Job-Hunting 2.0

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Traffic to the popular business social networking site LinkedIn.com doubled following the stock market meltdown of last fall, according to media reports. That’s not surprising, given LinkedIn’s utility as a way to create and nurture business relationships. Business professionals have a vast variety of tools available to them today to look for jobs and in an economy like this one, it behooves you to use as many as you can.

I’ve hired more than 200 people in my 20 years of management, and I’ve learned what makes a candidate stand out as memorable and potentially hirable. Here are some ideas for incorporating Internet services into your search.

Get recommendations — One of LinkedIn’s more intriguing features is the ability to ask business colleagues for recommendations. You should do this on an ongoing basis, not only when you’re looking for a job. The best time to ask is when a person’s impressions of you are still fresh. They’re more likely to give you an enthusiastic endorsement if you’ve just help them with a big project. Always give back a recommendation as a way of thanking them for their time.

Find jobs that aren’t advertised — aOne of the coolest features of social networks is their continuous status updates. Whenever someone in your circle of contacts gets promoted or takes a new job, you can find out immediately. Remember that when someone assumes a new job, it usually creates an opening in their old one. That’s an opportunity for you. Also, when a person assumes a new role, they often want to hire people they trust to work under them. Be sure to send in a congratulatory note and let them know you’re available.

Research opportunities — Even when I worked for an Internet company hiring people who are supposedly Web-savvy, I was often stunned by how few job candidates showed up with any knowledge of the company or job they were interviewing for. There simply is no excuse for that today. Before you arrive for your interview, be sure you spend at least a half hour learning about the company’s business, its objectives, competition and challenges. Be ready to tell the hiring manager what you can do to help. Believe me, they will remember that.

Research people — People reveal lots of information about themselves in social networks, blogs and online profiles these days. Even if they don’t volunteer that information, you can often learn about them from the groups and organizations that they frequent. Spend some time learning about the person you’ll meet in your interview. Mine some personal nuggets that can help you establish a more personal relationship. Perhaps you share an interest in a particular author, film genre or sport. That’s a basis for discussion outside of the business context. Anything you can do to personalize the engagement will help your chances.

Make yourself memorable — I can’t emphasize this enough. Hiring managers often interview 30 or 40 candidates before making a selection. Names and faces tend to run together, so anything you can do to distinguish yourself will increase your chances of making the cut. Create a video or a screencast demonstrating some special skill you bring to the assignment. If you’re musically inclined, send an audio clip of yourself singing a song of introduction. Write a personalized letter describing three ways you can address a challenge the company faces. Show that you’ve invested some time and brain power to apply for the job.

Next week, we’ll look at how the Web can help you nail down the position and how to prepare for future job hunts. We’ll also talk about how you sometimes need to abandon the keyboard to cement those personal connections.

Web 2.0 Carrots

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Back in the dark ages of the early Internet, some colleagues and I got hooked on instant messaging. We loved its immediacy, and IM quickly replaced e-mail as the preferred way to communicate among our far-flung staff. This frustrated our IT organization, which didn’t even know about our activities for over a year. IT briefly tried to restrict IM use but ultimately gave up and just shrugged its shoulders.

The group didn’t have time to wrestle with the problem. It was too busy trying to shove a corporate mandated group collaboration package down our throats. This expensive and over-engineered solution had been selected by someone at the corporate level without any input from the people who would have to use it. For two years, our IT organization tried to teach users how to tap the software’s powerful but Byzantine capabilities with little success. By the time I left the company, the collaboration suite was basically a bloated e-mail client. Meanwhile, IM flourished.

Mandates From Above
Top-down implementation comes naturally to IT organizations. Much of what they’ve been tasked to do over the years has involved driving technology into their organizations to achieve executive mandates for efficiency. But the new breed of Web 2.0 tools presents a new challenge.

New research by McKinsey reveals that Web 2.0 tools are turning in decidedly mixed results in organizations that are experimenting with them. Half of the 50 respondents to a detailed set of interviews indicated that they are dissatisfied with the performance of these collaborative tools so far.

