Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game.  My initial analysis of using this application makes me believe that such mashups will play vital role as far as job search is concerned.  Applications like JobDeck will provide an alternate channel for employers to scout for new talent and at the same time give multiple opportunities to the jobseeker.

TweetDeck and TwitJobSearch have teamed up to provide you with a dedicated JobDeck. This makes it even easier to search for jobs, as well as staying in touch with what’s happening now, and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Source: TweetDeck.

The Hiring ecosystem:

Since I run an HR services company and a social media enthusiast I am in a position to analyze the tool both from the employer and employee perspective.  My analysis of the positioning of JobDeck is given below in the table.

JobDeck analysis:

JobDeck consists of primarily 2 column layout where in the first column job related tweets are displayed using the powerful search engine developed by guys at TwitJobSearch. The tweets are filtered in a manner where the content is limited to job hunting.  There is a “Job Search Experts” user list. This area can be used to stay updated with the latest development in the job market and it has lot of HR and career related articles as well. The second column is a dedicated column that is directly connected to the main feed of TwitJobSearch which searches the web and returns search results relevant to jobs and job market.

What I would love to see in JobDeck

• Even more powerful search – based on location, job type, company name like you usually have on job boards
• Ability to filter updated just based on my career stream. Like a customized JobDeck for a sales professional in the telecommunication sector.
• Ability to develop contact base and tweet with each contact from JobDeck
• Trending like twitter
• Better integration with other social media applications

JobDeck is a pretty decent attempt made towards being innovative, it has a long way to go before it can become main stream and threaten the existence of traditional media like Job Boards. Did we just think about News Papers are traditional media?? Sorry that’s dead long time ago.

To me this is a brilliant concept and the first step towards a newer, smarter and a synchronous mechanism for a job seeker and an employer.

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• How many websites were added
• How many emails were sent
• How many internet users surfed the web
• Web servers in use
• Information of domain names
• Social media statistics
• Information on images
• Information on web browsers
• Information on malicious software

The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com

Email usage statistics in 2009

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• 22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

• 62.7% – Internet Explorer
• 24.6% – Firefox
• 4.6% – Chrome
• 4.5% – Safari
• 2.4% – Opera
• 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Reference for internet usage statistics in 2009

Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

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I would like to see companies provide iphone application which caters to varied interest level of internal employees, candidates/ consultants and clients.

Features that I would like to see in an iphone app by category

Candidates:

• Resumes submission
• Push notifications for jobs of their interest
• Search for jobs
• Contact details of recruiters
• Applications status
• Job referrals

Companies:

• Push requirements to the vendor
• Status on applications
• Contact details of the team working on the assignments

Internal employees:

• Access to internal recruitment system
• Quick submission of resumes to client
• Contact details of client
• Send out job alerts
• Access to candidates social networking details for quick connect

My research recruitment apps on iphone resulted into very few well designed apps.  A quick search on iTunes and Google search resulted in apps like:

• Radar Recruit – very well made application by an Australian recruitment which specializes in creative jobs in the advertising sector. Radar is primarily using this app to provide job listing by category where the candidate can search for jobs and apply or refer the job posting to someone. You can view the app screen shot here
• JobServe connect – Provides a job search engine where candidates can search for more than 50,000 jobs globally with locations services on, it has an interesting feature to find jobs near you. It also provide generic functionality like creating a search agent, emailing the job etc You can view the app screen shot here
• Korn and ferry – this is one company that is taking social media recruiting to the next level. They have developed an iphone app with a lot of real good features. You can read the features here
• Recruiterapp.com – these people have gone one step further and have developed a full blown app to manage recruitment cycle for recruitment agencies/ consultants. You can read about them here

The iphone app market is heating up and along with social media I foresee companies will have to develop innovative apps to reach candidates via mobile devices.

I would love to see a list of features that you would like in an iphone app that can facilitate the recruitment experience on a mobile device.

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Visual evaluation of my blog:

Analysis of my blog:

• 30% of my visitors will not be able to see my banner ad which says advertise for free. If even you can’t then you can check this link here
• 40% of my visitors will not be able to see connect to Facebook icon on my blog
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the submit button to my RSS feed
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the following:
  • Team behind this blog
  • What we recommend
  • Our rankings across prominent sites – like blogged
  • Most importantly the second post on the blog

I plan to make certain changes and conduct a test run

I am going to  test run by:

• Moving the banner to the left so the visibility will be improved by 25%
• Making connect with Twitter and Facebook icons smaller in size to improve visibility
• Moving the subscribe button will be a design call so might take it up later

I will be keeping a close eye on Google analytics for the next whole week specifically on these links to see if the analysis is true.

