Personal Branding WebLog

Go to this Weblog at http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/ to access a wide variety of material on personal branding.

The way you manage your career is changing, due to the rise in competition and the introduction of web 2.0. In order to extend your reach, visibility and networking capabilities, you might turn to personal branding. In the digital age, your name is our only currency and by taking the first step reading this blog and consuming the information provided, you might have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The content provided on this blog includes podcasts, interviews with experts, insightful articles, research reports, games and much more, for all your personal branding needs. Remember that YOU are the brand.

I especially found the posting entitled "A high school and college entrepreneur speak out" very informative.

Please read the WebLog and send me any comments you have on its value.

Occupational Outlook Handbook

For hundred of dfferent types of jobs. the Occupational Handbook (OOH), 2008-2009 Edition tells you: The Occupational Outlook Handbook is a nationally recognize source of career information designed to provide valuable assistance to individuals making decisions about their future work lives. The Handbook is revised every two years.

> the training and education needed
> earnings
>expecte job prospects
>what workers do on the job
>working conditions

In addition, the Handbook gives you job search hints, links to information about the job market in each state and more.

Go to http://www.bls.gov/oco/home.htm to find out about all the occupations in which you might be interested.

10 Attributes of a great President

Doris Kearns GoodwinPublished: September 14, 2008

Taking Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt as guides, Doris Kearns Goodwin, a renowened historian, identified 10 attributes that distinguish truly great Presidents. They are:

1. The courage to stay strong. A President needs the ability to withstand adversity and motivate himself in the face of frustration. From childhood, Lincoln showed a determination to rise above the poverty into which he was born. Despite failures that would have felled most others, he never lost faith that if he refused to despair, he would eventually succeed. Roosevelt, by contrast, grew up with wealth, privilege, and love. His crucible came in a polio attack that left him a paraplegic at 39. While crippling his body, the paralysis expanded his sensibilities. He emerged from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. Far more intensely than before, he was able to put himself in the shoes of others to whom fate had dealt an unfair hand.

2. Self-confidence. Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation. Lincoln placed his three chief rivals for the Republican nomination in crucial positions in his Cabinet and filled the rest of his top jobs with former Democrats. His Cabinet sessions were fiery affairs, but they provided him with a wide range of advice and opinion. Similarly, FDR created a coalition Cabinet on the eve of war, bringing unsparing critics of the New Deal into key positions as Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy. And for his Army chief of staff, he reached 34 names down the list of senior officers to appoint George Marshall, because the straight-talking general was the only one to disagree with him in a meeting.

3. An ability to learn from errors: To lead successfully, you must be willing to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes. After the rout of Union forces at Bull Run, Lincoln stayed up all night writing a memo on military policy that incorporated the painful lessons he had learned. And when FDR concluded that a New Deal program was not working, he created a new one in its place, built upon an understanding of what had gone wrong.

4. A willingness to change. Conditions change, and Presidents must respond. When war came, FDR made his peace with the industrialists whose hatred he had welcomed during the New Deal. He relaxed anti-trust regulations, guaranteed profits, and brought in top business executives to run his production agencies, aware that only with their commitment could we build the planes, tanks, and ships we needed to win.

5. Emotional intelligence: A President must encourage his closest advisers to give their best and remain loyal. Lincoln shared credit for his successes and shouldered public blame for the failures of his subordinates. FDR had a remarkable capacity to transmit strength to others, to make them feel more determined to do their jobs well.

6. Self-control: Great leaders manage their emotions and remain calm in the midst of trouble. When angry with a colleague, Lincoln liked to write him a "hot letter," giving his emotions free rein. Then he would put the letter aside, knowing he would calm down and never send it. If he lost his temper, he would invariably follow up with a kind gesture. "If I was cross, I ask your pardon," he wrote to one of his generals. "If I do get up a temper I do not have sufficient time to keep it up." And on the Sunday that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt was struck by her husband's "deadly calm." While aides and Cabinet officers ran in and out in excitement, panic, and irritation, FDR remained at his desk, absorbing the news, deciding what to do next.

7. A popular touch .The best Presidents have an intuitive awareness of public sentiment, a sense of when to wait and when to lead. Lincoln once said that if he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation six months earlier, "public sentiment would not have sustained it." By following the gradual shift in the newspapers, by opening his office to conversations with ordinary people, by visiting troops in the field, he rightly concluded that by early 1863, the opposition was no longer "strong enough to defeat the purpose." FDR was said to possess an uncanny awareness of the hopes and fears of his countrymen and to know precisely when to move forward, when to hold back, and when to deliver one of his fireside chats.


8. A moral compass.Only strong leaders have the courage and integrity to follow their convictions when the risk of losing popular support is great. In mid-1864, top Republicans warned Lincoln that unless he renounced emancipation as a condition, the Confederates never would agree to peace talks, without which he had no chance of re-election. Yet Lincoln turned his party's leaders away without a second thought. "I should be damned in time and in eternity," he wrote, if he chose to conciliate the South over the slaves to whom he had pledged freedom. FDR chose in 1940 to supply England with what little America had in the way of weapons. In so doing, he drew the wrath of isolationists, liberals, and educators. His own generals warned that he so risked American security that he might be impeached or "found hanging from a lamppost" if England fell and Hitler used our captured weapons against us. Believing England's survival critical to the preservation of Western civilization, FDR was willing to take that risk.

9. A capacity to relax. FDR held a White House cocktail hour every evening. Its cardinal rule: Nothing was to be said of politics or war. Guests were to gossip, tell funny stories, and reminisce so that everyone could enjoy a few precious hours away from the pressures of the day. Lincoln possessed a life-affirming sense of humor and a legendary ability to tell long, winding tales that allowed him "to whistle off sadness." He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep

10. A gift for inspiring others. One of the key qualities of a great President is his ability to communicate national goals to the people and to educate and shape public opinion. Both Lincoln and FDR conveyed their convictions with stories and metaphors, as well as a profound sense of history and a love of poetry and drama. When Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, the North was on the verge of winning the Civil War. Yet he avoided a triumphal message. Knowing that his next challenge was to return the defeated South to the Union, he suggested that the sin of slavery was shared by both sides and called on his countrymen "with malice toward none; with charity for all...to bind up the nation's wounds." FDR's first inaugural address, delivered at the height of the Depression, conveyed a clear understanding of the difficulties the nation faced and projected such serene confidence in the fundamental strength of his country that he renewed the hope of millions.

. Let us look closely in the coming years at the leadership style of Barack Obama and analyze his strengths and weaknesses in relation to our greatest leaders.

The Ethics of Downsizing

The ethics of downsizingPosted by Jesse Nunes at 10:25 AM

It's a scary time out there. Millions of Americans are worried about the financial crisis, and with each day that passes it seems another major bank or company either bites the dust or gets swallowed up by a bigger entity -- or the government.

With companies large and small facing a credit crisis that severely limits their ability to borrow, downsizing is a real threat for many US workers. (Check out today's story in the Globe on how the crisis is affecting small business in Mass.) Even those who thought their jobs were secure are probably playing the painful mental exercise of imagining what they'd do if they lost their job.

Getting laid off is not any easy thing to endure. In BusinessWeek, "Ethics Guy" Bruce Weinstein writes that "getting fired is the eighth most stressful life experience, behind the death of a spouse (No. 1) or going to jail (No. 4), but ahead of the death of a close friend (No. 17), foreclosure on a mortgage or loan (No. 21), or in-law troubles (No. 24)."

