I am seriously considering moving all my e-mail — including years of archives currently stored in my laptop and managed by Thunderbird — to Gmail and, from then on, using IMAP to access it.

Right now I POP all my e-mail to my laptop. In the new setup, I’ll POP all my e-mail to Gmail and will then use either its web or IMAP interface (via Thunderbird) to access all my mail. [I wrote about this in a lot more detail on my personal blog.]

I like the idea of cloud computing and the ability to access my calendar and all of my e-mail regardless of where I am and what e-mail client, browser, or mobile phone device I’m using. Of course, actually doing this will take a lot of time since I have over 2GB of e-mail archives to upload…but I suppose it’ll be worth it in the end.

Here’s hoping everything goes well (as it is so far).

The list just keeps getting longer!

• Cameron Olthius started it by listing 10 things
• Jeremiah Owyang took it to 17
• Jaffe Juice upped the ante to 23
• And now Azeem Ahmad has now moved us to 32

The trick, of course, is to figure out which of these things are relevant to your enterprise and to track those regularly. The rest you can look at only occasionally.

What happens to all the cognitive surplus that exists in society today? A lot of people spend it on watching television…but a lot of others don’t.

Read the transcript of an awesome speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 conference a few days ago.

Today I attended my last MBA class and participated in my last syndicate meeting. I now have two assignments (one individual and one syndicate-based) and two exams to do before I’m completely done with the MBA.

11:15am on Friday, 2 May, 2008…here I come!

Meanwhile, I went and signed up for my graduation regalia. Since The University of Melbourne follows the Oxford style of gowns and hoods for its formal academic dress, I get to wear a black gown (the Melbourne Business School MBA’s colours are a sky blue stripe with a gold band), a hood, and a black trencher cap (with black tassel).

We have two other functions before that, though — the end-of-term party and the valedictory dinner — both of which should be lots of fun. I’m getting all excited about this now :)

I would move to Seattle for this job:

I Can Has Cheezburger? is looking to hire a moderator to work in our Seattle office (Lower Queen Anne area)! You too can works for Happycat!

Moderators screen all submissions, moderate comments and help our users with the dangerous world of lolcats. This is a paid part-time (or possibly full-time position). Due to the nature of the site, moderators work non-standard office hours. You will be joining our team of 3 moderators in enjoying all the fun the Web can offer.

We’re looking for someone who lives in Seattle with a great sense of humor, a deep understanding and love of the Internets and a strong work ethic. Cat ownership is not required.

If you’re interested, email us your resume and/or cover letter at lol@icanhascheezburger.com

*sigh*

[Via Yahoo! News, via Digg]

Silk Charm (a.k.a. Laurel Papworth) was on 9am with David and Kim on Australia’s Channel 9 this morning. She talked social networking and MySpace and made some really good “ah, I get it now”-type analogies. Make sure you take a look.

Great post yesterday by Chris Brogan: What I want a Social Media Expert to Know. Great comments too.

To expand on his post: What a social media expert should also know is that the answers — if you re-frame Brogan’s list as a set of questions — can be different in different situations, with different companies and industries.

The social media expert might not be able to answer the questions correctly — and with a high degree of certainty — in all those situations but at least s/he should know (a) that there will be differences, (b) where to look to find the right answers for that situation, and (c) if there are no right answers, make a pretty educated guess as to what they will be.

I know this to be true, by the way, because I’ve worked both on external-facing web portals and internal-facing intranet portals and some of the answers to Brogan’s questions are vastly different in those two cases.

Still, like he says, social media experts should have answers to all those questions. In fact, I’d expect a good social media job interview to cover most, if not all, of these questions as well.

So far, I’ve applied for three jobs and have received one rejection. As any good job applicant will do, I followed-up with the recruitment agent who handled my application to see why I got that rejection.

The Feedback

I wanted to know: did I not get the job because (a) he didn’t think I could do it or (b) there were other, more suitable candidates for that position?

So I e-mailed him a couple of quick questions and got a rather encouraging reply. He said I wasn’t far off the mark with the skills requirements but that the client had wanted someone with significantly more experience in that specific area.

This is good news because it tells me that my job application targeting is generally accurate. However my lack of explicit communications experience might be an issue, especially when applying for more senior management roles.

Lessons for the Future

What I need to do in future applications, then, is be clearer about the fact that, while I don’t have formal, job-title-based communications or relationship management experience, this is something I’ve actually been doing for years. After all, you can’t be a good consultant, teacher, or trainer if you’re not proficient at both relationship management and communications. I guess I need to explain and, preferably, demonstrate that a little better.

What I should also do is phone recruiters soon after I’ve submitted my application (a few days later, maybe). That might help me catch and correct any perceived shortcomings before they reach application-rejecting levels. It’s also good to put a voice to the applicant who, till that time, has existed only as a chronological listing of skills and experiences on a piece of paper. 

