Have you ever been to meetings of social media groups and wanted to leave because they felt like a Home Owners Association for Social Media? Or read an idea on a blog and thought to yourself “Why is this person or company trying to lay claim to this idea people are already doing on a local level and stifle its growth with rules?”  It seems to me that people or companies strive for rules and regulations for two reasons: a desire to validate their presence in a space, and fear.

Every good social media campaign needs a backbone. It needs a concerted, well-conceived goal set. The right tools (this includes the people actively acting on the campaign). You need solid strategy in place to get you to wear you want to be. At the same time, you need flexibility. If everyone is given a proscribed set of rules on the national level, all we’ll get is an impersonal, HMO style social media experience. This will only serve to drive people away from the platforms you have invested in. If you are going to spend the time, energy and effort (and trust me, a great social media campaign does take effort, time and energy) in this space, why would you shoot yourself in the foot by creating a situation where you can not innovate?

Don’t fall prey to false metrics. Eschew extensive rules. Avoid boilerplate social media campaigns. Leave yourself the ability to respond, to think actively and proactively about the results you are getting. Leave yourself and your company the room to do what needs to be done, and where, in real time. Practice a few common sense guidelines (Listen, Engage, Listen, Be Human, Don’t Tell The Internet If You Wouldn’t Tell Your Grandma, Listen, Share, Help, Be Trustworthy, Listen) and you’ll be fine.

Applications Analyst I at Partners Health Care System, Inc in Wellesley, MA

Applications Analyst II at Partners HEalth Care System, Inc in Charlestown, MA

Applications Analyst II at Partners Health Care System, Inc in Wellesley, MA

Corp Team Leader I, EMPI at Partners Health Care System, Inc in Charlestown, MA

Account Executive at Ripple6 in New York, NY

Good Luck!

Social Media Specialist at Aquent (Boston, MA)

Digital Content Manager at the Center for Civic Education (Calabasas, CA)

Manager, Enterprise Social Marketing at HP (Cupertino, CA)

Senior Sales Director at Web 2.0 Social Software (New York, NY)

Account Director for Incrossing (San Francisco, CA)

Sr Director, Corporate Communication for Choice Hotels, Silver Springs, MD

Word of Mouth Program Manager at HealthTalker (Sommerville, MA)

Social Media Marketing Coordinator at CauseForce (Los Angeles, CA)

Supervisor of New Media for CONE (Boston, MA)

Social Media Sales Professional for McKinnis Consulting Group (Chandler, AZ)

Social Media Specialist at PEAK6 Investments LP (Chicago, IL)

Developer for TipJoy (Cambridge, MA)

Sales, Developer and Engineer positions at Attivio (Boston, MA)

Assistant Marketing Manager, Social Media at Macy’s (San Francisco, CA)

Developer, Marketing, SEO, and more for Edvisors (Boston, MA)

Please note: Uptown Uncorked is not the respondent for these jobs, we are simply aggregating third party information to benefit job seekers visiting our web site. Some jobs may be pulled from the third party web site or company web site where they are hosted if they get filled. We suggest contacting the hosting web site or listing company for each job with any questions about particular listings.

Triston touched briefly on this from a Millennial perspective over on Tech.Blorge, as well. In light of the changing job market and emerging new economy, I wanted to go into a bit more detail for those of you who are coming in to the job market. Following some of the pointers will help you if you are already in the market for a job, but these tips will most benefit the Millennials and Digital Natives out there who will be entering the future work space.

Your Online Presence Is Part of Your Searchable Personal Resume From The First Day You Participate on the Internet

Whether you first log on to MySpace or a school network in your teens, or start using Disney’s closed social networks from the age of three with parental supervision, know that your online presence is recorded somewhere, in some way, from the first time you participate. Levels of privacy vary, but it is safe to assume that a determined person can find our online history, all or in part. Thanks to sites like the Wayback Machine you can even find data from the early days of the Internet as we know it, pre social media.

The up and coming digital natives are much more in tune with this lack of separation between personal and private identity. Even so, job seekers should be prepared to either monitor what their friends say about them online, or be prepared to address it when interviewing for a job. Quite a few employers already include Google, FaceBook, Flickr and MySpace in their pre-employment screening of you, making that MySpace ‘photo shoot’ have implications beyond fun and games. The number of employers who search your background online will only increase as the social internet becomes more and more mainstream.

In the eyes of some employers, and some clients for the self employed or entrepreneurs, simply untagging photos and notes mentioning you is not going to be enough. These potential employers and clients want you to be more careful in even choosing your free time activities and friends. Luckily, these employers that don’t fully grasp the connectivity of the web and real world and the necessity for having a life in addition to a career will all have digital natives managing their Human Resources department in a few years, so that should ease up a bit. The rest of the companies out there are often satisfied by keeping photos of you socializing untagged and other basic reputation management precautions.

You Are Your Brand

Reputation management goes farther than making sure those photos and videos of you with the donkey doing tequila shots down in Cancun on Spring Break stay untagged. It also applies to positive reputation enforcement. Realizing that you, and your name, are going to be forever associated with your actions and making sure positive, well-rounded actions are tagged to you is just as important as keeping tabs on your slip-ups.