And while doing the ethical thing may not be the first thing on your mind when you lose your job, Weinstein writes that it's critical – for both your mental well-being and future job prospects – that you handle getting laid off correctly. In a two-part series in BusinessWeek, Weinstein offers tips for those who are on both sides of the downsizing issue -- employers and workers. Here are samples of some of his advice for workers:

1. Get angry ... later. It's easy to react with hostility when you're told that your position is being eliminated. Don't... It's only human to be terribly upset or even filled with rage, but acting on those feelings may violate the do-no-harm principle. Less obvious but also important to think about is the damage you would do to a valued relationship that you may not be able to undo. You won't regret holding back, but you will regret losing your cool.

2. Don't take it personally. We'd like to be able to control our lives and shape our destiny through the sheer force of will, but sometimes things happen to us that have absolutely nothing to do with what we've done or who we are. This is one of those times.

3. Get a recommendation. One of the best ways for a potential employer to find out how valuable you are is to hear from your current boss, but you may have to be the one to make this happen. Get a recommendation in writing as soon as possible. Volunteer to write it yourself. If a letter is out of the question or doesn't arrive in a timely fashion, ask your boss to send you a short e-mail; even a one- or two-line testimonial will do. Get your boss's permission to put his or her direct phone number on your résumé and give out at job interviews.

4. Be a self-promoter. We're raised to believe that it's wrong to toot your own horn, but if ever there were a time to put that belief aside, it's now... One of our greatest challenges is striking the right balance between self-absorption and devotion to others. Still, there is not only no harm in standing up for yourself; it is unethical not to do so.

5. Grief is good. Grief is a natural and healthy response to losing something or someone of value in your life, and taking your grief seriously is another important way to treat yourself with kindness. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to seek counseling in the wake of being downsized. If you sustained an injury to your back, you would have no qualms about getting physical therapy. Why shouldn't you seek the appropriate remedy when your world is turned upside down? Many of us still attach a stigma to psychotherapy—wrongly so.

6. Accentuate the positive. Is it possible that one of the worst things that could happen to you might turn out to be the best? Take a look at Harvey Mackay's We Got Fired!: ... And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us (Ballantine Books, 2004). Michael Bloomberg, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, Lee Iacocca, and Robert Redford are just a few of the wildly successful people who explain how losing a job led to something much better.

(Read the complete articles on BusinessWeek's website: Part 1 and Part 2)
Of course, following such a plan is easier said than done when your way of life is at stake. As the Job Doc pointed out in a recent column, it is hard for some to move on when they lose their jobs.
Many Boston.com readers chimed in on a discussion thread on the topic of being 'wronged on the job', and it is clear that, even many years after being slighted, many still hold ill feelings toward their former employers.
How would you deal with a layoff? Have you been through this before? What steps have you taken to prepare for the worst?

What Peter Drucker would have said

The Financial Crisis: What Drucker Would Have Said.... by Rick Wartzman

Peter Drucker didn't have a whole lot of nice things to say about those on Wall Street, at one point likening them to "Balkan peasants stealing each other's sheep."Given the magnitude of the latest crisis to grip Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, American International Group, Lehman Brothers, and their friends, one can only imagine what kind of acid analogy he might have used today.Or perhaps he would have simply said, "I told you so." After all, so much of the trouble that has befallen these giants of the investment banking, mortgage, and insurance sectors—and that threatens to "undermine the financial security of all," as President George W. Bush put it—comes from a foolish disregard for the kinds of fundamental lessons that Drucker taught about risk, reach, and responsibility.

Some prefer to complicate things. Indeed, there is a temptation, in certain quarters, to fuzzy up what has happened here—to mask the basic management failures that are at the root of this disaster by pointing to the intricacies of credit-default swaps, "naked shorts," and other arcana. Luck Doesn't Last But as Drucker knew so well, none of this is really very complex: If you make enough dangerous bets—and amassing your fortune on a foundation of laughably loose lending standards and mountains of debt is nothing if not dangerous—you're eventually going to run out of luck."No matter how clever the gambler," Drucker asserted, "the laws of probability guarantee that he will lose all that he has gained, and then a good deal more."

He wrote these words in the 1990s, as a different group of once-illustrious institutions—Barings, Bankers Trust, Yamaichi Securities—were felled by their recklessness.Drucker noted that top management professed to be shocked by some of the activities that had taken place at these firms, and it won't be surprising if we hear similar talk this time around—especially if people wind up going to jail. It was reported that the FBI has opened more than two dozen probes into possible fraud connected to the financial meltdown, including investigations at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and Lehman. But Drucker didn't buy that senior executives were blind to their employees' egregious behavior a decade ago, and he wouldn't buy it now. "In the first place," he wrote, "there is a limit to coincidences. Such widespread breakdowns cannot be blamed on 'exceptions.' They denote systems failure.""Too Big to HideBesides, Drucker added, "in every single one of these 'scandals,' top management seems to have carefully looked the other way as long as trading produced profits (or at least pretended to produce them). Until the losses had become so big that they could no longer be hidden, the gambling trader was a hero and showered with money."Of course, the pressure to produce these profits—and, in turn, prop up a company's share price—has become unrelenting.

It used to be, veteran financial journalist Bob Reed remarked recently, "the stock price was an important component of something more grand: how well the company was managed, product quality, innovations, customer satisfaction—you know, the business." But over time, those pursuits have become largely overshadowed by just one: maximizing shareholder value.To Drucker, this mentality was anachronistic.

"One thing is clear to anyone with the slightest knowledge of political or economic history: The present-day assertion of 'absolute shareholder sovereignty'…is the last hurrah of 19th century, basically preindustrial capitalism," he wrote in a 1988 article. "It violates many people's sense of justice."Perhaps even more important, Drucker said, this lack of balance is unsettling in a world in which large institutions have such an enormous effect on so much"on the portfolios of shareholders, yes, but also on the lives of millions of other people, as we're seeing right now.Long-Term ThinkingIn this day and age, "modern enterprise, especially large enterprise, can do its economic job—including making profits for the shareholders—only if it is being managed for the long run," Drucker wrote. "Altogether far too much in society—jobs, careers, communities—depends on the economic fortunes of large enterprises to subordinate them completely to the interests of any one group, including shareholders."

All of which leads, in the end, to the biggest thing missing today on Wall Street and in much of Corporate America: an ethic of responsibility.Drucker believed strongly that every business must contribute to the general health of society. This means doing "good works" where appropriate. But above all, it means ensuring that the business itself is well-managed and built to last."The institution's performance of its specific mission is…society's first need and interest," Drucker wrote in his 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. "A bankrupt business is not a desirable employer and is unlikely to be a good neighbor in a community. Nor will it create the capital for tomorrow's jobs and the opportunities for tomorrow's workers."I often tell people that there are a million reasons to read and reread what Peter Drucker had to say. This week, it's more like 700 billion.

Rick Wartzman is the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Posted by Jose Muri at 7:24 PM 0 comments

How six companies Energized Their Employees

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/08/0814_energize_your_team/index.htm.


This link provides a slide show that describes how six companies energized their employees, and as a result, made them more productive and fulfilled. Managers must constantly find ways to provide the challenges and opportunities needed to help employees maximize their talents and to motivate them to continue to "add Value" to the company.

