Thirteen ways that you will certainly say social media has helped my career :
 

Job hunting

1. Expand your network – Social networks like LinkedIN, Facebook and even Twitter are a fantastic way to get to ‘know’ people in your industry but it goes beyond that. Search out their blogs. Find relevant forums. Comment on their work and get to know them. Create your own high-quality, regular content and they will come to you, too.

2. Obtain references – More and more companies nowadays look online when recruiting. If your co-workers, clients or partners are on LinkedIN, ask them to write a recommendation for you. It reflects well on you and, if the recommendation matches the person, it reflects well on them too.

3. Own your online brand – Your homepage may be what Google says it is, and so is your personal brand. I went as far as re-locating this site from a different URL in order to reclaim the top spot when you search for “dave fleet.” What does that matter? Well, when a client recently Googled me when we proposed some social media work for them, they came back saying “you know your stuff” rather than “what do you know?”

4. Find jobs – Most jobs aren’t advertised – they’re filled through networking and recommendations. My job certainly wasn’t advertised – I got to know the team here at Thornley Fallis through social media tools and related events. When the time came for me to move, I already had that connection. Without that, I would likely not be in this job now.

5. Build thought leadership – By creating your own content, you can (over time) develop yourself as a thought leader in your space. (This one could fall under ‘job hunting’ or ‘job performance)

Job Performance

6. Stay on top of industry trends – If you haven’t already, get yourself a Google Reader account and search out the places where people are discussing your industry online. Subscribe to them and read voraciously. My number one tip for agency newbies was to “be a sponge” but that really applies to everyone.

7. Stay on top of breaking news – You can do more than just stay on top of your own job or industry through social media. Pretty much all of the major news outlets have RSS feeds; subscribe to them and set aside time to skim through the latest news each day. Read what’s relevant; discard the rest – the ability to filter out the noise is one of social media’s big benefits. On Twitter, subscribe to feeds like @breakingnewson and any media feeds that you like to stay on top of news by the minute

8. Demonstrate you’re on the leading edge – Whether it’s internally with your boss, co-workers and internal clients, or externally with suppliers, clients and stakeholders, knowing what’s going on will go a long way to improving your reputation. Staying plugged-in helps you get there.

9. Improve your productivity - I subscribe to a couple of hundred sites; I read about 40 on a daily basis (although a couple of them are aggregators). To go to each site individually and search for new content would take most of my day, and catching new posts as they come up throughout the day would be impossible. My RSS reader lets me get through it in a few minutes before work, during the day and in the evening. It’s a huge productivity boost for me.

10. Learn from others – One of the best parts of writing this blog, posting on Twitter, listening to podcasts and all of the other tools out there is that I get to benefit from other peoples’ experience and knowledge. If I’m not sure of an idea I’ll throw it out there for input. When I have an opinion, I let other people challenge it. In the end, I’m that much more sure of what I do and think because of the input of the social media community

11. Improve your writing – When it comes to writing, practice makes perfect. I’m told my writing has improved immeasurably since I started this site (although I still have a way to go). You simply can’t beat the benefit you get from editing your thoughts down to 140 characters for Twitter, or constantly structuring and re-structuring your thoughts as you write blog posts.

12. Become a better editor – In order to have good writing you generally require good editing. With social media, you rarely have someone else to do that for you so you’re forced to teach yourself.

13. Clarify your thoughts – Putting my thoughts, opinions and approaches to problems down on ‘paper,’ as it were, forces you to get your head around them. As a result, you’re more effective when confronted by those issues in your work.

Official Digg Tools

• Digg Pics - tracks the activity of images on the site. Images slide in from the left as people Digg and submit them.
• Digg Arc – displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere.
• Digg BigSpy – places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list.
• Digg Stack – shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once.
• Digg Swarm – draws a circle for stories as they’re dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow.
• Digg Clouds – Check the digg queue in Clouds format. The more diggs a story has the larger it appears in the cloud.
• Digg Spy v2 – autorefreshing real time view of Digg now with spying all stories, front page stories and queued stories.
• Digg Q – Unpromoted digg stories. Similar to DiggSpy.
• Digg the Blog – “a means to detail all digg-related news, events, upgrades, feature additions, and much more.”
• Digg Widget – Customize and add digg news to your site.
• Digg Top Stories – A collection of top stories by day, week, month and year.
• Digg Search – advanced search for Digg stories.
• Google Coop Module – See Digg articles at the top of your Google search results.
• Google IG Module – View recent stories from Digg on your personalized Google homepage.
• Digg Buttons & Badges – to add to your site.

