Alpha Mind Blog

Shel Israel, discussing how BuzzLogic Calculates Influence, says:

What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media’s goals is less tangible.

(emphasis mine)

What he’s referring to at the start of the quote is Kami Huyse’s wonderful work calculating the ROI of the Sea World San Antonio campaign that launched their new roller coaster. It was a great case study by a fast-rising star of social PR.

But I’m struck by that last sentence of Shel’s quote (and not only by the grammatical gaffe.) When I heard Shel Holtz discussing Kami’s work on For Immediate Release, as soon as he mentioned measurement of ROI, and before he got into the meat of the segment, I remember thinking “Who measures the ROI of having a desk or wearing decent clothes?”

Yes, when you launch a social media campaign, you ought to think about how you’ll define and measure success. But if you’re still on the fence about using social media at all, I believe it’s time you started thinking about having a presence (on Twitter and a blog at minimum) in much the same way you think about basic office equipment and your business wardrobe. No, a social media presence isn’t a minimum requirement of doing business, not just yet, but that corner will be turned so soon, so suddenly, and so quietly, that you’re safest–by far–turning the corner yourself as soon as you can.

Chris Carfi would have gotten a write-up here on The Alpha Mind in December except that my blog was so badly beaten up by hackers it took me well into the new year to get it cleaned up.

If I’d written about Chris, it would have been because he was in a tie for Best Conversationalist at a geek dinner in San Francisco. (No mean distinction, considering the tie was with Shel Israel.)

But the man doesn’t need me to help make him a star… cuz Chris Carfi was featured in some footage on CNN yesterday.

Congrats, Chris. Alas, the clip says nothing about Cerado and what it does. But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

And yet… and yet…

if you had just acted psychotic, you could have gotten a million views on YouTube, where that seems to be what passes for funny.

So, to stay with the same topic for a while:

Bryan Person  blogs about Comcast’s efforts to use Twitter to improve customer service.

He makes the point that Comcast is paying attention to everyone, not only to A-list bloggers.

Apparently that is a real, rather hot issue. Note the number of comments on Scoble’s post suggesting that, because he’s an A-list blogger, Robert is trying to bully Facebook.

I’m pretty sure companies take a blogger’s Technorati influence score into consideration when they think about how to respond to a blogger. It’s good to know other are treating the social media more democratically.

And I salute Bryan for pointing it out. Companies that behave this way deserve as much love as we little people can send them.

Just after posting my last post, about how thoroughly up-to-here I’ve had it with stuff that doesn’t work, Google Reader brought me Lee’s feed, with this post.

Lee, my friend, it happens that I do have some advice:

Admit that Mrs. BetterComms is right. For technology that really works, is really mobile, is really supported, you’ll need to pay enterprise prices. I’m afraid that’s just all there is to it.

Full disclosure: I gave up on all of it while I was still on a paltry pastor’s salary, and I suppose I could now pay a bit more and might get some cocktail of ingredients that works. But, for now, here’s what I’ve settled on:

I keep my contacts (a quite large number) in a very old version of ACT!

I keep my calendar and my to-do lists on my Palm, using Palm’s basic, native applications. I don’t use Palm’s to-do list app, because I need too many different lists (they’re context-specific, a la David Allen). So they’re simply in Palm Memos.

I write notes on whatever I find, and I clear all the notes out of my wallet fairly often so they’ll get into the software.

I have to keep using:

• a linux laptop (for video editing)…
• a Vista laptop (which is my basic business machine now)…
• a Win XP laptop (because elements of my podcast rig won’t work with Vista)…
• and a Palm Z22 because I don’t need anything fancier in a PDA, and even if I bought something snazzy I know full well I’d never get its apps to work across the other platforms.

And I will absolutely not attempt to get my do-lists, contacts, and calendar all working across all these machines until I have at least US$4K and a full week to throw at the problem. And I won’t put my data online until I find Internet service that’s truly ubiquitous and fully trustworthy (I believe this is a long way off.)

I’ll be curious to see how others advise you. For now I’m happy with a non-integrated, somewhat low-tech solution.

BTW, Lee, I think you meant U3, not E3.

