How to find your next job using LinkedIn

If you are in the St. Louis area, next Tuesday I will be giving a speech for the Go Network on the above topic, how to maximize LinkedIn. The seminar is free but pre-registration is required, and you get a light breakfast as well. Hope to see you there. Here is a link to the slides and here is a link to the video recording of the actual speech.

PC World: Keep up with the news with personalized Web portal pages

If you are like me you want to keep track of what various Web sites are posting about your field, your competition, and just general technology news that is specific to your business. As the number of online sources for information continues to spiral upwards – one place quotes more than 20 million Americans post at least weekly to their blogs – you want to have an organized plan of attack so you aren’t buried in data. And as you can imagine there are dozens of different Web-based services that you can use to filter and organize things.

I mention a few of the potential alternatives, such as Pageflakes, Bloglines and Google Reader, in my latest column for PC World. 

Think big, start small, and move fast

At the Innovation conference, heard a great presentation from Tracie Gildehaus, the director of portals for Scottrade. Her motto is above — they constantly innovate with their company Intranet and have managed to continually evolve it over the years from a relatively pedestrian upload-the-Word-requirements-and-corporate-policies-manuals to a more Webbified 2.0 version that encompasses blogs, Wikis, and massive amounts of user-generated content. They now have 80 different “publishers” who are responsible for posting their own content, and some blog postings get read by half the staff within the first 24 hours that they are put online. How is that for reach and readership? One of their efforts is a corporate wiki for acronyms and core corporate policies and procedures called purplepedia that has dozens of active authors. Their Intranet now spans more than 70 different Web sites with more than 30,000 pages of content.

Understanding how innovation and collaboration happen in organizations

I am attending the Gateway to Innovation conference today in St. Louis, put on by a variety of local IT-oriented organizations and sponsored by some of the larger IT shops like Scottrade. The opening speech was by Mark Showers, the former CIO of Monsanto, and Peter Gray, a professor at the University of Virginia. They talked about understanding the structure of your internal personnel networks, and how information flows both inside and among workgroups. They survey people within particular organizations and match what data they collect with the formal org charts and team reporting relationships that are supposed to be there.

In one oil exploration company, they investigated why one drilling team was much more efficient than their peers and found that one guy way down the food chain was the glue that held things together. He worked closely with all the different stakeholders and pushed for better collaboration between departments, something that the company eventually implemented with the other teams to improve their productivity. Part of the problem they found was the overall boss wasn’t trying to connect the teams and didn’t really communicate with anyone outside of his direct reports, who primarily communicated just with the boss and not each other. They also found that if companies invest in improving the connections and collaboration abilities of their less effective employees, and just bringing them up to average can have big impacts on overall productivity.

Questions that were going through my mind during his talk:
• How dong does it take your boss to respond to your email asking for help?
• When you need to schedule a meeting with the boss, does it take longer than 24 hours to get on their calendar? The teams that are better at collaborating cut down these latencies.
• How many direct reports are there to the boss, and do they talk to each other or just to the boss?
• Are you empowered to make your own decisions? The less often that you have to escalate things up the management food chain, the better.
• How many outward-focusing projects (standards committees, community orgs, etc) are you involved in where people can get to know you and add to your network? These are the key people to watch because they spread their knowledge and influence outside the organization.

Five tips to being more professional on social networks

As more 30- and 40-somethings login to Facebook, begin to Tweet, add their credentials to LinkedIn and post pictures of their family vacations to Flickr, it becomes harder to separate your work and personal personae. And as more employers begin to use these social networking sites to vet their new hires – assuming that people will start to have new hires at some point in the future once this miserable economy turns around – the situation is only going to get worse.

What got me started thinking more about this was that I am giving a speech next week to show people how to make the most of LinkedIn, one of the leading social sites that is used by a wide variety of professionals to look for work and polish your resume, qualifications and recommendations from previous employers. Granted, this is not a new topic – people have been having problems with what they say online for years. Heather Armstrong, who’s Web site dooce.com created the verb that is used when someone is fired over their blog, was fired over her blog many years ago (her new book is a real treat and a collection of some of her writings that is a true joy to read). Now dooce.com generates thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. That is taking lemons and turning them into not just lemonade, but Absolut Lemon, or maybe even Absolut Gold.

