“One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you’re in the room… Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you’re not. The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.” — Seth Godin

Growing up playing multiple sports I was always the kid that had to be first. You may say, “That’s great. You should be pushing yourself. You should be challenging your teammates,” and you’re probably right.

But… what I slowly began to learn was that there was a time and a place for being first, and there was another time. A time when being a teammate and not showing others up mattered more (i.e. warm-up laps and long, slow days for those of you who ran long distance).

Running full speed during warm laps is a great way for your teammates to start resenting you and the same thing holds true when you’re the person who ALWAYS has to talk during team meetings at your office.

Whether you’re an employee who thinks you’re getting ahead by standing out or an employer who encourages and reinforces this behavior I hope you’ll watch this quick video and reconsider.

Are you making noise or making a difference?

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I’ve been fortunate in my career that I haven’t had to interview too much – though I enjoy the process and learning from those interactions as I hope this post will illustrate.

There was a handful of times I didn’t get the gig. Of those, I was usually in the final 2-3 candidates; however, there was one time in late 2009 when I flat out BOMBED an interview.

Let’s talk about that time.

The interview was with an up-and-coming social business firm based out of Austin and I fell in love with the work they were doing from the onset. The interviewer was a brilliant strategist who I admired a lot. For the first time in my life I was a little intimidated.

When I found out that I would have the opportunity to interview/have a conversation I started reading EVERYTHING I could about social business. I read everything the company had written, and I didn’t just read it, I thought about it.

I took an inordinate amount of notes and dove deep into the content. I thought about how it was applicable to marketing, the workplace, organization architecture and much more. I pored over it for hours and felt like I had something semi-insightful to offer from almost every vantage point.

On the day of the interview, I was nervous, but felt like I was more prepared than I’d ever been for anything in my life. I had notes scattered out (it was a phone interview) and though I was ready to answer ANY question.

I thought wrong.

We didn’t talk about social business. We barely talked about the organization at all. The interviewer asked me questions about myself.

“What did I want out of life?”

“Where did I see myself in five years?”

“Why did I want to leave sports marketing? Sports marketing is fun.”

Ummmmmmmmm… I wanted to talk about measuring a social brand and capturing value from today’s emerging technologies and evolving operating environments.

The funny thing is that I’d learned more about myself in 2009 than I ever had before, but I was completely unprepared to articulate most of that to someone else.

This company was full of brilliant people that could teach me social business. They were looking for someone who fit their culture, who wanted to learn, and consistently push him(her)self beyond their level of comfort. Hint: That’s what most companies want. They can teach you the rest.

In a world where most people are looking for a quick fix, (popping Adderral and anti-depressants like they’re candy) most of us are completely unwilling to turn the lens on ourselves. To think deeply about what we think, feel and believe. And how experiences, thoughts, and feelings impact our lives and they way we interact with others.

I encourage you to spend more time reading books that challenge you and retreating into your own mind more often.

Understanding who you are is crucial in understanding what you’re capable of and how you fit into our fancy little ecosystem.

Had I done that, I might not have gotten the job, but I wouldn’t be writing posts about that one time I bombed an interview.

What about you? Have you ever bombed an interview? What would you have done differently? What are your favorite interview tips?

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Disclaimer: The following post is self-indulgent. Most end of the year round-up posts are. Despite that fact, I felt like this was a good way to pay respect to the work that went into this year and to provide a review of content you may have missed (or have never seen before). Should you decide to keep reading, I hope that it will give you a foundation for where we’re headed in 2012.

Last January I wrote that I wanted 2011 to be about you. It wasn’t.

I wrote that I wanted to read 52 books. I read 27. I only reviewed 3.

I wanted to write more posts and ship a couple of projects. I wrote 47 posts this year, and only 5 after after July. I didn’t ship either project.

And yet 2011 was one of the best years of my life. It was *easily* the best of my professional career.

