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.

Technorati Tags: lifestream, lifestreaming, tumblr, tumblelog

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Oh yeah, and this video coves user generated content, social media, personal publishing, blogs, online community, video, web publishing technologies like HTML, XML, and RSS and has same great music from deus to go along with it (oops, this is the deus I meant from the music in the video – two new music finds in one!).

This amazing video is courtesy of Assistant Professor Michael Wesch, who leads the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University. Thanks to Organic’s Three Minds blog for making me aware of this and Patrick Dunphy (I wish I had a link but Three minds didn’t post one) for making Three Minds aware of it.

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The good news is that I finally managed to get into Yahoo! Pipes. How have you fared? The bad news is that no one in our little community has done anything with it yet (search:recruiting). Quick, first one to do something cool with it gets…

well, good question. I’m just sitting here thinking about it.

On the other hand, our active job seekers seem to have the right idea.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo! pipes, pipes

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My Dad just sent me a Fortune article called “I got my job through Second Life” all about real people and real companies finding jobs directly through Second Life. It reminded me that most every job I landed over my career was through my small network of friends and associates and how the same has been true for my business exceler8. Here’s an excerpt from the Fortune story.

“And just as the way we surf the web changed, the way that corporate America does business has changed in this middle space. Case in point: the most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life. Instead of posting a resume on Monster.com that will hopefully net a flesh-and-blood job interview, your avatar can be interviewed and hired all within Second Life, often for jobs possible only in virtual reality.”

“People who have been in SL since its inception might not be professional content developers, but they have become experts,” says Brandon Berger, senior strategist at OgilvyInteractive’s Digital Innovation unit. Hence, Ogilvy has hired a lot of people directly from Second Life to execute projects for the big name clients who have worked to be in Second Life.”

Imagine arriving for your Second Life interview in this little number…

I first heard about Second Life from Jim Stroud and went to check it out after our phone call. Back then (which wasn’t that long ago) SL hadn’t yet exploded on to the front page of every business magazine, blog page and tech site known to man. Despite my complete lack of interest in online role playing communities (which is strange given my dweebiness and love of online community) I recognize that I have to be involved in SL because it is a highly relevant community for my personal and business interests. I am a social media geek after all. While I find SL’s interface complex, limiting and ultimately boring, I’ll keep trying it for the promise that it holds in meeting real people. There ARE interesting people in this community. And just like other interesting communities, our exposure to the new people we meet in them expand our horizons on all fronts.

Hey Shannon, does this qualify for the category you coined “Job Search 2.0“?

Technorati Tags: Second Life, SL, Job search 2.0, social media marketing

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CollegeRecruiter.com find themselves in a hot spot. If you’ve read my previous post this evening about mtvU buying RankMyProfessors.com you’ll know that a lot of heavyweights, like mtv parent Viacom, see big dollars in the college market. That’s why niche sites that really know the college world like Facebook and CollegeRecruiter are positioned so well in the coming months and years. Need I remind you that with the coming baby-boomer exodus from the workplace that demand on our next generation of workers may top that of any we’ve seen to date? Hey wait a minute, I’m in the wrong business.

After clicking on the “Add to Google home Page” button on CollegeRecruiter’s home page you’ll see a confirmation page acknowledging that you’re about to swear off all rights to your second born, (it’s all Google-e-gook to me) and presto, as soon as you hit the almighty confirmation button you’re taken to your personalized Google start page. Here’s how it looks on my Google home page where I searched for ‘Dream Job’ in Florida in my favorite industry.

This kind of user personalization and web site functionality has been a strong point for Google in the past year. Not long ago Google rolled out the ability to create your own custom search engine, like the one we used to create Popula8ion.com, which indexes our world of recruiting, jobs, and recruitment marketing over hundreds of sites across the globe. Personalized search is fast, more relevant, and more valuable because you get what you want the first time. The power of CollegeRecruiter’s Add Google button is in its simplicity: it is so easy and fast for users and publishers to put into action. It took me about as long to add CollegeRecruiter.com’s job search engine to my Google page as it did once for John Belushi to yell ‘Toga!’ in Animal House.

I asked CollegeRecruiter.com President Steven Rothberg about his Google addition via e-mail and he had this to say about it:

“Julian, I’ve been reading about “mash-ups” for a while now, where one web service is combined with another and thought that there must be some good potential there for CollegeRecruiter.com. I’m a big believer in first picking the lowest of the low hanging fruit. As the vast majority of web users conduct at least some of their searches through Google and Google has made it so easy to create these gadgets, it seemed logical to me that the lowest fruit to be picked would be to add our most basic feature to Google by enabling our users to add our job search engine to the Google home page with two clicks of their mouse.

I do not expect that this gadget is going to cause our traffic to skyrocket, but I do expect it to cause our repeat traffic to increase noticeably and, more importantly, make our site even more friendly to the job seekers who we serve. It is this devotion to the candidate experience that helped us win the 2007 Weddle’s User’s Choice Award for best job boards.”

That makes as much sense to me as going to college to get ahead of the game.

Technorati Tags: CollegeRecruiter.com, College Jobs, College Graduates, Careers for College Graduates, Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter, Google, Google Personalization

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Cool hunters are often depicted as shallow wannabes who lack enough individuality to face the world on their own merits. To that I say, damn straight. But that’s just one side of the story. We also associate cool hunters with people looking for an edge, either trend spotters or drivers of important business, consumer, or social change. These are the individuals Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point, the connectors, mavens, and salesmen of our world.

psfk.com announces job board today for Interactive marketing industry.

You might be interested to know that psfk, a web site and community often associated with the words cool, hip, and innovative has just launched a vertical job board or blogboard. It makes me wonder if the world of filling jobs, building employer brands, and recruiting, are somehow finally making a move to a new address somewhere along Hip Street?

psfk’s Piers Fawkes (left) and Simon King (right) scowl and smile their way into the future. That future now includes a community job board.

Piers Fawkes and Simon King, founders of psfk.com are both A-list bloggers and Cool Hunters (yeah, the good kind) who started their site as a way to talk about what was happening in London and New York. Today, they’ve grown their stable of sites to seven and feature content ranging from interactive marketing and fashion, to architecture and business. psfk was among the early adopters of social media, their sites typically feature blog posts, comments and significant interaction from other writers and community members all centered around interesting stuff. psfk has a strong creative bent and that certainly is manifest in the high-design present in all their web sites.

Piers sent out an announcement last week soliciting job content from the interactive marketing community we are mutual members of. Piers extended a free job posting to the community as a trial for the remainder of the month. Disclosure: I sent Piers a posting for Shannon for a job she’s recruiting for on her own team at Hodes Interactive in the Bay Area. Shameless plug for Shan: here’s the job posting for an Interactive Solutions Manager.

I thought you would be as interested as I was to see an innovator’s take on a job board from someone outside our recruitment space. My suspicion is that we could both learn from each other. So I asked Piers to answer some questions for our blog and he obliged. Here goes:

First the press blurb to set some context (I feel that it is additive):

“PSFK the popular forward thinking innovation team, launch a new jobs listing service targeting emerging media, creative staff, employers and head-hunters. PSFK appeals to an audience of switched on creative professionals seeking inspiration in their day-to-day work place. Now users will have the added bonus of an international jobs list (jobs.psfk.com), which is targeted to professionals in companies driving the next wave of design, branding and media.

jobs.psfk.com is the first ever jobs site that uses a map function to help prospective candidates find jobs quickly in neighbourhoods they want to work in and provides an RSS feed for every type of category – plus email alerts. Listings are updated daily and companies at the launch include hip ad agencies, web publishers, video game makers, architects and design consultancies. Although the job site is international, the focus is on London, New York, LA, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai & Sydney.”

