The Young Professionals Forum I run at my organization (InsideNGO) hosted a great workshop on Friday about Career Building for Young Professionals.

The trainer, Maureen MacCarthy, Principal Consultant at MGS Consulting, led us through the high-energy, participatory event with tons of networking opportunities.  It reminded me that while the advances in technologies that bring us webinars and other virtual events save travel time and costs, in-person events are critical for building your network and connecting with people.

Our YP Forum is different from other similar groups because everyone at our events works in the international NGO sector and shares similar experiences, challenges, and your organizations have probably partnered on projects together.

But the majority of the tips Maureen gave us apply to everyone.  I want to share 4 of the most useful ones.

The first is Be What You Want to Become.  Let’s say you’re a Program Assistant and want to become a Program Manager.  Start acting like a Program Manager.  Tell trusted colleagues/mentors that you want to be a Program Manager and to coach you on what that looks like at your organization.  Practice with a friend introducing yourself as a Program Manager.  Be who you want to become.

The second:  Get to know your organization’s culture and what people talk about when they’re not talking about work, especially the leaders.  Understand others on a more personal level so you can more easily be understood when you may present a new idea or try to get buy-in for your project.  Maybe people like to chat about movies, what’s in the news, or their children.  Get to know others to understand them better and use that knowledge to become fluent in your organization’s culture so you can know how to talk about your idea in a language they can understand.

Third, get to know your field.  For example, organizations in the international NGO sector are funded by similar donors and government agencies.  We as young professionals know we must remain adaptable and build transferrable skills because the donors might decide to fund reproductive health projects instead of HIV/AIDS projects.  PEPFAR is changing phases and you have to know how to do the work.  In general, the world is moving faster, there’s the economic downturn, and pressures and changes in budgets.  Be aware of the trends in your field because the complexity of what your organization’s leaders are dealing with is something you should be aware of so you can adapt.

And fourth, one of the best tactics for growing your career is networking:  meeting new people and passing out your business card.  You might be on Facebook but be sure to also create a profile for yourself on LinkedIn because businesses and recruiters do use LinkedIn to find outstanding employees that fit their culture, know their industry, and can do the work.

Like traditional societies, associations, advocacy groups, memberships, and unions, there is strength in the shear number of people Brazen Careerist has organized on your behalf that want to grow careers using social media.

On Wednesday evening, Brazen Careerist was gracious enough to let me produce their first webinar to launch the Networks feature on their site.  I set up the technology but also fielded questions from the audience to feed to Penelope & Ryan.  It wasn’t your mother’s webinar, and it was a lot of fun.  What a creative and thoughtful community Brazen has.

The webinar was for those who started groups in Brazen’s site.  For example, I had started the Associations group to find other young professionals who work at associations.  Brazen had just made the decision to change Groups to Networks and the webinar showed us how to be better Network leaders.  (If you look at my group, you can tell I need advice).

During the webinar many people wanted to know why they should invest time in Brazen instead of LinkedIn.  Penelope thoughtfully responded that Brazen is a network of bloggers and that blogging can help you land jobs because it publishes your ideas when you don’t have the experience to land a job right after college or grad school.

Participants responded, But blog writing is scary.  My ideas?  Out there?  Isn’t execution and experience better?  How do I know this is safe?

No, it’s not safe.  Like anything new, it is risky.  Brazen Careerist is genius because it helps you manage your social media activity risk.

This table shows you why social media activities like blogging are scary to you and explains the difference between traditional career networking and social media career networking.

Brazen Careerist manages risk for you.

Your Social Media Career Networking Risks:

• Someone might disagree with my ideas
• I don’t have enough experience, and my ideas will be dumb, no one will hire me
• What if my boss finds out and fires me
• Blogging needs to be so niche, limiting myself to one topic will hurt me in the log run

How Brazen Careerist Manages Your Risks:

• Network to show yourself, your boss, and others that blogging is a new career tool that normal people use
• Advice at your fingertips from other smart people
• Teaches you how to express your ideas to your intended audience and industry in a professional, thought-provoking manner
• Has created a talent market of tech-savvy, entrepreneurial people – think strength in numbers rather than competing for the same jobs

Questions for fellow Network Leaders:

How can we leverage our Brazen networks to decrease our social media risk even more?

