Category: General

Chicago GSB MBA

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Billy Dexter – MTV’s Chief Diversity Officer

Billy Dexter is a power networker in Keith Ferrazzi’s league. I had the priviledge of seeing Billy speak this week at a National Black MBA event here in Chicago. He is dynamic, funny and charming. He currently serves as MTV’s Chief Diversity Officer, it was not a job he asked for, they asked him. To study Billy is a great case study of the importance of personal branding to future success.  

Billy was working as a headhunter on the search at the time. MTV couldn’t decide which candidate to select and met with Billy to discuss the issue. After the meeting, MTV HR called Billy and said they changed their mind, they wanted to hire Billy instead! He thought they were joking, but they weren’t. They asked him to make his offer for them. In his words, he went “real ghetto with it”. They accepted his initial proposal untouched and h felt like he should have asked for more! I’m not doing the story justice with this blog entry, you should hear him tell it one day!

One of his networking tips that is distinct is that Billy says, “people need to feel comfortable with you.” It’s an interesting concept, one that Billy himself is a bit challenged to explain more deeply, though he claims not to be a natural.

Here are some of Billy’s tips for success:

– Develop a script to engage people and your “30 second commercial”

– Attend an opportunity event frequently

– Develop both up and down mentoring

– Study, refine and prioritize your personal and professional networking contacts

– Put your execution plan on paper by date and context

– Find ways to make connections with others

– Constantly monitor you results celebrate your accomplishments and adjust your plan, if required   

As I stated, Billy Dexter is both interesting and enganging, I look forward to building a relationship with him over time.

If you ever need someting to start a conversation about with Billy – try golf, he is an avid golfer!

Posted on by — 1 Comment

An Indeed.com Alternative

Getthejob.com is a new job aggregator that differentiates itself from indeed.com in that it doesn’t pick up  postings from headhunters, third party recruiters or too-good-to-be-true scam jobs. They claim that 70% of the postings can’t be found on commercial job boards. They do have Ladders affiliate ads however, so the option is still there, it’s just in a less spammy format on an ad on the side. I like this and it’s potential. What it lacks in comparison to Indeed is the freshness date of the listing, this is a major oversight that, once rectified, would make it a superior product.

What I’m not certain about:

– Mr. Amato states, “Most employers don’t post ALL of their openings on traditional job sites because it would be cost prohibitive, but they do post them to their own corporate career center, which costs nothing, we help jobseekers find these hidden jobs.” This is not 100% true – for some reason many employers do not post all open jobs, choosing to keep senior jobs private and undisclosed. This is most unfortunate as many qualified and passionate seekers are not enabled to be looked at and more employers need to look at becoming fully transparent.

– How does one know that these companies actually utilize posted resumes and not primarily from recruiters?

– Mr. Fulton then states, “This allows jobseekers to read the entire job description and apply for the job using the companies preferred application method. It is believed that resumes passed directly through a company career site are more visible than those transmitted through a third-party site.” Based on what?

– Not having a searchable resume database is interesting, but it’s very time consuming to fill out things with an uncertain outcome.

Overall, I appreciate Bob Etheridge for calling me and informing me about the service, with a few tweaks, I could see it becoming a strong player in the marketplace.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Wanted: Brillant Administrative Assistant

Netowrking

Argh, I’m so behind on indexing my business cards!!! It’s terrible and I must catch up. I also have tons of correspondance and phone messages to reply to. I need help! At the moment I can’t offer you cash, only still hypothetical options of some soon to launch companies and the ability to interact with some amazing people. You must enjoy and thrive on meeting the most interesting and creative people in the world. In fact you should aspire to be on of them that is my only requirement.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network

Robert Scoble: Keynote Speech: Naked Conversations

Talks about history, blogs are best way to get stuff indexed in Google.

There is an informal conversation network. Tells the story about how a few people he told that he was leaving Microsoft. How that spread and then a largely unread blog was the one that first posted it is why you need to pay attention to *ALL* bloggers, not just him.

Talking to bloggers is more important than covering Walt Mossberg.

People who read blogs are far more likely to click and take action.

The auto blog reader is more likely to click through to other auto sites.

Most people understand search engines. Talks about google.com and how people search “Yahoo” and vice versa. It demonstrates that it’s a Google world.

If you pipes are leaking, you need a plumber. So you type in “Chicago plumber leak” and you need to be on the top of the organic search results. Links are important and so are other things. Changing the content every day helps the algorithms. Blogs, due to the frequency of content update are excellent tools to do this.

He talks about the plumber blog that gets link due to the knowledge. Also talks about how he got a ripped off once with a carpet and is blog entry ranked higher than the company.

A dirty secret about Google is that the ad click through rate is lower there du to the higher educational level of a typical Google user.

People will link to audio and video more than they will text. Suggested video press releases. Be different. Hugh’s cartoon’s are different. Video and Flickr and other sites can create buzz.

Talked about the “Dell Hell” issue. (strangely few in the room had heard of it – shows how far we have to go) Tells the well known Jeff Jarvis story.

Talks about how to listen. (I would say this is Robert’s biggest gift)

Then gave examples of how he linked to complaints directly when he joined Microsoft, fascinating!

Currently, HP story is a great example. They have not listened to the blogosphere. It is making the ethics crisis there worse.

Every project should have a story behind it. Talked about channel 9 naming story and how Microsoft built transparency. The PR folks didn’t pay attention to our blogs and Channel 9 until we were in the New York Times. It’s so funny how that works. Tells more about telling good stories and how important that it. It’s all about story telling process.

If you post something it shows up in my RSS aggregator. Using RSS is far more productive!

How do I get my content viewed in new places…talked about second life.

Valleywag recently wrote about a bad pitch. Democracy Now, Z Fank, Ipod can aggregate. Steve Jobs used Rocketboom to do the recent Apple launch.    

Again, HP – where is the engagement in the ethical issues?

Ragan PR conferece 2006