Doug Neeper's Blog

DFN: Not sure I agree, but, I’m biased, I like email. I’m thinking this is overoptimism about a new horizon, time will tell who’s right.

Why Email No Longer Rules…

And what that means for the way we communicate

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave create a constant stream of interaction among users—for better or worse.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Journal Community

“I’ll stick with e-mail — write when I want, as often (or not ) as I want, to whom I want privately. No interest in letting the world know that I overcooked the spaghetti.”

—–Don Brazier

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Digits

How Many Emails Did You Send Yesterday?

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

"The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks," says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let’s start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.

Into the River

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

The Journal Report

Read the full Technology report .

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to "follow" you to see. You can create links to particular users in messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private "direct messages" through the system by typing d and the user name.

Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that show up in their friends’ "streams." They can also post links to content and comment on it. No in-box required.

Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with "a river that continues to flow as you dip into it."

But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Too Much Information

Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It’s a constant stream.

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening’s plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we’d drown in the deluge.

Enter filtering. In email land, consumers can often get by with a few folders, if that. But in the land of the stream, some sort of more sophisticated filtering is a must.

On Facebook, you can choose to see updates only from certain people you add to certain lists. Twitter users have adopted the trend of "tagging" their tweets by topic. So people tweeting about a company may follow their tweet with the # symbol and the company name. A number of software programs filter Tweets by these tags, making it easier to follow a topic.

The combination of more public messages and tagging has cool search and discovery implications. In the old days, people shared photos over email. Now, they post them to Flickr and tag them with their location. That means users can, with little effort, search for an area, down to a street corner, and see photos of the place.

Tagging also is creating the potential for new social movements. Instead of trying to organize people over email, protesters can tweet their messages, tag them with the topic and have them discovered by others interested in the cause. Iranians used that technique to galvanize public opinion during their election protests earlier this year. It was a powerful example of what can happen when messages get unleashed.

Who Are You?

Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name followed by a "dot-com." That’s it. In the new messaging world, you have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly some you don’t.

Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you’ve ever exchanged a single word.

Take, for example, Facebook. Message someone over the site and, depending on your privacy settings, he may be a click away from your photos and your entire profile, including news articles you have shared and pictures of that party you were at last night. The extra details can help you cut to the chase. If you see that I am in London, you don’t need to ask me where I am. They can also make communication feel more personal, restoring some of the intimacy that social-network sites—and email, for that matter—have stripped away. If I have posted to the world that I am in a bad mood, you might try to cheer me up, or at least think twice about bothering me.

Email is trying to compete by helping users roll in more signals about themselves. Yahoo and Google Inc. have launched new profile services that connect to mail accounts. That means just by clicking on a contact, one can see whatever information she has chosen to share through her profile, from her hobbies to her high school.

But a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

Having your identity pegged to communication creates more data to manage and some blurry lines. What’s fine for one sort of recipient to know about you may not be acceptable for another. While our growing digital footprints have made it easier for anyone to find personal information about anyone online if they go search for it, new communications tools are marrying that trail of information with the message, making it easier than ever for the recipient to uncover more details.

A Question of Time

Meanwhile, one more big question remains: Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users’ in-boxes.

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

Perhaps. But there’s another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

—Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro

–
Doug

Filed under: Networking | Tagged: Job Search | Leave a Comment »

DFN: I went to a class today, and a person gave me there business card and then walked off, odd way to network? Today’s event made the following article even more meaningful.

Seven Habits of Highly Horrible Networkers

Networking is a tool vital to the success of any business. But many people’s complete misunderstanding of the term impedes them from building valuable relationships. Here’s how they go wrong and how to put it right. By Scott Ginsberg. C 2005 All Rights Reserved.

Networking is a term that didn’t exist (academically) until almost 40 years ago. It’s a word uttered in and around the business world every day, yet is unclear to most as to how it actually works. Still, it’s a fundamental tool to the success of any business.

By definition, the term networking is the development and maintenance of mutually valuable relationships.

It’s not schmoozing; it’s not just handing out business cards, selling, marketing or small talk. Those activities are part of networking, but unfortunately, many people’s misunderstanding of the term causes them network ineffectively.

The following are The Seven Habits of Highly Horrible Networkers and they can stand in the in your way of developing mutually valuable relationships. So, next time you attend your Chamber or Association meeting, keep these ideas in mind so you can offer the most value to your fellow networkers.

