Headline: Submit a nomination to RecruitingAwards.com and you earn a chance to win an iPad 2. And you make the person you nominated feel great. How’s that for a worthwhile weekend chore?

In the spirit of actually rewarding the act of recognition, The inaugural Recruiting Awards from TalentHQ.com is giving you a chance to nominate a recruiter or Talent Managent Pro and be entered in a drawing to win the illustrious iPad 2. You can even nominate an entire recruiting team or organization.

You don’t have to dance or sell your soul. But feel free to do either, especially dancing.

Submit your nomination to RecruitingAwards.com by Monday, September 12 (5PM EST deadline).

Go on, do your good deed for the week.

~julian

Really Honest Disclaimer
This post is my good deed for the day. Jason is a good friend and I work with him on his websites and online marketing. I’m biased and admit that happily. This bias doesn’t change the fact that recognition is an important part of helping people in their life and career. So, that’s why I’m happily stumping for a friend. Have a great weekend.

I co-author EXCELER8ion with my better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of the time I’m a pixel farmer for my clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far way, EXCELER8ion was a blog about Internet marketing that accidentally transformed in to an online recruitment marketing blog. That was fun. Most of my writing these days is on behalf of clients and I post my own stuff on social media and JulianSeeryGude.com, where I share the best stuff I’m finding on the web.

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Note: The beta is free until the end of 2011 if you sign up today September 6, 2011. 

Are you interested in the stories people tell? How about the stories data tell? 

You’ve probably heard the saying, ‘lies, damned lies and statistics!’ and a chief reason for that is that it’s easy to miss the real story behind the numbers. While truth in statistics for politics aren’t likely to improve, the same can’t be said for Business Intelligence Dashboards.

Business intelligence (in business speak “B.I.”) may well be two of the most important keywords for business owners to research over the next five years as web services transform the data reporting and analysis industry the same way that blogs did for self publishing and journalism. Business intelligence is an arena that is ripe for improvement. Pay particular attention to new web based business intelligence services if you use web services (think Google Analytics or Mailchimp) to run your business and don’t have the time (or a clue) as to how to pull all that information together.

Of course, you’ve thought of all this before. Late at night as you ponder another day trying to figure out which lever of your business will effect your results. We lack time, tools and knowledge about what the most important things are to our business. We often have little or no idea what small actions and results will improve results over the next month or year. We suffer from too much data and not enough understanding about what it all means.

DigMyData is trying to address this by plugging a hole left by various web services from PayPal to Gmail. Here’s how DigMyData describes themselves:

“We claw your business data from the services you use to run your business and expose the secrets it’s been keeping from you

• » See how your business is put together
• » Know how your business is doing
• » Change your behavior to reach your goals faster”

From my early use I can’t say yet if DigMyData is THE transformative business dashboard you’ve been searching for, but they’ve got a lot of stuff right out of the gate. I have tons of websites and loading them in to the default chart view of digmydata is every bit as ‘yuk’ as looking at the source tools themselves but ‘chart sets’ promise a fix for this.  It’s probably worth your time to try digmydata’s beta and take advantage of their free offer through the end of this year. I’m signing up my clients for the free beta and it’s a rare day when I do that with a new service.

Read more about their beta launch here and sign up to try the beta here.

~julian

Disclaimer:  digmydata is extending my beta trial by the same time period as is available to the public by signing up for the beta today on their website. I’d recommend the digmydata trial regardless of any incentives.

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion.

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Are today

Short answer. For most of us, no.

I was listening to a favorite podcast this morning and the subject turned to blog and article commenting on websites. The podcast panel expressed their frustration and exhaustion with mundane or moronic blog and website comments. They have become the norm, rather than the exception.

Good points were made on all sides of the discussion. Some of the panelists pointed out that you reap what you sew, while others went the opposite direction and said that there’s simply no point with blog comments anymore – the idiots and machines have taken over (trolls and comment spammers). From a practical perspective, I agree with the latter.

My own experience is that commenting on websites is about social give and take (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) and less about an honest reaction to the content or a true desire for conversation. We stray from honesty and clarity in our comments because we have bills to pay and people or customers we don’t want to offend. Or, we get trolls or enemies with a bone to pick who are similarly biased, just with a negative tilt. Either way you sidestep reality.

Today you don’t need a comment system on your website to have engagement. People are engaged by good content. Good writing is engaging. Good video is engaging. Good products are engaging. Good design is engaging. What you need is a person to engage with, therefore an active social network, an email address, a phone number, a physical location, or an easy to find contact us page does the trick.

Even if you allow commenting on your website will anyone see it?
Imagine you saw a beautiful whale breach the water or some similarly rare and exciting event. What’s the first thing you do? You turn around to share the experience with anyone around who may have seen it. Even if they’re a stranger you want to share the experience. Have you had the experience of no one else seeing what you did? It’s a little sad. You can’t interact in an empty forest when you’re the only one around to notice the tree fall.

