I was searching for a job on Malakye for a year and half so I know how discouraging, writing cover letter after unacknowledged cover letter can be, but I’m writing today to give you just one more reason to keep your eyes on the prize.  Doing a job you love will make your work easier.

As I pick up more Marketing and PR duties for H2O Audio, it’s so much simpler for me to figure out our audience, because I’m a part of it.  I love the stuff we make, I had some of it before I even worked here, and now I can’t imagine never having the option to surf or swim with music.  So when it comes time for me to write a press release or the next Facebook post, it’s much easier to be engaging, sound excited and be creative, because I really do think what we do it pretty darn cool.

Whether you’re designing clothes, marketing shoes, selling accessories, wherever you fall in this industry, being a legitimate consumer and prophet of your own products or services, will help you immensely.  You’ll be happier, your job will be easier (or at least seem that way) and you’ll really be stoked when you get free stuff. 

I realize that not everyone can live the dream, let’s face it, there’s crappy jobs that need to be done.  But I think a lot of people can get closer than they realize, you’re never stuck unless you think you are, so keep looking and keep trying till you stumble upon a winner.

Keep writing those cover letters (DO IT.  They make a difference.  And THINK when you write them too.) eventually enough persistence and patience will pay off.

Recently, Facebook held its F8 conference and outlined new programs and features aimed at keeping Facebook the dominating presence on the social web.  If you’re involved in Marketing, PR, Advertising, own a small business or just have a fetish for social media, I’m sure you’ve seen or heard something about Facebook’s Open Graph API or Open Graph Protocol.  If you’re looking for an explanation of exactly what those terms mean, sorry, you won’t find that here.  There are plenty of places around the web that can speculate about what this means for your business, your privacy, the future of marketing, and the world as we know it.

Blame it on the down economy or shrinking attention spans, but however you spin it, mobile, social media is growing and changing at warp speed right now.  You can’t fault people for wanting to be the one who’s most connected and most knowledgeable.  ‘Cause after all, the person or business on top, the one with the most market share, gets the biggest chunk of the hard earned cash that consumers are much less likely to part with these days.  But continue on this path and soon you’ll be leading a life of what Scott Belsky calls “reactionary workflow”*.  By trying to keep up with multiple channels of constant input, it becomes a job unto itself to just stay afloat, meaning that larger goals and the type of thinking that brings about true innovation, may be shelved in favor of trying to keep up with the changes at Facebook or how to use Four Square.

Pete Cashmore noted that social media has become increasingly complex, and that soon, no one may be able to stop Facebook as a social media power, simply because no one understands it.**    Most changes Facebook or any social media outlet makes are aimed at making the user experience easier, better and more convenient, while also integrating some engine for generating profit.   But as the front end simplifies, the backend grows more complicated and technologically tedious.  Judging by the amount of abandoned Twitter accounts, I think it’s pretty much common knowledge now that you can’t just post a profile and automate your way to easy money. 

At the end of the day, social media is just that, SOCIAL.  It’s networks of people, of consumers and really the rules haven’t changed.  The companies that are using web 2.0 successfully are the ones who started with a grand plan.  It’s time to go back to square one.  Stop thinking about websites and accounts and just think about your consumer, how could you better serve them?  Think about yourself, what would you like to get in your inbox or Facebook news feed?  Set aside some time or call a meeting to think big, REALLY big, about how you’d like to communicate with and better serve your consumers and clients.  Out of all this chaos, there are some amazing tools out there that allow you to target specific consumers in useful and productive ways, but they don’t all work for everyone, and they definitely don’t work if used incorrectly.  Fill your Facebook Fan page with posts about what you had for lunch and pleas for more fans and you’re just adding to the noise.  Create your ultimate social marketing plan, stock it full of value laden features, then a find programmer or tech savy person to get it up and running. 

The good news is, if you can dream it, these days there’s probably a way to make it a reality.  Want to text someone a discount coupon on a brand they’re interested in the moment they step foot in your store?  How about a first time visitor being able to logon to  your on-line store with their Facebook password and instantly see items their friends have purchased?  Yup, that’s not crazy talk either.  Don’t get caught up in just keeping up.   Think big, make time for creativity, do the research and get the help you need to do things right.  With just a little focus, you’ll be able to escape the reactionary workflow cycle and emerge successful in this brave new world, and hopefully, gain just a bit of peace and clarity in the process.

 *You can read more about reactionary workflow in the article, “How To Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive”, from Scott Belsky.

 **Read about Pete Cashmore’s take on social media dominance in “Nobody Can Stop Facebook Because Nobody Understands Facebook”.