Now let’s have a conversation with Piers Fawkes of psfk.

exceler8ion: what spurred you to pursue this strategy?

Piers: “2 reasons. (a) we’ve been featuring quite a few jobs on IF! (http://if.psfk.com/if) and wanted to put them in a specific section to make it easier for people to find and (b) as we move towards a publishing business model, revenue from jobs listing will be a pillar of our success.”

exceler8ion: why now?

Piers: “There seems to be all these emerging and exciting companies and agencies but I don’t think it’s easy for people to find jobs in these agencies. We just wanted to put people in touch.”

exceler8ion: what do you hope to accomplish?

Piers: “Help inspirational people work in imaginative jobs.”

exceler8ion: Do you see the site being used to post mostly for full time positions? Or, would you hope for an equal mixture of freelance postings and users given the large contingent of freelance talent common to our space (interactive marketing)?

Piers: “We’ll see how the market reacts. I’m not too sure. In the past, we have featured full time jobs that we’d love to have.”

exceler8ion: how much does a job posting cost?

Piers: “$250 for a month”

exceler8ion: how firmly do you intend to manage the niche job content aspect of your job board?

Piers: “We want to list jobs we’d love to have. Adding jobs to the site is much like the content we put on one of our sites. We only put stuff up that interests us. By doing so, hopefully we’ll maintain a useful service to job seekers and recruiters.”

exceler8ion: Have you seen any pent up demand with your advertisers for targeting this new area?

Piers: “Maybe, it’s noticing an increase in numbers of jobs posted on blogs by recruiters who can’t find people through the regular channels.”

exceler8ion: With the highly virtual nature of our space, how do you think the location based Google maps will play with users?

Piers: “It’s about speed of access. People judge jobs on their location: for example, do you think people consider ad agencies in SoHo more forward thinking than midtown agencies. Location at a micro-level is very important to people in their job and it’s something that’s been long overlooked.”

exceler8ion: Would you like to use the expertise and experience you gain from this to roll out more job boards for your clients?

Piers: “This is just something we want to offer our readers. Maybe we’ll do something around each site – e.g. a fashion one for fashion.psfk (http://fashion.psfk.com). We’ll see. It took us a couple of days to build and prepare for this launch. We’ll go for it and see what the market says.”

exceler8ion: Can you confirm (because I think it’s quite a noteworthy accomplishment) that you put this together in a couple of days? Like as in 48 hours from a) hey I’ve got an idea to b) hey, here’s the finished site.

Piers: “48 hours from the time I decided to code it. Have been sitting around on it for a month or so.”

Did any of those answers turn your head? Sound off, tell me what you think.

Here’s a sample job posting (note the Google Map – I thought it was apropos considering that it was for a Google Job)

A sample job posting on jobs.psfk.com. Note the google map.

Wrap up

Where’s a functional keyword job search? There are two search boxes on the page (both powered by Google) but I couldn’t get either one to work with any reliability. Search engine indexing seems the likely cause resulting in delays between postings and valid search results. Then again, I searched for ‘hodes’ for Shannon’s job which posted on January 9th and had no luck. In another search for ‘TBWA’ I got a hit but then I was taken to the site’s index page showing all the jobs and not a specific job, or jobs, for TBWA. A search function connected to a psfk jobs database would seem much more useful here.

In contrast to this search issue, I love the simple craigslist style (or blog) reverse chronological order of the job postings. Simple works for me – as does the drop down box showing key cities for Interactive marketing jobs. I would add one called “Virtual”. Oh shit, they already thought of that. Not surprisingly, the design is clean, attractive and inviting, something the big boys like Monster, CareerBuilder and other careers sites would do well to mimic. Since psfk has a strong community, I’d love to see some interactive features added to the jobs section. Employer ratings or interview experiences for example, or a comments section where the job seeker or recruiter could ask questions of the job poster. All in all, with the exception of the job search, the psfk blogboard works, and the site’s base strikes me as a solid one to build on.

Technorati Tags: Piers Fawkes, Simon King, psfk, jobs.psfk.com, if.psfk.com, Cool Hunters, Blogboards, Job Boards, Niche Job Boards

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“ Scrybe™ is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.” -Scrybe home page.

The much anticipated Scrybe online personal organizer has launched their beta today. I’m writing about it here for two reasons. First, who isn’t interested in ways to be more productive? As far as tools go, the quality of the axe you swing does make a difference, even if the skill of the operator is more important. Second, it’s a great example of how you might use savvy online marketing techniques to promote your effort (be it a recruitment campaign, local, national, or even international, hello world, launch) as Scrybe is going for.

Scrybe made all the cool watcher lists due to a knock-your-socks-off video that they circulated on video sharing sites like YouTube. The video has been described as a savvy use of modern online marketing. Take a look at their home page and all the ‘A list’ blogger testimonials and it’s pretty obvious that Scrybe made the blogging digerati a key part of their social media marketing plan as well. Call it what you want: guerrilla marketing, word-of-mouth-marketing, buzz marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization. Whatever! I’m calling it a great example of how to make a ton of people aware of your stuff so that they’ll want to someday buy your stuff when you’ve got a budget of…well, pretty much nothing. Judge for yourself.

Remember folks, this is only the launch of Scrybe’s beta – not the final product. If you’ve watched the video, you’ll get an idea of how their use of the latest web technologies (like Ajax) are used to create what would appear to be, highly functional and useful tools.

Useful tools eh?

OK, here are a couple that make my list. Offline sync, once the Achilles’ heel of web based programs, is handled with aplomb, as are paper output modes designed to appeal to the luddite or PDA Hipster in all of us. And it all looks easy to use – dare I say it – even enjoyable to use.

So here’s the thing. I’m always on the hunt for better ways to organize my life (I use David Allen’s framework) . Yes, sometimes my lust for new tools even outweighs my desire for productivity itself. But, never for long, and I’m quick to apply a .22 to the head of any self described productivity tool if it gets in my way. For now, I’ve signed up to be part of the beta with about four different e-mails in hopes of getting in on the action. So far, I haven’t heard a peep from Scrybe. I imagine this blog post might help. At least it will if Scrybe is as up on their social media marketing as they appear to be. Because if they are, they’re monitoring the blog buzz on their launch right now and they’ll see this. So, what are you waiting for Scrybe? I can’t write my review until you give me the keys.

Technorati Tags: iScrybe, iScrybe.com, Organizer, Calendar, PIM, Personal Information Manager, Life Hacks, GTD, Getting things done, Time Management, To-do Lists, PowerLists, ThoughtPad, Social Media Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Interactive Marketing

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Sergey Brin of Google presents at a U.C. Berkeley class “Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business”

With the addition of six full college classes from U.C. Berkeley now on Google Video (over 250 hours), it’s getting to feel more like I might be able to attend someday in the not too distant future.

“Visitors will find a half-dozen Berkeley courses in their entirety, including “Physics for Future Presidents,” “Integrative Biology,” and “Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business,” featuring a lecture by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.”

