Interesting career networking site: resu.me

The folks at Resu.me asked me to check out their website, which they are launching to become a job and career networking site for the Millenium generation.

So I checked it out.

Here are the good parts:

• The focus is on helping people get started quickly. So they enable sign on using facebook connect – no long winded registrations needed.
• The site makes it possible to import your Linkedin profile – so no need to build a resume . And you get a vanity URL. Mine is http://gautam.resu.me
• There’s a tab which I think is a cooliris app- so if you are a photographer or other visual artist you can show off your videos and pictures there.
• It builds an activity stream – which shows what you do on the site, and you can add your blog posts/status updates to that also. It also imports your existing blogs from Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress and Posterous.
• There’s a stats chart – which promises to be interesting (or depressing, if you find that people are not viewing your profile) 🙂

Things I didn’t quite like or what didn’t work for me:

• The Reader tab is to enable you to import your OPML file of RSS feeds or one feed at a time. Tried doing that – but it’s not working. The larger question is why would you read your feeds on a career networking site. This is one example of over-engineering features
• The UI is quite dull and doesn’t engage me.
• The Jobs section is US centric. There’s no other country mentioned there. Which is quite useless for folks from India. I don’t know why they invited me to check out the site.

So overall I think it needs to focus on getting the job search process done well, and let go of the blogging/reader aspects – or at least tuck it away and not make it so prominent.

Will it become a linkedin competitor? I doubt it. Even millenials have linkedin profiles and networks in place. Getting them to move – even as Linkedin focuses more and more towards being a service focused on jobs – would be tough.

The site also needs to think about how to attract recruiters – and showing them a value that they may not be getting at Linkedin.

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Thoughts on Online Influence: Social Media

Am not sure if you saw this, but I was named one of the 25 HR Digital Influencers of 2010.

Now that could be hilarious.

It’s important to remember that influence/popularity/power in the digital world is totally different from the real world.

The issue is that the online world enables one to measure a lot of things – like impressions, number of readers, followers, fans across various platforms – which are collectively called “engagement metrics” because they show the number of people interested in the content you put out and the community that you help build.

On top of that there are things like PageRank by Google, Alexa Rank which show over a period the number of people who link to you and hence the “authority” you have.

It’s no wonder that there are enough services and information providers that slide and dice this data to enable people to make sense of these numbers.

Earlier there were directories like Technorati.

Then there came lists like the Career 100 – which combined data to rank blogs roughly in the same domain.

However with the rise of social and information and professional networks – and movement of the focus from pure content to the people behind the content – services that track “influence” based on Twitter numbers, Facebook fans, and Linkedin connections rapidly are making strides.

The demand is being driven – primarily in the western world – by companies who believe that “social influencer marketing” is the way to reach out to an increasingly splintered audience across these networks.

Enter services like Klout (my profile here) and About.me (my profile here) which want to enable people and others track their “reach” and “audience”

Then there is traackr which use algorithms

However, it’s early days yet and these systems can be easily gamed.

Let’s see how it evolves in the future

Related Articles

• Why Klout doesn’t count: putting social media influence in context (econsultancy.com)
• Influencing Klout. (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• Social Influence Measurement – Tools, Resources & Commentary (digitaloperative.com)
• Does online influence matter? (socialmediatoday.com)

Changes to LinkedinGroups

If you manage a Linkedin group here are some changes they have introduced. Here is what they commnicated over an email:

Sending Announcements
In response to overwhelming demand from group managers, we have created the ability for you to send group announcements directly from your LinkedIn group to your members, via email. Your announcement will also automatically be posted as a discussion within the group so members can comment on it together.

As membership in LinkedIn groups continues to explode, we hear increasing concerns from our members about how their privacy is protected. Now that we have the Announcement feature, and in response to these concerns, we have removed the ability to download or view member email addresses.

RSS Feeds into Groups
Posting news items into groups has become very popular in the past couple months. So we’ve made it even easier for you to spark discussions around news and other Web content by enabling you to add RSS and Atom feeds to your group. You can pick up RSS and Atom feeds from your favorite sites around the web. News items from your feed will automatically show up under the News tab.

Managing Job-Focused Discussions
Group managers now have full control over whether to enable the jobs discussion capabilities within your group. The jobs area enables members to discuss job opportunities in these difficult economic times without cluttering the main conversation, and like all discussions it’s free.

Visit your groups today

Academia.edu – The Linkedin for Academics

A team of people from Stanford and Cambridge have recently launched a website, Academia.edu, which is being billed as a "LinkedIn for academics".

4 months after launching, there are now over 30,000 academics on Academia.edu. It has 67% of 2008’s Nobel Laureates on it, and many of the world’s most well-known academics:

– Richard Dawkins – http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardDawkins

– Stephen Hawking – http://cambridge.academia.edu/StephenHawking

– Noam Chomsky – http://mit.academia.edu/NoamChomsky

– Steven Pinker – http://harvard.academia.edu/StevenPinker

– Paul Krugman – http://princeton.academia.edu/PaulKrugman

Academia.edu does two things:

– It shows every academic around the world in a tree diagram, displayed according to their departmental and university affiliations.

– It enables academics to find out the latest research in their area – the latest people, papers and talks.

The goal is for Academia.edu to eventually list every academic in the world — Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students.

New Linkedin Search and other features

Got this email from the Linkedin folks:

We have now improved your search experience and delivered some of your most requested features. Today, we’re pleased to announce the very latest in professional productivity: All New LinkedIn Search!

Your search experience has been completely redesigned to make it easier to find the right person, expertise, or knowledge that you’re looking for:

• Improved search results, see the most relevant results whether people are in your network or not
• Streamlined results page with new sorts, views and contact tools
• Search refinement tools to create even more focused searches
• New “in common” feature that shows you the connections and groups you share with people

And just for you: We invite you to try a premium feature that is free for a limited time. Save up to 3 searches and automatically be alerted by email when new people match your search.

Go beyond names with new search criteria. For example: management consulting – consulting , or try your own search and find exactly what you’re looking for.