How to Get Millions of Customers … on a Shoestring

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For the first three years of my company, HootSuite, we spent literally no money on marketing, PR or advertising. As a bootstrapping startup, we simply couldn’t afford it. A lot of you have asked me how we did this.

 So recently, I wrote about one of the ways my company got five million customers with zero ad budget: by building a business on the freemium model

. In this post, I’ll share the second secret behind HootSuite’s early and explosive growth on a very tight budget: a successful global brand ambassador program. What is this? A brand ambassador program involves building up a global ‘army’ of people who are genuinely interested in your company and therefore willing to spread the word for you. It’s an incredibly effective way to increase global brand awareness on a shoestring.

 Here are just a few key tactics behind this successful initiative, which helped us gain millions of users in our first three years:

 Facilitate cost-effective but irresistibly fun grassroots campaigns

. As our user base quickly grew from thousands to millions, we discovered that a key secret to our rapid growth was organizing fun but small-scale, locally-driven campaigns around the world. Thanks to advancing technology (like social media, of course), this is surprisingly easy and manageable, even for a business with limited resources.

 First we’d notice an emerging organic market and immediately start reaching out to locals in the region using networks like Facebook and Twitter. Then we’d engage with them further by doing translation projects together, sending them ‘swag’ (like stickers and owl masks), and organizing fun, casual community events. Finally, we would always celebrate what they were doing by posting their photos and stories on our own channels, like on a dedicated blog or our company Facebook page. We would also choose a few select industry events like SXSW to attend and come up with cost-efficient, enjoyable ways to stand out from the crowd.

 In this way, we saw hundreds of people all over the world become brand ambassadors because they liked our product and they liked us. And they did it all for free, because they were having fun. Many of these ambassadors, it turned out, were bloggers, consultants, early adopters, and "digital influencers," who really helped us spread the word in new markets.

 Build authentic relationships with people.

 In our early days, we quickly learned that building a successful brand isn’t just about ROI; it’s also about developing relationships with people.

 The key to doing this—even with limited resources—is to really listen. Again, tools like social media are essential here. Even if just one enthusiastic fan in Iceland or Siberia reached out to us via a Tweet or Facebook update, we made sure our community and support teams were paying attention and engaging or responding.

 Looking back now, what really differentiated our community programs from many others at the time and what certainly contributes to our continued growth today is that we always prioritized users first (even if they were non-paying) and spoke to them over all of our social media channels. For example, by our second year of business, HootSuite had dozens of active regional Twitter accounts to make sure no one reaching out to us went unheard. From the start, our community managers were on the front lines, connecting with people all around the world.

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State of Advertising: From Programmatic Scale to Programmatic Sophistication

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How often does a multi-billion dollar industry develop in less than five years?

How often does that industry have the potential to grow to tens of billions within another five years?

Not often.

The first industry I was involved in like this was paid search. After a couple of hard years struggling to gain momentum in the late 1990s, the category started to explode in the early 2000s and has since become the leviathan of digital advertising, a $58 billion industry globally.

Now I’m working in a new space within digital advertising that has already demonstrated huge growth and has the potential to rival paid search in the next few years. That space is called programmatic.

Programmatic Defined

What is programmatic? Programmatic is a technology that enables buyers and sellers to instantly and automatically trade digital advertising inventory through ad exchanges, marketplaces that operate rather like stock exchanges but for ad impressions instead of stocks.

Like many new technologies, programmatic evolved in response to economic and process inefficiencies.
Before 2009, practically all digital advertising (banner ads, video ads, rich media ads etc.) other than search was sold in bulk and executed via traditional manual methods. Buyers bought advertising space in large blocks. As a result advertisers' ROIs were often lower because buyers were unable to exert as much control over the specific inventory they were buying. On the process side, directly negotiated prices, emailed and faxed insertion orders, manually transferred creative assets and high touch; multi-step ad operations defined the approach. For example, back at Yahoo in 2008, we still had a 30+ step process for getting ad campaigns live. This resulted in lots of work, time, back-and-forth and cost.

