Show me the Money! Job offers in the Credit Crunch

...or the importance of getting a good deal before you accept the job offer

I haev ignored this three times in the last ten years and it is well worth your effort in NOT accepting a low offer despite your circumstances. Look the gift horse in the mouth! Make an informed decision and play some poker!

I cannot stress enough, I will not say too many times and I dare not shout too low that you must get what you need from a first (or second ) job before you accept the offer. Usually this boils down to money, and YOU MUST be happy with the balance between training, projects and salary, because that is all you are going to get while in the job.

Work experience per se is meanginless if you accept a "marketing assistant" job blindly or the nice tasks are only 10% of the time and maybe telesales, database admin, photocopying etc are 90% of the actual job. I wasted a crucial year in such a job! I managed to play catch up with a heck of a lot of hard work in my next job though. It is in fact much better to be paid virtually nothing on a 2 month work experience project where you actually conduct quality marketing tasks than the department GOFER for 12 months.

You need to avoid this by negotiating before you start. Negotiating is always a subtle play of information, and probing for a little bit more and then using it as a little bit more lever, while giving only a little bit out which gives a poorer lever to the other side. This is how you win, you subtlely win tip the balance in your favour while accepting some sort of concession compromise: a few prawns fall but you put them in check-mate.

But firstly, back to green-backs: Companies will palm you off with " we can't afford" or " we have current wage frameworks". This is rubbish, they want to screw you especially in a recession. " If you want people to work harder, pay them less" ...this is true in bum jobs or non graduate jobs......but how effective this stressed, undervalued work period is for both parties is quesitonable. The cost between a market going rate ( admittedly low -I know in the credit crunch hangover period) and a lower offer boils down to a few hundred pounds per month, maybe £70 quid per week for you as a graduate. Can't afford? they could save this by using a better travel agent for business flights, or missing one useless client dinner a month.

Facts are bosses like to screw you over and say they got you cheap, it makes them look good.

So what is on the table to get your information war going in your favour
1) salary
2) training
3) projects and defined responsibilities
4) relocation expenses
5) a 50 to 80% job so you get time to look for something better
6) promotion prospects and turn over in the firm/sector
7) external prospects when you have a year experience
8) the company brand name for your CV ( or client brand names !)
9) start date
7) legnth of trial period
8) Legnth or termination period
9) possible contract engagement only

How can you bargain? Well your only chip is to withdraw your offer of labour. If you are on benefits, this is high risk - you can get them stopped for refusing a job. But given the job is high risk and has financial implications ( expense of rented property). But it is still a poker game and you can't show your hand too soon

How do you bet this chip then, play this card?

Well first of all, you should from outset know what the "wage framework" would be for this position, and know that you as an MSc Marketer have five years of uni to offer and a very good marketing masters under you belt. This should NOT be turned back on to your expectation: some jobs have been 18K outside london for a while. Play dumb, say you have only started looking for work and have expectations to work hard and get on over money: what would they suggest as for me in this job? Don't push too hard, but do revisit the wage BEFORE you bother to go to final interview. Also don't go to employers who dont refund expenses and prefably choose those who book everything for you: if they do this, then put on a bloody good show as they will look after you as an employee!

Now when you get a disappointing offer in an interview, you need to not look too disappointed. It is more likely you will get this on the phone, same here , move quickly on from the money to the responsibilities. Now between this and the eventual decision you must buy time and get concrete DECISIONS not just information, but agreements on tasks, training and projects you will get. You need this in writing to refer to if y our job starts going down the pan soon in.

The important thing with a low offer and poorly defined work responsibilities is to stall in an assertive, positive looking way. Comms mus tbe very positive but not fully committed.

The pieces then come in the list come to play: low pay versus excellent experience or low pay because it is a crap job a graduate in medieval history could do. What tasks, repsonsibilities are up for grabs? Remember you have an MSc, they have not made their minds quite up, so help point them away from the photocopier and mail list towards the high valuie customer satisfaction survey, the social media PR campaign, monitoring competitors, the effective review of the marketing budget and so on....What training courses are internal, who will be your mentor, what courses do they offer externally, will they support your time and materials in doing the CIM courses?

The next thing is of course relocation expenses. These were , a while ago, tax deductable for employers but funnily enough NOT employee personal tax. Employers will put new senior managers up in penthouse suites with hired 4x4 executive wheels! But they will try it on with you as a new graduate in need of work experience. Don't let them if the salary stinks. If it just an average salary, negotiate even a lower salary for the first six months relocation on the back that they find you afirst a hotel and then pay rented accomodation. I have not done this on one notable occiasion and really got stung for the outlay when the job didn't work out ( they put a directors daughter in my job) As a graduate you will have enough debts.

So now you have the balance of information: if the job now sounds poorly paid, poorly trained, low level tasks without relocation, then you may as well ask for say 20k and tell the m you have an offer at that level: never tell them where ( esp recruitment consultants, they are desperate for leads and to close deals! )

Now given the pay is low, but there is relocation and training, you need to find out more about career prospects. Suggest a day's visit to meet the team and finalise the contract. This is a positive thing for the employer. Ask other employees how often people leave - is there a turn over- ask why the job is vacant from your prospective coworkers . Ask how your coworkers started out in the firm. Ask what they studied.

One thing too, what type of cars are in the car park? This is a very clear indication of salary prospects later. Audis, beamers, volvos, 4x4s good...., old fords and citroens very bad...a subsidised canteen is nothing much really as a benefit but a gymn, studio , pool? .

Now you have enough information to make a decision: take it only with more pay, reject it outright, ask for silly money as above or there is another option: shape something new based upon your own needs: a more focused project 3 days a week or for just three months on say expenses only as a work trial. Or a 60% position covering only relevant, higher value marketing tasks. Or they pay for your CIM proffessional development and two triaing courses of your choice within industry average cost of courses.

In negotiating you need to push them to the wire: stall as long as you possibly can if the wage is low: get as much information out of them while remaining positive, but non committal verbally amnd on paper. Then if you have managed say two weeks stalling for a job where there are lots of questiona and a final visit to meet the team, then you can pull your card out and say the offer is not attractive enough and thank you but no thanks

Then you can let them do the talking and you should not let them bully you, just repeat the pay is very low, you have a better offer, or you have interviews for better paid jobs.

If you have been looking for a job or working temp for a long time, up to 8 months say, and you feel forced into accepting a job, then a final end game is to stall and ask for a later starting date. Use the time and security of something to do anyway to look hard for other jobs. The fall-back and interview-offer experience will be good. When you get a better offer you will only have a months termination, which may be even before your start date or you can turn up to work with an offer, see what tasks and training you will actually get and then demand them or you will just call it all off.

Once again you could ask for a 60% position focusing on the real marketing tasks and thus avoiding being given rubbish to do. You could probably expand it to 100% if it goes well or at least have two days a week to look for other work.

DIY Consumer Generated Media Survey

DIY Market Research in Consumer Generated Media

At this instant, many universities around the world are spawning out small start ups and VC are raising eyebrows as angel captial invests in a new type of market research and intelligence firm.

The new enterprise opportunities are based on the sheer volume of CGM and the vogue for the big brands on the web in this area: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and the latest brave new entry, google-buzz. Statistics, as I discussed below, are a little hard to use in reality and the cold world of market-movements and quantitative , conclusive, inferential and the numerically indicative is somewhat removed from CGM at the moment. What the meat-of-the-dinner is in fact, remains qualitative research with some utilisable methods for stat's which help describe the parameters and prominent qualities within voice-of-public or "Buzz" in social media.

Now from the arena I have seen, there is quite a smidgen of the "emperors new clothes" around in social media-monitoring. Take for example what is all dressed up and being used and no doubt abused: In areas like sentiment with some pretty flimsy algorythms out there, or little if any statistical significance to confirm the relative changes over time or differences between brands.

Also hit count statistics: for reasons of the prevalence and magnetism of the big sticky threads I discussed earlier, these can in fact populate a large amount of your hits in a topic, and if a topic has become google-rooted ( search engine ranks are high for that forum on the given free search in the topic area) then these get alot of noise about nothing other than one place to look. You see where I am going? If you want to open a kosha sandwich deli, then you will soon realise that most of the current world market is in new york.

