Blogging workshop wrap up

The blogging 101 workshop, at Jobing.com on Monday was quite an experience. As always,  I ended up having a great learning experience myself. More on that later.

The topic, Using Blogging and Social Networking to Support Your Job Search, comes with a bunch of disclaimers. At the risk of seeming repetitive, I have to say that a blog will not and should not replace a resume. It may enhance your resume, but better still it gives you a way to rethink how you work on your resume. Or your reputation out there.

A resume, after all is a way to capture your reputation system on a sheet of paper, which is an odd thing to have to do in this day and age. That sheet of paper needs to become a living document, and not something that lives in a folder.

I happen to think that a blog is easier to maintain than a resume. Certainly much easier than a web site. (A few people in the audience had personal web sites. I do, too, and it’s a royal pain to update.) Indeed, a blog requires more care and feeding at the initial stage, but once you set up some good blogging habits, use a few simple tools and tricks, it’s not a huge chore.

Once you compare how limited you are with some of the existing tactics you use to define who you are, and what your potential is, a blog becomes a no-brainer.

Comparison between different reputation ‘tools’

Big thank you to Pat Elliott for getting me involved with the Scottsdale Job Network.

Too many swine flu experts hyping it up?

I have seen a flurry of responses to the outbreak of swine flu over the past few days, and have to wonder if our ability to monitor and repeat information often overstates the situation /crisis. Or exploit it.

I can say this with some confidence since:

(a) I work at a the Decision Theater, where we have conducted three pandemic flu exercises –the last of which was in February this year.

(b) We have to caution many people who ask, because everyone’s in reactive mode, not realizing that this is still an outbreak, not an epidemic, and still far from being declared a pandemic.

I suppose we could hype up the situation, and claim to be ‘experts’ in the field, just to get media attention. But we won’t go there. It is not in the public interest to add to the uncertainty.

Down-playing. Sort of. If at all, I have had to tell media who call that guess what, Arizona was recently ranked the most prepared state as far as pandemic plans. I also sat in a meeting where one researcher in this field noted that Mexico has some of the most advanced epidemiologists, and that their health care monitoring system was not to be doubted.

I have seen communicators jump into this space. Some in a good way. But as Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute noted, “too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.”

Here’s a short list of how some in the industry reacted:

• On Sunday, while I was monitoring the information on the outbreak (at 10 pm Mountain Time), Gerard Baud pinged me about how his outfit is looking at the crisis, with a short podcast. Unfortunately it was an ad for a tele-seminar that you would have to pay for. I would have preferred if the response, in the public interest, was a free ‘seat’ at the teleconference for at least one person in the organization.

• Melcrum today published a short but intelligent piece in the Melcrum Hub about an effective crisis communications plan. One of the points they raised seemed so pertinent to the present situation: Stick to the known facts. It’s so easy to go on anecdotal evidence –as in stuff you saw online, repeated by someone who thought she had heard it from a ‘source.’
• Ragan Communications also published a good piece on it but unfortunately they too have connencted it to a webinar that will cost you $99.

• Happy to note that IABC is making a teleseminar available free. Details here.

Bottom Line. I know times are tough. But people are also getting sick. There are lots of cities, school districts and healthcare systems who have plans but will like to see what else they could do. I don’t think at this time they should pay for learning about better communications to help their local community and their country.

Hey, that’s just me.

Jailbreak, compulsory-volunteering and other verbal baggage

Time once again for a look at words and expressions that creep up on us –or as someone about twenty years younger would say, “creep me out.”

“Did you jailbreak your iPhone?” To a lot of people not involved in a tech world they wonder what the heck you are talking about. Jails and phones don’t go hand in hand unless you tend to read Mossberg or Wired as bedtime stories. What ever happened to the old word “hack?” So much easier to understand. I know, I know, jailbreak speaks to  Steve Jobs’ obsession with a locked down phone and the so-called walled gardens such as Facebook. Jailbreak is the semantic enemy of Open Source, I am told. Which brings me to…

Walled Gardens. The phrase has been around but it’s always being brought back. I deliberately said ‘so-called walled garden’ and added the Facebook reference so people understand what this obscure expression is all about. Wikipedia has a decent entry on it, so I won’t go into it. By the way, there’s lot of talk that Facebook is opening the gates to its walled garden, but that idea still needs to be explored –or flushed out?

Flesh-out or Flush-out? As Andrea Goulet, a copywriter whose  blog is worth reading, notes that both expressions are used as a handle for brainstorming, but both have a yuck factor.

Edupunk. I have never heard of the word, but it makes perfect sense. It’s a sorrt of rebellion to standardized teaching methods. As Christopher Sessums explains, “Edupunk is … a sociohistorical reaction to an educational system that has allowed textbooks, tests, politicians, and schools of education to supervise teachers and create curricula that takes away educators’ professional responsibilities to build their own.”

Desertification. I heard Secretary Clinton use this in her Greening Diplomacy address. No she did not coin the word (there’s a long Wikipedia entry on it), and a desertification blog by a professor in Belgium.