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By early 2010 we would be able to book domain names in Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and a lot of other languages

Impact of localisation of domain names

Local reach: Doman names in local language will help companies to reach the large segment of the market which cannot access the web due to the absence of English speaking skills. Companies will have another avenue to market their product and services by creating websites that will have highly localized content online. For example a lot more people would be able to read this article in India considering the diversity in regional languages in India.

Acquire desired domain names: with restriction to Latin characters (A to Z) a lot of companies were forced to choose domain name that were available. With localization companies will have the opportunity to choose the desired name especially companies catering purely to local market will be at an added advantage.

Decide your own extension: One of the other major advancements discussed at the event was to allow companies to acquire new top-level domain names ending with extension of their choice. This change will enable businesses to use their business name as extension for example www.iphone.apple this will not only improve the branding but help them create series of domain names for their different products and services.

Drive search engine traffic: Search engines are focusing more and more on localized search and indexing and promoting local search results to users. As of today the percentage of people using local search as compared to global one is very low but moving forward the traffic generated by local searches will be significant. Proactive companies will be able to take an early movers advantage.

Service Providers: Service providers like registrars, hosting providers, web designers and SEO people will have tremendous opportunity to grow. The key here is to focus on selling domain name internationalization services at the right time.  I would say start a campaign to gather database of people by displaying “register domain name in local languages” like in India register domain name in Hindi.

Companies will have to think fast and act upon it the moment it’s out in the open. The early movers will have to strategize and plan their domain name localization initiative.  Companies who are agile in adopting local domain names will reap the rewards primarily in addressing local target audience and also win the search war when the localization of search heats up.  Here in lies the opportunity for services providers to identify opportunities and grow their business.

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The latest Hollywood offering, ‘2012‘, is a $200 million movie about the end of the world is based on myths backed by the Mayan calendar.  Since the first promotion and marketing event of the movie 2012 there has been a casual buzz about world coming to an end and people are highly curious about the prediction.   In the past there have been numerous predictions about the world coming to an end.

To me the Barack Obama online marketing campaign was the best in terms of strategy and execution. The team at Sony has similarly done a great job at strategizing and executing online marketing campaign for the movie 2012.

Online marketing Lessons we can learn from 2012’s.

Strategy

• The What: Exploit people’s fears and generate curiosity amongst the target audience
• The Where: social media – primarily websites, Facebook pages, myspace twitter and video viral
• The How: Use of organic Google search coupled with highly focused SEO, SMO and SEM activities

Execution

It all started with a phrase “Find out the truth, search Google for 2012″. This prompted people to do just that and as a result in Google and SEO parlance the key phrase was searched over and over again in very short period of time. This increased the SEO value of that keyword and since it was passed around over various social networking sites there was a huge viral effect. Initially 2012 was not ranking first in Google it came right up there in couple of days

Big Viral effect

Search Google for 2012 the movie and you will see loads of articles, websites, videos, images, fan pages, groups, social organizations, NGO’s and last but not the least even NASA has to get into the act.  This topic appeals to wide variety of audience the viral effect was very strong and fast, this can be clearly seen in the research on Google Trends

Google Trends

Alexa Ranking

In addition to the official movie site, whowillsurvive2012.com, the search results pages include Wikipedia pages as well as Web sites built by devotees of the Mayan doomsday prophecy, lending more credibility to the premise of the film. You’ll find the same type of results at Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.

There has been a negative impact of this marketing campaign as well, since the news that the world is going to end by 2012 spread like wild fire authorities like NASA has been bombarded with people asking them to question if the world would really end.  The authorities at NASA had to create a FAQ page on their website clarifying that the nothing wrong is going to happen.

To me the marketing campaign of the movie 2012 is a huge success considering its effectiveness online coupled with its offline marketing and promotions activities.

Movie reviews for 2012 look promising the world over,I only hope that the movie lives up to the hype and expectation.

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Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 56.1 million active users in October 2009. Source Wikipedia.

