Post-camp blues.

Yesterday was LaidOffCamp in San Francisco. It was a huge gathering and I had high hopes that I would leave with some kind of amazing inspiration and also a job. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. It was quite unorganized and for someone like me who is overly regimented and likes to plan things to death, I got distracted by the mayhem and had to leave after lunch. However, before I did, I sat through one really informative session about social networking on social media sites and how to brand yourself appropriately. 

John McCrea, VP of Marketing at Plaxo spoke along with Valerie Gonyea, a career consultant. They had a lot of great insight into the job hunt, considering the fact that this is the first major economic downturn with so many efficient tools to leverage one's network. Some thoughts:

• Use people you DO know to make connections to people you DON'T know on LinkedIn. They list connections to certain people who are directly connected to other contacts whose companies are hiring. Request introductions through your contacts.
• When trying to make connections related to a new job, don't go after the HR person but try and find out who the hiring manager is. 
• All networking sites should be accessible to the right people. If you have a personal blog or photo site featuring parties and running around like a freak, make that either an alias or private to only your friends/family. Plaxo has the ability to link all of your sites (Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn) but you can edit accessibility so you're able to share different things with different people. 
• Your brand is the sum total of your education, personality, skills and expertise brought together to form an identity. In order to form an online identity, use a dashboard like Plaxo or Friend Feed to bring all of your information together in one place. And to reinforce this, use the exact same user name and photo.  
• Blog! Twitter!
• Make your "About me" the same across all sites.
• When commenting in forums, create a stamp with links to all of your appropriate sites. Comment intelligently on sites that pertain to your industry. When you sound like a serious expert, you want your LinkedIn profile to be the thing they click on to learn more about you.
• Think about the descriptors that best describe who you ARE personally and what you want to BE professionally. Flush out this description and apply that to your profiles.

So, again, I feel like this was a great opportunity that was in some ways squandered. I know they were eager to have the content generated by attendees but I think some kind of expert involvement and pre-planned programming would have lent itself to a more streamlined experience. Anyway, I tried!