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Seelio, a social network to match college students with cool jobs, has launched its beta to anyone with a .edu email address.

On Seelio, users can spice up their boring, old resume with graphic designs, computer-aided projects, videos and academic papers. Students with shared interests can connect, and potential employers can reach out directly through a private messaging service.

Moses Lee, the site’s founder and chief executive, told me that he was inspired to build the site after hearing students complain that they seemed identical on paper.

“The career center was coaching them to use the same buzz words or keywords, even the same active verbs,” said Lee, a serial entrepreneur who developed the site while working at the University of Michigan’s Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

The site, initially known as “TruApp” in its alpha phase, was developed by Lee, and cofounders David Jsa, and Jerry Wang, at the University of Michigan. The first version was launched late in the recruiting season, and succeeded in placing about 40 students in jobs. Now the site has built relationships with 180 employers, primarily in the tech industry, including Airtime, PayAnywhere, Menlo Innovations and Compuware.

No doubt, Seelio will primarily be used to source engineers and designers, but Lee said it has been used by employers to fill creative roles. At times, the right candidate for these jobs is an unlikely match on paper. For instance, one student, a brain and behavioral studies major, proved to be perfect for a marketing position.

The focus on college students is reminiscent of Facebook, but unlike the social networking giant, Seelio’s founders have deliberately opened up the site to potential employers. They pay $50 per month to reach out to students on the site, and $150 to post a job. Registered companies can create a multimedia platform of their own to attract young talent.

“Typical students don’t have much job experience but they are doing projects outside of classes,” said Lee. “Employers are more excited about these projects than their part-time job at Barnes & Noble or the cafeteria,” he added.

Students applying for companies not affiliated with the site can include a link to Seelio on their resume. It’s less time-consuming than starting a blog or building an online portfolio from scratch.

In the height of the recession, digital natives have increasingly gone to extreme measures to stand out from the pack. In March, 22-year-old Lindsay Blackwell developed and designed a website, described as “the best social media application ever“, for an employer, coincidentally the University of Michigan.  Lee told me that Blackwell’s job application was an inspiration for Seelio.

Seelio faces competition from AfterCollege, which is targeted at seniors and recent grads looking for entry-level positions and internships. During the recession, a small number of startups developed to make job applications pop. On sites like JobOn, job seekers can record a video to send alongside a resume. Lee told me that Seelio is different as it’s exclusively focused on college students — a practical decision as they typically own the rights to market their own work.

The next step is to bring Seelio to other universities in the Midwest, including Northwestern and the University of Illinois. Unlike Zuck, Lee doesn’t intend to board the first flight to the Bay Area to reach that elusive Stanford.edu. “A lot of companies are looking for great talent right here in the Midwest,” he said.

Filed under: VentureBeat

This guest post is by Anne-Sophie Reinhardt of aMINDmedia.

We all know this dream: you’re walking down the street, wondering why everybody is laughing, snickering and pointing at you. You look down and notice you’re naked. The shame that washes over you is immeasurable. Everybody saw you. All of you. The parts you’re extremely insecure about, the parts that you’ve always tried to hide, and the parts you hate and would do anything to get rid of. You’re revealing it all.

Blogging tends to feel that way too.

You put yourself out there. You write from the heart. You try to get real. You’re basically repeating that nightmare, with the only difference being intentionally telling people to look.

People will read it. People will discuss it and they will criticize it.

Putting yourself out there makes you vulnerable. It makes you attackable. It’s like taking the defenses down in the biggest battle of your life. It often feels counterintuitive. However, once you become completely authentic, you’re blogging success is practically guaranteed.

There’s only one unknown barrier: your self image.

How hating yourself ruins your career

I hated my body, but most people—at least secretly—have something about themselves that they hate. So in the following discussion, feel free to substitute your secret hate for the word “body.”

Hating your body means having a lot of inhibitions. When you feel constraint by your physical appearance, writing about things in your life that aren’t perfect or may cause some controversy is brutal.

However, that’s exactly what readers want to read. They don’t want you to make them feel bad about themselves because you’re such a flawless human being and have your life all perfectly lined up. They want to read about your struggles, your challenges, weaknesses and maybe even your problems. That’s what makes you interesting and will keep readers returning to your site.

