Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m., U R What You Tweet Social Media 4 Career Advancement

Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m., U R What You Tweet Social Media 4 Career Advancement

I went to the Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Metro has a number of excellent classes and networking events. They even have an individual membership now for
$100. It is worth considering if you go to their classes regularly.


The Metropolitan New York Library Council http://www.metro.org/  is on 57 East 11th street, Fourth floor, New York City, between Broadway and University Place. The location is easy to get to by subway. This event was open to nonmembers. Suasna Gormley, the chapter chair, introduced the speakers. I saw one person from New York Librarians Meetup and I saw Tom Nielsen who is the member services chair for Metro. I remember meeting him once when he was working at an engineering library many years ago.



Metro New York is very clean and well laid out. The meeting room is comfortable, the projector is large, and at every meeting or class I have been there, they have decent coffee.



As always, I try to present what I thought was important that I heard at the presentation. There was a lot of very relevant information in this presentation.



One of the presenters was Bonnie McEwan President of Make Waves. Her blog is called Ripples and Wipeouts, http://www.makewavesnotnoise.com/blog . Make Waves is a marketing and communication consultancy for nonprfits. Tbe other presenter was Donna Severino, Vice President, Records Management at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. She is also the Chair of the SLA Employment Task Force. I found a recommended book title which looks interesting on her Linked In profile, If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Pracitce by Carol O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson, Jr. The title of the preseentaion was UR What U Tweet Social Media and Your Career. Having seen lots of different presentations, this was one of the more practical, better presentations that I have seen. It is part of Bonnie McEwan's slideshre presentations. http://www.slideshare.net/BonnieMcEwan/social-media4careeradvancement



Having the url for the presentation freed me to listen to what was being said and take notes on what was not in the slideshow. Slideshare is wonderful because it eliminates the need for copious notes. I could think about what she meant by transparency. In a way, I am not very transparent. I don't necessarily agree that being transparent is the most wonderful thing. A certain amount of being enigmatic can have its usefulness. I would rather represent myself as an image of what I work with; book related pictures, book related art, or book posters are some of the imagery I like being associated with. It generates some controversy which is not always a bad thing.



Some of the ideas that were particularly useful were that you should frame yourself in the social media environment or other people or employers will do it for you. This means checking how people are talking about you and branding yourself. Sometimes it is good to Google yourself. Bonnie McEwan described Linked In as being a fairly safe environment to brand yourself to start with. Facebook is more about relationship building and twitter is one of the best communication channels. Part of branding yourself is keeping your communications consistent with your image. I found these ideas something to ponder. Bonnie McEwan talked about a little bit about how to keep your Facebook profile clean of arguments and present a good face to the world. Employers are looking at your Facebook account. I agree that facebook is a way to share ideas and build relationships.



There were of course some tools that were mentioned. One of them was http://www.tineye.com/  which allows people to upload an image and search for it. I have heard about this application at other meetings which I have attended. The other application that seemed interesting was an application called wordle which generates word clouds http://www.wordle.net/



The main focus was on Tiwtter, LinkedIn, and Facebook which are the three largest social networks. Bonnie McEwan also talked about Foursquare http://www.foursquare.com/  which is a location based social network.



There was a small amount of discussion on the topic of copyright. Creative commons was brought up. There are so many different kinds of licenses available for content. It can get confusing. There is copyright, copyleft, creative commons, gnu free documentation license, and other agreements. There are also trademarks and personality rights which are just as important to pay attention to.



There was also a discussion of the concept of librarian by Donna Severino . For some people, the word librarian summons up old fashioned connotations. I found this interesting. I am finding that some of the newer information jobs are spread into other fields like information science, records management, computer programming, web design, and content management. Librarians are one of the groups of people that can fill these positions.



Donna Severino also talked about wording in resumes and other places. She said it was very important to pay attention to how you used words in resumes. It was enlightening and makes me think that I need to have someone review my resume.  She suggested Laura Hill of Careers In Motion http://www.cimllc.com/ .



Bonnie McEwan reviewed books with the purpose of being viewed as an expert book reviewer. She focused on professional books with a mix of serious mysteries like Elizabeth Peters. Elizabeth Peters is an excellent writer. This showed a little bit of her personality along with the different styles of music she likes on her Facebook profile. Social media encourages a certain amount of mixing between professional and personal interests.



There was also some discussion of putting your resume on the web. Eportfolio is the term for a website with samples of all the different work you have done on the internet. I think a Linked In profile in many ways is superior to a resume. It would be nice if we could just send our linked in profile instead of a piece of paper to employers. I liked how Bonnie McEwan described how she no longer uses much letterhead paper or envelopes for her company anymore. At the same time, a person showed a very detailed business card which used both the back and front of the card. The back was a bullet pointed list with skills. Bonnie McEwan's business card is in color with printing on both sides.



This was a very well rounded presentation. It was worth going to. Depending on how things are going, I may go to another one of the Career Sigs at Metro in December.



There was only one element missing from the description of social media for careers. This was the meetup where people meet in person to discuss a specific activitiy like ebooks, libraries, social media, or technology. I have been to a lot of these lately and write about them. The social in social media ultimately in many cases is face to face. I found out about this meeting through http://www.meetup.com/NYLibrarians/  which led me to the Metro website.