My point is that if you want to interact with people do it in a venue that has reach, social relevance and immediacy. Five years ago you could do that on a blog. Today, forget it. All but the most popular of blogs are desolate islands when it comes to interaction. If you enjoy what used to be possible on blogs in terms of community, friendship, sharing of ideas or values then migrate that behavior to a new venue.

But what about my blog?
If you’re talking about commenting on your blog it may well not be worth your time to have commenting enabled given the administrative headache of dealing with comment spammers. Just the time you spend fending off comment spam (even with myriad plugins and comment spam solutions) makes you question the investment of time for the occasional quip from a friend or associate. Can’t they interact with you elsewhere anyway? Won’t ten times more people see it on a social network if they do?

A great alternative to blog comments these days is to employ an old world method made popular by magazines and newspapers. Publishing reader mail. Done even moderately well, this is comment moderation and content curation that is superior to blog commenting in every way except one – immediacy. But, that’s more than made up for by the value a well curated weekly post with reader comments can have.

Publishing a weekly or monthly reader email post provides much the same benefit that blog commenting once did – it shows you care about other people and ideas and that you’re open to opposing views and dialog. And I’m confident you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that you edited out a trolls latest diatribe, your readers will too. Given today’s time and attention starved individual a post of reader email shows you’ve taken the time to moderate and curate your own community of ideas – giving your readers quality and additive information versus troll babble, comment spam, or just plain old crap content.

Got something to say? By all means give me a shout.

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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If you haven’t read my related post have a quick gander – it will tie some things together for this post. – Julian

The Evolving Engagement Model

The Broadcasting Model

It would be an understatement to say that communications models are changing. Old marketing and communications practices followed a we speak/you listen model. This worked out pretty well for marketers when people used to have more attention to spare or we could rely on the novelty of an advertising medium to break through the clutter. Unfortunately, the expiration date these days on novelty expires in months and not decades.

The issue now is that people don’t have the time or interest in listening. Before they expend their time and attention on your company or product an exchange of value has to take place. For today I’ll call that exchange of value, engagement.

The old model looked something like this.

Ye Old Marketing and Communications Model

The Interaction Model

Interactive online tools like blogs ushered in today’s interaction model and extends today in webinars, livestreams, chat rooms, virtual worlds and social networks. Clearly we have a lot of tools that make it possible to better listen. The influence of these tools has grown and today companies are starting to see the value in listening more. But listening skills aren’t enough and far too many organizations are still stuck in the broadcast model.

The interaction model looked something like this.

The transitional model - think web 2.0

The Evolving Engagement Model

With today’s tools we have what we need to move towards a new engagement model that focuses more heavily on listening, processing, interacting, and broadcasting. Ideally, the net result is tangible engagement and then a lift in your brand.

It probably resembles a formula like this.

Listening 30% / Processing 20% / Interacting 30% / Broadcasting 20% = Engagement

The evolving engagement model

In my next post I’m going to dive into the engagement model in more detail and perhaps in another post or two we’ll bring it all together with an actionable process.

Let me know if you’ve thrown up in your hat yet or if any of this is making sense.

- Julian

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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Where you are is where it’s at, The new interaction engagement model

One of our sister practices at exceler8 is called LOCAL Na8ion where we help small businesses harness the web to get more customers from their local city. Our slogan at LOCAL Na8ion is where you are is where it’s at. The slogan hints at how our physical and virtual worlds have become intertwined. At times, where we are is a state of mind, such as when we’re contributing to an online community, while at others we are grounded in the context of our physical location and needs like when we go out to dinner or look for a plumber on Google.

Where your people are at has changed

The slogan is apt for our new service Brand Trampoline because where you are and where your people are (be they job seekers, consumers or buyers of your product or service) has radically changed…if you want your company to be where it’s at you have to participate.

Every aspect of life is converging and connecting

Connections are now happening in multiple contexts and dimensions including our physical proximity and shared interests to our social networks of friends and associates on Facebook, Twitter, email and blogs, and yes offline too. Perhaps the ultimate mashup of all these interactions is  TCFKAP – The computer in your pocket formerly known as a phone. Wait, did I just make a Prince reference?

Facebook is becoming the web’s top source of traffic

The web today is pretty search centric (that’s spelled G-O-O-G-L-E) but times are changing quickly, Facebook is fast becoming the web’s top source of traffic. Real time search results and social search are replacing the way we interact almost overnight. We have new interaction touch points, tools, and communication vehicles and in almost all cases consumers, job seekers, and local buyers are way out head of the typical enterprise - be they the mom and pop variety or the Fortune 500.

Companies of all sizes are making one of three mistakes

1. They’re failing to engage at all.
2. They not keeping pace with where people are moving due to budgets, expertise or red tape.
3. They’re failing to engage in a meaningful way, often in the form of broadcasting their information rather than following an interaction model (what we refer to as digital engagement)

We all need to let go of the paradigm where our company website is where it’s at. Not that we don’t need one, it’s just that your website has already become a spoke in the wheel as far as people are concerned while your business operations, marketing and PR are still treating it like sun that your customers all orbit around.

