Can I Use JibberJobber With, And To Help, A Family Member Or Friend?

Here’s a question I get every once in a while… I got this last week:

“I’m a dad trying to help my son who is in college to get started on gathering data on industries and companies he has an interest in pursuing upon graduation. My quick question is can we share the use of the tool. I’d like to get it started by populating it with some data and work together with him to continue to advance his use of the tool.”

The short answer is yes, of course.

Over 10 years ago, when I had the idea for JibberJobber, I part of my vision was exactly this.  Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, whatever, helping someone who was just entering the workforce. Whether it is your kid in college, getting ready to interview for their first big job, or your brother deployed to Iraq, having to look for a new job when they got home, the idea was, and is, that multiple people (Seth Godin has called this your “tribe”) can and will help you.

You would simply create ONE JibberJobber account, which both (or multiple) people would login to.  It’s that simple.

Then, anyone can add information about potential network contacts, target companies, job postings, industry research, or anything else relevant to networking, the job search, and career management.

Since you are using one login, we can’t know which of you logged in and put in certain data, so you might adopt a system to say who put in what.  For example, if you put in a target company, perhaps in the notes you put your initials, like this: -ja.  This will simply let everyone know that YOU put that company in. I would recommend you also put in why that is a good target company, and even some background. Looking at the company later, you might find yourself wondering why you added the company. But if you put something like this:

“I met John, who works there, and he said they are doing some amazing things, especially in the mobile marketing space.  This seems to be a perfect fit.”

then you have some context. Trust me on this one, and do it as often as you can. As time goes on, and as you add a lot more data, it’s easy to wonder “why in the world is this here?” This applies to companies, contacts, log entries, etc. The more context, the better!

Here are two Jason Alba tips, if you want to help someone by adding data to their JibberJobber account:

First, set up your own account, enter the data (jobs, companies, etc.) there, and then “share” those to the other account.  Sharing data is easy…

Second, in the other person’s account, add your email as an approved Email2Log sender.  You can check out the Getting Started videos on Email2Log (videos #4 and #5). Basically, any email address that is added to the sending list can add data (Contacts, Companies, Jobs, Log Entries, and Action Items) to that account.  It’s very powerful, and convenient. What this really means is that you can add the information this dad is talking about without (a) logging into JibberJobber, and (b) learning the JibberJobber interface. He can simply do it by forwarding emails to JibberJobber…. very convenient!