I've been thinking a lot about video recently. I want to dip my toe in the water soon. It's a powerful medium and the time is right. I'm not very comfortable in front of the camera so I have a lot of natural resistance to getting started. But, it's good to start crappy and dignity is overrated, so my hats off to all those who've already started. Even to Head2Head.ca for trying with "What can 60 hours do for you?":

At first, I thought Twitter was foolish, then, I tried it and became enamored. About six months later, I lost all respect for Twitter. A few months more, and I can finally see its strengths and weaknesses in balance. 

The strengths are pretty easy - meet and interact with new people that interest you, market yourself, get to know your "friends" better, know what's going on right now and eavesdrop on conversations you'd never be privileged to hear in any other setting.

What's the downside? Here is my five step plan for entrepreneurs to entrap themselves in bad karma with Twitter:

The lack of confidence that is behind this historic meltdown is reinforced every time we pay high prices for weak or defective goods and services - and find ourselves without recourse!

Everywhere we turn, we find people in positions of power and trust robbing and looting their very constituencies for personal gain. And, the recruiting industry is no exception.

So, I want to give recognition here and honor those online recruiting and job board professionals that have chosen to stand up for something, make themselves accountable on their websites and move our industry forward.

InternetRecruiting.US is a new place to promote your USA job board, ATS or related company - free to join and you are encouraged to post your press releases! Just make sure to use your company logo and not your picture.

Yes, it is another ning website.  Can it work like a directory for the Internet recruiting industry? I am sure that it can. And, it has the benefit of being more interactive than the typical directory.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think!

 

If business were like baseball, credibility would be first base, authenticity second base and good branding third-base.  But how to hit a home run? According to Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding, you score big when your customers open their hearts to you so that your product or service becomes a meaningful part of the culture your clients move in.

Reading Primal Branding was the experience that gave me the courage I needed to trust my instincts about authenticity. The implications for job boards and other Internet businesses are significant.  Just have a look at the number of anonymous job boards in the top 100 niches.  This is a situation that can only hold in a low competition environment with little transparency.

Yesterday, I talked about why I blog so today let's talk about why you should blog if you run a job board.

Competition is heating up geometrically. Transparency is being forced on us all as secrets become evermore difficult to keep. The winners will be boards that build credibility and authenticity.  You can have high credibility without a blog but if you want authenticity, start blogging.

In a fascinating article about branding versus SEO, search engine watch put into words very nicely a feeling that has been tugging at me for a long time:

Before-

In 1991, if you wanted to buy a portable compact disc player, you had to know:

1. What you wanted to buy (portable compact disc player) R.I.P. Branding
2. What brand you wanted to buy (Sony)
3. What product you wanted to buy (Discman)
4. What store to buy it at (The Wiz)
5. Where to find that store (Menlo Park Mall)

Aside from Step 1, every other piece of information came to you from branding.

After-

A friend who runs a top niche job board recently asked me this:

In the past, we’ve only hired local sales people but we’re looking at the possibility of hiring remote reps. I know it’s hard to find employees in South Florida and I was wondering if you have any staff that works remotely and if so is there anything you can tell me that would help us?

My answer -- you can't afford not to. We tried for years to grow our sales team by hiring locally. We would hire-train-fire and then repeat. But all the while, I was watching Don Firth (friend and fellow Florida job board entrepreneur) grow his sales team three and four times as fast by hiring virtually from around the country.

I'm on twitter now too -- fashionably late according to Toby Dayton. Until recently, I thought twitter was just foolish but somehow in a very short matter of time, I have completely reversed my opinion. It took me a few years to start blogging and I generally prefer to arrive late to a technology party. So, I still consider it a bit early for twitter in spite of Toby. In fact, I am intrigued by my own reversal.

The most important reason, is perfectly articulated by Joel: