Randi has been actively involved in the direct hire staffing business for many years, as a second generation recruiter.

The online world has allowed Randi to mine sites such as LinkedIn and Monster.com to get introduced to people who she might not have previously encountered, while simultaneously gaining insights into companies who she can help find candidates. As a relationship business, using all of these tools helps maintain contact with people and growing the extended network.

Randi stills sees hiring taking place even in this challenging economy, particularly with people who have interactive marketing experience.  She cautions candidates not to jump at the first offer simply because the need to find is job is so strong …. rather she tries to counsel that candidates should not settle on a salary unless absolutely necessary.

It truly is a collaborative effort among recruiters, candidates, and client companies so that the best placements are made for a win win scenario for everyone.

Randi’s Rules for successfully finding a position:

• Be proactive, work to establish a relationship with the recruiter so they may best represent you.

• No matter the circumstance, always put on a happy face. You can’t complain about the situation that you find yourself in.

• Have a great resume that demonstrates successes in the previous position. It is also vital to have good recommendations who will vouch for your work.

For those of you just entering the work force, Randi cautions about posting things online that may impact your ability to locate a position in the future. It may be cute and funny now, but there are employers who are constantly using Google search to find more information about a candidate than appears on a resume.

If you would like to contact Randi to see if she can help you to locate that new position, she can be reached through her web site at www.recrutingspec.com, via email she is at Randi @ RecrutingSpec (dot) com, or phone 770.392.4255

Sports organizations have not embraced the features to any great degree yet, but for entities ranging from professional teams to youth organizations there are ways to ensure the participants and fans can be integrated into the efforts.

At this stage there are many more sports bloggers who provide insights into the workings of the teams that they cover, than the actual teams or organizations themselves.  Some of our favorites are JB_Launchingpad,  Coryh64, DodgersBlog, Ducksnorts … even an auto racing blogger on twitter, Brutonnb.

For the younger generation of professional athletes, Cameron postulates that by developing and nourishing a group of followers, the athlete will gain an advantage in terms of landing lucrative endorsement contracts. Nascar auto racing is a perfect example of how the fan and player already interact and allegiances are formed, but now with social media tools the drivers who connect at a more personal level will have a long term benefit for their team and their own success.  For example, Joey Logano is a rookie Cup Driver who we have had some connection with in the past, we could see him participating directly in social media, providing insights into the inner workings of the race team, communicating directly with the fans and growing a more engaged community in order to reach the pinnacle of the racing elite.  In this sport in particular, success can be measured by how well you race and how well you develop a fan following.

As an early tactic for building these greater communities, sports organizations could provide a more in depth look at the action on the field through the eyes of the participants.  Why not have an after the game breakdown by an “insider” with details and analysis on a forum, blog or a live chat session with Q&A.  In order for it to be truly unique transparent dialogue that is the hallmark of social media, it can’t be a marketing or broadcast person assigned to interpret the situations. It must be an participant’s point of view that will gain a loyal following.

For the amateur sports or organizations such as the Cape Cod Baseball League, social media can lend itself to assisting in fund raising, maintaining top of mind awareness during the off seasons, and generating excitement for the players who will be participating on that team during the upcoming season.

This is a topic that we will focus in on with much more specificity detailing specific sports and levels of organization.

But in the spirit of the holidays, here’s to hoping that all of the listeners to the Overflow podcast have a very special season.  We truly appreciate all of you tuning in while we work through this new media, and wish you significant success in 2009!

We met some really cool people here locally who are also going through the process of establishing their networks and providing their expertise to either clients or employers.  It would be great to help us post-meeting to see info about who attended, and who we might want to connect with on Twitter and other social platforms.

Acting in our previous businesses, we haven’t attended many of these types of events because they turn out to be groups of people trying to impress one another by name dropping clients and proclaiming expertise through buzzword hyperbole.  There was some of that going on Thursday night, but actually the social media space appears to be different (at least for the time being). I think there was an attempt by many to truly get beyond the “buzzword bingo” and more after helping to develop the group expertise.

