Lately, a few friends of mine are making some moves in their careers, they asked me for my advice, so I decided to give them my observations. I’ll probably refer people to this post, I often use this blog to save me time. One caveat, my experience is within corporate, so if you’re of the entrepreneurial spirit, I don’t have as much insight.

Six Career Tips To Help You Grow

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Learn something new every day
When I was a lowly intern right out of college doing grunt work IT application clean up and light UI design, I asked harassed, my dear colleagues to teach me something every single day. They thought I was bright-eyed, cute, and naive and I ended up learning a little about each of the web developers, system integrators, project managers, web managers, web architects, computer support teams. Although this was clearly outside of the scope of an intern, bit by bit, I soaked in each little morsel about web in the enterprise and it fueled me to learn more. Leo Cheng, Jason Martorano, Oliver Cheng, Dave Giffen, John Perera, Kunal Malik, Jeff Cavano, Aileen Cheng, Robert Cartelli were so good to me, thanks guys.

Often, the fastest way Up is Out
Often, the fastest way up, for those who enjoy working in companies, is out. In most cases, incremental raises are often single digit changes (keeping you above the inflation waterline), and the occasional promotion will be low double digits. For those that I’ve met and move to new job positions, outside of their company they can often expect a 20%-40% increase in salary as they join a new company. It’s interesting to see that firms may value outside talent as more important than inside experience talent, in some cases, a fresh skillset or experience may be what’s needed.

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

You are a company of one
The other observation I share with my friend (and now you) is that you are a company of one. Even though your paycheck is being delivered through your employer, you are solely responsible for your direction, what you learn, how you perform, and how much you’re paid. I firmly believe that you are paid what you’re worth, so when I hear people complaining “they are underpaid”, in my mind, I translate that as you’ve “undersold yourself”, get skilled, spend time on weekends or early mornings to learn more, and apply new projects, programs and skills –or leave. Therefore, you are your own CEO, CMO, CFO, COO, CTO, you’re in control of your destiny. As you can tell, I don’t believe in fate, you are driving your ship of one.

Develop your plan, and put it in writing
If you’re with me so far, develop your own plan, both short term and long term plans, and set goals on how to reach them. Often, these goals don’t have titles or companies in them, but they describe the environment, or the end outcomes of which you want to reach. Over time these goals will change, and that’s ok, but at least you’re looking forward. I learned this from my buddy’s dad when I was growing up, he had several businesses, and one of his dreams was to have a Ferrari –he achieved it.

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Wishing you all the best! (really) I want to see you succeed. I get emails about once a month, where someone has said they’ve achieved more, party due to this blog, (but the majority due to their ambition of course) If you’ve other tips, please share in the comments.

Update: Connie Benson reminded me to post up my mantra of “pay yourself first” and “Manage your time as you do money“.

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Social Networks continue to show a strong future of growth.

Two recent Forrester reports published by my colleagues, Josh Bernoff and Oliver Young, both showing the future of social computing for the interactive marketer and for enterprise 2.0 purchasing. A very obvious trend for both of these reports is the growth of budgets by marketers and companies for social networks.

I’m not releasing any new information here, but just highlighting the public data that they both point out:

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Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession

We polled interactive marketers with the following question: “Assuming that the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your Investments in the following marketing channels?” Over 40% of them indicated that they will increase spending on social networks even in face of a recession during the next 6 months.

Josh writes: “Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing.”

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Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

In Oliver Young’s report on Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013, or read the blog post, and the graph has been published on Read Write Web and ZDnet, Enterprise spending of social computing software (internal and external) his report provided some clear forecasts demonstrating that purchasing in social networking software (like this white label list) will increase, and take the largest segment of the budget.

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Your internal discussion
You should forward these stats to the web strategy teams within your company, and start a discussion answering each of the following questions:

Is your organization of what social networks are (believe me, many aren’t)?

Are you aware of why social networks are so important (talk about trust)?

Is your marketplace using social networks? if so, which ones?

What are you competitors or others in your industry going?

What are people doing in social networking sites in our marketplace?

That’s just the exploratory questions you’ll need to answer, there’s a much large discussion you’ll need to have, after the awareness questions are answered.

I’ve published quite a few posts on social networks, view archives.

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I’m starting this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

Teresa Valdez Klein moves on to T-Mobile as a product planner, she’s very entrenched in social media, so we can expect her to add to the social media charge at T-Mobile.