Birth of a New Industry: Programmatic

Starting in 2009 several companies (including my company OpenX, then later Google) began to offer publishers a new way of selling, or trading, their advertising space. They could do it automatically through a real-time ad exchange. This new model offered several advantages for both buyers and sellers.

Buyers could analyze each ad impression in real-time, determine its value and bid accordingly. For the first time, they could buy exactly the audiences they wanted and avoid the waste of bulk buying. As a result, they could also pay higher prices for the inventory they really did want. Also, because the ad exchange aggregated ad inventory (or “supply”) from many selling publishers, buyers could buy their target audiences at scale across multiple publisher sites in one efficient way. And they could do all this instantly – in true real-time, during the ~200 milliseconds it takes to serve ad space to users.

Meanwhile sellers could “real-time sell”: they could place inventory they had not yet sold or inventory they had sold but on a non-guaranteed basis into the exchange, set a reserve price and see if they could get higher bids from the new programmatic channel. This was huge. Rather than having to guess what a buyer was going to pay you and allocate inventory to buyers based on that guess (which typically was different for each individual impression), the seller now had a situation where buyers were telling them explicitly how much they were willing to pay for each individual impression, in real time. In short, a more economically efficient allocative mechanism had been created.

Finally, there were also significant efficiency gains on the process side. Buyers and sellers could now execute transactions with much lower friction, through automated algorithms and API-level interactions versus multi-step manual processes.

Naturally this fledgling industry faced challenges. Premium publishers worried about channel conflict, direct sales cannibalization, control over price and quality and transparency. In the early years, as with most new technologies, programmatic was adopted fastest by more aggressive, mid-market publishers with less to lose. But over time the concerns were better addressed, both through features and controls but also through dialogue. Now the majority of the Comscore 100 publishers use programmatic as an element in their revenue strategy and most major advertisers include programmatic buying in their portfolio. Other players like Facebook started to adopt programmatic trading, launching FBX in mid-2012.

Along the way, an entire new ecosystem has evolved. On the sell side, several ad exchanges and supply-side platforms like Google's AdX, OpenX, FBX and Rubicon achieved real scale.

On the buy side, a new class of company emerged. Generally known as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), companies like Turn, Mediamath, Appnexus, The Trade Desk, RocketFuel, Invite (now Google) and Criteo created the ability to bid into ad exchanges in real time — in other words to buy programmatically. Within the major agency holding groups, new organizations called Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) were created to leverage this new way of buying advertising.

And a range of companies focused on data also flourished. Generally known as Data Management Platforms (DMPs), companies like BlueKai, Lotame, Acxiom and Krux focused on applying the rapidly evolving science of Big Data to audience data at scale, helping arm the DSPs and ATDs with the data signals they needed to value immense numbers of ad impressions instantly.

As a result of all this innovation and economic activity, programmatic grew from zero in early 2009 to $6 billion in 2014. By my estimates, this is roughly comparable to the first five-year cycle of the paid search’s rapid growth. In other words, during this first five-year phase, programmatic proved that it can scale.

Programmatic Scale: Formats, Screens and Business Models

During its scale phase, programmatic grew very fast but remained fundamentally quite simple. This is most clearly visible when we break the business down into three critical dimensions: formats, screens and business models.

In the first dimension (ad formats), during the last few years over 90 percent of trading volume in programmatic has been executed within just three IAB standard ad format sizes. On dimension two (screens), the vast majority of RTB transactions have occurred on desktop – and laptop — screens. And in the third dimension of the business model, programmatic has mainly been applied to open market, RTB bidding model where all buyers compete for ad inventory.

In short, programmatic’s first phase has been a relatively homogeneous system focused on scaling.

