anything openly hostile or negative about your employer or a company you wish to work for in the future on social media. Chances are if it’s a public post there are people employed to monitor all comments about the company and it could get back to your boss/recruiter. If it’s private, well exactly who is on your friend list, in your circles, perhaps you have a work colleague there that you didn’t remember or perhaps you added your boss?
• Be honest about yourself – if you have conflicting messaging, views, opinions and data about yourself on different social media (e.g. between LinkedIn and Facebook) chances are that recruiters and employers may pick up on it and start to question your honesty and integrity.
• You are entitled to a private life, but online you have to take steps to ensure that you manage and protect it. Social media like Facebook and Google+ will automatically default you to the most public and open settings and each time they bring in new tools and features you’ll automatically be opted in.  If you want to keep a private side to your online life then make sure you regularly check your privacy settings and use tools such as the ‘view as feature’ in Facebook to see how different types of people view your profile.
• Having no public Facebook presence can raise concerns with recruiters. It shouldn’t have an effect, but it sometimes does. In some places (notably the US) recruiters are illegally asking candidates for employment to give over their personal Facebook information for recruiters to ‘peek’ at your world.  My advice is to never give this kind of access and be sure to state that what they are requesting is against the law. However, it is possible to avoid getting into this situation in the first place by putting the occasional public post up that is non-confrontational and says something about what you’re interested in and do with your time. You can see my public Facebook profile as an example of this.
• Regularly google yourself and any aliases you use. You’d be surprised by how much information can come up and how a post you might have put on the internet back when it wasn’t all that popular (if you’re as old and geeky as me) can come back to bite you in the bottom! I make a point of googling myself about once every other month and always google myself before I start looking for work.
• When you’re looking for work it’s a good idea to become a bit more publicly active on your social networks, most notably LinkedIn to increase your chances of getting noticed by recruiters in your field of expertise. I find writing about my expertise and field of work helps enormously. I contribute to groups and try to blog on my website more often.
• Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, but not too much – when I’m looking for a new contract I update all my social networks to show that I’m looking for work. However, be mindful that on your more ‘social’ social networks like Facebook your friends might not want you to keep going on about needing a job. With LinkedIn, it’s the opposite, take time to refresh your status and profile, post frequently – but only on relevant topics, be active in groups and state that you’re job seeking where appropriate. Take the time to recommend colleagues on LinkedIn that you would like a recommendation from and then request a recommendation in return. It’s a lot harder to turn down someone’s request when they’ve already done something for you.

So, in conclusion use your social media to raise your public profile in a positive way that helps attract recruiters. When using social media for personal use take a moment to think before you publish your undiluted thoughts and feelings in a public forum. Most people don’t say everything they think and feel in crowded public places, perhaps it’s time to adopt this thinking for online as well as offline interactions?

Happy posting!

Wealie x

LinkedIn is an excellent tool and social network and as I’ve previously mentioned in other blog posts I highly recommend that everyone should maintain a LinkedIn profile if job seeking and it is also a highly useful resource for learning and sharing whilst employed as well.

Disturbing Practice by Pay Day Loan Employees on LinkedIn

Of late I’ve come across a disturbing development on LinkedIn; first I’d like to recognise that this isn’t a practise perpetrated by LinkedIn, but by enterprising pay day loan company employees! Basically these loan companies are creating LinkedIn profiles which have a normal person’s name and a photo, but the majority of the profile is advertising for the loan company and a link through to their website.  These profiles then send out spam connection requests to actual LinkedIn users like myself and are also liking your LinkedIn activity posts to garner good will and perhaps attract people to view/connect with their profiles.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of accepting one of the connection requests on the iPhone app as the name sounded familiar to me.  The iPhone app doesn’t show as much information as the full LinkedIn site and in the past I’ve often accepted a connection without really checking his or her profile.  A few days later I realised my mistake when I received more spam connection requests from profiles with similarly named loan companies as their current employer and I started receiving likes on my activity updates from these and other pay day loan style profiles. I promptly went onto the full LinkedIn website and found out how to remove a connection and flag a profile as spam to rectify the situation and hopefully stem the tide of further spurious spam connection invitations – I’m still getting a few.

