My name is Koka Sexton and I’ve been a junkie for longer than I can remember. I even like to do it at work. It must be going on 20 years now but my use has increased exponentially more over the past several years. Social media addiction has been a battle that I’m losing and I’m loving Generation YOU. Unlike other addictive substances, I think social media is something everyone young and old should be a part of and as often as possible. Here are some of my favorite social media links.
I would think the reality is that most of the people I know and the people reading this post suffer from this addiction also. Good for us. Social media is a way for family’s to stay connected, keep in touch with friends and even promote your business. I don’t even know how many social media sites there are out there from Facebook to Twitter and the other thousands of places people stay connected through blogs and forums. The first part of recovery is the admission of your addiction and then to expose yourself to a group that can help with the healing process. My readers are my support group and before there’s an intervention, I’ll share with you my favorite social media sites of choice.
Facebook is like crack
I started using Facebook the same reason most people do. I wanted a way to keep in contact with all of the friends I have grown up with, gone to school with and served in the Army with. I’ve been told I post too much but when you have something to share, you better put it on Facebook. Facebook is like the social media hub for most of the people I know. My Twitter, blog and other updates are fed into Facebook like a hungry child. I used to be picky about who I “friended” but with the privacy controls I have a good handle of making sure certain updates are only seen by my closest friends and family. I like being able to log in and see what my friends have been up to, pictures they’ve shared and every other update they pass along.
FriendFeed is a Speed Ball
I follow a lot of content and produce feeds for more things than I want to admit. I started using FriendFeed as a way to aggregate these RSS feeds and never really had the intent on using it for it’s social features but that didn’t last very long. From my personal feeds, news and social media, FriendFeed lets me see EVERYTHING streaming across the web that I may have otherwise missed. I started getting alerts to people following my FriendFeed and was wondering why. I guess some other people have similar interests and wanted to see what I was spreading around.
StumbleUpon is a True Addiction
I don’t even know where to start with this. Stumbleupon is a vortex that sucks you into a quantum parallel universe. You can NEVER just click the StumbleUpon button on the toolbar once. It only takes one click and the next thing you know, it will be two hours later and you only have brief memories of the past 200 websites you just ran through at a blinding pace.
Twitter Overdose
This is no surprise to people that know me. I am a Twitter fanatic and get my fix 140 characters at a time. I think I have something posted on Twitter several times a day. Besides my personal Twitter profile which only has a small 1,500 followers, I have a few others that I started over time just to have something to feed my addiction further. I started a social media Twitter feed that has gained over 8,000 followers, a business / sales twitter profile that has grown to over 3,000 additional followers. Each of the Twitter profiles have an associated WordPress blog that was created because obviously I have that much free time. (well…I used to) It never started off as a way to see how many followers I could get, thought I do enjoy that so many people do. I just wanted a place to share links that I thought were interesting and maybe give an opinion or two.
These are my regular haunts and there are more but I don’t want to spend all day writing about the social media profiles I have scattered across the web. I forget sometimes myself so I have to Google myself just to find them. Are you just as addicted to me? What are your favorite social media sites to stay connected.
There are a few apps that were available on the iPhone App store that could tie into your Netflix account. I have been using iTV and been though it was a bit clunky at times, it was the only app available that I could find that would work with my Tivo and Netflix. The application was great for seeing what was going to be on and set the Tivo to record it. I typically used it when out and about and a friend would mention a show they liked or movie that was going to be on TV that I wanted to see. Getting on the phone and setting the Tivo to record was easy peasy.
Netflix Streaming to my iPhone
When it came to my Netflix queue though it wasn’t always the best option. So I am happy to see that the long awaited official iPhone app for Netflix has arrived. Not only can I manage my Netflix DVD and Instant View lineup but Netflix went one step further and allows me to watch movies right on my iPhone. What I also discovered was that Netflix seems to keep track of what movies you watched and where you left off. So if you started watching a movie at home and then wanted to continue watching the same flick on your phone, Netflix lets you resume from the last point. How cool is that?