Today’s Inflection Point: From Scale to Sophistication

Now we’re at an incredible inflection point where programmatic is rapidly becoming more sophisticated because participants on both the buy and sell sides have seen the power of programmatic and want to apply its power to a much broader, more diverse set of opportunities.

For example, the range of ad formats that are traded programmatically is beginning to increase. We’re starting to see trading of a greater array of rich media and more specialized ad units that traditionally were only sold via Insertion Orders (like big homepage units). Programmatic trading of Facebook’s sponsored stories via FBX has become a major category within programmatic. And we’re also starting to see cutting-edge work on programmatic native within mobile.

In addition, screens are rapidly becoming more diverse as programmatic buying is being applied to mobile phones and tablets. Over time we expect this trend to extend into Smart TVs and other connected screens.

And finally, with regard to the business model dimension, we’re seeing a rapidly proliferating range of transaction types such as private marketplaces (in which trading takes places based on more tightly defined rules of participation), programmatic direct (a hybrid approach wherein ads are sold through the traditional sales process but executed through the new programmatic infrastructure) and many variations of these new deal structures.

This kind of maturation cycle makes sense. Many other industries evolve from a preliminary homogeneous scale phase in which they prove themselves before entering a new level of sophistication that emphasizes more flexibility and enables a much more heterogeneous array of applications. A good example is car manufacturing. In the beginning the products come in one form (think Model-T: one shape, one size, one pricing model etc.), but now you can pretty much configure your own car.

Another example is sales force automation software which started out pretty simply but has now become enormously sophisticated, with companies like Salesforce enabling companies to finely tune how their SaaS sales support systems mesh with their operational processes to give them terrific execution leverage.

Far Reaching Potential Scope

As we begin to grasp the full potential of programmatic it’s becoming clearer to me that the potential is truly enormous. The efficiency and effectiveness of the underlying programmatic technology means that it will likely play a vital role in every single digital advertising category (except Search).

Since the industrial revolution we have learned that nearly all industries are transformed by waves of innovation that improve efficiency, often through automation based on technology. These innovation trajectories are rarely totally linear and they often transform parts of industries more than others, but they are usually inexorable.

In the case of digital advertising, programmatic will apply across all screens and formats. Any screen that has a digital connection will be in scope: not just the familiar desktop and mobile screens we’re focused on now but scenarios we are only beginning to imagine. And these scenarios will use data in ways that are not obvious today. Adjusting video ads in digital outdoor screens overlooking the freeway based on the speed of traffic. Firing up a targeted ad in the in-elevator screen that recognizes your phone’s unique ID. Presenting more relevant native ads within your Smart TV experience and removing all those 8-minute workout routine ads that so annoy you. Presenting a curated restaurant recommendation in the heads-up display (HUD) in your driverless car. They will all be programmatic.

In fact, there is no reason programmatic technology has to be limited to advertising. Over time we may see the same underlying real-time, programmatic response prediction technologies applied to unpaid content as well. That restaurant recommendation on your HUD could be purely “editorial."

Put simply, the future of advertising likely has two main paradigms. Unique, ultra high-value, custom and complex advertising transactions — sponsorships, large premium guarantees, Super Bowl ads — will likely be handled by people negotiating and working together.

Everything else that is more scalable, with clear parameters and standards, will be handled programmatically through technology. As a result, within the next decade, programmatic may well be bigger than paid search.

This means that anyone involved in modern media or advertising related businesses; whether on the buy-side, the sell-side or even the content side, needs to understand the current state of the programmatic industry and where it’s going. If it's not affecting you today, it probably will be soon.

BY:  TIM  CADOGAN

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Part 2 HTML5: Meet 10 Sites That Demonstrate What the New HTML Can Do""

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New HTML5 sites, though, seem to prove Steve Jobs right. If the 10 websites below are any indication, most developers will soon be jumping ship from Flash and moving over to the incredible and plugin-free capabilites of HTML5.