This is a completely unprofessional practise on the part of the pay day loan companies and the profile owners.  I am supportive of businesses marketing their services to potential customers in legitimate advertising and forums, however, there are limits and rules governing how and when they do so.  LinkedIn does not condone the use of your individual profile for blatant advertising and we as the LinkedIn community have a duty of care to report this abuse of the system when we see it happening.

What angers me more though is that this practise is being perpetrated by an industry that I have absolutely nothing good to say about as it takes advantage of ill-informed and desperate people and muddies the good name and reputation of financial services as a whole, where there are reputable companies and institutions who provide valid and vital services to our community.

All I can say is that it was a really bad tactic for these companies to target me; all they’ve done is draw my attention to their further unprofessional practise and spurred me on to add my voice to the growing cacophony of the call to regulate and stamp out this reprehensible business practise of what amounts to legalised loan sharking.

My Advice

1. Don’t accept any LinkedIn invitations without first checking out the connection’s profile to be sure that they are who they say they are, even if you recognise the name and profile picture.
2. If the invitation is spam wait until you can view the full LinkedIn website and report the invitation as spam.  The option to do this is only available on the full LinkedIn website and is shown as a third option after accept and ignore.  This will inform LinkedIn so that they can deal with the situation and hopefully deter the individual behind the profile from doing it again.
3. If you see a spam profile visit the full LinkedIn website and view the profile and then use the flag a profile as inappropriate option.  Again this will inform LinkedIn so that they can deal with the individual responsible for the profile and deter future unprofessional practise by the individual.
4. If you do inadvertently accept a spam invitation visit the full LinkedIn website and remove the connection in your contacts page and flag a profile as inappropriate.
5. Don’t, whatever your circumstances or problem take out a pay day loan, it really isn’t worth the terrible consequences that you’ll face if you default on paying back the loan and the extortionate interest rates you will incur.  It might not seem like it, but you do have options.
6. There’s always a better option than dealing with these pay day loan companies and I’ve listed some sites and organisations below that have your best interests at heart and can offer practical advice and support in getting you back on track with your finances.
7. If you know of anyone considering taking out a Pay Day Loan encourage them to learn as much as they can before doing anything and point them in the direction of alternatives that might be better for their long term financial health!

About Pay Day Loans

For those of you unfamiliar with pay day loans they are short term loans due to be paid back between a week and a month that are given on the back of proof of your wages/employment for usually small amounts, anything up to £1000 and don’t require a standard credit check that high street lenders use.

On first look they seem like a great idea; a short loan of a week or so to tide you over until pay day, but delve a little deeper and you realise that they charge extortionate interest rates of APRs in the thousands, compared with the average credit card which has an APR of between 17 and 40% and the average high street loan of around 9%.  These loans are targeted at people who are ill informed and desperate, taking advantage of individuals who are unable to obtain regular credit and most in need of professional financial guidance!  What’s worse is that often these companies are not following the standards of the Irresponsible Lending Guidance (ILG) required of all companies licensed to provide consumer credit under the Consumer Credit Act (CCA).

Lots of people who take out these loans are already in financial trouble and fall into a debt spiral as they can’t afford to pay back an initial loan and have to keep taking out further loans to pay back the balance and continually increasing their overall debt.  People can end up being unable to cover to the interest let alone the original sum.  Stories of people borrowing an initial £100 and owing up to £20,000 are sadly not uncommon, with many people taking out multiple loans from different pay day lenders and ‘rolling up’ their loans four or more times with individual lenders. Rolling up is the practise of taking out an additional loan with the provider to cover the original debt and the interest accrued.

These companies may have a professional veneer of snappy TV advertising and slick websites and sometimes shop fronts, but please do not be fooled.  We’ve all heard of loan sharks and how they are best to be avoided, well Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of a loan shark is “a person who charges very large amounts of money for lending money to someone else” and that’s exactly what these pay day loan companies do.  The aggressive debt collection activities of these companies is also not dissimilar to the bullying tactics of the traditional loan shark as evidenced by the horror stories reported in the press and on the internet.

Before Taking out a Pay Day Loan

If you are interested in learning more about pay day loans or are considering taking one out I suggest reading this very useful article from money.co.uk: Warning: Payday Loans Can Seriously Damage your Wealth and checking out The Guardian Payday Loans section on their website.

