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Get to know the people you work with (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

On paper, networking is a relatively simple task. Mingle with like-minded professionals while sipping wine and you greatly increase your chances of landing a coveted role, or building your dream career.

Pre-COVID, gearing up for a networking event, you would probably have walked into a venue, thinking: Smile. Remember your elevator pitch. If all else fails, talk about the weather.

Now though, many of us are faced with a slightly different predicament: how to network while working remotely.

Operating out of makeshift home offices, with children demanding tea or pets stepping on keyboards, we have collectively become BBC Dad, AKA Robert Kelly. The Busan-based political scientist famously went viral in 2017 when his children interrupted a live interview he was doing on television, and his wife had to scramble to get them out of his office.

As tricky a proposition as it might be to meet people in such circumstances, research shows that rising to the challenge is worth it. According to one online survey, networking accounts for up to 85% of all filled vacancies. It can also lead to substantial pay rises, as evidenced by the recent story of how one employee secured a 24,000 pay rise solely through networking.

My research shows that in early 2022, 44% of young people used social media to look for career information up from only 19% a decade ago and 42% consulted their social networks when looking to make a career decision.

Online networking, even before the pandemic, was a crucial tool for career development.

Remote working has of course seen videoconferencing become the norm. Online networking events are now routinely held on platforms including EventBrite, Slack, Yammer and Instagram live.

So first, do your research: identify the organisations, associations, and causes of most interest to you. Find the blogs and forums that are relevant to your field of work, and sign up to as many mailing lists as you can efficiently handle. Find your people and follow them on social media.

The goal of this first step is to increase the volume of information that you receive passively. This creates what is known as environmental affordance: the possibility for action afforded to you by your environment. The more regular updates about relevant events that you receive, the more likely you are to attend them.

Second, be strategic. In a world where conference dinners and impromptu water cooler conversations have been replaced by Zoom catch-ups, things arent as spontaneous as they were before. Scheduling is key.

Create a personal networking plan. Decide how much time you are going to devote to online networking and note down your goals: how many people you want to speak to; which companies you want to find out more about; which specific people you need to seek out to discuss specific topics.

Make sure to schedule in time to maintain your online presence. And opt for a variety of engagements such as webinars, online recruitment fairs, one-to-one Zoom meetings, and online conferences.

Third, research shows that the most prolific networkers possess proactive personality traits, and are likely to score high on extroversion a trait associated with being outgoing and seeking out new experiences in personality tests. That does not mean, however, that you have to be an extrovert to succeed at networking. You just need to be proactive: proactive behaviour is the strongest predictor of networking success.

If there is a specific person or a group of professionals that you would like to build a relationship with, get in touch with them directly. Email them, message them on Twitter, set up a Zoom meeting, or research the online networking mixers they might take part in.

Networking underpins two key aspects of professional advancement: employability and self-directed career development.

The first, employability, pertains to what economists refer to as the human capital of a potential employee: their external marketability and the relative value of their educational background, technical skills, and soft skills such as communication, time management and creativity on the job market. Networking makes your human capital readily apparent to employers and prompts hiring decisions.

Self-directed career development, meanwhile, is an ongoing personal development project, whereby you seek career information and take action towards longterm career goals. Here, networking is a crucial means for obtaining career information. This both helps you raise your personal aspirations and figure out whether a particular job, company, or sector is right for you.

The firsthand experiences of other people working in a given profession can be helpful in gauging whether you too would be a good fit.

Networking also helps to build relationships with mentors and role models, and gives access to peer support communities and professional groups. This is about more than just securing a job. It creates a sense of belonging and of professional identity, and in doing so develops what social scientists term social capital: shared norms, values, and beliefs in professional communities.

Networking involves a number of skills approaching others, finding common ground, maintaining relationships that can be practised and learned. Of these, listening not talking is perhaps the most important. E

xpress an interest in other peoples work and ask them questions, and youll be well on your way to making meaningful connections that benefit not only you as an individual. Because they bolster knowledge exchange and collective problem-solving, they benefit your community too.

By Marina Milosheva, PhD candidate in social informatics, Edinburgh Napier University

Click here to read the original article on The Conversation.

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How to network online when you're working remotely - and why it matters - Metro.co.uk

Published: Published Date - 04:54 PM, Sat - 16 April 22

Orlando: According to a new study, parents who share photos of their children on social networking sites tend to have a more friend-like parenting style and allow their kids to use social media at younger ages.The findings of the study were published in the journal, Computing Machinery.

