First: what’s changed about the interview process now?

1. 1. Your competition is the decision to not hire even though for each position there are 2-3 times more the # of candidates.

2. 2. Time lines are stretched: In most companies now the CEO has the final approval on opening new requisitions or approve new hires. In normal circumstances it would take 2 weeks to get anything signed by the CEO (trust me, I’ve been there), but now it takes 4-6 weeks.

3. 3. You are meeting / interviewing with lot more people (3-4 before vs. 6-8 now). The dynamics of the interview change with the increasing number of opinions and stakeholders.

So how do you need to adapt to get hired?

1.  Network twice as much: Look for specific industries that are growing: Green Technology, Repossession firms, Property Management companies. Within industries look for companies that are doing well in a down sector: E.g. Data center consolidation (Virtualization).

Using LinkedIn you can see new hires and promotions within a company. Usually a promotion carries with it some head count or new responsibilities that might be best for a contractor or free lancer. Target those individuals first, so you can get a leg up before your interview.

2. 2. Research about the individual you are going to interview with before: Most recruiters will be able to tell you who’s going to interview you. Else hit Linkedin or Xing and get the list of all the employees in the position that you believe is relevant for you so you can better understand who’s going to interview you. With the exploding # of users on Facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. you are bound to find more details about that person, their background, school, college. It’s a great way to break ice quickly and gives you more time to discuss what’s unique about you and how you fit the role.

3. 3. Come prepared with a point of view on the position (90 day plan): To put the person at ease that you can “hit the ground running”, spend some time to think about what are you going to do in the first 90 days. Put it in writing. A simple month by month with max of 3 bullets per month should suffice. It need not get too specific, but during your interview it gives you points to discuss.

4. 4. Provide an active leave behind which can be distributed easily via email: Your 90 day plan might be one. Some analysis on a competitormight be another. A list of relevant blogs they should be reading on the industry might be 3^rd. A landscape of the market or relevant news with your color commentary on how it affects that company might be 4^th. This makes it easy for you to be on their mind even after the interview and helps the discussion around candidates on a more tangible deliverable.

5/ 5. Be thoughtful in your follow up: The usual thank you for the email won’t suffice. That’s table stakes. Now you need to ensure that you ask questions during the interview that can lead to a more thoughtful follow up. You have more time to think about the questions, so leave an email to the individual with a more detailed response and ask 1-2 questions you missed during your interview.

The basic rules of the interview have not changed during the downturn; it’s just that changing dynamics means you need to change your strategy and correspondingly your tactics to respond better.

What do you think? How have you adapted your interview techniques during the downturn?

There are several articles on how to Do It Yourself PR. I read one by Jimmy this morning most of which can be attributed to Jason Calacanis. There are several tactics to DIY PR, but there are 3 main strategies that we recommend.

1. Listen: Pick the topics / categories, areas of interest in your field and listen to what’s being said by key influencers – these include reporters, journalists, analysts (like Gartner, etc.) bloggers, micro-bloggers, video-bloggers, podcasters, and photographers.

After you listen for about a day you’ll get a picture of who’s who (or the landscape) in this space.

2. Learn: Pick about 20-30 of these influencers and get as much detail about them as possible. What do they write about? When do they write? Who is their audience? What do they care about? What topics interest them? What are unique stories you can tell them about your startup?

3. Engage: Attend relevant events that your influencers go to. There’s no substitute for face-to-face discussions. Commenting on blogs is the best way to make the initial engagement. Write and manage your blog by “joining the discussion”.

The key is discipline and making sure you do it consistently. You need to show and see results, but dont expect to get written up on the WSJ within a week of starting this process.

Image credit: http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/how-to-do-it-yourself-pr/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/how-to-avoid-the-%e2%80%9ci-was-taken-out-of-context%e2%80%9d-retweet/ http://news.buzzgain.com/how-to-avoid-the-%e2%80%9ci-was-taken-out-of-context%e2%80%9d-retweet/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:27:00 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=93

We spoke about the echo chamber that retweeting on Twitter does a while ago. Well, on the same topic but a totally different reason Retweet is stupid argues Dave. Because its a vote of confidence on that particular tweet.

The problem I want to address is one when you get a Retweet gets taken out of context or “shortened” because it needs to fit into 140 characters.

I had a couple of instances of when this happened to me last week. My tweets were long (close to 140 characters), but when they were ReTweeted, the twitter user that did the RT “eliminated” a few characters so it could fit the 140 character limit.

Result – “Tweet taken out of context”.

Solution: Until there is a technical solution I recommend you plan on your tweets being 130 characters or less (if you have a long twitter handle, plan on 120 characters). That gives enough room for the word RT followed by your handle.

I really cannot believe I have put a post together for this, but getting “tweet quoted” out of context can be embarassing.

This post primarily discusses corporate uses and engagement with Twitter, unlike how most people use it to keep up with friends and discuss “What are you doing”? The # of companies on twitter is growing dramatically from fewer than 5 in 2007 to over 500 in 2008.

Given that twitter has about 1.3 million registered accounts, the question we get asked frequently is:

<Update>: Jason asks where we got the 1.3 Million number vs. 3.1 reported by TwitDir. Two items: 1) We only track accounts that have more than 5 friends and at least 10 tweets. We think these are real users vs. bots. If we did all accounts, we track about 3.27 Million. Bottom line there are a TON of fake accounts on twitter.

