I have sticky finger prints smeared across my flat screen TV.

They’re not mine, I might add. Rather they belong to my two year old son. Unlike his other random markings around the house (walls are a particular favourite), these are deliberate and with purpose.

He tries to operate the TV like he would my iPhone. That is, he competently swipes and pushes objects (buttons) on the flat screen as a means of navigating to the content he wants.

When the TV doesn’t respond he gets annoyed and airs his displeasure. For instance, a favourite programme of his starts and ends with the characters entering a lift (elevator) – the top floor housing a fun play room. One day, as the programme was coming to an end and the doors to the lift closed on the departing characters, he began to furiously ‘swipe’ the doors on the screen, yelling “no, no, no!” – desperately trying to open the doors so the programme wouldn’t end.

But end it did, and in tears.

It struck me watching this, that he’s two years old and already he’s frustrated with the speed of technology advancement. To him, there is no reason why a TV shouldn’t work in the same way as Daddy’s iPhone.

Which makes me wonder, how fast will technology evolve in just the first couple of decades of his life?

Flash back

When he’s old enough to understand, he’ll probably laugh when I tell him about the technology I had when I was growing up.

Two main broadcast technologies, TV and Radio – three channels on the former and mainly national stations on the latter. As a kid, the height of cool was owning a twin deck radio cassette player (for recording the Top 40 Charts on Sundays). And…, well, that was about it for the early years.

Then came the technology revolution, as the (top-loading, not front loading) video player burst on to the scene to change the entertainment world forever. Not that our family was an early mover on this one. We were well into the Late Majority before I discovered Vader was actually Luke’s father.

Consumer-owned computers appeared in my teens in the 90s but I barely touched them until I left college (mid 90s). Then of course technology exploded again, as we marched in the new millennium, with the next wave of game changers – the iPod and iPhone.

The odd thing for him is that these new technologies are all standard devices. They are so everyday in our house that he doesn’t understand why the other (older) shiny things don’t work in the same way.

Flash forward

Being fortunate (unfortunate?) to have a parent working in technology, there is a good chance that he’ll adopt emerging technologies and activities quite quickly. From a school perspective, it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

I still remember the excitement of being allowed to use a calculator in class for the first time, I can’t imagine being able to open up a browser to access the web via the school WiFi.

Much will depend on education funding, but isn’t it likely that within just a few years all school children will be working from laptops or iPad-like devices in class, rather than with books and pens?

Much of this technology is already available, but what else is to come? How about:

• User Generated Content Story books, placing the child within the (e)book (viewed on a Kindle-esque device, naturally)

• Desks and ‘blackboards’ using Minority Report style interfaces?

• 3D experiences of faraway places, visiting the Pyramids or back in time to ‘witness’ historical events?

• Virtual classrooms, with remote teachers delivering lessons by teachercam or holographic projection?

• Collaborative projects using wiki-based platforms?

• Start-ups formed as part of the Business studies or Economics curriculum (with Intellectual property rights shared with the school, of course)

All of these things are achievable within this next decade. I can’t even comprehend what it will be like by the time he reaches his teens.

I have no doubt children of his generation will readily adopt any new technology and application that emerges – perhaps the biggest question will be how will we keep up?

photo credit: foundphotoslj

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Let’s be honest, you can milk your Cash Cow for quite some time. However, like oil, one day it’s going to run out. Then what?

Well, by that point it’s too late. One, or several, of those pesky start-ups who launch good looking websites with shiny, multi-featured products, will have figured out how to monetise their passion and will be waving at you in slow-mo as they pass you by.

You’ll be left to wonder what happened and at some point you’ll look at your new market leaders and will lament “we could have done that”.

Ideas needed – apply within

So, you’ve seen the future and you don’t like it. What are you going to do?

Firstly, look to your customers. And particularly to those who aren’t your customers. Don’t start building anything until you understand what they need. Not necessarily what they say they want – or what you want – but what they need. There is a big difference. Answering a need secures a customer for the long term, answering a want will have you following fads and wasting resources.

