4 Biggest Lies About Social Media

Penelope Trunk

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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You cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

The best way to understand which tools will help meet which goals is to cut through the crap that the buzz is built on. Figure out who is really using social media to meet their goals, and how they are doing it.

[Here are the first two of the four "lies" that Trunk discusses. To read the complete article, please click here.]

Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking.

Networking should be at the forefront of every entrepreneur’s mind. Research from the Darden School of Business shows that startups are most likely to succeed when the founder is great at networking. But LinkedIn isn’t going to help you on that front.

LinkedIn is for displaying your network, not building it. For example, you can go on LinkedIn and find out that I’m really well connected. But most of you already know I’m well connected — I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. Which means I didn’t build my network via LinkedIn networking tools. I built it offline.

Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation.

Twitter is an index of people with whom you might want to talk. It’s a great index — you can search by topic to find out who is interested in what, and then talk to them about mutually interesting topics. It used to be that you’d have to suffer through endlessly boring events at conferences striking up conversation to find the people to talk to later. Twitter makes that conference drudgery superfluous; you can talk to anyone you want, by topic or specialty, super fast.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that you’re going to need way more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection. So Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a high-level way.

But you still need to go elsewhere — offline or online — to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

Social media is about being nice. The people who are best at meeting their goals through social media are the most generous as well. When you use social media, give way more than you get. And remember that giving something that requires someone to do something for you (Download my book! Test out my free software!) is not giving. Ask people how you can help them. Read enough about someone to understand what they need and then surprise them. Be interesting without expecting anything in return. You could think of social media as its own economy: Interestingness is the currency; kindness is the way that currency is transported.

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Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

 

How to Remain Relevant [in Today's Job Market] When You’re Over 40

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Your earning potential pretty much tops out at age 40. This is because your skills become increasingly valuable until you amass fifteen years’ experience, at which point you’ve hit a peak. According to statisticians at PayScale.com, in all fields except law, people are not paid more money for experience beyond fifteen years.

This means that to remain relevant and continue to increase your value, you are going to have to learn skills outside of your field. Here are five skills you should pick up as your earning power is due to drop.

[Actually, here are three. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. Community building.

Yes, this is an irritating buzzword for social media mavens who are probably fresh out of college and run their whole life on Facebook and tumblr.  But the reality is, social media infiltrates everything, in the same way that email  became essential 10 years ago. Ninety percent of messages today are via social media link, according to The Pinnacle Group, a New York City think tank. Only ten percent are via email. So we are already at that tipping point where you need to learn social media or go home. People who are exceptional with social media can build a community around themselves in order to get jobs, promotions, and do good works for their company. Here’s a first step: How to start a blog.

2. Information processing.

Remember the term “information overload”? That went out of fashion when hipsters made productivity blogs one of the most popular genre of blogs, and time management books hit the New York Times bestseller list. Today you are in a knowledge market, where knowledge workers trade on their ability to synthesize information faster and in more collaborative ways – or faster and in ways that are so innovative that their ideas stand out above the rest. Information processing requires a clear understanding of one’s priorities, and an insatiable curiosity. Starting point: Time management tips for multitaskers

3. Bridge building.

People who change jobs frequently build a wider set of skills and a wider network – both of which make them more employable. Job hopping enables you to create a series of bridges as you move between companies. The workplace no longer provides secure jobs, but you can provide security for yourself by creating a dynamic career where you move from job to job.  You can develop contacts and build relationships outside of a job, for sure, but if people don’t get the chance to work with you, then they can’t endorse your ability to work. Likewise, if you work in a company where people tend to job hop, you can still build this wide network providing you remain in touch with them after they move on.The best way to build a wide network is to actually work with a wide range of people.

Your resume, if you are doing this right, should reflect a significant, positive impact wherever you work, and you should leave in your wake a swarm of happy managers and co-workers who felt lucky to be on projects with you. That’s how strong the performance of a good job hopper is. Subset to this skill: How to quit a job.

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In general, it’s not about how old you are but how open you are to new ways of communicating. Aim to be open, widely networked, and adaptable to new ways of thinking. And in that vein, you should ask yourself routinely, what generation am I?

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Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

 

Perfectionism Is a Disease. Here’s How to Beat It.

Penelope Trunk

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up.

It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.

We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so many people keep trying to reach this elusive goal and they drive themselves crazy in the process. So cut it out. Accept that it’s okay to do a mediocre job on a certain percentage of your work. If you need convincing, consider this: Perfectionism is a risk factor for depression. No kidding. Sydney Blatt, psychologist at Yale University, finds that perfectionists are more likely to kill themselves
than regular, mediocre-performing people.

Here are three steps to take to avoid the perfectionism trap:

1. Allow yourself to be wrong in front of others.

Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.

We all have many competing demands. We do not presume to know other people’s demands. But we are all sure of one thing: Our work is often not the most important thing on our plate.