• I fell more in love with a job that affords me the opportunity to leverage social technologies and my knowledge of integrated digital strategies to market the nation’s #1 ranked cancer hospital while simultaneously broadening my overall marketing knowledge and picking up skills like video editing along the way.
• I spent a lot of time with my buddies drinking cold beers, listening to live music, hanging out by the pool, grilling, dancing, and watching sports.
• I visited with my family. At least one of my parents every day. I grew even closer to my sister. I absorbed lots of wisdom from my grandparents.
• I found an incredible woman who somehow puts up with me despite my desire to frequently say and do things that are “in the box.” (Notice where the post volume started dropping off…)
• I spoke at a really cool online conference to some very intelligent people.
• I stimulated my mind and body almost daily. (Which included running my first half marathon with no competition, just for fun in 1:49).
• I started saying “no” more often and I stopped doing things I wasn’t intensely passionate about.

What You May Have Missed in 2011:
22 Key Mentoring Messages – Mentorship is a great way of growing and progressing your career. This post features some awesome insights from my organization’s C-suite the basics of mentorship, embedding it into your organization’s culture, approachability and more.

Reasons Your Employees Are Running for the Door – It amazes me how many organizations don’t “get” why their turnover is so high. Here’s 8 reasons that shouldn’t surprise you. And here’s me angrily ranting after a I read a tweet an executive sent about all her employees getting poached.

American Education: You Deserve Better – One of my favorite posts from 2011. I genuinely believe that modern day education is severely broken and this post details the change I’d like to see. Some people smarter than me chimed in as well. And here are some resources that initially sparked the discussion.

Carving Your Own Path – Carving your own path isn’t easy. You will have to think for yourself. You will invariably call attention to yourself. People will hate you if you’re successful. This is why most people yearn to be led. This is why most people spend their entire lives following.

Forget Social Media – There’s significantly more noise than ever before. Trying to keep up with all of it and be everything to everyone is a waste of time. It’s just fear manifesting itself through excuses and procrastination and we’re all guilty of it.

Why Being a Thought Leader is Boring – This post totally contradicts the predominant advice that you should try to be an expert in one, narrow niche. While many people successfully employ this strategy, I think it’s boring as hell and this post attempts to explain why I’d rather be well-versed on a variety of topics.

I Probably Un-Friended You Last Night – There’s so much noise, so many things to keep us utterly distracted from the things that really matter why do we insist on validating ourselves with excess “friends” who’s status updates we’re totally indifferent to? It’s time to de-friend those that no longer add value to your lives.

3 Things the C-Level Still Doesn’t Get About Social Media – This title is pretty self explanatory. And 6 months later I think all of these still hold true at most organizations.

Life is Adversarial Enough… – Don’t test people just to display your authority. Most of us (young professionals) inherently know that in the scheme of things we’ve accomplished jack shit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to. That doesn’t mean that it’s not really hard to balance our desire to climb with the gentle reminder that patience is a virtue.

The Easiest Way to Evaluate Most Tasks – Time, not money, is my most coveted resource; therefore, I get really annoyed when my time is wasted. Here’s the strategy I employ to ensure I’m balancing the execution of a project vs. the resources (time + money) used.

Forget the Dream Job, Take the Money & Run – I don’t necessarily believe this (as evidenced by my career path), but the notion certainly challenges the status quo and I think it’s an idea that warrants some thought, especially if you’re still in college.

Creating Higher Quality Stimuli – Reading things that challenge the status quo and/or oppose my own core values/belief system/internal dialogue require me to re-evaluate where I stand on these issues. More importantly instead of just saying “That’s outlandish,” or nodding my head in quiet agreement, I’m forced into the process of absorbing a multitude of information, evaluating that information, and then evaluating what I think based on that information. I recommend you start doing the same more often.

Disruptive Social Technologies: How Your Organization is Missing the Boat – I wrote a lot about topics that go far beyond business/marketing/social media this year, but here’s one that doesn’t. I think it serves as a good reminder that more organizations need to use social technologies for tasks such as cross functional information sharing and internal networking.

If you’re a glutton for punishment here’s My Top 10 Posts of 2010.

