Day 36: The Voice From The Other Sofa

Posted by: Alison Chisnell on: January 5, 2013

• In: Advent
• 17 Comments

Today’s post is by Mervyn Dinnen, who was the very first person I met from the ConnectingHR community and has always been on hand to offer support, encouragment and hugs when required! You can find him on Twitter @MervynDinnen or at his excellent blog.

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Almost three years ago, January 2010 to be precise, the ‘GenY/Millenial Personal Branding Expert/Guru’ Dan Schawbel famously tweeted:

‘You have to be as committed to your social media profile as you are to your husband or wife’

This drew much criticism from the nascent social recruiting community on both sides of the Atlantic (including me, at the time). After all, this statement was made by a single guy, barely old enough to shave (let alone date) – what did he know?

Two years ago, in December 2010, I needed to find a new job. As some readers will know, I took the decision to undertake a social job hunt, blogging and tweeting about my availability, chronicling the process, and letting the jobs come to me.

Most of you will also know that it only took 6 weeks for me to find and start a new role, one that was exactly what I was looking for. The fact that it only took such a short space of time could easily be turned into a case study of how effective social recruiting is. Except for one fact:

It may have only taken 6 weeks to find the job, but it took 2 years to build the network that delivered the job in 6 weeks!

Two years of hearing the voice from the other sofa, night after night, say ‘what are you doing with your head in that laptop every night?’

Guess what. Dan Schawbel was right!

Building the social media profile did kinda take as much, if not more, of my effort!

Within a few months the voice from the other sofa had something different to say ‘I assumed that once you got a job doing this stuff all day long you wouldn’t need to be doing it all night too’.

‘But, during the day I’m doing business things, this is when I talk to my friends’ came my not very convincing reply.

In December 2011 I produced a blog of lists. One of the lists looked at the people involved in my social arrangements for that month. I went out 19 times (well, it’s Christmas!) and Traditional Social Friends shaded Online Social Friends 7 -5. I’ve just checked my list for December 2012 arrangements and it’s currently:

• Online Social Friends – 8
• Traditional Social Friends – 5
• Family – 4
• Colleagues/ex-colleagues – 3
• Just me and the Voice from the Other Sofa – 2*

More arrangements, but it’s ‘people originally met through social media’ that now figure in more of my nights out. And my liver is still suffering!

Now, many of the people that fall under ‘Online Social’ have become real life friends, and in my day to day life I don’t differentiate between how I first met them…they are all my friends. But it’s interesting to see the increasing time I spend on social media translate into a greater number of offline arrangements.

The voice from the other sofa is now slightly more resigned to it. But then the payoff is that she gets to watch more property porn and I’m a Celeb type stuff on TV without me moaning.

Alison’s theme is Reflections and Resolutions so here are mine:

Reflection – Social media takes up a lot of my time, but has given me lots of special friends and contacts. Many readers will probably have their own voices from the other sofa.

Resolution – My family and my liver are very important to me. I’m going to take good care of them all in 2013!

Wishing a Happy and Prosperous 2013 to you all

(* Panic not readers, The Voice from the Other Sofa is accompanying me on many of the other nights out too)