Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

I’ve heard people say this many times and have experienced it myself, job hunting is a full time job. This isn’t a pie in the sky tech blog post, this is coming from the trenches. I’ve been job searching for the past four months and I want to share my observations using LinkedIn to help you with your search.

Update Your Profile

The main tip for creating your LinkedIn profile is to create a focused account of your recent career experiences. Fill out the entire profile, including past positions, education, interests, and groups. Manage your profile information as closely as you manage your updated resume(s). Be professional, accurate, and put your best foot forward.


Key Sections

• Make sure to update your Contact Settings to match your job search strategyIf you can list that you’re interested in “Career Opportunities” then make sure to list it. If you’re currently in a job but looking for another opportunity, you may not want to add the “Career Opportunities” to the list to keep your search under the radar.
• Take some time to carefully craft the Summary section. I had a one sentence “mission statement” there for a long time but as I used LinkedIn more and more I found other people’s Summary statements useful. Plus, I received feedback from a career counselor that it needed to be beefed up.

  Think of the Summary as a condensed job description. If you’re currently working then write a one or two paragraph description of your key duties and also fold in some of your key accomplishments. If you’re unemployed then list some of your key experiences that match the jobs you’re looking for. You can do this by pulling out one of the job descriptions that you’ve applied to (because you think there’s a great fit) and reflect those qualifications in your Summary. Employers labor over writing those job descriptions and use very exact language to attract the right possible employees so make use of them.

Do Some Networking

1. Connect with current and former colleagues. Reach out to people you have good relationships with in your social network communities. The stronger the relationship, the more valuable they will be in your job search. You’ll be helping them out in the future. Connect with in real life and also online via LinkedIn. The photos above are from local networking events.
2. Use your contacts judiciously and only request connections to people you don’t know when they are super strategic to your search.
3. If you can connect with reputable recruiters, then do so. A Twitter friend recommended a recruiter and she’s been great at sharing job listings and keeping them updated with the current status. While I’ve been connected to her, she’s found jobs for dozens of people via LinkedIn. Contact me if you are in IT in the LA or Ventura County and I’ll pass you her information.

Use It For Research

LinkedIn is incredible for doing research on possible employers:

1. Many companies are listed on LinkedIn. During a typical day’s search, I’ll look up ten companies on LinkedIn and usually nine of them are listed.
2. You can “follow” companies. Then, you can see when new jobs are added, if people leave the company, or if someone gets a promotions.
3. Just as employers can research you online, you can research employees, especially hiring managers and people who will be interviewing you.
4. I also like looking at who’s being promoted and who’s recently left the company. This is a way to get a peek into the current company activities and may point out a new way for you to fit into the organization. “What, I won’t fit into that online marketing manger role? Well maybe I would fit in the Systems Analyst side of things.” This is all valuable intelligence.
5. Look at the Summary descriptions for existing company employees. This give you an idea of what people are really doing. You may be able to get a better picture of who you might be reporting to or who you might be managing.
6. Look at recommendations written for people in the company (you may need to be connected to them to see this). Recommendations from employee colleagues can tell you what employees value and some of their company lingo. For example, if several people recommend an employee and mention “excellent team player” then you have an idea that working in a team is important to that company culture.

Use The Job Search Tool

LinkedIn also has a good job search tool. You can actually apply for some jobs directly via LinkedIn.

I must say, I applied for several positions using this method but never heard back from the companies. This could indicate a hole in the application process or just a bad match. At the very least, this is a great way to discover job opportunities. If you have better luck applying to jobs via different channels (on Monster, Dice, Indeed, recruiter, etc.), you may want to use the LinkedIn search results then go check your favorite channel.

(click below to enlarge the image)

Review

LinkedIn provides an intelligent set of tools to help you with your search. Take the time to set up your LinkedIn account then use it wisely. I hope these tips help. Good luck!

Thanks for stopping by. Please share you LinkedIn job tips and comments below.