The stated topic of conversation was social media in retailing …

There are some customer service aspects to SM in retail of course that could be explored in depth:

• listening tools in order to hear the online conversations
• ways to be responsive to what customers are stating
• sharing relevant information about policies and pricing structures
• product support
• understanding customers expectations

…….. but it turned mostly to a discussion about Spam & Twitter.

One attendee brought up a project that he is working on, where during the checkout process you can tweet to your friends about the purchase and get an incentive discount. This generated a lot of discussion. His concern comes about because he has recognized an ethical dilemma in his technology. Although he can accomplish it, does he, and does the entire community want that capability to be an option during a transaction? He gets big props for even considering this issue.

In the end, I suspect the technology would end up being misused and potentially ruining the huge benefits derived from a service like Twitter.  When you are directly compensated for sending a tweet, it equates to selling out the network for a price.  You could do it, but it’s too big of a risk of turning off your entire community … It’s like hiding affiliate links in your tweet stream, or “selling Amway to your family”.

Don’t do it, there is no good to come of it. It’s the same backlash towards the Magpie ad network, which also entered into the conversation but actually did have some supporters in the group.

We were very glad to have attended the event and believe that we will be able to benefit greatly as the conversation continues to evolve within the group. We would like to suggest scheduling a followup session that excludes the dominant topic of Twitter, so that we can focus the session on all of the other elements within social media.  We could help each other determine the best practices for using all of the elements of social media in retailing.

The sponsor for the night was a blog aggregator called ReGator .. they were in the top three of Mashables Open Web Awards which should be announced later this week. (Followup note: It looks like Regator lost to Hubdub.com in their category — Congats on making it this far guys, best of luck going forward!)

Cameron and I were involved in a conversation this past Friday evening with StorySeeker from the land down under. According to his bio: “Generation W - succeeding at not thinking old. Looking to help the ’scared to start’. I speak in the stupid english language” The night turned into a fun conversation about music and politics.

Unfortunately, the night had a negative moment when a user profile with a sexually explicit name started following me.  I got really upset, not that I’m offended by seeing it, more that the entire Twitter experience could be completely undermined as new adopters come on board and are harassed by this type of communication.

Others quickly informed me that the Twitter folks are very active in keeping this type of thing out of the stream and have made concerted efforts to filter this type of spam.  I have to give kudos to the team since this is the first time that it has happened to me, but should this issue become pervasive, the experience of the community will quickly disintegrate.

Cameron’s concern is also about auto reply message spam when picking up new followers.  When the first impression of someone is a “thanks for following, now here is my link”, the pact between individuals is tainted in this social community.  Blatant, pervasive selling is not the point of social media, the point is to engage in real human dialogue and if it also leads to connections and networking, fantastic.  If selling is the first thing out of the gate, then you are the proverbial insurance salesman at the dinner party, hawking your business.

Amber Naslud (AmberCadabra) at AltitudeBranding.com did a great post about this topic, called Thanks For Following, Now Click On My Junk. She has taken it to a whole level of “rebeling against craptastic links”  with a Click My Junk meme, plus apparel at Cafepress. In true community fashion, $1 of each item is given to Autism Research.

We also need to address a fine line regarding maintenance of social networks, while balancing a healthy home life.  In the consultant role we need to be able to effectively recommend the best approaches for our clients, so are therefore burdened to adopt early and participate often. However, wives and children aren’t communicating with us via these tools … so we need to unplug and be available to them.

In our business roles we need to prioritize the most appropriate places for clients to see ROI, and to be in a position to respond when their customer base arrives on the scene. We want our clients to give their customers a great greeting when they arrive.  It is a given that in order to understand a community, you must participate fully in the community.

One final question for social media marketers.  Is it part of the job description to “ghost write” or communicate on behalf of a client in the social media space (with the caveat that you are not representing yourself as that person), but are spoon feeding words to the client and pointing out where to speak?

Let us know in the comments what you think.

Our concern is not whether his claims are right or wrong, whether his business claims are accurate etc… Our concern comes from the point of view of a Crisis Communications standpoint. How should he respond now that he has reputation has been challenged and negative criticisms have appeared in numerous blog posts? How will he repair the situation now that any new client will come across this fire that flamed up online?