“People are social animals, and love to move in packs. But they also like to purposefully individuate.”  ~Kovas Boguta, founder of Infoharmoni

After coming across the quote above, I started thinking about social trending.  As a general rule, most people aim to fit in, rather than stray from the pack.  So what does that mean for a consumer driven, product based business?  It means you need to know what moves the pack, what drives them to buy, what they’re interested in.  

In hindsight, social trending is not really rocket science. Take my generation for example; we all grew up on Saved By The Bell, where Zach Morris’ became infinitely cooler for having this amazing device called a “cell phone”.  It was bigger than a brick, probably weighed just as much and had an industrial antenna protruding from the top, but man, it was awesome, make calls prank calls from anywhere, WHAT?!  Check in with my generation today and it’s not surprising that many of us have a serious iPhone addiction.   If you look at the kids just below me, many of them just about peed themselves the first time Miley Cirus posted a YouTube video.  So again it’s no surprise that video is popping up everywhere, on phones, ipods and dominating the internet.  And probably one of the best demonstrations of the above quote in action is Facebook.  Across generations, Facebook has become the single most influential site on the net with the average U.S. internet user spending more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined [according to Ben Parr on Mashable].  So if you’re a consumer company today, it’s pretty well known that it would behoove you to have mobile access, the means for basic video recording and production, and an interactive and engaging Facebook presence.  But what’s next?  Predicting where the pack will move in the future, is not nearly as easy as analyzing the past.  

So, how do you keep up?  One way is to always have a member of your organization on safari, sitting quietly in the brush and watching the pack.  Noting what they’re interested in, where are they going, and readying everyone to run if they quickly decide to change direction.  Or better yet, if you’re innovative and intuitive, you can create an oasis and attract the herd to you, then like Zach Morris’ cell phone sway an entire generation. 

In a time of increasingly short attention spans and ever expanding choices things are bound to move quickly.  But now more than ever, there are many ways to tune in to your customer and provide them what they want before they figure out they wanted it.  It’s just a matter of diligently listening, observing and finding the next place and/or item the pack can use to purposefully individuate.

“In the nine quarter-century periods since the American republic was founded in 1789, the one with highest economic growth and job creation was the period from 1983 through 2007.  Particularly remarkable — there were just four quarters (out of 100) of negative economic growth in that entire interval, says … [the] Chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.”

 Usually I try to keep my posts here pretty positive, but according to the statement above, a good majority of my life has been spent in the most prosperous times EVER.  So when most everyone I know is working harder for less money, it’s no small task to keep your outlook rosy.  While there are signs that things getting a bit better, I highly doubt that we’re going to return to those “golden quarter” times instantly.  It’s a sobering thought that in the future you’re just gonna have to work harder for everything, whether it be a home loan, a successful business or that Tahitian vacation you’ve always wanted. 

If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, then your work NEEDS you.  Everyone has scaled back to the bare minimum, and if you’re still there, that means that you’re important and you’ve got lots of work to do.  So now, more than ever, is a time for balance.  A time to prioritize, get organized, get focused and really investigate the return of investment on your time.  You often hear about the return of investment on dollars, but time is just as precious.  If you’re not able to get the time you need to recharge, to see family and friends, to workout, to sleep enough, whatever it is you need to feel like a human and not a hamster on an endless wheel, you’re not going to be as present and useful as you could be, in all aspects of your life.  Take a good look at how you spend your time; are the projects that are the most consuming the ones with the most impact?

Yes, life post Golden Quarter may not be as easy as it once was, but I think it’s a good opportunity to be more conscious, and a good challenge to be more efficient.  Can you be twice as busy, just as successful and just as happy?  I think a lot of people have realized that what has happened over the past few years has just been one big wake up call, a giant ladle stirring the pot and the realization that no matter whom you want to blame, in the end, we as a society, as an economy, failed. Americans don’t like failures and we’re all in this together, so now the challenge becomes not be controlled by hard work, but to be in control of your time, with the clarity of mind pick up the pieces and energy enough to innovate and do better next time.   Do you know what you need in your life to be able to do that?

With my intern cronies at one of my first radio internships...look how happy I look in my late 90's sunglasses...

After losing my job last January, I had severance pay and a surprising amount of options.  Some people told me to travel, some asked if I’d enroll in grad school, others told me about the wonders of day filled with X-box Live and on-line poker.  At the same time, an old co-worker offered me a minimum wage paying part time job. He was drowning in work and needed some good help, so I obliged.   Part of my duties at my part time gig were to once again be in charge of a small herd of interns.  It’d been part of my job before so it was easy to step back into.  But the difference this time was that in the mornings I kept college kids busy with filing I didn’t want to do, then became the one doing the filing in the afternoons.  At the same time I picked up the part time job, I’d worked my contacts and gotten myself an internship with Osiris shoes** which meant that I dispensed menial tasks in the morning, then drove 10 mins across town and became the one picking them up in the afternoon.

