As I wrote in my previous blog post, I met with another recruitment consultant from Hudson this morning.  In order to introduce myself to her, I did some work on my elevator pitch and further developed my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In fact, I typed all this up and and gave her a printout of it. And, since I’m applying for an Internet-related position and the best place to learn more about me is indeed online, I added a section on that too.

Here’s what I came up with:

(Extended) Elevator Pitch

Experience: Six years of experience in IT consulting and management, over five of which were spent in the strategic planning, technical development, business integration, and marketing of websites, web portals, intranets, and social media sites. Overall, eight years of work experience.

Training: MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (see list of courses in this blog post, which I also included in the printout).

Immediate career goals: A management or consulting role that involves the alignment of business and marketing strategy with online strategy. This could include the formulation (i.e. research and analysis), implementation (i.e. administration and management), or further development (i.e. testing and advancement) of such a strategy. An online strategy includes internal and external marketing and communications and the use of social media to communicate with stakeholders internally and across the value chain.

Unique Selling Proposition

• Uniquely positioned between IT, marketing, and senior (strategic) management – with a background in IT and experience in all three areas
• Management and consulting experience in small start-ups, large multinationals, local and global non-profits, and government organizations
• Have been developing websites professionally since 1997; specialize in the use of social media
• Possess excellent written and oral communication skills; have experience in teaching and training

Online

• Website: http://insanityworks.org/ameel
• Professional blog: http://insanityworks.org/acme
• Personal blog: http://insanityworks.org/randomtangent
• LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ameelkhan
• Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/ameel

Comments?

So what do you think? Does that sum things up nicely?

My contract job at Linfox finished recently (I’ll write more about that when I continue my MBA-at-work blog post series) so I spent the last week watching the Olympics (which was awesome). Now that I’ve had a nice break, I’m back to looking for jobs.

An Unsuccessful Job Application

Actually, I did interview for a job during my last week at Linfox — the recruitment consultants at Hudson are very efficient — but, after three rounds of interviews and reaching the final stage of the process (with just two candidates in the running) I didn’t get end up getting it.

This was unfortunate because it was a good job, at a good company, and I really liked the people I would have been working with. Oh well. Such is life.

The Silver Lining

It’s not all bad, though: this was only my second serious job application since completing the MBA — i.e. an application to a permanent position that I really wanted to get and could then see myself growing with over the following year or two — and, in both cases, I reached the final stage before being dropped. [More on my job application philosophy here]

What this means is that I have what it takes to do these kinds of jobs — that is, I have the ‘can do’, ‘will do’, and ‘fit’, as my interviewers from both companies told me — it’s just that one of the other applicants was more appropriate for that particular role at that particular time. In other words, that applicant’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was more suited to that role than mine was. In the job I just applied to, for example, the winning applicant had the marketing agency experience that the company wanted.

This is good: this means the company is paying very close attention to the people it is hiring and, when it happens that my USP is the most suitable for that role, that company, and that team, I’ll win out over the other applicants and will know that the company did it for all the right reasons.

Next Steps

So, what next? Well, the people at Hudson have me on their radar — in fact I met with another recruitment consultant of theirs this morning — so I expect to get a good lead from them (they’re very good at what they do). Hopefully that lead will come sooner rather than later.

Otherwise, I continue to look for jobs online and continue to network for openings in the hidden job market. Let’s see how things go. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know. Thanks.

The Online Community Report just released its Online Community Compensation Study.

Most of the study’s key findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to people working in this space: the community team employs more women than men, most team members are between 31 and 50 years old, and most have over five years of work experience. However the compensation figures are a little higher than I expected at an average of US$81k (approximately AU$95k).

I also wasn’t expecting women to be earning 91% (on average) of what men are earning. Assuming that factors like experience, industry, average company salary, position in corporate hierarchy, department within the company, importance of community role for company, etc. have all been statistically removed from this analysis — and they probably haven’t all been removed — then the lower salary for women is most disappointing.

Meanwhile, the most heartening result from the study is, of course, the job satisfaction rating which is an average of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5 :)

FYI: OCR’s Key Resources blog post category is a great place to look if you want to start or further develop your online community.

Toby Ward writes on the Intranet Blog about a survey conducted by Robert Half Technology that found that over 70% of US CIOs don’t plan to use social media tools — such as blogs and wikis — in the next five years.

That number might sound a little daunting but, really, it isn’t.

Issues with the Survey Itself

Because these are aggregate numbers, they’re too generalized and don’t give us much information. In fact, they’re pretty useless: so what if 70% of US CIOs don’t plan to use social media in the next five years? What does that “70%” actually mean to you and me and to our company and its social media adoption decision? Not much.

A breakdown of the results by industry and company size would have been better…but even that wouldn’t have been enough. Had each social media tool included a follow-up question that asked “Why will you not be using this particular tool?” the survey may have been somewhat useful.