These parents also tend to share posts beyond small networks of family and friends, regularly posting on more public networks, which raises privacy and safety concerns. The findings also showed that parents dont see parental sharing as much different from regular photo sharing and rarely ask for their young childrens input.

There is no doubt that many parents are very careful regarding what they share online about their children. And there are significant benefits to sharing photos with grandparents and groups who can offer support and help keep families connected. But we need to be aware of some of the privacy issues when sharing childrens information online and conduct further research to figure out long-term impacts. This is all still so new. Were still learning, said Mary Jean Amon, an assistant professor in the School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training (SMST) at UCF who is one of the researchers on the study.

The team of researchers from UCF surveyed 493 parents who are regular social media users and have children under the age of 10.

We were interested in looking at what parents consider private when it comes to sharing young childrens information online and the perceived risks, Amon said.

We were surprised. Contrary to previous research that highlights the significant benefits of parental sharing, our study reveals that such sharing of childrens photos is associated with permissive parenting styles. That means parental sharing is linked to those parents having more friend-like relationships with their children and offering less guidance than other parents. Notably, permissive parenting has been linked to problematic internet usage among children, she added.

The research teams findings also suggested that parents do not strongly differentiate between parental sharing (sharing photos of their children) and general photo sharing on social media and may therefore underestimate the unique risks of sharing childrens photos online and engaging children with social media at an early age.

The study found most parents surveyed were comfortable sharing photos and with others resharing their photos. Most parents felt relatively comfortable with other adults sharing their childrens photos and anticipated the child would enjoy the photos posted, rather than be embarrassed by them.

Although the Childrens Online Privacy Act provides many rules to safeguard children, the data doesnt lie and shows that many children engage with social media at an early age. Social media platforms have a minimum age for use (13), but without a verification system, it is not uncommon to see children some very young with their own YouTube channel or TikTok accounts.

About one-third of parents with children ages 7 to 9 reported that their kids used social media apps via phones or tablets, according to the 2021 C.S. Mott Childrens Hospital National Poll on Health. About half the parents with children ages 10-12 reported the same.In the survey, the team asked questions including how often a parent posted their childrens photos, as well as their own social media activity.

Other questions asked about their childrens social media interests and behaviour, as well as how parents made decisions to post photos of their children. Participants had accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, Myspace, and Flickr, with most users favouring Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in that order.

The study raised important questions about ensuring the comfort and privacy of young children as they are introduced to social media. Research in this area also aims to help parents who use this mode of communication to support in raising their children.

There are broader questions about childrens privacy in social media, where a central question remains as to how much autonomy and control children, including children of different ages, should have over their photos and information online, Amon said.

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Many Americans decry the decline of civility online and platforms typically prohibit profane speech. Tech critics say the emphasis on civility alone is dangerous and that such thinking helps fuel the white supremacist movement, particularly on social media.

Theyre right.

Big Tech errs by treating content moderation as merely about content-matching. Polite speech diverts attention from the substance of what white supremacists say and redirects it to tone. When content moderation is too reliant on detecting profanity, it ignores how hate speech targets people who have been historically discriminated against. Content moderation overlooks the underlying purpose of hate speech to punish, humiliate and control marginalized groups.

Prioritizing civility online has not only allowed civil but hateful speech to thrive and it normalizes white supremacy. Most platforms analyze large bodies of speech with small quantities of hate rather than known samples of extremist speech a technological limitation. But platforms dont recognize that white supremacist speech, even when not directly used to harass, is hate speech a policy problem.

My team at the University of Michigan used machine learning to identify patterns in white supremacist speech that can be used to improve platforms detection and moderation systems. We set out to teach algorithms to distinguish white supremacist speech from general speech on social media.

Our study, published by ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), reveals that white supremacists avoid using profane language to spread hate and weaponize civility against marginalized groups (especially Jews, immigrants and people of color). Automated moderation systems miss most white supremacist speech when they correlate hate with vulgar, toxic language. Instead, we analyzed how extremists differentiate and exclude racial, religious and sexual minorities.

White supremacists, for example, frequently center their whiteness by appending white to many terms (white children, white women, the white race). Keyword searches and automated detection dont surface these linguistic patterns. By analyzing known samples of white supremacist speech specifically, we were able to detect such speech sentiments such as we should protect white children or accusing others, especially Jews, of being anti-white.

