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:

I co-led a session with Bill Lester of EngenderHealth and NPOKI at my organization’s annual member’s meeting. I thought I’d share my list of tools at large. It comes from months of finding tools that help me implement GTD. For our session, I went over the list below and the GTD quick reference. (Here’s my secret: my fav tools are still a legal pad and pen). What are the tools you use?

Personal Tools

Outlook
To process, automate, and file

Tips:
Create subfolders
Filter messages
Set reminders in your calendar or tasks
Set up general accounts like info@ for a team to manage

To-Do Lists
To remember
Remember the Milk
Evernote
Google Tasks

Meeting Scheduler
To schedule meetings easily
Doodle
TimetoMeet
Diarised

Online Backup Systems
In case your computer crashes
Mozy
Carbonite

Collaboration & Communication
Project Management
To track and communicate

Excel
Google spreadsheets – templates
Zoho
Basecamp

Wikis
To collaborate quickly
PBworks
Google sites

File Sharing / Syncing
To store your files easily online and share
Dropbox

Screencasting/Screen Shots
To show people what you mean
Jing
Aviary
There’s always PrintScreen on PC’s
and Command+Shift+3 or 4 on Macs

Surveys
To gather info quickly, free
Google Forms
Survey Monkey

Other

Texter
To reduce repetitive typing – info in Life Hacker book and blog

News and Info Aggregation
To let the news come to you

Google Reader
For blog reading/RSS feeds

Netvibes
For social media RSS feeds – listening

Atomkeep
Automate your social media profilles

Further Reference
www.lifehacker.com
www.zenhabits.net
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Upgrade Your Life by Gina Trapani

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.