Who you want to be
Take a few moments now to look at the following digital properties.
- Your blog
- Google (for your name)
Do you see the person you are?
Or do you see the person you want to be?
If you don’t like what you see, if you see someone who isn’t inspiring to you or others, if you see someone who complains too much or doesn’t say enough of value, then make the conscious choice to change this now.
Who do you want to be? Who are you supposed to be?
Imagine a Future You, the person you want to be, the person you are supposed to be. What would you find in their digital channels? Would Future You be tweeting about a lukewarm burger or a cranky flight attendant to an audience of 50,000? (would anyone care?) Would Future You be relentlessly spamming your Fortune 500 executive connections on LinkedIn with random, pointless quotes or repetitive book pitches? Would Future You be waxing poetic about your intestinal bug and its vivid consequences for 2,000 words on your blog?
Probably not. Future You would probably be a great deal funnier, more noble, more insightful, more helpful, more kind, more gracious, more powerful, more connected, more wealthy, more happy. Take another few moments and decide what things Future You would think, say, write, and do. Make a list of things that Future You would be retweeted for, recommended about, or blogged about, and post that near your workstation, on the back of your phone, on your iPad case, or wherever you do your communicating with the world.
Here’s the good news. Future You is within your reach right now, beginning the moment you stop reading this post and put your fingers to the keyboard to communicate again. Put away Present You and start communicating with the world as close to Future You as you possibly can each day, and sooner than you think, they’ll be one and the same.
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How to arbitrage data and become a leader
If you’re unfamiliar with the word arbitrage, it means this:
In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.
If you extend the idea of arbitrage – uneven levels of supply and demand that benefit someone who can transfer supply to where demand is – then data arbitrage is the idea of taking information from information-rich areas and moving it to information-poor areas.
If you can develop the practice of data arbitrage, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a valuable, profitable skill that few other people have. Let me give you a couple of examples to jog your brain.
Here’s a tip I often cite in my Blue Sky Factory email marketing lectures. Suppose you are responsible for your company’s email newsletter. Rather than just guess randomly at what might be a good subject line for your newsletter, why not search for the words you think people would be using on Twitter? Let’s say you’re writing a newsletter about financial aid, which was my old career. Hit up Twitter search and suddenly it becomes clear what people are talking about right now.
- FennellaMiller: College process almost over , reviewing financial aid
- ashCiERA: need to go see what my financial aid looking like for the summer.. !
- jshureb: Bitin’ the bullet and sending back the financial aid letter………………..
There’s a very good chance people will respond more favorably to the words and language used by their peers rather than by something you just dreamed up one afternoon, which will in turn make your newsletter much more successful. In a very short amount of time, you’re taking data from a data-rich environment (Twitter) to a data-poor environment (your company’s newsletter) and achieving results that other people in the same role do not.
Second example: maybe you’re responsible for writing blog content for your paper business. You need to know what’s going to get people’s attention. Again, rather than just guessing or slapping together posts randomly, you head over to Quora and see what the hot topics are in paper.
- Why are legal pads always yellow?
- Is using 100% post-consumer recycled paper worth it?
- What sort of things could you do to make your business card look unique, especially if you’re hand-making them?
- What is the name of the process where a logo or text is pressed into paper?
People are asking questions, many of which you presumably have the answers to. You’ve got blog post titles and articles pre-written for you based on the questions people are asking, and as a bonus, you’ve got an audience primed to hear the answer once you’ve written it, since you’re answering their question! You’re arbitraging between a data-rich environment (Quora questions) and your blog (no questions), and then back again from your head (professional knowledge) back to Quora (people who want answers). Your blog will have content people are looking for, and as a side benefit, there’s a good chance you will achieve some impressive SEO results, since you’ll be using phrases people actually search for.
The lesson is simple: look for areas where information is rich and areas where information is poor. Find a way to broker that data between the two areas and at the very least, you’ll become an authority in the data-poor area, if not a community leader. If that community is your target audience, then there’s a good chance you’ll develop plenty of business from it as well, and at no cost other than your time and information-brokering abilities.
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Mergers & Acquisitions: Stay or go?
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the process of mergers and acquisitions (very roughly) and its implications for employees. Today, let’s talk about the career prospects for those employees.
Stay or go?
When companies merge, culture changes. Sometimes the change is slow and gradual, sometimes it’s immediate. In cases where a large company acquires a small one, the culture and environment of the target company can be obliterated overnight. Before you start making any decisions about things to do, you have to decide whether you even want to be a part of the new entity.
Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to research how things are at the other company. Start doing concerted searches on various forums and discussion posts about what the culture and level of happiness is for the other company (regardless of which one you’re in). If you find things aren’t quite so rosy, there’s a good chance that when the merger completes, things will be very not rosy in the merged company.
For that matter, if things aren’t so rosy in your own company, unless your company is likely to be dismantled and absorbed entirely into the acquiring company, things will actually get worse for a while. That should weigh on your decision to stay or go as well.
