When Facebook could become a threat when you're looking for a job

          Do you have a Facebook account ? Are you looking for a job or an internship ? Or will you do it soon ? If your answer is yes for each question, you have to know that 7 out of 10 recruiters wil check your Facebook account and its content before to decide if it would be a good idea to hire you or not. So be careful about all the things shared by you or about you. It would be pitty to loose the opportunity of your life because of a photo of you drunk at your best-friend’s birthday.

To be clear, if I’m talking about the relationship between the recruitment and the social networks, you would probably think about Linkedin, the most important professional social network bought by Microsoft for 26 billion dollars. And you would be right because Linkedin is now a real tool in the working life of more and more people. But if we want to simplify Linkedin is more useful to find a candidate, the right profil thanks to millions of available resume. On the contrary, a recruiter can use Facebook to have extra informations and know who you really seem to be when you leave your office.

You never have to forget that Facebook is an open network, and often your name is the only thing that someone needs to know to find your account. You are potentially connected with each person who is able to go on the Internet. I don’t talk about some kinds of hackers or spies, but only persons like you and me with a computer and a keyboard. Your possible future boss is unfortunately for you one of them. And when you are using Facebook, you can’t hide to them all things you are sharing or reacting about, but you can at least try to narrow the risk to be penalized by what you did on this social network. 

On Facebook it’s really tempting to give an opinion or to share something. It seems that you are only with your « friends », and that you say will stay where it is without be used in the future. If you are lucky, maybe it would be the case, it’s better to act before the problem than after, so there some easy things to do. To start, the most important is to take care the confidentiality of the content of your account. It’s always better, when you are looking for a job, to choose for each subject the most efficient confidentiality, the one who allows to share your account’s content only with your friends. With this choice it would be really more difficult for a person from outside your own network to find too embarrassing things about you. And about your friends, the only ones who are able too see the biggest part of your activity, you have to think about sort the list and manage efficiently your requests.

Congratulations, your account seems already more safety. Now you have to take care about the visible part of this account. The part that everybody can see in few clics : Your profile picture and your last cover pictures. It’s not compulsory to have a real professional picture, don’t worry, but please, try to avoid your party’s pictures, your too « funny » pictures (we don’t have all the same humor), or all other kinds of pictures who present you like a person non really serious. I know, it’s possible to be really serious at work even if it’s not the case after it, but between two candidates with a similar curriculum, if one of them doesn’t seem serious in private, it seems unlikely that the recruiter would accept to take the risk to hire him. And be careful of older pictures who could stay available because of your old confidentiality Policy. And don’t forget to check the comments for each available pictures, yours and the ones of your friends. Avoid bad talking and spelling mistakes. Then you can check the design of the visible part of your account going on your profil without be connected to be sure that all is ok.

Your content seems enough protected now, but since the beginning of this article, I talk only about basic things, lots of people already know that, maybe your profile was already protect like this and you didn’t learn nothing. But now I’d like to talk about your activity on Facebook outside of your own profil or the profil of your friends. I’d like to talk about all your reactions you did about différents Facebook pages. Actually, as I said before, Facebook is an open network, and this pages could become a kind of link between you and all the users. And this connection is often an incentive to react about a content. On this network, everybody can give an opinion, can debate with people all other the world, and for this no diploma or certification is needed, everybody can participate. It’s a big maybe the main strength of this network. This flew of opinions allows to change our way to seek information, that information can always be challenging by numerous points of view and somebody who knows something about a subject can share what he knows. You just have to be careful when you are this one, because what you say can be found easily. Just try for example to go on Google, and search « your name + your surname + comment ». You probably will see links to several of your comments you posted on publications of famous Facebook page or others page you « liked ». So, when you do a debate in the comments of a page’s publication, just remember that all the things you said could be seen by people who want to know more about you. Just be careful of your opinions shared on Facebook who could be a problem.

To conclude, I said to you some tricks to protect your content from people you want to know more information about your private life, like a future recruiter. But if you only decide to manage the confidentiality of your profile, maybe it wouldn’t be enough, there is a link between the private life and the rest of the world, this link is the social networks, and you don’t have to underestimate the size of this link. I told about a job search period, but it’s only an example I used to show you how easy it is to have information about you.