Frank makes the distinction between reputation management and character management. Reputation management is what you “hope” people believe about you and character management is what you “are” … Matt is going to have to deal with repairing the character element.  By being somewhat contrite and stating the case that he took his action without understanding the full ramifications .. and letting it die down, he can then get to work on building back his reputation.

In the end, he wants to be relevant, so he needs to start acquiring testimonials identifying specific claims as accurate. Although there will be positive and negative response to these claims due to his reputation situation at the moment, Frank coins the term O+ Communications as what he is striving for .. more positive than negative responses.

As Frank says, “A good apology can keep you in the White House, ask Bill Clinton”

Most importantly, Matt should start to develop a dialogue, getting feedback by personally asking for advice from other online sources. This will turn the one way communications of a PR Web blast and a simple apology into the basis of Social Media communications which contains two-way input.

In the end he shouldn’t pout about the situation, just take solid efforts to engage the online community to help him eliminate his mistakes in the future.

Authored by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger with a forward by Thomas Petzinger, this book articulates the changes taking place in the business landscape today.

The gist of this book, is that there is a new conversation happening online about your brand, company or business and you have two choices to make.  You can make the choice to continue to hide behind corporate collateral that contains polished prose, with carefully crafted pronouncements that fall on deaf ears.

Or you can choose to participate in the conversation.

The definition of a conversation is an interchange of thoughts and ideas between people, and you can participate by listening, inviting dialogue, responding to the input whether it is good or bad … and simply coming out from your corporate hiding places.

At Fluid Media, our efforts are intended to help potential clients into this new realm of business by understanding the hesitations, outlining in a precise manner the rationale, strategies and tactics for embarking on this new level of community building and overseeing the process of execution and evaluation.

We are finding resistance from people that we speak to.  Many are choosing to remain within the comfortable confines of the top down, one way communication directed at customers (and employees by the way) rather than accept that business is changing and they need to get on board, or that train will leave the station without them.

Our peers are advising that we simply move on to other prospects, that the opportunities are endless and we should not waste our time with potentials who are not quick to engage in a consulting contract.  To our detriment, we are not capable of letting go that easily and we continue to evangelize our perspective with the contacts that we have, in the hope of persuading them that this is the future of business.

We have come to the conclusion that our approach will be to continue to promote the benefits of this new business paradigm in order to educate, show with specific evidence that the conversation is in fact taking place, and ultimately to earn the trust of prospective clients that we are capable of assisting them on this journey.

Are you standing at the station, but hesitant about getting on board the train and embarking on this new approach to business?  Leave us a message in the comments section, or contact us at jmagennis@befluid.com

We can discuss the conversations that are taking place about your business and your approach to engaging them … at the very least we can talk about The Cluetrain Manifesto.

However, we do talk about the issue of iTunes crapping out and losing the purchased songs that were in the library on Cameron’s hard drive. Apple now offers a service where you can make backups of the products that you buy, but if you are not diligent you can end up losing them.

There is a service that I used called iPod Access from Findley Designs which allowed me to transfer the files from my iPod back into iTunes to recover music lost in a PC drive crash earlier this year.  It is important to prevent an iTunes sync before proceeding or else the missing files will be lost.

The new iPod 2.2 release came through and the greatest feature discovered so far is the ability to download podcasts through wifi without having to go through the sync process with iTunes.  In an all out effort to find great podcasts to listen to, this feature makes it easy to seek and find the content you are looking for.

One missing element on the iPhone version however is that you cannot get any episode recaps or summaries about the program itself, so I am still in the process of promoting and expanding two bookmarking locations and encouraging others to contribute to the lists.

A Friendfeed room called Podcast Place has been set up, along with a Ma.gnolia Group where all are welcome to drop by and to put links to their favorite podcasts and give us a taste of why you like it so much.  Please send the group URL’s to others so that they can add to the community as well.