A Problem Analysis Tool-Fishbone Diagrams

What is a Fishbone Diagram? The fishbone diagram is an analysis tool that provides a systematic way at looking at effects and the causes that create or contribute to those effects. The design looks like the skeleton of a fish so it is refered as the fishbone diagram. I use it in categorizing the many potential causes of problems or issues in an orderly way and in identifying root causes.

Go to http://quality.enr.state.nc.us/tools/fishbone.htm for a more in depth fishbone construction explanation and a template for creating your own fishbone diagram.

Job Interview Mistakes

According to a CareerBuilders survey of over 3, 000 hiring professions and HR personnel, these are the most detrimental mistakes candidates can make during job interviews:


. Dress inappropriately 51%
. Speak negatively about
a current or former employer 49%
. Appear disinterested 48%
. Seem arrogant 44%
. Fail to provide specific
answers 30%
. Fail to ask good questions 29#

Interview tips for not getting hired

Would you hire someone who told you during an interview that he was fired for beating up his boss? Probably not, and the human resorces professionals agree.

CareerBuilders.com also presented these true stories that are surefire ways not to get hired:
. Take a call on your cell phone and then ask the interviewer to leave her own office because it's a private conversation.
.Tell the interviewer you won't be able to stay with the job long because you might get an inheritance if your uncle dies, and he's "not looking good".
. Turn down an offer of food because you state that you don't want to line your stomach with grease before going out drinking.
. Flush the toilet during a telephone interview.

I am sure you have more stories that you can share. Send them along.

A dumb PR stunt in Boston

The Problem Most marketing campaigns are not mistaken for terrorist attacks. But this one, like many of the campaigns run by Sam Ewen's New York City -- based firm, Interference, was different.

In January 2007, Interference launched a campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a Cartoon Network show starring fast-food characters with names such as Frylock and Meatwad. The campaign featured metal sheets covered with colored LEDs in the shape of characters from the show. The figures were hung in 10 U.S. cities, with at least 20 scattered around Boston. About two weeks into the campaign, a Boston subway worker noticed one of the figures, with wires sticking out of it, on a highway on-ramp. The police were called in, and a bomb squad detonated the prop. Highways, bridges, and transit stations were shut down, and the media pounced on Interference's New York City offices. By the end of the week, Ewen had issued an apology and agreed to pay an undisclosed portion of the $2 million settlement negotiated between Turner Broadcasting (the Cartoon Network's parent company) and the city of Boston. The immediate crisis was over, but Ewen wondered if it was time to scale back his firm's edgy ambitions.

What The Experts Said Michael Sitrick, founder and chairman of Sitrick and Co. in Los Angeles, advised Ewen to do media interviews outlining how Interference would ensure this would never happen again. Katie Paine, CEO of Berlin, New Hampshire -- based KDPaine & Partners, said mainstream companies might now be leery of hiring the firm. But Donna Sokolsky, co-founder of Spark PR in San Francisco, disagreed, saying, "It was a really innovative campaign. That's what people will remember."

What's Happened Since Interference didn't lose any customers. Today, Ewen and his 14 employees are extremely careful and try to imagine every possible scenario when designing a public campaign. They also make sure to contact city governments to get their blessing and address any concerns. The company is on track to finish 30 to 40 projects this year.
What's Next Ewen plans to target retail chains and automakers. And he hardly seems afraid to be creative. In a recent campaign to promote BBC America's Robin Hood, for example, Interference sent out people dressed in cloaks to do good deeds such as opening doors, paying for breakfasts, and carrying groceries throughout Philadelphia. To the best of his knowledge, no one called the cops to complain about the merry men.

Smart ads

The Future of Advertising is Here

It's becoming increasingly possible to target "smart ads" specifically to people who want them. And best of all, you can do this for a fraction of the price of mass-market.

From: Inc. Magazine, August 2005 By: David H. Freedman

Andrew Fano is showing off the living room. It's a plush, teaky, well-appointed affair, but what really catch the eye are several thin-screen video displays, including a few smaller ones that are embedded in furniture and picture frames. The displays are slowly cycling through what appear to be family digital photographs -- an appealing idea, considering many of us let our thousands of digital photos sit unwatched on a computer hard drive. "But would you want to see an ad stuck in there?" asks Fano, indicating one of the digital slide shows, apparently of a family vacation to a theme park. "No? Because you just saw one." One of the theme-park photos was a professional image designed to "enhance your memories" of the park, explains Fano, a senior researcher at consulting giant Accenture who is exploring new ways for advertisers to get their messages across. The tony living room is actually part of Accenture's technology laboratory, and the displays are an experimental prototype of a service that would arrange your photos into slide shows in exchange for the right to slip relevant sponsored pictures into the mix.

The world is awash in advertising clutter. For decades marketers have been spending more and more to try to get their message out -- only to find their pitches drowned out in a sea of noise generated by countless other marketers trying to do the same thing. In effect, companies have been paying big bucks to be ignored. Now, inspired by the Internet's ability to do a better job of targeting prospects and measuring results, advertisers are dreaming up new ways to break through the clutter and connect with potential customers at a lower cost.

The big advances in advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter & Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message. The new techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too.

Though the advertising revolution got started online, some of the new techniques are already finding their way onto streets and walls and even into clothing pockets around the world. Perhaps just five years from now, companies will be able to routinely and inexpensively embark on ad campaigns that hit exactly the right prospects -- and hardly anyone else -- with entertaining, hard-to-ignore messages that can follow people via new high-tech media into their cars, offices, living rooms, and bedrooms. For companies that master the new techniques, the payoff is potentially enormous: a big jump in customer mindshare while holding the line on marketing costs. And whereas the big advances in advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter & Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message, the new techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too. "Over time," says Karen Breen Vogel, CEO of ClearGauge, one of hundreds of interactive ad agencies that have sprung up to focus on online advertising, "we can cut the cost of the advertising in half while maintaining customer response."

Fixed in an archipelago of art galleries and airy cafes at the periphery of Chicago's North Loop, the offices of ClearGauge have the hip, slightly subversive look you'd expect of a boutique advertising agency. Except that where the halls of other agencies regale visitors with blowups of their all-important creative, ClearGauge has proudly plopped a wicked-looking bank of servers front and center against the exposed concrete walls. It's a tip-off to the agency's sensibilities -- and to a sea change in the advertising industry.

Advertising has long been a sort of black art with a murky ROI, and for a simple reason: Clients rarely know for sure who sees their ads, let alone whether the ads influence anyone. Even though companies spend a third of a trillion dollars a year on advertising, those ads often end up being irrelevant to the people who see them. On average, Americans are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Partners study said they feel "constantly bombarded" by ads, and 59% said the ads they see have little or no relevance to them. No wonder so many people dislike and ignore advertising, and so many business owners feel gun-shy about investing in serious campaigns.

The Internet has begun to change all that. The ability to measure the impact of an ad simply by counting how many people click on it, and to link advertisements to search-engine results, in large part drove Internet advertising to $9.6 billion in 2004, a 33% jump from 2003, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau reports. But the real advantage is going to companies that figure out how to use these tools to hunt down specific types of prospects and nail them with the right pitch. "We look for subsegments of Internet users who care about certain things," explains Breen Vogel. "We find them when they're online, we intercept their activities, and we start a relationship with them."

