I’m famous! Yes!  I was featured in a Media Bistro arcticle!

But more importantly, I have a good job at a strong, growing company, headed by smart, agressive people.  In the words of the Talking Heads, “And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” 

Well, I got here by using good old fashioned networking and social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc.) to keep in touch and meet people to help my career. It paid off and I landed a great position at PFS Marketwyse. Then, via twitter (note the lower case “t’), I learned of an author/recruiter who was writing an article for Media Bistro about using twitter to land a job.

I responded to the tweet and in April, I was interviewed by Lindsay Olson of Paradigm Staffing for an article she was writing for Media Bistro. The article, titled “10 Tips for Using Twitter to Fuel Your Job Search”, appeared on the web June 8, 2009.

The full article is accessible by subscription on the MediaBistro site. I don’t have a subscription (you may not either) but here are some excerpts…

You’ve heard the hype surrounding twitter by now. If you are job searching or interested in building a fresh network while enhancing your professional visibility, Twitter is a resource to seriously consider. In today’s job market, you need to use every tool available, including social media.

Greg Padley, Sr. Account Manager at PFS Marketwyse.com, and Sydney Owen, PR intern at WeberShandwick, both found their most recent positions through Twitter.

Greg’s story began about ten years ago when he met the President of PFS Marketwyse, Deirdre Breakenridge, for the first time in their professional circles. Greg explained that over the years “I kept in touch with Deirdre in standard ways through email, phone, and networking events. When LinkedIn came onto my radar a few years ago, we connected there. Then Facebook. Then Twitter.

Finally, Deirdre put out a tweet that she was looking for an Account Manager.” Greg responded to the Twitter update expressing his interest and he was invited for an interview. He landed the job as Sr. Account Manager with the agency. 

“Deirdre knew what types of things I was working on and had a feel for my experience before I even walked in the door because of the years of contact over social media. Although a previous relationship existed, he attributes his connection on Twitter to him finding the position. “If I had missed that one Tweet I wouldn’t have my current job,” explained Greg.

Here’s one of the ten tips from the from Olson’s MediaBistro article (just happens to be one of my tips): 

Try to update everyday. You want your name to be out there, not just as someone who pops i nevery now and then. If you use an application like Tweetdeck or Twhirl, it’s easy to integrate Twitter into your busy day. Be careful not to inundate your followers with meaningless updates, though. Padley warns, “you want to inform prospective employers and/or influencers who can advise you of job openings - not hammer them with every thought.”

So there you have it, how I got my job by using social media and good old fashioned networking techniques. There are so many tools available to job seekers and career changers that can be put to work to help you. Use them and use them wisely.

And, by the way, if you are in marketing and on twitter you should follow Lindsay. Not only does she post lots of good links to career advice - she’s also funny. You can also follow me.

In a June 4 iMedia blog post, writer Rich Cherecwich comments on the recent Time article titled, How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.

I hadn’t read the Time piece until after reading the iMedia blog - kind of backwards process but Cherecwich wrote one line in particular that intrigued me before I clicked thru to Time.

He typed, “Twitter will undoubedly fizzle at some point, just like AOL, Yahoo, Friendster, and MySpace all have.”

I don’t see this as a “fizzle.” I see each one of these as one piece in an online evolution of sorts. Would we have had Yahoo groups without AOL coming before it? Would we have had MySpace without Friendster? Would we have Facebook without MySpace? Would we have twitter without blogging?

These are all interconnected, several things leading to “the next big thing.” Twitter may evolve into something else or become extinct as other ideas built on those before it emerge.

Interestingly, the Time article author, Steve Johnson, points out that, “ I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s (his capital T - not mine) co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ’90s when he was launching Blogger.com.”

Johnson writes, “But the key development with Twitter (his capital T - not mine) is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of. ” Of course he is talking about all of the APIs, search options, hash tags, twitter short hand and other add ons and plugins created by programmers and users.

Natural selection or inteligent design?

I get a lot of e-newsletters, follow some interesting folks on twitter and subscribe to several RSS feeds. Every so often I get a few articles around the same time that touch on a similar topic in a slightly different but related way. Today for example…

Victoria’s Secret, I learned from mobilemarketer.com, “launched a marketing initiative that uses the mobile Web and SMS text messages to promote its products and shopping on-the-go. ”

Lingere shopping “on the go” from your cell phone didn’t make sense to me. So I posed the question, “Would you buy lingere from your cell phone?” to my Facebook friends.  A whopping two women replied. Both just said “no.”