Being ashamed of your body is a telltale sign of having no self-confidence. Readers notice that right away. Sure, you can always fake confidence to a point, but when it’s real, it shines through every word you put on a piece of digital paper.

The time you spend worrying about the way you look, hating certain body parts or wishing your next diet will forever liberate you from these limiting thoughts is time you can use much more wisely. Just think of how many hours you waste that you could use proactively working on new blog posts, strategically planning guest posts or working on new ideas. The possibilities that will present themselves are endless and thrilling.

Tapping into your emotions when feeling insecure about yourself is almost impossible when you hate some aspect of yourself, but that is an integral part of successful blogging. People are moved by emotions and they want to read about them. Some of the most successful blog posts ever written focused on stirring up feelings in the readers in order to influence them to comment on and share your content.

Overall, your dislike for yourself hinders your blogging career in more ways than you can imagine—and I speak from personal experience.

How hating myself almost cost me my life … and how I saved myself

I was ten years old when I turned against myself and my body. The pressure of living with a brother who was mentally and physically abusing me finally broke me.

I had been too strong for too long, but now I needed relief and I found it in obsessing over my body. I blamed my body for everything: the beatings, the spitting, the screaming and the sheer terror of my brother’s presence.

I didn’t like a single thing about myself. My belly was too big, my thighs were disgusting, my face was fat, my legs and arms too short and my fingers round like sausages.

So, I tried to fix my life by fixing my body. Instead, I almost died.

I started a diet that quickly led into anorexia nervosa. I was miserable, depressed and hoped that shedding more weight would finally make me happy again. The insecurity was eating at me and was slowly but determinedly killing the once vibrant, creative and confident little girl.

I started retreating into myself, losing all my friends, too weak to engage in social activities. I sobbed on the way to my three– to four–hour workouts because I was so weak my feet were hardly carrying me.

I fainted several times because of malnutrition. I stole laxatives from my mom’s pharmacy. I told hundred of lies in order to protect my addiction. I tried to commit suicide in order to escape this disgusting body.

I went through nothing short of hell.

When I woke up after 14 years, it was almost too late. It was then that I faced an even bigger struggle than I had been fighting for most of my life: I needed to make peace with the body I was given.

Make peace with yourself

How did I make peace with myself?

I started to transform my thoughts from negative ones into purely positive ones.

I started to sit up straight and walk with a head held high. I started to strategically work with the mirror and only focus on the parts of my body I liked. I started to express my feelings in healthy ways instead of simply translating emotions into feeling fat. I started to readjust my values in life and put my body in perspective.

All of these actions helped me become more confident, and as a result, my writing improved drastically.

Now I am not ashamed of my emotions. Now I am not hiding my brilliance behind self-hatred. Now I am not shying away from spending hours upon hours in my office doing nothing but writing. Now I am not enveloped in a cloud of misery, but giddy with excitement about every day that I am given.

I wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my life by despising my natural self. I could have advanced in many areas of my work where I put a serious limit to what I could achieve by simply portraying how uncomfortable I really felt. However, now that I am in love with my body, I am ready to change the world with confidence, drive and a welcomed lack of limiting thoughts.

And the best thing is if I can do it, so can you. In the end only one thing matters: taking action.

If I was able to radically change my self image, you can write that epic blog post.

If I was able to overcome a deadly disorder, you can improve your craft.

If I can use my past for something good, you can put a dent in the world.

If I can embrace life with the excitement of a toddler getting a new toy, you can start following your dreams.

Don’t let your self image stop you from making your life and your work matter. Don’t give your poor self perception the power to determine your career. Don’t hide your greatness behind a layer of self-hatred and doubt and let your life’s work remain hidden for the rest of your life.

Take advantage of the freedom and the possibilities we have in this world, act upon them and by all means, let the world take a close look at the bright shining star you are.

Anne-Sophie Reinhardt is an anorexia survivor, body image expert and the owner of aMINDmedia. She empowers you to achieve a healthier and more successful life by returning to your true purpose and values.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Is Your Self-perception Killing Your Blog?

As Kara Swisher notes, Marissa Mayer has brought the first Google staffer to join her at Yahoo: Anne Espiritu, who ran consumer technology PR for Google. In other words, not a geek.