To understand how the Internet and firms like ClearGauge have been changing advertising from a slippery craft to what might be called "persuasion engineering," consider the campaign ClearGauge has been developing on behalf of Mod-Pac, a Buffalo company that manufactures cartons and handles printing and packaging for more than 5,000 companies. Mod-Pac came to ClearGauge for help in launching a new 24-hour online service specializing in running fast, less expensive print jobs for businesses. Instead of conducting endless brainstorming sessions in search of a clever campaign hook, a team led by Breen Vogel -- a former industrial engineer with experience in supply-chain management -- attacked the problem the way a government contractor might set about building a nuclear submarine.

The team started off by breaking Mod-Pac's target market into seven submarkets, including event planners, ad agencies, and not-for-profit organizations. Each of these submarkets was further broken down according to who influenced the key purchase in each category -- in some cases a secretary can have as much influence on a buying decision as a CEO, but the two need very different sorts of pitches. In the past, for example, ClearGauge has gone after doctors' spouses to sell medical supplies and lawyers to sell commercial financial services. ClearGauge then enlisted online surveys and focus groups to uncover the hot buttons for each type of purchase influencer in each submarket. Some decision makers valued sophistication in their printing company, while others placed more emphasis on creativity, and still others on low cost. Different ads were then cooked up for the different targets, so that, for example, a creative director at an ad agency was targeted with a pitch that featured a dancing, mischievous lizard mascot, while a CFO at a nonprofit got a more sober version of the lizard with glasses and a pitch that emphasized cost-savings. To make sure each pitch ended up in front of its intended target, ClearGauge studied the click-through statistics on hundreds of business-oriented websites for banner-ad placement and paid search engines to have specific ads come up in response to some 5,000 carefully chosen terms. By obsessively monitoring how many people click on each of the ads to end up on Mod-Pac's website, and then noting what each person does at the website, ClearGauge can further refine the relevance and placement of each of the ads while weeding out the less effective efforts.

Online advertisers are about to get a new tool that will vastly increase their ability to place highly relevant ads in front of prospects. Emerging now are powerful "behavioral targeting" services that can track what an individual clicks on and looks at across a range of sites over the course of weeks and months, making it possible to build a detailed profile of that person's interests, purchases, and preferences. The companies prepared to do the tracking, including 24/7 Real Media, Blue Lithium, Dotomi, and Claria, don't capture personal information such as names or e-mail addresses -- only surfing habits -- and even then follow only people who have opted in to the tracking.

But that's enough to let advertisers do a far better job of matching pitches and prospects. At least 950 out of every 1,000 Internet automobile ads still land in front of people who aren't in the market for a car, notes Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer of Claria, based in Redwood City, Calif. "If you're starting a high-end pet-food company, you only want to talk to people who have a certain type of pet and are willing to pay a premium to feed it," he adds. "We can identify those people. Why do you need to reach anyone else?" In a study, website visitors were, on average, 14 times more likely to click on an ad when it matched their profiles, claims Eagle. He says he has already lined up more than 200 advertisers for his new tracking service and expects to reach 500 by the end of the year.

Given privacy concerns, will many Internet users opt to participate in these sorts of services? Actually, they might. Because according to a 2004 survey by the Ponemon Institute, a consultancy that specializes in Internet privacy issues and has worked with Claria, two-thirds of Internet users believe better targeted ads would be less annoying, and 45% would share personal information in exchange for that advertising relevance.

But it's not just the Internet that's poised to become a bastion of highly targeted advertising. In fact, the trend to interactive, targeted advertising is starting to break its chains to the computer screen. Even television, the grande dame of conventional mass marketing, is taking steps to offer a more focused advertising experience. For starters, A.C. Nielsen and other companies have been rolling out technology to measure more accurately who is watching which shows, providing test viewers with pagers, for example, that can measure TV-watching habits outside their homes. Experian, a consumer data company in Costa Mesa, Calif., is cross-referencing this sort of detailed TV-viewer information with vast troves of other consumer behavior data so that a network can pinpoint viewers not just by age or income but also by what products they're in the market for. "If you give people a television program that indexes well against their preferences, you'll get more mental click-through," says William Engel, co-CEO of Experian subsidiary Simmons Market Research Bureau. Some advertisers are getting even finer-tuned pitches by negotiating the ability to alter their TV ad slots in response to changing conditions. Some TV ads for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, for example, have been set to run only when the temperature drops below a certain point in a given market.

And even bigger changes are in the wings as television starts to morph into a more Internet-like experience. Cable provider Comcast offers advertisers in parts of Florida the chance to buy ads that run only in specific neighborhoods, so that, for example, ads for a Spanish-language newspaper appear only in heavily Latino communities. The technology to target cable ads all the way down to specific homes according to household viewing habits already exists, with deployment largely awaiting the resolution of privacy concerns. Cable companies are also experimenting with interactive channels that let viewers enlist their remote controls to click on banner ads and onscreen buttons. Video games are getting with the program too. Some are already packed with ads integrated into the cyberscenery, and a New York company called Massive has developed a technique for changing those ads to match an individual player's moves and preferences.

As more networked display screens permeate our homes -- on appliances, walls, even furniture -- each one will become a potential medium for tuned-to-your-lifestyle ad services of the sort that Accenture's Fano and others are dreaming up. Think of this new breed of advertisement as "smart," in that these ads know, in a sense, to whom they will be playing and under what circumstances.

Smart ads, it turns out, won't be confined to the home and office. In three Massachusetts Stop & Shop supermarkets, an electronic tablet attached to the shopping carts asks for a swipe of the shopper's loyalty card -- and in return provides a shopping list that the store's computers have prepared based on the shopper's past purchases. Oh, and by the way, the tablet also offers targeted electronic coupons that pop up when the shopper turns down the aisle with the featured product. "Why offer a discount on your yogurt to someone who usually buys it anyway?" asks Fano, whose lab helped develop a similar technology. "You want to pitch someone who's about to buy a rival brand."

Computer screens are popping up everywhere, and more and more advertisers are thinking up ways to make sure those screens don't go to waste. Take elevators, which now often sport displays above the floor buttons. These screens are becoming prime advertising real estate as marketers grab the chance to catch businesspeople or affluent tourists on their way to the street. Targeting elevator ads to the location, time of day, and audience is not rocket science, notes Larry Harris, who heads up multicultural marketing at marketing agency Draft New York. "Bloomingdale's could boost sales 5% if it put up an ad for a one-day sweater sale in my building at lunchtime," says Harris. "Everyone in the elevator will see it because they're desperate to not have to look at anyone else."

Taxis are becoming smart-ad vehicles too. Some New York City cabs have screens inside, and some taxis in New York and elsewhere have electronic messaging signs that are tied to GPS location sensors, so that a cab can pitch a nearby store or restaurant wherever it roams. Even your own car will get in the game. General Motors has been experimenting with location-aware sponsored messages tied to its OnStar communications system -- and all the major auto manufacturers are looking into ways to hook car-based displays up to the Internet, ads and all.
Not that drivers of nonwired cars, or even pedestrians, will miss out on the fun of targeted ads.