Extremists are active on multiple social media platforms and quickly recreate their networks after being caught and banned. White supremacy, sociologist Jessie Daniels says, is algorithmically amplified, sped up and circulated through networks to other White ethnonationalism movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that doesnt see race in the tools it creates.

Our team developed computational tools to detect white supremacist speech across three platforms from 2016-2020. Despite its outsized harm, hate speech is a small proportion of the vast quantity of speech online. Its difficult for machine learning systems to recognize hate speech based on large language models, systems trained on large samples of general online speech. We turned to a known source of explicit white supremacist speech: the far-right, white nationalist website Stormfront. We collected 275,000 posts from Stormfront and compared them to two other samples: tweets from users in a census of alt-right accounts and typical social media speech from Reddits r/all (a compendium of discussions on Reddit). We trained algorithms to study the sentence structure of posts, identify specific phrases and spot broad, recurring themes and topics.

White supremacists come across surprisingly polite across platforms and contexts. Along with adding white to many words, they often referred to racial or ethnic groups with plural nouns (Blacks, whites, Jews, gays). They also racialized Jews through their speech patterns, framing them as racially inferior and appropriate targets of violence and erasure. Their conversations about race and Jews overlapped, but their conversations about church, religion and Jews did not.

White supremacists talked frequently about white decline, conspiracy theories about Jews and Jewish power and pro-Trump messaging. The specific topics they discussed changed, but these broader grievances did not. Automated detection systems should look for these themes rather than specific terms.

White supremacist speech doesnt always involve explicit attacks against others. On the contrary, white supremacists in our study were just as likely to use distinctive speech to signal their identity to others, to recruit and radicalize and to build in-group solidarity. Marking ones speech as a white supremacist, for example, may be necessary for inclusion into these online spaces and extremist communities.

Platforms claim content moderation at scale is too difficult and expensive, but our team detected white supremacist speech with affordable tools available to most researchersmuch less expensive than those available to platforms. By affordable we mean the laptops and central computing resources provided by our university and open source Python code thats freely available.

Once white supremacists enter online spaces as with offline ones they threaten the safety of already marginalized groups and their ability to participate in public life. Content moderation should focus on proportionality: the impact it has on people already structurally disadvantaged, compounding the harm. Treating all offensive language as equal ignores the inequalities under girding American society.

Ultimately, research shows that social media platforms would do well to focus less on politeness and more on justice and equity. Civility be damned.

Libby Hemphill is an associate professor at the University of Michigans School of Information and the Institute for Social Research.

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Mastodon, an open-source and decentralized Twitter alternative, was trending as users sought out alternative social platforms in the wake of Elon Musk attempting a hostile takeover of Twitter.

Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla and Neuralink and founder of SpaceX and Boring Company, initiated a hostile takeover of Twitter on Thursday, April 14th. Twitter rejected and countered the takeover by initiating a so-called poison pill policy that would flood the market with discounted shares and dilute Musks ownership percentage.

Amidst the controversy, Twitter users started looking for alternatives to the platform. It didnt take long until Mastodon was trending on Twitter. Mastodon is an open-source Twitter alternative that is decentralized and can be run and used by anyone. Its somewhat similar to how email works, except instead of using a protocol like IMAP, it uses the open standard protocol ActivityPub.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon doesnt have any ads, is not centrally controlled, and doesnt track you. It allows users to control every aspect of their online social presence, including running their Mastodon server, using a custom domain, and following people on other Mastodon servers.

Mastodon accounts can also interact with accounts on other social platforms that support ActivityPub. For example, PixelFed, an open-source and decentralized Instagram alternative, uses ActivityPub, allowing Mastodon users to follow and interact with PixelFed accounts. This cross-network social following and engagement capability is called the fediverse.

The fediverse has a long history of stalled and failed projects, but Mastodons use is growing. And its slow success is proving ActivityPubs efficacy as a decentralized social networking protocol of choice. ActivityPub does have challengers, though. Twitter has been working on bluesky, its version of a decentralized protocol. The biggest difference between ActivityPub and bluesky is that bluesky is still vaporware, and theyre attempting to create a version based on Web3 principles.