It is actually pretty easy to follow the path " he who hath shall have a cup which over floweth, and he who hath not shall go without for ever" : the sticky sites and the sticky threads suck in a lot of the numbers and within this lies some of the really good qaulitative insight. You don't need large indexing or meta crawling tools to get the same qualitative result: but you do need sound judgement and the "corner pieces" of your social media space and range of consumer expression.

The opposite is also true: very small postings or postings which are very similar over a range of web forums and other social media, can point to a lead indicator or early problem alert after NPI. New users posting in a period after product launch are worth picking up: they are often the tip of the iceberg of customer dissatisfaction!

Until a few years ago, search engines did not want to index "live content" for various reasons best known to them selves! So any php , asp or cfm pages where ignored as perishable and not to be indexed. This had me stuck on a few forums we ran for clients a decade and more ag- Iit became a bit tedious because back then the big-thread magnet phenomenon, and ettiquette (discussed two blogs ago). However the corporate bosses were hanging on every word written down in awe and fear of libel suites or some tumultuous disclosure ( which did happen actually)

So your start point should be to follow the well trodden path like a wolf amongst the sheep who go google, and then like the idea of CGM forum rather than reading the corporatised blurb or sanitised PR bloggs. The doors to the crime scene are all open and there are hundreds of footprints.

So your tools are the search engines. Beware being all google centric: some may be more prominent nationally or within a specialist niche of global or national citizens ( academics always used Alta Vista and then moved over to FAST all the web for example). Now you add google buzz, google blogg search, twitter search, youtube, tweet deck etc and you start to have a powerful set of doorways to be able to set out and build a report like "attitudes the the bumble bee brand amongst international english speaking consumers in Social Media"

A few weeks ago, Google announced they would be indexing public content on FaceBook which will make both some opportunity , and a big stick to beat yourself with. As with analysing tweets, it can be a torturous route of reading conversations or following links to actually make sense of hit results.

It is a little difficult to get meaningful statistics in DIY SMMing but some clever use of search string arithmetic will help. More on this , making your google etc advanced or multiple searches efficient and exhuastive in a later blog.

You can meta-track launches, from rumour mill to unboxing and consumer adoption. You can track political issues, viral news story discussion...anything that affects several hundred thousand people in a western country, and you can bet it will be posted on, blogged, tweeted or have it's own fan or hate club on FB.

On some topics you will find a fairly concise set of mega-threads, a smattering of blogs and a pitter-patter of small threads and comments around the various social media nodes. Other topics you choose to research will be huge, sprawling and broad in both their appeal and the spectrum of opinion which is expressed.

Larger topics are usually worth sub categorising by sub topic, geography or forum-colour. Alternatively you can try to see the amenability of searches which find a type of segmentation based around a more qualitative factor: like consumer intention to purchase ; polars of sentiment ; brand or feature comparative posts and pages.

When you find page hits ( times 10 for post hits on average!) which run into the hundreds then it is worth using a very simple, well validated sampling methodology. First ensure that the page listings are exhaustive and you know the total number. Then take this and take it as every tenth page to counts of 100 or 500, and every 25th page for over 500 and so on. This will mean opening everything in "new tab". Most pages on forums will have 10 posts, but some may list the entire thread or hundreds. Then you can apply the same rule of thumb: every nth post: 5 for 100 would be a more quality result. The point of this discipline being that you sample from the whole distribution, (population of posts as species if you like) and you don't follow "interesting routes". In other words, you are forced to take a wide angled shot so you understand the landscape before you can decide which features are actually representative, prominent or meangingful in light of the whole spectrum.

From this approach you can do some surprisingly quick five-bar gate counts of keywords, brands or even sentiment. Many forums have sentiment ratings, and if you include comments and reviews on places like Amazon as CGM then you can start to do sample based sentiment ratings - which in fact can be pretty much as accurate as the latest AI driven ratings- if you have enough time.

All is not equal, as discussed in the sticky threads blog below. Some threads which are large or have topical subject lines, receive many more hits than others. Also some medias are more prominent and perhaps carry more status: like the BBC web forums and comments boxes. Forums with high SE rankings tend to have the most traffic. Retweet rate /total is another meta-metric .

From a knowlegde of prominent forums for a product type, brand, band, author, lifestyle or political view point you can then consider the sub set of consumers who are most interesting to follow up: the innovators, the early adopters, the opinion shapers, the self-appointed authorities, brand champions ( fan boys / fanboi's) ..brand terrorists....and follow their posting to gain a high level view of the discussion: see if indeed they are influencing people or if generally people make their own minds up and buy that pink coloured laptop anyway!

So you start to get a feel for how a report may be structured, using simple hit counts as a top level introduction and then results from your measurements within the samples. Finally you get into the qualitative observation with the prominence of the media and the activity of the opinion leaders, and the sentiment tallies from the different samples to give some kind of summative opinion poll for the topic. The conclusions you may draw should therefore be based upon prominent information, a knowledge of why it is prominent and what else lies in the spectrum, a handle on the polarity of sentiment expressed and the average point for consumers, be it neutral or not! When you make a conclusion which points to a useful management insight, then go back and check the prominence: check the hit coutns relative to other topics or shades or opinions etc, check your sample is exhaustive and re-check your search strings ( a little more on this latter below and then another blog , coming soon to a soggy-spot near you!)

There are plenty of kid on numbers you can put around these things. For computer scientist graduates, metacrawling or re-indexing can be a way forward to producing statistics based aroung the single post as the "Unit of selection". Different sampling strategies based on random and temporal dips can be useful when confronted with 50 million tweets per day!

For the very numerate amongst you as marketers, sociologists or computer scientists, you should be aware than CGM is in such large numbers that a topic such as a fairly common brand name or product, will have a "normal distribution" of opinion if you like, and this can be captured in a correspondingly 2 SD centric list of keywords: the first six search strings capture the first two or even three standard deviations .

There is a bell curve : x axis rating versus Y axis volume. The majority of opinion/keywords etc, will be within the first two standard deviations. When you do a nth sampling you really get to check that the bell curve is covered. If you do manage to plot data, sentiment or keywords, and you find that there are more peaks and troughs than one bell curve then you have either too small a sample size, a poorly defined opinion-keyword-etc scale, or in fact you are measuring two different things: either from two destinct populations with some degree of polarity to each other on your scale ( OOPS! you sample tory and labour forums ( republican / democrat) and not general political discussion!) .

When you know you have a nice bell curve then you can be very safe in using nth sampling or random statistical sampling and that your comparisons can be shown to be statistically significant: FOR THIS DESCRIPTIVE DATA SET. You cannot use this as inferential statistics, primarily because you cannot accurately capture social demographics in CGM and there fore you cannot make any extrapolations to the population as a whole.

If you combine an offline survey which identifies people's demographics in relation to their interaction with CGM, it can be possible to make some tentative inferences based on the knowledge that your large sampling base is composed of a cross section of society idenitfied in this CGM interaction survey . Even then you have to tread very carefully, statistically speaking, because your "Hits" are by a decided number of authors, some using several handles over forums, some using multiple identities to stimulate discussion on the same forums ! In other words your actual "n" for the study group is too small. Is the post more important than the author? Hmmm well people tend to be consistent and only change opinion after some degree of cognitive dissonance so really your "n" is authors and not posts.

Inference to the general population soon evapourates when as you get into small number of authors per posts, and some of my "sticky, syrupy threads" are very much dominated by a gang of less than 10 key proponents. But then again a knowledge of what cross section are reading those forums and the thread rankings on the SE's means you can start to make a judgemental call on the importance of an issue or the opinions around a topic.