Janice Diner heads up Ripple, the new social media division of Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG. In her previous role Janice headed up the Facebook communities and application development for TD Canada Trust and PlayStation Canada.

Tony Haenn takes a new role as Executive Community Architect at the Corporate Executive Board, which offers similar services to Forrester.

Petr Olmer moves to Good Data as the Community Evangelist.

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Jason Falls is hiring

Hiring? Leave a commentt
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

6 comments

In 2008, Business Adoption Of Web 2.0 Tools Is Expected To Grow Strongly

Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast
On Monday, colleague Oliver Young (I was involved with the report) published a forward looking report on the growth of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise entitled Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. As I mention with every report, you can purchase it directly from the site, or if not satisfied, obtain a refund, as we stand by the quality of our products.

Who should read this report?
Anyone investing in the space such as VCs, leadership at Social Media companies, or those involved in purchasing at corporations for social media tools.

Caveat: Sans services and “organic” sites
It’s important to note that calculations do not include properties such as ‘organic social networks’ like Facebook (which is valued at $15b), nor do they include services (a report I hope to do soon), so the numbers, in our opinion are just a slice of the overall technology sector. For example, in 2008 we project enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technology to account for just 0.2% of the $364bn global corporate spending on software and to barely even register as part of the $1.7 trillion we expect to see spent on technology overall is a useful piece of context. When you think about social media tools for the enterprise, most often, these commodity technologies are cheap, easy to deploy, and often free.

Web 2.0 Expo, a Physical Manifestation
I spent the last two days at the Web 2.0 expo (I was an advisor to the show), where 7000 people from this market assembled into one building. Who are these people? they are the ‘market’;, vendors, clients, analysts, press, media, and users. It was clear to me many mainstream businesses were attending, I’ll take a guess that many early adopters within the enterprise (I was that guy at Hitachi Data Systems) are dragging their boss, and colleagues who were once nay-sayers to the conference to learn. I saw many Fortune 1000 brands there trying to learn and understand how to use these tools for business.

Mainstreaming
To me, last year’s Web 2.0 expo was far different, it was a geek fest, where live streaming was prominent, and there was much more fascination over the tools –rather than the business impact. This year, many of the questions and folks I met were interested in using these tools to improve their business, they weren’t enamored with the latest widget. On the show floor, I spoke to two CEOs who read the report and commented that the numbers looked in par to their expectations.

Technology Infrastructure moves in
SUN (Who’s had the startup essentials program for a few years), HP, NetAPP, EMC were all present on the show room floor. What do they have to do with Web 2.0? In most cases, this is not their core business, but they realize this growing market will need infrastructure and technology to power these websites. I was pushing for this nearly 3 years ago at the data storage level, but I guess I was too early. Another change is the strong presence of an analyst firm, in this case it was Forrester, we were involved with four sessions, hosted a party, and launched a book. I guess this movement really is headed mainstream now.

What others are saying: in agreement and disagreement
Our friends at ZDNet may have misunderstood what we were actually sizing, at first it was assumed it was just “enterprise 2.0″ (internal) purchases, but in reality, this sizing encompasses externally facing (marketing), and is the largest piece of the pie.

The above and following image was posted on many blogs on Monday, where I encourage you to following the conversation and analysis. First, start with Read Write Web (Oilver and I are big fans of this blog), then Andy Beal takes Here’s the Reason Why Small Businesses Won’t Adopt “Enterprise 2.0″, and for a counterpoint, the respected Dennis Howlett The problem with Forrester’s $4.6 billion prediction, I always enjoy Dennis’ contrarion position, it’s needed in the industry. (update: Oliver Young left a comment on his post)

(This post was reviewed by colleague Analyst Oliver Young, who published the report)

Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

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Note: This is a repost of a previous post I had on my older blog, I’m reposting it as it’s still relevant, and I’m migrating some of my older content to this blog.

Left: The “e” from the Exodus logo that formerly used to reside on the HQ building. It’s currently in my garage, and I look at it every time I park my car –because I want to remember

I started my career at Exodus Communications, and was there for three long years. If you know your internet history, Exodus was a flagship turned bloated startup that exploded, then died painfully into highway 101. (I didn’t do it, I swear!). We hosted pretty much everyone, massive data centers with great security, right on the backbone. If you were an internet company, it’s likely you were with Exodus at one time or another. We even bragged “we ARE the internet”.