Espiritu seems happy about the move, if we can take her most recent tweet seriously:

Someone please pinch me. Just to make sure I'm currently not in a state of dream. #overthemoon

—
Anne Espiritu (@Anne_Espiritu) July 29, 2012

Espiritu has not yet updated any of her social media accounts. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ still show her as employed by Google, where she has worked since 2005 on projects including “proactive consumer media outreach for Google’s new social platform, Google+.”

Source: LinkedIn

Anne Espiritu

Espiritu also worked with Google Maps and various local initiatives for Google, which probably accounts for at least part of the Mayer connection. Mayer was most recently VP for maps, local, and location services at Google.

The obvious question: Does Yahoo really need help in the PR department?

OK, that was a stupid question.

Let me re-phrase: Does Yahoo need help getting its message out more than it needs help actually creating something cool? That’s perhaps a better question.

But it’s one that Mayer will have some time — and more than one hire — to answer.

Image credit: Eric Broder Van Dyke / Shutterstock.com

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

With the birth of Web 2.0, the Internet provided people with a lot of opportunities that they could only dream of. In fact, there are many online tools that were not made for marketing, but have a lot of potential to be used in such purpose. One of these is Twitter.

Why Use Twitter?

What makes Twitter an ideal marketing tool for businesses is its large and interrelated community. This makes the micro-blogging site a very convenient place to promote your brand. All that you need to do is set up an account, attract followers, and start tweeting.

It also offers a lot of helpful tools that can let you track your potential audience, the people talking about you, and what they say about you. If you know how to use Twitter to your potential, you can monitor whether people are pleased with your brand or not.

Furthermore, it can help you determine your target market, and what they are looking for from your business. In turn, Twitter tools will help you learn what adjustments you need to do for your business.

Ultimately, Twitter is one of the best ways to connect with your audience. Communication between you and your customers is an important aspect of trading and marketing. This will enable you to build relationship and trust with your potential customers, letting you establish your online presence and credibility.

If you know how to engage your Twitter followers, it could help you promote your business further. In turn, it will help you generate leads and boost your revenue.

Before You Begin

However, having a Twitter account and hundreds of followers is not enough to start your marketing campaign.

Setting up an account doesn’t give you a license to hard-sell and over-promote your company. Bear in mind that Twitter is a social networking site. This means that you need to have a strategy to take advantage of its social aspect to leverage your brand. You have to learn first how you can connect and engage with your followers.

You have to plan on how you will present your company, as well as your products and services. Find and implement good tactics that will shed light on your company, without annoying your followers.

Using Twitter to help develop your business could be a beneficial undertaking. However, you need to carefully build a good strategy that will help you engage your followers, and leverage your brand further.

Source: Enhance Twitter Profile Pages | Twitter for Business

The post Twitter Marketing: What You Need to Know appeared first on About Social Media.

A couple of weeks ago, we learned about Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo! and the conversation in the media began to circle not around her qualifications, but the fact that she’s a pregnant woman.

In the comments of the blog post I wrote about it, Marianne Griebler suggested we talk about what we can do to ”combat this offensive nonsense, mentor young people, support each other, and dream together about a better world.”

At the same time, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ria Riaz from Girls in Tech Toronto to talk women in the business world and more executive positions.

During that conversation we discussed why women are our own worst enemies and what we can do to be better to one another…and how we can change the world for more equality.

It’s funny. I suppose this also goes hand-in-hand with the “women having it all” conversation, as well.

As much as I joke about Global Domination (it is my initials, after all), I truly believe we can change the world by working together and changing our little piece of it.

How Do We Do That?

It’s not easy. But it has to start with us.

It’s in our DNA, our genes, our chromosomes to be catty and judgmental. But we have to stop being that way. The circle repeats itself because young girls see us behave that way and they learn the behavior. It must stop.

Supporting other women is the very first step in how we do that. Stop judging what they’re wearing, how they speak, how they do their hair, and whether or not we think we could live their lives better than they do.

You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all done it.

But how can we expect men to take us seriously if we don’t treat one another with respect?

Support One Another

Ria and I made the keen observation that there were only two women speakers (minus the panelists) at SocialMix on Thursday…Amber Mac and me.