Digg API Visualization Contest Finalists

• D’Lite is an Apollo application that utilizes Digg’s API to retrieve their data, information, and processes.
• Wheel of Upcoming – Displays recently submitted stories in a spiral pattern that a user can rotate using mouse gestures.
• DiggMob – A mobile interface for Digg in FlashLite 2.x.
• Mini Digg is a small Apollo Digg application that allows users to view stories and see the story activity.
• WordWeb analyzes the relationships between popular keywords and the stories they appear within.
• DiggCity – shows the 10 newest popular stories. The more popular the story gets, the taller the building.
• Digg Exposé – takes snap(.com) shots of pages from Digg and displays them in a configurable view.
• Digg Charts – Flex application that generates charts comparing popular stories.
• DiggGraphr Desktop – is a desktop application written in Apollo that lets you browse Digg stories in treemaps.
• Digg Watch – is a tool that lets users browse Digg and grab interesting information from stories.

Third Party Digg Tools

• DiggSuggest - a web-app that suggests new Digg-stories for you based on your previous interests.
• Zubbu – allows users to check how their Digg story submissions are doing.
• DiggView – See all latest promoted Digg stories by category on one page.
• Rigglations – is a Yahoo! widget that shows the relationships between members of Digg.
• Diggthis – this Drupal module adds a Digg this button to your nodes.
• DiggAlerts – allows you to setup alerts when other Diggalerts.com members submit stories you’re interested in.
• Digg IRC Bot – reports newly listed front page stories into IRC.
• Digg Notify – is an application that pops up a small box in the bottom right hand side of your screen to display number of diggs on your story. It tells you when your story hits front page as well.
• PHPDugg – Allows you to run a site on a similar system to digg.com
• Diggitizer – analyzes the most successful Digg titles and combines this knowledge with your keywords to create the fool-proof title to drive your entry to the very top of digg.
• diggth – is a widget set up for reading various Digg.com RSS feeds.
• Digg Anywhere – another mobile optimized digg feed.
• mb3Digg – see dugg articles in 3D.
• Diggless RSS Feed – a special feed that provides a direct link to the website, bypassing Digg.
• Digg Java Mobile – is an mobile extension of Digg. Application works on 790+ devices.
• Digg This! – firefox extension adds Digg This! to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally the toolbar.
• DiggThumbs – firefox extension adds website screenshot thumbnails to the listings on digg.com
• Digg Comment Spotlight – firefox extension that highlights comments over a certain threshold (20 by default) for Digg.com
• Jedi Digg – a toolbar docked at the top of your screen which displays the digg front page stories in rotation. You can directly digg the story from this toolbar.
• DiggThumbs – a Firefox plugin that adds website screenshot thumbnails to each and every digg listing.
• Live Digg Buton Generator – generates the code to copy and paste into your website to make a live digg button.
• Digg card – a way of inserting your Digg.com Profile on to you website.
• DiggSig – create your own automatic updating Digg Signature for your website.
• Digg Badge – a Sidebar Widgets capable WordPress plugin that displays your Digg profile information on your blog.
• DuggMirror – automatically caches the URL of each story submitted to Digg. If a site goes down because of a server overload or for exceeding its bandwidth, you can use the Dugg link to access it.
• DiggFiltr – create a custom digg feed in seconds
• Diggview – offers an overview of all current popular headlines in the different categories of Digg.
• DiggGraph – AJAX application to have a “bird’s eye” look on the digg queue stories and see rapidly which stories are getting up to the front page
• Digg Dashboard Widget – gets the latest headlines from digg.com every 15 minutes and displays them in a pleasant interface. Compliant with Digg verson 3
• Digg Trends – advanced ajax-refreshing Digg mirror page. Access digg trends graph and filter digg links by categories.
• Digg SMS – Get the top 5 front page stories sent to your cell phone every few hours
• Digg Front – View latest promoted Digg stories by category on one page.
• Digg Notifer – notifies you the moment a new story appears on the front page of Digg.com website.
• Diggaz With Attitude – DWA is a program that displays the latest Digg and Google in your taskbar.
• Digg Submits – View latest submitted Digg Stories by category on one page