What could Brazen Careerist develop that would make us thought-leaders on the well-executed personal brand?

What type of education/training would help you be a better Network leader?

How can Brazen Careerist stand apart from LinkedIn as a career management tool for Gen Y?

Are we on Brazen an association?  Union?  Advocacy group?  Society?

If we wanted 1 Thing in the world to change, what would it be and how would we do it?

Photo Credit:

Great discussion yesterday with Seth Godin, Holly Ross, and Beth Kanter about nonprofits, social media, and innovation.

Beth and Holly have great posts – read them before you read this because their sums were so good I’m going to write about something else.

I want to talk to the young professionals of our community.

I thought yesterday’s discussion would revolve around tactics to get other people to change – like how to prove a new technology to others in your org.

Really it was about how you can change – into a person who proves new technologies to others in your org.

I know of a technique that can help you do this.  You will think it is weird and unnecessary but you have to do it.  It’s called personal branding.  It’s what we do now.

Personal branding forces you to figure out what you’re about and define that for others.

Some tools for this are starting a blog about your industry, commenting on other blogs about your industry, and learning as much as you possibly can about the problems in your industry.  For nonprofits it might be fund raising in an economic downturn, delivering food to Somalia, or getting people to come to your event.

Blog writing will force you to come up with what you really think about an issue.  It will help you gain your own clarity and insight, which can be empowering.   Keep it about business and ideas and not about your cat or work place annoyances.

On the right of this page you area reading are most of my favorite blogs.  Get yourself set up with Google Reader to have their updates come to you instead of wasting time going to them.  You can even read them on your iPhone.

After a few months you will have enough knowledge to start solving real problems in your industry and connections with other people who can make things happen.

Then it’s just up to you to get things done.

If you already have a blog and are out there making things happen, please post your link below so I and others can connect with you.

Update:  Great post on personal branding predictions for 2010 to check out.

Two of my favorite teachers are Seth Godin and Chris Brogan. Seth is an expert in marketing and Chris is an expert in Communications – two of my favorite business functions that at a nonprofit we all get to do in some form or another.

I have their books stacked up with Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta that I am reading now and fantasize like a nerd about how a conversation with those three would go.

I think it would help win an important battle in nonprofit operations PR.  We need nonprofit trust agents to educate themselves in new media and technology to spread the story that a nonprofit’s overhead is not a measure of its effectiveness or credibility.  Nancy Lublin has already gotten us started.  We need to talk about how innovations in mobile and internet technology create opportunities to transform nonprofit operations.  Operations needs more seats at program planning tables.

Trust Agents are people who humanize the web, understand the systems, and how to make their own game, connect, and build fluid relationships.  Does this sound like your CFO?

New Marketing allows us to know our audience, make things that they want, and tell them about it in places and ways they anticipate and want and to get out of their way.  Online marketing is about messages that spread between people, not one-way announcements or ads directed at people to interrupt them and gain their attention to hear a message they weren’t interested in hearing anyway.  New marketing does not ask, “How can we use this new marketing stuff?” but “How can we be an organization that people want to connect with in this new, transparent way?”  Does your HR director know about new marketing?

Maybe we can address this during the upcoming interview with Seth and NTEN.

see more Epic Fails

This is the first blog post I am writing as I anticipate my upcoming interview with Seth Godin and the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

Many of you might not know what a Meatball Sundae is.  A Meatball Sundae is an organization that tries to add all of this new media fun stuff like Facebook and Myspace and Twitter and Google (the sundae part) on top of the same, tried and true, products they’ve been making for years (the meatball part).

The key is to not become a Meatball Sundae.