I still half-jokingly apologize to friends that bought stock just out of guilt for a promise that never was. The Exodus (EXDS) Stock split FIVE times in just a little over 12 months…if I can recall corrently–then it went to pennies and we filed chapter 11 –Twice! 3 CEOs later, 10 rounds of layoffs, I was the final 33% (or was it 12%…I forget) and I left on to greener pastures. I wish someone would create a [Edit: I did create a] wikipedia history of Exodus, it’s worth remembering, and a good lesson.

F*cked Company (one of the original grass roots conversational aggregators) always had clever names for us at Exodus Communications.

“Exit Us” or “Mass Exodus” or “ExoDUHs” or “XX for-eyes-us”

I remember the people
I learned some powerful lessons at Exodus Communications, I saw a complete business cycle in 3 years, had countless reorgs, and figured out how to survive 10 rounds of layoffs. (The secret is “embrace change”, btw). Most importantly, I remember the people. I had a great manager, (John Perera) who became my mentor, even came to my wedding, and we have lunch whenever we can squeeze in the time. Waili was even my groomsmen, Can you believe that? A sales guy in my wedding party. (just kidding…us IT folks figured you hated us and that’s why we got shipped over to the otherside of the freeway)

I know many other Ex-Exodus Alumni read this blog, I think the greatest takeaway was the people that I met, there was a strong caliber of people, risk takers, movers–the enterprenurial spirit ran deep. I’ve noticed that almost everyone I keep in touch with has a day job AND a side business! (rock on!) We still keep in touch, and even had a BBQ a few years ago. I’m even having lunch with a few alumni today at Rivermark.

I remember the Ferrari we had parked outside of the front door at Exodus, which was used to motivate sales closes, eventually it was awarded to the top earner.

Yahoo and EMC now inhabits the Mission College Towers (left) I used to call home, I drive by there frequently on my way to work.

I remember the dot bomb parties. I went to many dot com launch parties in SF, San Jose, and Tahoe. I saw eStamps, Beenz, Pets.com, and a bunch of other silly companies spend thousands on parties for no particular reason –then reality set in, a business model is sorta-kinda needed.

I remember the sock puppets, lime and purple logos, and a fleet of 3-Series BMWs on 101 in seemingly standstill traffic. I remember that having an Exodus badge got special treatment at luxury car dealers on the peninsula. I remember people doing silly things with big ice blocks and vodka, people dancing and bragging about ‘hittin the gold mine’, and C-level execs performing stunts to garner attention.

I’m sure if I watched carefully, I would have seen people jumping into pools to get attention/money/recognition. So although I was a dot bomber (many others fared way worse that me) I walked away with a lesson.

Now, today things are picking up again for web (called web 2.0). The new era of social software is coming around, and coming fast, really fast. But I’m with Loic, who questions if we’re headed back to the crazy bubble 1.0 again.

Let’s do it right this time, please remember.

Leave a comment, what was the dot bomb experience like for you during late 90s- early 2000s?

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Update: Constantin has created a new wiki of Social Media Managers and Strategists at the New PR Wiki.

I stand by my research, personal experience, and industry monitoring that the need for social media managers will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future.

This post is a direct response, refuting and correcting Steve’s post that the Social Media Manager will go extinct.

While I enjoy Steve’s predictions (as well as a peer) that the Social Media Manager will be extinct, I’m here to respectfully correct him and leaning on my research findings from my recent Forrester report: How to Staff for Social Computing. In fact, we’ve found that there are two roles to be found in corporations serious about online communities.

Steve comes from the PR agency perspective and from his view, this makes sense. Yet, I come from where demand actually happens: in corporate enterprise marketing, where I was a social media manager at Hitachi.

Currently, in large corporations, specialized marketing managers, are found often sorted by industries, but also sorted by mediums and channels. For example, there are corporate marketers that focus on Web Marketing (my background) Advertising, Direct Marketing (email, mail) Search Marketing, Event Marketing, and even Print Marketing.

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and the foreseeable, we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

In our recent report, we indicated that there are two distinct roles appearing within corporations, the social media strategist (I gave the example of VP of Social Media, Ed Terpening at Wells Fargo) and the community manager, who is responsible for being an online face to the community (Lionel Menchaca is a great example).

So, until the roles of medium based marketers (like direct marketer, web marketer, event marketer) go extinct or this skillset completely normalizes or the role of communities (another way of saying customers) go by the wayside, we’ll continue to see the growth of these dedicated and specialized roles.