1. Form Follows Function

URL: http://fff.cmiscm.com/#!/main

Jongmin Kim is a Korean-born designer who lives in New York City and is the senior designer and developer for Firstborn Multimedia. His company works for A-list companies like Sony, Cadillac and Pepsi. However, Kim might be better-known for his personal work than for his commercial work; his Form Follows Function site is a collection of entrancing and engrossing "interactive experiences" that highlight just how far HTML5 can go. The award-winning site includes a spinning navigation wheel on the homepage, with each interactive experience represented by a card. By clicking on a card, an interactive experience opens up. Each one is as much a piece of art as it is a chance to push HTML5 to its limits.

Some of Kim's artistic interactive pieces are inspired by well-known artists. "Raining Men," for example, is essentially an interactive version of Rene Magritte's famous painting of the same name. "Hue Blending" takes a cue from Andy Warhol's grids of soup cans, and "Color Pixelated" uses Van Gogh's "Starry Night" as its basis.

Each piece allows the user to interact with Kim's work. In "Raining Men," the user can change the direction of the silhouettes of the men as they rain down from the top of the screen; "Wiper Typography" permits the user to control the direction and speed of an imagined windshield wiper blade as it pushes letters on and off of the screen

2. Parallax.js

URL: http://wagerfield.github.io/parallax/

Parallax scrolling, for the uninitiated, is an animation technique that's been used since the 1940s to enhance the sensation of depth within a two-dimensional environment. In essence, the background images scroll through the screen at a rate slower than the foreground images. Since the days of Atari, video game designers have been using parallax scrolling to make video games more immersive.

Parallax engines have been used by website designers to create intriguing, often one-page websites that take a storytelling approach in their navigation to keep the visitor scrolling down almost indefinitely on a single page. Much like the original animation technique of parallax scrolling, the background images often move at a different rate than the foreground images on these sites or are covered up by a foreground layer as the user scrolls down. On other parallax websites, the long scroll down the page smoothly moves the user from one interactive experience on the site to another.

Parallax.js is a JavaScript API that enables web developers to create these parallax effects. Unlike many parallax engines around today, however, Parallax.js, which was designed by Matt Wagerfield and Claudio Guglieri, creates parallax scrolling sites that automatically respond to mobile device orientation and screen size. Furthermore, Wagerfield and Guglieri have made their parallax engine open source, allowing any designer to download and utilize the engine.

The demo site for the Parallax.js engine is the URL listed above. It relies upon HTML5 and CSS3 along with JavaScript for its artistic, beautiful animations and effects.

3. Idis

URL: http://ididthis.idispharma.com

Not everyone in the world has easy access to the medicines that they need. Some medicines are so specialized or unusual that they have to be flown in from other parts of the globe to treat patients. By the time the permits and paperwork are completed for the government agencies that monitor such medicines, it's often too late for the patients. In places like the United States, this isn't typically a problem. In places like China, India, Pakistan and other developing nations, however, it's a big problem. Furthermore, even within the United States and other developed nations, the hard-to-get nature of rare medicines can create critical drug shortages. In 2011 alone, 251 drugs were in short supply around the U.S.

Stepping into this pharmaceutical vacuum has been Idis, a British-based pharmaceutical access company. Idis is not a drugmaker itself; Idis works as a bridge between doctors, hospitals, their patients, governments and pharmaceutical companies. Through relying upon Idis, some doctors, patients and hospitals have been able to fill their pharmaceutical needs in mere days, compared to the weeks or even months it might have taken to gain access to those drugs without the company's help.

Today, Idis has a new HTML5-based website that tells the very human stories behind the facts and figures of drug shortages. The "I Did This with Idis" site is not the company's main website; rather, it provides the "human side" of the Idis company story. Indeed, the website's tagline is "Human stories of hope and survival across the globe."

