Social Media – Penn & Beyond

Networking Using Technology: Quakernet & LinkedIn

Anne Marie Gercke, Associate Director

The term “networking” can be daunting, especially for those of us who don’t find “schmoozing” or “wheeling and dealing” to be experiences we typically enjoy. For that reason, job-seekers may feel frustrated or even stressed when it constantly pops up in career-related conversations. When I ask my students about their networking endeavors, I will sometimes hear, “Oh, I don’t really have any helpful connections.” In reality, any Penn student or alum with a PennKey has thousands of connections. They just need to know where – and how – to look and find them.

So, here is a quick tutorial to help those students and alumni who have not yet been able to master the art of networking.

First, this is what you’ll need:

Computer/internet access
PennKey and password

Second, here is what you can proactively do:

Create a LinkedIn account (if you don’t already have one)
Bookmark these sites: LinkedIn Find Alumni Tool | Quakernet
Join the University of Pennsylvania LinkedIn Alumni Group (you are welcome to join as a current student)

Next, we will start with LinkedIn to find some alums. When you go to the Find Alumni Tool, you’ll see a page that looks like this:

The site currently pre-populates with over 145,000 alums who have Penn as their most recent university. You can filter the results so that you are working with a more manageable number. For ease, we will narrow it to alums who work at Google in San Francisco. You can do this by clicking on the tabs for Google and San Francisco Bay Area and the results will automatically refilter.

Now we have 256 results. We could narrow even further, but this will do for now. I’ll scroll down to the first row of results to see what we have.

I’ve hidden the identities of these alums to respect their privacy, but this screenshot should give you the general idea of what you’ll see. These are the first five of 256 Penn alums working at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area. This view allows you to see some basic information, like their graduation year and if you have connections in common (see red arrow). If you click on their name and then their profile, you can learn more about them and their career. Let’s click on that first result.

We can see that this person works for Google as the Latin America Marketing Lead. If it would make sense to connect based on your interests, you may reach out to one of your mutual connections (in this case, the screen is showing us we have two connections in common, but again, I hid the photos of the connections to protect their privacy since this tutorial is for information purposes only). I could then potentially reach out to a mutual connection to ask for an “e-introduction” with the alum. The goal would be to set up a 15-20 minute conversation to ask the alum about his/her role, experience at the company and advice he/she may have for you in the field. This is what we call informational interviewing and this is how networking is accomplished.

I know what you are thinking. Is it normal to contact strangers out of the blue? Short answer: yes. Your peers are doing it. More importantly, your direct competition is doing it. You should be doing it. Most alums are very happy to chat. For any job you are considering applying to, it’s a really great practice to try to reach out to at least someone at the company beforehand to try to make a connection. As you can see here, thanks to technology, it doesn’t have to take a ton of time.

Sometimes you will not have anyone in common with the fellow Quaker. Perhaps when you click on the person’s name, however, you see you are in the same group.

If you are in the University of Pennsylvania LinkedIn Alumni Group and you see the word ‘Group’ like you do above, it’s very plausible that is the group to which you both belong as there are currently 40k+ members. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn requires you to simultaneously request to connect if you want to message someone (if you aren’t already connected). But if you are in the same group, you can navigate to that group, type the person’s name into the member search, toggle over their name and a little email icon will show.

That’s how you can send an email through LinkedIn without having to simultaneously ask to connect.

Now let’s say you find someone you’d like to have a conversation with, but you have no connections in common and you aren’t members of the same group. Here’s where Quakernet can come in handy.

Quakernet is a great tool because it’s all encompassing of everyone who has come through Penn, with their email address. When someone gets a new job or is promoted do they run to Quakernet to make sure it’s up-to-date? Maybe. But probably not that often. Since it is such a large database, it’s very difficult to keep it as accurate as LinkedIn, which is solely updated by the individual and much more a part of mainstream social media. That said, here is why Quakernet is a very valuable tool.

Let’s look at this person (see below) as an example. Because I see the 3^rd in place of 2^nd (meaning we have common connections) or Group (meaning we are in the same group), I know that the only way I could reach out to this person through LinkedIn would be to simultaneously request to connect. Some alums are fine with this, so you can use your discretion on how comfortable you are requesting to connect with people you have never met.

However, another method would be to plug the alum’s name into the Quakernet keyword search to find his email address.

Voila! As you can see, his information hasn’t been updated in Quakernet, so if I had run a search in Quakernet this alum wouldn’t have been part of the results because he doesn’t have Google in his profile. However, when I click on his profile I am able to get his direct email address (in most cases several emails addresses) so the database is an excellent too for finding contact information. Once I found him through Quakernet I’d send him an email indicating I found his information through Penn’s networking tools and I’d be really grateful for 15-20 minutes of his time to talk about his career in marketing. Again, having these conversations and making connections is an effective and efficient way to network, and if you follow the steps I outlined, it doesn’t have to be quite as daunting as it seems.