Photo Credits:
Atomicshark (cat picture) – License
Stefan (strormtrooper investigator) - License

When I heard Beth Kanter and Allison Fine had created a book for non-profits,The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, I had to pick up a copy. I’ve been following Beth on Twitter (@kanter) for a year and a half and had the opportunity to chat with her at the Twitterville launch party a year ago.

The Networked Nonprofit does an excellent job explaining the “What?” behind social media for non-profits. What is social media? How does it apply to non-profits and what is the larger picture?

It’s easy to get caught up in the technology and tools aspect of social networking. The Networked Nonprofit lays out an easy to understand view of the Web 2.0 environment without forcing readers to jump over technological jargon barriers.

Social media is all about networking, something non-profits understand very well. The book builds off of that familiar concept and uses it as a scaffold to approach topics like online engagement, transparency, and crowdsourcing.

I strongly believe that The Networked Nonprofit belongs on the nightstand of every non-profit manager and anyone looking to support non-profits.

You can order a copy or a set of The Networked Nonprofits books via Amazon (affiliate link below).

Photo Credit: Noah Sussman – License

It’s easy to get caught up in technology for technology’s sake.

A programmer creates a cool tool in isolation and launches it to the bewilderment of users, a credit card machine requires unnecessary steps to process a transaction, an electronics security device is ten times more cumbersome than it’s worth in security.  These are all barriers that frustrate the heck out of customers.

I recently had a positive experience with a technology gizmo while shoe shopping.  The shoe store attendant offered to measure my feet using a digital foot analysis tool.  All I had to do was take off my shoes and step into the machine.

Once in the device, a wall-mounted screen displayed an outline of my foot, it’s arch area, and pressure points.  This allows the attendant to get the correct shoe size, suggest better fitting shoe options, and later try to sell me on custom inserts.

I ended up trying on several pairs of shoes but didn’t find the right fit.  But I loved how the store used a piece of technology to get me closer to a sale.

1. The first “step” was to get me to take off my shoes, which is always key in the shoe sales process.  This is getting me to “first base.”
2. The attendant used the analysis data to recommend well-fitting shoes.
3. Because the analysis screen was mounted on the wall, mall shoppers could see what was going on.  The bright and colorful screen could help bring in the curious.
4. The next time I go shoe shopping, I’ll visit that store because I know they’ll get me closer to finding well-fitting shoes.

So if you notice that customers suddenly started abandoning online shopping carts, sending few Web inquiries, or are buying few products from your stores, make sure you didn’t introduce a cool new technology feature that is getting in the way of a sale.  The best advice is to track the introduction of new technologies in your sales process and measure their effectiveness.

Do you know of a technology device or system that made a noticeable difference in your purchasing decision?  Please share.

I use Google Analytics to track activity to and from my blog. Unfortunately, there are a lot of holes in that process, especially related to Twitter clickthroughs.

• First, some users bookmark the page, then revisit the site. These visitors are great because they found value in the site and are coming back for more. However, there is no way to tell if someone actually bookmarked the page or if something else happened.
• Other visitors arrive here by clicking on a link from a mobile Twitter application. Several of these applications remove the “referrer” information which causes another question mark when I go to check stats.
• If a visitor is using Internet Explorer and clicks through on a link from a site that uses a JavaScript popup, then the referrer information is lost. This sounds like a minor case but if you’re doing hardcore tracking to drill down on a marketing campaign’s ROI, this factor can be maddening.
• Lastly, if a visitor clicks on the Tweet Button and posts a link to Twitter, the URL is “automagically” shortened via Twitter’s link service (http://t.co). If a user clicks on a tweeted out link, you’ll know that the visitor came from Twitter but you won’t know where the link originated. Did a user get there from clicking on a Tweet Button link? Did someone cut and paste the blog post’s URL from the Web browser into a tweet? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Benefits

Before I started using this Google Analytics tracking technique, 16.8% of my traffic was showing up as “Direct Traffic.” After I started tracking Tweet Button clicks and Feedburner subscription clicks, that number went down to 13.45% and a new “Other” figure emerged.