All in all, the follow-up was both encouraging and very valuable. Here’s hoping I don’t have to do too many more! :)

To follow on from the Death by Blogging post I wrote earlier, read Jason Calacanis’ post on What the New Your Times’ “Death by Blogging” Story Got Right. It’s long, but it’s worth a read.

He writes:

The New York Times sees the common thread amongst these folks as blogging, but that’s a superficial assessment. The truth is the common thread amongst these four individuals–and it’s kind of shocking the New York Times missed this–is they were all entrepreneurs.

The Times would have been better off blaming entrepreneurship over blogging. Of course, there are tons of healthy entrepreneurs out there who are not dying, and a certain number of men between 35-60 die from stress on a regular basis, so the story’s premise is flawed from the start.

…

… however there is one thing the New York Times did get right: the human species inability to deal with stress.

I know where Calacanis is coming from because I’ve been there myself.

Back in 2005-06 I went through a really difficult period in my life: my mother had just died (less than three months after we discovered the cancer), I was having a hard time at work (one of my colleagues had left and I was stuck doing his job which, at the time, was way over my head), I was working evenings and weekends on a second job (finances were an issue and I enjoyed the second job much more than the first), and I hadn’t gotten the scholarship I needed for my MBA (though I did, thankfully, get it in the subsequent round). All this coupled with a mostly unhealthy lifestyle (specifically, no regular exercise) and very little drumming (which is a great stress reliever) left me burnt-out and bordering on depression.

Interestingly, it was the hard time I was having at work that prompted me to go for an MBA in the first place so at least one good thing came out of all this!

Things have changed since then (life is simpler when you’re a student anyway; especially when you’re on an international student’s budget!) and I like to think I’ve learnt a few valuable lessons on how not to live along the way. Ironically enough, the MBA has taught me a lot about how to live a more balanced life as well [1]. And now the jobs I’m applying to and the life my wife and I intend to lead are both going to be of the more balanced kind. And though I do enjoy (yes, actually enjoy) the occasional 60 hour work week, I know that it should be a deadline-approaching exception to the norm.

So thanks, Jason, for that blog post. I needed it to remind myself about what is important in life. Others need to hear that kind of advice as well. Let’s just hope everyone listens.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

[1] I learnt this primarily through some teachers and one of my career counsellors. A heartfelt thanks, then, to Gavin Lister, Amanda Sinclair, John Onto, and Brian Gibbs.

In the latest Marketing Voices podcast, Jennifer Jones talks to Comrade’s Thelton McMillian about How Social Media is Impacting the Corporate Marketing and PR Functions. (It’s a quick listen, by the way, and I highly recommend it).

The discussion was based on research that Comrade recently conducted, the results of which are pretty interesting. For example, it indicates that companies that promote social media to a full line item (like PR, advertising, etc.) as opposed to lumping it under some other heading find the most success with their social media endeavours. (It’s nice, isn’t it, to get some empirical proof for what social media advocates have been saying for a while now?)

It’s About Control

Another interesting characteristic of what I would call ‘social media ready’ organizations is that their control over the company’s brand and marketing isn’t concentrated in the brand manager’s role but is distributed across the organizational structure. This means that, if a company wants to get ready for social media, its executives have to (a) know that they’re giving up some control and (b) decide on how much control they’re going to give up.

Good examples of companies that have done social media well are EMC, which has ten bloggers, and Google, which has craploads of blogs. Now that’s distributing branding and marketing across the organizational structure!

Approaches to Social Media

Another key point that Jones and McMillian made was around how companies should approach social media. In their opinion (and in mine), what companies should do is first find where they are being talked about and then figure out how to approach the people who are doing the talking.

Instead, some companies take the build-it-and-they-will-come approach in which they first spend time and money building a social media infrastructure and then try to get people on to it. Often that’s wasteful and it doesn’t help their customers trust them any more or any better. To give you an example, read Jeremiah Owyang’s analysis on Wal-Mart and Target’s Facebook strategies. That’s a case in which companies have gotten to the right place (i.e. Facebook and not MySpace) but are still going about things in the wrong way.

The one time an Australian company’s own setup could have benefited from a bit of social media, McDonald’s Australia didn’t add any social media to its Make Up Your Own Mind campaign’s website. The site itself is great (and the campaign was fine, too) but if you want people to make up their own mind, you have to let them speak their mind as well. You can’t make up your mind if you can’t ask questions or make comments. And thus make-up-your-own-mind became let-us-tell-you-our-side, instead.

(Briefly) In the Australian Context

Off the top of my head, I can only think of only a handful of Australian companies that effectively use social media to connect with their customers — with the most notable ones being web, tech, and media companies. In fact, the companies I would have expected to see blazing the trail for social media in Australia — the big retailers and telcos — are nowhere to be seen! Like I’ve said before, this is both a problem and a massive opportunity. Here’s hoping it’s more of the latter!

[FYI: If you want to learn anything about any phone company or ISP in Australia you go to the Whirlpool forums.]