Successful innovators are learning that a “high degree of participation” is required to make the tools pay off. This involves not only grassroots activity but also a different leadership approach: senior executives often become role models and lead through informal channels.”

That’s a cultural disconnect for the traditional command-and-control approach to IT management. Big hairy systems projects like enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and customer relationship management have always been mandated from the top in the name of efficiency and cost reduction. The technology didn’t work unless everyone used it, so employees had no choice.

But knowledge capture tools like wikis and social networks don’t succeed unless users embrace them, researchers found. “Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies…rather than observing what works and then scaling it up.”

In fact, Web 2.0 initiatives often yield results where least expected. McKinsey researchers cite the example of one company that put software in place to quickly train new hires. The package failed in that context, but the company’s human resources people discovered that the same application was effective in sharing information about job candidates. They turned out to be the ultimate end users.

Culture of Sharing

Web 2.0 technologies excel at helping people capture and share information, but that process works best when the motivation comes from within. The “give to get” culture of the new interactive web has tapped this human compulsion in a powerful way. It turns out that the desire to help one’s peers is more powerful than the motivation to fulfill a management mandate.

Not surprisingly, McKinsey found that incentives work better than commands in making organization successful with Web 2.0. Steel producer ArcelorMittal, for example, “found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, employees submitted many more ideas for business improvements than they did when the awards were given in less-public forums,” the report says. Celebrating the generosity of individual employees was also effective in stimulating activity by their peers.

Which means that when it comes to Web 2.0 technology adoption, the carrot proves far more effective than the stick.

The Case For Influencer Marketing

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Paul

I’ve recently worked with several clients on influencer marketing campaigns. These are proving to be popular new complements to traditional PR programs that approach media relations from a completely different perspective. Influencer relations is gaining popularity as the media landscape shifts and domain experts gain prominence.

The media industry is slashing and burning its way through a wrenching transition. There have been more than 5,300 layoffs in the US newspaper industry just this year, and three major dailies with a combined total of more than 400 years of continuous publishing, have closed in just last month.

The situation is just as bad in b-to-b publishing, where more than 275 business magazines have closed since the beginning of 2007, according to BtoB magazine.

Shifting Influence

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

An influencer relations program seeks to strike up conversations with these domain experts on the assumption that their opinions are reaching increasingly large audiences, both through their own websites and the amplifiers I just described.. This is quite different from a conventional PR campaign, which starts with analysts and journalists on the theory that they are the influencers. We are beginning to rethink this dynamic. Conventional PR will be harder to do in the future as the ranks of staff journalists shrink and the shrinking number who are left struggle with an overwhelming volume of PR pitches.

In contrast, most bloggers get very few inquiries from marketers, and are more likely to spend time listening to what they have to say. This is a pretty appealing option for marketers who are frustrated with being one of the 300 or 400 daily inquiries an already seriously overworked reporter gets.

The Human Touch

So how do you find influencers? There are a number of commercial services that attempt to perform the task programmatically, but my experience has been that they only get you halfway there. It’s not difficult to find someone who writes, podcasts, or tweets about a topic, but assessing that person’s biases and style is an entirely different issue.

For example, in a recent project for a company with a novel approach to weight loss therapy, we discovered that the topic was more controversial than we thought. Some people have very strong opinions about the subject, and pitching the client’s novel approach to them would have been the equivalent of sticking your hand into a beehive.

You also can’t assume that domain experts necessarily want to talk about their domain of expertise. In a recent engagement that looked for pharmaceutical researchers, we found that people with Ph.D.s in that area blog about everything from cooking to environmentalism. In fact, only a minority paid much attention to pharmaceuticals at all.

At this point, there’s no way to ascertain the agenda, biases or voice of influencers without digging in and reading what they have to say. If you don’t do that critical homework, you risk alienating the very people you’re trying to reach. Bloggers expect you to know something about them. Unlike the mainstream media, they don’t understand how the pitch game is played. They know a lot about their subjects and they tend to regard clueless come-ons with disdain.

For now, there’s no substitute for the human touch when it comes to influencer relations campaigns.