• Digg Marquee – generates a marquee with Digg stories to put on their websites.
• HotDigg – Live Digg news feed screensaver.
• DiggDesk – Read your favorite digg and reddit stories and watch youtube videos right on your desktop.
• Digg Search Widget – Search all of Digg’s archives.
• DiggBot – is an automated MSN robot whose sole purpose is to alert you (via an MSN instant message) whenever there is a new item posted on the front page of Digg.com.
• Digg Friends Checker – Who’s Digg friends’ lists are you on?
• DiggLicious – a cool blend of digg.com and del.icio.us
• Digg Opera Widget – downloads and displays the RSS feed from Digg
• DiggIRC – An Unofficial IRC channel on freenode with full digg rss feed syndication.
• DiggUpdate – gives you quick access to the front page stories of Digg in your Mac OS X menu-bar.
• Digg for PSP – view Digg stories on the PSP web-browser.
• Digg RSS Widget – gets the current front page headlines from digg and displays them in a nice little interface.
• Digg Sidebar v4 – enable quick navigation of digg links.
• Desktop Digg – a Windows Desktop Application that will pull down the newest submitted stories on Digg.com.
• Cacheout! – Firefox Extension lets you access articles crashed by digg effect through 3rd party caching services like CoralCDN.
• Digg.com Toolbar – Firefox Extension provides toolbar with rss feed reader, digg search and ability to listen to every diggnation podcast.
• DiggTray – is a free application which sits in the task tray and notifies you whenever there is a new article on the front page of Digg.com
• Digg vs Dot – highlights the act of crossposting articles among digg.com and Slashdot.org.
• DiggTree – a RSS aggregator for digg.com.
• Digg This! – firefox extension adds ‘Digg this’ to the right-click or Tools menu to speed up the submitting stories to Digg
• Digg Sidebar – enable quick navigation of digg links
• Digg Submit Bookmarklet – quickly submit a link to Digg
• PocketDigg – real time headlines from Digg formatted for mobile devices.
• Diggnation T-Shirt – buy another Tshirt.
• Digg Buttons – Chicklet buttons you can paste in your blog.
• Digg Search Plugin – plug-in for firefox that lets you search digg for stories.
• Upcomming.org Digg Group - a collaborative event calendar for Digg users.
• Digg Digger – useful Konfabulator widget grabs all the new stories submitted to digg area queue.
• Digg Eater – is a RSS news aggregator with some features unique to Digg.com.
• Digg Add Mirrors – Greasemonkey script adds mirrors to Digg.
• Digg Newstracker for Winbar. Just download and rename the extention to .trk and place in newstrackers in your winbar folder.
• Digg Top Stories – Google Desktop Sidebar plugin which displays the ten most recent stories from Digg.com. [download here]
• Digg News Widget – gets news via various RSS feeds from digg.com.
• Digg Toolbar – Instant access to digg from any site on the web and get digg.com headlines automatically. [mirror]
• DiggClone project – is an effort to reproduce the functionality of the popular social bookmarking site digg.com. [more]
• Digg at Cafepress – Tshirts, cups, bags & thongs!
• Diggnation – collection of the diggnation episodes.
• Diggnation Digging Game – for Diggnation fans looking to add more fun the podcast.
• Digg With Diggnation – gives you the latest items from a number of RSS feeds from the Digg website as well as give you the latest audio and video episodes of Diggnation.
• Diggnation Widget – lets you know what the latest Audio and Video Diggnation releases are.

Backflip.com -build your world on the Web. You can save all the Web pages yuo want and instantly find them again. From anywhere.

BibSonomy.com -is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on our server. You can add tags to your entry to retrieve it more easily. This is very similar to the bookmarks/favorites that you store within your browser. The advantage of BibSonomy is that you can access your data from whereever you are.

BlinkPro.com makes all of your vital Internet-based data available from any computer at any time: at work, at home, or on the road. And because its a subscription-based service, BlinkPro doesn’t bombard you with advertising or annoying email marketing. Today, BlinkPro is managing millions of bookmarks for its rapidly growing member base.

BlogMarks.net is a collaborative link management project based on sharing and key-word tagging. Build on a blog basis, BlogMarks is an open and free technology. Now, you can access your favorite URL’s from any computer. And with BlogMarks, you share your favourite with other users.

