Social media is infiltrating everyone’s life in some way however some recent events on Twitter have shown us that the phenomenon clearly has pros and cons.

The Good
Ashton Kutcher decided to make men everywhere jealous by posting a pic of his wife’s bikini clad bottom along with the tweet  "Shhh!, don't tell wifey." 

Thanks Ashton and I’m sure I speak for all the males in your 513920 followers when I say that!!!!!

The Bad
It’s difficult enough to find a job these days as thousands can confirm, so when a candidate in the States decided to tweet about a recent job offer little did he realise the effects it could have. Tweeting:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

He unfortunately caught the attention of Tim Levad, a "channel partner advocate" for Cisco Alert who quickly shot back:

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.’’

This was followed by YouTube videos, websites and I’d guess a withdrawal of the aforementioned job offer.

Helen A.S. Popkin covers it nicely for msnbc if you want to read more.

The Ugly 
Personal abuse levelled at former premier league star Stan Collymore led him to closing his account down. Collymore decided that jokes referring to depression which he has suffered with were a step too far and tweeted

"As depression is an illness that affects 1 in 4 of us at some time, making flippant comments on twitter I’m afraid isn't funny to me."

Fair enough I say but unfortunately flippant comments on twitter are funny to some people.

So there we go three recent events which ended up in the media and should serve as a warning to all newbie tweeters – Big Brother is watching and if he doesn’t see, be sure one of the millions on twitter will and they mightn’t let you forget it either!!!

Over the last few weeks I noticed a few articles about the web and papers about new and different ways of finding a job, I suppose thinking outside the box a bit and supplementing the traditional methods like online and newspapers with other things such as LinkedIn.

As you no doubt know from the developments on the site over the last 12 months we are big advocators of web 2.0 and of making life easier for our candidates by giving you ways to search for jobs outside of RecruitIreland.com, for example you can search for jobs from your Facebook profile.

Another thing we have become involved with (addicted to) over the last few months is Twitter, I explained a while back what it was all about but earlier I got to thinking how you could use Twitter to source a new job or help you find career advice. First off there are lots of great sources of advice on Twitter, we regularly offer tips and there are other users such as @krishnade and @CV_cafe who also regularly offer tips and will also give advice if you ask it of them.

Secondly it's a great way of keeping in touch with what's happening in the world news wise with @breakingnews and many others.

Thirdly you can connect with other job seekers and create a bit of a community feel to your jobhunt, interact with other candidates who are in the same boat and learn from one another. You can also connect with industry leaders, professionals in your industry and recruiters and in some cases you can connect directly with companies.

All in all, it's an excellent source of information, it's another tool to source jobs or contacts and it's a great way to touch base with people and build relationships. And it's fun - did you know lots of famous people are on Twitter these days including @Stephenfry and @wossy (Jonathan Ross)?

I have noticed while researching this that some jobsites have a direct feed of jobs pouring into Twitter, we didn't want to go down this route with our account because I think it's quite impersonal but on the other hand maybe it's something that would be of value to you the jobseeker, pop a comment below and let me know what you think?

I was reading an article earlier in yesterday's Evening Echo about Facebook and how detrimental it can be to your career. The article explained how 13 flight attendants were fired recently for talking about customers online and discussing how they claimed Virgin flights (their own airline I hasten to add) have cockroaches on board - nice! 

The article went on to say how one in five employers admit to researching employees online with two thirds admitting the info they found online influenced their decision.

This got me thinking about another article I read a few weeks ago which was encouraging employers to allow employees to access Facebook in work because it increased productivity and morale in general if employees could take a time-out and social network for a few minutes and by blocking Facebook it was allowing a bad atmosphere to permeate the office culture.

I use Facebook regularly - for research purposes you understand?   So as I said I use it regularly and I have blocked my page from being viewed by anyone except my own friends and I know I'd never (at least I hope I wouldn't be) stupid enough to diss my boss or announce I was taking a sicky on my profile (not that I ever ever do things like that).

So my musing brings me to this - do employers actually use Facebook to research their candidates? Would one drunken picture actually make a difference if you had decided to hire someone? and for you users out there for God sake change your privacy settings for your own sake...

I was having a chat with a friend last night about work amongst other things and was filling her in on all the exciting exposure we have been getting for the web 2.0 stuff we started doing a while back. Damien Mulley was great to write a blogpost about us and Krishna De interviewed me last week for PodcampIreland's Blogradio show which again was really interesting.

Chatting about all of this and I realised my friend had glazed over and was merely nodding and looking vacantly at me while trying not to yawn. When I asked what she had understood from our (albeit one sided) discussion her response was "Flipping nothing" so I realised just because I find this intriguing and understand the ins and outs of it (eventually) not everyone actually does soooo below is my "Web 2.0 for dummies" - not that any of you are dummies I hasten to add ;-)

Web 2.0 - is basically where websites try to interact more with their users, my understanding is that it's all about creating a community feel and allowing users to interact with one another and share information and for us its been about making the site more "human" and giving it a personality while adding things like this blog to let users interact with us, generate content and make suggestions.

Twitter - is a really simple tool to use to relay to your friends or anyone really what you are doing, be it everyday things like eating or working. It can be used to poll people so for example when this blog went live I asked people to look at it and give me feedback. Its essentially a quick and easy way to maintain contact and get opinions or advice.

A blog - is just the nonsensical raving of people like me - on a serious note its a way to give users relevant and informative content that hopefully they will recommend to other people and come back to check regularly

Social Networking - is websites like Facebook, Myspace or Bebo, you register and interact with friends and for me its great to post photos and keep in touch with people I don't see every other week!

RSS - this one is tricky and to be fair took me months to get the hang of - you will be seeing the little orange logo all over the place online - its so easy believe me - you download whats called a reader, I use feedreader.com because it was recommended to me but there are lots. Then you can add a feed to it so that you don't have to log directly onto a site every day to check it.

If you are anything like me you will love surfing various websites and checking them regularly - my life has not been the same since I discovered RSS, now I just add feeds to my reader and its automatically updated when something new goes onto the website - you can use it for anything from blogs to newspaper websites to our site to collect new jobs for you and just open your feedreader in the morning and flick down through them - it makes the whole process so much easier and faster.

Linked In - This is more of a professional website, similar enough to the whole social networking thing but people use it to network professionally. If you check out someone's LinkedIn profile it reads almost like a CV, you can be recommended by colleagues or clients and it's becoming more and more popular as a way to source jobs or put yourself on the market so to speak! Check out our profile here.

So all in all this web 2.0 stuff just makes your life easier, makes doing everything faster and gives you lots of new ways to keep in contact with people be they work colleagues or friends....

No doubt I have forgotten some vital parts to 2.0 so feel free to comment away below!!

Vic