Secondly, embrace the creativity in your workplace. Great ideas are not limited to the executive suite. The Support Assistant on the phone speaking to the irate customer may have the greatest insight of all in your business. A cliché it may be, but employees are the business’ greatest asset. Tap into it. Treat your employees like citizens, let them join the cause.

This is a cultural thing. Much like your brand in the social sphere, is your business happy to relinquish ‘control’ to the ‘masses’?

Consider it. It can produce exciting results.

A case in point

At the 2010 Onrec Awards for the online recruitment industry, Jobsite.co.uk won in two categories – one of which was for its candidate services. Amongst the products included under that banner, were Jobs-by-Twitter, BeMyInterviewer and RecruitRank.

Jobs-by-Twitter is an API integration between Jobsite and the micro-blogging platform. It was created as an experiment to understand how we can reduce the searching workload of jobseekers by delivering relevant jobs to a platform they were already using daily. It was also a direct response against the torrent of untargeted job tweets gushing into the Twitter sphere

BeMyInterviewer is an interactive interview practice service that utilises video to enable jobseekers to rehearse with top industry professionals, including the likes of Dragons’ Den mogul Duncan Bannatyne.

RecruitRank is a jobseeker feedback system, enabling applicants to rate recruitment agencies for the customer service they received. It came in response to research that revealed over half of jobseekers find the process of job hunting frustrating and demoralising.

All three products came to life through the creativity of Jobsite employees – be it initial concept or enabling the idea to flourish into a fully featured – and useful – product for our customers.

It was possible because the culture promotes such creativity – to step beyond the paint-by-numbers approach that has littered the industry with commodity products.

Be a market leader

Seth Godin, in his book ‘Linchpin’, defines a Hierarchy of Value as follows:

Lift, Hunt, Grow, Produce, Sell, Connect, Create

For your company to be (or continue to be) successful it will need to deliver at multiple levels across the hierarchy. However, to lead your market into the future you need to excel at creation, at innovation.

Take a look at what you offer your customers. How is that different to what your competitors provide? Now find out what your customers actually want and throw some grey matter at finding solutions. It’s crowd-sourcing on a company level. Get everyone in a room – physically or figuratively – and throw away the job titles. Leave them at the door, they’re not needed here.

Now start creating.

photo credit: Locomotive Stillstand

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photo credit: fazen

Have you seen our iPhone App? Do you have one? No? Really?

Been asked that recently? I wouldn’t be surprised if you had, mobile seems to be on the lips of everyone. If you haven’t got an iPhone app, some would have you believe it’s a minor miracle you’re still doing business.

So, should you be rushing out to find a mobile developer?

Yes, no, maybe, well, it depends.

Don’t be a lemming

First of all, you don’t have to follow the crowd. Just because Mobile is cool and trendy, doesn’t mean it will be successful for you (see the ‘popular’ kids at school as an example). There are some fundamental questions you need to ask of your business first, before you can determine your mobile strategy.

Five Questions to ask of your business:

Does your business lend itself well to mobile?

You have to be realistic. There are just some businesses that don’t lend themselves well to the mobile web – certainly the App market – and you have to ask yourself, is yours one of them?

Anecdotally, the average lifespan of an iPhone App is 2 weeks – in all likelihood because the App is pointless or poorly thought out or designed. To justify the expense of developing one you need to be sure it will be used.

Brainstorm a few ideas and share them with your customers. Feed the response back into the decision process.

Can you improve the customer brand experience via mobile?

If your customers access your product via the web, could you make their life easier by providing mobile access too? The key here, is to ensure that the mobile and web version are integrated, otherwise there is a disconnect and you compromise on the customer experience.

Should I do something in Mobile right now?

Tricky one. Ask yourself whether you’ll be left behind if you don’t – and if your brand will suffer if you release a shoddy product. Rushing doesn’t guarantee the latter, but it’s a risk. You need to find a balance between speed and quality. ‘Bells and whistles’ could always come in the version1.1 update, whilst you gather feedback from the initial release.

Which first – iPhone, Android, Mobile or other?