Bluedot.us a site about websites that are rated and organized by real people into a wide variety of topics. Dots have tags and ratings so they can be organized and prioritized across any number of topics. The content on Blue Dot is high quality because it has been rated by the Blue Dot community.You can also assemble your own community by inviting people to be your friend.

BmAccess.net is a bookmark a site where you can add tags, when you look up a tag, you get the names and a little thumbnail image of the site along with it.

BuddyMarks.com offers a storage for all your favorites on-line. You can import your current browser favorites in a snap, get to them from anywhere, add new favorites, share some or all of your favorites with your friends, use tags or categories or both to organize the web the way you want.

Buzka is a free and easy way to share your favorite web stuff. You can save and organize all your favorite web pages by creating Spots on any interest or topic. Each Spot is a collection of pages that can be shared with family, friends, colleagues and anyone on the web.

Chipmark.com allows to get your bookmarks from any computer, anywhere, whether you’re at home, work, a library, or at school. It is a place where people can share their bookmarks with friends, family, and co-worker. Chipmark is a fun, flexible, and fast alternative to standard browser bookmarking.

Complore provides 10MB of file storage, public and private sharing, tag cloud, popular feeds and more. With it you can easily manage your research work online.

Connectbeam.com helps organizations and their employees increase their productivity and the quality of their work by solving these problems. Connectbeam is a simple new addition to the software tools you use every day to communicate and get your job done.

Connectedy is a web site where you can upload your bookmarked/favorite links from your browser into a free account. Connectedy users enjoy the convenience of keeping all their links online. It is indispensable if you change computers often or use multiple computers at home, work, and school. You can sort your links, search through them, and collect new ones as you surf the web. It is free to sign up, and you don’t have to install any new software.

Connotea.org is a themed social bookmarking site specifically for researchers, clinicians and scientists.

Diigo.com provides a virtual highlighter and digital sticky notes, so you can highlight and jot down your comments directly on any part of a webpage and scan through all your research findings quickly. Tags and full-text search on everything make it extremely easy to organize and find stuff – no need to fumble with folders and subfolders. Your bookmarked pages are archived to insure they are always available as originally seen.

Excites.com is a social bookmarking site. You can save and manage your bookmarks online and have access to them from any internet connected computer. Share your bookmarks with family, friends and the whole excites community while discovering new and exciting websites at the same time.

Feedmelinks.com stores your bookmarks online so you can get to them anywhere. Import your favorites and share your links with friends. Add tags to organize your links. Discover new things. Open-source your interests.

GetBoo.com is both a social and private bookmarking website which can be used to keep links to your favorite news, blogs, music, games, and more on GetBoo and access them from any computer on the web. You can import/export these links from your browser’s bookmarks and view them with the same hierarchy. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.

Givealink.org is a social bookmarking site where people can donate their bookmarks to the Web community and to science. As an ongoing academic research project, our goal is to analyze bookmark files to build new Web mining techniques including new ways to search, recommend, personalize, and visualize the Web.

Hyperlinkomatic.com is an alternative to lists of favorites and bookmarks. You can grab links, makes notes, set multiple categories, search links, import links from web pages, upload bookmarks, create bookmarks files, share links, publish links. It is, in short, a place to keep your links.

Lilisto.com lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser. Use Smart Categories to create custom link sets. Equipped with a multitude of search options, you can be as vague or specific as you want. Sort links by number of visits, date of addition, date of last visit and much, much more.

Linkroll.com is a free link blogging service.At a personal level you can bookmark, categorize and comment on all the great web pages/links you find. All your bookmarks are then sortable and searchable by category and date. All bookmarks are also accessible, by category and/or user, in the form of RSS feed (for your news aggregator), or JavaScript (for syndication on your own web site).

Ma.gnolia.com allows you to access your favorite websites from anywhere. Bookmarks in Ma.gnolia are more than just entries in a database. Each one tells a little story about the websites that they help you find again.

Mister-Wong.com allows to bookmark and tag, search for tags that interest you, make buddies with people who have interesting saved sites.

Netvouz.com is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save your favorite links online and access them from any computer, wherever you are. Organize your bookmarks in folders and tag each bookmark with keywords. Access them quickly on your own personalized bookmarks page. Share your bookmarks with others or password protect them for your own privacy. Netvouz is a great way to discover new interesting web sites.

Nextaris.com provides up to 100MB storage for free. It helps you search the Web, save what you find, share what you find, create journals (blogs), comment on what you find and have saved, and to optionally publish the information you have gathered.