Sociologists and psychologists are very taken up with not interfering with the subjects:not introducing experimental method source errors, researcher interference or interpreter bias. If it is purely observational, then just a simple permission disclaimer is all that interfere, or in focus groups, skilled moderators stimulate debate and keep it on topic while being allegedly carful not to introduce biases (observers are usually in other rooms and should not confer on their notes themselves! )

But in the area of CGM you can be a little more anarchic. Having identified and qualified your CGM sources as "prominent" then you can set out to interact a little by starting threads, or tweets, yourself. This is a purely qualitative approach, but it can help you gain insight in an area where you found many tangenital conversations, unclear opinion or forum leader-or fanboy -bullying ( shutting out opinions, topics , alternative products/ solutions etc) previously skewing the area you are researching. Tread a little carefully and pick those forums or social networks where you have established that "noobs" ( newbies...first time or low count posters) receive a positive welcome and a range of replies and are not shut out when they post sensible . This means you can pose a question within a subject which is tenable : this could indeed include concept building around latent demand and unmet needs.

I hope this has stimulated some ideas for just going out and doing some DIY research from your desktop. This approach deals not only with qualitative observations, but you may also pick up some qualitive ideas on what would work with a crawling-indexing system, or a new type of social media platform!

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Perspective
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To show how long in the tooth I am, and just how jaded I am by the industry, market research is a be-whoared cinderella within marketing. Of course it should be the lead violin, the first on the dancefloor but instead it is the working girl who turns up in her best frock only to have a hand put up her skirt! They want her knickers off, just to get as quick as they can to what makes them happy: to drop the analogy, product managers have often made their own minds up about what makes a good campaign and where they are going and only want market research which will support that or their plan B. They have sales and national account managers to keep happy and they need to steal a bit of limelight by doing something unique.

This is true of research in social media, and it there is a danger for observer bias in generating keywords and search strings, and the in choosing themes or summarising the spectrum of opinion. Conversely, any-road-will-take-you-there-if-you-dont-know-where-you-are-going, so it is easy to follow seemingly prominent themes and paths of arguement which take you down blind alleys. Avoid the critical path approach, and keep it broad and objective.

In a later blog I will discuss how you create an objective set of search strings which are both exhaustive enough while being efficient in "containing" a topic, and as mentioned making sure you are within the first couple of standard deviations for a given distribution with the majority of your efforts.

Why Monitor Social Media ?

Perhaps you are new to the world of social media monitoring at work, or are embarking on your studies at university in this area, and you are wondering just exactly "what is in it for me ?"

Maybe your background is in traditional marketing or perhaps you work in a technical or customer services function and have heard that this new area is indeed something worth looking into further . How can monitoring social media help you make decisions and deal with problems and opportunities?

Well it is of course e-Marketing and web masters are the most interested and are sitting glued to the analytics and consumer opinions. Of course it is not just for the geeks: communications and customer services who are aslo getting engaged with SM. The benefits reach wider and deeper into the organisation though. Everything from new-product-introduction & tracking, or competitor pricing, to issue containment is amenable in almost real time : the feedback loop from action-consumer reaction is drastically shorter.

Statistically Speaking

One burning question is how can information in SM be used to make conclusions about the wider consumer population? Well speaking mathematically, usually we cannot make inferences to the general population or produce actual statistics - yet.

The day may come in the near future though, when the numbers of consumers engaging in discussion will be so high that we can draw inferences to the wider population, such as intent-to-purchase or brand awareness, and put some hard numbers behind this with SM a quantitative source for extrapolation to consumer behaviour in the market as a whole.

Even then it will most likely be from a definable cross section of different geographical- or network-societies: age and education related. It would be dangerous to draw inferences on anything but the first three standard deviations from one of those sub populations who are engaged with the internet and SM. However we will be able to utilise statistical probability based sample methods within any accessable or stored data set to produce smaller data sets which are make analysis more efficient within given parameters of accuracy and inferential significance.

Social Media Monitor Should Be Qualitative

For the moment though, reporting is focuses rather on the valuable qualitative insights to be found, "straight from the horses mouth". These are the root causes of issues, the actual verbatim opinions, the dissatisfactions, the real point-of-touch customer experiences : I could go on! These help illustrate findings from a company's quantitative reports and data-sources, as well as pointing to new insights which uncover consumer opinion hidden or distorted by the very interactive nature of surveys, depth interviews or focus groups. Also they can uncover uncomfortable truths which are hidden by line managers, front line operators or re-sellers.

Everything is Relative

Despite the qualitative output of reporting, descriptive statistics can be used within the domain of social media to illustrate the relative prominence these qualitative observations This includes the relative prevalence (or you could say "share-of-voice" ) of brand names, consumer opinions and for instance problems with newly launched products.


In combination with ever-more-accurate sentiment algortyms running with AI (artificial intelligent) systems, this area of descriptive statistics will be used more and more to give a picture of the cross-section of society using SM to discuss your brands and customer support. The value will increase if it can be shown that the "listen-learn-decide-react" loop on the web connecting to SM, is functioning.

Then our little world of SM becomes a market in it's own right, and this is already happening with companies engaging in different campaigns and communications which are built around information from social-media-reportage. Some companies in future may only interact with consumers through this interface and connections form SM to their web-services.


Numbers and graphs are all very fine and nice to present and talk about, even with the provisio that this is a little and twisted version of the world at large. But even a very low number of "hits" within the latter, for example, can reveal invaluable insight into potential challenges in production lines or further back in the supply chain which are creating problems not detected earlier in the testing and launch programme.


Tracking New Product Introduction

This qualitative approach has been of particular value in tracking new devices launched on the market, which have a plethora of features and most likely diverse internal software. However, this is equally valuable in tracking a new service, or immaterial product from a financial institution or a mobile network operator. Or in defining an unmet need or latent demand out there in the market place.


Within the world of gadgets- consumer electronics like mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or digital cameras - it is in fact often the lead consumers who are the real experts: they can be tracked individually, from maybe a sample of 10, as they try and buy diverse gadgets and report their experiences on the web. Often they seem very informed on how the technical features, like processor, touch screen, GUI, actually deliver benefits in use and how much better this performance is to earlier products or competitors offerings.

In fact these lead consumers seem to have a more wholistic view of the product's perfromance than the head of R&D and most likely the CEO at the manufacturer! Worth listening to SM?

Sticky, Syrupy Threads

Discussion forums continue to be the most useful social media space to gain consumer insight from, for now at least.

Within these forums you can follow consumer's problems, desires, experiences etc and see how discussions evolve around out clients products, services and brand values. One species of thread which has always very been prominent on forums is the mega-thread. Why are they so "sticky"?

These threads are way longer than average in number of posts. Some run to many thousand entries. It seems they break down into both serious, often heated discussion, diverse postings around a topic - like a new mobile telephone - , or pure trivia like jokes or chain stories.

One reason that they are sticky (ie attract users and keep them coming back) is that they often have prominent placings when forum threads are ranked in order of date on topic listings page, or on the more recent "hot topics" side bars on home pages and top level forum category indexes. It would be interesting to see statistically when such threads attract a critical mass, and how they develop from there. This could be a useful metric and watch alarm-trigger. Rate of growth, number of lead influencers, ranking: some algorythm could be made to work and fish them up to a dashboard panel of "Hot stuff"

Consumers coming to a forum see these mega-threads as the " tall oaks" amongst the grasslands of granular postings. By their stature, they demand respect and people will often come on board a product topic and post their " 2 cents" before they would consider creating a new thread, even if their "2 cents" is a little off topic or outside the current line of arguement. In this way they appeal to the conformist consumer.

These threads then, are not purely a result of some natural magnetic force , or social diffusion through the ethers of the internet. Most are nurtured, and some are not only fertilised with fresh content, but have their space cut clear for weeds, these being small competing threads. Users who can be identified as opinion -leaders, early adopters, expert-insiders or collectively lead influencers, will steer a thread they like and by carefully timed posting and replies to users comments, they will keep the thread up there in the top 5.

Lead influencers vary in how often they initiate threads, but they turn up like clockwork on the hot news threads or major theme threads relating to the forum's raison d'etre. They are in fact instrumental in coaxing the threads to gain critical mass.

Nurture also happens unfortunately perhaps, from forum owners and appointed "moderators". Some forum owners will post on new, related threads, stating rather rudely that the users should refer to the long running topic and "this is closed". They even delete competing threads apparently. Scornful lead influencers will also pounce on unsuspecting thread-starting-newbies, and stamp their forum authority by refering the user to an old worn arguement they should join the gang on the proper big thread, or just have used the "search" function to find the info' on old threads.