Steve is wise to assert that the blur between social media and traditional media as we know it is correct –from a PR perspective. But when it comes to corporate communities, developing social media programs, these are skills that the majority of traditional marketers have –nor understand.

As an analyst, many of my clients (at Fortune 5000 companies) consult with us for social media guidance, I’m increasingly on more and more concalls where these individuals have a dedicated role in this new medium.

Lastly, to drive my point home, I’ve been publishing a series of blog posts called “On the move” that list out (in groups of 5-6) individuals that have been hired to fulfill this specific job. If you notice, the rate has been increasing, not decreasing over the past weeks. Looking at actual job movements is a more accurate –and telling—way of looking at social media jobs than keywords from a job site.

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I’m starting this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. We should congratulate the following folks:

Tom Diederich joins Cadence as the Social Media/Web Community Manager. He’s working for Carlos Soares, my former colleague at HDS.

Brian Chappell joins Ignite Social Media as Sr. Social Search Strategist, and tells me he is seeking other talented individuals. Brian’s blog is here

Daniel Thornton moves from Journalist to Community Marketing Manager at motorcyclenews

Michael Brito accepted the position at Intel managing social media for the consumer segment, a great company doing lots of the social media front.

Adriana Gascoigne joins Ogilvy helping clients with their social media strategy as Vice President at the 360° Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. (and they are hiring)

Aaron Uhrmacher was appointed to the role of Global Peer Media Lead, where he will provide strategic consultancy to clients and internal teams, at Text 100 Public Relations

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

Also see my Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

Also see my community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Hiring? Leave a commentt
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

9 comments

Combining both third party plus member data, LinkedIn can reveal a persona –and social capital– of our companies

LinkedIn announces it’s ‘company’ pages (your company is likely there) that displays both status updates of content created by members, as well as pulling in third party data about companies in this unique mashup. The center column displays people in your network, new hires, promotions, and the most viewed profiles.

While I see this as a minor new feature release, it could pave the way to some interesting models on how the intranet is now in public. There are plenty of opportunities to compare across companies, to help both current management of companies understand their workforce, new employees making decisions on which company they want to work at, and ‘outbound’ professionals to scope out prospects.

The sample size
First, remember that the data is only of those who are participating on LinkedIn, don’t assume it’s your entire workforce. What’s interesting is that for many employees, this is the first time they’ve ever been able to see the majority of job titles on LinkedIn, tenure, and other data that is typically held tight (or non-existent) by HR.

Retention Rate (at tech companies)
People leaving too soon can quickly add up to major costs. It’s safe to say that those that are active on LinkedIn are highly networked, have high social connections, and are more likely to be mobile

Regarding tenure, or really, ‘retention rate’ of the employees I found the following interesting

Hitachi, 3.5 years
Oracle 3 years
IBM 3 years
Microsoft 2.5 years
Yahoo 2 years
Apple 2 years
Google, 1.5 years
Facebook, 1 year

Update: Louis Gray has taken this to another level, I planned on doing this, but didn’t have the time, great job.

Roles and Education
It was interesting (yet not surprising) to confirm that a majority of Facebook’s employees on LinkedIn were engineers: 26% and 10% are from Stanford, and 6% from Berkeley, with a medium age of a mere 27.

At Google, which prides itself in it’s marketing prowess also has 23% SW engineers, with a medium ripe age of 29

Expand on this Platform: My Wishlist
Some interesting features I’d like to see from this company directory could include:

Creating job satisfaction ratings for previous and current jobs (help determine who likes to work where)

How connected is the average company? A more connected company is likely to have more relationships, clients, and partners

Creating a company directory, at least at the executive level (consumer created org charts)

Show which one of the employees is the most connected (interesting for sales and recruiters)

Average years of working experience per employee per company (determine maturity or youth of company)

What’s the average connections per employee per company (help determine social capital)

Industry comparisons between highest educated, longest tenure, etc.

Create a heat map that shows where employees are located

Which companies hired the most per college rate (example: Stanford students has strong affinity to Facebook, etc)

There’s an opportunity here for this platform to expand and offer more data about a companies persona, and how it relates to the rest of the market. I look forward to future iterations and improvements.

Update: thanks Brian Keith for the typo alert

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This series of posts tagged On The Move (see archives) is to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions in the social media industry.