Also, “next five years” in technology or Internet time is ages! How can CIOs realistically predict whether or not they will be using a particular tool or technology five years from now? The question should have asked for a one-year prediction and the survey should then be conducted annually. Which is why Forrester’s surveys, or the annual Enterprise 2.0 survey conducted by McKinsey (which I wrote about earlier), are much more useful.

Issues with the Conclusion

That said, even the implicit conclusion — that most CIOs don’t see the benefits of social media in the enterprise — isn’t all that worrisome because true social media adoption rarely starts at the CIO level. More often that not, it’s bottom-up instead of top-down.

That is, employees first start to use social media on their own and among each other. Over time, the business begins to benefit from this. Once usage crosses a particular threshold — and the benefits become more obvious and more measurable — management (finally) realizes what’s going on and has social media (or just the particular tool in question) implemented across the entire organization.

This is pretty much the conclusion that Toby Ward reached as well. Read his complete post (with conclusion) on the Content Matters blog.

So What’s My Point?

Surveys like this provide neat sound bytes and are used as justification by senior management for not looking into social media.

So be careful when you talk to senior managers about social media usage and adoption in the enterprise: they usually don’t have a clue but, sometimes, they do have a little bit of knowledge (such as this survey) but turns out to be dangerous.

Over the last couple of weeks, Chris Brogan has been writing a series of fantastic primer/best-advice blog posts about social media on his blog. Make sure you read them:

• ‘My Best Advice About Social Media‘ (which follows-on from another most useful post on ‘20 Free eBooks About Social Media‘)
• ‘My Best Advice About Blogging‘
• ‘My Best Advice About Personal Branding‘
• ‘My Best Advice About Social Networking‘
• ‘Etiquette in the Age of Social Media‘
• ‘Sky News Interviews Me‘ (contains video interview on the basics of social media)

Oh, and here are a couple of more of his posts that are really good:

• ‘What I Want PR and Marketing Professionals to Know‘
• ‘Write Your LinkedIn Profile for the Future‘

Awesome work, Chris! Thanks.

CIO Magazine just published a really good article by Meridith Levinson called ‘Project Management: The 14 Most Common Mistakes IT Departments Make‘. It’s a good checklist to keep in mind no matter how good a project manager you are because there’s always the opportunity to do better. 

McKinsey recently published the results of its second annual survey of social media [1] usage in the enterprise: ‘Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results‘. (You need to register with the McKinsey Quarterly website to read the article, though).

The results, in one sentence, are encouraging: “Companies have adopted more Web 2.0 tools this year than in 2007 and are using them for higher-value purposes”. For a good overview of and commentary on the results, read Hadley Reynold’s article on this topic on the FASTForward blog.

[1] The term ‘Web 2.0′ is just plain silly. It’s like saying: “We now ship frozen food in refrigerated trucks via our road network so we should start calling it ‘Road 2.0′ because that’s an extension of what the network was originally created for. Regular warehouses are ‘Roads 1.0′ while refrigerated warehouses are ‘Roads 2.0′.” And so on.

ITWire’s Stan Beer reports that a number of Australian technology recruitment companies have signed on to make the iProfile their preferred CV template for candidates applying through them.

This sounds like an interesting idea and will probably make life easier for recruiters. I don’t know how it’ll work out for candidates, though. If candidates can retain their individuality despite the standard format — as the ‘The CV is Dead – Long Live the iProfile‘ video seems to indicate — then it should be okay. If not, it’ll commoditize them and that’s not good.

Since I haven’t actually seen the iProfile template — you can’t unless you sign up and they don’t have any samples you can view — I guess I’ll just have to wait and see (or, of course, sign up and take a look).

That said, the good thing about the iProfile standard is that a whole bunch of recruitment companies have signed up to work with it. Without that, it’d be no better than your standard Seek, LinkMe, or SixFigures online profile: good but maybe not as widely available as you’d want it to be. Also, the privacy and viewing controls that this system seems to have are really nice too.

More generally, I like the fact that this announcement evangelises the use of online CVs to the Australian recruitment industry. So while all recruitment agencies won’t be using the iProfile, maybe they’ll start to pay more attention to things like LinkedIn profiles and other social media attributes of their candidate pool. Here’s hoping.

I meant to post this…well, months ago but I completely forgot. I found it in my Windows Live Writer’s draft posts lists this afternoon and figured that, even though I’m late, its’ still well worth posting.

Jeremiah Owyang maintains ‘A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing‘ which he updated for 2008:

This document catalogs the many tools and tactics available for corporate web strategy in 2008. Even if your strategy or resource limitations restrict you from entering all spaces, awareness of the changes in our digital landscape are critical. This document is intended for decision makers roles such as CMO/VP/Director of Web and Marketing.

It’s an awesome and hugely important list of, well, everything you need (or could possible want) to think about for web marketing. You must take a look at it.