140 Characters to Rule Them All!

The Globe and Mail  Careers section advises Tweeting! I’m still trying to blog my way to a better career, now I’m supposed to tweet to my army of fanatical followers about needing a job. Color me skeptical.

They even trotted out a Vancouverite, of course she tweeted her way to a job in online marketing. Telling online marketers to tweet, that’s like telling fish to breath underwater. It would have been more impressive if someone had managed to tweet their way to a job in taxidermy. How many taxidermist tweeters are out there? I’d wager less than tweet about online marketing.

I’ve been online a long time

Who knows more about the technology behind online marketing than me? Not many I imagine. I remember the Internet pre-Yahoo before the phrase “monetizing eyeballs” was on everyone’s lips. I remember when search engine optimization was all about Alta Vista. I remember when AllTheWeb was the next great hope, hell when OpenText was a public search engine. I’m still not convinced 140 characters is sufficient to convey the brilliance and depth of say a Stephen Hawking or an Immanuel Kant. Kant was too long winded for Twitter, a priori his exactness obsession. I’ve written extensively about online marketing, or marketing with social media, and let me tell you few people noticed. But I persisted and I continue to update old blog posts to try and leverage them in my personal branding and search engine optimization efforts.

Tweeting your way to a better career

As someone who has spent way too much time hunting for a job online, every few days (hours) I see a story or a blog post about tweeting your way to a new job or blogging your way to a better career. I keep updating my collection of links to expert advice, but having written over 1000 blog posts, let me tell you,  it is far from a guarantee or a foolproof means of achieving success. Jobs get posted to Twitter. I have applied for and  interviewed for jobs posted on Twitter, but it is better to get an actual referral from a person you know in the real world.

Behold the Twesume

The latest thing at least one company is promoting, the Twesume, a 140 character version of your resume and a public appeal for someone to hire you. I gave it a go, but my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek. Now you have twice as many characters on Twitter, you can also link your tweets together in one long rambling “Tweetstorm” or perhaps you could just start a blog.

Tweet your way to an MBA

As of May 2nd 2012, you can apparently tweet your way into an MBA program in Iowa, but as someone who has had extreme difficulty finding a career after I completed my Sauder MBA, I’ve read far too many career advice articles. Another new trend is rejecting candidates because their Klout score is too low. I wrote about Klout long before the mainstream media and let me tell you their algorithm was flawed, it was very much possible to game the system at least in the early going. And as of May 2018 Klout is being shut down, so people can obsess about Twitter and Instagram’s algorithms full time on social media.

Keep on Tweeting

Word continues to spread through the blogosphere, the twitterverse and even USA Today about the importance of tweeting for job seekers, and I seem to be living proof that it just doesn’t work for all people, in all situations, in all industries. Of course sensational headlines sell papers and get the clicks, so here is a headline from AOL:

This Man Got A Six-Figure Job Through Twitter (No Resume Required)

I think it could have used at least one exclamation mark, perhaps a hashtag, and a “FTW”. I’m sure President Trump will be sad if you don’t leave a comment with at least a few buzzwords and self promoting links.

This entry was originaly posted on May 19th, 2010, it was last edited on April 22nd, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Job Search, Social Media, Twitter.