Your Online Life *Is* Your Resume

Yesterday, I said you need to be interesting if you want to get paid to be yourself.  But producing content that others willingly pay for is only one way to make a living online.

What people fail to realize is that everything you do online is part of a living resume.

As Doug Derda, the co-founder of the long-running Should I Drink That? podcast, pointed out in a comment yesterday:

you wanna know how I made money? I took what i learned at Podcamps, [and] worked on it for my podcast which eventually got me a full-time job as a social media coordinator. That’s how you make money.

So is Doug getting paid to drink beer?  No.  Is he making a living from the advertising revenue on his podcast?  No.  Instead, his expertise in creating and promoting his podcast is what opened the door for him to land a full-time job managing someone else’s media.  And that’s the job that allows him to keep funding his show.

Doug’s not alone.  Many other media producers — including yours truly — have parlayed their passions into occupations.  Just not in the romanticized way that get-rich-quick schemers might expect.

How I Got from There to Here

In 2007, social media veteran John C. Havens earned a contract to produce a series of web videos for a client.  The problem: he’s not a videographer.  But I am.

John knew of my work as the creator of Something to Be Desired, which came up during a 2006 interview he conducted with me for About.com after I organized the first PodCamp Pittsburgh.  Based on what he knew of my video experience, he brought me aboard for this particular job.  And that opportunity eventually led to me becoming the Director of Social Media for Creative Concepts LLC, who had been John’s original client.

Am I getting paid to produce STBD?  No.  Am I getting paid to organize PodCamps?  No.  But had I not produced STBD in the first place, I never would have had a reason to attend the first PodCamp in Boston, or to replicate the event in Pittsburgh, which put me on John’s radar, which led to the offer that became a long-term job.

So why aren’t more people treating their online persona as a full-time recruiter?

Monetize This

In November, a friend sent me a link to a job posting.  It was for a Director of Social Media position within a sub-office of the federal government, and its salary ($40-$50K) was the kind of number that most of the people who ask “how do I monetize my blog?” can only dream of.

Of course, the requirements for that job were also beyond the reach of most blog jockeys, who spend their days burrowing so far into their favorite niche that they can’t see the light of opportunity all around them.  Social media is a booming field, and as the examples above illustrate, legitimate employers are willing to offer legitimate money to people who understand how these tools work.

So why, in an economy where any job has to be considered rationally, is everyone still trying to become “internet famous” overnight?

One problem is that we’re still getting used to the idea of content-as-resume.  We’re still laboring under the pretense that people are either creators or they’re facilitators, artists or accountants.  Either you do, or you make.  Despite social media’s inherent ability to dissolve psychological boundaries, we’re still not comfortable allowing our preconceived labels to overlap.

Once you realize that a potential employer is as likely to contact you through your Flickr stream as they are through your LinkedIn profile, you begin to realize that everything you do online is both a statement and an opportunity.

So make no mistake: every pixel you produce is a brick in the wall of your future.

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Tags: audience, Business, perception, personal, PodCamp, privacy, Social Media, Sociology, Something to Be Desired, stbd