Ah, the hot potato. There is a lot of information out there on mobile use and many of the numbers are conflicting. However, what all the Mobile experts can agree on is that big things are about to happen in the market.

In a nutshell, we can thank Apple, their iPhone and their marketing budget for kick starting the smart phone market. That got consumers interested, now Google are coming along with Android to mount what is expected to be a serious challenge.

So which should you do first? Well, it depends on your business. If you’re ready to go now, it could be worth launching an iPhone App to go with market surge. Once live you might want to get started on the Android version pretty quickly to jump on that bandwagon as the platform gathers traction.

Conversely, you might find that your niche is already a little overcrowded in the iPhone App store, so you could dive straight into the Android space and be the big fish gobbling up market share before your competitors get there.

Or to continue with the nautical metaphors, perhaps you’d be better off swimming against the smart phone tide altogether? Whilst apps may be sexy, the mobile web (i.e. sites accessible via mobile browsers), may be where your biggest wins could be found.

Would you be better off making a great mobile-friendly site so any internet enabled phone can access it? It’s certainly a bigger market.

Do my audience want a mobile offering from my product?

Exactly how big a market is actually an important consideration. The global mobile uptake is huge, but that doesn’t really matter to you. How big is mobile in your market?

Try this. Go to your analytics package and look up the Browsers/Operating System report. You probably don’t delve in there too often and you might be a little scared by what you find when you start adding up the number of visits from Mobile devices.

Look at the data over the past year or two – how much has it grown? One site I worked on recently, experienced a 136% increase in mobile visits in just a 9 month period and nobody knew.

So the worrying thing is you may already have a mobile audience and they can’t use your product. Is the audience big enough to jump the smart phone Apps in the development queue?

Decision time

It’s clear when you consider the answers to the five questions that it’s not as simple as just responding to the excitement of the iPhone with an App of your own. What’s in the best interest of your company?

It’s an important time for businesses as we adapt to the changing media consumption of our audiences. We must move swiftly, but not hastily, and embrace the opportunities new technologies provide.

So what will Mobile mean to you?

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1. Your 60 Second Mobile Review
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It’s well established that a great experience can make all the difference in keeping a customer beyond their initial purchase. The best customer experience is when you can make their interaction with you so pain-free and simple that it becomes a no-brainer to return for more.

Healthy stock levels, useful product info, error-free payment processes, and prompt delivery – they’re all hygiene factors if your business is to provide a good customer experience. However, for a great customer experience, you need more. You need to think smarter.

Intelligent Shopping

Talking of smart, there are undeniably smart people at Tesco. Anyone familiar with the brand will know their Clubcard is a thing of CRM legend. Some very smart thinking went into that, understanding that utilising customer data to increase spending, whilst offering relevant discounts and additional rewards for being loyal, was going to be key to growth and market dominance.

That Clubcard has now arrived, to much acclaim, in the Apple iPhone App Store. Whilst its convenience is undeniably smart, it is the less heralded Tesco Finder App that caught my eye.

If the Clubcard App is the popular and attractive Prom Queen, the Tesco Finder App is the geeky Maths Club President who probably goes on to develop the next Google.

To be clear, this is not a sexy app. It doesn’t look spectacular and it undoubtedly has its flaws. It appears to be a work in progress, an experimental plaything of the Tesco R & D team. However, there is a smart idea behind it.

What they have done is to look at their internal tools and have asked themselves whether opening them up to their shoppers would improve the customer experience. In doing so, they realised that a tool they had built to speed up product selection for their Tesco.com Home Delivery Pickers, would in fact, make an ideal tool for those less familiar with store layout and content– such as their customers.

So now using the App, you can type in Green & Black’s Maya Gold Chocolate and you’ll be able to find it in-store in ‘Aisle 8 on the right side counting 15 units along then the 8^th shelf up from the floor’. Simple, but very smart.

Your Hidden Gems

Now think about this for your own business. What internal tools or information do you have access to that make your life easier? And now what would happen if you put those in the hands of your customers?

In this digital world, we have an abundance of data. We probably only use a fraction of it. How could you use your data and tools to improve your customer experience?