Visitors to the website are immediately greeted with an accordion-style line of images; clicking on any image expands the photo across the screen. On the expanded photograph appears a map and a person's name, such as "Sarah's Story." Clicking again takes the visitor to more information about that particular individual's medical story. In the case of Sarah, a video takes up most of the above-the-fold space at the top, showing Sarah, interviews with people in her life and the happy ending in which Idis saves the day. Below the video is a simpler text-and-photo based version of the story.

Other than the accordion-style frontpage of photographs, the small Idis logo in the upper left-hand portion of the screen, another button at the top that says simply "Info" and two social media links, the "I Did This with Idis" website has no other navigation. There are no footers, menus, company contact information or the like. Instead, the visitors are intuitively led towards the "Info" button if they want to find out more. A short, above-the-fold only page appears with basic company information, a link to its brochure and an email address. The site, therefore, is a perfect example of how less can often be more when it comes to website design.

4. HotelStyle

URL: http://www.hotelstyle.biz/

If Mel Gibson's character Mad Max had, at some point after the apocalypse, decided to go into business as a fashion designer, his clothing collections and his male models might look something like those at HotelStyle. It might not look like high fashion to the rest of us, but fashion trends have started in Italy for generations, which is where HotelStyle is located. The company, which has stores in Verona, Bologna, Andria, Bisceglie and other cities throughout Italy, offers the type of fashion items one might expect to find on a modern-day Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. Tight blue jeans, unusual combinations of sport jackets and t-shirts, denim and biker-style leather are the types of men's clothing offered by HotelStyle.

Like its fashion items, HotelStyle's website is simple and almost rebellious. As with many sites these days, and not unlike the Idis site outlined above, HotelStyle has opted to err on the side of giving visitors too little information rather than too much. There are no press releases on this site, no blog, no endearing "about us" page. The site is sparse, filled mostly with pictures, videos and long, vertically scrolling pages that tell HotelStyle's tale along with one, Duck Dynasty-style bearded male model wearing different outfits. None of the traditional SEO tactics are found on the HotelStyle website. Instead of using the website for that, HotelStyle uses its Facebook account to keep a running dialogue with its customers.

From a design point of view, the HotelStyle website is light and fast-loading thanks to its minimalism. However, its hard to imagine a similar site designed with Flash having such a quick load-time. Again, HTML5 shows off on the HotelStyle site; whether viewers dress like Mad Max or not, the clean, quirky site will be a welcome relief from traditional fashion websites.

5. Kennedy + Castro

URL: http://www.kennedyandcastro.com/en/

It should never come as a surprise when design firms and ad agencies make the most of the latest technologies and design trends. As such, it is no surprise that Kennedy + Castro, an ad agency founded in London with offices in that city, Rome and New York, has a spectacular, unusual, light-hearted but awe-inspiring website.

Upon arriving at the site, the company's buzzword-worthy tagline, "The missing link between brands and people," appears, followed by a poetic-but-vague one-sentence description of what the company does. As the user scrolls down, a cartoonish skeleton of a pig begins to draw itself on the screen. (Get the symbolism? "Kennedy + Castro = Bay of Pigs.") The more the user scrolls down, the more the pig starts to flesh itself out. Inner organs begin to reveal themselves, labeled with different parts of the site's navigation buttons. As the heart appears, for example, a label notifies the user that it represents the company's "People." The pig's intestines, strangely enough, represent "Works." The lungs represent "Clients."

As the user continues to scroll down, the pig fleshes out completely, politely covering itself and all its organs with a purplish outer skin. Clicking on one of the navigation links below, such as "People," quickly skins the pig, reveals the heart and allows the user to click "View," which then takes the user to the "People" page.

As if this unusual homepage was not already strange enough, most individual pages on the site have another unique feature: Instead of scrolling down to read additional content, users scroll across the screen. On the "Organization" page, for example, the user can scroll across the screen for some time, reading the different tidbits that Kennedy + Castro found to be important. If the user gets bored with all that scrolling, however, he or she can always jump to certain sub-sections using the navigation buttons at the top. Once again, HTML5 proves itself to be more versatile than Flash on this site; while Flash probably could have been used to achieve similar effects, HTML5 can do it all without a plugin, making the Kennedy + Castro site as easy to navigate on a mobile device as on a traditional computer.