Habit #1: Attitude

Much like the development of any skill, networking begins with attitude. Unfortunately, Highly Horrible Networkers have the wrong attitude. If you’ve ever attended a networking function before, perhaps you’ve encountered businesspeople who act in the following

ways: The hard sell – they believe networking is about one thing and one thing only: selling products and services to everyone in the room. Business only – they’re not there to make friends. They’re not there to have fun. And they’re certainly not interested in developing mutually valuable relationships. It’s all about me – they don’t take the time to help and

share with others, but rather focus on their own needs. In other words, they can’t spell
"N-E-T-W-O-R-K-I-N-G" without "I." Attitude is fundamental to effective networking. In fact, it’s the most important habit to understand.

Habit #2: Dig Your Well WHEN you’re thirsty

One of my favorite networking books is called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, by Harvey McKay. It’s probably the most well known text on this subject.

The key to McKay’s work is making your friends, establishing contacts and developing relationships – before you need them. Getting what you want by helping others get what they want first. Enter the Highly Horrible Networkers, who only network because:

a) They need new customers.
b) They have a new product or service to sell.
c) Their boss forced them to do so.

Take my friend Lawrence, for example. He’s quite successful in the insurance business; however he recently approached me about using networking to obtain some hot leads.

"My numbers are down. My boss is on my back. I gotta get out there and start networking or else! What do you suggest?"

"Networking takes time," I explained, "and you can’t expect to come into loads of business or dozens of potential clients without developing the relationships first."

As you already learned, networking is the development and maintenance of mutually valuable relationships.over time. If you try to dig your well WHEN you’re thirsty, you may never find a drink.

Habit #3: Dealin’ the deck

Habit #3 is a dangerous one, and it happens all the time. Have you ever seen people distribute 173 of their business cards during the first 5 minutes of the event?

They move as quickly as possible from one person to the next. They don’t make eye contact, they don’t ask to exchange cards – they just deal them out.

"Here’s my card, call me if you need a designer! See ya later."

"But. I .never even got your name!" you muse.

This is guaranteed to make people feel puny and insignificant. Notice these Highly Horrible Networkers don’t spend time actually meeting and establishing rapport with new people; but rather concentrate on giving out as many cards as possible. It’s quantity over quality, right? Wrong.

Dealin’ the Deck is one of the most common networking pet peeves. Whenever I give my program The Habits of Highly Horrible NetworkersT, I walk out into the audience for a quick demonstration of this habit. I grab a stack of business cards and quickly jump from table to table tossing out dozens of them without as much looking at the audience members

I’m handing them to. Unfortunately during one speech, it backfired. Literally.

Last year, I was demonstrating Highly Horrible Habit #3 when speaking at a local business meeting. While hopping from table to table as dozens of cards flew through the air and into people’s laps and salads, someone yelled out, "Oh my God!"

I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked back at the head table and noticed that one of my cards landed in the centerpiece, which was a candle!

MY BUSINESS CARD WAS ON FIRE!!

I threw down the microphone, lunged at the table and snatched the burning business card from the candle! As I toppled over the chair in front of me I yelled something to the effect of "Oh my God!" shook the flames off my half burnt card and regained my balance to a roaring

applause/laughter from the audience.

"And.uh.this just goes to show you ladies and gentleman," I fumbled,
"When you deal the deck of business cards without eye contact or consideration.uh.people may as well set them on fire – because they’re not going to read them anyway!"

Whew! Nice save, huh? Yeah well, that client did NOT invite me back the following year.

Habit #4: Unprofessional information

It’s remarkable how often some business cards will contain unprofessional information. Have you ever received someone’s card with one of those ambiguous, offensive and questionable email addresses with AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo?

Not only are those email servers frustrating and ineffective for business communication, but just imagine how it looks when someone has to send business emails to:

<mailto: HotLips98 > HotLips98

<mailto: KaylasMommyRules > KaylasMommyRules

<mailto: Isellcars2U > Isellcars2U

I have nothing against AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo. But if possible, always send and receive emails using the address of your organization’s website, i.e., <mailto: scott >
scott . If you must use free servers like MSN, SBC and the like, choose a simple username that doesn’t question your professionalism, i.e., <mailto: jackgateman >
jackgateman .

Habit #5: Sit with the wrong company

I’ll never forget my first Chamber meeting. One afternoon I sat down with six other local businesspeople for our monthly networking lunch. Naturally, the first thing I did was look at everyone’s nametags. (Not only to learn their names but to examine the effectiveness of their nametags’ design and placement.)

But these were the nametags I saw: ADM Financial, ADM Financial, ADM Financial, ADM Financial, ADM Financial, ADM Financial, Scott. (Company name changed to protect the victims.)

Highly Horrible networkers not only attend meetings with their friends and/or coworkers, but they talk and sit with them the entire time! These are people with whom they’ve worked 5 days a week, 8 hours a day for the past 3 years! This is not a good technique to maximize your company’s visibility.