Some lead influencers like to demonstrate their boundless knowledge and articulate debating skills, while others can appear very helpful and down-to-earth, sometimes though outright patronising to those with lower post number seeking advice. In fact some lead influencers post almost exclusively in big threads and never start their own.

Usually as rule-of-thumb, one can consider those users with over 1000 posts as a start point to identify lead influencers within a topic of interest.

After this start point, you can delve further into their posts and behaviour, to assert if they are leading discussion and influening others to change opinion, be informed or of course buy something.

Mega-threads have another type of gravity: Often they attract a disproportionate number of "reads" to their actual post number, relative to smaller threads in the same forums. In effect they become the headline pages, or new-channels within the forums. People go there first, they grab attention for read-only "lurkers".

This read-count makes them even more important for companies to gain insight and summary of which direction the group of big threads on say, a product launch or a service problem are going.

One explanation for their disproportionate is their prominence on the forum as mentioned. But also these are the threads which the Google/Yahoo type spiders actually come upon and index. The threads live longer and are earlier on the index-crawl. They have bigger clusters of keywords and have by pure virtue of size, more links out and eventually IN to. Hence they are search engine friendly and score high on relevance and hits. In conjucntion with good web site SEO, the forums get quite high index listings on the SE's depending on the search terms. Also consumers set a bigger price on their own generated opinion! They would rather read 100 different user opinions than one PR story regurgitated, neigh, re-tweeted 100 times.

SE listings then helps the threads gain extra critical mass and keeps them "bumping" back with new posts even some time after they seem to have bruned out.

As we know though, yahoo and google only index an estimated 15% of the web, so it is pretty much hit or miss for actually finding these threads. Choose a good SM monitor company with either full indexing on main sector forums and general consumer forums, or those who can sample effectively from these for the big issues.

Strange true facts

1- the famous, or infamous, "black box recorder" in all civilian aircraft is actually bright orange. ( usually there are two of them as well! Redu )

2- the average horse in average activity produces disputedly 3.4 hp, with a peak of 12.1hp (wiki) while of course just walking it is under a horse power effort. James Watt knew about averages and studied many horses - used in working pit hoists where horses were employed in tread wheels (mills) and those drawing brewery carts ( common in Glasgow!) so he based his work on foot llbs per minute, from a standing start I believe. So a horse in one minute can hoist a weight so many feet in the air. However a horse with momentum, already moving it's own weight, produces on average 3.4 allegedly in what is a horses average activity- I take it this means a canter or trot. ...and so rages on the torque versus absolute horse power ratings today ( hp = torque x rpm )
Sadly end is in sight for "horse power" as a measurement. James Watts analogous measure - he allegedly chose for marketing purposes- painting the picture of how much effort his improved steam engine could gain over the 'cornish'steam engine or horses themselces - a measure in flesh and blood rather than his own more esoteric measure ( 1 hp = 740 watts app, 0.7 KW hence kw is about 2/3 the rating in 1000s of horse power .)
Now ships and locomotives are quoted as generators have been for many years- kilo and mega watts. Generators Kw/h rating is more applicable to electric power, which ships are moving towards as final drive ( inc. the latest Queen Mary) so to speak- traction motors on shorte prop shafts. Locomotives are quoted more often now in Kw, but some linger on hp and most refer also to maximum lifting peak tractive effort- for example EE type three was 55,000 ft.lbs at 18mph. Electric locomotives have higher peak power at high speed where the high voltage available can be engaged for sprints to gain top speed, but these are not sustainable before electrical equipment overheats.

With the advent of hybrid cars, electric drive pleasure boats and alternative energies, the days of horse power look numbered. Marketing needs something less macho to sell cars which are no longer raw v8s. Perhaps we will relate more to our grandmothers kw electric bar heaters as we meander down the eco-friendly lane.

3.On the subject of driving, more people use the right lane of the road with left hand drive, as summed up on "world standards" hosted in belgium. China is decisive because otherwise the massive population of post colonial india would be outdriving the US and EU put together. Oddly, Samoa (not USA samoa) chose to shift the opposite way that sweden had 42 years ago, this year when they went right to left. Not long after they were hit by a Tsunami, two unrelated events you may ask?

The origins of driving on the left was due to the middle ages in england when riding with your sword at hand to defend from attackers meant people kept to the left hand side so as to defend quickly on the right. Suspicious bunch the english horsemen then. Driving on the right may have to do with rebellion, but also nautical origins where Starboard, or Right, and the relation driote-rights meant that those on the right had er, right of way. Interestingly traffic lights adopted the green, starboard light for GO and the red, port for YIELD surely a nautical decision.

e-marketing is dead, long live ...iMarketing

Push marketing is in it's death throws - well,many would have you believe that. What is true is that "e-Marketing" is percieved as push, spam and no thank you mam

Now in 2010 it is set to be replaced by a simple change of vowel and dropping of that heavy hyphen - here cometh the prodigy

"iMarketing"

But how do you interact as a brand manager?

Well it is all about listening, thinking, and qaulifying before you say something!

So trad' marketing is dead? Snail marketing will push more and more people to either the internet or outlets to allow consumers to have an media-rich enhanced and most og
all, interactive buying experience.

Listening has new ears :

Firstly you want to define which social media you NEED to listen to and which are "nice to have's", or just use a supplier like Integrasco to be your ears.

Secondly blogg or when you do something "allow" people to post.

Thirdly allow for customers to voice openly and make suggestions for new products, services or improvements with a suggestions button on your website and your other nodes of social contact on the web.

Fourth and final for this bigger than a tweet blogg, put on a call-me-now button for your country restricted web sites at points where a sale is to be made or a problem can be solved. .................after all, don't forget people like to talk, vent off a little and negotiate with a human once in a while.

meanwhile don't be a facebook fool

http://tech.uk.msn.com/features/photos.aspx?cp-documentid=149713830

USB movies Dongle Films

http://estb.msn.com/i/F8/548E14439260A3DFD57F63FB64ED6B.jpg

Well it had to happen. No more ripping from DVD for your favourite movie, get a plastic dongle USB movie branded up

They just had to have bodly gone didn't they?

Agency land ....again.....

Agencies economics do my little paranoic, presbyterian-pessimists head in.

Once again I am off on a below wonderful wage to a company who's business is probably so lumpy that it makes your blind grandmothers porride look of even consistency.

The issue with agencies is that they grow in non linear ways, completely sporadic and at the whim of the commisioning marketing director or senior brand manager at the client.

They either grow by reputation, hard pitching or selling more to the same customers. Every one of these hits a wall. Life's a pitch and then you die.

The company I am merily hopping off, bushy tailed to tommorrow COULD follow a route to producing a software revenue model by combining a browser - my Bot type set up and selling seats at clients. The value add could be in writing meta reports, doing set ups and then updating the system as the arms race on the internet starts to make obselite the once wonderful ( web promoter gold; remember that one?) A product is scalable in terms of sales, marketing and version management. Also today we could include cloud computing for bots, using down time to do crawls and indexing on a network of users machines. Problematic?

How much does it cost to get to a product ? Well it can be pretty well documented and worried about, while surprisingly getting a couple of big service clients and then bumbling through justifying your fees there and building up business on shoe leather, a wind, a single repeating prayer and all by the seat of your pants. Flights for directors probably amount to pretty much the same as a months programming here, or maybe a whole project in India.

Some how this is just accepted by investors, maybe because it is getting them near to the business and early raft investors are happy to see explosive growth on a handful of big-brand-name deals.

For my money and in this case time is money, I would go for the scalable product tied to a service, seat numbers and developments out from the core offering. Then we can get to be puppetteers and play at product management in stead of burning out shoes.