Congrats to those on the Move in the Social Media Industry:

Kris Smith is now at BlogTalkRaio as the VP of Product Development, you can read his announcement post

Eric Weaver is now the VP/Managing Director for Edelman Digital, heading up the digital and social marketing work in Seattle and Portland offices, and recently left Brand Dialogue, his own marketing consultancy. He announces from his blog

Joel Burslem, Social Media Manager at Inman News and founder of the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog was promoted to Director of Marketing, congrats

Peter Fasano joins the Reprise Media team leading the growing SF office as Group Account Director and contributing to the Social Media Marketing team. He also says that he is hiring account folks at all levels.

Sheryl Sandberg leaves Google to be COO of Facebook. I don’t think she has a blog, nor is on twitter, but she does have a Facebook profile (that lists she’s still at Google)

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

Also see my Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

See my community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

3 comments

I’ve been tracking with great interest the “White Label” (meaning you can rebrand as your own) Social Networking space with great interest for some time. When I first started the master list, it was at about 20 companies. Now it pushes 70 companies, and even spills over to collaboration and insight lists too.

I’m expected to know this market (it’s in my coverage area as an Analyst) and quite frankly, it’s very, very hard to keep track. I can only imagine how interactive marketers and web strategists feel. In fact, every other day I get an email or comment to message asking me for my opinion.

Today, Mzinga Acquires Prospero, who are both in the space. I actually had Mzinga in my insight community list, and Prospero on my white label list, so if all goes well for them, they have the opportunity to match features up. They aren’t the only ones, last month ONEsite Acquires Social Platform, and you can expect more of this to happen.

I’ve been chatting with Mark Hendrickson of Techcrunch, who’s also on point to watch this vertical, and I shared with him my thoughts on where this industry is headed. Read the interview at More Consolidation in the White Label Social Networking Space: Mzinga Acquires Prospero.

We should expect other players on this space to start consolidating, to strengthen their offerings, increase customer base, reduce overlapping costs, and to prepare to battle as others start to team up.

By the way, in Q2-Q3, I’m slated to do specific research on this market, to segment the market so interactive marketers will be able to make a decision on who to choose. Stay tuned.

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What idiocy am I talking about? The idiocy of the first web craze from 1998-2001.

I started off my career working at Exodus Communications, a premiere web host for the top web brands, at the headquarters in Santa Clara, in the heart of the valley during the height of the boom.

I’m moderating a panel at Graphing Social Patterns, which is focused on the current hot market, social networking, which I cover as an analyst, and comment on frequently. To me, it’s important to remember where we’ve been, as it’s an indicator of where we’ll go, and I’m not just going to only look at the benefits, but will also highlight the challenges that this industry has.

Let’s start by first looking at the idiocy of the first wave to give some context of where we are going now, I’m going to mention what I observed in the past, and want you to help me answer (via comments or your blog) if this is where we’re now.

Commemorating the Idiocy of the Dot Com Era: Did we Repeat or Reform?

1) In the dot com rush, I remember marketing plans starting (and sometimes ending) with lavish parties in San Francisco at some of the most premier locations. It included actors, food from 5 star restaurants, giant ice sculptures where premium vodka was shuttled down to clamoring guests at the “ice luge”. The who’s who were spotted at these parties, Did we Repeat or Reform?

2) In the eInsanity, I recall ridiculous companies being founded such as eStamps (buy stamps electronically so you could then send snail mail more efficiently), Beenz (internet currency), pets.com (online store for all things pets). I was at all of those parties by the way. Did we Repeat or Reform?

3) I remember that carrying my exodus badge (It had the company logo, my picture and provided access to the building) was like a god given right to drive a BMW home at a dealership over night, as many of those that had cashed out bought quite a few Bimmers at the local dealership in San Mateo. Did we Repeat or Reform?

4) A few years ago, one of the determinants for joining a startup wasn’t how fulfilling the job was, but how many shares you got, how great the cafeteria was, and if you could bring your dog, or get massages at work. Did we Repeat or Reform?

5) In the boom time, we declared real world shopping stories dead, the move to click was needed or companies should buy wooden boards to cover up their stores. Did we Repeat or Reform?

6) Recently, in Silicon Valley (and beyond), a business model was defined as an IPO (yet we know that’s an exist strategy, not a sustainable plan). I distinctly remember being on a plane ride, and remember a group of execs at a startup (I have no idea which one) ordering champagne and bragging that they could drink as much as they could as one was going IPO. Did we Repeat or Reform?

7) During the electronic gold rush, immigrants from around the world flooded silicon valley in hopes of catching the IPO wave. The economy (and layoffs) was informally measured by the amount of cars on 101 every morning. Did we Repeat or Reform?