2) We also did this initial run in July. We’ll update for September, but we doubt There were 1.5+M accounts added in 2 months.

<End Update>

“So if I get on twitter and make a lot of “friends” will our messages get propagated faster?”.

This is usually by a corporate client, who does not have a basic understanding of twitter or has just heard that twitter helps you get “Buzz”.

Usually we have to go over basics of twitter and community with them before they ask the next question:

“So how can we can get the key influencers to follow us and tweet about?”.

Another discussion ensues and topics such as engaging users and not spamming them comes up. They usually look a little lost at this point, but are able to somewhat relate to email spam so they eventually get it.

The next question comes up within the 30 minutes of discussion:

“So how many people have to follow us for our message to be heard?”.

We’re not sure if you really want to answer this question, but its a worthwhile exercise. There are varying degrees of influence on twitter. We define 3 types of twitter engagement. Each of these types of engagement is an increasing amount of influence obviously:

1. Another twitter user follows you (and based on her tweet history) tweets at about the same time as you do. Else if you are in different timezones, your influence on that person is lesser.

2. A twitter follower replies to your tweets (@replies) with a certain frequency. Or the # of @ replies you get as a twitter user.

3. A twitter follower retweets your tweets with some frequency.

There are 3 things that stand out when you analyze twitter statistics.

1. The top 250 twitter users (with the most number of followers, the most number of friends (people they follow) and the # of tweets) carry an inordinate amount of “influence”.

2. The average number of followers for the top 100 twitters is 9304, with the top at about 93,000 followers and #100 at about 6300 followers.

3. If you have less than 100 followers (with some exceptions), which over 500,000 users on twitter do, your influence rank drops to less than 8 (give time zone considerations). Meaning less than 18 people are really viewing your tweets, which indicates 4 of them are likely to @ reply and 1 is most likely to retweet.

The graph below shows Twitter influence. The top 100 users carry 65% of the influence on twitter and they have a minimum of 6300+ followers to a maximum of ~90,000 followers. Users from 100-5000 have 22% of twitter influence and so on.

Some questions:

1. Corporate clients still believe the best use of twitter is to leverage it as “yet another channel” for their message amplification. What are the best techniques you have used to convince them about the value of engaging their customers on twitter?

2. How are you recommending your clients engage with twitter users?

3. What’s the best example of large companies engaging on twitter?

Freemium

There are multiple types of Freemium models ranging from a free version of the product to a free trial period for your products. In metrics we track for Freemium products we talked about conversion ratios.

Given the recent downturn we noticed more companies abandoning their Freemium model.

1. Jott has ended its free version (officially Feb 2): “The free version of Jott is going to end on February 2, CEO John Pollard told me today. The terrible advertising market, he says, means every customer has to pay their own way from now on. Customers will need to pay $4/month to continue the service, the current price for a premium account. This includes users of the Jott iPhone application.”

2. Sprout has also given up on free version of their product. “We are focusing our product and sales on professional creative designers, agencies and publishers. Being a full software as a service model, we need to make sure we price the product at its true value.”

In a related discussion at Ycombinator there was a question if any startup is not charging users money and still making a profit? The intention was to see if you could monetize the user base in another way (which means via ads, or selling analytical data or charging some other person in the food chain.

In my opinion, the movement towards charging users versus providing free service is a good one for the startup economy. It increases barriers for the competition, requires you to have actual capabilities in the product instead of just putting 3 features together and calling them a beta version and finally makes the startup model sustainable.

We do offer a 2 week “free trial” to kick the tires of the product, but cannot sustain a free version of our product. Your thoughts?

Any other type of try before you buy model you’d suggest?

Image Credit. ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/freemium-is-dead-long-live-freemium/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/the-dumbest-advice-i-have-received-from-many-social-media-experts/ http://news.buzzgain.com/the-dumbest-advice-i-have-received-from-many-social-media-experts/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:34:23 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=28

“Be authentic. Be transparent. Be you.”

First, let me tell you something you know already. Most companies are way beautiful on the outside than on the inside.

Outside: Your website – fabulous. Your investors – blue chip. Your customers – love you.

On the inside - website: multiple bad links, daily duct tape and band aid. Investors – demanding daily (or hourly) updates on your leads, conversions and financial numbers. Customers – reporting bugs like they are going out of fashion.

So why is “Be authentic…” the most useless piece of advice?

Because no one wants to know the real company they are dealing with.

1. Prospects dont want to know that the “cancel anytime with no repercussions” policy will make your financial projections (and hence your ability to service them) go nuts.

2. Customers dont care that the bugs, if fixed, will still not solve the fundamental architecture issue your product has.

3. Investors wont hear you plead that if you hire that rock star developer; the rest of the team will a demand wage hike which will increase your burn rate.

To them its like a hot dog - Let me eat it, don’t tell me how its made.

What they are really trying to tell you is:

“Change your policies so you can be a better you. Then be authentic, transparent and honest”.

Until then just keep posting stuff that you’d rather be.

Unless most companies fundamentally make a cultural change to be more customer friendly, less focused only on the bottom line and more on lifetime value of a customer and their brand, they’d rather not be authentic.

Update: Read another post on this topic by Rachel Happe.