The industry of pay day loans is under review by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and has further referred the pay day lending market to the Competition Commission citing “…concerns the OFT has about deep-rooted problems with the way competition works”.  The OFT’s Payday Lending Compliance Review Report had some shocking key findings including: “38 of the 50 lenders we inspected failed to comply with at least one of the complaint handling rules of the Financial Ombudsman Service”.  You can find out more at the OFT’s Payday lending compliance review pages on their website.

If you are struggling with your finances there is lots of information on the internet at sites such as money.co.uk, Money Super Market, MoneySavingExpert.com and The Money Advice Service.

The following organisations offer free and independent services to help you to get your finances back on track: Citizens Advice Bureau, National Debtline, GOV.UK, Step Change and Debt Advice Foundation.

You can also read about other peoples’ sad pay day loan horror stories here:

Bude & Beyond: Payday Loans – It’s A Horror Story!

Money Saving Expert: My Payday loan horror

Mirror: Suicide dad hounded for cash as he lies in hospital

The Consumer Action Group: Pay Day Loans Forum

Mail Online: Father dies…after being hounded by payday loan companies….

Mail Online: Rugby league player…hanged himself after getting into huge debt with payday loan companies.

The Sun: Payday loan debts killed our son, 18

Happy hunting!

Wealie
x

LinkedIn  - Building Connections

The professional networking site you really need to focus on building a profile with is LinkedIn.  Basically LinkedIn works like a cross between Facebook, Twitter and Facebook groups, but for professional and business relationships.

It’s a fantastic resource for maintaining existing business relationships, reacquainting with old ones and building new relationships whether they be with potential employers, recruitment consultants, employees, suppliers, business partners or clients.

There are a wealth of tools included on the site and the degree to which LinkedIn will be of use to you will very much tie in with how much you utilise these tools.  The site allows you to do the following:

• Set up connections with people that you have had a professional relationship with in some capacity in the past or present
• Communicate with your network through internal email style messages, discussion groups and status updates
• Provide and receive professional endorsements of  your contacts through the writing of personal recommendations
• Meet new people by requesting introductions through your contacts or by joining discussion groups and requesting contacts
• Update your status in a similar fashion to Facebook and you can link your status updates to show your Twitter Feed as well
• Set up discussion groups to build niche networks and/or to discuss topics of interest to your profession or business sector
• Provide links to all your other online profiles

It’s a great place to connect with your work colleagues old and new, build a reputation through your recommendations, get introduced to potential colleagues through your network contacts and find out about what is happening within your industry through discussion groups.  Discussion groups are also a great way of making new contacts and finding out about vacancies before they are advertised on the job sites.  I have a number of recruitment agents as contacts on LinkedIn, so they can always see when I’ve completed a contract and looking for new work when I update my status.

I personally think that LinkedIn is on its way to becoming as essential as your CV in terms of job hunting.  I would advise everyone to take the time to invest in setting up their profile as soon as possible.

Google Profile – Advertising Your Presence to the World

It’s also a good idea to set yourself up with a Google Profile.  The best way I can describe it is like having an online advert for you as an individual person.  If used correctly it can pull together the links to all your online profiles in one handy place.

You can add a short biography of yourself, plus information about where you’ve lived, where you currently work and have worked in the past and where you went to school.  You can also add photos by linking to an online photo sharing service such as Flickr or Picasa which then displays the photos you have or a selection of them that you choose.

You have the option to put in personal contact information, but I would advise being circumspect about the information you share here.  You can restrict access to the information to your contacts,  but that would mean you could only add contacts that you were willing to share that information with, which could be quite restricting for you.  To be honest this is an area of the Google Profile I would advise not using unless you are putting in business contact information and even then it could open you up to receiving spam emails, junk mail and unsolicited sales telephone calls!

Finally the other option you can add to your Google Profile is connecting a Google Buzz account to display your status updates.  Google Buzz is very similar to Twitter, but with a bit more functionality, but considerably less take up than Twitter at the moment.  Whether Google Buzz will become more popular is debatable and having more than one status messaging service can be harder to keep up to date.  However, if you use a service like Tweetdeck which allows you to update multiple status messaging functions from the one programme, the issues over maintaining content on each of these is greatly reduced.  Tweetdeck is a multiple platform programme which you can use on your Desktop, iPhone, Android Phone, iPad and within the web browser Google Chrome.  Tweetdeck allows you to update the following status updates: Facebook, *Facebook pages, *Facebook groups, *Foursquare, **LinkedIn, Twitter and *Google Buzz.

*Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Foursquare and Google Buzz cannot be updated on the iPhone, iPad and Android Phone Tweetdeck Applications.
**LinkedIn can only be updated through the desktop version of Tweetdeck.

Twitter & Google Buzz – Tell the World What You’re Doing

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking/micro blogging site.  Essentially what that means is that it allows you to write and read messages known as tweets, which are a maximum of 140 characters long.  Think of it as an online text messaging service, but one that publishes your messages to the whole world!  It is one of the most popular social networking services and has been growing rapidly since it first went online in 2006.

What you can do on Twitter:

• Follow the tweets of people that are friends or share your interests
• Create lists of people tweeting, such as people who all tweet about a specific topic, e.g. communication, or from a specific location, e.g. San Francisco, or to group all your friends who tweet into one list
• View only the tweets from the people on the specific list – As the number of people you are following rises then you will find lists very useful to ensure that the most important tweets you want to read do not get lost
• Send direct messages directly to specific people (these will be private messages,  visible only to the person you send them to)
• Gain a following of people who are reading your tweets
• View the trending topics (what people are tweeting most about) and add your own tweet about a trending topic

So how will using Twitter help with your job search?  Firstly it’s a great place to announce that you are looking for work and letting those people who follow your Twitter stream know that you’re available for work.  Secondly a number of recruitment agencies have started using Twitter and it is a good way to see when they are looking for people to fill roles without having to call them.  Equally if they are following you then when you tweet that you are currently looking for a role they will see it.  Thirdly you can view trending topics and/or search Twitter’s tweets for keywords and terms such as “Jobs” or “Job Seeking”.

In addition to the benefits of looking for work, Twitter is also another resource you can use to promote the work and resources that you make available online.  A photographer can have a link to his or her Flickr account to send a tweet every time they upload a new photograph.  You can do the same thing with videos on YouTube, for example if you were an aerobics teacher, you could upload a video demonstrating your teaching abilities.

Google Buzz

As I mentioned above Google Buzz is another social networking/micro blogging service and is very similar to Twitter, but with not as high a take up of users online at present.  However, where Google Buzz has an edge over Twitter is in the additional functionality of the service.

What you can do with Google Buzz in addition to what can be done with Twitter:

• Because Buzz is part of the Google family it has excellent options for integrating with the other Google services such as Google Profile, GMail, Google Reader, Picasa and YouTube, that you can easily set up when you apply for an account
• You can allow your buzzes (messages) to appear on your Google Profile
• It also allows you to link in seamlessly with other non-Google services such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter
• It allows you to see thumbnails of pictures and links to the larger picture within an individual buzz

Google Buzz has the same advantages to job seekers as Twitter does, so I won’t repeat the benefits here.

As with all the online social networking applications, the degree to which Twitter & Google Buzz will work for you, depends on the time you are willing to put in.  I won’t lie, maintaining a useful and regular online presence takes time and effort, but the dividends you receive are well worth the hard work and time spent.

Your Facebook Profile, Pages & Groups – Leverage the Power of Friends

Although Facebook is primarily a social tool designed for fun a lot of businesses and individuals are using it in a professional capacity.  Whether you choose to use your personal profile, a Facebook Page or Group very much depends upon what you are looking to achieve with them.

For most job seekers using your profile will be sufficient, but if you want to demonstrate your skills and experience, or sell a product or service of your own then a Facebook Page or Group might be the way to go.  I’ll talk a little about each and what you can do with them in terms of job seeking and raising your profile.

Your Individual Facebook Profile

Although your individual profile is likely to be primarily social, you can use it for professional purposes in the following ways.