Compulsory volunteering. Trust the government to come up with an oxymoron like this. The British govt, in this case. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a case for this earlier in the month.

REASON I RAISE THIS: I often talk to people about writing, and people believe writing is very challenging and complicated. It is, if you bring all the baggage of buzz words and industry jargon. The moment you put pencil to paper or open up a Word template, the baggage seems to burst open and the jargon gets strewn all over your pretty page. Just be yourself, and strip out the jargon, and it’s suddenly very easy.

Quotes for the week ending

“I hate Earth Day the same way I hate Christmas and Thanksgiving … Should we only seek peace on Earth and be thankful one day a year?”

Justine Burt, on the ReGeneration blog

“Enough already. The Oprah and Ashton-i-zation of Twitter is good, if you believe, as I know many of you do, that the more universal Twitter becomes…”

Catherine P. Taylor, on how we are all guilty of being on a constant hunt for cool, but it’s all good.

“This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract.”

Nationale Swisse, an employer who fired a woman who was on Facebook, after calling in sick to say she could not be working in front of a computer. The woman was supposedly on Facebook in bed, using her iPhone.

“conversation shouldn’t be a blind ambition with social media, but rather an end that you seek strategically.”

Rohit Bhargava, on why there are many valid business situations where a conversation via social media are not needed.

“Online media’s ‘favorite child status’ … appears to have diminished over the last few months.”

Nielsen’s Global Online Media Landscape report, 2009

“The world has changed. It is no longer round, nor flat. It is Twitter-bird shaped and people are talking about you, your products and services.”

Wayne Kurtzman, in Media Bullseye

Can social media help you land a job?

The short answer to that question is: we’ll never know unless we try.

In February year, we were told we’d have to take unpaid Furlough. Unemployment was at 6.9% and climbing (today it is at 8.5%) Some 115,000 workers in Arizona had lost jobs in the past 45 days or so. In this context a pay cut didn’t seem so bad. I had an idea that many of us communicators here in the Phoenix area, who were employed, might be able to give a bit of our time to help those who were desperately seeking work.  My working title for a proposal I began circulating was JobCamp. Interestingly, of the half-dozen people who stepped forward, two senior communicators who said they would help, were also out of jobs.

The basis of my idea was that resumes are not enough. They are not exactly obsolete but need to be reworked in the context of how resumes are searched, how someone’s online reputation can be nurtured, and how best position oneself with current, forward-looking skills. And so it gave rise to:

• WORKSHOPS NEXT MONTH. We plan to hold a few workshops based on a lot of feedback, requests and ideas I have been getting. Details and registration will be announced shortly

• WORKSHOP NEXT WEEK: Somewhat related to this is a 2-hour workshop I am conducting for the Scottsdale Job Network. It’s a hands-on session on blogging, and how you might use a social media tool like this to enhance your job search.  Monday 27 April from 6 – 8 PM. I recommend you register here.

On the same page: I just stumbled upon LaidOffCamp, started by someone called Chris Hutchins. It’s a terrific idea, organized (just like Podcamp in an open source format) via a Wiki. The purpose is to help unemployed people network, share ideas and help them get back to work.

What if we had easy access and stinking content?

What’s the use of seamless web access if all you get is stale, flawed, biased, puerile content?

Meaning, what would happen if all the investigative reporters turned away from the news business, and all the stories that ever got published by stripped-down newspapers were opinion pieces and press releases thinly disguised as news?

These are my nightmare scenarios when I pick up my Arizona Republic, and grab a copy of The Wall Street Journal. The impact of this hit me when I read that one of the Pulitzer prize winners was a local newspaper here, the East Valley Tribune –a paper that is on life support, having turned to being a free paper, and published just a few times a week.

How can newspapers survive? Could they follow the National Public Radio model (by the way, NPR has cancelled its newspaper subscriptions!)  or turn to some other form of revenue to pay journalists? Mitch Joel has summarised some of the scary things happening in the news business.

On the same day he wrote about this, I listened to an NPR show (Talk of the Nation) talking about just this. I was somewhat optimistic to hear a few alternative business models. One of which was The Voice Of  San Diego that operates as a non-profit. Think about that. A non-profit newspaper. It says it is “the only professionally staffed, nonprofit online news site in the state focused on local news and issues” that is funded through “the support of individuals, foundations and businesses which, like you, recognize the importance of local news from an independent perspective.”

Sometimes, when I login to Yahoo, I see its front page with news such as “Paula gets choked up. Kara screws up on ‘Idol” and one about two guys in Philly who got a text messaging bill for $26,000. I know they are merely aggregating content, often content that appeals to everyone in general, and no-one in particular. At such times I want to cancel my cable and use that money to subsidize a journalist or one of the new media startups like these that can deliver some real news.

Three simple lessons from a visit to Starbucks. Or Four.

Retail spaces can teach you a lot of things. I once interviewed a guy who worked for auto-supplies store in California filling the racks and managing the register. He ended up as president of the company. How? He says he looked beyond the boring details of his college job and saw retailing as a learning ground for all kinds of management ideas.