Who knows, maybe Berkeley will pull out all the stops on their open source educational experiment and start doing this with livecasts and open up their class Q&A for the world’s students to participate. If done right, can you imagine the potential dialog and learning that could take place? It boggles my mind. Click here to see U.C. Berkeley’s dedicated Google video page (they’re the first college to have their own dedicated video page on Google).

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Thanks to Jason Whitman from Recruitment Technology: Beyond the ATS for alerting me to the news that Original Signal which is known for its aggregation of the 15 most popular web 2.0 weblogs has rolled out a Job Search 2.0 aggregator. Original Signal takes the RSS feeds and aggregates the jobs on one page. Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion recently said of Original Signal:

Original Signal continues to roll out “singlegators” (single topic aggregators) at a rapid clip. Three new additions include one following memes/blog buzz, a second tracking Web 2.0 jobs and a third on tech news. These join sites transmitting Web 2.0, digg and gadget feeds.

I am totally loving these sites. They’re all so good that I can’t decide which one to make my home page (jobs excluded). The good news is I don’t have to. I can keep my home page the way it is because every single one of these sites has an RSS feed.

You can see the screen shot of the jobs aggregation to the right. I’ve written some of my developing thoughts about how job search is being turned on its head recently.

I believe that the recent proliferation of Blog job boards points to a developing trend where top talent will be alerted to new job opportunities within the online communities where they dwell.

I agree with Jason – tools like JobThread Groups, make it VERY easy to set up a targeted job board. EXCELER8ion thought about putting one up for Recruitment Marketing Communication professionals (’cause GOD KNOWS THAT is a niche) – but decided against it.

Regardless, future job search may be driven by these highly successful blogs / online communities that will encourage readers to take a look at these jobs that are to their interests and needs. Original Signal is apparently tracking click-thrus and reporting on most-popular jobs. That’s great. The only question that I have about the Original Signal’s page is that they proclaim to aggregate the 15 most popular blog job sites. Included in this list are site like Jobster and Salon. Now please correct me if I am wrong, but Salon and Jobster are NOT blogs. Salon is an online magazine – not a blog. I find this a bit confusing. If Jobster’s CEO, Jason Goldberg, decided to add a ‘Company CEO’ or ‘Recruiters’ job board to his blog – then THAT would qualify. But adding a feed from Jobster’s main feed – doesn’t seem to meet the highly targeted, passive audience that we are talking about when we discuss Blog job boards. Regardless – an interesting development.

FYI – Original Signal was inspired by the VERY SIMILAR Popurls and the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Original Signal is a publication from Stillpoint Media, a Dutch webpublisher which is based in Amsterdam. Hey JULES… want to go to AMSTERDAM?

Technorati Tags: Original Signal, Blog Job Boards, Job Search 2.0, GigaOM, Jobster, Job Boards

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We’ve written our share of blog posts about how blogging can enhance your employer brand and help connect companies with passive and active job seekers. Lately, blogs with their attractive niche audiences in tow, have taken a page from the Monster.com’s of the world and started their own hybrid blog job boards. BlogBoards, BlobBoards? It’s a great idea.

Well, how’s this for niche?

Problogger, well known to the blog community as a place to find great advice on creating, managing and monetizing your blogs just introduced their own blog job board just for bloggers looking for writing work and for companies looking to hire a blogger! We think it’s a great plan and we’d venture to guess that it may just become their most popular feature.

They have an intro price of $50 for a 30-day job posting (until September 5th). Get ‘em while they’re hot.

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This post was originally published on Jason Goldberg’s Jobster blog on August 9, 2006 as part of the Recruiting.com blog swap (week 5).

Interviewer: “What were you doing in 2002 between your job at Smith Barney and Citibank? There seems to be a gap here. Was there a problem?”

How many of you have gaps on your resume? How many of you hear alarm bells ring when you’re recruiting a candidate and find a gap on their resume? What work crimes do you fear they’ve committed? Are they unstable, were they a bust at their last gig, a burnout, couldn’t hack the pressure, can’t handle office politics?

As a former hiring manager in corporate America I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve gone there. I spent 20 years working for ‘the man’ without a single gap in my resume until, gasp, a year ago. I have to go back to my time living in Australia to remember a mindset and culture where taking time off was considered healthy and productive.

Some years ago, I was watching a television interview of a business idol of mine, Richard Branson, of Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic fame. I’ve read his book ‘Losing my Virginity,’ always watch his interviews and follow his business and personal adventures. I’d love to give you his verbatim quote that ranks as my all-time-favorite but I’ve never been able to find it again. To paraphrase, he said something along the lines of “I don’t ever hire someone who doesn’t have at least one unexplainable gap on their resume.” Delivered with his usual devilish smile of course.

Heard of the gap year before? If you’re American there’s a good chance you haven’t. The modern origins come from students in Europe taking a year off between high school and college to explore the world – often working their way through their travel. The point is to expand your mind. Here’s an inspiring example I was reading recently on The Guardian Unlimited about Anna Hingley, 24, a British veterinary nurse who took a year off to ride across Australia on a horse with her boyfriend. She’s reportedly the first woman to make the trek on one of our equine friends. My mum would point out that Robyn Davidson, the woman who trekked across 1,700 miles of Australia with her four camels and her trusty dog in the 70’s did much the same thing (Mum would be so pleased if you read Robyn’s inspiring adventure Tracks).

“It’s been tough both physically and mentally but there was never a moment when I thought ‘what the hell am I doing out here?” said Hingley. The couple actually met during a gap year that Hingley spend in Australia in 2004.

Although variations of the gap year have existed for years, it was Europe where the trend really got going in the 90’s. The practice spread to graduate students and has now become more popular with regular cubicle warriors and executives who want to get in on the fun. As an American who lived abroad in Australia I’ve had a chance to be exposed to Aussie (and by extension European) ideals of things like long-service leave, sabbaticals and plain old fashioned long vacations, something we just don’t seem to be able to comprehend here in the U.S.

By my nature and experience I consider myself patriotic. Having said that, there are things about our wonderful country that, well…suck. I’ll give you one of my favorites: our attitudes about work productivity. OK, I know we’re one of the most productive nations in the world and all that is great but we’re living in a different economy now, one that values ideas, and the best ideas don’t all come about from beating your brains in with 80-hour work weeks. Don’t misread me, I’m not saying hard work isn’t a critical ingredient. I’m a self-confessed workaholic but I believe if you’re going to work smarter at out-of-the-box work (which is what our information economy in no uncertain terms rewards) then don’t you think it pays to actually work with some fresh content? We train people on how to fill out forms more efficiently and manage every last minute of our time, yet we often fail to fuel our imagination with new life-engaging experiences. If you’re looking for inspiration from your favorite strip mall book store, it’s probably better than your flat screen TV – but if you want to find something more than inspiration, step away from the strip mall and go on a trek.

In life, I have found a great deal of application in a famous educator’s words, Dr. Maria Montessori (creator of The Montessori method), who believed that, it’s hard to learn from an experience you haven’t had.

“Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.” –Dr. Maria Montessori

I think it would be easy to misinterpret my criticism of U.S. business as a critique of our record of innovation – and I’m not. I believe America is innovative because we are so willing to experiment as a society, we’re willing to admit when we’re wrong, and even more willing to pick ourselves up, dust off the dirt, and get on with it. The point of my article is to suggest that we haven’t yet wandered into this area of experimentation – gap years – and it’s overdue. We’re late to this party and it’s about time we got our ass in gear and started…goofing off with the best of them!