• Share details about your job seeking through your status updates
• Message your friends on Facebook asking them if they know of any work going at their place of employment, or anyone in their network looking for people
• Join Facebook groups that are relevant to your profession, skills and experience or recruitment agencies and become an active member of discussions, chat with other group members and contribute to discussions
• “Like” Facebook pages of  recruitment agencies, employers you would like to work with, business partners, suppliers, etc, so you can keep up to date with what they are doing and make them aware of your profile

A Facebook Page

You may want to create a Facebook page, which keeps your professional work separate from your personal Facebook information, or to specifically draw attention to it.  People can “Like” your page so that any status updates and activity that happens on your page is shown on their news feed.

A page has all the functionality of your profile, (chat, status updates, photos, videos, discussions and events, message people who have “liked” your page, etc) and you are not limited to the number of people who can like your page, whereas you can only have a maximum of 5000 friends on Facebook.

Probably the most useful features are the analytics of the number and frequency of visitors to your page and linking into Facebook’s advertising system to advertise your page.  This is a particularly good tool if you are offering a product or service to people.

I personally have two pages, one that focuses on my artistic outputs and another that I share with a friend as part of our Dance Dynamic business for dancers to find out about what’s going on with classes and events and ask us questions.

My personal page is updated primarily automatically through linking it to my various other social networking sites and through TweetDeck.  My primary social networking outlets are my Website/Blog, Facebook and Twitter along with my specialist sites Flickr and YouTube.  By setting up automatic updating on my Facebook page it remains current without me having to physically go in and add content.

A Facebook Group

Groups are a better tool to use if you are looking to bring a group of people together to discuss specific topics such as a single business or a certain profession.  By setting up a group like this you are taking on a certain degree of responsibility for ensuring that in the early stages there is content to keep people coming back.  Successful groups have a lively group of members that regularly contribute to it and have all the same functionality as pages, but also group chat and the ability to message all group members and invite them all to events.

It’s worth noting that you can add other people as administrators on both pages and groups to help spread the responsibility of keeping them up to date. However, if you want to keep full control of what is posted then a self managed page is probably the best way to go.

Slideshare & Brainshark – Demonstrate Your Skills

I’ve talked a little bit about how you can offer something back to the world through your online presence, such as participating in the Facebook and LinkedIn professional groups, or providing links to good resources through your buzzes or tweets.

If you work in the corporate world and/or have a corporate profession or simply want to share your skills, experience and knowledge then you might also find the following services useful.

Slideshare

Slideshare is an online resource for sharing presentations and documents with the web.  Basically you can upload an unlimited number of presentations and documents (plus a maximum of 3 videos) that can be viewed in a slideshow format and if you allow it, downloaded by users.  Users can favourite the content and they can also use the usual social media ability to share it via a number of different services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz and various Blogging providers.  Viewers can also embed the content in a web page or blog post.

I use it to share a selection of my communications tools, training and templates that I have developed along with advice about communications.

In terms of supporting my job seeking this gives potential employers a place to view the output of my work before they even decide to get me in for interview.  In terms of generating business for my consultancy work potential clients can see the calibre of my work and get an idea of exactly what I do and how I can help.

An added benefit to Slideshare is that you can also link the account to your LinkedIn profile so that your latest update will be displayed on your LinkedIn Profile page.

The basic service is entirely free, easy to sign up and use.  There is a sliding scale of  monthly subscription pro plans that offer an ad free service, additional space for video content, lead generation, private uploads, analytics, buzz tracking and LinkedIn extras, but I personally haven’t felt the need to upgrade to this.  The pro plans start at $19 US Dollars a month for the Silver package, $49 for the Gold and $249 for the Platinum.

A word of warning though, if you are looking to sell your work to clients you might want to think about how much information you are prepared to give away for free here!

My Brainshark

My Brainshark is an individual free version of the web based communication tool Brainshark, which is becoming extremely popular with large corporates as a means of marketing and communicating internally and externally.

Essentially My Brainshark allows you to upload presentations, documents and videos to it in a similar fashion to Slideshare, which it then converts into web based audio/visual movies.

It has all the functionality of the free Slideshare plus the following:

• Add audio to your presentations and documents by phone, microphone or MP3, which follows the animation of your slides
• Provide working links to web pages and/or documents
• Add in user response questions such as interactive surveys or user polls
• Track your viewing results

As my content on My Brainshark is primarily of a training nature I was invited to become a learning provider (there is no additional cost to this and you can apply and will then be assessed as to whether your content is suitable), which allows you to charge users for your training and materials and to categorise them as learning content.  This is a great added free benefit that raises its usefulness above Slideshare.