So here are some recommendations for those of you that are new to this whole Internet thing, to pass along to your less-clueful friends and relatives.

First, keep sex, politics, religion, and family out of your online life to the extent that you can. If you feel that you have to tell the world about these things, think about how a potential future employer might react to seeing this stuff in your profile. No one really wants to know that you are a member of the “Republican Party of the Virgin Islands” (as one of my Facebookers put it), whatever that means. Another friend is in a committed relationship with his dog, again, not something I really want to find out the details. And those married folks that indicate that they would enjoy having relations with a third party are just too icky for me. Leave some blanks spaces in your profile in these areas. Too much information!

Second, tell the truth. If you are single and looking for love, then by all means go online and do your thing and misrepresent yourself however you see fit or whatever you think will attract potential partners. But when it comes to talking about your professional accomplishments, don’t exaggerate, invent new job titles, degrees, or whatever other credentials that you don’t have. It isn’t worth it, and eventually it will come back to hurt you or prevent you from getting that plum job that you covet. There is also no need to document every waking and sober moment since college either: just hit the most recent highlights for now. And when it comes to those non-sober moments, leave that info on the cutting room floor. No one really wants to see your expertise with using beer bongs.

Third, if you are one of the unfortunate ones who are presently between jobs, make LinkedIn and other sites part of a daily ritual. Whether you spend a few minutes or hours isn’t all that important, just so that you spend some regular time updating your profile and seeking out to expand your network.

Fourth, decide on what your “friending” policy is going to be and be consistent, at least for inside each social site that you frequent. For example, I am most stringent with the people that want to network with me on LinkedIn, and only accept connections with people that I have actually met face to face, or who have been long-time email correspondents. I also routinely refuse connections from headhunters and HR people, because I am not interested in enriching their businesses with my connections. But on Facebook, I have a more liberal friending policy, just because.

Finally, spend some time thinking about how you acquired your existing professional friends: do you like to meet and greet at industry conferences? Are you more of a small group or large group socializer? Do you prefer one-on-one situations? Did you ever co-author anything and enjoy/detest the experience? Do you tend to keep work colleagues around for many years that last past the time on the job? Were you popular in junior high or peaked in sophmore year? Do you still stay in touch with your frat brothers or sorority sisters?

Remember that most of us are still pretty new at MyBook and Friendspace and that even Oprah did her first Tweet in ALL CAPS. Do experiment and try different strategies, and feel free to share what works for you if that is appropriate. Just don’t send me any links to those toga party pix.

Seven Signs You May Be Ready for a Social Media Detox

Sarah Browne’s rather excellent blog post where she talks about giving up Facebook for Lent, and other signs that you might be addicted to social media.

PC World: Make Internet Fax Services Work For You

I hate faxes. When I had a fax machine in my office, I would arrive in the morning and see the accumulation of restaurant menus, insurance come-ons, and other junk that arrived during the night. Plus, I was always running out of the special paper or the ink cartridges would dry out because I would so seldom use it. There is a better way, and I want to review your options with how you can connect your email to your faxing needs.

You can read my column in PC World here.

Buying a cheap 8GB PC

What is the cheapest PC you can buy that can sport 8GB of RAM? You would think this was a simple question, and within a few minutes of online shopping you could figure it out. Alas, this has turned into Yet Another Project, and I am nowhere near the answer.

Why would anyone want such a machine? Any 32-bit version of Windows can’t use much beyond 3 GB of memory. If you are going to effectively use 8 gigs of memory, you need a 64-bit operating system. I actually have one that I am using right now – my Mac OS. But getting a Mac with all that memory means getting their pricier Mac Pro desktop. And while you can save some money by getting a used Mac Pro, by the time you bulk it up with enough RAM and disk, it isn’t much of a bargain anymore.

