Even those who rarely watch sports all year get hooked on college basketball during “March Madness”. A recent post on Problogger states that sports may teach you to be a better blogger.

There are 4 elements of success in sports that also apply to success as a blogger:

Teamwork - Sports teach valuable lessons about working together to accomplish a goal. Teams meet daily to learn to play together, trust each other and win.  Just like sports, blogging successfully requires teamwork. Bloggers develop teamwork through inviting their readers to participate and work with them to develop targeted content relating to their topic.

Everyone has a position - In context of the team it is important to understand everyone has a position. Each position requires different skills and attributes. The blogosphere is the exact same way. Your niche competition should be viewed more as a team of bloggers looking to succeed online. Use your unique skills and attributes to play your niche role - stick to your topic and emphasize your strengths.

Practice – playing sports teach you valuable lessons about discipline and determination; you need to practice daily. Constant practice through writing content, developing relationships and customizing your blog’s design will train you to better your blogging skills and find your unique talents.

Everyone needs a Coach - Along with practicing, effective progression and eventual success comes from proper coaching. Great teams are prepared by great coaches, so find a mentor in your niche or topic. Once you have found great mentors, subscribe to their feeds or get their newsletter.

What have you learned from sports that makes you a better blogger?

With the growing use of Social Media to build a more comprehensive personal branding effort built, some are now questioning the value of cover letters.According to recent post by David Manaster on ere.net, both have a place in your career management strategy.

Manaster believes that to a large degree, the cover letter vs. social media debate is like discussing the merits of the hammer vs. the screwdriver. Different situations call for different tools, and often both are necessary.

The social media approach is a long-term marketing approach to career development where you make yourself professionally visible to the world. It gives you the opportunity to show off your work, drive, personal philosophy, and depth of knowledge.  More importantly, it lets you engage in conversations that would never materialize if you were not activity engaged in social media communities.

The purpose of the cover letter, on the other hand, is to convince the reader it that you are the right person for that specific position at that specific company. You’re hunting, not farming, and the cover letter is a tool to show that you have done your homework and have real interest.

So like many things in life, it’s not an either/or proposition. There are so many people today who need a job now. And these people cannot afford to wait for the farming approach to bear fruit. If you are serious about managing your career you should start planting those seeds, but if you are hunting for a job today, you had also better do what you can to tailor your resume and cover letter to show your interest in the position.

Does your career management strategy include both short-term and long-term marketing approached?

Facebook made a number of changes to their interface recently and it caught many by surprise. As with most changes, some people like it while others want their old FB interface back; as people get used to it however the number of those who like it will probably grow.

This month’s overhaul of the Facebook interface dramatically improved the functionality of the Pages feature on Facebook according to the folks at Duct tape Marketing. Anyone with a Facebook profile has had the ability to add something called a Page to extend some content beyond the profile page. This was a smart thing for businesses to do as you could control the content and fans could subscribe to the content. The functionality, however, was pretty limited and these pages were more like static web page brochures than anything else.

With the latest overhaul the Pages have become much more profilelike and, in the opinion of some, much more useful as a tool for a business build a brand and community inside of Facebook.

More on the changes to FaceBook and the implications for business to come. In the meantime, do you think the changes to FaceBook are good for business?

Referrals are an important way of building your profile on LinkedIn and Duct Tape Marketing recently invited Scott Allen to share his ideas about how to demonstrate and grow your character as a way of getting more referrals. His advice is to:

Answer questions well. Don’t just rattle off a quick opinion - put some thought into it. Provide some additional resources. Refer people to an appropriate expert from within your network.

Add value to introduction requests. If you buy into the idea that LinkedIn is designed for “trusted referrals”, then you need to participate in that.  A trusted referral adds context to the introduction which will help the two people get off to a good start.

Make good recommendations. Don’t just wait for people to recommend you and then reciprocate - be proactive. And don’t write empty, generic recommendations; write good ones.

Respond in a timely manner. Forward introduction requests right away. The rest, get to as quickly as you can.

Help your contacts learn how to use LinkedIn effectively. Most people can not get beyond the basics of a simple profile with their last couple of jobs and connecting with a few colleagues they keep up with. Help them!

Be proactive. One of LinkedIn’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t have a mechanism for proactively introducing two people that you know. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it for that.

Use LinkedIn to enhance face-to-face networking.

How are you using LinkedIn to build referrals for yourself and your connections?