The new interaction engagement model

We’re going to take up the case of the new interaction engagement model in the coming week but you might not be surprised to learn that success in our new world is based not in technological expertise or marketing gimmicks but old fashioned common sense applied in a contextually thoughtful way. Not to sound smug but it’s called listening. Have you noticed how little room there is today for listening? It’s hard when everyone is an expert and all of us posses some fantasmic skill or solution for becoming wealthy, skinny or successful overnight. Listening and understanding are more important today than in any time in our history.

Rather than rushing to establish an online reputation it’s useful for us all to recognize that we already have one, just like we already have a company culture even if you HR team or CEO failed to launch a multi-million dollar culture initiative in the 90′s.

I look forward to picking up the conversation about the new engagement model (er, old) in the coming week. In the mean time we’ll be out there looking for threads of knowledge in this and other conversations and looking to engage in more understanding.

-Julian

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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Video Topic: Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting

Earlier this evening I watched Shannon speak live at ERE’s Social Recruiting Summit at Google (it was streamed live on uStream). If you didn’t have a chance to watch her talk live you can catch up by watching the embedded video above.

Shannon’s talk was full of actionable information sure to be a boon to employers looking to engage in social recruiting. As a first step Shannon asks you to start by listening – which in Web 2.0 talk is called online employer reputation management. If you’re looking for a good place to start with social recruiting and online employer reputation management, tools to use, or simply want a good overview of social recruiting strategy, I think you’ll find her talk an hour well spent.

A couple of gems I wrote down during her speech:

“…you don’t build your community, you need to find your community.”

and on engaging your community…

“…you have to move in, not just visit.”

Of course, once I found out there was a live stream of the ERE event I had fun telling family members to go watch Shannon live.

Our six year old son took it in stride:

me: “There’s mum all the way across the country where you were born! She’s live.”

John: “oh. What’s she doing?”

me: “she’s talking with people about the Internet.”

John: “cool, can I have some popcorn now?”

It was also particularly gratifying to have Shannon’s mom posting Facebook status updates about her daughter’s talk as she watched it.

- Julian

Julian Seery Gude, EXCELER8ion Founder and co-author

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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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.

Thanks so much!

- Julian

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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.

[tags]Adam Einiger, Bernard Hodes, Omnicom[/tags]

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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.

[tags]Conversational Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing[/tags]

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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 book The 4-Hour Workweek and 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.

- Julian

[tags]The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss, outsourcing, personal outsourcing[/tags]

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You’ve probably read the news about fifty times over by now that The New York Times just killed their paid subscription called TimesSelect. Aren’t you ready for a fresh voice that doesn’t just parrot what everyone else has already said? Me too! I recommend you read my Father’s post TimesSelect Meets Web 3.0.

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!

Your # 2 Son

-Julian

[tags]Web 3.0, TimesSelect, New York Times, Hans Rosling, newmediatheory.net, newmediatheory, Marshal McLuhan, McLuhan, [/tags]

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Click to Play

[tags]social networks, social networking, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Mash Yahoo! Mash, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friending, blogs, blogging, vlog, vlogging[/tags]

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A blogging friend of mine, Yvonne LaRose asked me an interesting set of questions on Facebook. I wrote her back first thing this morning and then I thought it made sense to publish my answers. Who know, maybe you’ll find the content interesting as well.

Yvonne asked about what I thought about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and if I had any new terms I might be able to tell her about. I offered enterprise mashup and bacn . Bacn because it’s timely and relevant and enterprise mashups because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past four months (more to follow on this later).

Hi Yvonne,
Sure I’ll give it a go!

I think web 2.0 has been beaten to death. In memes, articles, and white papers it has been defined in a great number of ways. For me web 2.0 is about interactivity. Web 1.0 was about publishing and getting offline stuff online. Web 2.0 was about empowering individuals and adding conversation. In my opinion this brought *people* in to computers and the Internet for the first time in a meaningful way.

Web 3.0 is very up in the air as to what will shake out. Many refer to this as the semantic web, a place where a much richer tagging and classification of underlying data will drive greater access to content. Think enabling technology. I think all the technical stuff that underlies web 3.0 is very cool but the focus should be about humanizing the web, or humanizing technology.

I think that what is happening with web 3.0 has a chance of doing this. To me, I’ve always been a geek and a technologist but I feel now my mission and use of this technology is here for the purpose of connecting US – we the people! Just like Facebook did for this exchange between you and I Yvonne. A bunch of 1′s and 0′s in programming made it all possible to execute but a person and a group of people made things like blogs, messaging clients and Facebook. For these reasons I beleive we are living in a renaissance.