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HTML5: Meet 10 Sites That Demonstrate What the New HTML Can Do""

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What is A Website

Imagine that a space alien lands and asks the average Earthling this question. How would the Earthling respond? Perhaps the nutshell answer would be something like this:

"A website is a place online where Earthlings go to get information, be entertained, shop, find phone numbers, get recipes, read the news and so on."

"What does a website look like?" the space alien might ask.

"Well," says the Earthling, "a website looks a little like a page out of a book. There's usually text and pictures, but instead of turning the page, you use scrollbars that scroll down in order to read more, or sometimes you can use buttons that say 'next.' Some websites also have videos on them. You press a button and the video plays."

If the Earthling answered the space alien's questions in this manner in 2012 or 2013, the Earthling would be giving essentially accurate information. However, the advent of HTML5 means that everything we're used to seeing and doing online might soon change. Even our basic paradigm of how a website should look and what we do on a website will soon seem as naively innocent of the power of technology as a website from 1995 seems to us today.

Some websites are likely look roughly the same in 2014, '15, '20 and '25 as they do today. News sites, for example, will probably still contain text articles that people scroll through to read. However, as web designers and developers begin to explore the power of HTML5, how we view, read, play with and interact with many websites will change completely. Smash the old paradigm of what a website is and does; HTML5 is about to redefine it all.

Animation, Video and Other Capabilities of HTML5

There are good reasons to say that Steve Jobs changed personal computing as we know it. Besides the most obvious changes he unleashed through Apple championing the first smartphone and the first viable tablet, he also dramatically changed the Web by refusing to let iPhones and iPads have Flash plugins. At first, his decision might have seemed to be madness; by the time the iPhone came out, Flash was nearly ubiquitous. Everyone was using it. Jobs, though, might have told Apple execs who argued with him over Flash something like, "If all your friends were jumping off a bridge, does that mean you would you do it, too?"

Jobs had a lot of choice words for Flash. He called it buggy, the culprit of most Mac crashes, filled with security holes and just plain lazy programming. However, at the time that he went on his Flash rants, 75 percent of online video still relied upon Flash. Abandoning it seemed crazy. It seemed like suicide. Abandon it he did, however. Although he wasn't the only proponent of developing HTML5 as a replacement for Flash, he was probably the most important and loudest voice in the discussion. In 2011, most major browsers updated to support HTML5; in 2012, Adobe announced it would abandon development of a Flash plugin for mobile.

HTML5 integrates JavaScript, HTML and CSS for much smoother, faster animation and video. Instead of requiring a plugin, videos and animations can be embedded naturally within the website. That means that with HTML5, embedding video is becoming as easy as embedding a photograph.

HTML5 integrates JavaScript, HTML and CSS for much smoother, faster animation and video. Instead of requiring a plugin, videos and animations can be embedded naturally within the website. That means that with HTML5, embedding video is becoming as easy as embedding a photograph.

Furthermore, HTML5 doesn't rely upon cookies in the same way that most websites currently do. The "LocalStorage" and "SessionStorage" programming objects that store data strings are both faster and more secure than cookies. "SessionStorage," in particular, only lasts as long as the user session lasts; opening a new tab or a new window starts a new session. Additionally, and without getting too technical, HTML5 also makes working with databases.

When it comes to data storage, though, one of the features of HTML5 that developers are most excited about is the way it interacts with APIs. With HTML5, an entire application can be cached offline.

Is Flash Completely Dead?

Although Steve Jobs is probably smiling down upon us all thanks to the progress HTML5 has made, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Flash is dead quite yet. Even after Germany was finally defeated on the beaches of Normandy and it became clear that it was just a matter of time before the Third Reich fell, nevertheless the war still dragged on for more than a year.