Yesterday, I wrote about “who uses texting.”  Teenagers and twenty somethings were the main users - by far. “Older folks” over 35 years old are slowly adopting SMS yet 41% of respondants didn’t use text messaging at all….

This afternoon, the @imediatweet turned me on to an article on WSJ regarding online clothes shopping and women.

The author, Christina Binkley, said, “Online sales to women aged 25-34 fell 8% in the year ended in March, but sales to 55-to-64-year-olds rose 11% — recession be damned.”

So 55-to-64 year old women are shopping yet they aren’t using SMS text messaging but Victoria’s Secret is launching a text and mobile Web shopping platform.

Something here seems disconnected to me….is this mobile underwear effort missing the mark?

Who uses text messaging?

• 97% of Teenagers
• 87% of Twenty-Somethings

Yet, 41% of all people responding to a recent study said they do not text at all. The reasons:

• Don’t like to type on the phone
• Cost of text messaging

Both of these road blocks could easily be off-set with the “right” phone and the “right” plan. 

But re-engineering phone keypads for easier typing and reducing data transfer plan fees will only make a small change in the number of 40 and 50 year olds who use text messaging.

You can lead a horse to texting but you can’t make him drink.  Why?

The explaination why these people don’t use text messaging is the same reason some (usually the same) people don’t “get” social media.

Texting (and social media) puts more “power” into the users hands.  It is a lifestyle and/or a paradigm shift in the way people communicate.   

Studies with teens have shown that they like text messaging because it allows multitasking, offers speed and privacy, and gives them control to avoid verbal communication.

You can’t “make” someone switch their lifestyle or preferred way of communicating and start texting by lowering the price or giving them a new phone.  But some people will be “forced” to text.

Parents and grandparents of teens will make the transition to texting as a matter of necessity. To communicate with teenage family members, older adults start texting - the way they (the teens) prefer to communicate. 

Teens and pre-teens have always wanted more control and more power over their lives. By “forcing” the adults closest to them to communicate in a way they prefer teens can gain some of the control they desire. 

And, by default, they drag the “old” folks into the “new paradigm” of communication where they can begin to realize the benefits of text messaging (and social media) = multitasking, speed, privacy and the ability to avoid verbal communication.

What do you think?

A chip bag and a sign in front of a dry cleaner’s shop got me going on this post - first a few definitions….

Semantics: the study of meanings.
General Semantics: the language used to achieve a desired effect on an audience esp. through the use of words with novel or dual meanings.

A line of copy on a chip bag caught my eye the other night. It said, “All Natural Corn Oil.” Hmmmm. Seems tricky….

The corn oil used in food factories, such as the chip maker’s ”kitchen” no doubt, is processed. Can it be “natural” if it is treated with Hexane solvent, distilled, refined, bleached and deodorized? The raw material for corn oil - corn itself - is the product of a huge farm factory teated with fertilizers and pesticides.

I guess corn oil could be “natural” if you grew it and made it yourself - horse manure only please (depending on what the horse is fed and the medications its given though…some of the nasties go through the digestive tract without being absorbed, ya know.)

So, “natural corn oil” isn’t really natural at all then.  What is “natural” oil?

Way before there were any “chemicals” there were plants and animals. “Natural oil” then is a petroleum seep, like the LaBrea Tar Pits, Pitch Lake (Trinidad) and The Perpetual Fires of Baku. 

The source of the petroleum in a seep is organic plant matter from millions of years ago, ‘fermented’ under the earth and naturally forced to the surface.  Somehow, this seems more “natural” than the corn oil in my chips - and it’s “organic.” 

“Organic Dry Cleaning” said the sign on my way to the office.  I had to look this up because I know a little bit about dry cleaning after spending a few years working on B-2-B dry cleaning advertising and PR.

A quick Google search confirmed what I thought. “Organic” is used as in “organic chemistry” - any chemical containing a string of carbon is considered organic. It also pointed out that the “organic” dry cleaning solvent being touted by many cleaners now is slightly better than the older solvent (perc). Perc solvent is also an organic chemical though - according to chemists.

There were a number of other dry cleaning solvents in use before perc was developed - two of the earliest were petroleum-based kerosene and gasoline. According to the chemists then, these solvents too were “organic.”

So then, what exactly is the ”organic dry cleaning” that I read about on a sign today?  Nothing or nothing new depending on your perspective. (Some say simply it is best to avoid clothing that needs dry cleaning.)

So “natural” and “organic” can apply to petroleum products if you look at them in just the right way.  Kinda makes me feel a little better about mashing on the gas pedal when a good song comes on the radio….

Next Up: 5691gerg explores all the nasty-stuff that goes into a battery for your Hybrid-Electric car.