What I do expect is for U.S. companies to come up with some of the best thinking yet on the gap year to date. This isn’t misplaced patriotism talking; it’s based on seeing and experiencing unbridled American capitalism from the viewpoint of a foreigner and up close and personal as a participant in the American economy. But, we’re not immune from stupidity, bad ideas or a lack of imagination – we’ve got a long track record of those as well. Remember the U.S. auto industry in the 70’s and 80’s? Who took American ideas, manufacturing process and original styling and used them to beat up on us? Japan. It was our ultimate response that was unabashedly American. The U.S. auto industry copied the Japanese – copying us. Then, we applied those hard learned lessons all over corporate America. The formula for our innovation is one part inspiration, one part perspiration and one part execution. What I’m saying is that things like the gap year are fuel for the inspiration part of the innovation formula. Fuel the imagination and creativity results. Once you’ve got the idea it’s time to apply the 80-100 hour work weeks to hone the idea to a diamond-like luster.

Recently, we’ve all been discussing baby boomers and what their coming wave of early retirements will mean to business. Before they all return to working part-time as consultants many will fulfill life long goals to travel and see parts of the world that they only dreamed of while struggling through the monotony of their full time jobs. As we’ve read, they’ve got money, skills, and wisdom and soon, more time to think about what they’ve accomplished and what they still want to do. I think the baby boomers that go out and live some dreams before launching their consulting gigs will be the best hires – hands down.

Think of the gap year as a little slice of retirement, but at 23, 28, 37, and 45. You’re young, still at the peak of your faculties and most productive years and you’re acquiring knowledge about people, how they do business, what makes them tick, and what they think about your own world. It’s best practice research for life. There’s nothing like being confronted with a foreigner’s ignorance or misinterpretation of your own social, cultural and business values to make you realize your own ignorance of the world.

In an economy where ideas are money, it’s not hard to imagine a future where gap’ers are heralded as the cream of the crop. One day, I think we’ll glance at the resume on our screen and think to ourselves, what was he thinking, working 15 straight years like that? He must completely lack any imagination and creativity. We’ll sit across from job candidates and ask them what they were doing with no unexplainable gaps in between their jobs. I hope I’m there to see that.

Oh, you want travel advice as well? When I find myself in a foreign place, culture shock coursing through my veins, I try to remember these words. That and a Coke, or local Coca-Cola equivalent, can take me a long way.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

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There is no getting away from the fact that most job seekers begin forming their opinion of you as an employer from the first click of their mouse on your corporate web site. As such, how your “online candidate experience” measures up has become one of the hottest topics in recruitment this year. CareerXroads just came out with their list of the top 25 careers sites, reviewing the ability to “Target, Engage, Inform and Respect the job seeker.” According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on the same topic, the type of experience that a job seeker is looking for is one that:

1. Acknowledges them
2. Provides an easy process
3. Targets their interests or considerations
4. Protects their information
5. Provides details
6. Informs them about your company
7. Makes them feel wanted
8. Has a quick and easy application process
9. Application process is ONLINE
10. Has job listings that are easy to locate on the site

Most corporate careers sites don’t even come close to meeting these job seeker “bill of rights”. In fact, most are woefully pitiful with horrible navigation, lacking in updated information, confusing instructions regarding the ways for the candidate to connect with a recruiter that may be interested in them…etc. The result? A SAD overall candidate experience. Today I found something that might go a long way to helping all that.

Remember CareerBuilder’s Monk E-mail? Hilarious right? This fun viral campaign (one of the best CareerBuilder.com campaigns ever from a creative perspective in my opinion) was created by their agency Cramer-Krasselt along with the technology from an interactive company called oddcast. The Monkeys that you could add audio to and have them say whatever you wanted, is an example of the “talking avatar” products that oddcast develops. Their products can be delivered to any device including browsers and mobile devices, clearly enabling companies to personalize online communications.

Oddcast has ads running on Technorati for a new product that they have created called SitePal. According to oddcast, SitePal Avatar is:

…a virtual talking character that you can easily add to your Blog, Website, Flash movie, or even MySpace profile to express yourself online. SitePal avatars help you connect with your visitors (readers), impress your friends, and bring your website and blog to life, or just to be cool!

Such a component on your careers site could be used to provide job seekers with live audio information on where to quickly find jobs; give information about benefits; fun stories about working at your company; instructions on how to apply; and yes – even give job candidates information on next steps after they apply.  An annual subscription to SitePal is about 1/3 of the cost of a recruitment newspaper ad for a single sunday.

Go on over to the site and look at their examples. You have to see it to really get how this would work. You can see how sites are using SitePal to help close sales here (just translate this to say: how to use SitePal to sell candidates on your company and positions). You can even incorporate these into your recruiting blogs – see how one blogger is using a SitePal avatar here.

Adding a “SitePal” might be an interesting way to interact and connect with your site’s visitors and online job seekers.  Very Cool – very effective.

technorati tags: oddcast sitepal Careers Site Recruiting Blogs

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We liked Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic post about making real connections with people through the Internet. Well, the post was about a bunch of things, but the connections are what I’m focused on at present. From our first online exchange with Amitai we realized that we were in the same neck of the woods…physically and virtually. Our worlds quickly collided in a most enjoyable way when Amitai proposed a fun dinner with Shannon and me. Of course, the great power of the Internet is that it opens up new relationships and enriches our interactions. We meet people in places we’ve never traveled to and connect with people of diverse backgrounds. We rally around points of common interest, often ones we’d be unlikely to quickly unearth if we were to meet at a party or even learn about from working side-by-side. Online, we get to talk with each other in all different types of ways.

Blogs are supposed to be interactive, and they are. But we’re particularly interested in our new blog widget from Meebo, it’s the instant messaging window on our blog on the right sidebar. The service is called MeeboMe. Meebo launched earlier this year as a multi-client, browser-based instant messaging tool. That’s a mouth full. Let me decipher the geek speak. It allows you to connect to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Gtalk and other IM accounts all at the same time AND all from a browser window. There are other software programs that do this but you have to download and install them on your computer. That’s fine for some but many companies prohibit employees from installing even a simple application like Yahoo! Messenger on their work computer.

When I first tried Meebo during their initial launch I found the browser-based software to be a bit unreliable and I stopped using it after a week. Of course, the dynamic trio responsible for creating Meebo have been hard at work refining their program and launching the new MeeboMe instant messenger for blogs. It picked up tremendous word-of-mouth recently and is really taking off.

Meebome is all about making your blog even more interactive. Finding additional ways to begin a discussion with a reader, potential customer or jobseeker from your blog. While recruiters and hiring managers have a variety of opinions about receiving IMs at work – I think that if you invite readers to IM you regarding job opportunities, right from your blog – that’s powerful – practically making your blog a daily virtual open house. Regardless of how you feel about IM – there is a tremendous upside to being able to interact live with a blog author, as you read and consider their latest posts. It won’t likely replace blog commenting but it will add a communication channel that didn’t exist before. The phone, e-mail, and commenting will continue on but, from here on out, we’ll look forward to talking live with you on instant messenger right from our blog. Go ahead, reach out and meebo us, I mean talk to us.

technorati tags: meebo meebome wordpress widget

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Have you heard of QTAGS (as in Quickly Tag)? Qtags can be used with any advertising campaign so that viewers or listeners can use a wireless phone to get additional information regarding a promotion by texting a specific word to QTAGS (78247). When you send the text message to qtags, you get a text reply that will include important information about the advertisement. Qtags also stores a web-link about that advertisement for you in your qtags.com inbox.