In the same way, Flash has seen its Normandy invasion. Nevertheless, it hangs on. Remember, Flash nearly completely dominated Web video and animation for many years; it will take a while for HTML5 to make enough gains to say that Flash is dead forever. In fact, even though Adobe has been shifting its emphasis to the development of HTML5 tools, at the same time, the company has also been rolling out next-generation Flash tools to try to hang on to at least some of the market.

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Can social media convert terrible jobs into rewarding careers?@@

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Social media news tends to peruse technology, juicy gossip, acceptable business and personal use, or growth trends. What about poor ol' Wally, unwillingly stuck somewhere in the middle of some lifeless corporate cubicle farm preparing reports that upper management will scoff at anyway? He's bored, he's tenacious yet doesn't seem to utilize social media to leverage his work options - or at least in a productive manner.
If you’re an unhappy camper about to embark on a job searching tirade because your current job sucks the life out of every breath, your available social reach may not stretch as far as you’d like. Whether you’re organizing kindergarteners, or concentrating on financial recruitment, it’s tough to find employers with high enough quality to create an atmosphere worthy of calling your efforts 'reaching career fruition'.
Social media, however, will go to bat for you. You may need to hone these areas first, my friend, before grabbing your red stapler and darting off.
Improve communication skills

Where you ever in a situation when you had to ask someone to fulfill a task, but it didn’t turn out as you were expecting? Did you have a problem leading the ones under your subordination or delegating people who didn’t accomplish the task they received? Challenges regarding delegating, meetings and so on are the result of a problem in communication.
In terms of social media 'acceptable communication' bylaws (yes, they exist), there are two aspects that can impact communication: specifying your specific intent, and quantifying those intentions. Without communication skills, you’ll have difficulty securing new jobs anywhere, McDonald's included, so hone those skills before searching for career security via social media or career information sites.
Know where career information is found

Over a quarter of people in the world report being unhappy with their jobs. According some job satisfaction surveys, those interviewed cited pay as their biggest concern. Some stated that they felt they had no career progression and even more stated that job security and stress were a problem for them at work. While leaving without two week’s notice isn’t suggested, keeping your options open to explore other educational or career opportunities while working your boring cubicle position is always encouraged. Doing so in 2014 is much easier, thanks to social platforms abound.

Professionals, on the other hand, are quitting their day jobs to commit their focus and money to the concept of small business ownership, a dream they can grow into a profitable venture. If unsure which direction works best for getting into this field, CareerGlider offers an expansive amount of career and school information tailored to meet many goals, including those of an entrepreneurial sort. Selecting a career and school will show you facilities prepared to help make your options more plausible, along with your dreams a reality.

Spruce up your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is your “black book” of employer contacts, yet you probably treated it as Facebook for far too long. It’s a free and easy-to-use platform that can connect you to potential employers, and job training should further skills be needed at new companies. Any student or career-minded professional can set up a profile, but you need to be smart in deciding what to include and how to begin networking.
The basics of setting up a powerful LinkedIn profile, such as adding your resume, background information and areas of expertise, may help you secure more job interviews. Some employers have also setup their application pages to pull LinkedIn information to better assist the process of applying - the reason your LinkedIn should be safeguarded, nurtured and treated with respect like your resume.
Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons why more and more people today are looking for rewarding careers under the tutelage of social media. Older workers, for example, may find themselves out of work and finding it difficult to become employed again because of their age - yet a powerful social presence with the right influences could make a difference. Younger workers may have family responsibilities or they may even need to care for elderly parents, and their challenging schedules make it difficult to find work the traditional way - which is where social media saves the day again

Why No One Uses Your Mobile App Any More@@

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A few months ago I was really grooving on QuizUp. Now I rarely open it. There was a cool app that turned my photos into comic-style art. Was all over my Instagram feed for a few weeks. Now don’t even remember the name. Wired’s Mat Honan suggested SXSW might not have a breakout app this year because, well, nothing really breaks out for very long any more.