I haven’t thought too much about where this blog is headed in 2012, but I encourage you to:

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Or…

I recently attended our organization’s first town hall meeting under the tutelage of our new president. He spoke about the recent confluence of transformative identities and disruptive technologies that have come together over the last couple of years, leading him to believe that we will cure several major cancers in his lifetime.

I’m hopeful that I am a part of a place that can leverage new computational firepower, quantitative analysis of bio-specimens, and disruptive genome technologies to advance existing paradigms and cure this awful disease.

Your Organization Doesn’t Get It… Yet.

But in the interim, I’m rather dumbfounded and annoyed that more organizations aren’t leveraging disruptive technologies to enhance the way they communicate, organize and operate their businesses.

Even now, after all the hoopla around “social” has died down (a bit) and we know so much more, companies are still insistent about “integrating some of that social media stuff into our marketing.” Never mind leveraging disruptive social technologies to enhance business intelligence by listening to customers (patients in health care), conducting market research, solidifying customer service, managing a community and more.

I get it. I really do. I understand that your organization is big, siloed, doesn’t get social and so on and so forth. I also understand that most people don’t like change. Change is hard.

The Opportunities are Endless

But in a world where disruptive technologies give us the ability to potentially cure cancer, why can’t we leverage digital/social solutions to put an end to pointless meetings, collaborate across teams, dissipate important news or information, etc.?

Top-down hierarchical institutions wont always be the norm and the power of open source projects is becoming increasingly evident. Rule-followers and drones might keep their mouths shut and do what they’re told, but the industrial revolution is over and those people don’t impact meaningful change anymore.

Linchpins who ask hard questions, challenge the status quo, and demand to be pushed outside the comfort zone do. How do we scale the work that they do – the value they bring to the institution? How do we share it? How do we leverage it?

Oh, You Want Some Examples?

• Cross functional information sharing – What if there was an easy way for front line people to communicate issues to upper management, and then for upper management to share noteworthy changes to the PR/Marketing department?
• Increased Office Efficiency – What if instead of an hour long status meetings (# of people in meeting x how long meeting lasts) where people go around in a circle and say what they’re working on there’s a sharepoint employees keep updated where others can go and see what projects are relevant to them?
• Internal Networking – Most companies organize employees in such a way that all the account executives sit together, the creative sits together, the IT sits together. What if there were internal forums where employees could bond not just over their job description, but other things that interest them. Wouldn’t something like that unlock new collaborations and opportunities to learn and become more well-rounded employees?

How about?

• Increasing internal brand awareness
• Idea generation (brainstorming via Google docs anyone!?)
• Facilitating the spread of research, insights, etc. and making the information more accessible

The list goes on. And on.

What’s Next?

As we gradually come to understand how disruptive social technologies can enhance our own internal communications perhaps we’ll see forward thinking organizations take it a step further. Can you imagine MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering all leveraging these disruptive social technologies to enable their respective physicians, physicists, geneticists and more to collaborate with the other institutions in an effort to cure cancer?

The future is now. Don’t let your organization fall behind.

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The following is a guest post from Cameron Plommer. He’s a sharp guy who’s contributed a lot to this blog’s community so I am excited to get to share with you all some of his on-the-job insights and advice.

After I graduated from college December 2009, I didn’t get a full-time position until October 2010. This is another story, for another time. Instead, I want to share what I’ve learned in the past seven months as a full-time worker.

Working Eight-Hour Days

The biggest thing I had to get used to was having to devote eight (or more) straight hours to work. As opposed to school where you have multiple breaks in a day, work is consistent. Sure you get to do whatever you want when you get home and on the weekend, but it is still a big difference that takes time to get use to.

The Rhythm of The Workplace

Pay attention to how things get done where you work. In my office people where many hats, we all chip in to get things done. The lesson I had to learn was to be proactive. If you aren’t busy, lend a hand to someone else. The bosses will take notice and it will help you down the line.

One way to make sure your manager sees your initiative is to cc them in an email you send offering your help to a fellow coworker.