P.S. New additions to my list of stuff that doesn’t work:

• Enidicia electronic postage (U.S. only) doesn’t work with Vista.
• Twitter
• Jaiku (gave up on that piece of trash a month ago, should have been 5 months)
• URLtea, which went down for days last week, after I’ve sent out a lot of URLS using the service. None of those URLs worked, of course, because the whole URLtea server was MIA.

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

Seth says forget the resume. Heather Hamilton says Seth is leading people astray. Neville Hobson, on the For Immediate Release podcast, says “Seth has a point, but we’re not there yet.”

I agree with all of them, but mostly with Neville.

I had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second part.

Why is Neville the one I agree with most? Because…

The simple fact is that Seth Godin is all about the future. He writes for the bleeding-edge denizens of that brave world into which all of us, will we-nill we, are being carried by the Internet.

It’s a world in which monolithic companies and monopolistic brands are playing an ever-shrinking role. In which, as a direct result, there is more and more work to be done that won’t be done by people in jobs, as conventionally defined. And even less work being done by the kinds of jobs Seth refers to as being “a cog in a giant machine.”

So, my nutshell observations about all this:

1. Seth is right. If you’re outstanding, a resume will only serve as an excuse to reject you. “Look, it doesn’t matter that you learned Perl in a two-day weekend well enough that you were teaching it on Monday. We need somebody who knows Python.”
2. Heather is right. The vast majority of jobs, even some world-changing jobs, jobs people kill for, still require a resume. Heather’s company, Microsoft, is still changing the world in some wonderful ways. (Although I once scorched the inexcusable Word 2007 in this blog, I’m writing this post on Windows Live Writer, which MS executed brilliantly.) Most jobs at her company are still choice morsels, and if she says you need a resume to get ‘em, well, I trust her.
3. Neville is right, in that Seth will be more and more right, for more and more people, as time goes on. The world is moving Godin-ward.

Now, a bit of my own experience.

The most interesting job I’ve ever held, by far, I got without a resume. (It was also the best-paying.) A friend told me she’d given my name to someone who was creating a new position, and a few hours later, he called. It was 1997, when web sites were too new for most companies, and I had the nerve to walk into my interview without a resume, but with a web site for this prospective employer’s company. I’d created it the night before based on what I learned from a few phone calls.

A twist, though: I was asked for a resume, after the hiring decision had been made. “I just need to show the management team you’re a real person,” was how the owner and president put it. And that, I believe, is how many job seekers should be thinking during this period of transition to a more Godin world. Have a resume. But offer it last, and give it a lower priority than any of the items Seth suggests. Have it to meet the compliance requirements after you’ve already won the job. But, if you’re to stand out from the crowd, it’ll be by doing everything you can to win the job before you have to hand over a resume.

It used to be that “references available on request” was the last line on the resume, and checking them was a late step in the hiring process. Let’s turn that around. Let’s lead off with a blazingly enthusiastic reference that ends with the postscript, “In addition to the incredible talents I’ve mentioned, I hear Heidi has a good-looking resume.”

del.icio.us Tags: Godin,Seth,Microsoft,resume,jobs,Nevile,Hobson,forimmediaterelease,sethgodin

Talk about superb use of a symbol: Scoble was given a gift of a Webvan pen. He says Paul Lindner “handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype.”

Bravo.

I was deep into launching companies when the bubble burst in 2000. There were some voices then calling it a bubble, but not very many, and most of them outside the dotcom mainstream.

This time around it’s different. People who have played key roles in making Web 2.0 happen are sounding notes of caution. Like Scoble and Steve Rubel. It’s a healthy thing.

I’ve been a little acid toward those who first started throwing around the term Kool-Aid as applied to social media. But now, with the coupling of shaky business models and astronomical valuations, what’s being called Kool-Aid isn’t social media or its evangelism, but such truly scary stuff as the last bubble was made on.

But back to communications, which is what this blog is about (even if I sometimes forget). The Webvan pen is such a potent symbol I’m going to ask Scoble to get a really good still shot of it. Then we can all post it over our monitors and on our blogs. To remind us not only to look beyond today’s hype. But also as a reminder of what makes for a powerful message.