For the real Geeks out there .. The end of the mission for the Mars Phoenix Rover happened at the beginning of November and on the 10th transmitted it’s final tweet from Mars “01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3″ …  over the weekend I was thinking about the fact that there is some sort of historical aspect to the human race exploration of the nearest planet, the discovery of ice and how it was communicated directly to over 39,000 followers on a daily basis while the mission was taking place. I snagged the RSS feed and have tucked it away for posterity.

Also, here is a nice short tribute video to Phoenix by JPL.

The Disqus commenting system has been a great addition to the blogs that we have set up throughout this past year, and really feel strongly about making an effort to interact with others via comments. Having a system that allows you to follow others as they leave comments can have an even larger benefit than following on Twitter, simply because a comment tends to be more thought out and in depth. However, the downside to Disqus is that not every blog has integrated the system, so you can only see a partial picture of the content appearing in the comments across the web.

The commenting system that resolves that dilemma is called BackType where the email address that you use when logging in to leave a comment is what is tracked in the comment stream.  So any comment that you have left, no matter what commenting system in use, will appear in the comment stream.  We highly recommend setting up a profile and start following.

Check out the comment widget in the left sidebar of this post.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

We felt it appropriate to christen this series with a situation that is a very hot topic at the moment, which is the campaign that was launched by McNeil Consumer Health, the parent company of the Motrin pain relief medicine.

We are not here to rehash the entire episode from the initial launch of the campaign to the bloggers who posted, and initiated a Twitter campaign that expanded exponentially until main stream media picked up on the firestorm, which ultimately generated an apology from Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil.

As well as an apology on the Motrin.com web site:

This is all background information for the conversation that we had with Frank in which he provides insight into the episode from a Crisis Communications Strategist’s perspective.

Key elements of our conversation include:

• Motrin was not prepared at the launch of the campaign to monitor the conversation that was taking place regarding their brand, which was particularly egregious as they launched the campaign over the weekend and the delay in response only fed into the volume of negative reaction.  The company could have very easily set up a search group in a Twitter app such as Tweetdeck to see any tweets about their brand, and could have Google Alerts monitoring news and blog posts about them.

• A more “human” response should be implemented immediately from the company via setting up a twitter account and preparing a video response to address the situation.  The corporate apology is not sufficient enough to quiet the controversy.

• Engage the more vocal bloggers to present the approach that they were trying to take with the campaign and solicit feedback.

• It appears that the campaign was a quick turnaround tactical approach to reaching a particular demographic, and the typical time and focus group research conducted on major campaigns was lacking.  The agency was probably

• McNeil now has the opportunity since they have the attention, to become conversational with real human communication detailing their true intentions, and become a good case study for how to respond to crisis situations correctly. There is a learning curve, and they probably won’t make this mistake again.

Let’s hope that the Motrin experience can be used as a bellwether for brands awareness and understanding of the impact of social media, and can be looked back upon as an episode that instigated an acceptance of progressive marketing strategies that incorporate listening and communicating tools.

What do you think? What are your reactions to the whole episode from a Social media standpoint?

Today in the Overflow podcast we revisit these aspects of the business model plus the exciting addition of “twitterfied” content produced during the recent election cycle and planned for the future.

The basis of the programming is user produced “pods” that are submitted via the web site and voted on by the registered users of the site, with top vote getters making it to broadcast. Pod content can consist of everything from News, Politics, Music, Comedy etc.. plus the network producers will constantly develop assignments for a specific topic that they would like to run on TV.

Concurrently, advertisers provide users with the bare minimum of material to work with such as a logo bug, tag line, headline, video or billboard and allow them to produce their own commercials called VCAMs.  It costs very little to the advertiser since they don’t have production costs .. but if the ad is successful for them, they can choose to pay the producer and run it on other media outlets.  So they’ve witnessed the production cost savings & have had their own mini focus group to see how effective the ads are prior using the creative on other channels.

Here is an example produced by 21 year old Andrew David Watson (no relation) of Philadelphia.