I’m finding this occurring again and again with games, photo and chat apps, which seem to be the most ephemeral of mobile experiences. Games have always peaked, then valleyed. Photos and chat apps tend to swap because they each have at least one consistent fallback – your phone’s camera and SMS/iMessage.

With the iPhone 5s TouchID and automatic app updates I find myself going to the app store far less frequently but when I follow a link to a free app’s download page, convert nearly 100% of the time. Why? Because I no longer need to type in a password. Just keep my thumb on the pad and – boom – new app to try out. Now if Apple could just make it easier to open new apps once installed (since I’ve already left the download page to multitask). Maybe double-click’s app tray could include a downloaded-but-not-yet-opened app in the its stream of recently accessed apps.

But maybe it’s just because we’re being rewired to want “new” over any known quantity. Does the excitement over seeing something for the first time beat any known pleasure? Are we becoming app sluts?


As a consumer it’s really compelling – so many new things to try. As a seed investor it makes picking winners at the earliest stages a real challenge unless there’s at least some evidence of meteoric growth. Why I think we’ll see more of the larger funds track interesting apps and then work hard to win the deal later as opposed to throwing millions pre-traction.     Tweet   Google+   Share

The Big Work Lie: “Out of Office”@@

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It happens to all of us. You send an email to someone that requires a reply. You might even add some sizzle to it with a big red exclamation point. Could be a request to fix a problem. Could be something really urgent and you are desperate for an answer. Could be an appointment or a meeting request.

Within a second of hitting the send button, you hear the ping of a new email and see the response: “Automatic Reply – Out of Office”. Followed by, “I will be out of the office until _____ and will have limited email access. If this is an emergency, please contact


That response raises lots of eyebrows and generates lots of questions, mainly, “Do we believe that response? Is he or she really out of touch? With today’s devices, is it even possible to be really out of the office and out of touch? Does that mean the recipient is really not checking? Is it true that people are truly addicted to email? So let’s wait and see

Sure enough, within just a few minutes the one who posted the out of office note is sending a response. And it’s a good, thoughtful response that addresses the issue. The response is not, “Buzz off! I am in Hawaii with my family and I haven’t had a vacation in five years.” The thoughtful response raises a new question: Why did the person bother to create the out of office status if he took the office with him?

No one believes out of office status any more. No matter where we are, what we are doing, and whom we are with; we all sneak time to check and respond to email. Worse, we all expect others to do the same. No place is safe and no one believes that you are not checking emails, even whilst on vacation. It could be the tragedy of today’s workplace but it is the reality and it is not a good thing.

We should reconsider the out of office designation and use it as it was intended. That is, we are out! Maybe just adding the word “really” would help. As in, “I am REALLY out of the office and REALLY will not be checking email and would REALLY appreciate it if you didn’t bug me and I REALLY want you to deal with my colleague _____ whom I REALLY do trust to handle things whilst I am gone. REALLY.” I bet that would really do it.

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Out of office should be used, but only if we take the status to heart and personally enforce it. We all need a break and studies are showing that disconnecting makes us more productive when we do reconnect. We need to take time out of the office, to get away from it all. We need to preserve out of office but only in its truest sense.


Some love the OoO status but they have abused it. Others want to preserve the status because they use it as an ego thing, as in, “I am out of the office on a Polynesian Island with my super model girlfriend through the end of the summer. If there is blood involved call my people and I may get back to you.”

Remember those pink slips with the header “While You Were Out”? There used to be stacks of those on desks with names and phone numbers scribbled on them. They are long gone. I fear out of office status is not far behind so let’s bring it back in its truest meaning. My advice is when you need to take a break, post the out of office status but add the word REALLY. Maybe it will work and your health, both mental and physical will thank you. Or, only take vacations in places where there is no Internet access. If you can find one.  Tweet       Share    Google+  LinkedIn