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Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.
Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.
If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.
Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.
Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.
And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.
The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.
Below are Wilson’s five areas.
* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.
* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.
* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.
* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.
* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users
Mostly Media - Definitely Digital
The Ongoing Personal Brand Review | Brand-Yourself.com Blog
Use UnTweeps for Twitter
UnTweeps is a great tool to manage the people you follow. UnTweeps allows you to enter a day range, and if a person doesn’t have any tweets in the past x days, you automatically stop following them (30 days is the default setting, but I typically keep mine at 90 just to be safe). If someone hasn’t tweeted a message in 3 months, there is no reason for me to follow them and just have another number in my “follows” column.
Finding Real Work at Home Jobs
I've been updating the Work at Home Jobs section of my About.com Job Search site and I thought I should spend some time looking for work at home jobs to make sure that finding legitimate opportunities is really as hard as I say it is.
I've written that finding a real work at home job is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is. I honestly don't know how someone who doesn't know what they're doing can separate the scams from the jobs. One thing I learned today though, was that the more specifically you search (and, of course, the more skills you have) the more likely you are to find decent listings.
Searching for "work at home" doesn't cut it. If you have experience in insurance case management or IT skills, for example, it's easier to find home or field based jobs. If you have no experience, you can locate some jobs, but you need to really carefully investigate the companies to make sure that they're worthwhile opportunities and they aren't going to charge you to hire you.
I've updated my work at home job listings page, with the usual disclaimer that I can't guarantee (unfortunately) the legitimacy of the openings - web sites change, companies change, etc. so it's up to you to make sure that you're not being taken advantage of.
What Would Dad Say: You Are the Boss of You
Chances are, you are about to join or have joined a company where the stated strategy is basically to, somehow, with meetings (typically), strategy sessions (usually) and goals-missions-targets (daily) is to get you and the other members of your team to perform better and in alignment with what the company needs to get done.
Some people do better in this environment than others. They are perfectly willing to belong to a group, especially one that can achieve more than they could have achieved alone. Sport teams are like this, each team member has his or her role, and they know that if everyone does their job, all win. Think about the baseball team–one missing fielder can spell trouble if that is where the other team hits the ball.
Companies are like that, traditionally. The trick in management has always been to somehow meld individuals into a fine, functioning team. Some management (s) are better at this than others, of course. The successful ones use a variety of methods and techniques, motivation and training to get this group, er, team, to perform better.
Here is the interesting part, at least to me. Too many team members look to management, ie. the team leader/coach/boss, to make the team work. These team members say, in effect: It is ‘their’ job to train me, motivate me, teach me, explain things to me, manage me if ‘they’ want me to do THIS for ‘them.’
Luckily, at my current company, most of the team members are taking personal responsiblity for their skills development. They understand that skill development is the ticket to a successful worklife. Instead of sitting around and waiting for someone to give them the magic secret to success, they are working on it every day.
I hope they know they are actually in charge of this.
Fantasy Job Search
Welcome to fantasy job search?
In Career Brander’s version of fantasy job search…
You choose your next job.
For that matter, you choose your next company, you choose your next boss and to some degree you choose your next salary.
Impossible?
If you’ve spent the last few months monitoring job boards hoping that the “perfect” posting appears and you are still looking, please consider joining Career Brander’s fantasy job search league.
The league is free and here is how you play.
- Select a dozen companies you want to work for within 20 miles of your home. (Research)
- Go on LinkedIn, identify the most senior people in the department you wish to work at each company. (Best fit-targets)
- Now, still on LinkedIn, identify any 1st degree, 2nd degree and 3rd degree connections you have at each company. (Social Media connections visibility)
- Build a basic map to connect your 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections to the senior hiring managers. (Social Media connections visibility)
- Start emailing and calling your connections to identify a way to get a warm introduction meeting with the potential hiring managers. Obviously 1st and 2nd degree connections work best, but with work an individual should be able to turn 3rd degree connections into 2nd degree, and 2nd degree into first degree connections. (You need to invest time and sell/market yourself.)
