The Labor Department reported this morning that “initial applications for unemployment insurance fell by 4,000 to 621,000 in the week ended May 30,” but there are still 6.74 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits. It’s still a crowded job market, and qualified candidates need every edge they can get.

Professional social network LinkedIn is a great resource, but active job hunting is not the same as career development and professional networking. My latest Talent Zoo column offers some hints for using LinkedIn to find a new job:

“You can’t just ‘build it and hope they come.’ You’ll want to spend some time optimizing your LinkedIn profile and network. And you’ll need to check in to LinkedIn often to search for jobs, refine and update your profile, maintain relationships and communicate with potential employers.”

LinkedIn has so many features — like its applications, job search, and groups — that you can use to improve your chances of landing the right position. Whether you’re new to using LinkedIn as a job search tool, or you want a refresher, please check out the rest of the article. If you have some tips of your own, or a question about LinkedIn, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Tags: LinkedIn, job search, unemployment

On March 14 at SXSW, we* launched Presently.com, designed to be the first professional microblogging environment. The idea behind Presently.com is that we wanted to bring the best of microblogging and career/professional social networking into one environment. Think of it as Twitter meets LinkedIn.

Twitter pioneered microblogging and its features, like 140-character status updates, followers/following lists, and direct messages have proven extremely popular with users, and the service is growing dramatically. LinkedIn provides a more professional focus, but lacks social features, and therefore the true, dynamic Web 2.0 communications platform of a true social network.

Presently.com is based on Intridea’s Presently microblogging platform, which is used daily by many large corporations and government organizations. Presently extends and maintains the basic Twitter metaphor with additional features, like group messaging; the ability to embed formatted documents like MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, video and images; message capacity beyond 140 characters without compromising user experience; and extended user profiles to help people more easily identify others with common interests.

Why Professional Microblogging?

There is no doubt that Twitter is a revolutionary communications tool. But some users, even those who limit the number of people they follow on Twitter, are finding the noise ratio to be too high. Trivial and personal communications are inevitable in any public forum, and are in fact a big part of the appeal of Twitter. With Presently.com, we set out to flip the signal-to-noise ratio from 20-80 to 80-20, so serious users spend less time sifting through trivial information.

The Power of Group Updates

In addition to public updates, and private direct messages, features found in most microblogging environments, Presently.com users can create groups and send updates to just a few people, such as the employees of a company, or members of a workgroup or industry organization.

Anyone can create a group for a specific profession, hobby, project team, or any other community of interest. Groups on Presently.com can be public, private or secret. Public groups are useful for encouraging communications and collaboration within particular communities, such as the legal profession, graphic artists, web designers, and gamers. Private groups require an invitation from a current group member, and are useful for closed communications, within, for example, a committee, a sports team, a company, a project team or workgroup, or multiple parties negotiating an agreement or planning an event. Secret groups are private groups that are not listed in the publicly viewable group directory.

Once a group is created, users can send updates to the entire group, to individuals, or to one or more members of the group. Inviting new members is easy. Users can share documents, such as MS Word, YouTube video, Adobe PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, and can also enter formatted text, including software code, directly into an update. Presently.com maintains threads so that users can see the origin, progression and completion of a conversation, project or discussion.

Who Can Join Presently.com?

Presently.com is currently free to all users. Presently.com allows users with any email address to join and form groups of common interest. Similar services, like Yammer are built around communities based only on common email domains, such that users from a single company can form a group, but can only include members with the same email domain. (For example, you could form a Yammer group with people who have email addresses ending in @yourcompany.com, but could not add people with email addresses ending in @anothercompany.com.)

Try It Out!

Presently.com had a great reception at SXSW. We were really pleased to be able to chat in person with new friends and old. I hope you’ll check it out. I’d love it if you did your next group chat on Presently.com to see how much more seamless and enjoyable the experience is. On Presently.com, you don’t need hashtags (though you can still use them) so participants, particularly those who are less technical, won’t have to use an additional site or service to monitor the discussion. (And you won’t lose track of people who forget the hashtag or format it incorrectly.)

Speaking of hashtags, Presently.com has a unique and powerful way of dealing with tags. Once a tag is used, it is automatically added to a tag list. Users can see which tags are the most popular, can click on a tag to see all of the updates related to that tag, and can click to be alerted any time someone uses a particular tag.

If you like the idea of professional microblogging, please create a few groups in Presently.com. There are already quite a few there (many of which we created to get the ball rolling), but the site really needs to belong to users to be effective.

