We are addicted to magic bullets to solve all our problems. We want pills and potions and surgery and in business it is best practise or some new fangled software that will change everything and make you hugely successful. But the need for hard work and persistence just wont go away. On the other hand, it can work. Facebook friends open door to new employment

Derryn Brenan owes her new job at least partly to Facebook.

[...] Unemployed for four months, she felt the biggest risk to her future career was in losing touch with the industry. To keep up, she turned to social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.[...] "Every few weeks my network would broaden a little bit. It tells you if you have a friend in common and it will suggest [for example, if someone from a place where you've worked joins Facebook], 'Oh, you might know this person as well'."

[...] she had finally secured the job she has now, a marketing contract with Mercury Energy which runs until Christmas. Her boss, the head of marketing, was a Facebook friend she had worked with in the past. ... "I'm sure it helped," she says. "Because we are Facebook friends he sees my updates and I see his. It means that when he's thinking of staff I'm fresh in his mind."Mrs Brenan is now looking for a new job for next year and posted an update on her Facebook site yesterday.

By lunchtime, she had heard back from "two people from agency-land" saying, "We might have something for you."

The key is that the people she wanted to talk to are fully engaged with these technologies so they would expect to find her there and vice versa.

The trick for the rest of us is to figure out who, among our constituencies, is "there" and to use our online presence to talk with them.

When you put material online, is it just cut and paste from you hard copy press release or do you think about the segment of your supporters that you will find and customise the language and focus to them? Who does this? Is it someone like me who "thinks they know the online crowd" or is it, in fact, one of the online crowd themselves? Or does that look like too much work and not enough magic bullet?

Stories from the trenches always welcome in comments.

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