Google has just announced that starting today, U.S. based Gmail users will now be able to place and receive phone calls directly from the Gmail interface. Calls placed to U.S. and Canadian-based numbers are free, and if you need to make international calls, the rates are extremely cheap.
I signed up for a Google Voice number about a year ago when I needed a new business line that I could have transferred to my home office or to my cell phone. The added bonus of this type of business phone line is that the voice mail is transcribed and sent through email/text and stored online for review online.
And now for the latest in Scott Pilgrim viral treats: Watch as Michael Cera’s words enter Keanu Reeves’s mouth and take us to the edge of reality. I saw this video on YouTube and figured it would be a good Geek Break to post.
CoTweet is a Twitter web application that lets anyone manage multiple twitter profile from one easy interface. I came across the application when I was doing some research on tools for social media. As a free service CoTweet lets you manage up to 5 accounts at once. I would think that their enterprise accounts have the ability to manage more profiles but it doesn’t specify how many. Maybe it’s entirely scalable.
CoTweet for the Twitter junkie
A lot of people that use CoTweet would fall into this category. Obviously if you are looking for a Twitter tool like this you already have a few Twitter profiles that you are trying to manage. Maybe you have a Twitter profile for yourself and others for blogs/websites you run or just a secret profile that you share with only a few people. Using CoTweet you get a complete view of each of these profiles, updates, replies and DMs on one screen and also the ability to drill into any one profile specifically.
Corporate Use
I was using CoTweet to manage my personal profile as well as the Twitter profiles of Paragon Software. They have a couple and plans to build a few additional ones for specific business needs. What made CoTweet so great in a corporate environment was that I could manage a complete social media campaign for Twitter out of the web application. Their functionality to schedule tweets was extremely easy and you have the ability to send one message out through multiple twitter profiles at once. This was great to saturate our community with news and promotions.
Because CoTweet is meant for a company environment, you are also able to work in conjunction with other employees using CoTweet to monitor and manage a single profile.
I’ve looked around but haven’t found another Twitter tool that has an interface as easy as this and still carries such a powerful set of features. If you know of one, let me know, I’d be happy to take a look at it.
I first wrote about Xobni (Inbox backwards) back in 2008 when it was still in BETA. I thought it was the best thing to happen to Outlook back then and with the recent changes they have made I think it is a MUST HAVE app for anyone using Outlook for email. Besides making it easy to track down emails and find attachments that you knew were sent and cant remember where you filed it, the app now lets you see social network profiles for the contact just based on their email address. There really are a bunch of great features you should take a look at, go to Xobni and check it out.
One of the functions I performed at Paragon was being the voice of the company in the US. I was responsible for dealing with the media for publications, product reviews and contributed articles related to the corporate product line. It was new for me but it came naturally. How hard is it to talk to someone you never met and discuss the reasons your product is awesome? If you’re a sales person at heart, then it should be like another day at the office. The articles were a bit different since they had to be written and took more time but I run a blog and managed the company blog so writing isn’t too difficult for me.
I hadn’t gone out and collected all the links before. So I figure I can make a post that will showcase them.
Looking for a job is never an easy task. There are obviously the major job boards like Monster.com and HotJobs.com but it seems to me like these sites are a necessary evil more than anything else. Sure there are a lot of jobs that get posted to them and you can keep your resume there for employers, recruiters, and other agencies to find you. The truth is, at least for me, is that other than getting a few decent leads from them, they dont help very much for someone in my profession.
What I mean by decent leads is that you can see if there are companies looking for people with specific skills but your resume is going to be thrown into a pile of 1000 others that may or may not get looked at even once. As a person looking for work, you need to track down the HR or hiring manager on your own to make initial contact. (Well that’s how I go about it.) Then the boards can give you information on what companies are hiring and if there is a company that stands out you can check them out in more detail to see if they have other positions that are only listed on their corporate website. See…leads.
