Just over a year ago, I wrote a post highlighting 100 must-follow career mavens on Twitter. Since then I’ve continued to curate that list, adding new promising voices and focusing in on those that dedicate their tweets to the career advancement of others. The result, I’m excited to say, is what I believe to be the essential collection of career experts for executives on Twitter.

I did some fairly extensive research for this list. It includes top personal branding gurus, job search experts (including on resumes and interviews), as well as influential recruiters, search consultants and human resources executives. At first, I attempted to rate the final selections using popular Twitter rating services like WeFollow, TwitterGrader and Twitalyzer. While I think these services are on the right track, they are clearly not quite there yet. Unfortunately, I find that human curation is still the most effective means to identifying just the right candidates. Below are the four main metrics I settled on in the selection process:

1. Must tweet career advise for those at or aspiring to be at executive level.
2. Must have been included in at least 100 Twitter lists
3. Must have at least 1,000 followers
4. Must have a positive follower to following ratio.

I tried to rely solely on popular metrics, but there were some subjective exceptions that I made for those times when somebody was on the cusp on one or more metrics, yet still had exceptional information in their tweet trail.

Truth is, there are only 75 career mavens currently on this list. To get to 100 I need your help. Did I miss somebody? If I did, send me a tweet that includes the hash tag “#career100” on Twitter and I’ll be sure to add them to my list.

Without further adieu, here are the 100 Best Damn Career Mavens for Executives on Twitter. Enjoy!

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All companies that have used social media successfully have a common trait. It’s not the features or benefits of their products. There are thousands of companies making great products with exceptional and sometimes groundbreaking features that never make it. Products are not what inspire us to follow a company or spread their message. What inspires us, as Simon Sinek points out in his book about leadership, Start with Why, is the motivation behind why they do what they do.

Social media is about people, and if you want to inspire people to follow your company and purchase your products, then you need to stop looking to connect with people that need your products and instead find the people that believe what you believe.

Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Apple don’t have millions of devoted followers because their products are the best (they’re not in my opinion). They’ve managed to become the companies most successful at using social media because they clearly and often communicate to us what they believe. The same holds true for all of the great leaders I’ve ever admired. They have a dream, not a 10-point plan.

Unfortunately, most companies (and people for that matter) don’t know why they do what they do.  And if they do know, they haven’t figure out how to communicate it to the rest of us. When I say “why,” I’m not talking about making money, that’s a result. I’m talking about telling people about why your organization exists. What’s your cause? Why do you get out of bed in the morning and why should anybody care?

Of course this common trait holds true through all sales, marketing and communications. But what makes social media such a tough nut to crack is that unlike passive, couch-potato media, it’s a medium that requires people to become actively involved in the marketing process. And if somebody is going to become involved in spreading your message, it’s going to be to fulfill their own needs, not yours.

If you don’t know why you do what you do and people respond to why you do things, then how will you ever get people to buy from you? Make your products a way to prove that you are committed to your cause and your social media strategy will succeed.

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You are the leader of the most powerful organization in your work life—your professional network. How and where you lead it will determine what you get out of it.

What many professionals don’t realize is that by turning their professional network into a self-sustaining organization or tribe, they will have positioned themselves to benefit personally from the good works of others. The idea is to turn your network into an organization that not only provides you with job and work leads, but also one that provides hundreds of others with the same.

Traditionally, large groups have been difficult to form and costly to sustain. Mostly it’s because the most efficient way to manage a group has been through a hierarchical managerial framework. That framework is unsustainable without the capital to support the people (management) that holds it together. That’s why most traditional organizations that originally formed for a greater good inevitably must re-focus on self-preservation.

However, today the Internet allows us to organize without organizations. Eliminating the prohibitive costs of managing a traditional organization means that the size and scope of your professional network is only limited by what you wish to accomplish and how you inspire others to achieve it. In that spirit, I’ve outlined ten steps towards creating a thriving professional network of any size or scope.