Here are a few ideas to start you off:

Stock levels – how many items do you have left in stock? Can you save time and frustration for a customer who will discover their item can’t be delivered when they want it?

Expected delivery dates – internet retailing is about speed and convenience. Make this information clearly available to inform the buying decision

Best time and day to advertise – if you deal in classifieds (jobs, cars, dating, etc.) share this data to help your customer get the best response to their ads

Help guides / instructions – don’t make me ring a call centre to order a new copy of the instructions that were missing from my flat pack wardrobe, put them on the website for me to print off

Appointment availability – if you run a hair salon, doctors/dentist surgery, or MOT garage put your booking system online, so I can secure my appointment slot when it’s convenient for me, 24 hours a day

Hotel room selector – your may know which room overlooks the great sea/mountain view, but why not empower your future guests and let them select the vista they want? (Whilst you’re at it, add panoramic video views so I can really tell what it’s going to look like)

New product development list – you don’t want to give away all your plans, but why not make customer suggestions more freely available to others and collect votes to determine priority?

Think about how many of the above (or variations on the theme) could save your business money through reduced manual servicing, as well as producing happier, more satisfied customers.

You already have that ability in your hands; you just need to put it in someone else’s.

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1. 8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

photo credit: coquetboy

And that was 2009.

Hopefully yours was a good one, it certainly was for me.  On reflection, much happened in 2009 – both from a personal and web perspective. So much, in fact, it’s hard to imagine it all happened in just 365 days.

I felt like I learnt a lot this year. Much of which, I can say was due to Twitter. On the 5th of January 2009 I wrote my first blog post, entitled ‘What’s the point of Twitter?‘. I’d heard about it, wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it, but thought it was worth a go for a month. I never looked back and now check it at least a trillion times a day via my laptop or iPhone.

Twitter gave me access to the minds of brilliant people. Particular favourites being Chris Brogan, Brent Payne, Brian Clark, Lisa Barone, Scott Stratten and Steve Rubel. I’ve learnt a tremendous amount from them all (many thanks!), impacting my day job and the handful of personal endeavours that have spawned over the year. It’s been an incredibly enriching experience.

It makes me very excited about the prospect of 2010 – what on earth will we learn and acheive this year?

As we close the book on 2009, I’d like to thank everyone that has read my blog this year (or at the very least, come looking for images to re-use). It’s been a very enjoyable experience – one that I need to dedicate much more time to this year.

For one final look at 2009, I’d like to share with you the Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing posts this year. Enjoy!

1. Twitter Statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in a year (24th June)

2. Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market? (7th May)

3. 10 Insider Tips to win a Search Agency pitch (2nd March)

4. Ryanair: Cheap flights and cheap service (24th Feb)

5. Building an App for Twitter (2nd July)

6. 10 Signs you’re addicted to Twitter (25th March)

7. Social Proof: The wisdom of crowds (15th Sept)

8. To find a job think like a SEO (13th Feb)

9. Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll: Google Maps Mashup Style (23rd Nov)

10. Social Media Innovation (9th Oct)

Have a happy and prosperous 2010 everybody!

Gary

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Sex toys, crime statistics and the Artic Monkeys.

Words I never thought I could unite in one blog post. Take a moment to consider where this could go…

Nothing quite so sensational, I’m afraid, but interesting nonetheless.

Anyone who knows my geeky side will know that I have a penchant for Google Maps Mashups (If you don’t know what they are, take a quick Google Maps mashup detour. Just remember to come back).

They don’t need to be all bells and whistles, fantastically designed or integrated. It’s the idea that always fascinates me. The imagination and breadth of subjects poured into Google Maps mashups seems to be infinite.

We can't help ourselves - we have to know!

I’ll produce a list of some of the best ones at a later date, but for now I’ll share three that have caught my eye recently. And perhaps shed some light on the cryptic start to this post.

The Sex Map from LoveHoney.com – If you’re at work reading this, don’t worry there aren’t any images here that you don’t want your Boss or Tech guys to discover. LoveHoney is an online retailer of adult toys, lingerie and associated paraphernalia.

