February 9, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Nathaniel Whittemore, who blogs about social entrepreneurship at Change.org, often returns to the same piece of advice for his unemployed friends: Try blogging.
So why does he think blogging can help advance a career?
First, because finding things to blog about requires building your expertise on a range of topics.
Second, blogging helps a person determine his or her interests. Mr. Whittemore says that “this blog has definitely helped me affirm which pieces of the wider world of social enterprise I’m most excited about.”
Blogging can also help you become an authoritative voice in your field, he says, assuming what you write is interesting and of value to others.
And fourth, blogging provides an “excuse to network.” He says that, “as you become a voice in the field, it gives you a great context to e-mail or LinkedIn the brightest thinkers in your field, or the most interesting organizations.”
And Mr. Whittemore’s fifth reason for how blogging can help a career? Being able to sell yourself to a potential employer as someone who can help the company navigate social media.
But he says that “all this is predicated on one big thing, which is that if you blog, you blog hard. You can’t write a crappy post every other week and hope to gain traction.”
(See The Chronicle’s newly posted article about the ways online social networks are changing recruiting and job seeking patterns in the nonprofit world.)
What do you think of Mr. Whittemore’s advice?