Example:

“Hey [name], I have some free time this [today/week] and noticed you are a bit swamped. I could help you do [task] if you need a hand. Just let me know.”

Productivity Tips

How could I not talk about productivity?! First off if you work in an office staring at a computer most of the day, make sure to take breaks. Not Facebook breaks. Get away from the computer. Get up out of your chair, go outside and take a walk. Or just stand and think. It’s a simple yet effective way to clear your head. It’s often very easy to work continuously even when you aren’t being effective. Breaks help.

Use the Pomodoro Technique. This is related to taking breaks. Essentially you work for 25 minutes at a time, take a 5 minute break, repeat. That’s one Pomodoro. Sounds stupid yes I know, but it simply works.

As an entry-level employee it’s also crazy-important to be organized. Tools I recommend are Evernote and Teux Deux. I use Evernote for projects and references and Teux Deux for tasks. Having your shit together is a great way to impress the higher-ups and is often the difference between moving up and being past up for promotion.

Push Yourself

If you aren’t a bit anxious or slightly paranoid that something won’t work out, you probably aren’t pushing yourself enough as a new professional. Seek out hard work that you don’t quite know how
to do. You want to put yourself in sink or swim situations. Even if you sink (fail), you will have shown initiative and have an experience to learn from when taking on future work.

Last week the senior project manager where I work went on vacation for the week. Up until that time I was helping her project manage, in an assistant-type role. If I didn’t know what to do she would generally take over. But when she left I was tasked with new responsibilities. If I didn’t step up and just figure things out, projects would stall and I wouldn’t be seen as capable.

This was my sink or swim situation. I sunk at times, but mostly swam. Now that she is back, she sees that I’m very capable of handling more complex tasks on my own.

Find Time to Actually Work

This lesson is especially true if you work in a services business or agency of some kind where lots of email and meetings are the norm. Meetings and email take up a big block of my time. As a project manager I probably do more meeting than others, but even you are aren’t a PM expect to have large chunks of your day eaten up by meetings and responding to email.

Both are necessary evils, so figure out how to do work within the day. One tip I have is to try batching meetings and batching email processing. For example, try to set up your meetings in the afternoon and process email in the morning and late afternoon (that’s only if you don’t have frequent urgent emails). The benefit of doing this is that you don’t have to do as much mental switching, compared to having a meeting every other hour. If you get them all done at one time, you can devote large chunks of
time to difficult mental tasks.

Be Okay With Sucking

This is a big one for entry-level workers. The fact is you are new and don’t know much about anything. Sure you may have good soft skills, but learning the hard skills is well, hard. For instance, I
work in market research and have no background in the industry. I’ve had to learn multiple processes such as how focus groups run, how surveys are create/launched and all the other details of the industry.

The only way to learn is by doing and in this doing you will get confused, lost, angry, and frustrated. It’s only natural, you are learning something new. I don’t care if you got a 4.0 in college, you still have much to learn. Role with the punches, ask a lot of questions and just do your best. You will get better.

Bio:
Cameron Plommer is lives in Seattle where works as a Project Manager by day and a productivity blogger by night. Learn more about him at CameronPlommer.com or just say hi on Twitter.

Keith Ferrazzi is partially responsible for this blog existing. It was after reading Keith’s last book, “Never Eat Alone” that I transformed my thinking on relationship marketing and I started this little place on the web.

Now, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of reading an advanced copy of Keith’s new book, “Who’s Got Your Back?” and I want to share with you some of the most important insights I found in the book.

The premise of the book is that you can’t get to the top, or anywhere for that matter, relying solely on yourself and that the key to achieving your dreams comes from having “lifeline relationships.” Keith teaches you how to build these trusting relationships that won’t let you fail.

Check out the video review below, and then if you’re still interested – the notes after.

Here are my 4 Key Takeaways:

1.) Whether you want to surround yourself with a dream team or not, you should ensure that you’re practicing the four mindsets in your life: generosity, vulnerability, candor and accountability.

2.) Sparring – do it frequently, with people you trust, people that can help you grow. A great quote from the book, “The goal of an argument is not a victory, it’s progress.”