They have been really clever with their Google Maps mashup. They have tied together sales data from their own site, data from the UK Census, competitor and manufacturer accounts, and internet traffic monitoring services, and mashed it together with the Google Maps API. The end result is an amusing, yet fantastic bit of linkbait, which no doubt has brought a few extra pennies to the pot from inquisitive visitors.

Oddly, I felt somewhat disappointed to find my home town ranked only the 530th sexiest place in the UK. What goes on in Upminster (ranked #1) is anyone’s guess though?!

The Drugs Map – okay, not just drugs, but all kinds of crime, be it robbery, homicide or car theft. Crimereports.com say the U.S. site was created to help law enforcement agencies make crime data accessible to the public. It standardises the data from the different agencies and enables individuals to monitor what is happening in their neighbourhood, right down to their specific street or block.

I think this is a great example of how technology can be utilised to harness disparate information, organise it and communicate it in an easy to understand way. The participating organisations should be commended for supporting the scheme.

My one concern would be how obsessed a worried user could become with monitoring crime outside their front door. However, on a more practical note, it would be a useful evaluation tool when house hunting.

And finally, the Rock & Roll Map. Whilst not a big buyer (or listener) of music, I’ve always been appreciative of good album cover design. So I found it interesting to discover this Google Maps mashup the readers of UK music mag, Word Magazine, have been putting together.

The Google Maps mashup plots the locations of where iconic album cover photographs were taken. Whether its ABBA at Barkaby Airfield, the Beatles at Abbey Road, or The Verve lounging in Richmond Park, flicking through the list is a quirky and fascinating tour of music’s historical landmarks.

These are just three of the thousands of Google Maps mashup examples out there – and I’m sure there are many more brilliant than the ones I’ve chosen here. If you’ve seen any, let me know. I’ll be featuring more mashups here at a later date.

Have you built a Google Maps Mashup you want to share? Seen one you loved, but secretly wished you’d had the idea yourself? Or maybe you’re just rueing the day you skipped programming class and have to wait for the day when Google can make a simple wizard, so you can build one of these cool things yourself? Whatever, just get in touch.

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Now is the time to innovate, not stick your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass by.

That is the theme of my article on social media innovation in this quarter’s edition of Figaro Digital Magazine.

Front Cover design by pod1

The takeaway thought from the article was that whilst budgets are being cut left, right and centre, that doesn’t mean that you should just bide your time and wait for the sales figures to look a little rosier before you start being creative again.

In fact, if you do that it will probably be too late. At least one of your competitors would have had the gumption to use this difficult time wisely by experimenting. As soon as the market picks up they will be able to break into a full stride whilst you’re still crouching to tie your laces.

You may be thinking that you can’t afford to experiment when your budgets are so low, but who said anything about spending big? You don’t even have to take big risks. You just need to do something different.

For instance, look at where you spend you budgets right now. Like the majority of marketers you’ve probably had to reduce budgets over this past year. What did you cut? Did you look at your activities and wonder what their return was? Did you keep some things because ‘we’ve always done that’?

It might be worth having a look again. It’s very easy to keep doing the same old things, but as the saying goes you can’t really expect a different outcome if you keep putting the same stuff in.

As noted in the article, you can do something very different for your company – and at little expense – if you can get involved in social media. It’s a wild frontier land at the moment, where the rules are fluid and the pitfalls and rewards are as diverse as the possibilities.

In essence, it’s an opportunity. You can shape, innovate or change. You can influence your company’s reputation, your can engage with a new breed of customer and you can discover incredible new ways to do business.

And you can do that without spending a penny.

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Would you pay a guy $1 (or £0.60p at today’s exchange rate) to wear your branded t-shirt for a day?

Seems an odd question, but hundred’s of companies are apparently doing it.

Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com has made $70,000 this year by selling ad space on the tshirts he wears, according to Mashable. Prices start at $1 for January 1st, $2 for January 2nd and so on until you get to $365 for December 31st. It’s working so well that he has sold out all of 2009 and the first four months of 2010. From next year the prices have doubled (outrageous price hike!), but you do get the benefit of his friend Evan wearing your t-shirt too.