It’s not that the meatballs are bad and the sundae part is good.  It’s that they do not naturally work together.  One part or the whole thing must change in order for your organization to be successful now.

Did you know that?

Here’s a tip:  to move your organization online do so strategically – beyond interns on Twitter.

This is a senior management decision, although others in the organization can build the case.

As the picture above suggests, organizations fail when their marketing is not in sync with their organization.

Here is a helpful free eBook to help you find work using the social web by Chris Brogan, one of the most trusted leaders in this space right now:  Using the Social Web to Find Work.

He gives a useful overview of how to make the most of LinkedIn for building your network.  Great stuff.

Well, first you need to know it thoroughly yourself, so this assumes you are active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs.

1. Show her people who are using these tools successfully.  I showed my boss Beth’s Blog, Beth’s Blog’s Facebook Fan Page, and Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents Fan Page.
2. Show her how to grab RSS feeds and add them to Google Reader.
3. Show her how to search for topics of her interest that blogs write about to get her used to blogs.  Do this by showing her how to use Technorati and Google Blog Search.
4. Teach her how RTs, @ replies, shortened URLs, and advanced search work on Twitter.
5. Give her Chris and Julien’s new book Trust Agents after you’ve finished it.

I’ve done all of these things with my boss, and it was a great success.  Now that he understands what social media can do, we can start brainstorming how to use it to meet our organization’s goals.  That’s going to be the hard part.

Do you need a fantastic tech guru?  Who’s a woman?  And knows non-profits?

InterAction recently hosted a roundtable on the ROI of social media.  The presenter, Allyson Kapin, was excellent.  She founded Women Who Tech, which brings to together and empowers women in technology, which is absolutely necessary right now.  I want to go to their next event!  If you want to take your organization beyond interns on Twitter, hire her.

The most important thing I learned from her at the roundtable was that nonprofits should be involved in social media (Facebook, Twitter) for branding purposes only at this time.  Social media does not have enough results on return on investment to prove the time invested will get you volunteers or fundraising dollars.  Just set up your accounts on the services and get started to get your name out there and in front of the next generation of volunteers and donors.  That is all you can expect at this point, but it is necessary.  It’s about presence and branding.  Also, don’t build your own SM network on your site – go where the people are, like LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, whatever SM site may be popular internationally where your partners are, etc.

She did get us started on Social Media Metrics 101:

• Measure Click-Through Rates: On links to action alerts, online fundraising campaigns, blog posts, latest studies, etc. You can track CTR’s by setting up unique urls/landing pages back to your websites or calls to actions.
• Review your website referrals through a web stats package such as Google Analytics. What percentage of traffic is coming from social media sites you have an active presence on?
• Number of friends/fans/followers on a particular social network.

And for the more advanced:

• Bit.ly: A URL shortener that tracks information such as number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur. http://www.Bit.ly
• Xinureturns: Provides a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media.
• Run a report and you will receive information on Technorati, Google, Diggs, and links back to your website. http://www.xinureturns.com/
• PostRank: Provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content. http://www.postrank.com/
• SocialToo: A comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social media stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter. http://socialtoo.com/
• Summize.com: Tracks topics and hashtags, twitter user names, and top trends on twitter.
• RSS Feeds: You can setup RSS feeds on social networks like Twitter, Digg, Flickr, etc.
• Yahoo Pipes: You can create your own monitoring tools using Yahoo Pipes which lets you quickly set up your own RSS tracking, complete with filters. http://www.pipes.yahoo.com/

You need a home to read all of the things people say about your organization, field, and competitors.

This video shows you how to set up a custom social media listening station – a one-stop place to read how people are talking about your organization and issues you care about via Twitter, blogs, news, and discussion boards.

Once you watch this video and set up your station, you will save A LOT of time by reading everything in one place.

I’ll show you how to grab feeds from:

Twitter Search
Advanced Twitter Search
BackTweet
Google Blog Search
Technorati
Omgili
Board Reader

Then you can customize your own.