Your decision: go.
If you choose the path of go, then you need to immediately begin building out your base (actually, you should always be doing that no matter where you are or how happily employed you are). Mergers and acquisitions tend to take a long time – months, sometimes years – so if you’ve just heard about one, you have a little bit of cushion to get moving.
When I was doing recruiting and placement back in the day, I always advised people of my golden rule: never leap unless you know where you’re going to land. Don’t ever quit on the day you read about the merger on Mashable or in the New York Times unless you’ve got something lined up.
While you still have access to coworkers and resources, take the time to quantify and document all that you’ve done in your current role. If you have a sense of timing (say, from a press release about the merger), then take on or get involved with a project that will have a quantifiable impact and will likely be done before the merger is complete as a showcase piece for your personal portfolio.
Take the time to set up a thorough, complete profile on LinkedIn and garner as many legitimate recommendations as you can, especially from current coworkers, supervisors, and subordinates if you have any. Obviously, if you’ve done nothing noteworthy, this will be a harder task than if you’ve racked up some accomplishments.
We’ll cover many more of these tips in an upcoming social job search Webinar.
Your decision: stay.
If you choose the path of stay, then continue building out your base, but stay as attuned as possible to what will be changing in the organization. Especially in larger corporate mergers, there will be both overlap of job functions as well as new positions being created. Take advantage of your internal network to tune into what’s happening. Make a point to routinely visit human resources for internal job postings, not only to see if there are lateral or upward moves you can make, but also to look for the tone and tenor of what might be changing based on what the organization is looking to hire for.
Use social media to your advantage and find as many of your coworkers as well as future coworkers in the other company, then follow them and listen closely. See again if you can garner any sense of tone and information about what’s going on from the biggest possible picture. Do the same as above for yourself as well with regards to LinkedIn. Gathering legitimate recommendations for your profile about your current work is a stupid-simple asset to create that provides very public proof of your competence.
Here’s a obvious-but-not-obvious secret from the world of open source intelligence gathering: lots of little things add up. No one will outright talk about major organizational changes or major moves in a merger – such things are usually confidential. However, information leaks in little pieces all over the place. Let’s say, for example, that you’re following the developers you’ve identified in your organization and suddenly, simultaneously, their posts on Facebook or Twitter go from casual everyday stuff to career-focused stuff, or their posts go from average mood to decided negative all at once, all together. Combine that with sightings of the head of development spending a lot of time in a suit, talking to visiting executives from the acquiring company, and you might get a sense that your developer team has been identified for headcount reduction.
If your company is publicly traded, look for what your executives and other executives are doing with their stock shares, as they are legally required to disclose insider stock trades. If you suddenly see every major executive dumping shares, perhaps the merger isn’t going as well as it should be.
Ultimately, if you choose the path of stay, you have to do as much as possible to stay informed while racking up as many accomplishments as possible so that in a contest between you and an overlapping employee in the other organization, the only rational choice is you.
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Padcasting from the iPad and Garageband
Garageband for the iPad came out in the App Store and I gave it a test, doing some “padcasting”. It’s a very polished interface, typical high quality Apple standards, but there are some gotchas. Watch more in the 2 minute video.
Mobile editing of audio is awesome for all podcasters, and you can interchange desktop Garageband projects with the mobile version (sync through iTunes), so if sound quality is important, record on the desktop with your awesome gear and then send the file to the iPad for editing while on the go.
The glitch in the video with the recorder coming to a dead stop was easily solved – my iPad was out of disk space. Make sure if you’re getting an iPad 2 to spring for disk space or you’re going to run out really, really fast.
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Experimenting with premium content
In my next newsletter coming out some time next week, I’ll be experimenting with premium content using Blue Sky Factory’s Publicaster email marketing software. I’ve just about got all the pieces assembled and figured out, so that everyone will get the newsletter, but premium members will see more content in the actual newsletter than non-premium members. For example, a paragraph or a section might not be included for non-premium members, but would be there for premium members.
If you’d like to participate in this, it’s really easy to become a premium member, and no money is required. Just make sure you are subscribed with all of the information filled out on the newsletter page. What I’m going to do is pretty simple: I’ll do a database export of everyone who provided complete information and mark you as premium. If you’re already subscribed, make sure your information is updated so that everything is filled out.
What sort of premium content will be included that would make it worth it? I’ll drop this hint: some of my favorite WordPress plugins (and why).
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Sign up for the Facebook Analytics webinar
Updated March 3: The webinar has been recorded and is now available by clicking here.
There was such ridiculously positive demand for a re-run of the Facebook Analytics webinar from Social Fresh Tampa that I’m going to record it and make it available in the near future as a webinar on demand. If you’d like to be notified when it’s available, fill out this form. Be sure to read it as you fill it out so that you know what’s going to happen. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader of some kind or in an email client, you’ll want to click here to get to the actual form.
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