8] Leave your own in the comments, and feel free to answer the above, I want to know what you think.

I could go on and on, and if you’re interested, some time ago, I wrote this post on how I remember Exodus. If these stories are conjuring up dreams or nightmares, be sure to leave a comment, and answer those questions above.

Did we Repeat or Reform?

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David Deal of Avenue A | Razorfish sent me a copy of the Digital Outlook report (you can register for it here), (update: it’s available without registration here) it contains many of their findings from the past year, future predictions, and even has some excerpts from Forrester Reports. The scope is on interactive marketing, so it includes elements of social media, search, mobile, verticals, media, etc. I found the digital PDF version difficult to read, so they sent me a print version.

No way is this an endorsement for their interactive firm (If you want to learn more about the connected agency go read colleague Peter Kim) but I find it interesting that they published their billings (revenues) and broke it down by category.

From 2006-2007 “Community” shot up 34 million to 55 million an increase of 61%. If you look at that trajectory it was the fastest growing billing for their firm in the last 4 years.

At one time in my career I considered working at a PR or Interactive agency, and I told them that I thought they should be increasing their billings on social media at 20% for nearly every account.

Take a look at the list of companies that came last night, there were quite a few that had dedicated roles focused on community and social media.

Although we defined Online Community as: An online community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest, many executives have a hard time understanding the fluffy term community (”conversations” is far worse btw). so here’s how I translate it: Companies care about their marketplace. Also, customers are important. Since a group of customers is a community, a community is actually another word for marketplace. If you care about customers or your marketplace, you’d ought to care about community.

Now only if my bank account looked like that chart.

8 comments

This series of posts tagged On The Move (see archives) is to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions in the social media industry.

Congrats to those on the Move in the Social Media Industry:

Peter Fasano joins the Reprise Media team leading the growing SF office as Group Account Director and contributing to the Social Media Marketing team. He also says that he is hiring account folks at all levels.

Elsie has moved from full time yoga instructor in Los Angeles to full time podcaster relations in Pittsburgh over at Wizzard Media, congrats!

Bradley Bradley Horowitz Leaves Yahoo as VP of Advanced Development Division to head to Google.

Todd Hoskins joins Networked Insights, a social media measurement brand monitoring company has hired him on to head up sales.

Nick Gonzales, one of the famed bloggers at Techcurnch joins widget/applications company Social Media, great move, congrats.

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

Also see my Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

Also see my community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

Hiring? Leave a commentt
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

20 comments

(Left: I met and interviewed MySpace’s team Will and Jim)

I just got back from the brand spanking new SF MySpace office, an event tonight that was catered to the new developer platform which they announced today. This post isn’t aimed at developers, but at the Web Strategist (web decision maker) here’s what you need to know:

MySpace opens third party developer platform
MySpace announced a developer platform so third party developers can create applications on top of their existing commmunity. This is released on time, and is a competitive move to Facebook’s application platform. I’ve published stats and demographics about MySpace (and Facebook here). Over the next 30 days, developers will get to play in the ‘Sandbox’ (the theme for tonight’s party).

Here’s what to expect:
After watching this space, talking to MySpace techical staff, and talking to many developers at the event, here’s my predictions and insights.

1) MySpace builds strategic relationship with widget developer community
MySpace’s new SF office is a great foothold into Silicon Valley, in particular, to the widget developer community. Most of the widget network developers are located in this area, and by buidling relationships with them, there’s an opportunity they’ll launch their widgets on their container, fueling the next generation of MySpace. The schwag (pics below) really catered to the developer: a backpack full of shirts, flip video player, and a few toys for the beach. (for the sandbox)

2) Unlike Facebook, Developer and MySpace will partner and monetize
Unlike Facebook, it’s expected that developers will have direct access to monetize utilizing MySpace’s advertising tools. Although it wasn’t formally announced, expect hyper targeting, and other monetization opportunities to be available to developers.

3) MySpace respects Privacy
MySpace, a later adopter to this movement, let Facebook make it’s mistakes (newspage and Beacon) and will not suffer from the same issues. Expect Myspace to play it safe, and play it right, leaning on the mistakes from Facebook.

4) While not fully developed, expect platform to slowly evolve
It was very clear (I talked to many developers in the room) and they were all waiting to see what the platform was like, as very little was released, miany documentation. I asked during the Q&A session when all the APIs will be available, and they said “tonight…(looking over at colleagues) right?” Laughter from crowd erupted. There will be three APIs released each with different abilities. Also, applications can display in 5 different locations within MySpace, including a private area for the user to see the application without anyone else seeing it.