How to use this service for recruitment advertising?

The New York City Police Department is using qtags in its recruitment advertising through an outdoor campaign using Digital signs around NYC (similar to the one at the right made by Arena-Media Networks). The ads show NYPD officers with a call to action to send a text message with “NYPD” in the body to “78247” for additional hiring information.

If you have texting capabilities on your phone – try it and see what you get. The reply has a call to action and a link for more information.

Click the image to the left to see the ads in these digital signs with a qtags call to action.

Qtags even has a blog.

Interactive, meets Outdoor. Julian’s Great Great grandfather would be so proud.

NOTE: qtags is SPAM FREE and will not share your number or email address. You are not added to any lists, and are only contacted if you decide if to interact with the advertiser.

HatTip: On Message From Wagner Communications

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This post was originally published as part of Recruiting.com’s blogswap on Tuesday August 1, 2006 on Stlrecruiting.com, the recruiting blog of Jim Durbin of Durbin Media.

Want a low cost, out-of-the box way to reach passive job seekers within a 30-mile radius of your company headquarters? How does this sourcing list strike you?

• The Travel Channel
• The Golf Channel
• Lifetime Network
• Sci-Fi
• HGTV
• MTV

Which channels do you think your ideal candidates watch on TV at night? Now that Spot Runner has streamlined the purchase of local cable TV advertising and made the buy-in attractively low (think $500 not $5,000 or $50,000) maybe it’s time you found out.

Since its beta release earlier this year (read our EXCELER8ion post on Spot Runner beta here) Spot Runner has often been referred to as the adwords of TV advertising. Like Uncle Google (no blood relation), Spot Runner aims to make it easy for businesses to create, plan and execute an affordable media buy all from the comfort of their keyboard, albeit on cable TV instead of a search engine. TV advertising has never been a serious option for small local businesses (Spot Runner’s initial customer target base) because the production costs and pricing were either too complicated, out of financial reach, or both. Sound familiar? I could have just described the relationship between recruitment marketing and Television. In fact, if you replace much of what has been written about Spot Runner and replace ‘local’ or ‘small business’ with ‘recruitment’ you begin to see the opportunity.

“People think about mass market, but with local TV you can target practically the neighborhood level,” said Spot Runner co-founder David Waxman. According to the article TV ads on the cheap for small biz published on CNN Money.

Hmmm, reach people with specific interests in a targeted geographic location with the proven emotional impact of Television. You know, passive job seekers do watch TV! Why Television you ask? Here’s a quote from co-founder Nick Grouf that sums it up pretty well.

socalTECH: Why the TV space — when it seems like everyone seems to be moving toward the Internet for local search?

Nick Grouf: “Television is the most powerful advertising medium in the world. The average American spends half of their leisure time watching TV – twice as much time as listening to the radio and almost four times as much as reading the newspaper. Television also has the ability to capture people’s attention more strongly than any other advertising vehicle. TV has an aura of importance that enhances an advertiser’s image and prestige. By offering a dynamic message that incorporates sight and sound, motion and emotion, TV advertising has the ability to generate trust and excitement better than any other medium.”

I contacted Spot Runner and asked them about their views on recruitment marketing and they connected the dots with local Television advertising pretty easily.

“TV advertising is a proven, effective way for companies to brand themselves, and using it to attract new talent is an innovative application of the medium. With Spot Runner’s self-serve platform, companies can go to spotrunner.com and choose – from thousands of templates – an ad that reflects their brand, and customize it with a voiceover that fits their recruiting message. Then, they can easily create a media plan targeted towards their core employee demographic. If an organization with multiple campuses is looking to hire just in the Phoenix area, for example, they can utilize Spot Runner to launch a smart, cost-effective campaign in Phoenix. With just a couple clicks of the mouse, the ad can be up in just two-to-four weeks. Spot Runner’s intuitive website makes it possible for a marketer with no intimate knowledge of the local Phoenix media market to launch a smart TV advertising campaign,” said Keith Wiley, Spot Runner Corporate Communications.

Spot Runner just inked a deal with mega ad agency JWT. The combination is largely aimed at giving JWT’s national advertisers a tool to let franchisees and local dealers leverage their own national brand at a local level with appropriate customization and targeting. Just as national advertisers can leverage Spot Runner’s platform for national advertisers, so too can recruitment marketers. Perhaps Spot Runner will work with JWT’s recruiting arm in the future?

In the mean time, don’t forget the example of Arm and Hammer’s Baking Soda product. It was released in 1846 but it wasn’t until 1972 that people began using it to keep their food fresh in their refrigerator. Products have more than one use. Even though Arm and Hammer introduced multi-use interactive spinning wheels to illustrate the number of uses for baking soda it wasn’t until the refrigerator use that Arm and Hammer baking soda sales really took off. It’s no irony that the famous surge in their baking powder sales were directly linked to single-use TV spots featuring the fridge example – leveraging the mass-market penetration that TV is certainly most famous for.

Products and tools get used by people in highly creative ways when they see an application for one of their business or personal problems, even if they have to do some translating or work-arounds to bring it all together. Necessity, the mother of invention. While, there’s no greater challenge in business today than finding great talent I believe recruitment marketers and HR teams alike could benefit from stepping outside their comfort zone when it comes to finding the best people. Is it a lack of imagination? Have we been lulled into one-dimensional thinking by recruiting focused sales pitches telling us how special and unique our little world is? When did we loose our ability to put 2+2 together for ourselves? Well, I don’t think we all have but it’s amazingly easy to take the safe and well-traveled route isn’t it?

If we mimic the example offered by Spot Runner and JWT it’s not hard to see how you could leverage your national or employer branding and hopefully, some existing TV creative to build your own recruitment TV spots. Voila, you can finally leverage the power of Television to build your recruitment brand or even with more of a direct response angle for a major hiring spree. Or, go with an independent film vibe and have employees interview each other about why they love working at your company and pick the best ones to air in your commercials. Make a contest out of it like companies are doing with consumer generated advertising content on the web. Oh, and while you’re at it, use the finished product in your web advertising and employee orientation package. It’s all out there – even the home run.

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I like what Honda UK has done recently with their blog 2TalkAbout. Not only do you see user generated content in blog format but you also have Honda Engineers responding to comments. I also really like their feedback rating system (made me think of Netflix). Seems to me that this is also a GREAT way to have a corporate blog without having to turn your entire staff of engineers/recruiters/marketers/tech staff into bloggers (since a lot of them don’t want to be bloggers or shouldn’t be bloggers anyway).

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You may recall our post on word of mouth marketing that promoted the use of blogs and wikis as excellent word of mouth marketing vehicles. I thought I’d add on to that thread with a Top 5 list, or a list of 5ives like Merlin Mann likes to do.

Top 5 Reasons to have a business blog (elevator pitch)

1. Blogs are the most cost efficient means of connecting your business with your people (your customers, your vendors, your job seekers, your employees, your press, your critics, your champions, your next big thing (word-of-mouth).
2. Blogs are two way, interactive vehicles – a social media – they help create conversations.
3. Blogs are viewed as authentic, no bull,
   

   transparrant transparent, real, credible vs. traditional marketing approaches that are often viewed with distrust and cynicism.