As with Slideshare there are some paid subscription pro versions the My Brainshark Pro at $9.99 or the My Brainshark Pro Trainer at $19.99 a month, which provide additional services of adding private content, adding passwords to your presentations for added security and improved reporting tools.  The Pro Trainer also gives you the ability to provide testing and scoring, issue certificates of completion and integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS) and to copy and merge slides and audio from other presentations you have uploaded.

If I had to choose between Slideshare and My Brainshark I would have to say My Brainshark.  The free version has much more functionality and the pro prices are much more reasonable.  That said I would recommend keeping one or two relevant items on a free Slideshare account to connect it with LinkedIn.

Fickr/Picasa & YouTube – Display Your Talent

If your profession is an artistic one, or you want to raise the profile of your artistic endeavours then you might want to use a social media service to display your talent to the world.

Flickr, Picasa and YouTube are by no means the only sites that offer these types services, but they are ones that I am most familiar with so here’s a brief outline of what you can do on them.

Flickr

Flickr is part of the Yahoo group of web services and is by far the best free photo sharing service available on the internet.  It’s the only site of its kind where you retain 100% copyright of the content you upload to it.  You can upload photography, art and illustrations, graphic art and videos.  The video content is quite restrictive and I would recommend that you use YouTube as your primary site for showcasing your videos.  However, if you rarely upload videos and they are more often slideshows of photography or art then flickr will be sufficient for your needs.

Flickr allows you to organise your photos into sets and collections (collections are only available through the flickr pro account) and add them to groups and galleries.  A large community of photographers and those interested in photography or just your friends can view, comment on, share, add to galleries, invite to groups and favourite your content.

You can add people as contacts with varying degrees of access to your content and you can set privacy for individual pictures to make them private, friends and family only, friends only, family only or for contacts only.  This gives you a great deal of control over how and where people view your content.

You can upload, view, comment, favourite, share via the usual social networking services, blog your uploads, tweet them and embed pictures into web pages and blogs.  You can add tags for searching and add geo tag locations.

There are a number of affiliated services such as the creation of large scale canvas prints, photo book creation, normal snapshot prints, T-Shirts, Stickers, Mug printing, etc.  An offline flickr uploader makes uploading content to the site very easy and there are also iPhone, iPad and Android Phone applications to view, add and update your flickr content.

You can view, join or create flickr groups, which is a great way to meet new people and share your photos with a wider audience.  There’s a wide variety of people on flickr, from people just sharing their snapshots to amateur and professional photographers.  The community is a wonderful place to learn and share, provide feedback and encouragement.

The free version of flickr does limit the number of items you can upload to 200 and limits the number of sets you can create and the number of groups you can submit an item to, plus you have the ads on the site.  The pro account cost $24.95 US Dollars a year or $47.99 for two years.  What you get is an unlimited number of uploads, sets, collections and allows you to submit a single item in up to 60 groups.  It gives you access to your original files, statistics on the viewing of your items and photostream as a whole, high definition playback for any HD videos you upload and Ad free browsing. Also, they usually throw in a little carrot of a gift, which at the moment is a free photo book. If you have a pro account that lapses, don’t worry all your content remains on flickr’s servers and is accessible again when you renew.

Personally going pro on Flickr is so cheap that if you are serious about exhibiting your photography and art you really can’t say no.

Picasa

Picasa is essentially Google’s version of Flickr.  All the same services are available, but arguably Flickr is the photo sharing of choice for two main reasons, firstly the size and professionalism of the community and secondly the retention of 100% copyright of your content.

Where Picasa has an edge on Flickr is that it also has a desktop programme that allows you to store all of your content offline.

YouTube

YouTube does for video sharing what Flickr does for photo sharing.

You can upload, view, share, favourite and comment on videos.  There is the option to embed the code for your videos in blogs and to share it via a plethora of social media services.

Even if you don’t add video content, having a YouTube account is a good idea so that you can see all your favourite videos without having to search for them again.

YouTube like flickr also has iPhone, iPad and Android phone applications to make sharing on the move easier.

If you have a personal blog or website, another benefit to using these services is that you can link to the content without having to host it on your site, thereby reducing the amount of hosting space and bandwidth (the amount of data transfer generated from your site).