Netbooks Attack From Below

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

It’s been about a decade since someone first placed a tablet computer in my hands and waxed eloquent about its wonders. I remember thinking, as I cradled the 4 pound object with its delicate screen close to my chest, “I just hope I don’t drop it.”

I’ve toyed with many tablet computers in the years since, and my reaction has always been about the same. While there’s no debating the value of a system that doesn’t require a keyboard and that can capture and even recognize handwriting, the size, weight and fragility of these machines has always made me uneasy. And then there’s the price, which has typically been higher than that of a comparably equipped laptop.

The arrival of the latest version of the Amazon Kindle 2 has got me reconsidering my reservations, though. With its sleek design, color display and built-in networking, the Kindle is the kind of limited-use device that has the potential to accomplish what the tablets couldn’t. At $359, it also threatens to disrupt portable computing in a more fundamental ways.

Here Come Netbooks

The Kindle 2 is one of a proliferating breed of limited-function portable computers called “netbooks” that have taken the market by storm over the last two years. ABI Research estimates that some 35 million netbooks will ship this year, rising to nearly 140 million in 2013. Netbooks are positioned as essentially slimmed-down laptops at a lower price, but I don’t think those devices will take a market by storm. The Kindle 2 difference is that it attacks the portability problem from below. History has shown that disruptive innovation almost never comes from scaling down existing technology but rather from growing the power and functionality of low-cost, limited use devices. The personal computer is the classic example of this.

Critics have been quick to jump all over the earlier Kindle’s limitations, including a closed architecture and limited application support. This is to be expected. Disruptive products are almost always dismissed in their early forms. The reason Kindle is different is that it possesses the essentials of what users need in a portable computer: a readable display, excellent battery life, a usable if limited user interface and seamless connectivity. Amazon has had no incentive to open up the product to third-party developers, but as competition emerges, believe me, it will.

Kendall is one of the crowd of low-end computers that are emerging from the One Laptop per Child project, which I’ve written about before. Founded in 2005, the project attempted to innovate from below by delivering a basic level of computer functionality at a very low cost for people who could never otherwise dream of affording a conventional laptop. This is a completely different approach to innovation from that which is usually practiced in the US: instead of trying to cram more features of questionable marginal value into the same space, OLPC tries to deliver core functions at the lowest possible price.

Attack From Below

The intended audience is third world countries, but the approach will pay dividends on US shores as well. The weight, limited battery life and awkward hinged keyboard of conventional laptop computers have always made them a weak solution to the portability problem. Apple’s iPod has demonstrated that people are willing to trade off some laptop conveniences for portability. Kindle will squeeze its way into the middle of this market.

Although currently positioned as strictly a reader machine, the Kindle will evolve rapidly as market forces demand. I believe to could turn out to fulfill the promise of netbooks, particularly as Amazon peels back the proprietary shell that limits its potential. This race has only begun, and past experience supports the idea that the Kindle, coming from the low end of the market, will be in the pole position.

Here Come Netbooks

Attack From Below

Mars Deserves Praise for Innovative Skittles Initiative

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Paul

Early this week, candy maker Skittles rocked the media by giving over its entire home page to a list of Twitter postings labeled with the #skittles hash tag. The experiment initially provoked excitement, then doubt and finally alarm as pranksters used the opportunity to post all manner of negative and even obscene comments that had very little to do with the fruit candy.

As the volume of trash talk swelled, Mars Snackfood US pulled down the Twitter search page and replaced it with a Facebook profile. Today the site features a Wikipedia entry. Skittles’ branding consists of an overlay window that links to various references to the product in social media outposts. Basically, Mars reconfigured the brand’s website as a package of consumer-generated content.

A lot of people are trashing Mars for this bold experiment. “Disastrous” says Apryl Duncan on About.com. “Gimmicky” says VentureBeat. “Humiliating disaster” says SmartCompany. While some people are praising Mars for originality, the early consensus is that this campaign is not a good idea for the Skittles brand.