In our last blog entry we looked at what orientation programs could do for your organization. Here are some tips on designing an onboarding experience that will engage new employees and get them productive faster:

Address potential concerns upfront. Develop a program that has substance and that addresses the serious issues effectively.

Stretch your program out. After an intensive one to two day session up-front to start things off, subsequent activities may extend over several months at periodic intervals.

Take advantage of the intranet. Every employee needs to get used to using the corporate intranet and become familiar with how to get things done using these tools.

Educate managers deeply about the need to provide meaningful discussion and reflective work experiences. Many recent surveys show that the relationship with the manager is one of the most significant in an employee’s work life. Most employee turnover is ultimately caused by that relationship (or lack of it), which makes the ability to assimilate new employees a core competence of managers.

Assign mentors or coaches to each new employee for the first 90 days of employment. Research shows very clearly that providing a mentor who can offer insights into the corporate culture — who can explain the organizational structure and help the new employee understand economic and strategic decisions — is a major contributor to increased productivity and lower turnover.

These ideas are not new and have been discussed before both here are by writers such as Kevin Wheeler on erenet.com. Yet they certainly merit a revisit given the need to engage and retain new hires.

What are you doing to engage and retain new hires?

Even when times are really tough, most organizations are still recruiting according to Kevin Wheeler.  And, given the times, the people they are recruiting are critical to their organization.

Keeping these people engaged from day one is the challenge; let’s face it, other employees are not upbeat and many are feeling overworked and under-appreciated.

So how do you build engagement and promote retention in new hires?

Employees that have gone through an onboarding program report feeling better connected to company strategy and culture.There at least three things that orientation or assimilation programs can do for you.

First of all, they help new hires feel that they are part of a larger organization and that they are important.

Second, they help convey the culture of the organization so that decisions get made that are more in line with accepted practices and that help the organization function more smoothly.

Third, they help new employees get up to speed more quickly - helping new employees know what’s what and who’s who will make a significant difference on their time to productivity.

Later this week we will look at tips for designing a successful onboarding program. What does your organization do to build engagement and promote retention in new hires?

Earlier this week we looked at tips to build a ‘community’ among your readers. Here are some more tips to get you started:

Become a Cheer Leader. Look for any opportunity that you can to cheer your community along. Look for ways to give feedback to readers on how well ‘we’ are doing as a community – try to show the community what ‘we’ have achieved.

Give Readers Jobs.  Readers want to be a part of building something that matters. ‘Jobs’ can be anything from getting them to help you moderate comments, to being a forum moderator, to coming up with poll topics, to judging competitions, to writing guest posts etc.

Set Reader Homework. Another great way to get a little more interactivity and buy in from readers is to set them homework in your posts. This is particularly effective when you have a ‘tips’ or ‘how to’ type blog where you’re teaching people and it is a natural way to finish a post to say ‘go and do this’.

You don’t need a forum area dedicated to this to set homework. Just end a post with an invitation to go and do something and to report back on how they did and you’ll find a percentage of your readers will complete the task and in doing so will feel more loyalty to you and your blog.

Give multiple avenues to ‘join’ or be a ‘member’. Adding a weekly newsletter to the site will create another ‘connecting point’ with readers and a gentle reminder each week to stop by the blog and or forum to interact. Having a blog, forum and newsletter can be a lot of work but a fantastic way to engage with different readers in ways that appeal to their learning style.

These tips are based on some ideas from ProBlogger - what ways have you found to build your reader community?

So you have started a blog and post on a regular basis, what comes next?

Well, one way to make your blog readership grow is to build a ‘community’ among your readers. Here are some tips to get you started:

Start with Comments - Perhaps the most natural place to start to build ‘community’ on a blog is within its comments section: ask questions, interact with readers who comment and follow up with answers to readers questions

Reader Centered Posts - Show readers that you value them by regularly publishing posts that are all about them; this can be done by: answering reader questions, inviting questions from readers and highlighting a reader and their blog, comment, site.

Interactive Tools and Projects - Whether it be running weekly polls, using quizzes, running a competition in your comments section or some other interactive tool or project - the more you get your readers to ‘do’ something the more ownership that they’ll feel over your site.

Invite Reader Generated Content - reader generated content can help you keep fresh content on your site - but the other benefit of it is that it can help readers grow in their connection to your blog.

More tips to come later, in the meantime, what are your thoughts on building your reader community?