I know, I have not blogged in a while. I am sorry, and I do plan to make it up to you. I have a great excuse, though. You see, I was busy looking for just the right job. I decided that I would stop taking new clients way back on January first.

In order that you may excuse my absence and in hopes that you will find your way back here for more sensible marketing advice (you subscribe to my blog, right?) - I want to share what I’ve been up to. This is how I shared it on Facebook, so rather than totally re-write it …

HERE IT IS!

The time has finally come when I can make the announcement I have waited anxiously to share.

As my friends know, I made a decision in early 2012 to change my career path. I had simply stopped feeling the love in my work, and I was ready for a monumental change. The change I had expected was to work as a Chief Marketing Officer or Senior Vice President of marketing for a corporation other than my own. That would be a big change, but it was very exciting to me, and felt like a breath of fresh air. The biggest obstacle would be to find a company I could respect and feel good about.

My path was changing for a few years - but 2012 was monumental. As a marketing professional since the late 1980’s, I realized a huge shift since 2009 the likes of which I had not seen in the preceding decades. It was as if clients were almost intentionally sabotaging their own companies and stopped taking even the most prudent and well-researched advice. They all seemed to gain confidence in their own “gut feelings” (mostly fear-induced) while putting solid market research and planning to waste.

Social media should be an invaluable asset to a job seeker. At least that is the case if what we read is true. There are many stories of people landing a dream job with little more than a tweet on Twitter. Others will say it was their really great connections on LinkedIn, or friends who helped them spread their word on Facebook.

We’ve all surely heard that recruiters rely heavily on the use of social media for filling positions. It’s why we take down all of the party pics on Facebook, and stop beating our chest about politics or religion on Twitter. Those recruiters are watching. Right?

According to some people, recruiters and hiring managers are filling their quotas with the use of what they call “social recruiting”, but is it actually the way they’re telling it? Is social recruiting really the way jobs are being filled? I know what they’re saying, but I see something very different in what they’re actually doing.

If you pick a fight with time, time will always win. When it comes to your marketing and business strategy, time is not a good excuse for failure, but it is a popular scapegoat.

I often hear people say they just don’t have enough time. I want to inspire you to question how you are using your time, and how you could be doing it better.

You can scale this however you like - from an individual to the largest corporations - time is a very precious business resource. I want you to take this personal, so I’m scaling this down to just you. That’s because you are responsible to yourself, first. It’s easy to scale this up and see how it can affect any company of any size.

If you are wasting time doing the wrong things, you can stop complaining right now, because you are getting exactly what you asked for.

One great benefit of social media is the ability to communicate with others in the format and space they want to communicate. Some people will choose to discuss a topic on Facebook, while others choose LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Amplify, or a squillion others. Many people will pick a handful of networks to focus their attention, based on their interests or their intended audience, and monitor them vigilantly. Google+ is climbing the ranks of preferred networks very quickly!

Blog readers and writers take note: You probably don’t notice this challenge much from a reader standpoint, but if you are a blogger who is paying attention to where your content is being discussed, you probably see this all the time. Do you ever notice that there are comments in about 37 different contexts spread across a handful of networks, all related to a single blog post?

Klout is a social measurement tool that places a numeric value on a person’s influence within their social media circles. The service currently pulls data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare for their influence calculations, but plans to add Google+, YouTube, Facebook Pages, and others for a total of 20 networks by the end of 2011.

On the surface, it may sound positively impersonal, and even a bit absurd to make judgments based on a number, but is it really? We’ve been doing it for many years with credit scores. I don’t think it is a good idea to become obsessed about statistics such as these, but I do believe it is valuable to be aware.