Digital billboards and posters, which function essentially as large video screens, are already popping up alongside roads and sidewalks, adjusting their displays to different audiences -- a commuter crowd during morning rush hour, moms running errands midmorning, and young couples on dates in the evening. For even more precision, Smart Sign Media in Sacramento operates digital highway billboards that detect the radio stations playing in passing cars and flash up client ads that best match the profiles of those stations' listeners. And Mobiltrak in Herndon, Va., places car-radio-station-identifying sensors in the parking lots of retail clients so they can tell if people driving into the lots have been nudged there by their radio ads, allowing them to adjust a radio campaign to get the most traffic for the least cost.

By rotating ads at the right time through these various media, an advertiser can create a campaign that hits its best prospects several times a day in different locations -- and in theory pay less to do it, since the advertiser won't be paying to put the ad up in front of a mass audience. "The idea," says David L. Smith, founder and CEO of San Francisco advertising agency Mediasmith, "is to vertically stack the ad frequency among different ad vehicles rather than to horizontally stack it within a single vehicle" -- as with a repeating television ad.
Of course, the ultimate smart-ad tool would enable a marketer to hit any individual with a low-cost, interactive message any time of day, any place -- a platform for a campaign that could identify and follow prospects through the world as if they were continuously online. Forward-thinking marketers even have a name for this dream medium. They call it...the mobile phone.
"Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off. There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."

Okay, turning your prospects' cell phones into ringing spam machines is probably not your idea of cultivating goodwill. And it's not likely to happen. Unlike e-mail, mobile phones aren't readily accessible to marketers -- mobile phone privacy is zealously guarded by big carriers like Verizon and Nextel, as well as by law. There's an opening, however, and smart advertisers are preparing to drive a truck through it. Provided a consumer clearly opts in -- say, by dialing or text-messaging a certain number -- carriers are slowly becoming more or less amenable to letting marketers return a text message, or even an audio or video file, to that consumer's phone. Mobile phone ads are already big in some parts of Europe and Asia, and it's just starting to take hold here. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are among the companies that have beamed coupons to U.S. cell phones, eliciting coupon-redemption rates as high as 17%. "Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off," says Michael Baker, president of Boston-based mobile-marketing firm Enpocket, which ran the Dunkin' Donuts campaign. "There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."

Throw in location tracking, a capability U.S. mobile phones are getting right now, and you've got a device that can prompt you with a coupon for a discount oil change just as you're driving by the lube shop. Enpocket has already run such a "location aware" mobile-phone campaign in Singapore on behalf of Intel. And it won't be long before you can pay for goods and services with a click of a cell-phone button, too -- something many mobile-phone users in Japan can do today.
While lack of relevance may be the single biggest shortcoming of conventional advertising, it's not the only one. Even if an ad ends up in front of potential customers, they won't necessarily pay attention to it -- especially if it comes up as part of a stream of other ads. To have a chance of getting past our mental filters and influencing our decisions, ads have to grab attention and be compelling. In a way, advertisers have to learn to make their ads less adlike and more entertainmentlike.

Take television advertisers. They've always had to deal with viewers running out of the room to grab a snack when the commercials come on, but now they're facing TiVo and other digital video recorders, whose owners already fast-forward through 70% of commercials. Meanwhile, fast-growing video-on-demand services that enable viewers to order up programs provide another means to go commercial-free. These developments have pushed marketers to jump into alternative forms of television advertising, including product placement (Coca-Cola cups in the hands of American Idol judges), sponsorship deals that get brand names into the titles of shows (as in College Sports Television Network's Nike Training Camp show), and "long form" video ads designed to be entertaining or relevant enough to attract video-on-demand viewers on their own (as with Canada's all-commercial Advertising on Demand Network).
On the Internet, too, advertisers are finding more ways to intertwine marketing messages with entertainment. Online travel agency Orbitz has managed to entice Web surfers to bask in its marketing messages by embedding them in online pop-up ads built around simple interactive sports-themed games like Sink the Putt. Not only that, but players who like the games often forward links to them to friends and colleagues, spreading the message at no extra cost to Orbitz. LiveVault, a Marlborough, Mass., data back-up and recovery provider, got the same sort of free ride when it produced and released on the Web a short comic video about backing up data, starring John Cleese. LiveVault CEO Bob Cramer claims the $500,000 price tag for the video promotion was a bargain, given the big response. "It ended up all over the Internet," he gloats.

This sort of viral approach is getting a boost from some sophisticated technology. A San Francisco company called Pulse has developed software that can turn any image of a person or animal into a semi-animated talking head, complete with moving lips and a voice that delivers any lines typed in by a user -- and the resulting blabby little cybercreature can then be e-mailed to buddies. Sandwich chain Quizno's, online greeting-card site Sympatico, and cruise line Royal Caribbean have all made these online characters the centerpieces of successful Internet campaigns. At one point a third of all visitors to Royal Caribbean's website had come because of the characters, according to Dan Hanrahan, president of Celebrity Cruises, a sister company to Royal Caribbean. It may seem like a silly gimmick, but there's a powerful draw to this sort of approach, notes Byron Reeves, director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. "Persuasion is very much a social and emotional exchange," says Reeves. "An automated face provides some level of that."

That same sort of social interactive playfulness can also be put to work in advertising away from the computer screen. Accenture has designed a 10-foot-wide, high-resolution touchscreen display -- the world's largest -- intended to allow crowds in malls and buildings and on the street to interact with characters, games, information, and other images on the screen. Accenture has also integrated "focused sound" technology into the system, so that appropriate music, dialogue, or sound effects can be directed at individuals interacting with the display while passersby hear almost nothing. All of it, of course, would be mixed in some way with an advertising message.
You don't even really need a screen to get your interactive message out to the crowds. Reactrix Systems in Redwood City, Calif., offers a system that projects a colorful image on a sidewalk, wall, piece of furniture, or anything else, and that tracks the motion and gestures of people on or near the image to make it interactive. Ten or more people can stomp on or wave at the several-feet-wide image at once, kicking around a virtual soccerball or splashing in a virtual pool, all while ogling a sponsor's logo blended into the image. McDonald's, Sam Goody, and the MGM Grand have been among the clients, along with movie theater chains and malls, where the devices routinely attract enthusiastic crowds. According to Reactrix CEO Mike Ribero, studies have shown that as many as 86% of the people who interact with the Reactrix image can recall the sponsor days later, compared with 5% for prime-time television advertising. "In a world with a lot of advertising clutter, this sort of thing provides advertisers with a consumer's attention for an unprecedented amount of time," says Ribero. "Advertising has been built around reach and frequency, but depth and duration of experience is going to be the next big metric." What's more, he says, getting an advertising experience out closer to the stores can have a stronger influence on buying decisions.

And if you really want to reach out and grab the attention of people out in the real world, why not actually, well, reach out? Zebra Imaging in Austin produces large, lifelike holographic images that appear to float in 3-D in front of a filmlike panel -- no goofy glasses or goggles needed. People can even walk around the ersatz object to examine it from different angles. Zebra has created car-show-stopping holograms of automobiles for Ford to showcase new designs, as well as holograms of celebrities for promotions. As the technology's cost comes down and quality improves, says Zebra CEO Robin Curle, these startling images could eventually be popping out routinely at consumers on the street and in stores.

Karen Breen Vogel, for one, is hesitant to be among the first to reach beyond the Internet to tag people in intimate, surprising ways. "It's the next wave for us," she says. "But right now we're in investigation mode."