I’ve been focusing more on LinkedIn than the other sites and I’ll explain a process and what I like about it.
Initially you can go to the “job” tab and see what open positions LinkedIn thinks would be a good fit based on the experiences you already have listed in your profile. These are helpful and relevant but the positions that pull up for me are located all over the US and it doesn’t make sense for me to apply for a position in Wyoming. But that’s not even scratching the surface, here are some great features to looking for a job on LinkedIn.
Search by Keyword
Like the other sites, you can search by keywords. You can get very specific and only look at job posting within the past few days, job function and industry. The greatest benefit from having a network on LinkedIn is that you will immediately know if you know someone at the company or is you are closely connected to someone that works there. This is great because you can apply for the job on LinkedIn and then reach out to the people you are connected to through the same site and ask for a recommendation or for some inside information.
Search by industry
One of the features I have been excited over is the ability to search by a specific industry keyword. For example “Storage”. I found companies that were hiring much faster this way and you can open up the search to find companies in the specific industry that do not have postings on LinkedIn. That’s important because some companies obviously recruit new employees through other job boards or only recruit from their own websites. Searching based on keyword gives you all the names for companies in LinkedIn and now I can go to the company sites to see if there is anything posted there. Also even with no jobs posted on LinkedIn, I can see if I know anyone that works there currently and better yet, if I don’t know anyone, I can drill into the company profiles and FIND the people I need to contact.
I’ve been using LinkedIn for years, mainly to keep in contact with old coworkers that I don’t have connected on other social media like Twitter or Facebook. Until this recent job hunt, I didn’t dig into the robust features that LinkedIn allows for. Maybe these are all old news to most of you but I thought it was awesome so I figured I’d share.
Not really sure why this seems to be the status quo for the past few years but I’m on the job market again. Shortly after Acronis changed leadership, they got rid of the Channel Development position along with a few others. It made sense, a majority of the company was based in Mass. and I was only 1 of 6 people working in a small Emeryville office. After the VP of Sales was released, I saw the writing on the walls. Such is life in high-tech I guess. At that point I had been in long enough not to have my feelings hurt, when you work for growing companies they have to make financial decisions that tend to lay-offs versus other measures. The only bad part of that situation was that the US was in (still is in most aspects) a recession, unemployment was at an all time high and the job market was minimal. It wasn’t unheard of to be applying for a job and have 60-100 other people all vying for the same position and many of them over qualified but in need of work.
Then I was introduced to Paragon Software and they needed some help. I was brought on to build the channel and help the existing sales team become more channel friendly and work with high value partners. The company was a great fit, VAR recruitment doubled and revenue in the channel grew steadily and was becoming predictable. One of the reasons postings have been so infrequent here is that besides the channel sales/recruitment/enablement tasks, I was also building the social media platforms and doing some product management for the company. I explain that more about the social media piece in this post. Actually I don’t know how I kept all of the parts moving since I was multitasking at such a high rate. The truth is I was having fun, learning a lot and the team was a good group of people so working long hours didn’t bother me. I still had time to play with Grayson and spend time with family and friends but all of the normal free time (like writing for my blog) was used getting the job done.
To make a long story short, the company needed to make some hard decisions and they affected the entire US team. Again since I was located out of the HQ in Irvine, it could have something to do with the decision. Sad, but that’s how businesses need to be run sometimes and in the course of activities my role for the channel went away and the other tasks I was handling were distributed to those that were left in the US and to our other offices in Germany. Everything is in capable hands and it was fun to build a channel around such great products. So this leaves me on hunt for another great company to be a part of. The silver lining is that I am walking away from Paragon with a whole new set of skills that I can tap into for positions I would probably never have applied for in the past.
This all reminds me of a great book I read years ago called “Who Moved My Cheese“.
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