New Paradigm Marketing and Selling

i- Marketing

Traditional marketing Communication	New Media Marketing Comm's
Display Advertising/ TV ad's Transport / outdoor Media Ad's Direct Mail Sales Promotion Sports Sponsorship Press Releases & Articles Flyer (leaflets) Point of Sale (POS) Underground/gorilla marketing Stunt Marketing Product spot sampling Classified Advertising Fax mailings Closed group Seminars Exhibition stands	Search Engine (SE) Optimisation Paid for SE top-Positioning Social Media / Viral marketing webcasts- and youtube Banner Advertising - Pay Per Click Advertising On line sales promotion / cross selling Transport Media Ads Sportsponsorship Off line ad's referencing dot.com links Industry Directories, yell etc SMS - MMS GPS iPhone geo-marketing Strategic Linking – web ringing XML - Online Press Release Ezine Sponsorship On line press Article development e-mail blasts pod casting virtual conferences 'Permissions' marketing Gorilla Marketing & Chat PR marketing Snowball marketing WOMBAT Webex demonstrations Personalised web links- www.jimwyper.camera.com
Traditional Sales	New Media Selling
Sales Visits following up on DM Conferences Exhibitions Telesales Field Representatives Meeting booking agencies Business network meetings Consultants Networking Customer Referals	'Call-me-now' web-response teleselling e-mail selling Linked-In type contact selling on line networking that is to say Wombat - snowballing sales leads and messages Chat room selling/ referrals Skype sales / webcam selling Webcast / streaming sales pitches with chat/e-mail closing Specialist conferences (off line for online!) Virtual conferences purely on line with pod/web casts and webexes etc. Webex Telemarketing with Webex Passive / reward based customer referals
Traditional Sales Channels	New Media Sales Channels
Shops Distributors Resellers Re-marketers (local) Country/regional Subsidiary Joint Ventures OEM / Own Label	Your Own Web site Response Mechanisms!! e-Commerce online shop SMS booking and payment Online auctions and tender submission sites, price comparison web sites Reseller / rebrander channels Interactive sales booths Web markets / e-bay Online Joint Ventures OEM / Own label ( developer)

The King of Marketing is dead, long live the King!

Traditional Channels / Marketing that is Likely to Become Less Prominent or Even Die: well as you can see above even in a non exhaustive listing the means to inform and interact with your customer has widened. The emphasis is that more channels and methods create immediate interaction and opportunities for the customer to buy.

The content of those individual interactions is perhaps actually less rich and diverse than the traditional "press the flesh" or "TV Brand" advertising but cheaper to do per point of touch and it allows the consumer to get exact information and compare prices on line.

Fax marketing will probably die out, unless the spread of desk-top faxing comes back into fashion for some reason.

Traditional TV - this is underthreat beacuse Rupert Murdoch and other TV companies don't like and don't understand the internet. What they don't like is it's largely free and you can avoid a lot of the advertising. Also there are many more advertising sources and very granular business areas in on line marketing which is a sales model they don't relate to.

What they don't understand is that internett will soon become the primary entertainment and information source in the developed social sectors of the world. Their opportunity is to take their media into the internett wholeheartedly, but so far in most countries they seem to be tacit in allowing their "qaulity content" go webcasted- if at all - without big buck advertising they don't want to go on line. ADSL tv and the tv which surfs the net are here. They could have channelised with their own search engines built on a TV controller basis, and mixed media content on a time tabled basis but now they have been run down on the e-highway by on-demand TV and video.

Various models persist, such as the stream-view only packages most known now in spotify, where video on demand can be to some extent controlled to one viewing and advertising imbedded.

The fragmentation of the TV industry and prevallence of pay-to-view for quality broadcasting ( while public broadcasting remains largely devoid of advertising) means that the advertising buck is spread thinly and magical 'target audiences' dematerialse into the standard-distribution curve of decreased audience size. TV advertising is no longer sexy, so budding ridley scotts had better take to youtube productions in order to get a modern profile.

Ironically I believe that transport media will become the highest value per cm2/ hour as it will be used increasingly to drive the metropolitan masses to dotcoms. This is the one area where you get more than a scrolling blink amongst long listings- you can brand your web sites and hgave a call-to-action and sales mechanism all in a couple of lines with the magical www.com in there. This also goes for sports sponsorship, espeically with soccer becoming the biggest world spectator sport. It's format is adamently on the 40 minute half, unlike the NFL's advertising perverted rules.

Sales Promotion on the internet, and especially third part cross value discounting and reward schemes have been about at least since the days of web beanz. This area is under exploited in my opinion and ripe for closing deals from traffic. For example with really good web-only product bundles, discount vouchers, airmiles and likes of spotify earned points. I think this will show big growth because the internet marketer will find it hard to convert traffic to a full-price, branded experience site when cross comparision and used-goods shoppiong is so prominent. People will not only get more used to buying, but more used to shopping about or using 'bid-me' type web sites to invite in the cheapest party on a secluded unbeatable discount.

Thjis is a major problem with product sales on the web. Product sales channels have big vested interests in selling from the shelf and they don't want their margin eroded. However I don't think it will be long before some major brands offer really good discounting on line- they may need to work these up as bundles or do the opposite- sell bundles through the snail world channels.

Small comapnies marketing on the web still conform of course to the need to at some poiint buy from the channel, and also have the same old costs for premises , the CEOs ego based income, the web master and nerds and so on. So with a low barrier to entry, many small third and fourth party sellers struggle to offer any discount worth the salt.

I think the tender and I'll buy web sites will see major traffic expansion because the price can be hidden from the masses. Even if a bvuyer tells all their face book pals to go buy at 50% off, and posts your link on chat rooms, you will still get little traffic demanding the discpoutn or in fatc you could base your whole sales channel on outward spot price selling with no published prices to be frowned upon by the manufacturer!

Job offer

Well what does happen when you get a job offer which you can be cynical about?

How many times have I heard " we are a small company, and we must think of what our current coworkers earn" in the same breath with " good potential to progress quickly" ??

I feel very much like back in Stockport in november - december 1996. Then I managed to squeeze out 3 k more, but even that was selling myself cheap without a company car in the deal.

Even at h-lab I was cheaper than I needed to be and got no offer or leverage for a raise after 6 months.

They are even getting an employment grant.

So I sell myself down the road to long travelling on public transport. I have a feel-bad factor. I feel the same as when I moved to dynabeeeds! Hope is not a strategy, so hoping to get sales of this together and hoping to get opportunities...I think he is an honest guy but that is why vagueness is disinginous if the wind changes.

I get to do analyses, and that is it so far.

POSITIVES??

1. over riding is that I could do this on my own. I can either work from home eventually or I can start up on my own, or get a better job
- 2. there in I get to learn a new area and review my skills in use of internett

3. I get to know a lot of jargon and ideas

4. I get to have sales leads

5. If I get a sale or a lead quickly converts then I get to ask for 450 000

6. I get to move onto more money 450 000 plus car if I can

7. i get to develop the directions I want to go in.

8. Maybe most of all, I make myself far more salesworthy a prospect when applying for jobs, and I can negotiate upover with wages as the key lever.

summary of actions in CV and applicatons

tips of the day:

1) produce a mini cv resume for open applications. Do many around places outside aust agder, esp though in K'sand

2) FOLLOW UP in telephone with everything you are serious about. Follow up in e-post to those who are hard to get to.

3) Do CVs like dynal application- a focused pull out of key relevatn positions, the others in a list or not on

4) do a middle sheet - a table which compares your skills to their needs

5) consider your man managemetn and people skills

Interview debreifing

Now, my interview yesterday went very well. But I feel maybe everyone was building up expectations and maybe they are not "aligned"

Ok, so how was it overall?

I did a bit of an overlong career history, but being honest about Dynateeed won me some favour. I did not sell in my own personality or how it succeeds in a work place. I did not really get onto my actual achievements and was a bit worried about my actual level of responsibility, despite being pyshced up as a prospective, experienced and mature 'project manager'

The first mis-alignment is maybe that the job in hand is analyst , most likely to free up someone else to move into a more senior position. My expectation is to get in a little higher than this level, and since they are refocising on London, I feel this is a risk to take a low level, specialist role. However with a poorly formulated contract, I could probably actually get started here and maybe their new investment is not popular with the earlier soft-seed capital?ie moving jobs out of the area having had the idea of being a growth company for local employment!