New terms: hmmm.
As you say, mashup is a really good one.

How about enterprise mashup! I just completed a four month project on enterprise mashups (company mashups for profit). It’s about combining multiple data and or web functionality to produce something. At the very least a useful aggregation of stuff on the web but if done well, a solution or tool that is better than the sum of its parts.

Example: You want to build a site for collectible baseball cards. You build a mashup that collects classifieds information from eBay, Craigslist and forty different speciality sites that sell collectible baseball cards. You put it all together in a new online database and design a user-friendly search engine to sit on top of it. Then you get fancy and add a shopping cart that lets your site users buy baseball cards from any of those sites through your own new easy-to-use baseball card shopping site. You get the data by using mashup tools to scrape the web sites you want the information from. Scraping is no different than Google robots (bots) crawling sites to check for changes so they can be indexed in the search engine.

One more? Bacn. That’s pronounced bacon.

“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

Now, I think since I’ve done all this work early on a Sunday morning I’ll go publish my reply on a blog somewhere – maybe someone else will find it useful. Hopefully you got some little thing from all my blather!

Cheers Yvonne and thanks for writing.
- Jules
[tags]bacn, web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, mashup, mashups, enterprise mashups[/tags]

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There is some profound news afoot and I want to share it with you in case your normal media outlets have reduced it to an afterthought (most have).

Big mainstream media outlets reported the news but failed to report the big story, instead obscuring the story with statistics that only an economist would find interesting.

There are now more service based jobs than farming jobs for the first time in our world’s history. Further, the world’s workers are now skipping the industry sector and heading directly to the services sector.

This changes a pattern that has existed for 10,000 years.

Read about it here “For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry” with the man credited for bringing this story to light, Peter S. Magnusson.

For another take read more about it here on my Father’s blog who made me aware of the story.

Then try this quick post at Sippican Cottage to add some further context.

And if you just like to watch and want to continue blowing your socks off with new world perspectives watch this pretty-damn-amazing video embedded below by Hans Rosling: Global health expert and data visionary about how the world has changed through industrialization. The video isn’t about the jobs data but is relevant to the underlying story of industrialization.

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Boomers are an interesting lot – and there’s a hell of a lot of them. A good combination for employers, marketers, politicians, and web 2.0 startup companies looking to build vast piles of money from them, win their favor, or harness their expertise in the work place. There’s a post from yesterday on the New York Times titled “New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age” and it’s a good read for anyone wanting to get a 50,000 foot view of newer social sites like eons, and multiply.

“…there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.” – sourced NYT

So what’s going on with online social networking tools in this crown jewel of market segments? In a word – lots.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.” – Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed

Said another way, online Boomers don’t suffer from shiny object syndrome (ohhhh, that’s pretty, let’s try that!) like younger generations are famous for. Even as an entrenched Gen X’er at 38 I no longer look at a BMW without having the accompanying thought that you give up a lot of hard earned cash (see: freedom) to drive around in a pretty car. I sure as hell didn’t do that when I was in my 20′s.  Web companies, employers, investors and venture capitalists are all seeing the direct benefits of catering to Boomers and for good reason.

There’s anecdotal evidence now with early web companies in the space that their instincts on Boomer’s stickiness is well founded.

“Peter Pezaris, president and chief executive of Multiply.com Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he believed that older customers were stickier than younger ones, but said the evidence so far was anecdotal. He said 96 percent of the company’s active users returned each month, a statistic that he said impressed the venture capitalists who considered investing in the site.” – Peter Pezaris CEO Multiply

In the job search engine space we have the boomer focused RetirementJobs.com, a niche Boomer version of CareerBuilder or Monster.  RetirementJobs.com published some interesting research last year that corroborates some of the news featured in the New York Times piece.

“RetirementJobs.com research shows that on top of experience, workers over 50 stay in jobs longer, waste less time at work, and relate better to companies’ older customer base. Employers are increasingly luring 50+ workers given that half the U.S. workforce of 130 million people is scheduled to retire, or take a retirement job, in the next 15 years.”

RetirementJobs.com polled their users and pulled out some interesting charactertistics.

Right at the top is flexibility and lifestyle integration. Freedom.  From looking at these numbers you’d have to conclude that Boomers no longer agree with their youthful battlecry so perfectly echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee – “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Like any other generation Boomers have their own unique needs and desires and they need their own kind of pad to hang out in online. I believe that the only thing holding them back from being just as addicted to social networking sites as our younger generations is a relevant hang out. Get relevant and people will get connected.

[tags]Boomers, Baby Boomers[/tags]

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Shannon and I have been microblogging for some time now on Twitter. Shannon is also addicted to Facebook and thanks to her I’ve also been known to show up there. Come be our friends and share our life, we need all the help we can get!

The point is that we’re always publishing – just not necessarily on exceler8ion.

We have lots of blogs as you might know and we even update them once in a while. Taken alone, they can be all together too quiet – aggregate them and you can see that we’re always online doing something.

