Blogs | Social Signal

One of our favourite projects has been The Big Wild, a site where people who love Canada's wilderness can share stories, connect with each other and take action to protect our big wild spaces.

We worked with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Mountain Equipment Coop, the site's founders, to make it more engaging and easier to use, and for the past four months, our own Aaron Pettigrew has served as the site's animator - encouraging contributions, promoting the site and ramping up participation.

Now The Big Wild has reached the stage where it's ready to hire an animator on their own. And for a conservation-minded social media type - someone who feels just as at home wrangling blog posts and Flickr photos as they do sleeping under the stars a day's hike from the nearest human settlement - this just might be your dream job.

For organizations with a strong policy orientation, turning out documents and reports is a pretty integral part of their existence. And often those reports are valuable contributions to the dialogue.

First, you should know this:  although I love the Internet, I would never ever move over 9,000 kilometers to be with some guy I’d just met online. We can agree that’s obviously a crazy thing to do. Right?

So when I tell you that I just moved here from Poland to work for Social Signal, and that I did it on the basis of an interview process conducted entirely over the Internet – yes, I shut up my Warsaw apartment, yes, I uprooted my husband, yes, actually, I did move here with all my stuff in a few backpacks before I even shook hands with Alex – I can appreciate why you look a little bug-eyed.

This week in Harvard Business Online: my post about how to Hire Smarter with Social Media. That post shares some lessons on how social media can help employers find the best people for their team, inspired by the process we used to find our latest, fantastic hire, Channing Rodman. To show these lessons in action, I'm sharing the story of social media helped us find Channing.

Channing joined us in April as a Social Media Strategist, and she has rocked our world with her terrific online instincts, brilliant writing and client diplomacy. You can use social media to hire team members who wow you just as much as Channing's wowed us, whether you're hiring for a social media gig or something entirely analog.

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on the subject of how to increase the size of your network on LinkedIn. And one of the best tips is to write a personal note to prospective LinkedIn connections, instead of relying on the soulless boilerplate default text.

Make it compelling, persuasive, charming and engaging. Remind your potential connection how they know you, and what your relationship means to you, like...

Few industries have faced greater disruption from the digital revolution than publishing. From Craigslist's impact on newspapers' classified ad revenue, to the rise of e-books and the dominance of Amazon.com, huge changes are underway. And this is probably only the beginning; social media's influence has only just started to be felt.

Every summer, Social Signal gathers at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. And this year's lineup looks especially promising... but you don't have to take our word for it.

Social media are often called a disruptive innovation: one that surprises markets and, often, threatens market leaders.

A few nights ago, at Vancouver's seventh Democamp (blogged wonderfully by Raul Pacheco here), I caught a glimpse of what may be the latest facet of that disruption.

It was nestled among a series of other fascinating demonstrations - including our friend Kris Krug's use of NetVibes as a personal media monitoring platform; Anahita, a Joomla-based social network platform; and BuddyPress, which turns WordPress MU into a social network. All very cool.

But the thing that really caught my attention was the upcoming service LexPublica.

Hey, you've sponsored a conference – good for you!

Chances are good you wanted to help these folks out, and support some productive conversation, learning and networking. Chances are also pretty good you want to get some benefit out of the sponsorship yourself with goodwill and exposure.

And when they said you'd have an opportunity to speak to the participants, you jumped at it. And you have a great 15-minute pitch carefully crafted by the folks in marketing, including a PowerPoint video that hits all the key selling points.

So why do you have this nagging feeling of impending disaster?