The easiest way to get started with Mastodon is to create an account at mastodon.social. If you want to run your own Mastodon server as I do at coywolf.social, I recommend using masto.host. Lastly, check out Fediverse Guide to learn how to get the most out of Mastodon.

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Jon Henshaw

Jon is the founder of Coywolf and the EIC and the primary author reporting for Coywolf News. He is an industry veteran with over 25 years of digital marketing and internet technologies experience. Follow

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This article was originally published on NisonCo and appears here with permission.

In the age of digital marketing, it seemsinfluencers,email marketing,SEO, andsocial mediareign supreme. Are there any classic marketing tactics that have withstood the test of time? The answer is yes there are quite a few old school marketing moves that still pack a punch. Lets look at six tried and true marketing tactics you should still consider using in the modern era.

Networking online or in-person is just as important in the modern-day as it was in the past.Strong networking skills are essential for any marketing professional or business owner. Successful networking generates referrals and leads, encourages steady client retention, and helps to build a positive reputation among peers and patrons, alike.

Attending conferences in your areais a great way for you to meet other people in your industry and build connections with local businesses and clients that are geographically nearby. Attending national networking events or conferences can also help you expand your network across the country and meet prospective clients and professionals that are doing similar work and perhaps can partner with your business or brand to form a mutually beneficial relationship.

No, were not talking about FaceTime with screens. Investing in facetime with your audience or customers is still a necessary part of doing business and can be greatly beneficial to your relationship with clients, collaborators, and partners. You will developstronger circular regional relationshipsby curating interaction opportunities as well, which in turn helps to build more resilient local economies.

When you have face-to-face time with clients or business partners youre able to pick up on things that are often missed in emails or audio calls such as facial expressions, body language, and other social queues that can get left out in written text or audio-only interactions. This can help build trust and deepen relationships which can yield fruitful business opportunities.

People like free stuff. Its as simple as that. This is a marketing tactic that wont be retired any time soon because it has proventime and againto be effective. Freebies and discounts allow your target audience to interact with your brand or business and engage more actively with your services and content or sample your products.

It also offers an excellent opportunity for free advertising. When hosting a contest or free giveaway you can get entrants to repost the contest on their social media accounts, follow your brands account, and tag other people to spread the news extending your reach and engaging your target audience in a fun way. Everyone wins.

The USPS created a guide titledStill Relevant: A Look at How Millennials Respond to Direct Mail (PDF)to help companies understand why millennials respond to mail and how to create an appealing mail piece.

If you think paper mail is dead,then you would be wrong. It turns out everyone reallydoeslove mail. Direct mail is still a great way to reach out with the right purpose in mind, even for younger generations. There are several benefits to using direct mail. Direct mail campaigns give a high return on investment (ROI)even higher than paid ad campaigns.

It is possible to reach your target audience with the right information at the right time. Direct mail campaigns can work solo or in conjunction with a digital marketing campaign such as by integrating online sales or QR codes, and it is very easy to track their progress.

Audio is making a significant comeback, so dont sleep on this medium! Listen to what the founder and CEO of NisonCo Evan Nison had to say aboutthe benefits of radio advertising in Forbes:

The resurgence of radio-based advertising has become increasingly apparent. Podcasts and web-based streaming audio ads can reach national and global platforms. Radio ads can be used to target very specific local regions and varied audience segments.

For those with a brick-and-mortar business location especially, radio advertising is the fun, affordable option of choice for hyperlocalized advertising. For those looking to level up their findability in the technological age, look intooptimizing your local SEO performance.

People are generally more attuned to the tactics used to get them to buy things or engage with a brand. Testimonials provide both credibility and accountability for brands and businesses because customers are naturally more likely to trust feedback from other consumers. Creating space for testimonials and reviews allows for clients to leave positive feedback or bring attention to issues that can then be addressed to help better the brand or business. In addition to these benefits, bringing them into the modern era bydedicating time to respond on social media sites and to poor reviews will aid in your local SEO strategyso your site will rank better on search engine results pages.

It is imperative to examine the past for the lessons it has to offer our present, with the caveat that the world we live in exists today in the here-and-now. Each marketing strategy old and new has strengths and weaknesses when placed in different applications and contexts. If your brand is uncertain what blend of old-school and digital marketing strategies to employ,reach out to our team of PR, SEO, and Content Writing specialists todayto begin crafting a comprehensive plan.

This article was submitted by an external contributor and may not represent the views and opinions of Benzinga.

2022 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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