That’s the point of a lifestream – you use RSS feeds to get everything into ONE portal page. ONE ring to rule them all. We’re using a hosted service called tumblr to publish our lifestreams and we’re both very happy with tumblr’s servic now that Shannon hacked tumblr to include comments.

Come along for the ride and start a lifestream of your own. It was our friend Ami Givertz who inspired me to get off my duff and create a lifestream. I was lamenting on a phone call with Ami that I often grew discouraged by the difficulty of keeping up with so many blogs and yet still wanted to have them be separate and distinct based on content focus and reader interest. So after I finished bitching Ami said that he felt the same way and had done something about it. You can always count on Ami to be an action oriented cheeky monkey!

You’ll find our last 8 posts from each of our lifestreams right here on the right rail of exceler8ion or you can go to Shannon’s directly by pinging shannonseery.com or aka thegeekmarketer or mine here on Julians.name. If you start your own tumblr then make sure to add Shannon and I as friends so we can keep track of each other.

I recommend tumblr because it’s super simple to use, not the slightest bit technical, you can use your own url (or not) and you can post ALL types of content, including text, video, pictures, and many more. It does all this with a very inviting interface that encourages you to post. Yes, and there’s the aforementioned ability to aggregate all your RSS feeds at the same time. If you’ve thought of blogging but haven’t because you don’t have the time then a tumblelog on tumblr could be just what the doctor ordered.

[tags]lifestream, lifestreaming, tumblr, tumblelog[/tags]

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I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book for a while (an autobiographical novel) and it’s up towards the top of my list of things I’m worried I’ll never get to. How about you? I’d venture a guess that amongst our readers a brilliant book or two is distinctly possible. Cameron Moll, of Authentic Boredom an acclaimed designer, blogger, and pretty damn interesting person has a post today covering what it takes to publish your own book.

Let’s just stop and acknowledge the good fortune we all share today. If WE SO DESIRE, and IF WE WORK OUR ASSES OFF, we CAN publish our own book. Or produce and distribute our own music. Or make our own movies. We are living in a renaissance. But no one said it was easy being da Vinci.

Reading Cameron’s post about making his new book Mobile Web Design reminded me a lot of how difficult blogging can be.

And for inspiration? Begin with the first step I suppose. Then add a measure of fortitude, inspiration, sweat equity and resilience and you should arrive safely at your destination. Maybe…

[tags]mobile web design, books, writing, publishing, user generated content, user generated media[/tags]

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Thought you all might find this ad that appeared on Facebook today of interest.

They may well have been there all the time but this is the first one that I saw. Looks too much like regular Facebook content which is why I read it. Very annoying. Ho hum, back to work.

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This article is published in association with the CollegeRecruiter.com Blogswap.

Author: Liz Handlin
Author Website: Liz Handlin’s Ultimate Resumes Blog

I hope that you had a lovely Labor Day weekend, I certainly did. My brother came down from Dallas for a visit for the first few days of the weekend. On Monday, Labor Day, after my brother went home and my husband had gone to the outlet mall to avail himself of the holiday sales I spent the day watching the Travel Channel.

Specifically I watched the Anthony Bourdain “No Reservations” marathon. I had seen a few Anthony Bourdain shows in the past but had never watched as many as I did on Monday. I was really engrossed in the show because of Bourdain’s passion for travel and his absolute fearlessness. Bourdain’s enthusiasm and wit sucked me in to watching several hours of his adventures in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, and Ghana. It occurred to me that we can all learn something about the value of being passionate about our jobs from Anthony Bourdain.

Anthony Bourdain is sarcastic, funny, outspoken, and knowledgeable about food and travel. He loves trying new foods, some of which I wouldn’t try for a million dollars. Bourdain is a celebrity chef who ran his own restaurant for 28 years before taking his current job with the Travel Channel. So, when it comes to food he really knows his stuff and isn’t afraid to try any dish anywhere in the world. In other words, he has the perfect job (for him).

Are you fearless when it comes to your profession? Are you in the perfect job for you? I hope you are. I hope that when you see opportunities you take them. I hope that you try new things and walk fearlessly and happily into new experiences. If, however, you don’t feel passionate or fearless about your career then maybe you can learn from

In particular, I appreciate his confidence in his opinions and his outspokenness when it comes to sharing them. He wrote a blog post about the Food Network and its varied hosts/personalities that is one of the funniest things I have ever read. I admire him for being absolutely confident about his point of view and fearless about sharing it.

Check out Anthony Bourdain’s show on the Travel Channel sometime and see if you don’t come away from the show with a boost in inspiration. He inspired me to get started on some projects that I have been procrastinating on starting because they are a little daunting. If Bourdain can eat a seal’s eye or a sheep’s bladder I figure I can muster up the courage/energy/inspiration to start some high impact projects that I have been putting off!

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Watch the video.