This is awesome because now I can examine the behavior of visitors who click on the Tweet Button. Do Tweet Button visitors stay longer, visit more pages, or take key actions? Now I can answer some of these questions when before it was a mystery.

Because a good chunk of my blog’s traffic comes from Twitter interactions, you can see that the TweetButton clicks are in the site’s top 10 Traffic Sources. I can also see individual stats related to these visitors such as Bounce Rates, Time On Site, Goal Conversions and more.

The Hack

We’re going to address the last case with this next hack. In order for this to work, you won’t be able to use the standard Tweet Button plugin. We’ll have to add the button by hand.

1. Go to the Google URL Builder Tool page.
2. Enter your site’s URL.
3. Enter the Campaign Source, Medium, and Campaign Name. I used “Twitter”, “TweetButton”, and “Blogpost” respectively.
4. Click on the “Generate URL” button. This will build a link just below the button.
5. Copy the link. We’re mostly concerned with the end of the link, starting with the “?” mark.
6. Paste this code into your theme’s Header or Footer template files. I placed the code just before the < /head > tag in the Header.
   [php]<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>[/php]
7. Configure your Tweet Button HTML code as in this example (for WordPress.org blogs): [php]<!–Twitter tweet button–>
   <a href="http://twitter.com/share"
   data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweetbutton&utm_campaign=blogpost"
   data-via="jesseluna"
   data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>"
   data-related="niceblog:My Blogging Lab"
   data-count="vertical">Tweet</a>

   <!–/Twitter tweet button–>[/php]

   The main “hack” comes from the data-url parameter value where we add the Google Analytics formatted tracking parameters, just after the Permalink. This way, when Twitter shortens the link into it’s t.co format, the link value will contain the tracking information.

   In the above example, “data-via” is the Twitter user name that will appear on the tweet as “via .” “Data-text” is the text I want to display with the link.  In this case I’m displaying the post’s title.  “Data-related” is an optional related account that can be displayed. In this case I’m showing my blogging Lab account, @niceblog. The “data-count” value indicates how you want the button to appear on the screen. I chose a vertical format. You can see all the options on the Twitter Tweet Button blog page.

8. For WordPress.org blogs, paste the edited code into the Page, Single Post, and Main Index template files. I added the button just before the blog post content, after the title and date/author section of the templates. This will vary based on your preference and on other tweaks you’ve made to your theme.

I tried hacking Posterous and Tumblr blogs but the built in URL template tags kept blowing away the parameters once the Tweet Button was called. If you figure out how to do this please drop a comment and I’ll update this post.

Review

We just learned how to tack on a Google Analytics parameter to Tweet Button clicks on a WordPress.org blog. This will help you connect the dots on your online marketing and analysis activities.


If you find this useful, I’d be interested in how and why you would use it. Are you a marketing manager, a small business owner, or a code hacker? I’d love to find out.

We know about energy. We need it to heat our apartments and homes, we get more of it being around inspiring people, and we lose it when our bodies tire out. But I had never thought of emotional and physical energy as a business resource that has to be managed.

Traditionally, when we think of resources we think of time and money. If we are managing people then we realize that people are also resources so we add that to our list.

I suggest we should add energy to that list of resources.

Getting Things Done and Energy
The concept of energy as a business resource made sense after attending a Getting Things Done (GTD) seminar a few weeks ago. In the GTD productivity method, one sets up a series of “Next Actions” steps. These are discreet tasks that must be taken in order to advance to the next step of a project. In this framework, a project can be a large and complex production or it can be a simple as completing an office keeping function.

One participant at the seminar asked, “If you’re always working on the big projects, when do you have time for the little ones on your list?”