My reason for all this RAM is to host a collection of virtual machines for testing purposes. VMs consume a lot of RAM, and there are situations where I want to be able to run more than one VM at a time for testing networking products. I have been using the desktop VMware Workstation along with Fusion on my Mac, and have quite a collection of VMs now that I use in my tests. But my Windows PCs only have 2 GB of RAM, so I can’t really run more than one VM at a time. I needed something more powerful. A few months I had a client that sent me a DVD with seven different VMs on it to use for a series of tests.

So I thought to contact a system builder friend of mine and I ask him to spec out for me what I called a “white box ESX PC” – ESX is VMware’s virtual server operating system, and it is designed for this purpose, to run a lot of VMs on a single physical piece of hardware. And while ESX technically isn’t 64-bit, it can run very effectively with lots of memory.

But getting the right configuration was tricky, because it is also not designed to run its VMs on an ordinary hard disk that you would find in your average desktop. There are some discussion forums on this topic, but we were in uncharted territory.

To see what I was getting myself into, HP loaned me one of their Proliant servers that comes with ESX pre-installed. (Most of the major PC server makers have a selection of pre-installed machines with either ESX or Citrix’ Xenserver, but these are not low-end machines.) It took me weeks of effort to get the right licensed software from VMware to operate it and put the VMs on the box. I realized that ESX wasn’t going to work for me –there was just too much overhead. And while VMware gives away a freebie version called ESXi, I was too fed up at this point to try that route. If you want to learn more, check out this article here.

So then I went online and starting poking around to see if I could order a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM and be satisfied running the 64-bit Vista OS. I first went to Dell, mainly because I buy a lot of Dells and can find my way around their Web site. Back in the day when megabytes were a lot of RAM, Dell was one of the first vendors to sell PCs with 4 MB installed. But despite this history and familiarity, it wasn’t easy to search their Web site for an 8 gig PC. Lenovo has one line, the ThinkCentre M58, which sells for about $1200. HP has none that I could find on their Web site, which is odd because when I went to Newegg’s Web site I could find more than 20 configurations, some of which were pretty capable HP machines, all for around $1000.

The other issue with running a lot of VMs besides RAM is that you want the right CPU inside your PC, one that supports the virtualization extensions called Intel-VT or AMD-V. Neither company makes it very clear which of its Dual Core Duo this or that processor actually supports these extensions. Check out this discussion here. And Ed Bott does further research and actually reports on which Intel CPUs offer the extensions in his post here.

What I do know is the aging Dell desktop that I bought three years ago doesn’t have this support. Sigh. Here is a link to a discussion forum on Anandtech that goes into more details.

So meanwhile I haven’t bought anything yet. If you have any advice, you know where to find me.

Leveraging online and offline marketing at the NHL

This is probably the first time in my writing career that I have interviewed someone from the National Hockey League. In our MediaBlather podcast series, Paul Gillin and I talk to Mike DiLorenzo, the publicity director of the league, about his use of blogging, Twitter, and other online tools. What is interesting about the NHL (and believe me, I am as uninterested about watching hockey as one can be) is how they are working both online and physical worlds to leverage the best aspects, all to spread the word and get more fans of particular teams connected.

You can hear the entire podcast in episode 96: Social Media on Ice here. Yes, ep. 96! Paul and I have a lot of fun with this series of almost weekly podcasts, and you should subscribe to our feed and listen to some of the older ones too.

Datamation: VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Xen, virtualization in 2009

It is time once again for my annual look at what has happened and will happen in the server virtualization space. For the historical record, check out the comparison of VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Xen from 2008 and the same virtualization vendor comparison from 2007.In the past year, Microsoft has come out with Hyper-V, a free add-on to Windows Server 2008 for its 64-bit versions only. VMware has revamped its pricing and also gone through a couple of releases of various products. And Citrix, which owns Xensource, continued to expand its alliances.

Others, such as VirtualIron.com and Sun’s Virtual Box, are still hanging in there. And Cisco is starting to compete in this space with its Unified Communications platform that will run both HyperV and ESX on a new collection of hardware that integrates storage and switching.

You can read the full article in Datamation here.