So I feel that I have to not get all worked up about it being the next big thing, nor get pissed off like I did at Dynateeds, arriving under a cloud.

back to the interview - I got buying signs from everyone and had the EMIR roudn the table. So I did manage to steer things my way and keep it all relevant. This ticked the boses for most of them, but I hope i am not boxed in by my lack of 'wham-bang'

I need a wham bang - I mean like come into a company and shifted it round. I have had many false starts and lost opportunities but I made all the right noises. I just need to be more head strong and opportunistic and use levers with the board of directors.

My aim is to get into an incubator- share pay set up like forinnova. So I need to get on in this company if i take it.


Ah, relax.

Job Interview - a middle aged man !

How can the experiences of a middle aged man related to a new graduate from MSc Marketing?

Well I am in the same boat; for me in a foriegn land with too many marketing graduates, it is hard to get a stable job with some future! SO I am not really on the ladder here. As on old fart too.

Now I happened to have an interview yesterday and it was pretty much front-loading to an actual offer, despite being purely speculative. Here is how I did it:

1. I had contacted their investment-management firm before.
   
2. Being curious in the area helped in 1 and lead to the contact
3. I held off until after paternity
4. I went back to the investors and got shoe horned a little, and good mouthed seemingly from their business developer
5. I then sent a very, very short form post enquiry from the actual company's web site just with a couple of key words and followed this up with a phone call.
6. I still had to send a CV and not present it myself, but this made it a little more formal.
7. I was curious and motivated for the position
   
8. I am open minded on what form the job takes
   
9. I used a state- assisted training grant as an extra closing bait
10. I was curious....

So what shoudl you do? 60- 80% of first time jobs for you are going to be through unadvertised sources. Curiousity will be the key, and using your nose to come up with several ways into the company. This spurs your motivation and overcomes your distance and shyness to the firm.

Firstly, lose any idea of geographical restriction. Maybe there is a firm in Scotland who you are interested in your chosen sector - add them to the list and be prepared to get a K-B but keep the door open while you are working elsewhere- in the english speaking world if it is so specialist!

Secondly find different ways into the company- contacts. Try to shoe horn in through some route or just go in for an investigation on what they do, or a work place shadowing type day. Also investor companies are a good source or route, because anything coming from them is taken seriously! If you get a recommendation " chat to this guy" from the VC or incubator boss then it is a huge amount self- brand equity you have earned without doing very much.

Maybe you go in from the bottom up otherwise- find a really tarty brand manager or what ever and get in on her back - the marketing director will be more open to her charms ( or "one of the flirty girls" from time to time them being a Sit-Pee)

Next Generation Browser - Bots

Normal 0

I think it is interesting that while few have dared to go out in the market with new products like botbox.com ,

rather many companies have chosen to offer web-monitoring services on a corporate basis and that this is further become a buzz around making money from buzz- social media surveillance.

At some point these guys have to develop intelligent, directed web-bots to go and find the new content and keep on feeding in this and the meta-stats on how hot something is.

Web-bot – spiders or crawlers are the principle types of web-robots which search through URLs and find key words, links or metacontent and store them for indexing as lists on the search engines.

A distributed web sprider/crawler is one operating on decentralised processing nodes with usually a central machine allocating domain names and MIME types to look at. This is exciting because it could be integrated to specialist groups web browsing behaviour, searches and conscious wishes in building more relevant listings on SE and directing updates on particular topics, sites, themes or ”web rings” ie interactivity.

What is exciting to me is to create a personalised web bot system which enables a user in a specialist field to get to more relevant data per search minute! Also to let them keep updated on those site or page finds, and gather new closely relevant data from the web.

Web bots and indexing are bandwidth, memory and processing time heavy items but if the tasks are spread out over a cluster of like minded individuals active in a search area, and spread out over time when their machines are on line but doing very little then we have the basis for something which can truly be personalised, efficient and a product or service which can attract revenue streams.

The key principles in reducing actual live-search times is to metacrawl and screen out links which are undesirable. Users, or the user cluster, build on the efficiency and relevance by having their actual behaviour monitored- the system learns by AI like processes to frm what the user finds relevant and what they discard or look over. Successful filter builds from metacrawling lead to directed and ’temporal’ (return for updates, expansions, deletions) crawls in slow-time.

It is a sad fact that maybe only 25% of the web gets indexed on the main engines, and this is largely due to the pathway rules the bots obey and the inclusion of top level URLS to crawl down. Partly this is due to the duality of being ”linked in” – the principle of links in and out ’catching’ the bots (having been googles founding algorythm –mantra ” the more linked to relevance you are, the higher the listing”) as they explore outside the URL list. SO they miss material, but of course much of that material is going to be the vanity-web-logging which so many of us do, as I am right now. Proportionally to the traffic of say 1997, are search engines really any more useful to us now, than say following web rings or installing those channel buttons on your desktop was to us back then?

I see spam listings covering at least half of any simple key word search and end up doing my own, old fashioned web ringing to get to new unlisted or ’burried’ content in an area or simply resorting to several BOLEAN search alternatives- both tedious if someone could do this for me while I am away from my keyboard!!!

I am also guessing that in conducting new searches, there would either have to be a screen on URL names, MIME content tags and so on OR a randomly generated domain name engine which uses key words, and web ring to construct domain names and test them for real content.

We have sites like – compete, technocrati, google labs and so on which do something for free but they are apparently metacrawlers and some want paid as soon as value added data is approached. Also metastats are of course useful stuff to marketeers and criminal /terrorist intelligence, and you have to pay.

With the advent of appstores on several platforms and the predominace of book and music buying on the web for under 30s I think that revenue streams from sales and advertising can be secured for either international companies or those with some local-knowledge / language advantage.

Corporate Strategy and Quarter Four Forecast

CEO's Opening Statement

Now we are well into the last quarter of 2009, it is a good time not only to report on our financial status, forecast and after tax results for H1, but also it is an appropriate point to reflect upon our corporate strategy embarked upon August 2008.

Summary of 2008 -2009 Strategic Pathway

To summarise qualitatively, I am pleased to report that we have achieved much of our intended financial and family-strategy in the last 14 months. However as an immediate warning to investors it is in this Q4 that a major turning point will disrupt normal trading and this is a late part of the strategy which is being implemented in record short time. In effect it is to take advatnage of opportunity in the economic environment - more on this below.


In 2008 a strategic decision was made to relocate the corporation in order to reduce costs and stablise the company with the necessitated rise in personell, this being a factor of + 36%. Inflationary pressures in the Oslo area and poor availability of premises in end Q2-startQ3 created a problem, but also presented the opportunity to relocate to an area with far lower cost basis for doing business. Costs of physically relocating were kept low but there was some orginisational stress which was unavoidable if we take any realists perspective. We consider, in balance, that the positivity outweighed down sides and counteracted this stress.

Key Gearings and Results Relating to Change in Strategy

We appreciate the maturity our stakeholders have shown in bearing with us through a radical change in the corporate missioning for 2008. However our long term goals were to reduce cost of premises and increase time in actually conducting high value interactions. So to remind our patient investors, this move is not tactical. Rather it is a key part of fulfilling a longer term strategy and we have taken the pain of relocation now rather than later. We did what we said we would be doing, just a year earlier.

On the downside, our corporate earnings form h1 2008 were reduced with the removal of one main revenue source. However we have a stable stream of income which maintains us in the black and we predict our cash burn not to exceed our operating income and thus we will avoid burning reserves as working capital. When a larger revenue stream is identified from our main income-silo, reserves will be used to purchase new capital items in the IT department. Budget is earmarked for this and aligned to expected extra revenues from this investment.

Q1 2009 was marked by a lower than anticipated revenue stream from a contract in the local area. Upon realising this, an immediate reduction in committment to the customer was taken with a 20% reduction in man hours dedicated to this contract. Not only was ordinary income lower than expected, there was actually no bonus -dividend rewards from the effort used.This was clear breach of contract which would have been costly to persue by legal means and costly in terms of '"loss of forward focus" but the experience and visibility of acting in the local market is not lost on us. We did under perform in this contract. Sometimes it is good to make mistakes, recover quickly and learn what a wrong direction means to the corporation.

