Sometimes we make career development harder and more complicated than it needs to be. If you’re one of those people, like me, who is prone to overthinking and overanalyzing their lives, you can wallow in indecision and inaction for too long. Like procrastination, inaction breeds stress. So make a career development plan and start implementing it today.

I bring up career indecision and career development because they are a couple of the top reasons people come to The Career Key and this blog. We have many professional career advice articles on career development topics.

I’m not suggesting shortcut your process of choosing a career or evaluating your career options. But at some point you need to make a plan; and it may surprise you that you have short and long term goals – ones that take planning to achieve.

I recommend taking these steps proven to be effective:

1. Choose a career that matches your personality. You’ll see from our article “Getting Started” there are 3 steps: Know yourself, know your options, make a good decision.
2. If you’re in school or choosing an educational program, choose a major or program that matches your personality. A recent study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior shows making a choice this way leads to better grades and graduation rates.
3. Do the ongoing career maintenance to be successful. Do you work out or color your hair on regular basis? Are you taking care of your career development with the same enthusiasm?

Adopt the principles of the Free Agent Worker. You don’t need to fixate on career development every day – but incorporate these principles into your life and success and control over your career will flow.

My blog has many articles with practical steps you can take today to jumpstart your career, from researching career options to doing informational interviews via social networking. Just search the blog or look at the labels (like Career Tips) for what you need. As always, I love getting your feedback!

All things being equal people want to do business with people they know, like and trust.  That includes Not For Profit Organizations.

I am speaking a the AFP or Association of Fundraising Professionals on Friday.  I am the opening act in a line up of highly professional speakers on the topic of Social Networking, or Web 2.0.

I will be speaking about how Online Networking enhances your Face to Face networking and builds stronger networking relationships.   But, I am a little perplexed, I am not sure that many Fundraising or Not for Profits really do face to face networking.  I have met very few of them at a BNI meeting or at a Rainmakers meeting.  Thinking of the chamber events I go to, I meet few if any of them there.  So, I ask myself why don’t I ever meet them?  Where are they networking?  Do they network? Are they meeting the Small Business Owers, or are they just looking for the big guys?

Gleaners Food Bank is an example of a Not for Profit that networks face to face and does it well.  They are active in BNI and have even taken leadership positions in their chapter and in the region.  Because of their participation, many BNI members have taken tours, BNI Indiana does an annual fundraiser for them.  We learned that Gleaners does not just feed the hungry,  they help pantries around the state feed the hungry.  Not just the hungry but children who get backpacks of food and senior citizens who get food delivered to them.

They have gotten volunteers, like Stacie Shipley with JNS Electric who delivers senior boxes for them every week.  They have create positive word of mouth when the had Aaron Prickle of Lushin Associates take a tour so he could understand what they really do, and he now clears up a lot of misconceptions that he and many of his associates were once under.  Victoria has educated a lot of BNI members about the organization all because she believes in face to face networking.  Unfortunately they have embraced less of the Social Networking.

The Indianapolis Human Society has done a good job with social networking, I see them on Smaller Indiana and on Twitter, but I have never met anyone from the humane society at networking meeting.

If you are a NFP or a Fundraising Professional it is important to understand that people want to volunteer and donate to people they KNOW, LIKE and TRUST.  Getting out to business networking events are important activities, it allows people to get to know you and your mission, to build a relationship, to volunteer, to spread word of mouth and to be advocates.

Using Social Media to amplify those relationships is the icing on the cake.  It is a new economy and everyone is holding on to their dollars, it is time for Fundraisers to come out of the offices and board rooms and meet the small business people in the community.  After all small business owners want to help, they are the fastest growing sector of the economy, but they also want to know who they are helping and why.  They want to meet you face to face.

Hazel M Walker, owns three award winning franchise’s. She is a 10 year owner of two BNI Franchises where she teaches members how to leverage their time and network to build each others businesses. She is also a Referral Institute franchise owner and teaches Business Owners how to harness the Science of Referrals to develop Referrals for Life. Hazel is a published author in New York Times best sellers Masters of Networking and Masters of Sales. As a member of the National Speakers Association she travels the world speaking to businesses and women’s organizations on the topics of networking to create a life you love.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on 25 ideas for how to use your blog to create change. It has since become the most popular post I have ever written (mostly thanks to getting linked in Feministing, so thanks Ann). One of the ideas I had from that post was about profiling young people who are using blogs and social media to create change.