Great creative, great concept, great content. Love it! But, where are the viral hooks for people to share the video? No email to a friend, no embed code for a blog, Facebook, or MySpace, no nada. WTF? From a social media perspective this is like calling a Quarter Pounder with Cheese a Royale with Cheese.

Shannon, thanks for showing this to me luv – it made my day!

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That it all. This profound moment in blogging has been brought to you by EXCELER8ion. Have a nice day.

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What’s your metaphor?

I read a great post some time ago over on Creativethink.com by Roger von Oech . Roger uses a metaphor exercise during his workshop to get his participants to think about their company culture and persona (my own extrapolation of what Roger is saying). Here’s the original post on his blog.

Roger inspired me to fire up my favorite text editor and write a couple metaphors for exceler8. Make one of your own and post it on your blog or here (I’d love to hear from you). Be serious or have some fun (or both).

exceler8 as a science lab

Our company is a like a science lab at Princeton. There are a bunch of smart people from all different walks of life all mixing up ingredients in the belief that we’ll invent the next wonder drug. We enjoy it when our experiment blows up because the explosion is both entertaining and educational and because we know we’ve just moved one step closer to creating our vision.

exceler8 as an API for people

exceler8 is like an API for people. We know how to plug in or connect systems (people) that speak different languages (knowledge) with divergent protocols (practices) but share a common end and are both stronger from the combination in achieving it.

Hmmm. What do you think? I like the blowing up/science lab metaphor because it seems like real life and captures some of my real nature. The second one is attractive to me because it’s a little clever and cheeky which is also like me (well, I said a little didn’t I!)

[tags]Corporate Culture, Strategic Planning, Employer Branding[/tags]

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Thanks to one of Shannon’s partner’s in crime (hat tip Laura) we have the following representative example of old fashioned marketing colliding with today’s consumer.

The inspiration for the movie comes out of Microsoft. Surprised? You shouldn’t be – Microsoft has proven more than any other company that if you get out of the way of your people, your people can save your ass.

In this example Microsoft employee Geert Desager AND Microsoft’s Belgian communications agency Openhere have been turned loose in the blogosphere with some good ideas, a blog, and some video production talent. The result? Here’s what Geert has to say on their results after two weeks.

“Another small update:

• more than 75.000 views of the movie
• more than 240 incoming links
• more than 250 comments on the blog”

What a couple of people at Microsoft did, and even more importantly, what Microsoft DID NOT DO (try to stop bloggers like Robert Scoble), is what makes it possible today for Geert and Openhere to do this.

Today this outreach continues and has continued to evolve with stories like Geert’s and Microsoft Recruitosphere pioneer Heather Hamilton. To these people, The Scoble’s, The Hamilton’s, their bosses, and bosses bosses go the thanks! Not only does Microsoft win in advancing their products and services but they also build a stronger employer brand and employee culture. Moves like this make it easier on the recruiters at Microsoft to land their next software guru. It’s a nice contrast to the tyranical employer brand that Apple is presently building for their abusive blogging and employee communication policies. Apple would do well to go back and watch their famous lemming commercials while consulting Wikipedia with a keyword search for “Orwellian.”

Well done Geert, and Robert and Heather and the legions of other Microsoft talent who have helped move us forward. Everyone in corporate america owes you and Microsoft our thanks, and not just for Excel or Word.

– Jules

p.s. Check out Openhere’s about page. I love their pitch (even if it isn’t a pitch).

“Openhere is an agency where open-minded people work for open-minded advertisers. “

You get the idea that soon the agencies that pretend to hold these values will be replaced by ones that really DO believe in what they’re selling. We believe.

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Dear EXCELER8ion reader

Now that summer is here we’re getting around to Spring Cleaning. Now THAT’S EXCELER8ion!

All jokes aside, our blog caught a nasty flu over the winter that it’s just recovered from. The symptoms? Old comments obliterated. The ability to post new comments: S.O.L. Our blog went from a sounding board and coversation to a simple web site. We feared we had returned to the year 2000.

I keep meaning to get to all the fun work that is involved in switching hosts, migrating databases, updating blog plug-ins, changing design, cleaning house and myriad other tasks. With all that work to do and the same stacking up for my clients it was looking like it would never happen.

I decided to chunk it. No, not chuck it, CHUNK it. Take it one small step at a time. Moved the host, threw up a base design I like, started the never ending customization process, and wrote a post (this one ‘ere).

Hey, you can comment now.

The old content will be forthcoming. So will all your old comments. Updated blog bling. Some greater focus. Lots of stuff too exciting to even contemplate.

We’re not gone, we’re not out, we’re just focusing our EXCELER8ion on client projects and not our blog fixes. We hope you’ll understand. Oh, and leave a comment now that you can.

Be well

– Jules

p.s. reports of Shannon’s abduction by aliens are completely false. She’s just being held captive by Corporate America (the real illegal aliens).