Also, you’ll notice that people are not particularly vested in you being right. They don’t care if you’re right or wrong in what you do or say. They just want you to get stuff done well enough that they can do what they need to do. And this is usually a far cry from perfection.

The other huge problem with perfectionism is that people stop learning when they’re constantly afraid of being wrong. We learn by making mistakes. The only way we understand ourselves is to test our limits. If we don’t want anyone to know we make mistakes, which is how perfectionists tend to behave, we are actually hiding our true selves.

2. Being hard working is not the same as being a perfectionist.

You can be a hard-working person and cut corners. In fact, it’s often a requirement: Smart people cut corners. The art of being a star performer is knowing which corners to cut.

Focus on your goals, and be honest with yourself about whether your goals require perfectionism along the way. A lot of times perfectionism is a way to avoid focusing on goals. Real goals, after all, almost always require a little bit of luck and assistance along the way — factors the perfectionists tend to dismiss.

3. Spend your energy making yourself likable.

Tiziana Casciaro reports in the Harvard Business Review that people are not all that interested in you being super-good at your job. They care if they like you.

And, Casciaro found that if someone does not like you, he or she will decide you’re incompetent whether you are or not. Sad, yes, but the converse is true as well. You can do a poor job and no one will notice if they like you. And, newsflash: In many instances, this is good for business — teams do better work when everyone on the team likes everyone else. So don’t worry about doing a perfect job. Do a decent job, but leave yourself enough time to manage your relationships at work. Take lunch. Participate in office politics, because office politics is really about being nice
— which, frankly, is more healthy and certainly more achievable than being perfect.

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I highly recommend Tal Ben-Shahar‘s book, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life, in which he explains that many people fail to lead a full and fulfilling life because they do not allow themselves “to experience the full range of human emotions” and thus limit their capacity for happiness. “They need to give themselves the permission to be human…to ground [their] dreams in reality and appreciate [their] accomplishments.” Throughout the book, Ben-Shahar refers to negative perfectionism simply as perfectionism and to positive perfectionism as optimalism. “The key difference between the Perfectionist an the Optimalist is that the former essentially rejects reality while the latter accepts it…as a natural part of life and as an experience that is inextricably linked to success.”

Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

Penelope Trunk on “Why an MBA Is a Waste of Time and Money”

Penelope Trunk

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To read the complete article, check out others, and/or sign up for a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

MBA applications always go up during a bad economy. That is because business school generally attracts people who are lost, and more people who feel more lost when the bad job market is lousy.

But let’s be clear: This is not the type of recession where there are no jobs [click here] for young people. This is a recession where there are no GOOD jobs. McDonald’s is hiring in management. There is a bank teller shortage and a shortage of actuaries. There is a shortage of insurance agents. It’s just that people don’t grow up dreaming of these jobs. So they don’t take them. Instead, people who are early in their career – in that time when an MBA sounds like it might work – those people are determined to have only a good job. And if they can’t have that, they get an MBA.

The problem is that an MBA makes it worse.

There are seven reasons why you should take a bad job instead of getting an MBA.

[Here are three.]

1. Business school won’t help you be a good entrepreneur.

There is no correlation between being a good entrepreneur and going to business school. In fact, according to Saras Sarasvathy, professor at University of Virginia’s Darden Business School, the most important skill for an entrepreneur is that you know your weakness and you can find people to fill in your gaps. [Click here http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/04/23/you-dont-need-to-love-risk-taking-to-start-your-own-business/.%5D So you pay a bundle to go to school to learn what you don’t and how to find people who can do stuff you can’t? Sorry, that doesn’t add up. The ultimate irony: entrepreneur programs are booming at business schools [click here http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-business-schools/2010/07/21/schools-add-new-entrepreneur-programs-for-mba-students.html%5D.

2.     You likely don’t need an MBA for what you want to do.

There are some jobs, very few, where you cannot land if you don’t have an MBA. These are mostly high-level officer-type positions in the Fortune 500. Even then, though, you probably don’t need an MBA. In fact, Forbes reports [click here http://www.forbes.com/2002/04/25/0425ceoschools.html%5D that CEOs without MBAs bring more value to investors than CEOs who went to business school.

7.     Business school puts off the inevitable.

Look, it’s really hard to be an adult. You go to school for twenty years being told what to learn and what to think and when to show up, and then you get tossed into adult life and there is no one telling you what’s right for you. You have to figure it out, but you didn’t go to school for that. In fact, school is the opposite of that. So it looks fine to be lost in your 20s. This is when everyone is taking time to figure things out. It does not look fine to spend $150,000 to go back to school just to put off the hard knocks of figuring out where you belong in the workforce. Face reality. Join the workforce.

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Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups — most recently, Brazen Careerist [click here] a social network to help young people manage their careers. Her career advice appears in more than 200 newspapers. In a review of this blog, BusinessWeek called Penelope’s writing “poetic.”