Gettin’ the Gig
April 24, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
I owe my b5 gig entirely to the connections I’ve made through social media.
I met Tris Hussey on Twitter. We chatted, I found out that he was across the water in Victoria. We met, briefly, face to face at Bloghaus at SxSW. I knew he was with b5. We got to be better friends after SxSW, primarily over GTalk and Skype.
I saw ProBlogger’s post about b5 looking for a new blogger through a tweet from Jesse Stay, but not through Twitter. I noticed it on my Facebook homepage, under the status updates. Jesse has connected his Twitter account to update his Facebook status. I followed the link out of curiosity. I sent it through to Tris via GTalk.
Tris sent Kelly, the business channel editor an email introduction, directing her to a blog post he had written about a recent presentation I had given and put on SlideShare.
I immediately sent an email to Kelly, introducing myself and offering her some writing samples, two of which were from my writing on Techvibes about Technology in Vancouver.
Kelly took a look at the slides and my writing, and less than 12 hours later, we were discussing the terms of my contract and I had the gig.
Social media is changing not only the way things work, but the speed at which things happen.
I’ve been on twitter for ~48 hours and already met / spoken with people I didn’t know existed and would of never had the chance to converse with otherwise. Things are changing faster by the second it would seem.
Rockin!
Seriously tho, you totally deserve it.
a) You earned the job by having the right skillset
b) You worked the network – which is key to understanding this new social media world we live in
That said, congratulations and woot!!
I love my Twitter network. I feel weird when I’m cut off from it for any amount of time.
:)
Like you, I also owe my b5media gig to networking. Maybe if I started fully tapping all the social media tools out there (I’m currently stuck at blogs), I’ll create more opportunities for myself?
@Rob – Twitter is amazingly powerful. a lot of the good things that have happened for me around social media can be traced back to Twitter.
@geekmommy – you’re so sweet! but you’re right. and i know exactly what you mean! I start to jones if i’m away from twitter for too long. ;)
@rico – it’s very possible. blogs are so just one piece of the pie…. there’s so much else that can be done!!