This is a classic workplace dilemma and one that can cripple productivity and zap communication.

The presenter’s response was, “That’s why you have different types of projects that must get done. If it’s Friday afternoon and you can barely stay awake, that might be a good time to change out the printer cartridge that’s on your Office Management project list, for example.”

I loved that response and it makes sense. If you’re working on a big project but just don’t have the energy to do an effective job at that moment, then completing a smaller task can actually get you back on track. Work with your energy, not against it.


Prioritizing By Energy
Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky on Twitter), CEO of Behance.com and author of Making Ideas Happen (affiliate link) sees energy management as extremely important in project management.

Energy is your most precious commodity. Regardless of who you are, you have only a finite amount of it. Just as a computer’s operating capacity is limited to the amount of memory (or RAM) installed, we all have our limits.

-P.59, Making Ideas Happen

Belsky suggests prioritizing projects based on energy level, ranking them on a continuum from “Extreme” to “Idle” in terms of their energy requirements. In this model, energy is equated with project importance, as opposed to the how-much-energy-do-I-have-at-that-time factor which the GTD presenter discussed. Either way, being mindful of energy is key to leading projects to completion.


Final Thoughts
I actively plan my daily schedule around my energy levels. Right now, my job search activities are the most important and deserve the most attention and energy. Because of that, I schedule my job search activities at the beginning of each day when I have the most energy and am in “work mode.”

When it comes to blogging, I often start at 10pm and work as late as my brain lets me. That’s when I can write most effectively and not feel like I have other higher priority tasks (or honey-dos) to accomplish.

Do you have formal systems in your workplace to help manage people energy? If so, what are they? How about energy management at home?


Related site:
Getting Things Done

Photo Credit:
Łukasz Strachanowski via Flickr

You don’t have to buy a book and take a seminar or ever buy a fancy blog theme to crank up your blog’s SEO Super Powers.

These top tips will help you zoom up the organic search rankings without breaking a sweat.

1. Use friendly post and page URLs for your new blog.

Quick Note: This tip works best for new blogs. See the BIG NOTE at the end of this item.

When you set up your blog, you will have the option to configure the way your page and blog post URLs are formatted. Search engines love URLs that contain meaningful and related keywords.

Good: http://< mydomain >/awesome-blog-post-title-with-keywords

Bad: http://< mydomain >/?p=45

The standard WordPress.org custom install defaults to the “Bad” URL structure. If you want to drive search traffic to your blog, switch the structure to one that includes the post’s title. In WordPress, you can change the settings from Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

In Tumblr, Go to Customize > Advanced, then scroll down and check on the “Use Descriptive URLs” checkbox.

Posterous has an SEO-friendly URL structure by default. This is an example of a Posterous URL: http://jesseluna.posterous.com/curating-tweets-on-flipboard-by-using-twitter. The URL is friendly to read and search engines like that.

Big Note: If you’ve had your blog for any length of time, changing your URL structure can have a huge negative traffic impact. Search engines will have already combed through your blog pages, indexed things and added them to search results. If you’ve had your blog for a while but don’t really care about past “traction” on search engines, go ahead and change the structure.

2. Use targeted keyword terms in your blog post titles.

Try to use one or two target keywords per blog post title. If you have a blog focused on non-profits then “How to talk to small nonprofits: A guide for vendors” is a great title. The title hits on two key terms, “nonprofits” and “vendors.” A Web search over those two terms would likely position that blog post on page one of search results.

An additional tip is adding a combination of not necessarily related keywords together. For example, I did a post on a Tweetdeck’s ability to post to Tumblr and now that post shows up in the number 3 spot for the search term “Tweetdeck Tumblr“, which ranks higher than tumblr.com, second only to Tweetdeck.com.

3. Use “Alt” tags on images.

Every time you use an image on your blog, add meaningful text to the “ALT” tag.