4. Blogs get you close to your customer. How close? Ask Bob Lutz, VP and General Manager of GM. Go read his hugely successful auto blog Fastlane. People talk with Bob. Bob listens. Bob talks, people interact. Millions of cars are re-designed, sold, improved. Kinda cool.
5. One word: Google. An entire company built on the back of social and word of mouth marketing. And you thought it was all those TV ads they ran, er…

I just re-read what is now an ‘old’ article from Business Week that was the first highly influential business magazine article that nailed business blogging. It was way back in May 2, 2005. Here’s the article – it was their cover story.

Some helpful quotes:
“If people are talking about my brand (which people are apt to do), I’d rather be part of the conversation.” Heather Hamilton’s blog on Microsoft recruiting.

“What’s going to sell the tourism product more,” asks David Heidenreich, of Ripple Effects “a paragraph of marketing fluff my copyrighter develops or Joe from Pittsburgh talking about his whitewater rafting experience – and here’s a video of him falling out of the raft.”

What are your top 5? Do you agree with these or do you have a better list of 5ives? Come on, share the wealth.

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Heard of DIY maps?  If not, check them out here and ask yourself if there’s a good way to use their data/map analogy in your business.  We liked how indeed used DIY to show jobs per capita in cities throughout the U.S. as shown here. Our old home in the Bay Area topped the list with San Jose coming in with 121 jobs for every 1,000 people.

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“The Opening,” will be sponsored by MonsterTRAK and will air on mtvU as well as mtvU’s broadband channel, MTV Über, starting Jan 25. See the press release here. I was just talking to Julian about how it would be interesting to think about ways to combine recruitment marketing with “product placement” to reach younger workers (along the lines of having a Fed-Ex guy be a character in video games for example). MTV and Monster take my idea to the next level by bringing recruitment straight into the Reality TV world. I honestly think that this type of approach will greatly appeal to the Generation Y’ers out there that grew up when MTV stopped showing videos and featured numerous reality shows and documentaries about the life of teenagers and 20 somethings. (Yahoo! HotJobs teamed up with “The Apprentice” – but the viewer didn’t really get a feel for what it would be like to work at the featured companies).

MTV Über is their 24/7 on-demand, streaming channel (incidently that doesn’t support Macs or FireFox). “The Opening” has archives that you can already view online at Über including episodes featuring EA Games and the NCAA. The show has a decidedly MTV’s Cribs feel about it.

Students will be invited to visit MonsterTRAK and mtvU’s comprehensive online jobs resource at http://www.jobs.mtvu.com/ after each episode, where they can immediately apply for jobs profiled on-air, along with other opportunities and internships. Much the way NACElink does, the partners will work with the career centers at mtvU’s more than 730 colleges, to provide their listings to students. The site is co-branded and will feature a selection of coveted job opportunities for recent graduates, interview advice, salary information, and a job of the week.

Maybe Monster.com could have a reality show targeting those at the middle stages of their career? How about – “Pimp my Job”?

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Update: You may have heard that the news on this story is that THERE IS NO NEWS – the NY Times reporter apparently got the story wrong. Steven Rothberg wrote in to EXCELER8ion about the erroneous story and summed it up this way. “It would have been really big news had it been true. But again the NY Times has let us down. The reporter apparently didn’t understand the deal.” “From my read, it appears that JobCentral a/k/a DirectEmployers was simply announcing that it was now making its postings accessible to users of Indeed, SimplyHired, and GoogleBase. If so, yawn! We’ve been doing that for a long time as have many other premium job boards.”

Begin original story…
Gerry Crispin over at The CareerXroads Annex broke the news to the blogosphere today that according to an article in the New York Times, JobCentral.com; Indeed; SimplyHired; and Google Base are joining forces, aggregating all their jobs and launching what they are calling “a national labor exchange” on JobCentral.com.

I have to admit, the first thing that struck me is the irony that this announcement had its debut in a newspaper. So far, I can’t find any online sites that are talking about this (other than NYTimes.com of course, AND it is the #4 most emailed article on their site).

The first issue I see is branding. I mean no disrespect, they may have a great site, but when you are in the leagues of brands like Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo! – you have to ask, “JobCentral dot who?” While this conglomerate will obviously be a worthy competitor to the big boards, why did they choose this brand as the umbrella? Why not use “Google” and gain immediate mass-recognition? Yahoo! is probably the most well-known brand on the web, but they are #3 in the big board race for traffic. Why? I attribute this to the effects of promotion. Job seekers KNOW to go to Monster and CareerBuilder to search jobs. Yahoo! is number three as their HotJobs offering is not as well known. Similarly, while the launch of Google Base caused a stir within the recruitment community a few months ago, there wasn’t as much of a stir among job seekers. As compared to the big boards, masses of job seekers aren’t using the aggregators like SimplyHired or Indeed frequently either. This shift is going to take larger promotional efforts. Look at how much marketing and promotion among the general job seeker audience it took to draw job seekers away from the newspaper.

These young brands are just starting to garner the attention of job seekers – and they are doing it through promotion on Google, not with Super Bowl ads. Robert Wilson over at Job Search Engine Guide just wrote that SimplyHired surpassed Indeed in traffic perhaps due to what he called a ‘Googleboost’. According to Robert,

“SimplyHired is boosting exposure to their site by sponsoring a link on Google putting them above the fold on the first page of results when searching for “Jobs”.”

I am most interested in seeing what the fallout is for CareerBuilder. CareerBuilder has given Google its feed of jobs to help bolster Google Base (and of course to get itself more traffic). But you would think that Google would be in some breach of contract by including CareerBuilder jobs on JobCentral.com. In his post, Gerry Crispin noted,

“Google may have to revise its “Do No Evil” mantra – at least from the point of view of the job boards that have been feeding it 100s of thousands of openings. They might rightfully feel screwed over.”

What about pricing? Unlike the rest of the siblings in this new Brady Bunch – JobCentral.com CHARGES for posting jobs ($25 per job or $12,500/year). Will this model change? It would have to – why would a company pay to post when they could just get their jobs up via aggregation? What model will they then adopt to make money?

To me – the piece that is still missing in all of this is the recognition that it is job seekers that matter. Where job seekers go – companies will follow. We all have heard the criticism that finding a job on the big boards by sifting through postings or posting a resume – is less than ideal. But the JobCentral.com conglomerate is claiming that they will have 4.5 million jobs. That’s a lot of sifting. What is the differentiator – major aggregation? Yahoo! HotJobs! already did this earlier in the year by utilized its Yahoo! search engine to “aggregate” jobs from across the web to supplement their paid listings.

Google is after all Google, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and have high hopes as to the direction that JobCentral.com will be taken. But the bottom line is – we can offer cheaper or more “organic” ways for companies to “recruit online” but unless the job seekers follow and use the site; unless the site is able to provide a candidate experience that is different from what is currently out there; and unless JobCentral.com REALLY become a central repository for ALL jobs online, then the all that really has been done for the job seekers – is to give them big board number four to visit.

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What do you get when the people who started PeoplePC and FireFly Network get together for round three?

Spot Runner, a new Internet based Ad Agency. Spot Runner is attempting to bring broadcast television commercials to the masses of local advertisers for as little as $500. That’s right, $500 and that will include production, planning and air time for five Benjamins.

