The 405 Club

Ed. note: Laurie Dillon-Schalk teaches the downsized how to use social media to get a job and is the author of Social Wisdom. You can reach Laurie Dillon-Schalk by leaving a comment here or emailing 405club@gmail.com.

I really identify with anyone laid off who is in IT, science, advertising or any other discipline moving at the speed of light.  It can be a real struggle to get back in the game, be relevant and able to hit the ground running when world is still spinning for the employed full timers.

Having taken 2008 to be with my latest and last born, I unplugged myself from the grid reluctantly as my then employer took back my blackberry. vrrr grrr…    After a year long maternity leave and waiting to get my blackberry back [mat leave is up to 12 months long in Canada], I was given notice of my termination planned for my first day back from maternity leave.  This wasn’t totally unexpected given I was in the housing/home building industry.    Still, I had hoped for at least some employ to help me feel relevant again and find the natural cadence between getting a nanny, going to work, and being with my kids in the evenings.

I was fortunate;  I won a contract about four weeks later and managed to keep the nanny, for a while anyways.

With the brain learning enthusiam of a mother coming off maternity leave, I fell into itunes to feed my commuter time and discovered a great deal of information available in podcast/videocast form.   After listening to many duds, I found some great podcasts.  Among my favorite podcasts are the University channel within iTunes.  I’ve been listening to Stanford’s Social Entrepreneurship podcasts as well as the Harvard ideacast channel. (See my favorite - an interview with Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia on the Stanford section).  I sprinkled in the daily news like the Wall Street Journal morning reviews  - a paper I can ill afford in the worst of times.   For entertainment, I watched/ listened to the Onion News Network and  Shill - a podcast about PR and social media featuring a great deal of swearing and whisky drinking (no ‘e’ - apparently they drink Scottish whisky).

When I heard all the lectures and jokes, I started listening to great speeches in history including “I have a dream” by Martin Luther King jr, Obama’s inauguration speech and “We shall never surrender” speech by Winston Churchill - all excellent speeches that I’ve never heard before.  And when I was finished with those, for eye candy I would start watching Bear Grylls in  ‘man vs. wild’ - slug snack and others videocasts from the Discovery Channel.

In listening to it all (above and more), I’ve figured out how newbie the whole podcast/videocast market is.  Described somewhere by someone as a 1.0 industry (as opposed to web 2.0) podcasts and videocasts often feature poor descriptions, labeling, no tagging, really bad handling of sponsor messages, poor audio, hard to find podcast notes and importantly limited expertise and selection online.

As luck would have it, I was on contract (or ‘engaged’ as we say in small business) helping an e-learning firm, Engage Learn, deliver corporate communication and sales training for an international conglomerate.   I was acting in a director capacity and while in a planning meeting for the launch of an internet portal, I was able to intelligently talk about the opportunities of turning a portal into a brand asset library for international staff (of online videos, podcasts and other tools).  It wasn’t my idea alone - certainly the savvy owner of Engage Learn had envisioned all of this - but at this meeting where she was absent,  I could articulate all sorts of information on podcasting, online video, digital media, do’s and don’ts, etc.   Much of the discussion seeded from my commuter listening.

At the end of the day, though, the most important parts of my client discussion were not from my podcast listening but from my good solid experience in launching digital based businesses.  OMG, my good business know-how and experience will always make me relevant.  Ah.. I could breathe again with the realization of it.

Truthfully, I have moments where I feel like I’m a total fraud.  Hell, I teach people how to use social media to find a job and I don’t have a job.  I’m a reluctant small business responding the no-hire but need resources market.   That said, I did learn that what I know already is good enough for gold.  I just need a little relevance to seed it.  With that thought, I plug myself back into itunes, netvibes, twitter and other tools and keep absorbing like nobody’s business.

P.S. if you have a favorite podcast/videocast to share, I’d be grateful.