Positioning yourself as an expert in an interest or field early on is key. Have more than one interest? Find ways to associate yourself with them all, in a reliable, visible way. Two shining examples of reputation management and positioning in a field of expertise at two different stages of life and career are Ben Grossman and Chris Brogan. Ben, a digital native, has already worked on national campaigns in social media, started a consulting business and launched a career as a speaker. If you look for Ben online, listen to him online, then meet him in person, what you see is what you get because of his innate awareness of online presence. Chris Brogan also translates well from online ‘persona’ and image to offline person. At a much more advanced stage of his career than Ben, Gen Xer Chris has been keeping his personal brand “real” since before the concept of personal brand even existed, participating in the social media space since it first took flight. Chris’s approach involves a great deal of involvement with and transparency of his on and offline brand.

Managing your personal brand as well as Chris and Ben do takes quite a bit more time than most of us have to spend. By setting up tools like Google Alerts, TweetBeep reports, and other monitoring services you can find ways to check in on how you are presented online more efficiently. Periodically do vanity searches on your name to make sure you are confortable with the content that shows up, and be prepared to handle it if you aren’t. By keeping track of how you appear to the world, you make yourself more hirable in the age of the social resume and hyper connectivity.

If you look around the social media universe and the internet, you start to notice that the people that are talking and the people that are also listening are standing out. These people are getting the job offers, the offers of collaborative projects, the referrals. They have used the social web via tools like FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more to be seen and heard, to help people out, to showcase their knowledge, to learn from others and to interact. When you are job hunting, this network and authority building online is key to your success.

Building Authority and Trusted Networks

Building authority is part of the equation, as is presence, brand and reputation management and building your trusted network. The key component to this is the element of trust. In order to become trusted (and hirable) you have to prove yourself trustworthy. There are plenty of people online who are authorities in their field who aren’t trustworthy. Online leeches, they gain reputations for stealing content, horning in on clients or potential bosses, being creepy in general (usually when you meet them in person the creep factor is high) and doing nothing but take. To be hirable, you want to avoid becoming an online leech.

To become valued, you have to listen as well as talk. Please tell us about your area of expertise, but also listen when we respond to you, when we ask questions, when we offer suggestions. Authority without compassion and listening is hollow, and will get you nowhere. Success in hiring 2.0 is a two way street. Your next employer or client is looking for you, even as you are looking for them. You never know how you will find each other, so make sure you have been keeping your ducks in row and working toward your own bright future since day one. Innovate, participate, and actively listen and see how you can give back a part of your recipe for success in creating your social resume.

As the Baby Boomers begin exiting the work force, my generation, Generation X, finds ourselves in the unique sandwich position. Caught in the middle of two massive generations, we have operated largely ignored and uninhibited for quite some time. While the Baby Boomers have been running traditional corporations and operating in the pre-Web 2.0 world, my generation has been quietly building our own working world.

My generation is a generation that frequently operates best in a freelance environment. We like to have the freedom to work at home, often alone by default, and are not traditionally joiners. This means that I often know several Generation X colleagues I can tap for one project, and I often do bring them on board, but their network is often much smaller than I seek for an ongoing relationship. Sure, Gen X is on Twitter, for example, but generationaly often scoffs at the connectivity of social media even as they use it (or build it).

For that reason when it is time to consult on a project I turn to my colleagues in Generation Y first (personally, I prefer Digital Natives to Gen Y as a “label”). As a consultant, I don’t “hire” people for permanent staff, I collaborate on projects with other freelancers instead. For per project consulting, I find that Digital Natives, as a rule, are more in tune with quickly shifting trends and have larger trusted networks to use as the building blocks to future collaboration. This makes them ideally suited for social media projects.

Do I ignore my generation in favor of Generation Y? Absolutely not. I simply find that my generation is already self sufficient, set up to freelance, and we work better together on one-time projects and as a resource behind the scenes for each other. If you run a company and you have Generation Y on staff that you “don’t understand”, I recommend finding out more about them. You have a vast, untapped resource at your disposal.

One of the first things I tell a new client is that part of the evaluation I make of their office is determining the existing resources they have to create a successful social media presence without undue expenditures on their part. I consider the employees of a company part of a company’s social media resources. I always recommend having me help them set a policy in their employee handbook that handles online presence and covers issues like privacy and basic conduct online, then include their existing staff in my training sessions.

Every employee has down time. Even the most over worked have a few minutes each day to play around online. I think companies who frown on corporate time used for a bit of personal fun are missing the mark. Yes, clear guidelines should be in place to make sure that your employees aren’t posting confidential information, and I do recommend choosing one or two “point people” to become the bulk of the company presence online, but there is no reason why your other employees can’t also disclose that they work for you, talk a bit about what they (and the company) do, and help make your brand more accessible.

The one or two “point people” you choose should be people able to get things done within the company. These people should become your help channel, your news conduit, your marketing source for social media. Think of them as the @comcastcares or @zappos for your brand. Then you should have other employees as minor points of information and news (Zappo is a great example of this in action as they have a number of employees on Twitter and other platforms). Above all else, everyone in the social media space for your company should be personable and make sure to include fun, personal tidbits in with the corporate. It makes your brand seem more likable, more accessible and creates a fan base for your service or product.

It is my opinion that anyone telling you to hire one person to be your company spokesperson online is leading you astray. Yes, you absolutely need social media training, a guide, if you will, to come in and help you and your employees learn the best practices of social media. This includes helping you pick the social media platform (or platforms) you are most comfortable with (not everyone needs Twitter, people) and learning how to use them in an effective and efficient way. It is much more cost effective to pay someone (yes, someone like me or others who do what I do) to come in and teach you how to help yourself online than it is to spend loads of money on an annual salary for one person to “brand you”. You are not a cow. Brand yourself – use existing resources, get some outside training and best practices in place, and let your employees really be part of the process. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.