This habit creates an elitist, unfriendly attitude. And think how uncomfortable this makes the one or two people sitting at the table who don’t work for that company! It’s unfair to them because they’re unable to meet a diverse group of people with whom to develop mutually

valuable relationships!

Remember: If you’re sitting with YOUR company – you’re sitting with the WRONG company.

Habit #6: Small talk is for suckers

Highly Horrible Networkers forget about the small talk. It’s a waste of their time. They don’t ask or answer about "New and exciting things happening at work" or "How Thanksgiving was," they simply jump right into (what they believe to be) the most important part of the

discussion: selling 17 of their products before the salad arrives.

Has this ever happened to you? For example, has someone ever introduced themselves, breezed right through the conversation and flat out asked you for a referral? Refer you? I don’t even know you!

Reciprocating self-disclosure is the most effective way to build rapport and ultimately develop trust. The people you want to do business with are those with whom you have built that rapport and trust. So, small talk is not for suckers.

Debra Fine, author of The Fine Art of Small Talk put it best when she said: "Small talk is the biggest talk we do."

Habit #7: Limitations

Finally, Highly Horrible Networkers believe there is only one specific time and place for networking. It’s called "A Room with A Sign Posted Outside That Says So." In other words, they only network when someone forces them to. They don’t believe networking opportunities in places like elevators, busses, supermarkets or parks. That’s it? A measly half hour for networking? Doesn’t give you much time, does it?

The truth about networking is that it can happen anytime, anywhere. There is a time and a place for networking – it’s called ANY time, and ANY place.

Scott Ginsberg is a professional speaker, "the world’s foremost field
expert on nametags" and the author of HELLO my name is Scott and The
Power of Approachability. He works with people and organizations who

want to become UNFORGETTABLE communicators – one conversation at a
time. For more information contact Front Porch Productions through its
website: < http://www.hellomynameisscott.com. >
http://www.hellomynameisscott.com.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Filed under: Networking | Tagged: Job Search | Leave a Comment »

DFN: I belong to a number of SF Bay Area Networking Groups, SF Bay Area FENG, CPC Job Connections and SING. I sometimes question whether I’m spreading myself too thin, but, then a good article, a good lead come through, and I persevere. Louise is right, we almost always hear that we need to quantify our accomplishments, sometimes, there just not quantifiable, doesn’t mean we should leave them off our resumes.

So Much Bad Resume Advice, So Little Time
Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:18 AM PDT
By Louise Fletcher
http://blueskyresumes.com/blog/2009/10/bad-resume-advice-time/

Every now and then, one of my clients sends their resume in to another service for a critique. When they send it to some places, they get an honest response – usually saying ‘this is great and you don’t need any more help.’ But when they send it to one of the big resume mills (you know, Career Builder, The Ladders, Monster etc), they invariably get back a long critique telling them the resume needs a complete rewrite and offering to do it for ‘only $695′ or whatever their fee is.

My clients and I usually discuss this feedback, address the one or two nuggets that are relevant and brush off the rest. But today I got one back that really annoyed me. Not because it was critical of me (I sometimes have to face the fact that I’m not actually perfect!) but because it was just plain wrong.

Success is not always Quantifiable
My client worked for a web development agency and had gained some very valuable knowledge about a number of web analytics programs. He became so competent that everyone in the company came to him for help when analyzing one of their web sites. But because of the nature of his work and the way his company ran, he couldn’t quantify exactly how this knowledge had helped anyone – he just didn’t have access to the numbers.

But given his target positions, this skill was likely to make him very valuable so I included it in a list called ‘areas of expertise.’ But I wanted to go further. I wanted to show that he didn’t just know about analytics – he knew enough to be the one person everyone relied on. So I added a bullet point to his resume saying exactly that. I’m paraphrasing now because I don’t want to publish his exact resume text here, but my bullet read along the lines of:

‘Became the ‘go-to guy’ among 25+ employees for all things related to web analytics, providing guidance on set-up, analysis and reporting to developers and designers on over 30 sites to date.’

Now it’s a basic tenet of resume writing that your bullet points should always contain quantifiable accomplishments (you should say you increased sales by 13% or you boosted customer satisfaction by 25%), so when the resume mill got hold of my client’s resume, they told him this bullet point had to go – that he was under-selling himself by not quantifying his accomplishment.

Nonsense.
If we had numbers, then including them would have been better. We could have said that by using his knowledge of Google Analytics, he revamped some landing pages for a client and thereby increased their conversion by 60%. That would have been great! But he didn’t do that – or at least, if he did, we don’t know about it.