Previously: e-Cards, environmental angst, flourescant light bulbs, damaging dentistry.

First, let me say I DID NOT WRITE this piece. It came from “Grant’s Client Brief” an email newsletter (Vol 9, No. 3, April 1, 2009) I subscribe to (you should as well). I tried to find a link to this piece elsewhere but couldn’t so I am reposting it here…it is that good. 

So without further ado here goes….

Chances are you know the TalentZoo folks - they specialize in connecting people with jobs in the ad agency business, but that’s not all.

Their website at TalentZoo.com is a first-rate clearing house for fresh industry news, salary data, career advice, and insightful articles about the ad business.

. . . Like the one I wrote for them a couple of weeks ago, reproduced in full below. Hope you enjoy it.

And you should make it a point to visit TalentZoo.com regularly, too.  

Are You in Advertising? No Worries!

TalentZoo guest columns usually offer pithy advice with a lot of focus lately about how to survive this economic laxative we all seem to have ingested.

Well, I don’t have any pat answers for you here, no “6 Easy Ways To Keep Your Job” stuff. I’ve seen bad spells several times in my career and all I can say is like a rodeo cowboy, you just ride the beast as long as you can, get the tar whupped out of you, and hope it stops before you’re bucked off. If you land in the dirt, get up and find another bull.

So instead of a bunch of platitudes, I’ll tell you about an art director named Fred, may God rest his gin-soaked soul, who taught me an important lesson.

My first ad agency job a long time ago was in Rochester, NY. When the CEO said I’d be spending the first couple of weeks shadowing Fred, I couldn’t believe it. He was snarly, petulant, and usually hung over. But worst of all Fred was an art director. And I on the other hand had been hired as an Account Executive which I always spelled capital A capital E. Before starting work I’d even bought a shiny new suit and a couple of ties at Sears so nobody would miss that I was on the clean side of the business. So why am I stuck with this old fart?

It didn’t go well in the beginning. He wouldn’t speak a word to me the first week, wouldn’t even let me sit in his office so I perched on a stool just outside the door to peer in without aggravating him. But after some time he mellowed and started tugging me along like a pet to printers, type houses (I told you this was a long time ago), art studios, photo shoots, and a couple of bars where - believe me - everybody knew his name.

[You know, every new account person should get baptized by spending their first few weeks in Creative. In retrospect it was invaluable and really helped years later when I landed agency management positions that included creative oversight]

Well, times grew tough in Rochester and we lost some accounts which meant staff cuts were looming. Everyone knew they were coming and I was petrified. Like many young couples we had more bills than income plus a new baby at home. I couldn’t sleep, had trouble concentrating, and was observably scared.

Old Fred read me like a book, of course.

He took me aside and said, “Always remember - once you’ve been in the ad business a while you can get a job doing just about anything anywhere.”

He said our business is so demanding, requires so much talent in so many different ways, that almost any other job will be a cinch and you’re guaranteed to be successful. “If you can sell stuff to these [expletive forgotten - supply your own] clients of ours, and push ads through this place then you can do anything. Besides, people on the outside think advertising is magic. You’ll be fine.”

Wow. I never thought about it like that.

I did get the axe, and in fact it happened a couple more times in my 35+ year (so far) career. But each time it was a comfort recalling what art director Fred declared: I can do anything . . . I’m in Advertising!

He was right and I’m still riding the beast. Lots of people who got shaken out of the business in prior bad times became successful elsewhere; many came back and thrived all over again. But you know, if you look closely they never really shed what it takes to succeed in advertising - they just applied that special mash-up of skills, creativity, and craziness someplace else. (5691gerg note - that’d be a Jack Ass of All Trades BTW)

Once an ad guy, always an ad guy.

So you were expecting some profound magic bullet advice in this column?

You just got it.

Sign up for Joe Grant’s new blog  It’s free, topical, and engaging, and will come right to your mailbox several times a month (you can always bail anytime. Sigh.).  Subscribe using an RSS feed reader.

So, there you have it! A “special mash-up of skills, creativity, and craziness” = Jack Ass of All Trades.

I’ve been pondering an iMedia article titled The Dark Side of Twitter by editor Jim Meskauskas  (VP & Director of Online Media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company) all morning. 

In it, Meskauskas asks, “Will Twitter hurt how we think and, thus, act, and in turn change how we market to one another?” He answers himself, “Maybe.”  I agree to “maybe” and I agree that it changes how we market to one another but I disagree to “hurt.”