This is the structure of an image tag in HTML:

< img src="my-awesome-image.jpg" alt=”My-awesome-alt-tag-description” />

[Note: in this and other HTML samples in this post, I'm inserting extra spaces at the beginning and end of the text to keep WordPress from rendering the code. Just a warning in case you do any cutting and pasting.]

When search engines parse through your web site, they index image Alt tags. When more of your site is indexed, that means there’s more of a chance your site will show up for related searches.

Alt tags are also very important for accessibility reasons. Meaningful tags give blind and visually challenged readers a description of the picture which can help with context.


In WordPress, you can set the image Alt tag when you select an image:

In Tumblr, the “Caption” field in the Photo Upload tool will be the image’s Alt tag.

Posterous – As far as I can see, there is no way to set the Alt tag on a Posterous blog post image. Bummer.

4. Set “keywords” and “description” meta tags

Meta tags are bits of information that may be added to Web pages to help describe the contents of the page. The contents of the tags aren’t displayed on the page but search engines use the information in the tags to help rank pages and to help display them properly in search results.

I never meta tag I didn’t like. -Old webmaster’s joke

The two main meta tags are the “description” and the “keywords” tags.


Description meta tag
The HTML for the meta tag will look something like:

< meta name="description" content="This is my awesome two to three sentence, keyword-rich, description of this page. This is my second awesome sentence." />


If you want to get crazy with the description, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to get feedback on whether you tried to jam too much information into your description meta tag.


Keywords meta tag
Here’s the HTML for the keywords meta tag:

< meta name="keywords" content="Awesome-keyword-one, Awesome-targeted-keyword-two, Awesome-descriptive-keyword, Awesome4,Awesome5,Awesome6" / >


You will add highly relevant keywords instead of my “awesome” ones above. The keywords should be highly related to that specific web page and to the site. You don’t want to put too many keywords there. I usually keep the list to under 20 unless there are 25 products on the page or something like that in which case I list them all.

If you’re not sure which words best describe your page, you can use an offbeat tool like Wordle.net to visualize the page’s top keywords.

The image below is a Wordle.net keyword visualization of the YouTube Adds New iPad-Friendly HTML5 Video Player blog post. I copied the post’s text, went to the Create tab on Wordle.net then pasted the text into the “Paste in a bunch of text” field and ran it.

The diagram points out that the main page keywords were “player”, “html5″, “YouTube”, “Video”,”iPad”, and “Embed” because they were used the most in the post. Of course, if you have special target keywords that should be associated with the page, you’d want to list those as well in your keywords meta tag.

WordPress.org custom install blogs
In WordPress, to add meta tags you need to add a plugin that allows you to either set the meta tags or “builds” them dynamically based on some criteria. The most popular plugin is the All in One SEO Pack. This plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Once you install and activate the plugin, you can set it to build meta tags for each post based on the post’s tags. There are also a ton of other knobs and do-hickeys that you can set but describing them all is beyond the scope of this post.

Tumblr
If you are using a Custom Theme setup, you can set the meta tags but only on a global scale. In other words, you can’t set them on a per post basis. You can set the meta tags by going to Customize > Theme then setting the meta tag somewhere between the opening “< head >” tag and the closing “” tag.

Posterous
Posterous allows for custom meta tags but, like Tumblr, the tags can only be set on a global scale, not per post. You can set the meta tags by going to Settings > Look and Feel > Edit Theme > Advanced. Expand the area and you’ll see a couple of other meta tags. You can add your keywords and description meta tags immediately below those.

Review

We just learned how to use four key SEO tips and tricks to boost your search engine rankings and attract more site visitors. These techniques work with the content, not the other way around. You should never compromise your writing to make things more SEO friendly.

I will be adding more SEO tips in the comments over time (I didn’t want to overload you with this initial post). Feel free to comment and to leave your own tips and questions.

This post was made to be shared with the world. If you like it, set it free and share it.


Additional Resources: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF, 560KB)


Photo: Purchased via iStockPhoto