- Leverage company information, which is readily available on the Internet, to create customized marketing messages. (Business Intelligence)
- Make sure your “marketing message” clearly describes the business problem you can solve for the potential hiring manager. (What value can you bring, not what have you done.)
So why do we believe this will work? The answer is two- fold.
1) We are confident that waiting for the perfect opportunity to appear on a job board or from a job site search engine is a fool’s game.
2) Effective job search has always been about networking and all we are suggesting is to find a way to get in front of “the right people at the right companies”. By leveraging relationships that already exist (Without LinkedIn you may not be fully aware of them) you will accelerate the likelihood of a successful job search campaign.
Phrased differently, look for people and relationships to people as opposed to simply looking for jobs. We are confident this career transition strategy will have better results than mining the Internet for job postings!
Career Branders’ Job Search Radar automates much of the “fantasy job search process”.
Job Search Marketing Toolkit - References
“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it” - Benjamin Franklin
Okay, so you've done all of the hard stuff. You updated your resume, applied to countless jobs, went on almost countless interviews and now it's paid off - you have a job offer pending references. Hopefully you've planned in advance and already have your references lined up, but if you don't it's not too late to start now.
There are a few things you need to consider when lining up your references, such as:
- Do you know if they will give you a good reference?
- Do you have 3-4 people who will do this for you?
- Do you have all of their information (phone number, email address, etc.)?
- Did you ask them if they will provide a reference?
- Resume References - Okay, for one, you need to have a line on your resume that says "references will be provided upon request" (or some nifty sentence like that). This article, by lovetoknow.com, provides background on references, why it's important, who to list, what information to include and more. On the left hand side of the screen are links to additional articles which will help you with your job search.
- Free Sample Job Reference Lists for Job-Seekers - Free samples always sounds like a good deal. This link, from Quintcareers.com, provides information on how best to leverage your references, keys to choosing the best references followed by several samples. The samples (both in pdf and html formats) provide examples of how your references should look.
- The 4 Biggest Myths About Job References - US News & World Report provides this article, which helps dispel some myths about references. A very interesting article, and there are additional links to related information (not the double-underlined ones). So what are some of the myths? Some of the myths are - they will only contact the names you give them, your former employers won't give a bad reference and there are a few more.
- Google Yourself – Every man’s reference check - What about checking on yourself? Do you know what stuff might be out there on the World Wide Web? You may think you are clean, but you just never know. This article, by Sam Headhunting, tells you several things you should know (and do) like be aware of your online image, how to Google yourself and more. There are a few additional links which provide more information on the topic.
- Background Check Yourself? - Sounds like a good idea. The purpose, of course, is to make sure you find out any negative information about yourself first. This particular article is for multiple purposes (like checking your credit), but employers are also on the list. This is likely to cost you something, as I don't think there are any "free" background check services. So I would save this option for those who are worried something might come up.
- Employment Background Checks: A Jobseeker's Guide - This article, by privacyrights.org, is a guide that is specifically written for the job seeker. There are 10 topics covered (such as what is included in a background check, how to prepare for a background check and more). This is a very comprehensive article and includes just about everything you can think of. Again, not sure I would spend too much time on this topic (other than learning the "what's" and "why's") unless you are concerned there is erroneous (or damaging) information about you.
Visit my site www.CareerAlley.com
Search engines can help restart your career
A typical job hunt can last 15 to 19 weeks, and it seems that many have been struggling with a search longer than that. Only the staunchest optimist will understand that each "no" you endure in the form of a lack of jobs matching your qualifications or desires, an unanswered application, no invitation for a second interview, or a rejection letter, is getting you closer to the "yes" you want to hear.
Posted by David Perry aka The Rogue Recruiter on Friday, April 09, 2010 at 22:46 | Permalink