Aside from the people he meets during the day, your t-shirt will get exposure on his blog, his Twitter and Facebook accounts, plus photos and a video show.

So is it worth it?

Well, the daily video blog runs on Ustream.tv, which reports his videos have been viewed over 129,000 times since 16th December 2008. He also distributes the video content to Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion among others. The top video on Youtube (below) was watched over 9000 times, though most sit around the 150-350 mark.

So there is plenty of exposure as a whole, but it’s debatable whether your single day of exposure and subsequent viewings will have much impact for you. But then we are only talking $1…

As an advertiser, I’m not convinced I would do it. Yes, it would be pretty easy to get a ROI, it would probably only take one person to visit your site or purchase your product to make the investment back. But in that scenario, it’s almost not worth the time to process the paperwork (unless of course you sell high price products). You probably have other more pressing projects that need your attention.

Where it would work, is if you could make the video of him wearing your t-shirt the one that reaches 9,000+ views and get it to prompt a whole series of purchases. For that to happen you’d probably need to have an extremely clever idea or giveaway, and utlise it as part of a larger campaign.

What really impresses me about this though, is the fact that it’s a great idea. Kudos to Jason for making this work. He’s come up with a really simple idea and found a way to make it work. And did I mention he made $70,000 wearing t-shirts? I do that for free. Actually no, I pay brands to wear their tshirts. I’m a mug.

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1. I’m a Socialist – Not really but it won me a t-shirt

On Monday 15th June 2009, Jobsite launched it’s Jobs by Twitter service – a simple but innovative service to help jobseekers find a new job by providing personalised job tweets via Twitter.

The key component of that sentence is the word personalised. The fact that you can specify the jobs you receive makes it different to the majority of the Twitter based job services available today.

Jobs by Twitter has been a bit of a pet project for me over the last couple of months. This is how it came about…

In the beginning

Well, I have to admit I wasn’t much of a fan of Twitter until recently. I couldn’t be bothered to update my Facebook status very often, so didn’t see the point of a service where it appeared you could ONLY update your status and nothing else.

So I certainly wasn’t an early adopter of Twitter but I was definitely Pre-Oprah. Once I started though, it didn’t take me long to get hooked. I wasn’t interested in reading what people had for breakfast, I wanted knowledge and I found that by following the right people I had access to topical and relevant information that would benefit my work.

I was enthralled not just by the sharing of information but the innovations and applications (such as Twitterfall and Twitpic) that began to appear, integrated with the Twitter universe.

Going backwards

The massive growth of Twitter attracted would-be entrepreneurs and eager developers to the API like prospectors in a gold rush. The urgency to get the product to market meant that for every good application launched, there seemed to be a handful of half-baked or bad ideas.

The recruitment industry quickly embraced the Twittersphere as a new frontier to mine untapped passive jobseekers. Many new services sprung up, such as JobAngels and Twitjobs, both embraced by the media for their innovation and/or timeliness in this economic downturn.

Since those early days (January 2009!), a flurry of recruitment services have appeared, the vast majority sharing one common approach – the jobs feed. Essentially, these services tweet a volume of vacancies out to their list of Followers with links back to their websites. There is little targeting involved, beyond perhaps a feed defined by a sector or location (or both), i.e. IT jobs in London.

Whilst this may generate some applications, I can’t help feel a little frustrated and disappointed with this lost opportunity. The internet is a fantastic place, home to amazing experiences built on incredible technology – surely we can do something a little more targeted and personalised for the individual than a one-size-fits-all feed of jobs?

I carried this thought around for a while until I discovered Mr Tweet and Mahalo Answers. Then the thought became an idea.

Joining the dots

Mahalo Answers describes itself as a ‘knowledge exchange community on the web’. It enables its user base to ask and answer questions. The element of the service that interested me though was its Twitter account @answers. If you’re a Follower of @answers, you can type a question into your tweet box on Twitter and Mahalo will tweet back any answers it receives from its community.