ArtFire & iStockphoto – Sell Your Wares

Whilst YouTube, flickr and Picasa are great sites for showcasing what you can do, you cannot make money directly from these sites.

If you want to make some money from your art then you need to be looking at sites like ArtFire and iStockphoto.  Again ArtFire and iStockphoto are by no means the only sites you can use, however they are the ones I’m most familiar with.

ArtFire

ArtFire is a community marketplace set up for users to buy and sell their handmade arts and crafts, without the need for their own website and e-commerce functionality.

If you’re just beginning or don’t create a lot of items, but would like to sell what you have then ArtFire is a great place to start.  If you’re a well established artist then ArtFire brings the added benefit of a greater number of visitors and potential buyers for your items.

ArtFire pulls together a diverse community of artists and is a great place to share ideas, get inspiration and advice from other users.

iStockphoto

iStockphoto does for photography what ArtFire does for arts and crafts.  You can buy and sell stock photography, vector illustrations, video footage, audio clips and tracks, and Flash media.  Simply set up a free account, buy some credits and download the content you need.

There are subscription services as well as the pay as you go options to purchase stock.  The subscription services are best for those people who are purchasing a lot of stock on a regular basis.

If you want to sell your work through the service you have to go through an additional sign up feature and complete a little quiz, it’s all free though.  In terms of getting paid for your stock, you receive a base royalty rate of 15% per download and you can sign up to an Exclusive programme where you receive between 22-45% royalties per download, but it is much more restrictive in terms of how you can use your stock elsewhere.

Conclusions

When using any of these online social networking applications, the degree to which they will work for you, depends on the time you are willing to put in.  I won’t lie, maintaining a useful and regular online presence takes time and effort, but the dividends you receive are well worth the hard work and time spent.

Other articles in the job seeking series:

Hints and Tips for Job Seeking
Using Recruitment Websites
Hints and Tips For Successful Interviews
Job Hunting and Standing Out from the Crowd
Hints & Tips for CV Writing
Infographic CVs

With a strong community of followers a blog and website thrives and allows you to make it work as an effective mode of communication for your personal and business needs and to allow it to pay for itself through sponsorship and advertising and/or selling your products and services to a wide audience.

So, with this in mind I’ve been busy getting Wealie’s World onto some of the key blog directories: blogcatalog, blogged, blogger, and MyBlogLog.  I’ve also been further linking the website with my key social media channels: Facebook through the NetworkedBlogs App, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and many more.

In the human body, it is the interconnection of the veins and nervous system that let the key organs do their job and interact, the same principle can be applied to your key communication channels, with the linking and promotion being the veins and nervous system.  In order for all our different on-line and social media channels to work effectively and in conjunction we need to effectively promote and link them together.  By linking all our channels together we create a virtual communications network that can tap into all the diverse communities available to us and take advantage of a truly wide demographic.

There are also pitfalls to not connecting together our virtual comms network, with so many potential avenues of communication available to us, we need to ensure that we effectively manage and control the information and messages we are disseminating from the different channels.  Without the bigger picture we cannot ensure that we do not communicate at cross purposes with ourselves, or worse contradict ourselves.  For example there’s always the chance that we will forget to update certain channels and the information contained on it will be out of date.

It’s very easy to sign up with lots of different social media accounts (I’ve done so today with the blogging resources), but if you don’t update and manage them all, they can work against you, just like the website that is out of date by 3 – 6 months can.  By linking accounts and channels together we can minimise the number of times you have to enter information into systems to update your channels, e.g. By linking your YouTube account to update both Twitter and Facebook when you complete certain actions like when you favourite a video, or upload new content automatically means you are just putting in the information once to  YouTube, but a status update will appear on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter.

And last, but by no means least, we must not forget our traditional forms of communication, we still meet face to face with individuals, word of mouth is as important as ever and paper communications are still a reality in our daily lives.  Make sure that all your business literature has the key social media sites and your website address clearly displayed upon them, e.g. the business card and headed paper.  Ensure that your email signature has direct links as well.  When you’re speaking with colleagues, business partners and customers, take a moment to remind them of the different ways they can keep in touch with you on and off line.

Happy communicating!

Wealie