Last night Shaq was traded to the Cavs…and he found out about it on Twitter.  That’s right.  Before Steve Kerr could pick up the phone and call the big man, Shaq’s faithful Twitter following alerted him to the deal.  And needless to say, the Big Cactus was shocked.  Here’s the screenshot of Shaq’s Twitter page minutes after the deal…

Take note of the reply to @allonso…”I didn’t hear dat yet.” This example will go down as one of the reasons why you need to be on Twitter.  If the Twitter community can break news before your boss, shouldn’t you be part of the conversation?

Brett Farmiloe is the social media manager at Jobing.com.  He and Zach Hubbell consult with small and medium sized businesses to offer social media solutions that best fit their recruiting strategy.  To learn more, please visit: http://phoenix.jobing.com/socialmedia 

Ever since Twitter has come around, I’ve been telling Zach that public speakers have more pressure than ever to deliver an entertaining, insightful speech. The reason? What you say can, and will be tweeted about.

We just got back from delivering a speech entitled ‘What Our Generation Wants’ to 300 chief executives in DC at an ASAE conference called FBOS. I decided to search Twitter to see what, if anything, was tweeted about during our speech. This is what I found:

How about that for instant feedback on whether your speech went well?  Speak wisely.  And beware of asking people to put their cell phone away during the speech…they could be twittering about you.

4 years for most, 5 years for some, and in the case of one my dear friends, 7 years of school and you’ve got a great piece of paper that officially says you’ve graduated. Now what should you do with your life?

Chances are that you’ve probably heard this question from parents, teachers, peers, and asked it to yourself. It’s a darn good question. How should you answer it? A great guide of figuring out the ‘what should I do with my life’ dilemma can be summed up into three words: ‘Pursue the Passion.’

Quick story about me. I graduated a couple years ago with an accounting degree. I took a job I wasn’t really excited about and it sucked. I decided to quit in order to take a road trip I had been dreaming about taking. On this road trip, I planned on interviewing people who loved their jobs with hopes that their insight would lead me, and many others like me, closer to finding passion in work.

I lived on free Hot Pockets for 45 days while I tried to find funding for the website and the road trip. I went to places like MTV’s Pimp My Ride, my former college, and second cousins looking for money to get this idea off the ground. I got more ‘no’s’ than I can begin to describe.

One day, I quit eating Hot Pockets and realized Jobing.com was right down the street from where I was living. I approached them for a sponsorship, and after talking with the CEO, he agreed to sponsor our road trip and website. Me and three buddies hit the road for four months in a new RV.

We ended up interviewing over 300 people across 38 states and 16,000 miles. When we got back, Jobing.com agreed to give us jobs. In those jobs we got the opportunity to speak to thousands of people about our journey and create a program that sent over 2,000 high school students into their community to do interviews like we conducted. We’re now the social media managers for Jobing.com.

The point of the story is, you’ll never know where the journey will lead if you pursue the passion. In today’s economy, people feel lucky just to have work. The words ‘pursue the passion’ may not have the same meaning it once did when the economy and job outlook was bright. But for you, the recently graduate, the words still have meaning. It means to chase after whatever you’re excited about.

Back to the title of this blog- ‘So you’ve graduated…now what?’ The answer to that question is that you can pursue whatever you want, despite the economic outlook. You’ve graduated! It’s your life, your decisions, your time. Just make sure that whatever you do, that you’re always pursuing something with passion. You never know where the journey may take you. Best of luck.

Brett Farmiloe is the social media manager for Jobing.com. He wrote this blog in a hotel room in Washington D.C. after speaking to 300 CEO’s and CFO’s about the journey just described. It’s just more evidence that the journey leads you to some unexpected places if passion is behind the pursuit.

One of the things Zach and I talk about in our speeches is the need to take an entrepreneurial approach to work, no matter what the job may be.

Last week we launched the first ever Pursue the Passion Entrepreneurship Conference to drive home this point to hundreds of FBLA high school students. These students all had an entrepreneurial requirement in order to attend the conference- they had to conduct their own Pursue the Passion interview with a professional from their community who has a job they’re interested in. Their reward was a ticket to a conference filled with engaging speakers and workshops, and more importantly, a ticket to that night’s Suns game.