A Positive Take On Slacktivism

Slacktivism is the self-deluded idea that by liking, sharing or retweeting something you are helping out. We’ve probably all been there at some point. The term derives from the combination of the words ‘slacker’ and ‘activism’, to point out the little effort needed from participants to involve in this virtual support for a social cause. To clarify this phenomenon, I will start with describing a few examples.

If you missed this one, you have been living under a virtual stone: the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which resulted in your Facebook timeline being full of videos of your friends pouring a bucket full of ice cubes over themselves. At the end of the video, people challenged some of their own friends to do the same. During July and August 2014, this challenge went extremely viral all over the world. The idea behind the challenge was encouraging donations to research on the disease ALS, amytrophic lateral sclerosis, which results in weakness of the muscles (with a chance of death).

A participant of the Ice Bucket Challenge in the heat (or cold?) of the moment

Another example of slacktivism regards the online support after the 2015’s Paris attacks. Facebook users massively changed their profile photos into the French flag, to either show respect to the victims of these horrible attacks, to support their friends and family or just to show that they care about what happened.

My brother's Facebook profile photo on November 16, 2015

There has been a lot of criticism of slacktivism: these internet-based social awareness campaigns are seen as a lazy way of showing your support and would be ‘killing’ historical forms of activism, like protests, marching and public speaking. It would just be an easy way out for people to show that they care.

I do agree with the criticism of slacktivism to a certain extent. This online attention on social causes is far from matching the real life work, like going out on the streets or actually donating money to the organization. Of course this is frustrating and simply annoying for the people who participate in political activism in the real world. 

But here’s the thing: slacktivism actually does something. I think if all these forms of slacktivism had not happened – which is unthinkable in the digital era we live in – there would have been much less awareness on many issues. How hard your criticism on slacktivism may be, you can’t deny the fact that people do get more aware. Sure, in case of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a lot of attention was pointed at popularity of the videos and the excitement behind pouring a bucket of ice cubes over yourself. However, on top of more or less 100 million dollars in donations, many people learned about this disease for the first time. The campaign informed a huge number of people all over the world and created higher awareness to the disease. 

Through slacktivism, more and more people get involved in social issues. This way, it gets easier to get what needs to get accomplished, accomplished. It’s not about the fact that sharing an article about climate change is not the same as donating to the organization behind the article. It’s about the synergy of all these small cases where awareness is created, which ultimately results in actual change, either on a political level or on a personal level.

I want to point out one last thing: the cynics of slacktivism should not stop expressing their critics. Slacktivism creating awareness is fantastic, but isn’t enough to actual get us somewhere. It’s great how people can come together over a cause, either by organizing a protest against TTIP on the streets, or by sharing an online petition against it on Facebook. I rather see this, than another article about the physical transformation of the Kardashian family.

What I’m trying to say is that cynics should keep speaking out against slacktivism, because they will address people who realize they need to do more in terms of actual activism. As much as these cynics might disagree, your online voice does draw awareness to the cause you choose to support.

Google & Social Networks: a Love Story?

We all know that air is composed by an almost 80% of nitrogen and just a 20% of oxygen, but it's this oxygen which our lungs use to keep us alive. Google's projects are almost the same: 80% of them are failures, but that one out of five that stands makes our Internet way better. Most of us just know Google Inc. as the creators of -indeed- the search engine, Gmail, Google Books or that AdSense that provides us with advertisings surprisingly related with our latest searches. But Google is much more than this.

Google's engineers have their brains working full-time, and lots of ideas are born in the company's headquarters, in Mountainview (California). Some of them are successful, some of them are not.

In January 2005, for example, they launched Google Video to compete with a rising website called YouTube. Google Video was intended as a place where just broadcasting companies, and not users, could upload their videos. Six months later, they realized how fool that was in the age of sharing and collective intelligence, and they let Google Video's users upload their own videos. But it was already too late, and in October 2006 Google Inc. bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Now, Google Videos (with an S) exists just as a search engine for Youtube videos and the videos of the few loners that uploaded chunks of their lives to Google Video.

But maybe the biggest challenge of the dozens of brains working for Google is to create a social network that actually work. They know that the future of the web is probably there, so they try to create a platform able to compete to Facebook.

Their first attempt, in 2004, was the creation of Orkut. Its main problem? Maybe it came too early, when people did not really know what a social network was about. Anyway, it managed to survive in some countries - nowadays around 60% of their users are from Brazil.