Why this game is so famous:

• Everyone can relate to farming
• Everyone has basic knowledge about agriculture
• It’s not like normal role play gaming that gets over at that instant
• Game can be played over period of time
• Creates an environment of healthy competition

Management lessons that can be learnt from FarmVille game on Facebook:

• Strategic planning: Improves your strategic thinking capability as you need to strategize on what you’re planning to grow according to the time available.
• Utilization of resources: Need to choose your options (trees, flowers, fruits, animals and crops) to earn income on harvesting thereby one has to ensure optimum utilization of resources
• Planned Growth: Growth largely depends on your experience level and that can be achieved by planting can be gained
• Team work: sending gifts and helping friends farm leads to better team work.
• Cash flow: since everything has to be purchased and has a return on investment, it becomes important to manage your cash flows and invest in the right areas at the right time.
• Time management: each crop/fruits/tress has a predefined time to mature where the cost of planting and time of harvesting is fixed. It becomes imperative to choose what your are going to plant based on the time available with you

At the end of the day this is just a game but I am sure if played with good intent one can surely learn a lot of aspects of business.  Feel free to add me as your neighbour on FarmVille.

It would be nice to receive comments from people who have played Farmville and let us know what their experiences have been playing this super cool game.

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The job market is tough and it’s even tougher for fresh graduates to get suitable jobs in the current market.  Normally this leads to frustration and depression and most of the students blame it on recession and how bad their luck is.

However there are few students like David Rowe of Cambridge.  A law student who got tired of send resumes to companies and searching for jobs via job boards decided to innovate.  David Rowe’s idea was to wear a suit and hang a sandwich board around his neck to market himself hoping that someone will notice his talent and give him a job.

University graduate David Rowe walks in London. Photo: REUTERS

“David Rowe, who has built up £20,000 worth of debts since leaving university, said he had sent out hundreds of CVs and offered to work for free but could not find a job.

The 24-year-old history graduate decided he would pound the streets round the Fleet Street area past law firms and investment-banks in a suit with the sandwich board round his neck”.  Source Telegraph.co.uk

Lessons that one must learn from David’s innovative attempt

• Accept that the job market is though
• Nothing is going to happen overnight
• Stop cribbing and start doing
• Don’t just get frustrated and depressed with the lack of calls from employers; find innovative ways to approach your target market.
• Think of yourself as a product and identify your target market and find multiple ways to reach your audience
• Prepare yourself very well – you will get one shot make the most of it.
• Have patience
• Cheer for the fact that recession is about to end and very soon things will be back to normal

The moral of the story is that when things are not going the right way, it’s time to be proactive and be prepared to march forward with persistence.

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The first thing to hit during recession was hiring and recruitment and the first thing will pick up would be the same. Economy is already showing signs of recovery and that can be seen in the news that companies across the globe have started hiring or are at least positive to recruit anytime soon.  The timing of this post seems to be just perfect and I would like to share this useful piece of information with all job seekers and in as many ways as possible.  This is a must read for people seeking jobs in the current market.

1.      Effective job interviewing from both sides of the desk by Andy Lester

.

2.      10 commandments of job search by applicant blog

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3.      Leveraging LinkedIn for job search Maurene Grey

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4.      Rethink your job search by CareerTiger

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5.      10 job search attitudes that will get you more interviews by Brain Massey

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6.      Job search with social media and mobile by Gabe Zichermann

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7.      Converging trends impacting your job search by Steve Drake

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Services offered by uSocial

Regular services

• Front page services – basically getting on first page of dig, yahoo buzz and other social media bookmarking sites
• Press release distribution – the same old thing

Interesting Services

Now these are the services where money can buy you friends and followers

• Facebook marketing service
  • Buy Facebook friends – how to increase Facebook friends
  • Buy Facebook fans – how to increase Facebook fans

The packages depends on the number of fans your desire and in multiple of thousands. You can increase the number of Facebook friends and fans from 0 to 10000 and the pricing starts form $100 to $700 for 1000 to 10000 contacts respectively.

• Twitter marketing services
  • Buy twitter followers - how to increase followers on twitter

They do the same thing on twitter and the packages depends on the number of followers you desire the range starts form 1000 and goes up to 100000 twitter followers and the pricing starts from $87 to $3500.

They claim that via both services they will help you get friends and followers based on your target audience.

My views on the model:

I think just like in the real world you cannot buy friends and family and more importantly when you use social media for business then in that case you cannot buy customers.  The basic idea is that you need to slowly build your presence via these social media sites and deliver value to your potential customers.  If you resort to buying friends, followers, connections, contacts then they will just be there in your contact list and will not prove to be of any value.  The key is not to have thousands of followers because it is going to be virtually impossible to manage one on one relation with each and everyone and at the same time you cannot deliver value to thousands of people at the same time.

I maybe wrong but to my mind companies like uSocial are opportunists and want to make quick bucks from people who are at the start of the learning curve in social media.  According to me these auto generated contacts will prove to be absolutely useless.

What’s your take on this ?

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