Advertisers may drool over the promise of smart ads, but many are also wary of invading the public prematurely with clumsy, personalized, unignorable pitches on billboards and cell phones before anyone has a chance to get used to the idea. ClearGauge's Breen Vogel, for one, is hesitant to be among the first to reach beyond the Internet to tag people in intimate, surprising ways. "It's the next wave for us," she says. "But right now we're in investigation mode."
Until marketers can read consumers' minds, there will always be uncertainty about the most effective ways to deliver messages. And mind reading, at least, is a technology that's still a long, long way off. Oh, wait -- scratch that. Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology and Baylor College of Medicine are already using high-tech brain scans to measure people's responses to marketing messages. So stay tuned.

As if you had a choice.
Sidebar: Hot New Advertising Tools
Fun, targeted, effective. Being ignored is so 20th century
Accenture has designed a 10-foot-wide touchscreen that lets crowds in malls or on the street interact independently with characters, games, and information.
Imagine a day when you can text-message a discount coupon to a cell phone user just as she walks past your shop. That day is here.
With Reactrix Systems' interactive images, 10 or more people can kick around a virtual soccerball, splash in a virtual pool, or (below) swirl through a logo.
In cities like New York, taxi-top messaging signs are tied to GPS location sensors, so that a cab can pitch nearby stores and restaurants as it roams.
In Massachusetts, Stop & Shop is testing a touchscreen that with a swipe of a loyalty card can remind shoppers of past purchases and suggest alternatives.

John McCain- Baby Alex

This is from my Marketing class:

This is an ad from moveon.org that attacks John McCain's "100 years" statement about the war in Iraq. It's not really factual but it's effective on playing towards people's emotions.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq30lapbC9c

Nike Ad

According to my summer 08 Marketing class, they did not think that this advertisement is effective because it doesn't really have anything to do with the brand Nike. Some people may even feel insulted by the nature of the Ad.

Watch your online profile

Will Your Online Profile Get You Hired or Fired?
By Selena Dehne, JIST Publishing

"Having an online identity is becoming increasingly important as a way to establish your credibility and personal brand, find a job and develop key contacts and to attract career or business opportunities," say Ellen Sautter and Diane Crompton, co-authors of "Seven Days to Online Networking." To ensure that people create a profile savvy enough to help them land a job, they offer the following tips.

1. HOW TO GET HIRED:

Be consistent from site to site. Too often recruiters and hiring managers get mixed messages about job candidates based on their online profiles. For example, you might have a LinkedIn profile that portrays you as a driven go-getter with an excellent sales background, but your MySpace profile portrays you as someone who lives the life of an '80s rock star. Make sure that every profile you create portrays the same person -- someone who's respectable, professional and high-achieving.

Master a brief sound bite. When looking at your profile, hiring managers and recruiters want to learn more about you. The "About You" section of your profile offers the perfect opportunity to briefly describe your work history, strengths and notable achievements. This paragraph should be similar to a thirty-second elevator speech you may have already prepared about yourself.

Develop a network. Some people prefer massive networks that consist of hundreds of strangers from around the globe. Others prefer a small network that includes only people they've befriended, are related to or have worked with. Crompton and Sautter suggest developing a network of 50 to 150 contacts through each site.

Showcase your skills through links. You should include links to your blog, webfolio or Web site, if they are relevant to your career. If you don't have any of these things, consider including links to any projects or work you might have been involved in that can be viewed online.
Strategically use keywords in the "Tags" section. Similar to using keywords in a résumé, this strategy allows you to list words that help other people in your network or search engines find you. These words can include your area of expertise, job titles, industries, hobbies and anything else that defines you as a professional.

However, the following five mistakes are some of the most common social networking missteps.

2. HOW TO GET FIRED:


Post a scandalous photo. You know what I'm talking about: It's the photo of you showing off your hot, bronze body in a barely there bikini. It's the portrait of you -- in all your glory -- bonging a beer while sporting a Bears jersey at last week's tailgate. Profile pictures like this may be amusing and help you score a ton of friend requests, but they certainly won't impress your employer.

View or update your profile on company time. You can't help it. You have to accept a friend request as soon as you receive it. You have to know who has added pictures to their profile in the past hour. And as soon as you realize wakeboarding tops your list of interests, you have to immediately change your profile to reflect this. You jokingly refer to it as your Facebook addiction, but it's no laughing matter to your employer. Instead, it's considered a waste of company time if you're scoping out these Web sites while at work.

Post information that conflicts with your employer's values. Remember that anything you wouldn't want to share with your supervisor or co-workers is better left off your profile. This information may include how you spend your leisure time, how you feel about sensitive issues or any personal experiences you may have had. Also, be cautious about things your friends post on your profile that may portray you negatively.

Reveal why you're a lousy employee. Ever taken a sick day to hit the beach, rather than nurse a cold? Or maybe you were supposed to work from home one afternoon, but your profile suggests you slept in and spent the afternoon catching up on your soaps. Believe it or not, some people actually make this information public on their profile! Whether you reveal this kind of information in your profile status or a friend has left a comment ratting you out, be aware that if others can see it so can an employer.

Vent about your employer, boss or job. Many social networking sites allow people to include their work history. Posting unnecessary, negative information about a particular aspect of the job, such as "Job sucks, but it pays the bills," gives an employer all the reasons he needs to slap you with a pink slip.

Some Myths about Online Learning

Myth 1: Classroom learning is superior to online learning.

There is a large and growing body of evidence (see http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/) that demonstrates that, generally, there is no significant difference between classroom instruction and online learning. Just as there is good and classroom learning, there is good and bad online learning. The quality of the learning experience, of course, varies based on class size, student preparation, instructor skills, the quality of the curriculum material and other variables.

Myth 2: Online learning lacks important interaction with faculty and other students.

Well designed online courses have a high level of interaction built in. These include collaborative group/team projects (developing a business plan, for example), threaded discussions, Group/Team Discussion Boards, instant messaging, e-mail (originated from a course management application) and phone communication. It is more work to teach online because online courses have more and deeper interaction with students.

Myth 3: Online learning works well for some subjects/degrees but not for others.

This might be true in very limited areas like laboratory science or engineering which require specialized equipment. But there are now high- quality online programs in most academic areas, including highly interactive /clinical disciplines like teacher education, nursing and even PhD programs.

Myth 4: Online learning works well only for certain types of students.

Online learning today includes every kind of student in all age groups, ethnicities, degree levels and geographies. It provides huge advantages for working adults who need to fit their education into their work and family life. Also, students who are quiet in the classroom often become active participants online. All students now realize that to learn online is fast becoming a needed skill for most learners as they move on into other learning environment or into the workplace.

Myth 5: Employers do not value online degrees or courses.

Research from Eduventures shows that 62% of employers believe online learning is equal to or better than classroom-based learning. Many employers value the traits exhibited by holders of distance degrees: maturity, initiative, self-discipline, and strong goal orientation. Generally, corporate tuition reimbursement programs treat all accredited programs equally, whether delivered online or not. Also, online courses are accepted by most colleges for transfer credit.

Myth 6: It is difficult to measure online learning.

Online learning focuses more on completing assigned work and generally not trying to measure the time. Credit is given for work completed on schedule and with suitable quality. However, Discussion Board participation-its frequency and quality- is clearly measured by various course management systems. To deal with cheating concerns, online students might take exams in a secure proctored test center, their work checked for plagiarism, or have oral defenses of their capstone work. The variety of assignments and their use of current events makes it easier to evaluate class work.