5) Widgets on MySpace react different than other Social Networks
Even if widgets can be easily ported over from Facebook to Myspace don’t expect them to work the same. Demographics (who they are), Psyhographics (their emotional drivers), and Technographics (how they use technology) will all be different. Expect very few of the successful applications in Facebook to perform the same way in MySpace.

6) MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo coexist
I can’t tell you how many times I’m asked “is Facebook a Myspace killer?” the answer is no, they are different tools from different audiences. They will coexist.

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What it means:

Predictions
Expect a lot of trial and error development to occur, this is really and experimentation stage for the next 3 months. The platform will ilkely have a lot of tweaking and expect a lot of experimentation from the developer community. In the long run, MySpace will be able to successfully monetize, developers will profit, and brands will start to get involved. Hopefully, the user experience will respect the wishes of the users, and it will be a win for all.

Recommendations to the Web Strategist
Unless you’re already a successful widget developer you should not engage, instead you should Wait and Watch, and see what applications work, and what won’t. Then, consider contacting those developer networks to rebrand successful applications, or go a step further and create interactive of social campaigns partnering with them, and lastly, developing your own widget.

Update: Thanks Steve Ames for the assistance, he spotted a few errors in text, more from Justin Smith.

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This series of posts tagged On The Move (see archives) is to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions in the social media industry.

Congrats to those on the Move in the Social Media Industry:

Andrew Cafourek got a job, from reading this web strategy blog. (of course he did all the hard work, I just was happy to connect folks)

Shel Israel is launching his video show Global Neighborhoods at Fast Company TV, I look forward to being on his show soon.

Brian Wallace has now joined Google Tutor (I believe it’s independent of Google) to cover the social tools of Google.

Bob LeDrew has joined Thornley Fallis in Ottawa as of Monday , January 14. Congrats to Bob and Joseph Thornley

Alex Landefeld has moved to a customer support position with web development and e-marketing company Elliance, Inc. in Pittsburgh, PA. He also vlogs at logos.blip.tv

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

Also see my Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

Also see my community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

Hiring? Leave a commentt
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

6 comments

I like Lena, she writes an insightful post suggesting that the same ol’ speakers at conferences is getting boring, I agree. She makes a call that we need diversity in our speakers and asks where all the social media female speakers are at.

I left four comments on her blog of different speakers that are female and focus on the social media industry, please swing by and leave some other examples, hopefully conference organizers will see this, and attract new talent. I listed out:

Tara Hunt (social media/anti-marketing marketing)

Connie Benson (community)

KD Paine (Social Media Measurement)

Jennifer Jones (Marketing Voices Podcast)

Any of the blogher founders

Deb Schultz -Social Media Marketing

Heather Champ –Flickr

Teresa Valdez Klein, she’s really fantastic.

Charlene Li, my colleague at Forrester

Know of other female speakers who rock at social media? Leave a comment here or over at Lena’s blog

Some conferences are pretty balanced, for example today, I’ll be at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference at the presidio in SF, it’s being put on by the Get Satisfaction team (a website that is a disruption to your corporate website) I’ll be running a workshop on online community best practices (and area of coverage as an analyst) and will be leading the attendees to share their best practices. I’ll be capturing the top attendee responses and will share via this blog. Many of the speakers are female, it appears to be a mixed crowd.

A few years ago I bitched about the lack of asian speakers, and ended up creating this list. I guess if I’m over-exposed now, then things have certainly shifted.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if our speakers are pink or purple, transgender or androgynous, what matters is 1) they’re experts at their field 2) great presenters 3) the audience walks away with more than they did before the session.

Update: Lena has suggested that making lists isn’t enough. I’ve send this post to an upcoming conference organizer whose having a hard time getting speakers, I hope it makes a difference. Susan Getgood says to vote with your feet, a practical approach that hits conference organizers in the wallet.

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When we saw the story about Microsoft wanting to acquire Yahoo, my colleagues got together to discuss why this would be an attractive fit for the two companies –much of it stems back to taking what Google has.

Microsoft has often wanted to be in the search business, they know the value of building relationships within they small and medium sized business. While search may look like the biggest cherry to pluck, Charlene gives reasons why it’s more than that. Hint, think about what google docs means to Vista and office apps.