I would be a lame hypocrite if I didn’t take my own advice, so that’s exactly what I’m doing today. I was really excited recently when I stumbled upon a post about HandsIn, a new nonprofit idea created by fellow twenty-something blogger Nicole Antoinette.  Check out the following interview with Nicole to learn more about her and her new organization, HandsIn.

Tell us about yourself and your blog.
I’m a freelance writer, perpetual nomad, cheesecake connoisseur, children’s day camp Director, and overall person of intense passion.  My blog, More is Better, is a chronicle of my shenanigans where absolutely nothing is off limits.  It’s also a way for me to explore my Life List and keep myself accountable for everything I want to accomplish. 

If you had to describe your blog in five words what would they be?
Best blog in the universe.  Or, less narcissistic: Girl lives life out loud. 

What is HandsIn? What are your goals/ vision for HandsIn?
HandsIn is an organization that harnesses the unique energy and creative passion of 20-somethings, inspiring them to connect with each other through volunteerism and empowering them to change their world through dedicated service and a shared commitment to a sustainable lifestyle.

My goal is to break the stereotype of 20-something apathy, to prove that us Gen Y-ers do care about the world, and 

are taking it upon ourselves to help change it. 

What inspired you to start HandsIn?
HandsIn was born after a particularly stressful bout of how-can-I-make-my-world-a-better-place-itis.  So much of social media and social networking is about the individual, and I wanted to create a way for it to be bigger than that, for people who care to come together and take action.

Well said! I’ve written recently about how I worry not enough Gen Y bloggers are using social media to create change and make a difference. Do you think Gen Y/20something bloggers care enough about social and political issues?
I actually think they care more than a lot of other people, and are often more informed because of how plugged in they are to the internet.  20-somethings are passionate and fiery and when they believe in something, they believe in it pretty fiercely.  I think the challenge is that sometimes, they don’t know how to get more involved in those causes, or they get too bogged down in their “quarter life crisis” to stop and do something. 

What issues are you passionate about?
I’m most passionate about issues of human rights, and childhood poverty/malnutrition.  I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the hungry, impoverished children of the United States.

How can people get involved with HandsIn?
There are lots of ways to get involved with HandsIn, and they’re all quick and easy, perfect for the 20-something lifestyle.  The first step is to join and subscribe to our RSS feed, and after that? Get involved in the projects that move 

you, write about the efforts you’re making to change your community, network with like-minded people etc.  Getting involved means making a commitment to change, because change won’t happen overnight, it’s going to happen one person, one small act at a time. 

How did you create HandsIn.org? 
HandsIn was created in a coffee shop, on about twenty sheets of scratch paper, after a serious caffeine overload and a major session of inspirational brainstorming.  The website itself came together pretty quickly, about a month from start to finish, thanks to lots of dedicated work by myself and Aram, the guy I turn to when the coding gets too complicated for me.  Now that the site is up, I’m constantly looking for writing submissions and creative ideas from readers.  My goal is for the site to grow organically, highlighting the work of dedicated 20-somethings, and inspiring new people to take action each and every day!

Twitter handle: @nicoleisbetter and @handsin

Check out HandsIn.org today and sign up and participate — it definitely looks like a fantastic project.

Nisha Chittal is a writer and journalist who currently serves as Associate Editor of CitizenJanePolitics.com and is a political columnist for UniversityChic.com. Her personal blog is Politicoholic, where she offers commentary on a range of topics, including but not limited to politics, technology, and the changing role of women and Generation Y in politics today.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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This post is one in a series of three about the phenomenon we call Twitter. Many people in The Mom Entrepreneur Support Group I run, and clients, have been asking about this form of micro-blogging. What is it? Why should I care? How do I use it? My goal is to answer these questions and more.

“New to Twitter – not quite sure how this works but I am sure I can figure it out. Love this social networking stuff.”

“I am here, now what?”

Start by posting some practice tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. My second tweet was:

“Working on my blogging clinic, which will be offered for four sessions in April in Barrington, NH.”

When the blogging clinic write up was ready on my website, I tweeted again about it and included a link to the page on my site. Now remember, you are limited to 140 characters. This can easily be used up with one URL; especially a blog URL. Visit http://www.tinyurl.com/ and turn your long URL into a short URL. You can even customize your URL so it is easy to remember.

