Trying to keep up with younger portfolio workers and one’s own children for that matter I welcome Saga’s recent free app which translates teenage slang into terms that I understand. It has the wonderful title of Wotever!

I particularly liked the ‘powerpuff presentation’ as I have had to sit through too many of those – “A presentation that is full of animation and fancy graphics but completely devoid of any substance”.

And to show just how trendy I am you only have to scan the QR code to the left using your smartphone (you’ll need to download a free QRReader app to do this if you don’t already have one). And of course I will do my best to prevent Googleheimers disease and being a hot mess and stay meaty!

Having written a piece on digital identity recently ( will post in next few days) got me thinking about how most of us don’t worry too much about what people know about us via the web. The thinking goes – if you don’t have anything to hide then its not a problem. But I came across this post on white walling and it seems to make sense particularly if you use Facebook a lot and mix work and social together. Thoughts?

Peter Osborne has started a very interesting discussion on this topic on our linkedin portfolio careers group. He also has a fuller posting in which he discusses these 8 ‘lessons’ that he has learned. I was particularly interested as a couple of weeks ago I did a keynote speech specifically on portfolio careers for the over 50’s and in 2 days time I am doing another one for 200 accountants aged over 50 and who wish to explore portfolio careers as a possible career pattern. One of the items that I discuss concerns what you need to do to market yourself when you are over 50.

Marketing your brand when you are over 50

• I make the point that the advantage of being a mature worker is that you bring a lot of stability, experience, presence, knowledge and wisdom to the table. Personal branding is  key these days. It’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. Make sure you get noticed for all the right reasons.

• It is crucial that you are clear on your motivated skills, your values and your passions. That applies to any age but is especially important here as you will be more time limited. Sorry to sound depressing!

• Again – relevant to any age-  but especially here because of  potential age stereotyping. You really need to focus on the the first impression you make? Appearance, voice, face. Decide what fits for your brand. And smile! It is likely to be reciprocated and the positive psychology researchers tell us that the physiological act of smiling is hard wired into our neural network so that you will also feel happier. Which means you will make a better impression.  Especially as we know that rightly or wrongly people form these impressions within 30 seconds of meeting you.  They will make  assumptions about everything from your education and your wealth, your credibility and your success, your trustworthiness and your believability – even your sexuality and desirability.

• Create the marketing materials used to communicate to employers: business cards, a cv, cover letter, references document, web site, blog, or work portfolio. Google me is the new business card. Over 77% of employers will Google a job candidate; 35% of those candidates won’t get the job because the boss finds negative or explicit content on social media Web pages. Research your digital footprint.  Try for something different. Katie and I both use a special bookmark designed to promote our book and containing the crucial contact information about us.

• You must understand and be familiar with new technology. Get your grandchildren to teach you! Exhibit how you stay on top of technology. For example, establish or update your LinkedIn profile or develop a web portfolio to show your ability to incorporate cutting-edge marketing tools and put the URL on your résumé.

• Talk about new things that you are enjoying learning about – as that is one of the other stereotypes about older people.

• Build a network before you need it. 70 percent of participating executives found their current positions by networking. Yet professionals tend to network only if and when looking for their next positions. 46 – 60 year olds spent three times as long networking as their younger colleagues. And before our Gen Y friends comment that this is simply because older people are slower that is not what the results show!

It would be interesting to get other tips for this age group. I will of course credit you if I put them into my talks!

Our friend Peter Osborne who comments regularly on our Linkedin portfolio careers group has put together what he calls his personal blog roll as to what he has found useful as a freelancer and portfolio worker. An eclectic list of blogs and books that you would find useful to peruse. You will see many names that you recognise but almost certainly, like us, will find some new ones well worth following up. Yes – I know we are on it too – but of course we are not influenced by that!

Another classic from our friend Hugh MacLeod!

That is the enticing invitation that I received this morning from the people at Hubspot. You can download it as a PDF or listen to the interviews. A lot of redundancy but some very good tips. You will recognise many of the 60 contributors as they contain most of the really successful bloggers.

Excellent article which summarises what is known about Twitter use. It certainly confirms my limited experience – limited because I make little use of it. All my postings are tweeted and that is about it for me. There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year.

Some of the findings which stood out for me:

Most tweets are babble

While not academic research, some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories (similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):

1. Pointless babble: 41%

2. Conversational: 38%

3. Pass-along value: 9%

4. Self-promotion: 6%

5. Spam: 4%

6. News: 4%

20 per cent are ‘informers’, 80 per cent are ‘meformers’

* Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users

* Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.

Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps because they passed on more interesting things and weren’t talking about themselves all the time.  This split hints at the different ways that people use Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated. If 80% of users don’t reply to others then it’s not that social.

Trends are one-time and short-lived

Tweets on a particular topic rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days. Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these trends are news-related.

10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the tweets

The mood of the nation

Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analysed their emotional content, and produced a ‘mood of the nation‘ video. It shows how the emotional content of people’s tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive).

So – as I of course classify myself as an Informer I will now tweet this to my embarrassingly few followers!

Gosh thats not easy to say! Brilliant new app( big nod to Geek in Disguise). This will save you time, effort, money and probably help world peace. Well maybe not the world peace bit but I have been doing a bit of pruning lately of who I am connected to in my social networks. This is a quick and easy way to figure out who to hang on to and who to ditch. It may also encourage you to find some new thinkers who will encourage and inspire you……

A New York Times article highlights the fact that 98% of twitter users are within 6 degrees of separation from one another and the average number of degrees between users is only 4.67. Just as everyone in the world is thought to be connected to one another within six steps (and the  movie star  Kevin Bacon is linked to just about every other actor in the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”), data from the social media consulting firm Sysomos finds that the same holds true for Twitter users. Interestingly they quote research suggesting the average degrees of connection of Facebook users is 5.73.   Twitter’s high connectivity makes the site a lucrative web spot for marketers, who can reach large audiences with just a handful of retweets.