I’ve also made the observation that I’m typically the only or one of just a couple of women who are in the priority lanes at the airport (which equals frequent fliers). On Friday morning, as I flew home from Toronto, I was the only woman who had priority access on that flight.

Women are not being invited to events as much as men. But plenty of women organize and coordinate those events.

Can you imagine a day the speakers at a conference are equally balanced between women and men?

I’m not advocating adding women to the conference agenda just to balance it out. But there are plenty of women speakers who are fantastic.

Invite them to speak at your next conference…and pay them the same fee you would pay the men (I’ve noticed women are paid about half of what men are paid, but that’s a different story for a different time). Pay them the same.

Mentor and Dream

We all have different views of how we want to live our lives. That’s good! But it’s not up to us to judge someone’s choices just because they’re not the same as our own.

Mentor one another. Dream together. Support one another. Find ways we can change the world by changing the way we behave around the women in our lives.

I’m building an organization that is flexible enough to respond to the personal needs of employees – both men and women – who want to exercise in the middle of the day, who need to respond to kids and/or parents at home, who need a mental health day after working a really rough week, and who aren’t judged if they’re not at their desk every second from 8:30-5:30.

The organization is built on getting results and we’re moving more and more toward achieving goals vs. working more hours.

What are you doing to support the women in your life and change the conversation?

It’s always good to see advertising agencies flex their artistic muscles outside of paid, commercial work. BMF have collaborated with some top photographers to visualise people’s recurring dreams. They even involved a dream doctor to cast her analyzing eye on the stories. A physical exhibition and an extensive online gallery with videos are the result.

Dive into ‘As you dreamt it” here.

Agency: BMF in collaboration with various photographers.

With successes like the Pebble smart watch, crowd-funding is becoming more and more attractive to startups. But maybe you aren’t even at the startup stage in your idea. Maybe all you have is an idea and a computer. That’s where Noodlecrumbs comes into the picture.

It’s a new type of crowd-funding for those of us who don’t quite know how much we need to make the dream a reality. In fact, Noodlecrumbs could be used by someone who doesn’t even want to build the actual product, but just wants it to be built. I have friends who pitch me ideas all the time, and I say, “sounds good, build it.” Most of the time, they say they don’t have time or don’t know how, but they’d love to use the product. That’s the perfect situation for Noodlecrumbs.

Once the idea receives some funding, organizations or companies that have the means and resources to build the product write up proposals to take over the idea. Those who have donated then get a vote for which proposal is best.

There’s obviously a fatal flaw here: that this sort of “reverse” fund-raising suggests the founder knows nothing about his or her chosen project – or at least not enough to know how much he needs. It’s kind of a Kickstarter for the catastrophically lazy – or that’s how it could be perceived.

Shukla used the example of a mashup between two of your favorite artists. Obviously, you can’t just send Lady Gaga and Gotye an email and hope for the best, but you can post about it on Noodlecrumbs and see if the rest of the world is interested, too. If enough money is sourced and interest displayed, perhaps the artists will want to collaborate for their fans.

The second concern would probably be in equity for the “founder” of the idea. It could be argued that anyone who has a truly great idea, one they fully believe in, would pursue it. But founder Sachin Shukla feels that there are plenty of people who have an idea for something they’d like to use rather than something they’d like to build and distribute. And when it’s as easy as posting the idea on a site and doing nothing more, there isn’t a huge cost associated with planting the seed.

To the point of equity, he said there may be a way to offer some equity to the “founder” in the future, but he’s still just testing the water to see what picks up.

The platform is brand new, so there’s only one project currently looking for pledges, a startup based TV show called Midas Touch. It’s already received $500 in funding, which is a good start.

So if you have a genius idea — and you don’t want to follow through with it — post it up on Noodlecrumbs. Maybe one day it’ll actually be a real thing. Or maybe not!

Click to view slideshow.