So we worked with what we had – the fact that his co-workers seek him out for help indicates a level of expertise that will be valuable to come potential employers, and we shouldn’t have left that off the resume just because we couldn’t quantify the impact.

How does this impact you?

Which brings me to your resume and the reason for writing this post. You’ve read lots of stuff (some of it even written by me!) that tells you to quantify, quantify, quantify. Results are everything we say. Make sure employers know how you have made an impact. But what we sometimes forget to say is that not all successes are quantifiable and that in those cases, you need to look for other ways to prove your worth. And one of those ways is to demonstrate that other people value your knowledge.

I think the key is to remember that when you write your resume, you’re telling a story. And that in storytelling, there are lots of ways to make your point. If the most obvious one isn’t available to you, that doesn’t mean you have to give up – it just means you have to be a little more creative in getting your point across.

Filed under: Networking | Tagged: Job Search | Leave a Comment »

DFN: Good tips regarding how not to look for work.

Top 10 Job-Seeker Mistakes
Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:14PM
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/10/19/top-10-job-seeker-mistakes/
CareerBuilder.com

So many people wonder why they have trouble getting a job. They go on interview after interview, thinking they did well, but then don’t get a call back. This can lead to frustration, anger and depression. Most people do not know why certain people are hired, and why others aren’t.

Following are 10 mistakes that many people make when searching for their dream job. Hopefully, after reading this article, I can help you avoid these blunders.

1. Mailing Unsolicited Resumes

Unsolicited resumes are garbage, scrap paper, wasted effort and job-search (junk), according to Jack Chapman, author of ‘Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1,000 a Minute.’ Frank Traditi, career strategist and author of ‘Get Hired NOW!?’ feels the same way. He says that people “treat their job search like a direct mail advertising campaign. They expect great response from blindly sending out hundreds of resumes. They wait by the phone and it never rings. They sit at their computer and never get a response.”

2. Looking for ‘Vacancies’

Many jobs are not advertised. Harvard’s Mark Granovetter found that 43.4 percent of jobs are created for the applicant, often at the time of the interview. Traditi agrees. “It’s no wonder that job seekers spend many months on their job search, or become so frustrated that they give up looking for work. They are looking in all the wrong places,” he says.

3. Inept Networking

When people are beginning their careers, asking their friend to get them a job probably works. Once people enter the senior job market this strategy doesn’t work anymore. Person-to-person networking is a highly effective way to land a job.

4. Trying to Go After Too Many Types of Jobs

My friend Jack Chapman put it best when he said, “Don’t confuse a job market with a singles bar.” You will not find a job by applying to everything and hoping one lands in your lap. You must pick certain targets and go after them.

5. Losing Your Motivation

It is hard to face rejection on a daily basis, which is what usually happens when people are looking for a job. However, you cannot let this rejection get you down or you will never find a job. If you want your job search to be successful, you must look at life with the glass half-full, not half-empty. The most successful people have a positive attitude, no matter what life throws at them.

6. Thinking a Recruiter Is ‘Working for You’

Recruiters don’t work for you. They are paid by the hiring company. Many people think that just because they send their résumés to a recruiter, somehow a job will mysteriously appear. The opposite is actually closer to the truth. Unless recruiters have a job opening that match your skills, you go into the computer or dead-letter file, along with thousands of others.

7. Not Preparing for Interviews

Prospective job seekers always tell me that as long as I get them in front of the decision-maker they will take it from there. Most people think the purpose of an interview is to “interview.” Wrong. The purpose is to eliminate your competition. If you don’t know how to do this, then you will not be successful in securing the position or money that you want. You can never be over-practiced or over-prepared for an interview.

8. Talking About Money Too Soon

Employers are quick to ask how much money you want. If your answer is too high, you are too expensive. If your answer is too low, you are not worth it. The key is to focus on value, not money. You should put off talking about money until after you have discussed your skills and their expectations.

9. Not Planning and Scheduling Your Time Properly

Most people spend more time planning vacations than they do their job searches. Like most things in life, if you do not plan properly, nothing will work out the way you want. Imagine if you did not have a plan or schedule for your personal time. You would never know who you were supposed to have lunch with, or what time your son’s basketball game was on Saturday. Everyone needs to determine a schedule and have a plan if they want to find a job.

10. Not Asking for Help

There are many myths about conducting a job search alone. Society expects you to know how to find and land good jobs on your own, but no one ever shows you how. There are companies out there that have qualified people to help you with your job search — you just need to do your research.

If you avoid these you just might be on the right path to landing your dream job. Good Luck!-

Doug

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