Archive for the 'Career' Category
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 19, 2008
Perfect clip for me to post and share, since I am now a Wiki Community Manager, which is another name for online community organizer. Not only is this Fast Wonder Blog post useful, but Seth Godin is always worth reading. If you want to learn more about this emerging role/career, both posts are good places to start.
Over time, I hope this blog will become another good resource for learning about the online community organizer role, as I will be posting about my experience, and my learning curve, going forward.
| Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories. |
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Posted in Blogs, Career, Social Media, Trends | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 19, 2008
I started this blog just to get started blogging. I had wanted to blog for years, but one thing after another held me back, not the least of which was fear that I would not keep up with it. Blogs that aren’t updated regularly aren’t really blogs, IMHO. I didn’t want to set something up that I could not commit to and write in frequently.
So, one decision I made was to let this blog include any and all content I felt like blogging about. I know people who have different blogs for different kinds of content. That makes sense, and if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog it’s probably best to be targeted in what you write about, so readers interested in that content will find your blog valuable.
But I’m not doing this for the website traffic and I couldn’t commit to keeping up with more than one blogs, such as one about work topics and one about things of personal interest to me. So I made this blog a blend that reflects all of me — all of my interests, whether professional or personal, the serious and the silly, the carefully considered and the random tidbits. I’ve decided I like it this way.
Now, my career has changed direction and blogging is suddenly part of my official job, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Blogs, Call Centers, Career, Social Media | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 17, 2008
Sorry I have not been posting much here recently. I’ve plunged into my new job, and that includes blogging for my company internally. I’ve lost track of how many posts I have created there, but the last thing I really want to do at the moment is blog here, too, at the end of a very long day.
So, apology and excuse offered, I’m shutting down and getting out of the house.
Posted in Blogs, Career | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on June 24, 2008
I just accepted a new job! I was not looking (really!) but when the job description landed in my email I was stunned. I have never before seen a job description so perfectly tailored to me. Point by point, as I went through it I kept thinking, “yeah, I’ve done that, yeah, I have experience with that, yeah, I want to do that…”
So I went for it, and happily the hiring manager thought I was a good fit for it, too. It’s with the same company, actually: I’m moving from ICMI, which is a part of United Business Media (UBM), to UBM’s corporate entity, specifically in the People and Culture Group (formerly known as Human Resources, formerly known as Personnel).
So what’s the job? UBM Wiki Community Manager. We’re going to be rolling out wiki software and other collaboration tools across the entire enterprise. My job, in a nutshell, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Career, ICMI, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ted Hopton on May 28, 2008
Wish I had read this good advice from Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent blog before I wrote a bunch of LinkedIn recommendations last weekend, but I’ll certainly keep it in mind for the future. Some good suggestions — I recommend reading the post.
For a recommendation to be useful in a practical way to both the individual recommended and the potential buyer/employer, it needs to answer one main question first: why? Why would you hire him/her instead of someone else? Why would you engage his/her services? It’s because… tell them exactly why.
read more | digg story
Posted in Career, Networking, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on May 24, 2008
Remember when you were young and thought you got to decide what you would do when you grew up?
My earliest memory of a career ambition was my wish to be a milkman. Yes, we still had milkmen when I was very little, driving around in their trucks before dawn and leaving glass bottles with the foil top in an insulated box outside the door. I wasn’t so fond of school at that age, and I found out that college (more school) was not required for a career as a milkman, so that sounded good to me.
Even when I was in college, I was under the impression that I got to make a choice about my career. I simply had to decide what it was I wanted to do and then go about making it happen. In fact, that is what happened, and I embarked on my first career, as a teacher. And when I wanted to try something else, I went to grad school, thinking I would get to choose once again.
And perhaps I could have chosen, if I had been truly determined to do so. But that’s when things really began to shift. Since that point, what I have done, the jobs that I have held, have been much more determined by circumstances than by my careful planning.
I’ll date myself again: remember the video game, Frogger? A frog attempts to cross a busy highway by jumping from one moving car to another. If you fail to land him on a car he gets flattened, instead. Well, since graduate school my career path feels like a game of Frogger. And I suspect for many other people that is the case, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Career, Nostalgia | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008
There are many reasons why LinkedIn can be ideal for maintaining and possibly developing the loose ties or weak links you have in your network.
read more | digg story
Posted in Career, Networking, Technology, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008
Young urbanites, learning that dirt can also be soil, are using their Carhartts as originally intended.
read more | digg story
Posted in Career, Economics, Environment, Human Interest, Outdoors, Trends | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on April 6, 2008
The headline pretty much says it all, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” as the quite young profession of blogging has lately experienced high-profile and early deaths. The bloggers themselves were not so young, but they were not so old, either.
Many professional bloggers are essentially piece-workers, getting paid by the post. And speed is the key to success, since the first blogger who breaks a story gets the glory. Miss out on being first, even if it’s the middle of the night, and the rewards are much smaller. It’s a high-pressure profession, and now professional bloggers are asking whether Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Blogs, Career, Health, Human Interest, Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged: blogging, Blogs, Health, mortality, stress | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on April 3, 2008
My tongue does not have a hole in it, but if I were literally biting my tongue as often as I find myself doing so figuratively, there’d be quite a few severe wounds. It’s not really my natural inclination to hold back what I am thinking, so I have to make a tremendous conscious effort to do it. I find myself concentrating on this quite a bit lately.
Cliches are scorned by English teachers (as a former English teacher, I understand why), but that doesn’t mean they don’t have power to convey ideas. Biting your tongue is one example, and another is choosing your battles. The two go together. The reason I am biting my tongue is that I am choosing my battles.
There’s no point antagonizing people pointlessly. I don’t wish to antagonize people at all, but I’m perfectly willing to do so when there’s a good reason, and my definition of a good reason Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Career, Ethics, Human Interest | Tagged: bite your tongue, cliches, judgment | No Comments »