You can learn more about networking on our website, and we are happy to walk you through the process in person, as well. Now that you have the tools and know how to use them, get out there and connect!

Check out the new LinkedIn Students App

Alyssa Perkins-Chatterton, Administrative Assistant for the College Team

Last week, LinkedIn launched its newest feature, the LinkedIn Students app. The app is geared specifically graduating seniors who are looking for help in their job search. The app helps you look for jobs that are a good fit based on your major, companies that recruit at your school and the career paths of alumni with similar degrees.*

LinkedIn wants students to look at this new tool as their “personal job exploration guide”. When accessing the app you are given 5 items to review: a career suggestion based on your school and major, an article to read on various career-related topics, a company that often recruits from your school, a list of job suggestions based on recent alumni from your school with a similar major, and lastly, the app provides an actual job posting that you might be interested in based on your major/school.** What is also helpful is the “extra credit” option that allows you to swipe through more of these suggestions and add even more information about yourself such as your interests, goals and careers you find interesting. This option allows you to have a more personalized experience. Keep in mind that the app does tend to use a student’s major as one of the main data points when making suggestions. As we know, your major does not firmly dictate a straight path to your career. We’ve had English majors go into Finance and Religious Studies majors join the FBI! Just check out our survey reports to see! While your major should certainly reflect your interests, your supplemental activities and internships also help you learn what career path is right for you. This is especially true for our liberal arts students who can often have a variety of experiences that contribute to their career goals. That being said, be sure to utilize the extra credit section and add in those extra details about your interests and goals in order to have a more tailored experience!

In general, LinkedIn has received positive feedback from student users. The most common trend being that students reported the app very easy to use and navigate.

This is a great first step and career exploration tool for graduating seniors to use when planning for those next steps. However, be sure to utilize our office and resources as well! Again, we have career plan survey reports that offer great data and insight into what our recent grads are doing post Penn. And as always, call us to make an appointment or stop by for walk-in hours! We are here for all of your career related needs.

*https://blog.linkedin.com/2016/04/18/introducing-the-linkedin-students-app–helping-soon-to-be-colleg

Never a “Typical” Day

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the Career Services Summer Funding grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending the summer. You can read the entire series here.

This final entry for 2015 is by Hope MacKenzie, COL ’17

This summer, I worked at an innovative and unique advertising agency called Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners. RTOP’s off-the-wall office was located on the top two floors of 1 South Broad Street in Philadelphia. The office was definitely a sight: the walls, floors, desks, and even bathrooms were anything from art pieces to Christmas ornaments to Elvis paraphernalia (in fact, there was even an “Elvis Room” was dedicated to the King himself). One time, upon walking in, a construction worker asked if the office was a daycare! The creative space was really just an outward display of the creativity that spread throughout the agency. RTOP is small but mighty; with powerhouse clients like Planet Fitness and Dial Soap for Men, they have clientele comparable to that of a much bigger, more established agency. In fact, RTOP won this year’s Ad Age Best Small-Sized Agency award. Overall in my position as a Social Media Strategy Intern, I not only learned a lot about the creation and spread of social media marketing campaigns, but I also gained a clearer understanding of the structure of an advertising agency.

As a “creative” (a person working on the wording and visualizing of ads), I had a hands-on introduction to the advertising world. My bosses were really co-workers, and my tasks were both important and skilled. I specialized in creating social media posts and campaigns primarily with Planet Fitness, Dockers, Dial for Men, and Honest Kitchen. With a combination of tasks like researching trends in the market, creating presentations for the client, writing and planning the social media posts, or going to client presentations, no two days were the same. For this reason, it is difficult to describe a “typical day,” so instead, I’ll describe each of my tasks and how I’d go about them.

Researching trends in the market: Some days I would sit down with my bosses and fellow interns and examine an area or avenue that our client was interested in pursuing. On those days, I would research things like how to reach a certain audience, what strategies competitors used to break new ground, and how to utilize different platforms to achieve our goals.

Creating presentations for the client: After I conducted the research necessary, I would create PowerPoint presentations that would be critiqued by my bosses to present to the client.

Writing and planning social media posts: This is what I spent the bulk of my time doing, especially for Planet Fitness. I learned the voice of each brand that I represented, and I created a social media cadence of posts for every outlet – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. This job required a lot of creativity and a complete understanding of how the brand was represented to the public. The cadence would then be critiqued by my bosses as well as the client.

Going to client presentations: On occasion, I would be invited to sit in on actual presentations for clients. This granted me tons of experience in the logistics of how these meetings typically run.

Overall, I really loved my time at RTOP. I would like to personally thank all of the people who made this experience possible for me. Their motto was “be unforgettable.” This banner hung at the entrance of the office as a subtle reminder of their goals as an agency. Though I really learned a lot from this experience, I think that RTOP reminded me how important it is to do just that – to be unforgettable. No matter where I go in life, I know that this experience will stay with me, and this motto will ring true.