#SMOOC II Day 7: Social Web and Personal Identity

Who hasn’t sent a text message saying “I’m on my way” when it wasn’t true or fudged the truth a touch in their online dating profile? But Jeff Hancock doesn’t believe that the anonymity of the internet encourages dishonesty. In fact, he says the searchability and permanence of information online may even keep us honest.

Jeff Hancock studies how we interact by email, text message and social media blips, seeking to understand how technology mediates communication.

Work in the network age simply doesn’t work the way it used to, he says. Whereas a career would once have progressed smoothly from role to role, up an evenly-flowing escalator, the fast-moving, interconnected world has “jammed the escalator of the previous generation’s careers,” says Hoffman. “We need a new map. The new map is a network.”

He started LinkedIn, he says, precisely to help provide the technological basis for workers of the future, based around one simple framework: we should all be the entrepreneur of own own lives. And if we think of this as surprising, that entrepreneurs are pioneers, or lone wolves, then we need to rethink our preconceptions. Because as it happens, entrepreneurs are building networks all the time and we all need to think more deeply about what it means to live in a networked world. ”Network literacy is absolutely critical to how we’ll navigate the world,” says Hoffman, whose book The Startup of You was published recently. And there are four important attributes to understand in order to master the skill.

1. Network technology
2. Network identity
3. Network intelligence
4. Network capabilities

Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the Silicon Valley, is Executive Chairman and a co-founder of LinkedIn, and in 2009 joined Greylock Partners. Reid serves as Director of a variety of successful Silicon Valley businesses, most in the social media domain.

Algorithms that measure influence and motivation are part of a new group of analytic tools — from pre-employment analytics to on-the-job assessments — that can help a company determine an employee’s value throughout her career.

Today, your performance review is based on things like sales numbers or number of goals met. Tomorrow, though, it could be based on something that until now has remained ephemeral: organizational influence.

Salesforce.com's Chatter system released a new feature this spring called Influencer. It purports to measure how influential you are within your company, by tabulating, for example, how your fellow workers respond to the items you post to your corporate social network.

It's still a work in progress, senior director of Chatter product marketing Dave King tells Fast Company. But already companies are using it to help them run more smoothly.

A blueprint for thriving in your job and building a career by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley's most innovative entrepreneurs.

The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past.

Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today's competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.

Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage.

Me 2.0 shows job seekers and established professionals alike how to leverage the power of online media for personal empowerment and career success. “The business world is changing and what Dan Schawbel has captured in this book is the pulse of the changing branding market.” - Gary Vaynerchuk, best-selling author of Crush It With record unemployment and a volatile economy, Dan Schawbel’s powerful message about personal branding is essential for anyone seeking to achieve success in today’s difficult job market. Me 2.0 offers a proven plan for creating a strong and effective personal brand. By focusing on the 80 million members of “Generation Y,” Me 2.0 shows job seekers innovative ways to separate themselves from the competition and how to have jobs look for them by creating an impactful personal brand. Me 2.0 demonstrates to job seekers how to leverage the power of online media for personal empowerment and career success. Schawbel outlines his unique four-step process for discovering, creating, communicating, and maintaining a personal brand. Schawbel also gives inside tips on how to use blogs, videos, and social networking to find careers based on both passion and experience.

Make the most of Twitter as a tool for creating a personal brand

Twitter boasts more than 100 million active users with 50 million of them actively tweeting every day, making Twitter an indisputably powerful marketing platform. With this insightful book, author and Twitter guru Sarah-Jayne Gratton offers real-world examples and proven techniques for capturing a Twitter audience and using that audience to spread the word about you to build a personal brand.

- Details ways in which you can use Twitter to build a personal brand
- Shows you how to maximize Twitter?s potential as a powerful marketing tool for your own benefit
- Encourages you to take advantage of Twitter?s vast audience

Follow Me! Creating a Personal Brand with Twitter escorts you through using Twitter to create and execute a surefire personal marketing campaign that spans the globe.

"The Digital You is a complex mosaic of habit, subconscious acts of both omission and commission, and premeditated presentations. It is how our peers and friends, bosses and family actually experience us, as ever more of our lives in the real world takes place in the digital one. The purpose of this book and the associated software . . . is to help you begin to experience your Digital You in the same way that everyone around you does." -- From e-Habits, by Elizabeth Charnock

For the millions of people like us whose lives are increasingly lived online, E-Habits is the first-ever digital image makeover guide that empowers you to present yourself in the best possible light with every electronic action--whether on the Internet or within your own organization. Elizabeth Charnock, a pioneer in the field of digital evidence analytics, reveals what everyday activities—looking for a job, applying for a loan, searching for romance, e-mailing coworkers—tell others about us. By showing what you can do to assess and control the information about you that's "out there," Charnock outlines the steps you can take right now to ensure that the Digital You--the image of yourself that you present online--is the best representation of your values, your work, yourself.

The Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement that compels the company to obtain consent before making changes to users’ privacy settings.

According to Darabi, all these professional and personal Internet services create a chasm between our true selves and our online identity. "What social media presents really is an issue of Web literacy," she explained. "We have to first understand what it means to be social online before we can accurately and authentically represent ourselves on each individual platform."