It goes without saying that a major element in growing your business is buy generating referrals. Let’s take a quick look at a few tips that may help you gain the much sought after referral.

Over at the Networkingstrategist blog, Hazel Walker, says that you need to ‘thank or reward’ someone who is an advocate for you. She says, ” If you find you have one person who is acting as your advocate you will want to find ways to thank or reward that person.”

Making sure that the referrals that you get are of high quality is a tip from the Salesandmanagement blog. Paul McCord writes, ” You can easily double or triple the number of high quality referrals you receive through careful listening and observation.  Every client you have knows people and companies you would like to be referred to.  Unfortunately, clients often forget about those potential referrals.  Your job is to help your client make quality referrals—the easier you make it for your client to give you quality referrals, the more referrals you’ll receive.”

The age old question regarding referrals is whether you need to pay for them or not. Sparkplugging has an interview with best selling author Jill Lublin. He asks her about compensation for referrals and while she doesn’t take a position on compensation she does add some keen insight. ” If your business is going to involve referrals, clarify whether money or other compensation will be exchanged. Few things can destroy a relationship faster than misunderstandings and bruised feelings relating to referral fees. Specifically ask your referral partners if they are willing to give and expect to receive referral fees. If referral fees will be paid, clarify the amounts and how and when they will be paid.  It isn’t always necessary to compensate someone for referring business to you, but you should clarify the arrangement up front.”

It’s not easy but getting good referrals can be the key to growing your business.

Techcrunch had good coverage of Wikinvest’s launch of embeddable, annotate-able, wiki-able charts.  Wikinvest, which like it sounds, is a wiki focused on building out user-generated company and stock information.  Now, the site has developed charts that can be annotated and embedded into websites and blogs.

If you check out Apple’s chart (sorry wordpress.com doesn’t allow posting of javascript) and click on ‘B’, you’ll see that on June 10th, Apple reported a new iPhone with GPS and 3G capabilities, better battery life and improved audio quality.

Or, on Amgen’s chart, you can click on ‘L’ and see someone’s explanation for a continued slide in the stock price (which he/she attributed to a potential safety risk for Aranesp)

Google Finance has charts that attempt to pair up news events with movements in the stock price.  While it’s a really interesting cause-effect, Google Finance unfortunately doesn’t capture the news or information that is affecting stock price movement.  I attribute this to 2 reasons: 1) Sometimes it’s just impossible to explain price movement (sorry, financial commentators) 2) Google’s news set is in some cases unexplicable weird and picks up stories that seemingly have little impact.

Anyway, these charts powered by wikinvest are interesting for financial bloggers and may ultimately do a good job of providing numerous opinions as to what’s affecting individualk stocks at any given moment.  It would be very interesting for someone to look into the accuracy of wikinvest’s annotated charts and provide some metrics at some point (if this is possible to track).  If anything, these charts improve on Google’s charts (which I happen to like) by overlaying wiki-like UGC on top of stock charts.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com has a great article out this morning about the recent sale of DailyCandy.  A great site with some great content, I agree with Salmon that DC, with great content and a great vibe, has built a great email newsletter.  The design is top notch, extremely well designed and the right blend of

edginess.

Salmon’s belief for all those running a web business (or a business that utilizes the web channel) is that it is extremely important to turn web content into an email product.

Says Salmon:

It’s also an important reminder: if you want to make money from a website, put a lot of effort into turning your blog(s) into some kind of email product. Email reaches millions of people who never read blogs, and advertisers often adore it.

When thinking about utilizing the web to tap the power of social networks or using Sales 2.0 techniques to quickly scale your online business, email still remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching customers, selling advertising, and as we see with DailyCandy’s recently announced sale, monetizing your equity value.

Today it is generally agreed that a business is not serious if it does not have a website. People look to websites to find out more about businesses, see how the company presents itself, and what are the services that company provides. People also want to be assured that the business has other, satisfied customers by viewing client lists and testimonials.

However, that type of web presence is quickly becoming outdated…it’s so 1999. The typical corporate website has become irrelevant, and today it’s all about creating a “web presence.” A web presence means that you have a home base, i.e. a website and/or blog, but your brand can also be found in other places on the web, like social networks.

People are spending so much time on social networks, that they expect to find you and your business there:

“a recent Universal McCann report stat[es] that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site – through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.” (from ReadWriteWeb)

Four steps to a successful social media strategy

I often meet people who understand that they need to expand and diversify their web presence, but don’t know how. Some people feel lost, while others are sure that the way to being part of the social web is to…create a facebook group.

