A really strange thing happened to me this year.
I wrote this post on 15 Facebook for Business Tips and landed myself the ideal job working in social media in Dublin. As some readers might know, up until June I was working in the Waterford Institute of Technology as a researcher.
I always say you have to have a point in everything you do, and this is also true in social media. My point in starting this blog while doing my Masters, was to give me the edge over other’s looking for work. So 2010 arrived and I managed to get a couple of speaking engagements from organisations who had heard about my Masters research (Why people are friends with brands in social media) and read the blog. My talks were on social media. I used the blog as a way of expanding on points raised at the presentation and as a way to direct people to here, who knows maybe some have even ended up as subscribers.
Anyways the post gained traction and it’s probably the most tweeted post on this blog at 20+ tweets and also 20 Facebook likes (not bad since I only added the Facebook like button at the end of August). So that post got tweeted about and one person who saw it was an employee at Neworld Associates. It just so happens the company had a new position in their digital division as a Social Media Strategist. Out of the blue I received an email via Linked In asking if I’d be interested in this position.
At first I had mixed feelings. I had vowed years ago, never to ever return to Dublin. But at the same time I had only days earlier began looking for work in social media, looking a bit further to the UK, thinking there would be very few positions like this available in Ireland. And here I was, being head hunted for a job, I had just started looking for. Talk about timing.
Within a week I had a contract in my hand and a month later I started the job.
Pretty cool. One of my highlights of the year, and it’s mostly down to blogging. The blog got me noticed, got me in the door and demonstrated I knew what it is I talk about. My CV has a good bit of social media experience anyway, but my CV didn’t get me in the door in the first place. So some part luck, some part CV, but mostly thanks to the blog.
That is how I blogged myself a job.
1. Set goals for your blog / social media
2. Work out how those goals can be achieved
3. Good content is still the most critical thing when it comes to blogging
4. The post that got noticed was actually an updated post I had written a month earlier. So did the update work better? Or had I not done enough to promote the original content? I think it was the fact the updated version featured much more examples was why it caught on. Lesson, make your posts as good as possible, even if that means not hitting publish for a day or so while the idea can be fine tuned.
5. Keep plugging away at it. I did start the blog in December 2008 and while not actually looking for work for most of that time, when it was called upon the blog did what I set it out to do.
6. Finally, luck may play some role in achieving the goals or objectives. However, while this scenario happened by chance, I don’t think it would have worked unless all the pieces had been in place.
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