Add Value to Stand Out: Job Tips from Last Weekend's Local Career Conference

A local organization called Asian Focus held a career conference last weekend for local Chinese community. The conference invited a few seasoned professionals to talk about how to find a job, how to impress an employer/recruiter, how to polish your resume/cover letter, and how to use social media to land a job offer.

There was this speaker called Neal Hill that really impressed the audience. Neal Hill talked about how he got into starting up his own consulting business. He discussed how job seekers should avoid wearing the "I'm seeking an employment" hat, on the other hand, one should try to offer value to the organization before they even consider to help you. Neal Hill found most of his jobs through providing help to the organizations or people. Networks also helped his job search scope. 

Recommended by Neal Hill, one should think about how to add value even before your potential employer think about hiring you. Ask what they are dealing with, and tell how you can provide your second thoughts and help. 

These tips are not directly related to social media. This post is to tell you that searching jobs is not just about posting your resumes on LinkedIn or updating your Twitter status. It is about strategy as well. 
P.S. Wanna share something fun I saw from Guy Kawasaki's retweet...Make your usb cords in line...

 

Chatroulette, where a book is officially judged by its cover

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.
After watching the video from Casey Neistat regarding Chat Roulette, I realized why Chat Roulette has been such a struggle for me since I knew about its existence the first day. 
It is officially providing people a place to judge other people by the way they look. The Appearance outweighs wisdom, knowledge, personality, and pretty much everything else. That explains why Casey as a guy can keep Chatrouletters there for less than 2 seconds, while his pretty female friend can keep people there for more than 2 minutes.
Living in 2010, we have many rules to obey. We are not supposed to discriminate people by the way they look or what they are wearing. Chat Roulette, however, brings us back the old time where we were free to judge people.
Is this a benefit of Social Media too? I doubt it. This may add another point to my previous post about why Chat Roulette is not marketable.

Facebook Fan Page: Best Way for Groups To Get Together?

 It is the first time in my life to hear that moms nowadays may choose to breast feed their babies off-breast. The Times article discusses how moms feel lonely, uncomfortable, or inconvenient to breast-feed their babies, instead, they choose to pump breast milk and feed their babies with bottled breast milk.

Later I checked one of the web sites the article mentioned called Got Breast Pump! The web site provides products related to breast pump, tips to get more breast milk, and so on. Appalled by the many options women nowadays have, I also found the web site had a Facebook Fan Page: GotBreastPump.com

Then the question became, what kind of groups or organizations is Facebook Fan Page best way for?

Some underrepresented groups like GotBreastPump? 

So I kept on reading other articles and found Fan Page fit best the needs for non-profits, some acting stars, activist groups, and small organizations. 

Then I kept on thinking the differences Fan Page makes over other Facebook applications.There are heated debate over Facebook Fan Page and Facebook Group. Which is better and how is one better? According to Ann Smarty's post, Fan Page is better to be used to build and maintain a long-term relationship with customers or supporters. That seems to be an ideal way for non-profits or smaller organizations like GotBreastPump to manage.

Bad news for Facebook Fan Page is a recent annoucenment by Facebook.com that they will plan to have a new tool to replace Fan Page(Facebook To Announce Plans To Take Over The Internet With Facebook Pages)

Before Facebook Fan Page is long-gone, let's talk about it here. What are some of the good stories Fan Page leaves us? 

Mobile Marketing Should Be Easy for Consumers To Take Action

As mobile marketing becomes more and more popular, ad and marketing agencies gets heated competition. Oglivy Interactive did some quite impressive accounts. One that I really like is Dove 'Campaign for Real Beauty.' 

Dove erected a large billboard of a happy, fresh-looking older woman with a text-to-vote number so that pedestrians could choose between 'wrinkled' and 'wonderful.' The billboard's live ticker showed the combined results from both text and online voting.

The campaign turned out to be a successful one. 

Christine's net analyzed the following reasons:

• Relevant to the consumer
• Welcome invitation to participate
• Entertaining
• Drives a specific action
• Integrated where appropriate
• Connects what was previously disconnected
• Simplicity

Among all the above reasons, I found "drives a specific action" and "integrated where appropriate" as the two most crucial ones. The billboard ad apparently leaves people with two options---whether to think the woman in the picture is "wrinkled" or "wonderful". The message itself calls for a specific action---to choose between the two. When people text messages to vote, it probably won't occur to them other things or words. People will tend to choose between the two words since that's what is given. This makes it easy to make a decision and make the action easy to take too. 

In other words, a good mobile marketing campaign should not leave all the questions for the target audience to answer. A good campaign should be specific and make the action easy for the target audience to take. If the target audience only needs to type a eight-lettered word (wrinkled) or a nine-lettered one, they won't feel bothered.It's just easy. Again, marketers shall find an easy way to have the audience's voices heard. Mobile marketing needs to be highly interactive than treating text messages as a mass outlet, or asking the audience to passively receive discount information. It needs to be two-way. Get their voices heard, and the marketers will gain more awareness and eventually profits.

The second reason I agree on is "integrated where appropriate". Mobile marketing will be dead if marketers only use it to promote their products or sending out discount information. It should be actively integrated with other promotions like a billboard ad. Marketers want to connect dots together for the target audience. In this case, the idea of real beauty should be viewed on a billboard, and should be documented by one's text message. Once the marketers make the target audience to move their fingers and type the word out, the target audience will have a higher chance to remember the message and accept the products coming with the message. People will recognize Dove products as for women with real beauty.

I think mobile marketing should integrate with other forms of marketing, and should be easy to interact. What do you think?

Where Did Capital One Get My Information?

I've been struggling with the Capital One promotional letters for months. I still did not figure out where they got my contact information and send me the annoying credit card mails. Did you have the same problem before? Got spammed by some company you have no idea about?
This is what I learned from Leah Betancourt's post---How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data? It is almost incredible how people's conversation over the social networking sites are documented and used for some business reasons. Can companies do that without violating media ethics and all? I knew that Google used your emails to determine what kind of ads to put on to each individual's gmail page, but I don't see things this worse coming.
I think I know why my information was acquired by Capital One. My facebook account, my twitter, and LinkedIn, they are selling me to strangers with business agenda. I hope y'all won't encounter similar problems. So why don't we take a look at some of the tips Leah Betancourt offered? 

1. Determine whether you want to go public or private with your social media profiles. I

2. Eliminate people and sites from your social networks that you don’t need.

3. Pay attention to your friend, invite, and connection requests. 

Twitter Is Not The Panacea For Customer Service

As many Fortune companies take the lead and adopt Twitter for customer service, social media is considered as the panacea for customer service by many organizations who are thinking of using it. However, social media is not the cure for bad customer service. Complaining over tweets doesn't help the customer service people to give prompt feedback. There is no Twitter magic. It is just people working behind their laptops trying to satisfy angry customers. Introducing Twitter will not change the customer service quality and timeliness, yet management and corporate policies will. "If a company's DNA is not truly dedicated to listening and responding to customers in a genuine and timely manner, no technology will provide a solution," Lloyd Trufelman, president of Trylon SMR once commented. That also explains why companies hesitate to open accounts on every single social media platform. It is too much for them to handle. Easier said than done. Below is a list of companies that provide off-hours service over Twitter. It is not a good idea to over-work the customer service staff. And this is a world that not all will be happy anyway. What is your opinion? Do you believe that Twitter can improve customer service?  It doesn't hurt to make your voice heard. So please leave me some insights. Thank you!