During the election coverage this fall, Current rolled out the integration of a live Twitter feed on the screen as the debates were taking place called Hack the Debate. So as you were viewing what the candidates were saying, you could also see what the great community of the electorate was saying simultaneously.  It has to have been a double check for the statements and claims of each of the candidates, in the long run it will continue to ensure the the campaigns of the future remain more factual.

Information that has been disseminated recently indicates that Current TV is going to continue this type of integrated content with Twitter in the future, and plans to launch another programming channel focusing on movie content.

Let us know …. Do you watch Current TV?  What do you think about the quality of the content, the format of the programming and especially the VCAM user produced advertising?

“I think I need an intervention. The iPhone App Store is my dealer and the apps are my crack. 9:22 PM Nov 9th from web”

These are the applications that we discuss:

ITalk - This application turns the iPhone into a recorder.  With one touch you can record at three different quality levels Good/Better/Best.  There is a free version that contains advertisements or for .99 cents you’ve got the ad free version.  The companion iTalk Sync allows you to drag and drop the recordings through Wifi to the desktop for archiving. The Mac Sync is available now, and the PC version is now in public beta.

Say Who Application, which is brought to you by the same people as Say Where, is a voice dialer where speaking into the phone will search your contact list and bring up the name that you are trying to call. It’s not entirely hands free because you still need to click to dial, but it’s better than scrolling through a list of contacts.

Twitterific - Currently the best way to communicate via Twitter on your iPhone.  Easy to read and respond to your tweets, and includes the user’s avatar so it’s easy to see who is making a post.  It’s free and includes advertising every 50 posts.

LaTwit - is an app that you pay for.  It’s $2.99 but provides you with the ability to post to Laconica based applications like Identi.ca and Twit Army.  For the smaller Laconica communities I generally view the public stream. Since they are not a voluminous as Twitter’s public stream they can give you a better sense of the conversation taking place. This app lets you set whether you want to open in the public or friends timeline, which is think is a nice option. Coming soon will be the ability to send private DM messages.

Flickup - is an application developed by Martin Gordon this is an easy way to get pictures from your iPhone to your Flickr account - Joe’s Flickr Stream & Cameron’s Flickr Stream. Of course, the limitation is that the camera on the iPhone is terrible, so we’re hoping for an upgrade in the future (video too?) .. But with a few easy steps you can upload the picture to Flickr as well as send a tweet with a link to the photo.  This is a great way to let your twitter friends know and see what you are up to!

Pandora - Rock and roll!! Wifi lets you listen to your Pandora stations on the phone.  If you are away from home but still have a jonesing for your perfectly tuned music genome project, here you go. Subscribe to our profiles Joe’s Pandora & Cameron’s Pandora.

New York Times - this app gives you access to the online version of the paper. It’s still a little bit buggy as there are many times when it will just shut down, forcing you to go back out to the menu to come back in.  It’s so graphics and content intensive it’s probably just a matter of bandwidth.  This free app is best if you have wifi access, but you can also use it in “Airplane” mode once you sync (open the app) all of the current content is on your phone.

ESPN Game called CameraMan this one is a brain teaser game for the phone that tests your memory and visual recognition.  Remember when you were young and had to look at two pictures and determine what was different? This is the sports fan version of the game.

Ringtones - we touch on ringtones in the podcast but both admit to not having anything but the standard tones that come with the phone. It’s ironic but we like our music too much to let it become and intrusive ring.

Google App .. gives you the ability to access all of your services such as Gmail, Gtalk, the calendar, etc. through the phone. Since we are very cloud computing based here at Fluid Media we can get to pretty much anything we need.  However, the best use of the applicationt that I find in particular is the RSS reader.

Finally, the really important element of our conversation comes at the very end when we discuss making purchase (or download) decisions based upon the ratings that other users have given a particular application.  Ultimately, any brand or company is interested in having some form of conversion take place and in this new social media world it is proven that the static corporate communications are less likely to convince a buyer than will peer group recommendation.

If you are not using some form of commenting or discussion functionality in your communications processes, then you are falling behind.  Word of Mouth (not an affliate link) marketing is where we are now.

Do you have a favorite iPhone app that we should get?  Let us know in the comments section.