Some years later, in 2009, with Gmail and Google Docs already running, some Google engineer decided to melt them both with the typical functions of the old chat groups: that's how Google Wave was born. It was intended for people to make arrangements, but it was quite complicated to understand. Consequently it was never loved by an audience who already knew the easy-to-use Facebook. One year later, Google decided that they did not "

plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product" but they would "maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects". Wave is still online, but it will be switched off definitely the 30nd April, so you have still some time to understand it!

Google Buzz came shortly after, in February 2010. I cannot tell a lot about it because I just know it as "the colourful button below the Inbox in Gmail". As the 99% of Internet users, I guess. Maybe because of that, it has already been shut down.

The last (but not least) attempt of catching the social networks' train was Google + (G+). It was opened on June 2011 and, in the beginning, was a closed network where you could only enter with an invitation. And not a lot of them were flying around the Net by that time. Experts said that technically, it is better than Facebook, as it solves the biggest issue on Mark Zuckerberg's social network: privacity. On G+, you can decide exactly who you want to read each one of your publications.

The Spanish IT scholar Enrique Dans has defined G+ as "the boneback of the future net" and maybe the biggest investment than Google Inc. made in its whole history, with one hundred engineers working on it for more than a year. But after the first-minute "G+ madness", it started to vanish. Far from the 100 million users that Google said it expected by the end of 2011, statistics say nowadays G+ has around 90 million users. And moreover: in January, G+ users spent there no more than 3.3 minutes (in the whole month!), while Facebook users stayed there 7.5 hours. A huge difference, don't you think so?

Even Steve Yeege, senior engineer in Google, has publicly called G+ "a big failure". Among the reasons given for the rise and fall of G+, people point out specially that it has no games (you cannot imagine how much time do people spend on Farmville), that expectations were too high and that, simply, nobody is there, which is a pretty big issue for a social network.

Thus, we could state that Google's romance with social networking was a bitter, tortuous one. Anyway they will always have the "I'm feeling lucky button".


P.S. For Google haters, I found a quite funny link, probably made by an angry Microsoft hooligan.

Jorge Pan Varea

#Loewe's viral experience

March, 14th

“Do u wanna laugh for a while and/or feel embarrassed? Watch the new advertisement of #Loewe” by @pathernando.

“The documentary about special education of #Loewe is great” by @cot_julia.

“All of you hate #Loewe’s new advertisement, but, all of you talk about it. Do you know what viral marketing means?” by @October_Lee.

What does viral marketing mean?

Viral marketing means advertising, it means money, interactivity, and above all it means social networks as means.

Just imagine a virus. A simple flu will serve. Yesterday you went to a hospital and you, unknowingly caught the virus. Later, you went out with your fiends whom you, unintentionally, transmitted the virus. They came back home and transmitted it to their families. Parents went to work and brothers and sisters went to school. We already have an epidemic. All infected.

Now, replace the flu with an advertising message and the hospital with Youtube. The key: to transmit = to share. Like.

This is viral marketing, an advertising strategy that seeks the rapid spread of a message to potential consumers of the advertised product.

Viral marketing is no new. Do you remember mouth-to-ear (word-to-mouth)? These are the roots. Nowadays, mouth have been replaced with “Notification on your wall” and ear with “Share on a friend’s timeline” or #let’screateaWorldwidetrend. Today, the Internet and social networks are the mean and the propagation is quicker and more effective.

A company hides an advertisement within a provocative idea in video format that make viewer’s opinion came up et violá!, for the modest price of a video uploaded to Youtube for free, it got to manage to thousands of people. And everything without paying for spots on TV or radio. Economic ¿right? Yes it is, and much more when traditional media publish pieces of news about the success of the viral campaign. Total media convergence. Just one text, many media.

This is precisely what Loewe, the Spanish firm of luxury goods, has achieved. Let solve the unknown factor. A company: Loewe. A message: gold collection 2012. A provocative idea: try to represent the Spanish youth with a sample of "supercool” young people."The results: #Loewe, Spain trend in Twitter, 730,000 views on YouTube, hundreds of posts on blogs, articles in national newspapers, parodies on YouTube... and most important, thousands of young Spanish people speaking about Loewe, even if it’s only to criticize and satirize. But... how true the idiom 'let them talk, well or bad, but talk' is?