Twitter doesn’t hurt lives. It’s arguable that twitter will alter our thinking. Considering that world population is about 6.7 billion, twitter’s seven million users are unlikely to have any effect on changing how human beings “think and, thus, act.” Selecting one slice of the social media pie is not the right approach - the effect of social media as a whole or the 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide might be a more effective argument.

Did Gutenberg’s printing press, the telegraph, the telephone or the Internet change how we think? Yes. Did it hurt how we think. No. It only added to the fodder from which we could learn, grow and interact. Twitter is no different. 

It is interesting to see that Meskauskas is another writer who likes to capitalize the “T” in twitter. Twitter is not God. Twitter is not a proper noun. Twitter is twitter. Like SMS or email, twitter is a communications tool. Can twitter hurt us? Only in the way that a tool such as a hammer can hurt you - by misuse - for twitter, that means following uninteresting people. (I touched on this in my post titled I Hate Twitter.)   

“Most of the time, the posts I read are not relevant to my life,” Meskauskas says. “They rarely offer a depth of insight on a given subject.” That’s unfortunate for him and a disservice to the readers of his article. If I’m test driving a Ferrari for Car and Driver and don’t know how to drive a stick shift how am I serving the reader?   

If you are reading a book you don’t like, you put it down and you get another one. Why read tweets that aren’t relevant to you or your interests? Meskauskas’ argument in this case goes something like this, “I don’t like reading Shakespeare so I don’t like books.” Not a very effective argument or proof that twitter will negatively impact human intellect. 

Maybe he needs to choose some different people to follow. If you follow the right people, twitter is a constant feed of headlines from sources that you have selected. You scan newspapers for headlines of interest and flip through magazine pages until something catches your eye. How about that TV remote? Do you surf the 57 channels searching for something to watch? Has that hurt how we think or act? 

Does it effect how we market products or services? For sure! Print ads, TV commercials and Internet ads have to capture your attention in a few seconds. How is that different than a tweet? You have a 15 second spot, the flip of a magazine page or you have 140 characters.

Participating in media (blogging, tweeting, uploading videos of their cats), according to Meskauskas, “provides the illusion of participation” and “is physically no different than buying something on eBay or surfing porn.”  

What’s the point of noting the PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE between things you do on a computer? Watching TV or reading a book is physically no different than participating in online media. The difference lies in the varying levels intellectual involvement. Watching TV isn’t as creative as writing a blog, shooting and uploading a video of your cat or a shortening a tweet to 140 characters.

Twitter “is not an experience, and it is not a conversation.” To say twitter is not an experience or a conversation shines a light on the way the author uses twitter and links with his statement noted previously, “the posts I read are not relevant to my life.”

He’s right though; twitter is not a conversation - unless YOU make it one. You learn things about those you follow and they learn things about you. From that you can CHOOSE to engage in a conversation with them.

You can have that conversation through twitter or turn to other methods - email, telephone, face-to-face. I’ve done that in many cases. Twitter is the ‘introduction’ in these instances, encouraging and facilitating the conversation. Or you can CHOOSE simply to follow tweets and not engage in conversations.

Reading a book or watching a movie I feel emotions and physical changes in my body - tense muscles and elevated heart rate in suspenseful scenarios for example. Is that not an experience? Maybe Meskauskas needs to define “experience.” Regardless, I feel emotions and physical changes in my body when reading and writing tweets. I laugh out loud at some tweets. Is that less of an experience? I think not.

The author seems to see the world devolving into some scene from the cult film Idiocracy or Kornbluth’s 1951 short story The Marching Morons. The root of all evil, in this case, is twitter which has the power to turn the world into a uniformly mindless mass of humanity. I bet twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone never imagined they’d be the progenitors of world-without-brain.

Meskauskas points out that, “Twitter’s atomization of human expression means that marketers are faced with the prospect of trying to wedge in on even smaller pieces of communicative action, which ostensibly offers waste-free interlocution. To achieve this, syntax has to be simplified, while at the same time maximizing its semantics; that is, the letters or symbols we use have to represent even greater sets of meaning.” Try to say that in 140 characters or a good old-fashioned elevator pitch….

All that said, Meskauskas still has me thinking about his article and the points he makes. He mentioned a book by Lee Siegel titled “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” that I now want to read. And THAT is the whole point of reading, writing and tweeting about it.

Oh, and, by the way, I found Meskauskas’ article via iMedia’s tweet…. @iMediaTweet    

Read a good iMedia interview with Dwight Caines, President of Worldwide Digital Marketing for Sony Pictures Entertainment.

iMedia’s Matt Kapko asks some questions about “innovative campaigns” and “campaign you wish you were behind.”  Here’s an excerpt….

iMedia: What’s the all-time most innovative and clever campaign you’ve seen so far?