Mr Tweet, meanwhile, cites itself as ‘your personal networking assistant’, enabling you to discover new people of interest by providing recommendations based on the people you currently follow on Twitter.

The two common elements between these services are 1) they are personalised, based on interaction with the individual and 2) they use an off-Twitter website to assist in the personalisation.

Once I connected these two dots together a little light bulb went on above my head and a new product for Jobsite was born.

It’s all about you

Tell us what type of job you want and we’ll send you those that match. You won’t have to waste time sifting through jobs that don’t match your skill set, jobs that aren’t in the location you want to work in or jobs that don’t pay the salary you’re looking for.

That statement was written for the Jobs by Twitter service, but the sentiment can be equally applied to any of the products we build at Jobsite. It’s an approach we try to take with everything – how can we make it super targeted and relevant for the individual so that the process becomes easy and less frustrating?

With that in mind, I couldn’t bring myself to launch a simple jobs feed on Twitter; it had to be a little more special. It had to be based on search criteria relevant to the individual.

Like Mr Tweet I looked to Twitter for information. Each Twitter account has the option to feature a Bio (about the person) and their Location. I thought that this could be a good place to start with personalization. If we could gleam some personal info from this we could make some basic assumptions about the types of job that would interest the user (this logic works perfectly well for someone who states their job title, specialism or interests in their Bio, though we haven’t yet found a solution for the person who described themselves as ‘Eater of Souls’).

The other issue to overcome was that of privacy. You can’t hide the fact that you are following someone on Twitter, but we wanted to at least keep the details of the types of job (and salary) you’re looking for private. We also didn’t want to send out hundreds/thousands of personalised job tweets that would appear in the stream of every user – kind of negates the point of personalised tweets if you have to wade through everyone else’s to find yours.

The answer to both points was Direct Messaging. Communicating directly keeps the content of the message private and stops us spamming our Followers with irrelevant content.

Keeping it brief

One of the benefits of working with talented and creative people is that the ideas come from all directions. Conscious of the need for short URLs I had asked our analysts and developers to integrate with a service such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Their response was “why don’t we build our own?” A good question.

Apparently, it’s not that hard, so I took their word for it. I was too busy trying to think of a really cool, relevant – and of course, very short – domain name for it.

It made sense to keep it Jobsite or jobs related. I got hold of a list of all my country level options and began to scour the choices. The problem comes with getting hold of the extension you want. In many cases your business needs to be physically established and registered in the country.

I struck gold with the Bahamas. Their extension is .bs and they allow overseas companies to purchase their domains. So I registered myjo.bs – rather fitting for a personalised job service, I thought.

All systems go

The new service has been live for just over a fortnight and we’ve just broken the 500 mark in Followers. It’s early days yet and we know there is more work to be done to refine the service but we’re optimistic about its future.

Since launch, we have received positive feedback on the service and it is hoped that this, along with increased promotion, will increase our Follower count (and their subsequent job applications) over the coming months.

Aside from its potential for being a good source of new jobseekers, the project was a good opportunity to continue our journey into the world of social media. I anticipate social will play an increasingly important role in recruitment over the next few years, so it’s important to get in there now, to understand the environment and community by listening and participating and to identify our role in this new future.

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Today I noticed the new Google Profiles section inserted into the UK search results (see screenshot below).

When the new plans for  Google Profiles were announced last month, it was mentioned that they would insert up to four matching results in a Profiles section at the foot of the first page of the SERPs (for a search on a name). The roll out was due to start in the U.S., but with no announced timetable for the rest of the world.

Well, it seems the UK is ready. I noticed my face staring out at me from the screen over breakfast this morning.  Now at mid-morning, it had disappeared – that is until I login into my Google Account via Gmail. Now I’m there looking out at me again. So it seems the Google Profiles are being tested through account holders in the UK, before a likely launch in all results.

It will be interesting to see how the use of Google Profiles develops, not just here in the UK but generally as a global product offering from Google.

There is still time to go grab your own Google Profile vanity URL – get it before it’s gone!

Related posts:

1. Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?