Meet the new faceless face of chemical conglomerate Dow. He (it?) is a giant green biped made of hedges, created by Draftfcb in Chicago. He goes to London and helps Olympic athletes train, mostly by getting in their way. He symbolizes the planet, which the ad points out, has "its own Olympic dream"—which is, not getting completely destroyed by humans. Of course, the planet doesn't actually have that dream. Planets don't dream, or walk around as anthropomorphic shrubs. Not destroying the planet is a dream people have, because they want to keep living on it. Incidentally, not all of them are feeling so happy-go-lucky about Dow's role in the Games, mostly because of a dispute over the extent of its responsibility for the long-term effects of a devastating 1984 gas leak at an Indian pesticide factory, owned by a company Dow has since acquired. Dow's environmental history is otherwise checkered. In recent years it's earned EPA accolades for improvement, and paid EPA fines for past lapses. Anyway, it might want to consider a different Olympic mascot (he's actually called Hopeiary … groan), if only because this one is pretty ridiculous.

Annoying Orange creator Dane Boedigheimer is a surprisingly normal guy. Yes, he’s contagiously funny, digitally famous, and has started wearing his hair Bieber-style. But despite the popularity, Dane is a clever guy who “just likes making videos.”

The first Annoying Orange video debuted on October 9, 2009. It was a short YouTube video about a talking orange who pesters an apple (“Hey, hey Apple!”)…until the kitchen knife comes along. Dane’s friends insisted he make more. The original Annoying Orange video now has more than 120 million views, and it seeded a sensation.

iMedia’s Bethany Simpson recently spent time with Dane. Find out more about the guy who created YouTube’s No. 10 most-subscribed channel, including his favorite Annoying Orange character voice, his dream celebrity guest, and what comes next for the famous fruit.

Meet the Annoying Orange gang

Annoying Orange creator Dane Boedigheimer introduces us to Orange, Pear, Midget/Little Apple, Marshmallow, Grapefruit, and the rest of the core group (pun intended).

What is the Annoying Orange TV show like?

Annoying Orange’s dream celebrity guest

Will there be an Annoying Orange movie?

Who is Annoying Orange’s favorite voice?

Annoying Orange gets LIVE results from the Cartoon Network

Dane Boedigheimer (also known in the video world as Daneboe) is the creator of the Annoying Orange series, the No. 10 most-subscribed channel on YouTube. Dane is a prolific video creator, the founder of Gagfilms, and at one time he worked for MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.” In addition to the Annoying Orange web series and TV show, Dane continues to produce additional video features including Daneboe Exposed and Video Game Mashups.

You can follow Dane and Bethany on Twitter.

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The dream of two Stanford professors of making America’s higher education system interactive and universally accessible just got one step closer, with an extra $3.7 million in funding ($22mm total) and 13 new university partners, including Caltech and Duke. “I think the reason for the huge enrollments is that these are real courses,” says Co-founder Andrew Ng, who met up with TechCrunch at the Annual Aspen Ideas Festival*. With an expanded university roster, a swelling piggy bank, and 1.5 million users, Coursera has become a major player the recent surge of universities and for-profit education organizations looking to dominate the web.

Like MIT and Harvard’s joint online education initiative, Coursera aims to bring actual top university courses online with a measure of interactivity and peer support. In addition to the same video lectures and reading materials enjoyed by enrolled students, Coursera provides interactive quizzes, tailored learning, and homework help from a student’s digital peers.

To incentivize peer support, Ng says that students are rewarded for helping to grade other students, after they can prove that their assessments match the same grade that the instructor gives on a set of student homework. This way, Coursera peer support approaches the same quality that enrolled students get with professors. Still, Ng says that Coursera cannot replace universities, since it’s impossible for online students to get the same one-on-one mentoring with a professor.

We’ve been critical of online education in the past, arguing that video lectures, even enhanced with some interactivity, still propagate the antiquated memorization-obsessed education standards of the 20th century. While Coursera isn’t looking to revamp education, students can have confidence that online learning is a quality experience, as a review of research by the Department of Education found that students learning online performed as well as those in physical classrooms.

Coursera has no immediate plans for monetization, but is mulling ideas like selling certifications. Their newest equity funding round comes from “two universities, as well as additional investment from current investors New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers Education,” according to a press release. Education is a big (big) market, and as college costs outpace many Americans’ ability to pay tuition, the market will be ripe for a leader.

*Disclosure: I help the Aspen Institute with a separate government innovation-related conference

Image Credit: Flickr User 401(K) 2012