Myth 7: Online learning is a quick and easy way to get a degree.

The evidence is that students take longer, read more, write more, and do more research that a classroom student. But some students may be able to earn a degree more quickly in some online programs because they are able to move at their own pace.

Myth 8: Online learning diminishes the teacher’s importance

The faculty role is often enhanced and even more important in online and hybrid courses. Online learning can free faculty to interact more with students, to mentor, advise, review individual work, and answer questions. Faculty use a host of technology that fosters student interaction and learning, including the Web, Chat sessions, Discussion Boards, Web Logs, Wikis, e-mail and telephone communication.

Myth 9: Online learning will make traditional classroom-based education obsolete.

While online learning education provides advantages of access and potentially lower cost and higher quality, this does not diminish the value of face-to-face student services and learning. Particularly for under prepared and returning students, the classroom and the campus provide necessary connections and resources that help them learn. It is likely that many of these students would be better served beginning in face-to-face courses, then moving to a hybrid environment (a mix of face-to-face and online) and then progressing to learning purely online. Rather than making traditional instruction obsolete, online learning gives instructors another tool to apply to modern teaching and learning.

Please comment if you are aware of any other myths about online learning.


(Adapted from Innovation Abstracts published by NISOD.)

The Welchway-A series of Podcasts.

Belwo is a site containing a very helpful series of Podcasts delivered by Jack & Suzy Welch.

As you remember, Jack Welch was the CEO of GE. GE experienced consistent growth in profitability, market share and stock valuation under his leadership. He now provides a podcast each week in Business Week on a variety of management issues. Take a look at the wisdom he imparts, with his wife, on many issues confronting the modern manager..

http://businessweek.com/search/podcasts/welchway.rss.

What Marketing Is and Is not -Know the Difference

Knowing what Marketing Is and Is Not and knowing the difference is the first step in creating a successful campaign.


Marketing, according to some marketers, is just a fancy word for selling. It's more common sense and patience than anything else. It's a process and not an event.
Marketing is any contact that your business has with anyone who isn't a part of your business. .



Marketing is the art of getting people to change their minds.
Many business owners think marketing is a bunch of things that it isn't, such as the following:

1. Marketing is not advertising. Don't think that because you're advertising, you're marketing. There are more than 200 forms of marketing. Advertising is one of them. If you're advertising, you're advertising. You're doing only one half of 1 percent of what you can do.


2. Marketing is not direct mail. Some companies think they can get all the business they need with direct mail. Mail-order firms may be right about that. But most businesses need a plethora of other marketing weapons for their direct mail to succeed.


3. Marketing is not telemarketing. For business-to-business marketing, few weapons succeed as well as telemarketing. Telemarketing response can be improved by augmenting it with advertising. But don't kid yourself. Marketing is not telemarketing alone.


4. Marketing is not brochures. Many companies rush to produce a brochure, then pat themselves on the back for the quality of the brochure. Is that brochure marketing? It's an important part when mixed with 10 or 15 other very important parts, but by itself? Forget it.


5. Marketing is not the phonebook. Many companies run a phonebook ad and figure that takes care of their marketing. In 5 percent of the cases, that's the truth. In the other 95 percent, it's a disaster of marketing ignorance.


6. Marketing is not show business. There's no business like show business, and that includes marketing. Think of marketing as sell business, as create-a-desire business, as motivation business. But don't think of yourself as being in the entertainment business, because marketing is not supposed to entertain.


7. Marketing is not a stage for humor. If you use humor in your marketing,people will recall your funny joke, but not your compelling offer. If you use humor, it will be funny the first and maybe the second time. After that, it will be grating and will get in the way of what makes marketing work--repetition.


8. Marketing is not an invitation to be clever. If you fall into the cleverness trap, it's because you don't realize that people remember the cleverest part of the marketing even though it's your offer they should remember. Cleverness is a marketing vampire, sucking attention away from your offer.


9. Marketing is not complicated. It becomes complicated for people who fail to grasp the simplicity of marketing, but marketing is user-friendly to guerrillas. They begin with a seven-sentence guerrilla marketing plan, then commit to that plan. Not too complicated.


10. Marketing is not a miracle worker. More money has been wasted by expecting miracles than by any other misconception of marketing. Marketing is the best investment you can make if you do it right, and doing it right requires patience and planning.


11. Marketing is not a website. And if you don't know marketing in the first place, you're going to lose a lot of money online. The web helps with the job, but it's not the whole job.
Marketing is an opportunity for you to earn profits with your business, a chance to cooperate with other businesses in your community or your industry and a process of building lasting relationships.


Adapted from Jay Conrad Levinson who is the Father of Guerrilla Marketing. His books have sold more than 20 million copies and appear in 54 languages.

Interviewing Questions

Behavioral Scientists tell us that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Situational type interview questions can be strengthened by anchoring them to actual past behaviors. These are some behavioral questions in which the leader/manager is asked to recall specific actions, with rich detail; they have taken in job related situations.

Tells us about a time when your judgment was tested in a crisis. How did you act and what did you act on?
Can you share some examples of when you were a catalyst who brought groups with polarized opinions together so that all voices were on the table?
Tell us about a high-performing team that you’ve built. What made it high performing?
Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive, Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble. In retrospect, what would you have done differently?
Can you give some examples of how you overcame resistance to bring about needed change.
Give us an example of how you brought about a more favorable cultural change.
Give an example of how you dealt with a particular situation that threatened the viability of the company.
Do you have some examples of how you improved the communications within a company.


In addition, situational questions are good ways to evaluate whether the leader/manager can handle difficult situations likely to be encountered on the job. Some examples are:

1. What are the first few things you’ll do to raise confidence among all the company stakeholders.
2. How will you create an environment for innovation within your leadership team?
3. Describe how you will create a more participatory democracy and give people the opportunity to influence decision making.
4. What would you do to create an ethical climate in the workplace?
5. Describe how you would deal with a product recall.
6. How would you deal with a drop in stock share value.
7. What would you tell shareholders about the current and future prospects for the company.
8. How would you deal with a serious breach of security?

These are just two types of interviews-Behavioral and Situational-that will give the interviewer a good grasp of a candidate’s suitability for a leadership role in your company. Please send me your list of behavioral and situational questions.

Marketing Words

Words are at the heart of almost every form of marketing.. Choose words carefully, and sales will follow. Make the wrong choices, and customers will tune you out.

Check this list of the most overused words eroding the quality of today's marketing.

1. Care: "We care," "caring for you" and "from people who care" are all versions of the same weak promise. Typically, you'll find these phrases in health-care, insurance and financial marketing. They prompt prospects to wonder how the promise will benefit them and in what ways this caring attitude is manifested. But because the word itself is so overused, prospects may not pay attention long enough to learn the answer.

2. Solutions: The great love of technology marketers, this word has been beaten to death. So many companies promise to have the solution that the word is no longer credible. Since most customers or clients believe their challenges are unique, it's hard for them to specifically imagine how these solutions will be delivered without lots of additional information from the advertiser.

3. Results: Though not truly a naughty word, results has been overused and represents a highly general, fairly toothless promise. When confronted with the promise of results, most prospects will want proof. So if you choose to use this word, be prepared with testimonials and other support.

4. Amazing: How many "amazing" breakthroughs have you seen advertised today? Are most of them really amazing? Probably not. This superlative makes something sound too good to be true. Use it with caution and be ready to back it up with plenty of details.

