Shannon isn’t one to toot her own horn but I don’t mind doing it for her. Er…Coming from her husband that sounded a little dirty didn’t it? Bill Vick published a great interview on Friday with Shannon on XtremeRecruiting.org about using social media in recruiting. Check it out here.
I think Bill asks excellent questions on all his interviews like this session with Jibber Jobber’s Jason Alba or this one with Chris Brogan.
My focus these days is helping small businesses attract clients in their local town or city using local online marketing and social media. Because of their small budgets, the small business market is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention from our Recruitosphere or ad agency types (or bloggers for that matter). Since there are so many recruiting experts who visit EXCELER8ion I would love it if you could stop by my latest post on recruiting for small business on Local Na8ion and give them some of your words of wisdom in the comment area - it will really help my Local Na8ion readers a lot.
As some of you know, Shannon is a Vice President at Bernard Hodes, the online recruitment marketing agency that makes next generation careers web sites and the like. Shannon was very fortunate to hire some former Jobster talent this year and one of those people was Adam Einiger. During a recent video shoot for a client the video and client team were testing the cameras when they asked for someone in the team to get on screen for the video and mic check. This is Adam’s version of a mic video/audio check…
I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed his rendition and I’m pretty impressed by Adam’s creative side (awfully important at an agency where creative solutions are a must). I asked Shannon for a few words about what Adam does and she gave me this…
“Solutions Provider, Interactive Producer, Sales Engineer, Magician, F-bomb dropper, flip-flop wearer, new daddy, all around straight up good guy!”
There’s only one thing missing as far as I’m concerned with this content and it’s easy to fix. Get it front and center on the main Hodes web site. Hodes has some good video content on their site but I feel this content is better because it isn’t staged and it demonstrates (rather then telling) a creative mindset, technical ability, and a healthy culture.
While it’s a great example of personal branding it also represents a fantastic employer branding opportunity. I hear many people lament that they don’t have any good employee video to put on their careers sites. When was the last time you searched on Google and YouTube for your company name or the names of employees with the mindset of finding valuable content you can leverage? Right, social media has much better uses than as a recruiters tool to bust recent college applicants with wild Frat party pictures!
Just because the video isn’t about how great your benefits are doesn’t mean it won’t work when placed in context of an employer branding theme. More and more, there is fantastic employee generated content that employees would be only too happy to have featured in a positive light on your corporate site. Just ask and ye shall receive.
Readers here on exceler8ion know that Shannon and I are social media advocates and practitioners. As geek marketers we use this stuff, we live this stuff, and we make this stuff. Joseph Jaffe of JaffeJuice.com, a respected colleague and conversation leader in our space is hosting an online book sale today over on Amazon.com. His latest book is called Join The Conversation and promises to share new research, case studies, insights, along with trends in social media that are happening right now in businesses around the world - large and small.
Joseph is using OUR network of bloggers and blog readers along with his offline and online social networks to make a statement about our collective voice today by selling as many books on this day as we can (Sunday October 21, 2007). I just purchased a copy for Shannon and I, and I hope you do the same. Joseph does very good work.
Buy the book today using this link and Joseph will donate all the affiliate commissions from today’s book sales to charity.
If you want to enjoy more of Joseph’s work I’d also suggest you listen to his weekly podcast Jaffe Juice and visit his company Crayon, a social media company among the first agencies to build online communities in Second Life.
Do you feel like you’re running on a treadmill and can’t get off while your life passes you by?
Work for a boss or company that belongs in the last century?
Clawing your way through each day trying to achieve a work/life balance while all the time you’re drowning in financial and spiritual red ink?
Do you know deep down that you’re not living up to your potential?
Me too!
At least I was until a couple of years ago.
Have you heard about entrepreneurial phenom and renaissance man Timothy Ferris? Tim is on the New York Times bestseller list right now with his bookThe 4-Hour Workweekand with good reason. You may have heard that Tim went from earning $40,000 a year working over 80 hours per week to earning $40,000 per month while only working 4 hours per week. His book has people talking about personal outsourcing - using big company strategies to delegate your own personal and business work offshore and replacing that found time with high yield work and time for life. I just finished my first reading of his book this morning at 1:30. I read it over a few days and had a hard time putting it down. Next, I’m going to re-read it and do all the exercises and put the game plan in to action.
While I don’t have time for a full review right now - my main goal is to make the strong recommendation that you go buy the book and read it this week. More importantly, that you act on his recommendations as I am going to do (I’ve already started using some of his tools). There are some true paradigm shifts in this book that strike me as completely unique and I am really excited by the potential I believe is here. There are others that you’ll recognize as tried and true management practices, business, or personal management skills that have proven to work for many others.
The difference between many of us and Tim is that we don’t act on this knowledge at all OR we do so inconsistently and incompletely. It is clear from reading Tim’s book that Tim is highly effective at *doing*. That’s why he put together a supplement business soon after attending Princeton and started ringing up $40,000 in monthly income before he got smart and really accelerated his business using the techniques he details in his book. Tim is scary good because he embodies working smarter not harder - that’s the whole point of the book.
Whether it’s because you want to start your own business, spend more time living life richly, or get back to actually having a life while you stay in your current job there are actionable tactics in this book to help you. For me the book is exactly what I’ve been working on really dilligently over the last couple of years with my business exceler8 and in my life in raising my two youngest kids while Shannon slays the corporate dragon at Hodes Interactive.
This book is highly meaningful to me RIGHT NOW because I have been working my way up to doing the very things in Tim’s book that he recommends. He’s given me some needed keys to unlock my potential and has also confirmed that I’ve been 90% on the right track. I’m on the precipice of a big leap forward in my business and in life and I feel that you could be too if you can absorb and act on what this book is saying.
Good luck on your journey and let me know if i can help.
Dad got me thinking more about Web 3.0 and this is what bubbled up for me today.
Dad,
I agree that starting newmediatheory.net is aligned with Web 3.0 because you’re starting to use the tools we have for action, a tool that is an extension of man. It’s collaborative, and it’s focused on people - not blinded by technology for technologies sake. You’re not just driving in to the future with your eyes in the rear view mirror.
To be fair, newmediatheory.net doesn’t feature the tech side of web 3.0 yet (things like artificial intelligence or automatic linking and categorization with other like databases). But, I think the technology is the easy part in comparison to getting the human side of Web 3.0 right. And while I am trying to get people to focus on the people side of Web 3.0 I don’t want to lose the power of the enabling technology that Web 3.0 could drive.
For example, I think that the ‘one database’ theme extolled about Web 3.0 is very exciting because it could lead us more quickly to knowledge that will increase our understanding and in turn create clearer paths to action. We could see exponential increases in understanding if everyone and every organization connects every database and does it in ways people can relate to.
Your recent link to Hans Rosling is apropos. Rosling’s data visualization tool leapfrogs conventional analytical tools to create an entirely new understanding of the world around us. It clears a pathway to action. This is Web 3.0′ish.
We will continue to see new ways to categorize, connect and interpret LIFE, people and our world. There are so many fantastic possibilities with Web 3.0!
Bill Vick published a great interview on Friday with Shannon on XtremeRecruiting.org about using social media in recruiting. Check it out here.
EXCELER8ion is where Julian and Shannon Seery Gude write on Social Media, Interactive Marketing, Technology and Internet Business Topics. 