Karl Gibson
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Great, concise post with heart, @ginidietrich . Sometimes having some time on your hands is when the revelations come.
When I was job-hunting two years ago, I absolutely stepped up my digital profile on all of the platforms I cared about & knew I could maintain. I'd come from a magazine that was in turmoil and found in interviews that no one really *knew* what I had done there for years - they knew I'd helped manage a newsroom but they had no idea what an 'editorial business analyst' was. An interview at Warner Bros. (with an executive I'd stayed past deadline for years to help), when she asked me ,"So you answered phones, riiiiight?" was the catalyst that drove me over the edge to fix any professional misconceptions in my own sincere yet assured voice. I wasn't a Hollywood spaz and branded myself with that professional distinction in tone: results, not chaos.
Whether it's FB, LinkedIn, a blog, Twitter - there's a way to throw your hat into the ring successfully. Even my blog, which was a random, intimate niche blog helped and I got a lot of positive, private feedback. Branding yourself to the market you're in and contributing to (as you do in Chicago) with reliable confidence works wonders. You've earned it, so keep your eyes on the prize, as they say!
@AmandaMagee That's a brave response and I agree with you and Julie Tyios. I am 42 years old, stepfather of three before my partner died (the kids are all adults now) and I know there's only so much parents can do. I would never lay blanket blame on parents; most parents have no idea what is happening and would never allow these atrocities to happen.
I was 11 when my Mom's car broke down on the way home from work and I was 'babysat' by friends of the family while waiting for her to come. I had three adult men in a basement pin me down at this house- I already had a broken wrist and a cast up to my shoulder - and while I was iinexplicably able to fight them off sexually, I got beaten for that by adults who put on nugget rings and ran a punching train on me. I walked out of there with fractured ribs and a cracked cast that had to be reset at my house that night for another month. I told my Mom it happened playing football after school and other code words she could never have known.
It wasn't her fault as my parent and no one 'asks' to be sexually assaulted. I just know that from when that happened in 1980 to now, thank God we have more communal awareness of these things happening where hopefully there's a dialogue we can have with our kids to arm them in this new landscape where looks and intentions can decieve in the worst way. The company we're talking about here, Skout, is handling this atrociously and hopefully it leads to discussions like we've seen on this blog today where we can translate "bad acting" to what it really is. Rape. It should be said. Thanks to you, Amy and everyone here for what we've been able to express.
@AmyVernon True and I'm certainly not saying all parents as a generalization because that would be insane of me. I guess I speak of people I have discussed this with whose kids overrule them on the tech side completely. I know people who don't want to learn the basics of what their kids can do with ease online or on mobile devices. Parents who can't get their kids' attention for them texting in front of their faces. I hear a lot about peer pressure - their classmates are on Facebook and 10 years old, but since when did that matter? There's only so much parents can do, I just hope we don't stop having these discussions with them about safety. And Skout's PR strategy on this is clearly an oxymoron.
Amy, thanks for posting this as well as your earlier tweets after the NYT mentions that helped put this in perspective in real-time. I think it's horrendous and horrible what happened to these individual minors. I applaud your criticism of Skout's handling of this. It's wrong to handle this as a tight-lipped PR crisis more suited to a benign indiscretion versus the breach that it is that will affect its victims for a lifetime. They should absolutely be transparent about it and help prevent more of the same for unknowing users who will just take their profiles elsewhere.
I am sure not blaming the kids - trust me, I'm a kid of the '70s, so I know this can happen with or without apps/technology - but I don't think 'we' as adults can ever stop having safety discussions with our kids about the dangers of online connections. Dangers from predators and pathological adults before the internet were tactile: you saw body language, leering/shifty people, you got your sleeve pulled by adults and it was presently real, which is lost and filtered out in the fourth wall of digital artifice. Parents can't police everything but these sort of web-related assaults are only one generation old. It's a relatively new frontier beyond what we dealt with in our respective youth. It's beyond compare and much more initially seductive and consequently tragic when it goes beyond one's strength to stop invasive crime.
@joshroinut Absolutely I'll accept! Thanks again for your post. I'm always more than glad to help others in my professional capacity when I can, so your tips for people new to the LinkedIn landscape are needed. I think the pressures for sales people, especially, can lead to those common mistakes. We're all guilty of canned invites from time to time but a little homework for people learning the medium is invaluable. Your tip for 100% updated profiles is huge - I was on LinkedIn as 'Freelance' when I was in between gigs two years ago. A lot of people don't want to lose brand recognition and so they leave outdated current jobs on their profiles - if they can't be contacted because they don't work there anymore, the missed opportunities are vast. Thanks for letting me share and will look for your invite. Continued best to you!
Congratulations on your post. You make solid, enthusiastic points. I have found LinkedIn to be valuable for overall editorial reach to an extent. However, a lot of sales pitches/prospecting that I encounter via LinkedIn is done poorly: jumbled, busy, link-overkill in e-mails where the objective is obfuscated by too many links and no clear message; prospective sales people connecting as 'Friends' when you've had no such relationship with them, despite the drop-box LinkedIn has that would allow them to list a professional prior connection with you if there was one. I get pitched, esp. by authors, musicians, filmmakers and writers but when I ask for information I could help them with, there's very little follow-up. These aren't the majority, but it happens far too often.
People who prospect you as 'Friends' when they're random associates smacks of someone wanting to mine your connections and it's tacky. People know when they're being 'handled' and farm-sourced by social media spazzes. In addition to LinkedIn, I always suggest Google Alerts for those who need to bone up on history or details of what people do/have done professionally beyond LinkedIn profiles. Educated outreach with basic rules of how to build relationships on LinkedIn is necessary or else you're just bombarded with quantity and greasy pitches thrown at you to see what sticks. I've worked for The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times Media Group- I've been pitched for years and I am all for it and for connections. I respect it but most don't know how to do it on LinkedIn.