Bold Move

I beg to differ. While Mars certainly could have better anticipated the frat-boy efforts to undermine the program, the Skittles experiment is a bold statement about where the company is taking its marketing tactics. Full disclosure: I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the Mars marketers on a paid basis over the past year. Unlike many other corporations I’ve encountered, these people get it. Sure, they’re still feeling their way through the process of working with uncensored customer conversations, but they’re on the right track and they’re taking the right risks.

In January, Mars held a day-long offsite meeting with more than 100 of its global marketers to talk about word-of-mouth marketing. I was there, along with many of the company’s agency and branding partners. I was impressed with the commitment the company is making to understanding and working with social media. While many of their peers still regard online forums with a mixture of suspicion and disgust, the Mars marketers see it as an opportunity. They’re also fully aware of the risks. One breakout session at the meeting was devoted almost entirely to an analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin Moms fiasco.

There’s no question Mars could have thought through this experiment somewhat better. Twitter was a bad place to start and under the circumstances, some filtering would have been appropriate. However, the whole concept of giving over the Skittles Web presence to customer conversations is daring and innovative. It’s unfortunate that some of the same people who trash brands for not being more hip to social media are now trashing Mars for almost being too hip.

Proof in the Pudding

Also, look at the coverage this story has generated: The Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Fast Company, CNET and the list goes on and on. If you believe Oscar Wilde’s theory that “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” then this campaign is a hit. If Skittles sales don’t jump 15% in the next month, I’ll eat a bag of the candy, including the bag.

Experimentation is central to new media marketing and negative reactions to bold ideas are nothing to be feared. Nearly three years ago, General Motors invited visitors to stitch together their own video ads for the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. About 15% of the videos people created were negative, prompting critics to call the campaign a disaster. But inside General Motors the project was considered an unqualified success. The Tahoe hit 30% market share shortly after the Web promotion began, outpacing its closest competitor two to one.

The Skittles campaign is outside-the-box thinking. Despite its shortcomings, it deserves praise.

Come Immerse Yourself in the New Marketing

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Paul

Search engine optimization firm Hubspot came up with the best term I’ve heard for the new style of marketing that emphasizes conversation, linking and social media awareness: “inbound marketing.”

The concept is to break from the old style of interruption marketing that is so inefficient that companies consider a 3% response rate to be a triumph. Inbound marketing is about enticing customers to come to you by offering them something of value. We’re talking 100% response rates.

Hubspot staged a successful conference last fall just a few weeks before our own successful New Marketing Summit (NMS) in the Boston area

Several of my NMS colleagues and I have close relationships with the people at Hubspot, so over the last few months we got together and decided to merge our two conferences into one. And we adopted the great term they created.

SF in the Spring

So on April 28, the new, improved Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS) will debut in San Francisco, the first of three conferences this year (Dallas is in May and Boston in September). This event isn’t for marketers who are figuring out how to tiptoe into conversation marketing. It’s for people who are convinced that the world of marketing is changing forever and who want to get out in front of that wave, drive a new form of high-quality engagement and turbo-charge their careers..

IMS will have web 2.0 visionaries like Tim O’Reilly, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott (left), Jason Falls and Brian Solis on the program. More importantly, we’ll have practitioners from companies like Cirque du Soleil, Harley Davidson, French Maid TV and Microsoft talking about how they’re putting new media to work right now, achieving results and measuring those results.

Immersion Therapy

You can drown in social media marketing in San Francisco that last week in April. We’ve collocated the conference with the New Communications Forum, now in its fifth year, presented by the Society for New Communications Research. That event also has a great lineup of speakers, some of whom will be presenting at both conferences.

I’ve got a few discount codes available to people who are really serious about attending, so if you want to meet me in San Francisco, connect with a bunch of thought leaders in this area and trade business cards with successful practitioners, drop me a line and I’ll arrange to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the fee.

I hope to see you there!

Flushed With Success

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Although he was awarded more than 1,000 patents during his life, Thomas Edison famously said that he had failed more than 10,000 times in the process.

Inventors know that success usually comes only after running down many blind alleys. Failure can’t and shouldn’t be avoided, but if inventors can be guided down the most promising paths, they can dramatically cut down on time, cost and frustration.