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What do French Fries have to do with innovation in recruitment practices? Well, you’ve come to the right place to find out.

I was just reading a great post by Jason Warner from Google over on his site, meritocracy.net. He starts out his post by recounting his experience with the pleasant staff from IN-N-OUT Burger with their simple yet pleasing menu, and the recognition that IN-N-OUT must be employing some really good recruiting practices. JW goes on to compare IN-N-OUT’s laser focus to the moving target – Jobster.com, whose recent layoffs and change of focus has left some folks without jobs, and left customers/prospects, JW included, wondering what business problem Jobster.com solves. JW makes great points about the realities and subtleties of staying on the leading edge of recruiting – this post is my contribution to that conversation.

Here’s a quote from JW about IN-N-OUT to get your mouth watering:

“…I stopped by an In N Out Burger over the weekend and had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. The restaurant I visited is right down the road from my corporate apartment of Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, and I was amazed at the quality of the staff that was working. These people were friendly, attentive, and in genuine good spirits. It was a unique fast food experience to say the least. In N Out is doing something right when it comes to talent acquisition.

If you haven’t been there, In N Out Burger sells 6 items. That’s it. I counted. Only six: Burgers, Milkshakes (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry), Sodas, Milk, Coffee, and French Fries, as I recall. $350 million per year of these 6 items by most estimates (they are privately held so we don’t know for sure).”

What’s so innovative about a menu so lacking in variety? To answer that question you have to consider IN-N-OUT’s history:

“In 1948, the first In-N-Out Burger was founded by Harry and Esther Snyder in Baldwin Park. Harry’s idea of a drive-thru hamburger stand where customers could order through a two-way speaker box was quite unique. In that era, it was common to see carhops serving those who wanted to order food from their car. Harry’s idea caught on and California’s first drive-thru hamburger stand was born.

The Snyder’s business philosophy was simple: “Give customers the freshest, highest quality foods you can buy and provide them with friendly service in a sparkling clean environment.” These principles have worked so well over the years that they are still the company’s fundamental philosophy.“

Back in 1948, the innovation was the speaker box – who would have thought that an oft ridiculed device of our modern era would prove to be a feature that consumers found attractive. We can only assume it was the speed and convenience of drive thru service that caught people’s attention back then. But, what kept burger lovers coming back was a focus on solid business fundamentals, in the form of providing a squeaky clean burger stand and only the freshest ingredients and methods of preparation. Today, the speaker box is no longer an innovation but what is innovative, is great tasting fast-food and great service!

And what about recruiting and hiring practices?

In-N-Out pays its employees significantly more than the federally mandated minimum wage of $5.15 per hour and California’s minimum wage of $7.50 per hour — currently starting pay is a minimum of $9.50 per hour. For its full-time associates, the company offers complete employee benefits, and provides ‘fringe’ benefits in the form of annual company picnic, gifts at Christmas, the opportunity to participate in a variety of other company-sponsored activities, as well as paid holidays and paid vacations. On average, each of their 200+ store managers earn just under $100,000 annually, and have been with the company for 13 years. The restaurants are closed on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter. It is one of the few chains to receive a positive mention in the book Fast Food Nation. In-N-Out is active in the communities it serves. Every year the company provides free burgers to participants marching in the Rose Parade, provides cans for donations, matches customer donations 3-to-1 in April for National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and underwrites various fundraisers to support local charities and non-profit organizations.”

source: wikipedia, IN-N-OUT

I’ll let you be the judge of whether these specific practices would be best categorized as innovative, or simply solid business fundamentals. For me, they are often hard to separate in practice, since the ability to execute on business fundamentals is so incredibly rare.

Innovation is a culture – it doesn’t tend to happen in isolated silos (just talent acquisition or just sales for example) so it’s not surprising that IN-N-OUT has lots of innovation up its sleeve. While the burger connoisseur in me has long coveted an IN-N-OUT burger and shake, the marketer in me has always appreciated their ability to create scarcity, devout, loyal (even rabidly loyal) customers, while fostering an environment where community word-of-mouth from their happy customers was rewarded.

I’m talking specifically about IN-N-OUT’s now rather famous ‘secret menu.’

Back in the day, which in this case only goes back to the 90′s, IN-N-OUT was a state-of-mind that could only be enjoyed in Los Angeles. When L.A. transplants traveled home for the Holidays from Northern California, New York, Seattle, or other far-flung locales, their itinerary for their visit would look something like this (I’m not exaggerating – if you’ve spoken with enough people about IN-N-OUT you’ll know that this is pretty common):

• get bag from luggage claim
• go to IN-N-OUT
• head home for Thanksgiving Dinner
• visit best friend from Grade School
• Go to IN-N-OUT with friend from Grade School
• depart

These devout IN-N-OUT clients were the very community that created the secret menu. And long before the ‘secret menu’ was acknowledged on a corporate web site, before even the presence of a corporate web site, there was IN-N-OUT’s burger university where store managers were taught to live and breathe not only their core menu, but the secret one as well. Those store managers then made sure that all of their staff knew BOTH menus and that the cash registers had selections for secret burgers like the ’3×3′ right along side their most famous menu item, The Double-Double.

