Now THIS is a question I have actually heard (and been) asked quite a lot. And since Twittering and Facebooking and yes, even blogging, are prevalent enough in the modern scheme of things, I wanted to share with you the truth about this on a special occasion (the first month-iversary, naturally).
For simplicity’s sake, I have two answers: the short one and the long one.
The short answer: it depends.
The long answer: This might take a while to explain.
You might have heard recently about people using the internet to get jobs, from that guy who used Twitter to get an advertising job to some friend of yours who lucked out using Monster.com to even the new person in the office that was found through Craigslist. It might seem that everyone’s getting hired or recognized through the Internet these days, no matter what their job or talent is.
They’re not.
Think of how many kajillions of bands and musicians are on MySpace. Hell, you might know a few (these guys are awesome – check them out!). But the chances of finding good music through the Internet by combing through social networks is almost infinitesimally small. That’s kind of like how it is with social networks.
Sure, something like LinkedIn might help your job search, and I am a huge proponent of everyone having their own website, and while I agree that it’s a good idea to maximize your online presence to help control what happens when you get Googled, it’s not all necessary. Showing someone your Twitter probably won’t help that much. Neither will showing your Facebook (actually, given some of the photos that people put up, it could hurt your chances quite considerably). And unless you have film samples, your YouTube page probably won’t give you a great advantage either.
If, however, the job you’re looking into requires familiarity with social media networks, go nuts! The problem with this, however, is that no one has figured out how to utilize them very well in the business world. Large services like Facebook and MySpace use banners and adwords for revenue generation. Sites that start out free that then decide to charge for their service tend to die out. And the smaller, specialized sites that are made for certain population segments remain too fragmented and unknown. So everyone still has a way to go with being able to make social media REALLY work.
Even this blog, which I started to give me a place to share some of the boneheaded decisions I made while scavenging the classifieds, is one of hundreds of thousands. As much as I’d like to believe it, I don’t think that someone will stumble across this site and decide to give me a job because of it (however, if you did stumble across this blog and are in a position to hire me for your company, for god’s sake, forget I wrote the other sentences in this paragraph and get in touch with me).
Social networking is still too dependent on the first part of its name (“social” for all the slow kids in the class) to be a fully-realized tool for job searches. But if you want to throw your LinkedIn profile on your cover letter, I can’t say I’d blame you.