5. Needs: It seems like every advertiser these days promises to meet our needs. But most are short on specifics. This tired promise elicits a ho-hum response because we already expect the things we buy to meet our needs. Why else would we buy them? Strengthen your selling proposition by detailing how your product or service will do a better job of meeting needs than what your competitors offer.

6. Quality: Just as we expect products and services to meet our needs, we also expect high-quality merchandise. Consumers believe quality should be a given. What makes your product of higher quality than others? Tell consumers the ways you ensure quality, and you'll put some teeth into this bland promise.

7. Turnkey: Marketing that promises a "turnkey solution" is likely to be met with skepticism mixed with a touch of fear over the prospective loss of control it suggests. Prospects must trust that your company will provide stellar performance every step of the way. That makes it essential to use specifics and take sufficient space or time to tell a complete story.

8. #1: It seems everyone is claiming to be No. 1 at something. Whether it's price, delivery, convenience or savings, marketers are claiming number-one status with very little proof. And that has damaged the effectiveness of this claim. Plus, being No. 1 is all about you and not about the advantages you provide to the customer. Use words that specifically detail how your number-one status translates into a higher value for the customer, and everyone wins.

(Source: Entrepreneur, July 2008)

An Aging Workforce

An Aging Workforce (“The Brain Drain”)

Take a look at these statistics about the Aging Workforce:


The percentage of U.S. workers 55 and older is rising

2006 16.8%
2016 22.7%

While likely successors will be on the decline in the next eight years

Age 55.64 +30.3%*
Age 35-44 -5.5%*
Age 16-24 -1.1%*

Projected percentage growth or decline 2006-2016
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Few managers have taken steps to retain professionals nearing retirement age. These are some of the methods that progressive managers have established to cope with the Aging workforce:

Flex schedules 19%
Part-time options 12%
Contracting retired employees 9%
Bonuses for staying on 8%
Delayed retirement plans 4%
No steps taken 60%
Source: Survey of 233 professionals May-June 2007

Based on the above statistics, it has become clear that growth in the number of older workers will soon surpass growth in the number of those just starting out. In particular, in my field of Information Technology, there has not been an influx of new talent. According to the Computing Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 14% each year between 2004 and 2006.

But, in a survey conducted by Buck Consultants, only 42%of the respondents said that the aging workforce was a significant issue. So it seems that many businesses are content to watch their boomers leave the company.

Some companies, however, are taking steps to capturing the knowledge that is lost when the boomers leave the company. For example, Tennessee Valley Authority realized that 30 to 40 % of its workforce would retire over the next five years so it developed a process to determine which employees possessed unique, undocumented knowledge; to assess the risk or losing that knowledge; and to find ways to capture it through retention, documentation, mentoring, training and the sharing of expertise.

One of the most important things is to assess the value of the knowledge and skills that are walking out the door. Then build a database to capture documentation and lessons learned. A powerful tool is to offer long time staffers new challenges, new benefits and new roles to keep them longer and available to transfer knowledge about their job. Another is to involve older workers in mentoring younger workers to make knowledge sharing a priority.

Obviously, it is clearly important for managers to assess the value of the knowledge and skills that could be walking out the door and do something about retaining the aging employees and developing plans to capture their knowledge before it is disappears into retirement.

Funny ads

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRiYkwtBK34

Podcasts

A podcast is a series of digital-media files distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

Though podcasters' web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

http://www.jobdig.com/podcast/listen.php?180 is an excellent site containing a series of management podcasts. Just click the "Hideout XSPF Music Play" toolbar to activate. The site hosts a variety of Podcasts dealing with many management issues, such as delegation, providing feedback, communications, etc. Take a listen.

Economic Indicators-Federal Reserve Beige Book

ECONOMIC INDICATORS-

Beige Book Fed Survey

Officially known as the Survey on Current Economic Conditions, the Beige Book, is published eight times per year by a Federal Reserve Bank, containing anecdotal information on current economic and business conditions in its twelve District through reports from Bank and Branch directors, and interviews with key business contacts, economists, market experts, and other sources.

The Beige Book highlights the activity information by District and sector. The survey normally covers a period of about 4- weeks in duration, and is released two weeks prior to each Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, which is also held eight times per year. While considered by some as a lagging report, (Lagging indicators demonstrate how well an economy has performed in the past few months, giving economists a chance to review their predictions and make better forecasts). The Beige Book has usually served as a helpful indicator to FOMC policy decisions on monetary policy.

Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts as of April 16, 2008 indicate that economic conditions have weakened since the last report. Nine Districts noted slowing in the pace of economic activity, while the remaining three--Boston, Cleveland, and Richmond--described activity as mixed or steady.

Go to the site: http://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/beigebook/2008/20080416/default.htm for more detail on the current economic situation in the twelve districts (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St.Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco.)

Some simple ways to reduce workplace stress

Here is a list of ways to reduce job-related stress.

1. Build co-worker relationships. Wiki's are an effective tool for coordination and relationship building.

2. Set realistic deadlines. Gantt or Pert charts help schedule and manage projets.

3. Act immediately with problems. Distinguish between a symptom and a problem. For example, declining sales could be a symptom of poor product quality, or poor marketing and product distribution.

4. Take short breaks.

5. Talk openly with management about issues.

Please add any others in your "comments" that you found to be effective.

Blogging Dos and Don't

1. Students using blogs are expected to act safely by keeping personal information out of their posts. Do not post or give out your family name, password, user name, email address, home address, school name, city, country or other information that could help someone locate or contact you in person. However, you may share your interests, ideas and preferences.

2. Students using blogs should share their user name or password with anyone besides their teachers and paren and agree to never log in as another student.

3. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for your blog. But students are welcome to post on any school-appropriate subject.

4 If you receive a comment on your Blog that makes you feel uncomfortable or is not respectful, tell your professor right away. Do not respond to the comment.

5. Do not attack personally fellow students, employees, authors, customers, vendors, or shareholders. You may disagree with the school and its officers, provided your tone is respectful and you do not resort to personal attacks.

6. Do post any material that is obscene, defamatory, profane, libelous, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful or embarrassing to another person or any other person or entity. Also, do not to post advertisements, solicitations and/or market and/or promote any business or commercial interest, chain letters or pyramid schemes.

7. Be careful not to violate copyright laws. If you are not sure is that reference is copyrighted, contact your professor before posting the material to your Blog.

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson

Hi Everyone:

I recently delivered a presentation on energizing the classroom using various Web 2.0 tools.. I used Will Richardson's book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" as a guide to get started in using social software for education. The book provides a clear definition of WebLogs, Wikis, RSS, The Social Web, Podcasting and other Web 2.0 Tools that can offer students a dynamic online experience at low cost using established, largely free software tools.

The following were especially relevant to my presentation:

WebLogs that provide a good way for students to collaborate with people inside and outside the classroom.
RSS, which Will calls the New Killer App for Education
Wikis that provide easy collaboration.
The Social Web: Learning Together
Podcasting and Screencasting.

These Web 2.0 tools are described clearly and are supported by many examples. The last chapter details the meaning of social software for educators by describing what he calls the "Big Shifts" (the first Big Shift:Open Content)

I would recommend this book for anyone interested in Web 2.0 and its application to education. The only caveat is that some of the examples are outdated.