I kept this up for about 6 months and what I learned during this time was that the things I hadn’t wanted to do in the morning, I had no problem doing in the afternoon.  Without deadlines, an overflowing inbox or really any responsibility, I was more than happy to file papers or compile tedious reports. And this is the beauty of internships.  To use a business cliché, it’s “a win-win situation”.  As an employer you get to pass off a few time consuming tasks, plus have the opportunity to hire a tested employee that requires less training.  As an intern you get the invaluable chance to gain contacts, real world experience and to test drive a job with little commitment.

Every company is unique in the way they run, they way information travels and the way employees relate to each other.  So you can write all the resumes, get all the degrees and read all the books you want, but you’re never going to be able to gain the same knowledge you get from diving in and getting your hands dirty.  I think internships are the modern day equivalent of being an apprentice and I recommend it to everyone.  Better employees, less turn over and the possibility that you’ve helped someone decide what to do with their life.  I’ve talked to skeptics who think you should never give your time away for free, but it’s not just free labor, it’s a labor of love, and when you love what you do, to me, that equals success.

**I ultimately had to leave Osiris, ‘cause there just weren’t any jobs to be had, darn economy….But much love to everyone over there!  They were more than awesome to me and I still rock the shoes!!  It wasn’t until 2 months later that I came across the opportunity at H2O Audio that led to my current job…

No one has done this before.  Sure the economy has faltered in the past, but now add social networks with the population of entire continents, sound bites have been reduced even further to the 140 characters of Twitter, and there’s an entire generation of kids out there who will never know life without the Jetson’s like invention called Skype.  It’s indeed a brave new world out there.  We’ve totally changed the way information moves in our society and that effects everything, from business to personal and all that falls in between.

The Social Media Prism

We’re all looking at each other, barely figuring things out as fast as they’re moving and although people in this industry weren’t able to offer me much advice, there was no lack of support.  I’m so grateful to a huge list of people who took the time to answer ALL my questions, offer up their own stories and tell me to hang in there.  There’s a saying out there that goes something like, ‘hard times show you what people are really made of’, and the people in this industry have shown me nothin’ but love.  What better motivation could there be to keep up the quest to work along side these fine folks?

Tried and true advice may be hard to come by, but I feel like support is just as good.  The fact that no one has been here before leaves a lot of room for possibility. If we take the time to teach and learn from each other, then maybe we can straighten out some of our financial problems and answer other important questions such as how to read the Social Media Prism or finally determine the official past tense of “To Twitter”.  Happy 2010 everyone, may your family be healthy and all your texting jolly.

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 In the everyday stresses of deadlines, crunching numbers, and meetings, meetings, meetings it can be hard to remember that, for most us, what we do is not life or death.  You don’t have to be serious to be professional and hard work can be fun.  It’s amazing what you can get done with people who work as hard as they play and at every opportunity blur the line in-between. 

 There are companies out there who figured this out, and ANY job is hard to come by these days, so why not aim high?  For me, I feel like I don’t have a choice, I’ve seen how great work can be and in the long run know I can do better than a library quiet cubicle farm.   So, don’t settle for anything less than a Nerf gun.  Great companies are out there, and there are a ton of them in this industry.  Keep up the search and you too could know the joy of wading through e-mails while readying yourself for possible attack.

I’m sure many a business person has pondered this question, and in this case what I’m selling is me.  Although some may think this involves a mini skirt and a pair of stilettos, it’s actually just a ton of cover letters and follow up.  I’m aware that, right now, companies with open positions receive literally hundreds of resumes a day and having been on the other side of the hiring coin, I don’t blame them for not responding to everyone, but still it can make you question your skills.

So, in my endless quest to improve my product, I attended the Action Sports Innovators Panel held by The University of San Diego’s Entrepreneurs Club on Monday night.  There, the point was made that no matter how amazing your product, if you’re lacking a distribution channel, you have nothing.  All my work experience, passion, thought and spell checking are just a .doc file on my computer if they’re not in the hands of the right person.  Now, more than ever, this is the essence of job searching.  Setting up as many contacts as you can, building relationships and exhausting every contact you have.  Even your brothers, girlfriends, dog-sitters, cousin who works for that big surf apparel company can be a help if you’ve played your cards right.  Talk to anyone and everyone, volunteer, intern and ask tons of questions, so when that rare job opportunity arrives, you have your network in place and you can get your product where it needs to go.

I really believe that if you’re hard working, passionate, determined and patient you can end up with a job you love.  It happened to me once, and it can happen again.  So every time I send off a well thought out, well loved cover letter, I try to keep in mind that it’s not personal and I still let myself get excited every time my phone rings with an unknown number, because I know that’s all it could take to put me in a great new position and end my pro job searching career.