Forecast q4 '09- H1 2010

In q4 we expect a major new revenue stream to come on line. This demands committment and we must take the view that it be a profitable contract otherwise be prepared to keep to our basal income levels following up with renegotiation or alternative customers. The new potential customer is a major actor in the internet surveillance and web-bot market on an international scale and becoming a supplier to them is a shinging possibility. However we must be realistic and not be a "cinderella supplier" - in other words a poorly paid servant who does not get to actually play in the real innovation and management of the company.

Strategic Appraisal 2010 H1

Looking into Q1-2 2010, I consider that we will secure either a contract with this major potential customer or take a direction in line with our corporate abilities whilst diversifying offer in our other skills base. Our current run-rate income, as stated, retains us in the black with no capital cash burn. However this limits our expansion and growth in equity. New, high value and long term contracts will be secured by end Q1. If not, then you can expect my resignation as CEO!


Yours faithfully

Damp Freddie
Household CEO

Take Control of Your Own Brand Communications

To summarise a little on what I have included in several bloggs....

You have the power to take control of what a potential employer thinks of you to a far higher degree than you may expect. Take control- don't let them itnerpret, read between lines or skim over things or misunderstand the relevance and specific abilities you offer for the job.

Let's consider it from the two usual approaches - open application ('on spec') and usual advertised job.

In both instances you have to make sure the employer knows what you have to offer and why you are motivated for this job. Either situation means that an employer is trying hard to get rid of time wasters (many in marketing applications) and get down to someone who really has enough to offer the company. It is really easy to leave too much to 'between the lines' from your CV or to write to succinct an accompanying letter such that you lose the opportunity there.

Advertised Job Applications

The employer ( or the hateful recruitment consultant) has a list of qualities and skills they consider important in the job- of the advertised list only maybe half are DEMANDED skills, another quarter are DESIRABLE while the last quarter of the job list is just paff- padding, HR speak, crap. So you have to phone up to find out which are DEMANDS, which are also important -maybe mostly in personality terms or track record - ad which skills can be learnt!

For example, the job ad' may specify a years experience but is that really necessary over the greta knowledge of marketing and tool-set you have from the MSC Marketing at Strathclyde Uni? The hard skills may be in use of data, formulating market research, breifing agencies and writing strategies....The soft skills may include ability to churn through data, or a bubbly 'can do' personality . So Call!

The purpose of your call is NOT to sell yourself- it is enough you call and leave your name as a selling exercise, or e-mail even is ok these days to pose questions. The purpose is to find out which skills / experience / attitudes are absolutely desired and which are also-rans. It is to find out anything like say, which CRM they use, which you can offer a USP in reply to.

THEN in your application make sure you give answer to these key areas in the letter and cover as many of the other ALSO DESIRABLES you have on your CV. Make sure they are not open to interpretation or could be read over.

No one usually fulfills all the requirements- for example "MS PRoject and seibel v 7 an advantage' - you can write- Find it easy to use new datasystems for direct marketing, analysis and planning. In marketing there are often only a couple of really needed things to cover: mayeb statistical ability, maybe an idea of branding.....most often they won't get someone externally who is used to all their datasystems, their market, their marketing mix and of course their product.

Better yet for an advertised job which you can fulfill on several points, take those key DEMANDS and DESIRABLES and make a third sheet on your application - a tabel which lets you give direct, prose answers to their requirements.

This will improve your chances of getting interviews, along with checking the decision maker has your CV and it hasn't been lost, screened out early by a co-worker/gate keeper or skim read.

In interviews you want to continue uncovering what the job actually entails, and which skills are pre-requisite whilst which can be learnt (for that read ANY database, CRM, accounts package or ISO documentation and project control system!). Steer the interviewer to talk about the job itself NOT the comopany- butt the hell in when they begin ranting at the chance to say "and so you are in the happy position to have a new vacancy because of this investment?". Find out even if they have defined the tasks in the job or just have extra budget (OFTEN the case!)

Given you get a goodone2one interview, and not a recrutiment day, then you have the chance to start STEERING THE POSITION AROUND YOUR MOTIVATIONS AND AMBITIONS! Especially in marketing - discuss areas of responsibility, routine reporting, forthcoming projects and steer them around YOU when you see felxibility. Otherwise when you come on board they will STEER you. You will get various monkeys on your back and also some people will just want a piece of you! They will presume authority over you because you have 'new boy syndrome'.

In summary- cut to the qucik, understand the salient skills and the actual tasks in the job and then set your skills and personal brand against that- lead the discussion when you can and make it clear why you fulfill criteria in your letter & CV, your follow up call, the interview and then at the offer stage even! Steer the job around your motivation and take control!

Open Application ( on spec')

This is kind of the opposite from a closed-circuit application in answer to an advert with defined tasks. In an open application you want to avoid letting them exclude you because so much of your CV does not fit in with their little sphere.

You want to sell yourself more as a person and let them decide on the positivities of your 'personal branding' to take you further.

I recommend as in the last point, to have a mini-'teaser'-CV with a good photo of you. Send this by e-mail to a decided target person who would make decision to employ you or just give you work experience. So probably marketing manager, group brand manager or marketing director.

DO NOT send to any vague or old e-mail address. Send it by post.


BUT- wait! Before you lick the stamp- it has to be read by the decision maker if possible- hence you have every right to write "Private and Confidential, Addressee only" on the envelope. Thus you get roudn the jealous temp or the condescending menopausal secretary!

Din CV

• CV en skal være god reklame for deg selv

• God reklame er ærlig og positiv!

• Målet med CV’en er å gjøre din mulige nye arbeidsgiver interessert og invitere deg til intervju.

• Våg å satse på enkel
  

• tilpasser det jobben du søker.

Hvem er du, hva kan du og hva vil du videre?

Bruk i størst mulig utstrekning et aktivt og positivt språk når du skriver CV.
”Innførte”, ”gjennomførte” og ”bidragsyter” er slike stikkord. Det at du har nye mål er også viktig å få frem.

Beskriv innholdet i det arbeidet du har utført i form av ansvarsområder, arbeidsoppgaver, oppnådde resultater, avdelingens størrelse, bransje og eventuelle kundesegmenter.

Hvem er du, hva kan du og hva vil du videre?

En ny arbeidsgiver er opptatt av hva du kan bidra med fremover i tillegg til hva du har gjort frem til nå.

Sats på en basis-CV
Det er mange forskjellige måter å skrive en god CV på. Uansett må den være oversiktlig og ryddig satt opp og uten skrivefeil. Sats på en basis-CV og tilpass denne til hver enkelt jobb du søker på. Sjekk at det er sammenheng i det du skriver i søknadsbrevet og det du fremhever i CV’en.

Det vanligste er en kronologisk CV, men en kompetansebasert CV kan også fungere meget bra i endel tilfeller. Vurder om du skal ta med en kort innledning etter dine personalia der du kort sammenfatter hvorfor du søker denne stillingen.

Fremhev dine fortrinn
Kommer din spisskompetanse tydelig frem, eller drukner den i ”allsidighet”? Allsidighet er bra, men våg å satse på å fremheve dine største fortrinn i CV’en. Vekker du interesse og kommer på intervju får du muligheten til å fortelle mer om din anvendlighet da.

Skal du legge den inn i en CV database på Internett bør du sørge for å få med kjente forkortelser som sikrer deg treff på dine kompetanseområder, f.eks. CRM, HR, SAP.

Du skal kunne underbygge alt du skriver i CV’en. Det du skriver blir garantert samtaleemne i intervjuet.

Working for me

What has really worked for me over the years?

In getting jobs that is, and possible a lot to do with getting laid...same principles, reverse pay off!

Firstly what used to work still does- get yourself fished out the pile of applications or inbox junk by calling up with a few salient questions.

Secondly - this is devious - the teaser Mini CV aka pesonal summary, personal resume. As a communication exercise it is very much personal branding Physically it is a nice little attachment, sheet or footer on an HTML e-mail which sums you up in prose without any direct reference to time periods, job titles etc. It includes a picture and full contact details, and is best sent as a media-rich e-mail.

What it permits you is to tease- to give answer to what an employer wants for their company without letting them 'hang up' on you by losing interest in your actual job titles - or lack of them!