But what about the recent Microsoft investment in Facebook, we clearly know that traditional internet advertising is a strength of the Redmond company, if MS+Yahoo will still be second place to Google, then we can expect brand advertising to be a safe bet.

I encourage you to check out those two posts, they’ve both been covering this space for a long time, and chime in and give your opinion on their reasoning. I thought Dave Taylor also did a great job of giving his analysis.

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Congrats to college graduate Andrew Cafourek for getting a job with Outrider. How’d he do it? by creating a professional looking site, being an excellent blogger, posting his resume, and learning how to use the tools to network with others –he demonstrated his web marketing prowess by doing it.

I’m always thrilled to see when the community connects, especially if it happens on my blog, and this is no exception. Andrew read my people on the move series, and connected with the folks at Outrider and received a job offer (read his post). He’s now packing his gear, moving to St Louis to start his new career, and life, straight out of college.

Jobs aren’t the only thing you should be thinking about, vendors should realize that where conversations are about their industry is there marketplace. In many cases I know the savvy buyers and savvy sellers are checking each other out in my comments, this is all encouraged as long as everyone is adding value to the conversation and not just taking.

Congrats to Andrew and the Outrider team for connecting!

12 comments

Recently, I met a developer who was frustrated. This web developer had been programming and developing websites for nearly 10 years, but admitted he was having a very hard time keeping up with the younger faster developers that knew the new languages.

It’s not really about age, but about the ability to constantly learn new languages and skills in order to stay competitive in the environment. The last thing he wanted to do as a web developer is get stuck doing production work, or maintaining a system someone else had already built for him.

I suggested that he should probably look at expanding his business skills, to grow beyond being a ‘code monkey’ which would lead him beyond tech lead, into program management and eventually strategy.

What specific steps did I tell him to take?

Start reading books on web management and process management

Understand how the software fits into the greater scheme of the business, department, or company

Expand and learn more about user experience research

Grow a network by adopting social media to learn, discuss, and market oneself

Lead projects: develop needs, do research, develop plans, create feature function reports, and feasibility reports, learn cost/benefit analysis

Lead programs: manage a business program (where software is the core) and manage it like a profit and loss, become an integrated part of the business.

Practice presentation to business managers and stakeholders

Engage business teams in meetings, training, and lunch

Ultimately, he should be able to move into a more business role, where business and customer needs are always present (and hopefully, with greater compensation and opportunities). Since strategy is always needed, and armed with a strong technology background, he should be able to move into a position that requires less time to re-invent a new language every other year.

Do you have suggestions for him? What should he do to avoid the developer recycle shuffle and move up the food chain?

12 comments

[Viral Marketing doesn’t work, tell everyone you know]

Left: Dave McClure is being Ironic. According to Flickr, this is my MOST popular photograph, even more popular than my photo that got on digg and received 200,000 views.

Problems
Currently, there are over 13,000 widgets on Facebook, and we should expect that number to increase exponentially as companies like MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, and all other networks become containers for widgets to grow on top of them.

Goals
Help users, marketers, developers, and the industry better understand the widget industry. Help define where widgets are heading, what are trends, and what to plan for next.

What we’re going to do
Sadly, there’s no way to accurately describe widgets, measure them consistently, or categorize them. As a result, tonight, I’ll be hosting Dave McClure (who helps teach the Stanford Facebook class, and runs the Graphing Social Patterns conference), Justin Smith (of Inside Facebook), Rodney Rumford (of FaceReviews), and colleague Charlene Li over to Forrester in Foster City (picture of building) to have a discussion about the widget industry. We’re going to do a landscape segmentation of this growing industry, map it out, so we can better understand the market, and thereby help support/analyze it.

Success for this widget industry mapping exercise looks like:

Be completely self-containable with no overlap with each other

Succinct and descriptive

Every widget will cleanly fall into one of those (or more than)

The labels will stand the test of time

Be vendor agnostic, and think of the bigger industry

I’ve been very transparent in my research process (while still maintaining value for my clients), I’ve recorded a few videos of folks I’ve interviewed for upcoming reports, and plan to live stream this discussion (providing it works, technically), and Rodney is going to film it and publish it. Watch my tweets around 4pm PST today for details.

In the future, I’ll be hosting other events for this social networking and social media industry, but my only requirement is that actual work get done and actual deliverables are created for my clients and the marketplace. It’s easy to be all talk, but let’s focus on deliverables.

6 comments