I was reminded of that at my stop at Starbucks last morning. The shelves and the signage were screaming with marketing messages but the barristas were doing some pretty amazing –if basic– things. Those we take for granted as communicators. So here are the three takeaways:

1. Know your audience. Not the trite know your audience by name, but know their preferences, to the point of knowing a bit of their personal lives.
2. Ask a lot of questions –even though you may *know* a lot about the audience, and have a big database of information in your head and on the corporate server. Ask and you will engage…
3. Engage in a genuine conversation –Go beyond the mundane  greetings, and leave brand conversations to the brand folk.

I don’t think managers set a timer to make sure a patron is served within a certain time. If they do, it sure doesn’t show. The lines are long, but unlike the wait in a grocery store checkout, no one seems to get impatient when the customer interacts with the service provider. Which brings me to the fourth point:

4.   Reset Expectations: Starbucks seems to set –or reset– people’s expectations when they step inside.

Do you?

Ecohes of Ogilvy in Creative Refinery

I have to applaud Nathan Wagner, a friend with whom I chat about all things marketing and branding. he occasionally leaves a comment on this blog, and that starts an offline conversation.

Having worked for some pretty cool interactive agencies, he’s launched is own shop, called Creative Refinery. Intriguing name, that. (Previously there was BaconPony) Nathan is one of the few marketing practitioners I know of who rather than parrot the marketing-speak from business books, coins his own expressions. His recent blog post (the blog is called “Relevant Chews” – go figure!) talks of something after my own heart. The ordinariness of the consumer:

“I am not a consumer.  I am a husband, father and a hard working guy – but I could be your next loyal customer.”

I found it almost echoes a famous David Ogilvy idea: “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.” Actually I think that’s a  misquote. It is most likely Ogilvy said “The customer is not a moron. She is your wife.” Big difference.

The refinery guys should know.

The Oprah effect on Twitter doesn’t bother me

Now that Oprah has put her stamp on microblogging, does that mean we’re going to be drowned by too much interest in branding and celebrity and too little attention to innovation and communication?

As the niche medium begins to gain mass medium status, a lot will change. The downside to all this could be the wrong kind of interest in quantity over quality. Oprah has 75,000 followers when she had founder Evan Williams on her show. As of today she has 453,000 (an increase of 61,000 since yesterday).  Yet, it’s those small communities that will thrive.

Todd Defren said it best: “It’s OKAY if “everyone joins Twitter.” You still only need follow your friends & allies. No one’s gonna *make* you follow @Oprah”

Twitter’s value to me is in how it can be an antenna not a loudspeaker. A filter, not a vacuum cleaner for every dust bunny that floats by.

Why do carriers still sell locked phones?

Imagine this scenario. You buy a tuxedo online from Kohls for an upcoming event. When it arrives you realize that it still has a security tag you cannot break. You call the store to find a way to remove it and they give you the runaround. Thy say they need to contact manufacturer, Croft and Barrow, to get an unlocked code. Please give them 48-hours until they they hear from the manufacturer, and email you. Meanwhile the event you need to attend comes and goes, but the product you paid for is unusable.

OK, hypothetical situation, but that’s what a locked cell phone represents. A crippled product. Companies such as T-Mobile that sell locked phones are blind to the reality that (a) the device, once paid for does not belong to them or the manufacturer anymore. It should be open by default (b) the world is flat and boundaries have blurred. People should not need customer service intervention to replace a SIM card when roaming.

I had the bad luck to travel to Sri Lanka earlier this month with such a crippled phone — a T-Mobile Dash made by HTC– because I had no time to call to check if it was locked or not. I realized my problem when I tried to swap my SIM card. I got online and found a way to chat with a customer service rep who said it can take up to 48 hours to get the phone unlocked.

I told her they had to be kidding. What kind of unconnected world were they operating in? Two days was a sort of a good turnaround, apparently.

She: When we have to email the manufacture it can take up to 14 days to get a response.

Not good enough, I said.

She: I will inform my supervisor of this issue to see if there is anything that we can do however when we have to e-mail the manufacture we just have to wait for there response as that is out of our hands to get a sooner responses.

Sooner, as in two weeks and counting. I am back in the US. Still no unlocked code. I called twice, checked my email and junk-mail folder. Still no code. That’s why there’s such a thing as text messaging, I tell them –to bypass email.

But the bigger question is not how long it takes to solve a problem, or how to communicate with a customer. The real question is: Why on earth do mobile phone companies sell locked-down smart phones?  I can only imagine three reasons:

1. Forced loyalty. It makes customers feel they have to grovel to get their basic rights.
2. Easy revenue: Even if 10 percent of customers get trapped in a situation like this and roam, the money to be made is just too good to forfeit.
3. Clueless. Carriers don’t take trouble to understand just what usage patterns their customers have. They are still trapped into the old marketing mindset of selling ‘packages’ – few sizes fit all. Customers’ social, professional and economic patterns have changed but carriers have never bothered to find out.

It will take legislation for companies this backward to comply with basic customer rights. It will take a lot of disgruntled customers who say bye-bye to them, for the T-Mobiles of this world to wake up.