1. Make Meaning. Your first task is to define the purpose of your network’s existence. Complete this sentence: If your organization never existed, the world would be worse off because_______________________________. A strong sense of purpose will be the only thing that pushes you beyond the dips.
2. Circle of Five. Recruit four co-founders that share similar passions. As the network grows you’ll need a tight circle of peers to share the workload and maintain the integrity of your fledgling group. Ideally you’ll want co-founders with extensive personal networks and a communications platform from which to influence people, such as a blog or newsletter.
3. On LinkedIn. Start a LinkedIn group and have your co-founders invite every relevant contact from their own personal networks. Encourage them to ask their closest contacts to do the same. LinkedIn allows you to quickly reach critical mass because everybody is already there and joining your group requires only a click. Make each co-founder a group Manager so they can invite contacts and reject applicants if necessary.
4. Meetups. Meeting face-to-face is still the most powerful way to make a lasting connection. Using your LinkedIn group, start organizing meetups at local coffee shops once or twice a month. Remember to vet the location and schedule events off peak hours. Encourage everybody to bring one or more potential new members. Use a sign in sheet to collect names and emails—after the event share that information with attendees.
5. Growing up. When you outgrow the local Starbucks you’ll need a more intimate and dependable venue. Look for local outplacement firms, libraries, churches or a community college with an available conference room. These organizations welcome exposure to the local business community. They typically won’t charge a fee, but I highly recommend giving them a plug during meetings and on all network communications.
6. Emails. Eventually you’ll need to communicate with hundreds of members. Speaking directly to each member is impossible so it’s time to start a newsletter using a simple email distribution service like ConstantContact. Use their free newsletter templates and don’t forget to track open rates and click-throughs to ensure your messages are favorably received.
7. Expert Presenters. Once you can predictably fill a room with say 15 professionals, you’ll be surprised how many highly-qualified presenters will be looking to speak to your group for free. High caliber membership attracts high caliber presenters. It’s a great draw for members and it’s a terrific networking opportunity for the presenter.
8. Website. If you want to attract press coverage, business partners or exponentially expand your audience, you’ll need a strong central presence online. I highly recommend a free and dead-simple to use blogging platform like Wordpress. Sign up, choose your template and have your website up and running within minutes. It’s that easy.
9. Connectors. Always keep an eye out for “connectors.” These individuals are expert cultivators of acquaintances and are powerful allies as you look to expand geographically. If you wanted to expand from say Los Angeles to Orange County, you’d find members with extensive personal networks in those regions. They can fill up meetings quickly and give you instant credibility with the right type of professionals.
10. Fees & Dues. Eventually you’ll be tempted to make a living off of your network. Anybody would, but be warned, it’s likely to be an uphill battle. Choosing a revenue stream introduces market norms into an otherwise purely social environment. Helping others without direct reward feeds our need for community. Introducing money into the equation gets members into a more cynical you-get-what-you-pay-for mind set. Basically, it’s too easy to lose the warm fuzzy stuff that greased the network’s wheels in the first place.

Don’t be surprised if your organization takes on a life beyond your original intention. That’s a good thing. At the end of the day, when you’ve done a great job, you’ve given members the ultimate gift, the infinite possibilities that come from meeting likeminded people and making new productive connections. And for that, they will always remember you.

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This is the second post summarizing Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (affiliate link). If you missed Part I, click here to read it before starting this one.

The perfect social media strategy… doesn’t exist yet.

Truth is that with just over five years of experimentation, we are still in the trial and error phase of understanding how exactly social media will shape our culture. Shirky points out to the early days of Gutenberg, who made a mint typesetting bibles and indulgences. If you lived in the fifteenth century, you might have thought the printing press was made to buttress the Church. However, just the opposite happened. A flood of printed indulgences swept through Europe, leading to Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Luther’s rebellion then went viral thanks to the printing press and ultimately undermined the Church’s dominance.

Quote: Because we’re so lousy at predicting what we will do with new communications tools before we try them, this particular revolution, like the print revolution, is being driven by overlapping experiments whose ramifications are never clear at first.

8 Lessons To Improve Your Odds For Social Media Success

In the final chapter, Shirky provides a goldmine of information that alone would make the book worth reading. Below are my favorite eight lessons:

1. Start Small: to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger.
2. Behavior Follows Opportunity: it doesn’t matter how much you want users to behave a certain way. What matters is how they react to the opportunities you give them.
3. Growing: a hundred users are harder than a dozen and harder than a thousand. A hundred people is often too big to operate as a single group but too small to become socially self-sustaining.
4. Participation: you can’t insist that participation be either equal or universal. A low threshold of participation invites the accumulation of the smallest units of value.
5. Intimacy Doesn’t Scale: you can have a large group of users. You can have an active group of users. You can have a group of users all paying attention to the same thing. Pick two because you can’t have all three.
6. Support a Supportive Culture: a visible willingness to enforce the rules, actually reduces the amount of energy the people who run the network have to expend on policing, because the members know they can count on predictable support.
7. Success Causes More Problems Than Failure: successful services heighten expectations and attract people that want to take advantage of the goodwill of others.
8. Clarity is Violence: groups tolerate governance only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. The burden of rules has to follow, not lead.