Caines: It’s hard for me, after working on some 200-odd campaigns, to really isolate one, only because there are different levels of success with each. Frankly, some campaigns are designed to maintain a particular positioning among consumers. Some are designed to change their perspective. And so it’s really hard to isolate a campaign and say this one worked better than that one.

iMedia: OK. How about this: What’s the one campaign that you wish you were behind?

Caines: Nothing comes to mind right now, but I will say that I try to be a student of marketing and watch what other people do. I’m always looking at other peoples’ media that runs and how well they’ve integrated the call-to-action from, say, broadcast to digital to a print interaction. And I always respect when people do that really well. Because attention is so fragmented, what we’re trying to do is just build deep immersion as many ways as we can.

Caines answers are great! They reinforce the fact that marketing is business man! Sure it’s creative and fun, but it’s business. You can’t say “this is the best campaign” without understanding the business logic behind it. 

Who is the target audience?  What do they think/believe? What do we want them to feel/think after seeing the advertising?  What action to we want them to take? These are business related questions that need to be addressed before the creative fun begins.

Maybe that’s why 66% of Americans think ad agencies are partially to blame for the current economic situation. Advertising (and all the other associated marketing communication and efforts) makes people want to BUY stuff! That’s what ads are supposed to do! That’s what ad agencies are supposed to do!  

This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for new zine called Luupe due out next month. With all the hub bub around media personalities joining twitter right now, I thought it would make sense to post today.

I read an iMedia blog post the other day that said Howard Stern (and now Oprah and Ashton Kutcher) is now on twitter.

Big deal. After several on-air lessons with a BlackBerry, Mr. Stern racked up over 8,500 followers in just eight hours with only a few updates. The author wrote, “If that’s not a perfect example of the power of Twitter, I’m not sure what is.” (notice the capitalized “T” in twitter)

How is that a perfect example of the power of twitter? Mr. Stern has made himself a bloody fortune selling his type of humor. Now, he can give it away for free on twitter? That’s success? I don’t think so. Sure, he can update his fans and communicate with them (I mean to talk about his sponsors and tell fans where to buy Howard t-shirts) via twitter but he does that already via subscription-based satellite radio.

The real winners here are Stern and BlackBerry. BlackBerry got their name in the listeners’ ears a bunch of times and certainly will have numerous other mentions (also on twitter no doubt). They’ve associated themselves with a celebrity who has a very large and very dedicated fan base. Maybe I just need to understand the iMedia blogger’s rationale behind the statement “the power of twitter.”

I think what it really shows is that twitter has gained “mass market” status. Mr. Stern’s “people” have organized the whole twitter account, contractual agreements, promotional announcements, free product, etc. in order to push “more Stern” and more brand mentions (i.e. advertising) out to the people AND solicit more “material” from the fans who communicate with the comedian via twitter.

This is not a two-way street to “open up communication” and “be transparent” like all the people who spell twitter with a capital “T” would say. It is pure marketing and promotion. It’s no different than what happens now on listener phone calls to the studio. Fundamentally, nothing has changed – how is that proof of “the power of twitter.”

So now we’ll have even more folks on twitter. Great. Along with all of twitter’s popularity comes more junk. There’s more junk on twitter now than ever before. Seems some folks just don’t “get it” that twitter isn’t only a place to “push out your message.”

It’s up to us, twitter users, to make sure twitter remains worthwhile. Twitter is a Democracy and we “vote” with our follows AND our tweets. We can decide not to follow those who do not offer value. We can be cynical and question the motives of our fellow twits. We can ensure that we are open and honest. We can “out” those who provide only junk. So, I challenge you and all twitters to do just that…

We had a pow wow at the office recently discussing the question, “Should Bloggers accept gifts?”

It was interesting to hear the different perspecitves. The agency President, Deirdre Breakenridge, wrote a post for her blog on the conversation.

Personally,  I think it is an acceptable practice - even a recommended practice. Unlike traditional media, blogs - by their very nature - include opinions and personal thoughts. Influencing the opinions of blog authors is the whole point in this case. Accepting gifts has already spilled over into traditional media.

Travel journalists, for example, have been accepting free trips for years to cover various destinations for their readers. I think blog readers understand that the reporting practices of major media are different than those of an independent blogger and so they have different expectations of a blogger writing underneath The New York Times or Wall Street Journal masthead than of a blogger writing on his/her own platform.

So, anyone out there want to send me a gift….??