Here’s a video featuring the conference speakers and the advice they had for the students who attended.

With all the negative stuff going on in today’s times, it is important that we still see the positives. Every Friday I challenge myself to identify 5 things that I’m excited about. It’s usually not too hard, and makes the day that much more enjoyable after reflecting on the good stuff that’s happening.

Here’s the five things I’m excited about, and I hope that you comment below with whatever is exciting to you on this Friday morning.

1) With the unemployment rate now at 8.1%, its highest rate since 1983 and the highest in my lifetime, I’m excited to have a job.

2) I’m excited that my mom is coming in town today. We’re going to catch a couple Giants spring training games, one of which is against the Oakland A’s.

3) I’m excited about a few of the interviews we’ve got coming up. We’re interviewing a couple people involved with Arizona BioDiesel next Tuesday, a jewelry cutter, a windpower manufacturer, the San Francisco Giants PA announcer, and some people who work in healthcare. That’s in the coming weeks.

4) I’m excited that the book process is coming along, although ever so slowly. I made a purchase of a ISBN number yesterday, along with a barcode. That officially makes us official.

5) I’m excited about the prospect of adding 35+ new career videos to our site. Although it wasn’t Pursue the Passion who completed the work, it would be us who is the beneficiary. Be on the lookout for that soon. In the meantime, here’s a sample of one of the videos…

What are you excited about?

Rarely do we feature other sites on our blog, but recently a guy named Aswan Morgan reached out to me to talk about this site called UpMo.  After talking with him a few times, here’s the skinny.

First off, you can learn more about UpMo by clicking here.  But what Aswan and co. are looking for are people who would be willing to submit themselves to a 2 hour interview process so that you can mentor younger people trying to find their way in the world.  As an added bonus, by participating in the process you will receive a $250 to donate to a charity of your choice.  So you’re doing a lot of good.

Contact Aswan’s colleague Lisa if you’re interested in being a part of the process at lisa@upmo.com.    

Monday, Monday… I’d love to say we’re back to work after a long weekend, but the truth is that we’re still at work after a long weekend. The upside is we’re getting some things done. We’remaking moves.

Hopefully you have seen the new homepage compliments of our own Brett Farmiloe and Jobing’s incredibly talented Kristen Zirkler. I’m really excited about the the look of it but more importantly what it could mean for our visitors in terms of increased usability. It’s not done yet but it’s certainly an already improved work in progress. The new breakdown for interviews is a la career cluster, something students and teachers alike should be able to appreciate, and there is now a link to our featured video and write up on the front page. The career links are not fully functional yet, but if we didn’t have some developmental hiccups it wouldn’t be PTP.

In addition we’ve got an all new career profile for you featuring Joy Estes, Insurance Agent and Entrepreneur. Now, Brett and I are aware that the insurance industry has some stigma attached to it. But as someone who recently spent time in an emergency room, take it from me, coverage and courage share a symbiotic relationship. Joy’s also got a great story. The first female ever excepted to West Point Military Academy she has rebuilt her business multiple times until it looked and felt exactly as she had envisioned.

Let us know what you think of the new video and homepage. That’s the beauty of the internet, instant feedback can yield nearly instant change.

Talk to you soon and until then pursue your passion. With coverage.

Cheers to the last Friday in February. Here’s the 5 things I’m excited about on this Friday.

1) The Pursue the Passion Entrepreneurship Conference…which starts in an hour…250 high school students from FBLA have all done Pursue the Passion interviews to get to U.S. Airways Center to learn about Entrepreneurship from 4 workshops, and of course, a Phoenix Suns game.

2) The Big Speech Tomorrow.

3) Coding Camp. Should be getting the last ‘skeleton’ update on our site tomorrow to arrange our interviews in a way that people can actually use them. Then it will be time to put some meat on it.

4) My San Francisco Giants Flag. Spring training has started and yesterday I received my San Francisco Giants flag in the mail. It is now flying high in my front yard for the duration of an optimistic spring.

5) I’m excited about seeing our videos play on the Phoenix Suns jumbotron. Plenty of pictures and videos from the next two days to come. In the meantime, we’ve got some cool stuff to look at on our flickr account.