Cognitive Surplus did not live up to my expectations, but my expectations were so high that it’s still well worth reading. One of my biggest bones to pick was that Shirky, time and again, used the same academic studies originally used by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational, a must read on another one of my favorite subjects–Behavioral Economics. In short, Cognitive Surplus has some insights worth absorbing, if you haven’t read Shirky’s previous book Here Comes Everybody, or Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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This is Executive Book Summary is the first in a series of book reviews. If you would like to check out the rest of my bookshelf, where I’ve rated several of my favorite books, click here.

Clay Shirky (TED, Blog, Twitter) is the Godfather of social media. His work on Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (affiliate link) in 2005 was a visionary book and is still a must read for any serious student of social media. His encore work Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (affiliate link) is another worthy read, but wasn’t as intellectually satisfying. Not that it wasn’t written eloquently and convincingly, it was, but because he recycles ideas that don’t bring much new to the party. With that said, I still highly recommend this book, if only because these insights can’t be emphasized enough.

The fusing of means, motive, and opportunity creates our cognitive surplus out of the raw materials of accumulated free time.

In Cognitive Surplus, it isn’t the big ideas that make the book worth reading, it’s the way Shirky positions social media in a historical prospective. Just as in early 18th Century London the population drank themselves into the Gin Craze to cope with the harsh realities of early industrialization, post-World War II America turned to sitcoms to consume their new-found free time following the advent of the 40-hour work week.

When Boomers today ask where “these kids” find the time to post on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, they need only look to their wasted youths watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy. As Shirky points out, recent generations are opting to take advantage of the abundance created by social technology to communicate, share and be generous through amateur content, as opposed to sitting back and mindlessly consuming the scarce content created by professionals. And because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorientating to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.

Quote: In fact, were this preference for the professional universally applied, we would all be patronizing prostitutes -they are after all far more experienced at their craft.

Abundance creates opportunities.

In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations. Where once we sat brain dead watching Gilligan pooch the rescue yet again, social media is providing opportunities for humans to express a previously untapped need to communicate, share and create on a massive scale, desires driven by both intrinsic (personal) and extrinsic (social) rewards.

Quote: Interpretations of those behaviors that focus on the technology miss the point: technology enables those behaviors, but it doesn’t cause them.

A an old motivation, revealed through new technology.

Contrary to common belief, social media and other studies in behavioral economics are proving that human motivations based on social contracts can be stronger than those based on market compensation. For as long as we can remember, there have been two ways to get things done on a civic scale: the first was by government and the second through commercial enterprise. However, we now have a third viable option: wired communities that leverage massive aggregations of small contributions into civic-scale projects, for example Wikipedia and Ushahidi. According to Shirky, understanding how to create and maintain those communities for the greater good is one of the great challenges of our era.

Quote: Is their behavior rewarding a desire for autonomy or for competence? Is it rewarding their desire to feel connected or generous?

Clay Shirky concedes that there are no fool-proof recipes for social media success. However, over the last few decades we’ve learned a few things about human interactions that can improve the odds for those of us committed to using social technology. The second part of this book review (to be released) will highlight some of those keen insights.

Clay Shirky at TED discussing Cognitive Surplus

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Most executives that are honest with themselves know that the services they offer are virtually identical to those offered by competitors. Don’t believe me? Take a blank piece of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left side write the top five selling points you use to convince prospects to choose your firm over another.

Now for a bit of good news, bad news. First the bad news, you’ve just been fired by your firm. Bummer. The good news is that you’ve been hired by their biggest competitor. With your new employer in mind, now write the top five selling points you’d use on the same prospect. For all intensive purposes, the two lists are likely similar enough to be unconvincing to prospects looking to make a decision.

So how to differentiate? The answer is not in the services you provide, but in the people that deliver them. You’ve spent valuable time and resources recruiting, mentoring and immersing your employees in your company culture. Why not amplify that investment by arming them with social tools that allow them to build deeper, more trusting relationships with stakeholders, clients and prospects?

The technology to get there is free and widespread. The missing ingredient is senior leadership with the vision to see beyond the new technology to the well-worn business adage it actually supports – people like to do business with people they know, like and trust.