When David Pearson was presented with the challenge of reinventing one of the world’s most common household objects recently, he applied automation to the task of guiding him toward the goal. The result: A better product designed at half the time and less than half the cost.

Pearson works for the Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network (Magnet), a Cleveland-based nonprofit organization that incubates inventors’ ideas and helps bring them to market using local resources. Pearson’s task was to take a novel idea by inventor Wally Berry to reinvent a core component of the everyday toilet and turn it into reality.

Flushing the Old
According to the plumbing services in Staten Island & Brooklyn, the average toilet can actually stand an overhaul, for it is one of the chief sources of water waste in the US. In the south central and southwestern US, where water supplies are dwindling and costs are soaring, the steady drip of aging toilets has become a major concern of financially strapped municipalities. Berry had an idea to build a better toilet.

He knew that one of the chief causes of water waste is a device called the flapper valve. That’s a spring-loaded plate that permits fresh water to flow into the tank but blocks backflow. Most conventional flapper valves have a rubber seal that is prone to erosion by chemicals in the water supply and household cleaning agents. As tiny cracks develop in the flapper valve, toilets can start leaking gallons of water each day without their owners even knowing. Multiply that by an estimated 220 million toilets in US households, and it adds up to a lot of wasted water.

Berry had conceived of the idea of a leak-proof toilet while solving a problem in his own home. He set out to reinvent the flapper valve and submitted his idea it to Magnet, which chose to fund it. Pearson’s job was to make the concept practical, economical and capable of being mass-produced.

For help, he turned to Goldfire, a software suite from Boston-based Invention Machine, that applies automation to the inspiration of product design. Goldfire can be programmed to tap into databases of original art, products and materials and extract their essential elements. The software prompts designers through the process of deconstructing a problem into its most basic components. Goldfire that helps the designer probe for alternative technologies or materials that can solve the problem better or more cheaply.

For Pearson, designing a new flapper valve involved describing the function it fulfilled in the most basic terms. He built a model in Goldfire that removed the existing flapper valve and replaced it with a description of the function it performed. Instead of looking for a better value, “I needed to find a flexible element that changes with fluid level,” he said. Once he discarded the idea of building a better valve, alternatives opened up.

The most intriguing idea was a spiral-wound hose, which could expand an compress with fluid levels. The problem with spirals, however, is that they spin when compressed. That wouldn’t work within the confines of a small water tank. So Pearson defined the characteristics he needed and sent Goldfire out to look for spiral-wound hoses that wouldn’t spin.

It turns out such a technology is used in surgical applications. Bingo. Pearson incorporated the surgical hose into his model. He applied the same discipline to several other components of the flush valve and began converging the elements, using the software to search for weak points in the model at every step. “I basically narrowed the design down to the few basic elements that I needed,” he says.

A Simpler Approach

What was left after the entire cycle had been completed was a valve retrofit kit that was vastly simpler than the original equipment it replaced. A standard toilet has about a dozen discreet parts; Siphon Flush has just four.

Simplicity also yielded better reliability, enabling American Innovative Products to go to market with an unusual 20-year guarantee. And there was an unanticipated side-benefit: The more efficient flushing mechanism is able to flush twice as much matter with one-quarter less water, further improving its economy.

American Innovative Products will begin shipping Siphon Flush in early March at a price of $27.95. The small firm already has 10,000 orders in its pipeline. Siphon Flush is a radical new design of a product that’s more than 100 years old. Without Goldfire’s guided innovation, “I’m not going to say I couldn’t have done it, but it would have cost twice as much and taken two to three years,” says Pearson.

American Innovative’s Berry says the software cut development costs by 75%, and that’s assuming the product could have been developed in the first place. “Without Goldfire’s definition of what we needed, we’d probably still be looking,” he says.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Job-Hunting 2.0

Web 2.0 Carrots

Netbooks Attack From Below

Here Come Netbooks

Attack From Below

Here Come Netbooks

Attack From Below

Flushed With Success