What are you excited about?

People oftentimes dream of working in a job. The fact is, they know little about what that job actually entails.

Beer Brewer: One better not start brewing without being into beer.

Celebrity Chef: I have a lot of friends at my twenty year high school reunion coming up, where there will be a routine line of people waiting to talk to me about whether they should quit their $450,000 job at AT&T to be a chef. I say the same thing every time now. “You know that barbeque you had a month or two ago for eight of your friends? And how fun it was? It’s not fun when it’s 800 people waiting who don’t care about you. And they don’t know you. It becomes a different thing.”

Professional cooking and home cooking are not the same. Wives come up to me and say “Oh, my husband. He loves cooking at home! He really wants be a chef…” It’s not the same kind of cooking. It’s like you strap on your tool belt and say let’s do this.

There’s a little bit of the grass is always greener no matter what. People always say to me, “I’ve always wanted to be a chef.” And I say, “Did you enjoy the holidays with your family like the last ten years, because I spent the last eight Thanksgivings cooking dinner for people in a restaurant.” So they got something I didn’t and I have something they didn’t.

Pizza Shop Owner: One of the first things I tell my new hires is that 60% of your job is cleaning. It’s not making pizza. It’s not talking to customers. It’s cleaning. 40% is making the pizzas, talking to the customers, that’s only part of your job. It’s a small part of your job. Some people don’t like that.

Reporter: You can turn the camera on and you’ll find people who are the worst people in the world to be around, and when the light flips on for the camera, it’s like, ‘Wow. This person is wonderful.’

About ten percent of my job is when the camera is on. I would say even ninety-five percent of my time is spent off air. Because we’re only on for two minutes. Ninety-five percent humble, five percent arrogant.

Accountant: The thing that’s cool in accounting is that I don’t just deal with the accounting department. A lot of professions you go into, you just do marketing. Finance affects everyone. We get to meet everyone from ticket sales to the entertainment groups. We have our hand in everything, which is really neat.

Goat Farmer: I decided I wanted to be outside, so I decided I wanted to be a botanist. I went back to college and was taking biology courses. I remember thinking I was doing something exciting because I was studying plants.

I remember sitting there and someone said, ‘You want to do plants? That’s so boring.’ I was like, ‘Here we go again!’ People would tell me, because I had an accounting degree, if I got a botany degree, I’d still be in an office. They’d have me managing projects in botany.

You’re like, ‘Okay. I’m going to spend all this money to get a different degree, only to still be in an office.’ Field work turned out to only be a small part of a lot of those fields. Whereas a long time ago, if you were a botanist or biologist, you spent a lot of time in the field. It’s gotten so molecular that you don’t even do that as much.

So I gave that up.

Serial Entrepreneur: I think when you have an idea, it sounds really great. It’s like this pristine thing. You’re just so excited. And then you test against reality and things become more discouraging and down to earth. You realize all the complexities around it.

CEO: As I travel around the world, people think that Las Vegas is only about gaming. When I first arrived here eleven years ago, gaming represented nearly 70% of the business. Today, gaming is in the neighborhood of 35% of the business.

There are many, many, millions of guests that come to Las Vegas and never go to a slot machine or a table. They come for the great restaurants, the great shows, the great hotel pool spa experience. We have the highest retail per square foot anywhere on the planet. The show attendance, the revenues from shows. The restaurants!

The guests have come to expect an entertainment experience from Las Vegas.

Surfer: I would say, don’t go for fame, go for fortune. Understand? Maybe you don’t. I always thought, I was under the illusion that fame was fortune. Right? And so without being a glutton, or a weirdo, I didn’t think anything about money. I still don’t. I kind of hypnotized myself. I didn’t need help. But, it was just the wrong thing to wish for. Because I got my wish. I got the fame. The fortune went somewhere else. Someone else was thinking about that. So I couldn’t even get involved in that shit. But I thought it came hand in hand. That’s a word of advice from someone who’s been through it.

Public Defender: When I went to law school, the first thing they said to us in our opening was to make a back up disk of who you are now because you won’t be the same person when you finish law school. That’s really true.

So find out more about what each job entails before you jump into it.  View a list of career interviews on our website.