IN-N-OUT, did these things because their customer focus went beyond listening to their customers, they were students of their customer. As such, they made adjustments to their menus based on observing the nuances of their clientèle. Just as JW talks in his post about being a student of business, and how he uses this focus to help him innovate in talent acquisition:

“What I have done is made a career out of observing and assessing behaviors, competencies, and the subsequent results of executive leaders with whom I’ve worked with at both large companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, and Google, and at the small 50-person start-up Oracle technology consulting company that my team and I helped rapidly scale in the late 1990s. I have become a student of competencies, behaviors, and their resulting impact on business results.

One of the key behaviors I see effective leaders consistently dispay is to separate the productivity from the activity in their pursuits, and winnow that down to clarify business results around a single, well-defined objective. Generally, things aren’t as complicated as we make them.”

The key that relates to innovation I’d like to pull out of JW’s comments lead me to my summary for this post:

Breakthroughs in performance often come from taking notice of some small, but terribly important characteristic or trend (think Gladwell’s Tipping Point here). IN-N-OUT’s first was the speaker box, a solution to address the explosion of the car culture that L.A. created and is still known for the world over. IN-N-OUT is like the world class surfer who pours over tidal data and weather reports as much as they study the ocean and the break of the waves before venturing in to the water the same way a pro golfer will pour over the bend of the grass on the putting surface or the surrounding terrain, knowing how it will make the ball move from left to right or vice versa before making their putt. They are students of the small, but terribly important characteristics of their trade.

To innovate in any area you can often get the jump start you need from just this kind of observation, analysis and perceiving, and a student of business looks for clues to their problems and solutions EVERYWHERE. Sure, you already attend recruiting industry events, network with colleagues, and read blogs that cater to this community like JW’s Meritocracy – but don’t get stuck in our little world of talent acquisition – for its borders, like any small community are reassuringly relevant but so well defined as to sometimes prevent new thinking.

If you’re going for innovation – you NEED new data, new exposure, new people, new networks. Perhaps an example from one of my old communities would help bring this point home:

I ran an online ad serving team for a network of 40+ web sites. I was, and remain, a student of web technology, design, online advertising, ad serving systems, and analytics among others. A few years ago, as the dotcom economy recovered, the online ad market experienced their first true widespread inventory shortage. One of the key aspects of online ad inventory is that it is perishable. Once you serve a web page with the ads that are supposed to appear on it, that inventory is GONE. In other words you are dealing with a highly dynamic format, and a perishable commodity.

All of a sudden the key topic in every ad serving newsgroup was about inventory utilization and optimization. All sorts of new practices were developed – my peers and I hired and trained dedicated inventory management personnel, and we all worked on improving our systems to better manage our perishable inventory. In the heat of all this work it occurred to me that we were trying to rewrite the book on how to manage inventory, as if we were the first to have to deal with such matters in business. I started to think of other non-internet advertising related fields that might help shed some light on our struggles.

Can you think of any?

Sure you can. The one that excited me the most was the grocery industry. Who has been dealing with the problems of efficient use of perishable inventory longer than your grocer? Food goes bad, demand ebbs and flows, annual cycles run their course, unanticipated spikes in demand occur, and through it all at the end of every day – what is not sold is tossed out, gone forever. With people starving around the world, the perfect picture of waste and lost money. What I learned from searching for information in this industry gave me new insight into the problems of inventory management, from people, who unlike me and my peers, had been dealing with these issues for their entire career, rather than a few months.

What parallels in talent acquisition can you find in the lessons of IN-N-OUT, JW’s post, or my example? Please, let me know what you think. Perhaps you can even share an example of how the subtle differences you observed, the dots you connected in a moment of shower inspiration, once helped you create an ah-hah business practice in recruiting and talent acquisition.

P.S. For JW and other Bay Area newbies, the burgers at IN-N-OUT are hard to beat, but right across the San Mateo bridge and a little north of you is a local East Bay Burger chain called Nation’s Giant Hamburgers. Their location in Alameda at 1432 Webster street is one of their oldest and Alameda is well worth exploring. Their original location was actually in San Pablo, and then Oakland’s Jack London Square, and the latter is worth a visit as well but since JLS has been strip mall-ized to some extent I enjoy the laid back working class nature of their Webster street location. Yeah, I could send you to their newest Daly City location but this is an EAST BAY institution and so that would be pure sacrilege. For my money, Nation’s make the best burgers in the Bay Area – I’ll go so far as saying that as a burger connoisseur who has sampled many hockey pucks across this great nation, that this is the best chain burger I’ve ever had, perhaps even the best ever.

- Jules

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