You probably recognize the name, PeoplePC, but may not recognize FireFly right away (at least I didn’t). FireFly was the company that made FireFly Passport, which Microsoft purchased and renamed Microsoft Passport. Yeah, we all recognize that one. PeoplePC is the company they sold to Earthlink.

Whenever two entrepreneurs like Nick Grouf and David Waxman, who have managed to strike gold twice before get together, you should take notice. But that’s not what caught my attention at first, it was their new product Spot Runner and the implications it could have for local advertisers of all kinds (including mom and pops, recruitment advertisers and many more small to medium sized businesses that want a T.V. presence on a craigslist budget).

Why am I writing about T.V. advertising on a blog about Interactive advertising? Because online video, or Internet T.V. ads, are really making a big splash right now for all the right reasons (they work great for both brand and direct response advertisers) and local advertisers of all kinds need help with broadcast production at affordable prices. Spot Runner is demonstrating just how easy and inexpensive that could become and I expect to see this model with an online focus very soon. In fact, I’m shocked that Spot Runner isn’t launching with this option, especially since BusinessWeek journalist, Justin Hibbard mentioned that Spot Runner was ‘building a platform for managing online and off-line advertising campaigns.’ on his August, 2005 post.

Common guys – why are you holding out on us? Actually, I’m sure similar services already exist for inexpensive online video production but I doubt they have the Video-Ads-for-Dummies like feel of Spot Runner.

The growth of online video is having a dramatic impact on local T.V. station revenues as I outlined in my previous post on the topic. Although Spot Runner isn’t going after online video production just yet, you can bet it won’t be long before they do so.

Where does this fit in and how will it work?

Back when the Internet first took off in the mid-90’s, the local advertising space was right at the top of the list of nuts that major advertising publishers wanted to crack because local represented then, as it does now, the largest, and most profitable sector of advertising.

While local Telco Yellow Pages, local newspapers and now Google and Yahoo! slug it out in local search there remains a huge void for local advertisers who will be eager to utilize ’sexy’ broadcast creative and distribution in their online media mix. I know these advertisers intimately. I’ve called on thousands of them in my career while selling for the Yellow Pages and online newspaper companies I’ve worked at for the last seventeen years (Knight Ridder Digital, SMARTpages.com, Pacific Bell Yellow Pages and GTE Yellow Pages).

I’ve sold against T.V. successfully for a long time and their Achilles’ heel was always production and air time costs. Spot Runner plans to change that by leveraging their proprietary technology to ‘templatize’ T.V. ad production. Spot Runner allows businesses to log on, provide information about their business and desired locations, and select a commercial from a library of thousands of pre-produced ads. The ads are personalized with the business’s specific information and logos.

We did this at Pacific Bell’s SMARTpages.com (originally launched as Pacific Bell @Hand) back in the 90’s as a way to bring super efficient ad creation and low costs to mom and pop Yellow Pages advertisers who were enticed by web advertising but lacked a web site or the knowledge and tools to create an online ad. The technology matched company industries with appropriate clip-art and created a banner ad on the fly with the advertisers ad copy. In this way a local florist could have their first Internet ad for under the Telemarketer magic dollar threshold of $19.99 a month.

Stuff like this makes me to want to start a locally specialized ad agency that creates, bundles and manages all this cool local advertising like local search, pay-per-call, local video, behavioral targeting, geographically targeted e-mail…er, don’t get me started!

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President Bush attended a fund raiser on Palm Beach this evening. I work about three miles from Palm Beach International, and of course Air Force One landed just as I left work. So while I was waiting for the motorcade to pass and let me continue home – I had some time to sit and listen to “All Thing’s Considered” on NPR.

On this edition, Robert Siegel interviewed Mike Pegg (listen here) about his Google Maps Mania blog and the Google Maps mashup craze. I immediately got to thinking about how targeted and local Google Maps are and, how they would translate brilliantly for recruitment marketing. How? Visual job searches. Of course as soon as I looked into it I realized my idea was hardly unique – Mike’s blog already lists the sites that are using mashups for Recruitment – http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/#jobs

For the Job Seeker – Visual Search
With this idea – job boards could offer visual search results. Instead of the usual overwhelming assortment of jobs that are returned, a map where you could then choose to see jobs based on their location would appear. The sample below is from Glendor.com’s job search page.

For the Recruiter – Visual Resume Search
Take a look at how FreeRecruiting.com has used Google maps for recruiters – The Linux Job, Resume and Consulting Market . FreeRecruiting.com runs 25 job boards, and they are all enabled with Google Maps. You can do a traditional text search to see all the relevant resumes. As candidates update their data in the database, you will be able to see the candidate posted on this map. FreeRecruiting.com claims that this is the world’s first map of Linux Professionals. Only the Linux board has data today, but their other job boards will be displaying data shortly.

This is the tip of the iceberg with how we can use mashups for recruitment marketing. Take a look at all the mashups for different categories that Mike has on his blog. Some of the best examples for how to apply this in a local marketing strategy can be found within Real Estate – take a look at this mashup – http://nosyneighbormap.com/. Other industries have already added images, additional information, and even video to their mashups.

In one of our recent post we spoke about the web’s power to bring authenticity to employer brands. I can see mashups’ use being expanded for employer branding, such that, a job seeker can find your open position on a map, click on its pin point, and have images of people currently working there – maybe some testimonials about why they work at the company or in that department, or for that manager, etc. Google could easily integrate this into Google Base right now.

The interview also featured some really fun things that people have created by hacking and placing overlays on Google Maps. When you are done here – check out some of the best one’s they discussed (BeerMapping.com; Dig to the other side of the Earth; Real-time locations of all running suburban trains in Dublin, Ireland.)

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Lately we’ve seen a lot of really smart folks talking about Wikis on HR blogs (read some here, here & here). For all the talk there haven’t been a lot of specific ways offered on how we might use Wikis in recruiting and management of human capital. There’s a good reason for that and it might not be what you think.

Let’s start by saying what needs to be said. By in large, people don’t know how to use Wikis in the recruitment space because they haven’t started using them yet. Guess what? That’s how Wikis are for pretty much everyone – even our beloved freaks and geeks in the tech sector where Wikis originated. Wikis are hard to ‘get’ from a distance. If you start using a Wiki you will begin learning why they’re useful and soon you’ll have five or ten new ideas about ways to use them for your efforts. Why should people in the recruiting space use Wikis? Because they add communication channels to human interaction and provide a perspective of your work that you won’t likely find in another venue. Since our world is all about information, any means we have to open up communication channels and gain context between people is critical.

Before I get any further you may want to just understand some of the basics about Wikis and what you can do with them. Here’s a good resource. If you find yourself looking at the list of functionality, scratching your head and wondering out loud why these Wikis are any different than web sites you’ve used before, don’t be surprised. Many parts of a Wikis functionality, say a forum page, aren’t any different than a web forum like we’ve been using for years on the web. Yes, Wikis are not that different in simple functionality from regular web sites but their subtle differences have great significance.

A couple of years ago I was talking with an employee who worked on my Advertising Operations team at Knight Ridder Digital and we were exchanging ideas about some of the challenges our team had with communication and certain types of work falling through the cracks. Our team members were located in Miami and San Jose and in turn supported internal and external clients in a a few dozen locations in every U.S. time zone. We had routine meetings, production systems to track work, Webex webinars, conference calls, a crack like addiction to IM and blackberries and exchanged tens of hundreds of e-mails every day about our work. Somewhere in all that Internet scramble things weren’t working. Big shock right. My employee, Erik Andreasen, suggested that a Wiki might be the trick. I said to Erik ‘a whati?’ He smiled in the knowing way of any good geek and took a few minutes to introduce Wikis to me. I was pretty excited as he explained the concept.