3.) It’s about collaboration not compromise. Speaks for itself eh?

4.) This is a great book for leaders. By the time you finish it you can’t help but think, “Man, it’d be awesome to work for a guy like Keith.” He’ll challenge you to get better, but you can also approach him candidly and tell him what he’s doing that adversely affects you and what he could do to make you a better employee, and consequently make the business more profitable.

So who’s this book for?
1.) Anyone who genuinely wants to take their career and personal life to the next level via a team/trusted group of advisors
2.) Leaders and people in managerial roles
3.) Fresh-faced college grads that want to get a leg up on their peers

If you’re interested in purchasing “Who’s Got Your Back?” or “Never Eat Alone,” you can find them on Amazon here. If you purchase from this link Keith’s team will be buying me a beer. If you’d rather not here’s the link minus the affiliate URL: “Who’s Got Your Back?”

Sometimes tough love is bullshit. And if I wrote about 5 ways to handle tough love, four of them would be bullshit.

I’m currently reading an advanced copy of Keith Ferrazzi’s new book, “Who’s Got Your Back?” (full-review here). It discusses the benefits of sparring in order to learn from one another and acquire new abilities and skills.

I think he’s onto something, particularly if you use the ground rules he’s laid out in his book. But most people don’t have those yet.

Sometimes tough love is genuine and you really are capable of having a heated discussion or being the recipient of a tirade. There are a lot of things to consider here: how well you know the person, how savvy they are about that particular topic, etc.

But guess what?

Sometimes tough love is malicious, sometimes it’s self serving, and sometimes it’s flat out bullshit.

People will tell you that they screamed at you because they care, and if they didn’t they would not have wasted their breath bothering to say anything at all.

Other people will tell you that they had to resort to ‘those measures’ to finally get your attention.

There are times that this is probably true.

In my experience though, there’s something that separates really successful people from those that get flustered and defeated, incapable of learning from the experience.

Successful people, people that know how to react to tough love don’t need a 5 step process. All they need is the ability to control their own perception. You see, people that react to tough love the best are always capable of turning it around and convincing themselves that whoever gave them the tough love HAD to in order for them to see through the fog.

Is it true? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter because these people absorb the blows, assess the situation and extract the important message out of all the yelling. Provided there is one (a valuable message) of course. If there’s not, they shake it off, learn that they don’t trust that person giving them advice about that particular topic and move on with their lives.

What about you? How do you react to tough love? Is your initial reaction to sulk in the corner, then come back with a vengeance and an “I’ll show them,” attitude. Do you flip it around, find the value, and apply it to your life? I bet it’s a lot more complicated than that. I bet it depends on who is giving the advice, how well you trust that person, their knowledge base, etc.

Join me in the comments section and we’ll continue this discussion.

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This post is part of the series entitled, “25 ways to get a new, better or different job.” The series is an effort to provide something actionable that anyone (not just Gen Y) can do that may directly or indirectly help you get a job. If you have any suggestions please e-mail me or leave them in the comments. After all, this series is for you!

The second post in our installment of 25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job features some key messages from Gary Vaynerchuk’s NYC Keynote speech. There’s a lot of buzz surrounding his speech, and for good reason. If he can’t convince you that you need to be searching (or creating) opportunities doing something you love then chances are nobody can.

First, watch the video, and then utilize the comments section to see if you can add to some of the key messages that I took away from his speech.

Some Key Messages:

• Patience and Passion are extremely important.
• Too many people are doing stuff they hate. There’s no reason in 2008 to do stuff you hate.
• Community – Listening to your users, absolutely, but giving a rip about your users is way better.
• Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what you want to do for the rest of your life, and do that. You CAN monetize it.
• Stop crying and keep hustling. Hustling is the most important word ever!
• You have to have a business model. Work hard and build up equity so you can finance what you want to do.
• Legacy is greater than currency. Your great grandchildren will be able to find you online.
• Answer every single one of your e-mails.
• If you’re pumping out good stuff people will follow, but if you for a ½ second don’t believe in what you’re doing whether it’s your personal brand or a product, get out.
• We are sitting where the gatekeepers are no longer in control.
• You need to build brand equity in yourself.
• The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent.
• Use all the tools available to connect to your user base, anyway you can, everywhere you can, as often as you can.
• It doesn’t matter how small your niche is.
• If you want it bad enough, work 9-5, spend a couple of hours with your family, 7 to 2 in the morning is plenty of time to do damage.
• Do what your about!