StumbleUpon.com lets you “channel surf” the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.

TastyCooks is a place to store bookmarks of your favourite recipes online. Discover new recipes based on your preference.

Unalog.com enables you to look at what various people and groups of people are reading on the web here. You can get an account and add your own links, and create and join groups here too. If you get an account, or create a group, either one can be made private, so nobody but you (if a private account) or your fellow group members (if a private group) can see your links.

WireFan.com is a search based and free website that contains the best information technology with a combination of social blogging, bookmarks, non-heirarchical editorial control and RSS. This is very exciting for account users since they can submit their own news and stories. Wirefand makes locating stories trouble-free so no need to jumble up stories in the web.

Xilinus.com lets you organize yours bookmarks by folders and unlimited sub-folders. Drag and drop directly on the main page to reorganize bookmarks and folders with no refresh.

Yahoo! My Web with one button click you can add your bookmarks to the search engine giants system, features duplicate detection to help you keep your bookmarks tidy.

AllMyFavorites.net allows to share your favorites/bookmarks with your friends. Just give your friends the link to your allmyfavorites web page and they can browse your favorites.

Social Bookmarking Sites With Clipping

BlinkList.com -lets you save sites for later reading, share your list or keep it private, even send your saved pages to your blog for wider sharing.

Clipclip.org is an online version of scrapbooks: when you find something on the web, you can cut out only the most interesting part preserving the look and feel rather than bookmarking bunch of links.

Clipmarks.com – Allows you to clip just the chosen bits of a webpage. Everything you clip is added to your own fully searchable library of things you find on the web. Clips can be saved privately or publicly. You can organize your clips by adding tags (keywords) to them, or by putting them in Collections.

del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

Furl.net provides an easy way to save and share your online discoveries.With Furl, you can find Web sites that others have Furled, save a copy of any web page with one click, share anything you’ve Furled — or keep it private. Furl also lets you store and organize all of your bookmarks.

Linktopia.com is a free utility where you can keep all of your “favorites”, bookmarked web pages, and notes online. Create a “Friends List” and share your links exclusively with those members.

RawSugar.com is a place to save, share and discover your favorite content in an organized and highly flexible way. You can use RawSugar to bookmark, share and tag your favorite content. You can save and tag content (any URL) to your account in RawSugar. You can access your bookmarks anywhere in the world with just a web browser and an internet connection. You can share your bookmarks or keep them private. Organize your content in flexible hierarchies. You can think of hierarchies like the folders in your computer, but RawSugar hierarchies have lot more flexibility. For e.g. one of the feature is RSS feeds for a single category in the hierarchy (think like RSS feeds for a folder)

Simpy.com is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.

Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.

SyncOne.net Your favorite web site, webclips, books, music, links, podcasts, feeds, images and more in one place, organize and access from anywhere anytime. You are free to add a banner, adwords or any promotion to your page.

URLex.info enables you to leave a comment regarding any Internet link on any site. The comments are available either only to you and your friends, or anyone visiting the site. You now have an opportunity of expressing your thoughts regarding any information placed on the Internet. The system enables you to leave notes on the pages and sustain the conversation on a selected topic. You can enter communities, or create your own, exchange links there. You can restrict the access to your comments by creating a closed community and providing access to the information by issuing special invitation.

Social News

Blog-buzz.com is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting. After you submit content, other bloggers read your submission and buzz when they like it. If your post rocks and receives enough buzzes, it is promoted to the front page for more bloggers to see.

Digg.com is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

Netscape.com is a a social news aggregator with voting of stories similar to Digg.

Newsvine.com is updated continuously by citizens like you. Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.

Reddit.com – vote up or down on a story making it move around on the home page.

Shoutwire.com – Similar to Digg, except instead of “Digging a story”, you “shout it”. Still a way to vote on unique Internet news stories.

Stirrdup has a unique system that promotes the interesting and controversial stories you guys discover. Stirrdup is about promoting content that encourages spirited conversation. You submit all the great stories you find on the internet. We calculate interest in them using our passive-voting system and promote the ones that are stirring the proverbial pot. The system is designed to eliminate the group censorship and stagnation that plagues other sites.

Thoof.com will show you interesting news, websites, videos, and other links, personalized to your individual tastes. Just click on the stories that interest you, and let Thoof do the rest. If you don’t like the way a story is described, just click edit and propose a change to it.