It wasn’t long before I was talking regularly on the phone with Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, and learning more about Wikis. Ross is a great guide for all things Wiki and especially business Wiki usage and I’d highly recommend his product. Ross was the first person I heard that used the term ‘occupational spam’ to define how people had begun seeing productivity losses because all they did was answer e-mail. Worse, people who were using e-mail to manage critical work, even small pieces of it (and yes we all are), were constantly stressing over missing important information burried in their inbox and then having to deal with the consequences. Ross coached me through various things I could do with Wikis and how to use them with my team but he told me the secret to ‘getting’ Wikis was just to use them. He told me to build some piece of regular workflow or daily team habit into a Wiki and watch what happened organically. That worked. Sure, he gave me concrete and subjective benefits of Wikis but he kept reinforcing the point that I had to figure it out myself. Far from a sales pitch without backbone I found Ross to be right on the money.

I’d like to say that we went on to use our Wiki for a multitude of things but budgets at the time were such that $200 a month was too much! Ross did give us a lot of latitude in our ‘trial’ and we did use Socialtext enough to see that it would have really helped us. Of course, it wasn’t really too much money but at the time no one understood Wikis and I had a difficult time just explaining the concept to my VP of Technology during a budget crunch. Today, it wouldn’t be so hard to convince him since everyone is implementing a Wiki because they’re ‘it’ right now.

As I mentioned before, Wikis don’t necessarily add functionality beyond what you can do with other web based tools but they do add depth and richness to your work in a way that other tools simply don’t. That’s how I’d summarize my experience with getting work done using Wikis – they add another dimension. In information work – adding dimensions to your work isn’t a small thing, subtle perhaps, but not small.

Speaking of small. I’ll close with a slight twist on Wikis that you really need to know about. There’s a chap named Jeremy Ruston who took the Wiki concept and adapted it to what he defines as ‘microcontent.’ In the same way that you don’t always write a full story on a blog, or a full letter in an e-mail you have microcontent. So he shaped a Wiki in a fashion that would best help him corral microcontent and called it a TiddlyWiki. See, you thought Wiki was the worst name you’d ever heard of and now we have TiddlyWiki. When I heard about TiddlyWikis I was twice as excited about them as I was when I learned of Wikis. Almost everything we do in our information economy jobs is about microcontent. We don’t write papers in business anymore, we don’t do full research studies, we guestimate 95% of the time, we don’t often run fully integrated advertising campaigns, and we don’t watch all of the TV show. We don’t usually digest much of anything these days in huge gulps other than stress. Instead we take sips from a thousand different wine glasses each day and swirl the wine around in our mouths trying to identify the ingredients so we can understand them, appreciate them, and find out which ones are worth swallowing.

Start using Wikis to collaborate with peers, manage a project, keep group meeting notes, track customer service, or edit documents together. Pick something that you’ll use often and just follow the discipline of using it and soon your Wiki will be growing like a Chia pet.

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If you’ve read the story from BusinessWeek on MySpace and some of my initial reactions you’ll have a good context for my comments on word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth-marketing, vs. a term I’ll coin hoof-in-mouth-marketing (known more commonly in the biz as stealth marketing).

To me the developing story is how marketers have taken something we all rely on, word-of-mouth, and moved it in to what is now referred to as word-of-mouth-marketing. For the purpose of this commentary I’ll refer to true word-of-mouth as just that, word-of-mouth. I’ll use word-of-mouth-marketing to describe the intentional, but above board practice, of companies attempting to generate word-of-mouth through various marketing tactics. Finally I’ll dub the quickly growing marketing practice of companies misrepresenting themselves to generate word-of-mouth as hoof-in-mouth-marketing.

We all know that word-of-mouth is about people conversing with each other naturally about a good or bad experience they’ve had with a product or service. Or, it might be solicited when a friend or family member asks another person for their opinion. We’ve all been there and we know and value how this works.

The next level is buzz marketing or word-of-mouth-marketing. This is the purposefully generated word-of-mouth created by individuals and companies to sell a product or service. One might ask how this is different from public relations. Good question. I’d like to think on that point more before commenting on it here. Richard Branson is certainly known as a PR king and many of his ’stunts’ have been known to be ‘buzz worthy.’ An individual selling Amway products or a similar multi-level marketing product would be word-of-mouth marketing if done in an upfront way:

“Hey Jill, I started using Arbonne skin care products recently and they’re incredible. I liked them so much I started buying product from them and reselling it. You should come over for dinner with Bryan next week and I can show you how their whole line if you want. I can give you discounts off retail that will save you a bundle.”

vs. an individual that uses the less than upfront version that we’ve all experienced at one time or another that makes us feel used.

“You know Jill, you and Bryan haven’t been over for dinner in a long time why don’t you come over next Thursday night?” “I’d love that Mary, let me check with Bill and I’ll call you to confirm.”

Jill and Bryan show up for dinner and after a nice dinner a full court press from Mary ensues extolling the virtues of Arbonne skin care products. Jill likes Arbonne products and even uses them occasionally but feels used by her friend Mary and can’t believe she’s been invited to dinner to an Amway like ambush!

How about the company version? A commenter on the BusinessWeek story made the points that companies will pretend to be an individual on MySpace in order to generate buzz about their product or service. To me they’re identical and they’re both 100% creepy. In the case of the personal scenario I outlined you feel used and it would be hard to look at your friend the same way again. In the company example you feel manipulated and the last thing you’ll ever feel for that company is trust or a positively feelings.

Why would companies resort to this? It would stand to reason that only people with inferior products and services would resort to word-of-mouth-manipulation. But, if experience with other marketing arenas is any example then forgot about reason. My experience earlier this year with an interactive lead generation business using affiliate marketing practices business would suggest otherwise. Highly reputable Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies purchased leads from this company but were careful to keep an arms length distance from them even though they were completely relying on the leads to power their sales efforts. Instead, they used brokers who purchased leads from multiple sources in order to maintain a veil between their company and the less than savory marketing practices being used by this lead gen company and their affiliate marketers. Why were they willing to sell themselves out? M-0-n-e-y. Lot’s of it and I think word-of-mouth-marketing is walking the same dangerous line right now since it’s just gotten started and there are so many opportunists in the online community that are ready to do just about anything to make a quick buck.

Somehow, someway WOMM should flourish as a savvy, above-board practice. It’s not hard, it just requires that you act with the intent to influence, not manipulate – to sell your product and service openly and unabashedly – not underhandedly.

The WOMMA is busy hiring all sorts of marketing professionals at their Chicago headquarters and one can only hope that they get the right kind of people. They’ve got to have strong fortitudes, impeccable reputations, the best credentials and the right intent. Oh yeah, they’ve got to be able to positively demonstrate the right AND wrong way to use word-of-mouth-marketing. That way we can all avoid hoof-in-mouth-marketing and make lots of money the old fashioned way. Make a good product or service, work hard, innovate, and provide great customer service.

Read the WOMMA’s guide to ethical WOMM and download the WOMMA’s white paper on WOMM in PDF format.

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