As in any career path, advertising and marketing has many specialties/niches — the biggest challenge may be trying them all out to figure out what is your first, best destiny. Like classic marketing, it’s critical for job seekers to demonstrate a point of differentiation that sets them ahead of their peers.

Here are my suggestions for someone starting his/her professional career:

Professional Social Networking
Aside from the good old fashioned meet-and-greet, I’d recommend using LinkedIn as much as possible to make connections, re-connect with past acquaintances, get recommendations, solicit opinions and demonstrate your subject matter expertise. These connections may be able to help you out in the future. Consider it an organic resume that should be more up-to-date than the paper versions you send out.

If you want to take it a step further, try a site like Biznik. You can make connections on a local level and publish articles.

Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
Publishing a blog on some sort of marketing niche would help you with your writing skills and work portfolio. If you don’t have any skills yet, write about something from your gender/demographic perspective (e.g. a twenty-somethings critique of advertising campaign effectiveness). I wrote some professional blogging tips you may find useful.

Self-Promotion
Twitter.com is a great way to start attracting attention to your blog and most importantly, promoting your personal brand. (But post useful messages, not inane drivel about what you ate for lunch.)

Reputation Management
Do a vanity search on Google and Yahoo to see what is out there about you and others that share your name. You may discover you need to distinguish yourself from others. Definitely delete anything that may hurt you professionally, especially if “friends” posted photos of you on their MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc. accounts.

There are also sites that let you identify content by/about you from content by/about your dopplegangers. Check out:
ClaimId.com
FindMeOn.com
BusinessCard2.com

Executive Recruiters
Definitely connect with Executive Recruiters – there are plenty on LinkedIn. They typically collect 15-20% commission on your first year salary so let them work hard to get you’re foot in the door. Then it’s up to you to sell yourself.

Organized Job Search
Try using RSS Readers to organize feeds from job boards. It gives you an aggregated view, shows the most recent, identifies what you’ve already read. Plus you can view on a mobile device web browser. I like:
Google Reader
Bloglines.com

I hope you find that useful. What would you suggest?
-Roland

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How Large Is Too Large?

As a content consumer, I subscribe to dozens of podcasts (i.e. marketing, technology, Mac-centric, parenting, TV/movie fans). Audio files for a 15-45 minute show are generally in the 12-50MB range, depending on compression and format.

It’s great that content producers are discovering the ease of publishing video. But I’m noticing an increasing trend by producers to push out files over 150MB on their feeds. Over the past week I got several ‘ginormous’ screencasts and a 628MB presentation. These files are passively downloading in the background while I’m working. But that kind of bandwidth consumption can clobber users like myself who regularly find themselves moving to various access points and connection speeds throughout the week.

Rather than publishing a heavy video file on the feed, how about posting a smaller audio file version? Better yet, edit that video down to a three minute highlights video. Then notify listeners that they can watch a streaming optimized version of the full length video at the publisher’s website.

Respect Your Audience

While content quality is important, it’s about time for content producers to seriously evaluate what they’re publishing.

• Edit for length — Invest a bit of time to the key points across.
• Choose the right format — Is video of a one-hour presentation really necessary? Or, simply a nice-to-have when audio will suffice?
• Is it really important? — I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by short videos that are just not really useful. (i.e. “I’m messing around with new screencasting software.” or “I’m trying out my new Flip video camera and thought you’d like to see my dog.”)

I enjoy being a podcaster (mainly audio) and I tend to be very sensitive to the file sizes I publish. I’ll noodle with compression options to balance audio quality against reasonable file size. I don’t always succeed, but nevertheless I do try before I hit ‘publish.’

So don’t let your enthusiasm get the best of you. Try to always put your best foot forward. It’s more respectful to the audience that’s investing their time with you.

What are your thoughts on that? Please comment and answer the poll below. Thanks in advance.
-Roland

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I was reading a thread online where the original poster questioned the effectiveness of HTML emails. “I’ve begun to minimize the graphical elements to try to minimize the big “X’s” that are displayed if a person does not download the graphics.”

A half-dozen responders affirmed/advised to steer clear of publishing HTML emails and including images.

Professionally, I disagree with that opinion and consider that a sloppy marketing approach. Why dumb down your message in the hopes of increasing reach?

In tests I’ve been involved with, HTML emails continue to have better click-thru performance than text. But admittedly in order to take into account consumers viewing email on mobile devices, we should continue to push both. A few more suggestions:

• Publish both HTML and text format so the email client can decide which to accept. A reputable email service should provide send options for HTML, text and AOL.
• Keep header images thin vertically. Nothing is more unattractive than a 600×800 pixel placeholder when image blocking is on.
• Overall, keep your design simple, put emphasis on a compelling call-to-action and minimize distractions.
• Use descriptive ALT tags and link titles.
• Push one or more tests to accounts you have on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. Then check how your messages look in webmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Safari and Thunderbird.

That’s just a short list. I’ve talked about more in my Ten Email Marketing Best Practices video.

I hope you find this useful. What’s your experience?
-Roland

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I’ve created a score of accounts on various sites, under various personalities depending on what I was experimenting with. Here’s just a small portion of my tale:

First Jaiku was great. It aggregated all my feeds into a single stream, but I couldn’t find my “friends” there.

Then I was enthralled by the speed of Twitter, only to be lured away by the fancy features of Pownce.

I became bored and bounced back and forth making “friends” and interacting on Pownce and Twitter until I learned to setup Twitterfeed — then I only had to post on Pownce and my posts would automatically make their way onto Twitter as well.

To combat distraction from refreshing the browsers constantly, I trialed a variety of desktop client apps to alert me with chirps and notifications as the timeline became updated throughout the day.

But I got lazy. Twitter had a mobile client so I went back there so I could read the timeline in the bathroom or in the parking lot. Eventually Pownce became mobile friendly too, but it was too late for me.

I don’t bother with updating my status in AIM, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, etc. Then came a slew of sites I can barely remember. I skipped over FriendFindr, FindFriendr, FriendMeUpOrIllKickUrButt, blah, blah, blah and moved with the herd over to Plurk. Not satisfied, I found the beta code (pingofpings or pingyoulater) for Ping.fm so now I can post from a single interface to a dozen other sites. I can even email from my mobile phone to my unique Plurk address and get posted all over. Very cool.

The hole I’ve dug myself into is two-fold:

1. I no longer want to add to the noise and clutter. I’m trying to post mainly useful commentary and links to resources.
2. Now how do I interact with all my social network “friends” scattered all across those sites?

Last night, the gang at the New Media in New Jersey meetup were playing with identi.ca. (*sigh*)

So, what’s your story? Are you a microblogging or social junkie? Or do you think it’s all time-wasting rubbish. Please share your thoughts with us.

Oh, and wont you add me as a friend?

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Listen to this podcast:

So why do projects fail? In my experience and opinion:

• Poor planning — failing to carefully capture and make decisions on all requirements, how to execute, how to define budget, and how to properly allocate resources.
• Not setting client, stake holder and/or internal expectations in order to hold people accountable.
• Unrealistic due date that is not tied to specific business need or resource commitments.
• No defined timeline to set expectations and dependencies for all required resources.
• Lack of clear leadership, decentralized leadership and poor project management.
• Poor/no requirements clearly defined — vague functional and technical requirements opens the door to misinterpretation and scope creep.
• Scope/feature creep — many little things add up quickly.
• No change control system to document and prioritize decisions.
• Not enough time for development and proper testing forces shortcuts and introduces more bugs.
• Same resources working on multiple high priority projects divides focus and increases risks of errors, confusion and missing deadlines. There are only so many hours in a week.
• Requirements exceed budget, in turn profitability suffers as scope creep escalates.
• Client / stake holder is not required to approve deliverables at specific milestones and freeze features.

How to lead a successful project:

• Continually learn from mistakes. Hold project post-mortems to help be better prepared for new projects.
• Estimates approved by internal department representatives.
• Clearly define leadership and who manages certain relationships.
• Excellent communications.
• Thorough documentation.
• Aggressively managing scope creep.
• Manage client/stake holder expectations.

Share your thoughts or project from hell stories.

Thanks for listening!
-Roland

This show is proud to be part of the Blubrry Network. Check out the fine shows at:
http://www.Blubrry.com

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Email list rentals are a great opportunity to get your message out to a targeted audience. But the concept doesn’t carry over well into marketing via SMS. Here’s some learnings from our past experiences:

• Quality of the opt-in list is critical. Only deal with a reputable source who maintains a list of fresh accounts that have been obtained through a double opt-in process.
• SMS provides an extremely limited number of characters to push a marketing message and effective call-to-action. If the action you want the consumer to take is too complex, SMS is not the right tactic for you.
• Be prepared for consumer complaints:
  • To some consumers, receiving a marketing message on the cell phone is an invasion of personal space.
  • Some consumers don’t remember ever opting in, and certainly didn’t opt-in to receive a message from your brand. Other consumers may have never opted-in because the cell number might have previously belonged to someone else.
  • Consumers not on a text messaging plan will get annoyed by getting charged for receiving the message.
  • Set the client’s expectation well in advance that some recipients will send angry/threatening messages to their customer service center. (We had a client freaking out about 60 complaints out of 250,000 consumers… yet never seemed to concerned about accusations of email spamming.)

In summary:

• Assess carefully whether an SMS tactic is appropriate for your call-to-action
• Take time to identify a reputable service provider. Ask your Linkedin connections for recommendations. Check references.
• Make sure you know how you’re going to measure success.
• Set expectations and be prepared to address negative feedback.

Please share your thoughts and tips. If you found this useful, please let me know.
Thank you.
-Roland

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