Back In The Saddle Again

I am pleased to share with you that I have rejoined the workforce today, after having been unemployed for 3.5 months. I am now Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software Practice, at the Gilbane Group. I am honored and thrilled to be associated with Frank Gilbane and his stellar roster of analysts and consultants.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Gilbane Group, they are one of, if not the, preeminent analyst firms focused on Content Management practices and technologies. In my new role, I will be heading up Gilbane Group’s Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software Practice. As a practice, we will be working with many constituents to define and deliver on a research agenda examining industry trends related to enterprise collaboration tools and social software. However, our analysis will be different from others’ in that it will focus intensely on the content management aspects and implications of collaboration and social software.

I am very excited to have been blessed with this opportunity to lead a practice, especially at a firm of Gilbane Group’s caliber. I will have much more to say about my new job, collaboration, social software, and content management in the days and weeks to come. I will continue to blog here about the broader aspects of collaboration and social media, but you will also be able to find my thoughts on the content management angle of those technologies at the Gilbane Group Blog. I will, of course, continue to use Twitter to publically explore these subjects as well.

Here is how you may contact me at the Gilbane Group and the URL for the company’s blog:

email: larry@gilbane.com

phone: 617-497-9443 x154

blog: http://gilbane.com/blog

Taken Out of Context

I had the good fortune to be interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article that was published yesterday (Feb. 3). The story discussed how recently unemployed individuals are filling their free time with Internet activities. Unfortunately, much of the piece was devoted to online gaming, in which I have not participated before or since the day I was laid off.

It would have been nice of the reporter to inform me at the beginning of our interview that Internet gaming and entertainment was the central focus of the article, but she did not. Part way through our conversation, she did ask me whether or not I played online games. The question seemed odd — out of place — given that I thought we were talking about how recently unemployed people were using blogs and Twitter to forge and maintain relationships, create and enhance personal branding, position as an expert in a particular subject matter area, and even land a job.

I’m writing this post because I felt a strong need to go on the record and state that the section of the article that references and quotes me (see below) only scratches the surface of what the reporter and I discussed during our 22+ minute conversation. We did talk about how I was staying in touch with former IBM colleagues via Twitter and how that was proving to be valuable. However, we also talked about how social media can connect unemployed individuals with work and new business opportunities. We discussed how blogging and Twittering can make an individual’s expertise known to a peer community, which is especially useful for someone whose previous job did not afford that kind of visibility outside of the company for which he worked. And we talked about how great it is that these social networking and media tools are free — an attractive proposition for someone who is unemployed (see my previous post, Social Software: The Unemployed Knowledge Worker’s Best Friend)

I am very pleased to have made the editor’s cut and been included in any article in such a respected and widely-read publication as The Wall Street Journal. I just wish that my story and remarks had been placed in an article that took a different, less frivolous, look at how recently unemployed folks are using the Internet.

“Larry Hawes, 47, was laid off from his job as a consultant at International Business Machines Corp. in November. But he has never lost touch with his former co-workers. The Ipswich, Mass., resident spends a lot more time building up his personal blog, which is dubbed “Together, We Can!” He also sends out more Twitters, a service for broadcasting short messages to a circle of friends and associates. He says he is on Twitter all day, sending out about 10 posts a day to a group of 137 people, including former IBM colleagues and other friends. In total, he adds, he’s sent out 652 “tweets” since October.

“I’m maintaining relationships with IBM-ers because I don’t work there anymore,” says Mr. Hawes.”

Social Software: The Unemployed Knowledge Worker’s Best Friend

Reading headline after headline announcing new job cuts has sparked some thought regarding what’s different between this nascent recession and the last economic slowdown of the early 1990s.  Several things, to be sure, but the most important one may be the ability of the unemployed knowledge worker to connect with others to mine employment and new business opportunities.

I predict that we will remember the the 2008-2009 recession as the time when the public availability of free social software proved to be the unemployed knowledge worker’s best friend and savior.  And, perhaps, the global economy’s as well.

When I was laid off in 2003, after the Internet bubble burst, I had several tools with which to stay connected with my professional and social networks.  Telephone and e-mail were the primary communication vehicles, of course.  Instant messaging wasn’t as pervasive then as it is today, but I used it to stay in touch with a few people in my network.  The best method to network was — and still is — by meeting with someone face-to-face.  In fact, it was an in-person conversation that triggered the chain of events that lead to my employment at IBM in 2004.

Knowledge workers in this economic downturn have all of those tools available, plus several more.  Online profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace), blogs, microstreaming (Twitter, FriendFeed), content sharing (GoogleDocs, Box.net), bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Digg), and other species of social software have greatly increased our ability to stay connected and work with others in our professional and social networks.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, we rely less and less on employers to provide the communication and collaboration tools needed to connect and work with others.  That’s great news for those who have, or are about to, become unemployed!  Knowledge workers in 2008 have so many more ways to mine their contacts to find regular or contract employment compared to those who lost jobs five years ago.  The ability of unemployed knowledge workers to explore business ideas and start new ventures has also been increased by the public availability of free social software.

I am optimistic that the current recession, as painful as it will be, will breed the kinds of opportunities that will leave all of us better off in the long run.  There is one caveat to my optimistic outlook though.  If you haven’t been maintaining and building your professional and social networks all along, your ability to leverage them to find employment or start a business will be very limited.  It’s not too late to start building networks now via social software, but don’t expect to harvest immediately from a plot that you’ve just sown.