You can sign up at: http://www.presently.com/

* Disclosure: I am a senior partner at Intridea. For more information please visit the Intridea web site, and also take a look at the Requisite Information and Services (What I Do) pages on my blog.

Tags: Presently, Presently.com, professional microblogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, Intridea, status updates, enterprise social media

I was interviewed by Francine Kizner of Entrepreneur.com for her piece on “The Unwritten Rules of Social Networking. Is your social networking strategy actually costing you customers? Use these strategies to get it right.”

Plenty has been written regarding the quest for followers, and the etiquette for social network interaction (particularly in connection with Twitter, but also applying to Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) Many of these discussions assume you are an individual, representing yourself, and that “social” applies in a strict sense, meaning you use the network to chat with friends and colleagues.

But what if you’re a business with a presence on one of the social networks, trying to engage with customers? Clearly, the “rules” are different. Kizner cites, for example, “SocialMedian CEO Jason Goldberg (who) Twittered about raising angel investment for his company, possibly running afoul of securities regulations. He tried deleting the Tweet, but in moments, it was captured, published and lambasted on TechCrunch and other blogs.”

Kizner also offers guidance on avatars, filling out your profile, the subtleties of offering promotions, and more. The full article is well worth reading.

Tags: Entrepreneur.com, Francine Kizner, unwritten rules, social networking, etiquette, twitter, facebook, linkedin

Is it OK to poke a casual acquaintance on Facebook? Can I send a LinkedIn invitation to someone I don’t know? If someone is following me on Twitter, do I have to follow them back?

Questions, questions, questions flooding into the mind of the concerned young person today*. In my monthly Talent Zoo column I attempt to answer these and other pressing questions about social networking, and offer timely tips for having the best online experience including:

“Women on Twitter are very wary of male users who are only following 600 female users in their teens and 20s. This kind of profile makes a guy look like a stalker, and then again, if this is your profile, you are one.”

Click here to read the article. 

*Free t-shirt to the first one who correctly identifies the source of this reference.

I believe the value of each of your social networks increases as you add more people. This week I’m trying to add new connections on LinkedIn. The number of followers I have on Twitter has grown quickly, though I am no Jason Calcanis, and my Facebook friends list has grown, albeit at a slower pace. There is probably a point of diminishing returns, but I have not yet reached it.

I am using a social network strategy I call cross-promotion to seek new connections. (I don’t claim to have invented this, maybe I named it.) For example, I assume most of the people I talk to on Twitter would make suitable LinkedIn contacts, so I post the following on Twitter:

“Launching shameless campaign to add LinkedIn connections: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelpostman“

(Go ahead, click it!)

I’m not really shameless. All networks have barriers to adding connections, and LinkedIn is probably one of the most restrictive. There is value in trust, and in selecting the people you connect with, but too many controls limit the effectiveness of the network. (Facebook didn’t really explode until it was opened to “everyone” instead of requiring members to have a school e-mail address.)

And on the right sidebar of my blog are links under a heading “Add Me,” so I make no secret I want to add people.

LinkedIn makes this hard to do. LinkedIn requires certain information before allowing you to invite a potential connection. LinkedIn also has a convention called the “IDK.” When you send an invitation to someone, they can accept, or indicate “I Don’t Know (the sender).” If you get five IDKs, you can be thrown off of LinkedIn. LinkedOut as it were.

There are workarounds, large and small. I found (and others have, too) you can indicate you know someone from a Group or Association and then enter anything you want. I was entering “Twitter” for Twitter friends, but then added “Blog” for people I met through blogs. I think everyone should just enter “Hominids” from now on.

For those interested in adding large numbers of LinkedIn connections, check out LinkedIn LIONS (LinkedIn Open Network.) According to the LIONS charter:

“Open Networks = Growing High-Quality Networks. Closed Networks = Stagnating Low-Quality Networks”

A friend also recommend I check out MyLink500.com, which she described as a “promiscuous” LinkedIn network.

It’s interesting that these LinkedIn techniques are viewed as “back doors” and “hacks,” or grassroots community causes vs. features of the network. (Colin Carmichael called this a “hack” on his blog. Thanks for the link love, Colin!) Perhaps this allows LinkedIn to attempt the kind of growth Twitter and Facebook have had while maintaining an aura of trust and exclusivity.

Tags: LinkedIn, twitter, facebook, cross-promotion, metcalfes law, jason calcanis, IDK, LinkedIn LIONS, MyLink500, Colin Carmichael