It gives you the chance to sell your character rather than allowing an employer to deduce what they want from your list of jobs and usually incomplete list of responsibilities. It makes them want you and not the list of jobs you have, and in overcoming the 'hyperscrutiny' a normal CV goes under-you cut from black and white to colour of YOU as a person, not a list.

The mini or teaser CV must however not be flanel, BS or over playing your trumpet.

I sent out 30 - 40 open applications as HTML mail with a mini CV at the foot. I got over 80% replies and three likely interviews or discussions. IN fact I completely oversold myself to an industry sector starved of opportunities - they thought I could probably walk in with contacts and erm, contracts, clean up their ISO systems and get them bought out by a blue chip! BUT the response was huge, I mean it was more or less spamming people ! I targeted as many e-mails to personal e-.mail addresses, going so far as to send out a few enquiries to 'info@' addresses to shoe horn my way in further to director level. The end result was negative for me because I completely oversold myself in the prose, having followed the James Hoseasons route to self inflation!

Missing CV.....

Employers often skim read a letter and cut straight to your CV. A sly trick I used to also tease with was sending e-mails WITOUT the attached CV or just sending an application letter with "I will be delighted to prepare a CV highlighting my exact relevant experience".

In this way I at least got their interest and if I was a serious candidate from my letter then I would get a polite note- if they were assholes then I would get to know that from a terse reply. One boss gladly avoided!

Keep it in the Bag.....

I often write that sending your CV is the kiss of death.

What I think actually happens psychologically is the following-

When confronted with having to assess and judge a person the one responsible for the process wants to on the one hand be objective consciously and on the other stay in the comfort zone which is (variably with individual):

1. Avoiding true eye contact
2. Avoiding discussion which could reveal their personal or positional weaknesses
3. stay shy until they have to stick their turtle head out
4. avoid being judged by their own bosses, peers and those prospective coworkers under them! Exactly the fear a candidate may have!


The thing to crack is to break down the resistance to dialogue, number 2 above. Eye contact and some relaxing body language can be achieved not only in person but on the CV- your photo and an appropriate, corporate-mirroring style of prose on your letter and maybe CV.

I am often afraid to establish dialogue, because when selling myself I feel i stand on a cliff with all to fail infront of me at the hurdle. I get over this by applying for many jobs and actually getting job offers I would rather not take- in other words my nerves are distracted.

But those of you who can establish a dialogue and over come the bland objectivity being undertaken with yuour papers, will have allways the benefit in an equal fight. That is to say a position where you are equally qualified and there are no nepotistic candidates long up the feeding chain infront of you. Unfortunetly marketing has plenty of that, being a profession that many are not professionally qualified to get into but are!

So as stated this means most of all that you do most of the talking. You actually want them to talk more and ask the fewer questions. This is done both in your precalls, your follow up call, your call to ask for a cancelled interview...(need I go on) and of course in the INTERVIEW

So keep the CV in the bag- if you are presenting to an open application get them talking about their company first, then interupt them a little to steer them on to personal areas- hiring? downsizing? RIght sizing is a good thing to say- both out wiht dead wood and in with good new timber for the joists!

In an interview where they have your CV, try to spin sell them- get always away from YOU and onto them and what problems have been posed to lead to a vacancy. Get them then talking about the job tasks, demands and goals ahead. Then you stand armed to point to relevant facts on your CV, better yet brushing over your CV by mentioning a job or situation where you had responsibility and results which bode well for your potential employ here !

I remember my very first sales call, as good as it would probably get in a cold-appointment sale, where I was alone and I did not take out the brochure until we had established a bit of dialogue, and to the doctors, which patient group and problem-stilling I would like to discuss. I kept it in the bag.

Tips for Job Hunting - Msc Marketing class of 2010 / 2009 also

10 Toptastic Tips for getting You that First, Illusive Job in Marketing!

1. Look back in the papers and marketing magazines a YEAR ago to fifteen months for 'marketing assistant' level jobs. Mysteriously they come up again because of course, those who have used them as a first rung on the ladder have moved up or out! Phone up, ask about any possibilities or just send a spec letter asap before they need to bother advertising again!

2. Look at ad' agencies / web / PR etc company web sites for lists of clients, especially new ones. Find the marketing manager at those clients! They have a spend at least.

3. Work around recruitment consultants! Find out who the employer is, and why they are recruiting, say you are not interested, and then go direct. Especially when they are recruiting a to a new or expanding marketing department. I have landed three really good jobs this way - two by later follow ups having gone through consultants, and one by completely going direct after meeting a brick wall at the consultants Also if you have to go through them, get hold of business cards from the clients and leave your own...brings us on to 4...

4. Make a simple visit card aka business card with your contact details, what you study/have graduated in, and a photo. Leave it at all interviews and networking contacts. This is a lot more discreet than people actually keeping and passing on your CV. Print out on sticky back paper, stick to card and cut with a good guilotine. Or get a printer to do them for as many of you as have cash towards a couple of hundred quid.

5. Make a list of questions you have on a job as your first point after you see the advert. Always call the point of contact and remember to let them talk and describe what the job's actual work-tasks will be.

6. i)When doing open applications, give most emphasis on why you are interested in that company, industry and job function.
ii) DON'T SEND YOUR CV! Send a quick summary of you as a person with your first degree, dip marketing when you get your exam results and MSC marketing when you finish. A mini CV with a photo of you in business dress.

7. Go to sales job interviews at large (blue chip) or otherwise interesting companies :

i) Why bother ? ? ? Interviews for sales jobs are easy to get at large companies which are otherwise fortresses for marketing graduates!

When at the usual 'selection day' you can use some time to network with any marketers there or at least get names out of personnel- marketing managers, brand managers and so on.

But remember - Discuss about being a rep and be positive. Do any group work or presentations as well as doing the best possible effort you can to impress all present.

ii) When they inevitably grill you about marketing as your choice, either agree and say maybe sales is only a short term route to marketing ( sales managers really hate this) or that on hearing more about the job, maybe it is not sales you want to work in- especially if you have a one to one with a personnel boss. Ask about working in marketing with them, not sales managers.

iii) If all their marketers have been in sales, or there are no opportunities right now in marketing, ask about temporary territory sales ie. cover jobs as a way into the company. These are ok paid, but the big pluss is that you get your expenses for living out a suitcase and a company car (otherwise forget it!) Your face is in the company, you get to meet marketers at training and conferences and you are available without the sales manager letting one of his prodigies leave to the temple of marketing.

8. Get into the local enterprise companies, Technology transfer offices, venture capital, and other government bodies or consultancies helping companies establish, grow and do marketing. Look for graduate placements or blagg some advisor work. Find out on companies who are really growing. or at least those doing a marketing project.

9. Try to find a previous MSc marketer, in a decent sized company, who will consider taking you on a two week shadowing. At the very least you will gain invaluable knowledge on the job, and you may get your face known and asked to put in a CV on spec.

10. i) Find out when interviews will be for an advertised job when you first call, or just phone a week after the deadline. Say you are very interested and would be able to come to a cancellation at short notice, even travel to the location just on the chance of getting in.

If you are a snake, when other class mates have interviews find out when they are...sometimes they will get another job offer and leave a gap, or you at least know which day to ask for cancellations on. At big interview days, ask other candidates what forthcoming companies they have interviews with and try it on there!

ii) another snakey thing is when you get an inteview but no further, is to wait about two or three weeks and ask if they managed to get the person employed or not. If it is an assistant level job then quite often there is an arguement about pay with the person under offer who has that ellusive work experience. Also really good candidates quite often have a choice of jobs and turn down one or other. Finally some companies suddenly refuse to pay decent relocation costs and candidates tell them to get stuffed.

If at fist you don't suceed...try, try again! Never place all your hopes on one job ,career route or company. Always have a couple at least on the go, and if you do get a knock back, you can ask if they will have other opportunities coming up soon. If you don't get an interview then there is little point in asking what was wrong with your CV actually- extenuate the positive by asking about future opportnities. Follow up a month after. With my previous advice, 5 second interviews will land you a great first job, or as in the recession today, a first job in marketing of some sorts! If you get a lot of first interviews, without progress, go back and ask them all what you could have done better or what experience you would need to be as good as the actual winner.