I created a facebook group. So why am I all alone?

Creating a facebook group, or even writing a blog or microblogging on twitter, are not strategies; they are tools for implementing strategeis. They may be the right tools for some businesses or organizations, but they also be the wrong place to invest time and energy for others. Choosing the tools or technologies that you will use to implement your social media strategy is actually the LAST step in the process.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target?
   Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

I need to build a house. I hear these tools are good so I think I’ll use them.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr

Thinking about Facebook’s Beacon from a partner perspective…

The Techdirt Insight Community recently addressed this issue and posited it to their group of experts.

“Does it make sense for a consumer-facing company to sign on to Beacon — or has the program forever been tarnished? How should we approach using Beacon? In an ideal world, we would like for it to be a way for fans of our products to pass on effective “endorsements” of the product, but we do not want to be seen as doing something intrusive or upsetting. If not Beacon, is there a better way to do this either within Facebook or through a different platform?”

Here’s my answer:

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I think the only two games in town that are worth exploring are Facebook and Google. MySpace is too raw for most consumer goods companies and the demographic doesn’t compare to Facebook’s and Google’s.

So, let’s look how Facebook’s efforts stack up vs. Google’s:

Facebook

Traffic: Facebook is on fire. Traffic and usage stats are sky high
Monetization: monetization is just getting better. Most of the current ad sales are sponsorship-related. With Beacon, lead generation becomes viral. Huge potential here.
Reach: Facebook just announced that they are licensing their infrastructure. This moves Facebook even closer to the Google/Open Social platform in terms of reach.
Privacy is certainly an issue. Check out the traffic to Facebook’s privacy page. Opening up profiles caused a bigger blip in users’ minds than did the hullabaloo surrounding Beacon.

The Pro-Beacon camp basically espouses the idea that (see Dave McClure’s article on the matter)
1) Facebook has introduced a universal opt-out which should satisfy the privacy police.
2) The biggest mistake was a PR one — one that positioned Beacon as opt-in when it wasn’t. Facebook is addressing this issue.
3) people who are going bananas over Beacon should understand that most people on Facebook are used to the default being opt-out (ie, lifestyle transparency), not opt-in (selective sharing).

I see parallels with what’s occurring surrounding Beacon to the snafus made during the introduction of In-Text Advertising. There was tremendous, immediate push-back when in-text advertising was introduced. Although privacy wasn’t the primary concern, users and customer advocates didn’t like the intrusion of advertising. Today, the ads (run by such networks as Vibrant Media and Kontera). Companies like Forbes were forced to remove the advertising originally and now, (almost) no one bats an eye. Editorial and advertising converge — I think the same evolution is going to occur with Beacon. My extra-Facebook activity is going to join my Facebook activity to be published to my friends network via my News Feed. That’s what I wanted when I joined Facebook, wasn’t it?

Google

Traffic: No one puts up search numbers like Google. Even at this stage, Google continues to gain market share
Monetization: Google runs it’s own network of publishers and has the ability to juice its numbers by adjusting its variable payouts to its partners and by adjusting how much traffic it shares out to the network vs. internalizing/monetizing it itself.
Reach: Keeps growing.
Privacy: Google offers Web History internally to users. Now that Open Social and Google Profiles have launched (see my article about this soft launch and what it means for Google’s moves into social networking), Google is going to have to deal with privacy issues as well. Google has tons of personalized information about users (from Gmail, Search History, Blogger, Docs) and continues to accumulate this info. Google has to be careful how it shares out this info and should learn from Facebook’s mistakes.

Google’s advantage vis-a-vis Facebook is that even with Beacon, Facebook is pretty much a closed network. You won’t have 100% participation and users still spend a lot of time and activity outside the Facebook network. Google has replaced the portal of the 1990s to become essentially the Internet for many users. From search, to email, from Adwords to Analytics to Checkout, Google has closed the loop in terms of activity.

I think Google is also more advanced in terms of providing partners with analytics — the absolute KEY to web advertising. It’s not enough to provide partners with an interface for social networking. Partners should demand ROI. Facebook is just in the early days of providing metrics for its Apps. Google has made an entire business out of metrics. As markets look to expand their influence in social networks, they will need the tools to address this.