Every year, Computerworld asks people in the geek community for their New Year’s predictions. The full article is here.

My responses included:

We will see social networking fatigue, but savvy users will continue to use platforms to build their personal brands. For most people, updating Facebook gets tedious, and your “friends” really don’t care which Hogwarts faculty member you are. Twitter takes a lot of work, although it can be a great personal brand-builder, with enough effort. LinkedIn is improving, mostly because of its Answers section; users can become well-regarded authorities in their subject areas by investing an hour or two per week posting thoughtful questions and responses. Plaxo? Please stop pestering me. You’re too far down my social networking depth chart for me to spend any time with you.

And

While the concept of a social networking guru might seem quaint by 2013 (do you have a photocopier guru in your office?), there is an opportunity in 2010 for people who really understand how to make social networking happen within the enterprise. While there are still a lot of carpetbaggers and “gee-whiz” cheerleaders playing in this market, I still find that there are a lot of people who don’t have a basic understanding of social networking and are reluctant to ask for help.

What are your thoughts? What will 2010 have in store for social networking?

Many of us had the advantage of committing most of our really stupid behavior before the days when everyone at, say, a keg party had the ability to record and publish said misdeeds. There are lots of stories of people losing opportunities for jobs because of inappropriate material posted on social networking sites. In a well-publicized case, someone lost an opportunity after tweeting “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” Someone noticed it and responded “Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

On the other hand, having an impressive social media presence can be a huge asset for a job seeker. For example, being LinkedIn to important people in the field or people with buying authority builds one’s gravitas, regularly retweeting interesting articles makes one a useful resource, even clever Facebook updates give an insight into one’s creativity and personality. A good social media presence also improves traditional resume fodder,  a hyperlink to “please visit my blog” is better than “excellent written communication,” and “I am proud of the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile” is so much better than “references available on request.”

Have you experienced any social media snafus?

Sometimes, it’s nice to be small. The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

Recently, I was directed to their new Council Agendas and Minutes webpage. I recommend you check it out.

Here’s why.

At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting.

As anyone who’s ever attended a City Council meeting (or the legislature, or parliament) knows, the 80/20 rule is basically always in effect. About 80 percent of the time the proceedings are either dead boring and about 20 percent (often much less) of the time the proceedings are exciting, or more importantly, pertinent to you. One challenge with getting citizens engaged on the local level is that they often encounter a noise to signal problem. The ratio of “noise” (issues a given citizen doesn’t care about) drowns out the “signal” (the relatively fewer issues they do care about).

The City of Nanaimo’s website helps address this problem. It enables citizens to find what matters to them without having to watch or scroll through a long and dry council meeting. Better still, they are given a number of options by which to share that relevant moment with friends, neighbors, allies, or colleagues via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, or any other number of social media tools.

One might be wondering: Can my city afford such a wiz-bang setup?

Excellent question.

Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up.

Two weeks?

No million dollar contract? No eight-month timeline? No expensive new software?

No, if you’re smart, a couple of creative hackers can put something together in no time at all.

You know what’s more – because Chris and the City of Nanaimo want to help more cities learn how to think like the web, I bet if the IT director from any city (or legislative body) asked nicely, they would just give them the code.

So how Open is your city? And if not, do they have $2,000 lying around to change that?

As creativity becomes increasingly important to all jobs, existing corporate recruiting and management processes face challenges. Some of these were documented recently by the Conference Board in “Changing Attitudes to Work – What Should HR Do.“  (Subscription may be required to view.)

First, some numbers about employer attitudes and approaches to hiring for creativity:

• 97 percent of American employers agree that “creativity is increasingly important in U.S. workplaces.”
• 72 percent say that hiring creative people is a primary concern.
• 85 percent of employers who seek creative employees state they struggle to find them.
• 25 percent assess creativity from interviewees appearances.
• Less than 20 percent use profile tests to identify creativity.

From the above, it seems that many companies appear lost when it comes to an approach to finding the types of employees they want.

The ways that creative people often want or need to work sometimes challenge traditional HR practices.

• 75 percent of junior to mid-level staff use social networking tools while most senior leaders have never done so and are concerned about privacy.
• Younger people appear to be more entrepreneurial, interested in starting their own ventures at some point. This leaves some HR professionals concerned about hiring them, wanting “lifers,” but in making this preference they may be rejecting some incredibly driven and talented people from contributing to their company.
• Many talented younger people are not interested in the traditional hierarchy of career paths within a company. Creative people often want flexibility, whether to balance work-home life or shift laterally within the company to learn new skills.

What do you think of these stats? Do you feel like you fit in at your workplace as a creative?