If you liked Gary’s speech you can check out this post (and corresponding video) providing Gary’s 13 tips on building a profitable blog (and/or business) on Darren Rowse’s blog.

What did you think of Gary’s keynote? I’ve watched it at least 3 times, and I just can’t get enough. What’s was your favorite point that he made? Are you doing what you love right now? If not, what is it that you wish you could be doing for a living?

If you find this series to be helpful in your job search, please consider subscribing to ensure that you get all 25 actionable posts.

So I expressed in my last blog post that I had some cool things planned. I guess that’s debatable, but I do have some new, different things planned. I am a firm believer that bloggers should mix things up so that their content doesn’t get stale, and also experiment with different kinds of content. What’s your favorite topic covered on RSM ?

If you tell me it sucks or that it’s irrelevant or inapplicable then chances are it won’t be back, but in the meantime I’ll be starting another series of posts in edition to, “What’s in My Feed Reader?”

In an effort to serve some of my Gen Y readers that have been e-mailing various questions about obtaining jobs, switching jobs, and upgrading jobs (yes, even in our current economy) my new series will be entitled (until I think of a better name), “25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job.” I’ll try to add a new one periodically.

The goal of this series is to provide something actionable that anyone (not just Gen Y) can do that may directly or indirectly help you get a job. This series also enables me to integrate some shorter posts onto the blog, and possibly update a little more frequently.

So without further ado …

25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job – Read ‘Never Eat Alone’

A few key things from the book:

• Keith teaches you, through brilliant examples, how to establish the right mind set for networking
• He teaches you the right way to network (i.e. not to keep score, and how to not be a networking jerk that you often associate with networking).
• He explains why you should never eat alone, why sharing your passions are so important, and how to connect with other connectors.
• One of my favorite chapters, social arbitrage, might be the shortest but most important chapter in the entire book.
• He literally takes you through the mindset, to developing the skills to be successful at networking, and finally how to leverage those skills.

When friends ask me how to become a better at networking, I hand them the book. I have two copies, I keep the other within arm’s reach at all times (at least while I’m at my work station). You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

Hopefully in the very near future I’ll also be able to point them to a particular blog post on this blog, but that’s enough foreshadowing for today.

I mentioned just the other day that I write my blog as much for me as for you. That said, there’s countless reasons that I blog, but one of the primary reasons I blog is because I’m passionate about connecting with, and helping people.

I realize that a lot of the big guns probably get so many e-mails like this that they could never answer them all. Being relatively new at this, I still don’t get a whole lot of them, and so I still take the time to make sure I answer every one of them. Just as my blog sometimes propels my readers to keep moving forward with their goals, getting e-mails like the one below, inspire me to keep pushing forward (sometimes through the everyday grind) to continue blogging, trying to inspire, and helping passionate people with their marketing dreams.

Take special notice of the bolded part of the e-mail. And thanks Anthony for connecting.

Dear Ryan,

My name is Anthony Harris and I’m a college graduate from Post University. I have been working in the marketing field over a year now and I enjoy every bit of it. My main priority is to make a transition into the sports marketing field. I am person that is willing to put the time and effort in to make it happen. I follow your blog on a consistent basis and every time I read each one it just influences me to continue to go after what I want to do in life. I have the potential, work ethics and the determination to be what I want to be. As mentioned, I am eager to learn as much information in the marketing field, or should I say Generation Y industry, and I feel that you will be a valuable resource to speak with.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Anthony Harris

As a blogger, do you get lots of e-mails like this? What is your reaction to them? Do you take the time and effort to answer the majority of them?