 Some quick stuff for today, May 2.
Customer Service
I had a little problem with my iTunes account so I sent a message to their support center. The first response I got concluded with:
"Good luck on downloading the song Matthew! Again, please let me know if I can do anything else for you in the near future. I am so happy I was able to help you today with your item. Have a fantastic day and take care! Cheers! Brittany"
I replied: "Thanks! Much appreciated. Now having a fantastic day, Matt"
To which she (Brittany) responded: "Thank you for your kind words and you are so welcome! Nothing makes me happier than to hear that I have pleased our iTunes family members."
I practically blushed when I read that.
Blowing the Job Search
Having some PR responsibilities here, I often respond to ProfNet queries, particularly when they apply to careers and job hunting. Because my responses are thoughtful, but do not always see the light of day on the other side of the querying reporter's in-box, I thought I would quickly share the helpful hints I provided a writer putting together a piece on how people damage their job search:
1) Not doing enough or any research on the target company or the hiring manager. What do they do? What are their goals? Who are their competitors? etc. You better know!
2) Not leveraging your network to get an introduction, a recommendation, or anything else to differentiate you from the pool of applicants. Related problem: Not having or cultivating a network in the first place.
3) Swearing or almost swearing (ex. "friggin'") in the interview.
4) Forgetting you are being interviewed. In other words, acting more casually if the interviewer takes you to lunch, etc. Remember: Until you get that offer letter, you are being watched!
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 You might not expect a graphic designer working as part of a program support center housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to say, "The majority of work I do gives me creative freedom," but that's exactly what Chris Spangler, who is represented by Aquent's Baltimore office, told me when I spoke with him last week.
I gave Chris a call because a poster he had designed on assignment won first prize in the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area (CFCNCA) Communications Contest. (To see his winning entry, you can click here.) As it turns out, designing posters, which he has done for everything from promoting IT security within the agency to celebrating Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, is just part of his job at HHS (or, more accurately, SAMHSA/PSC). He has also designed and illustrated annual reports, brochures, and info-packs, he's designed logos and updated brand identities for various governmental programs, and he's even had the chance to serve as photographer at meetings with ambassadors and other functions.
"Working for the government is great job security," Chris says, but what really appeals to him is "... feeling like your making a difference by helping people with the stuff you're creating. I've designed a book on preventing bullying, I worked for a year and half on materials related to 9/11, and I put together a publication on responding to bio-terrorism attacks. You've got to look for different ways to find satisfaction in your work and these types of projects help do that for me."
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 I always get in trouble when I start a post this way, but I'm a slow learner...
The other day I was talking to a friend who happens to be in marketing. When I first knew him some seventeen years ago, we were in a band together and he was one of the two guys who had a real job (I was not the other one). Back then he was doing market research, I believe, for a computer manufacturer and has spent most of his subsequent career in the tech sector working for some well-known brands as well as some fairly niche ones.
The only reason I bring this up is that he just started a new job. I wasn't too surprised because he always seems to be starting a new job and I said as much. "I don't look for them," he exclaimed, "they find me!" Then he laughed and said, "Well, I have had 7 jobs since 1999."
Talking to my wife about this later, she said, "That's going to look bad on his resume." I told her I didn't think so for a couple reasons. First of all, he keeps getting hired, so his employers apparently don't care. Second of all, I don't think they should care. Why? Because of something else he said: "I think of jobs as projects."
When you are looking for a job, the focus should be on what you accomplished and what resulted. Seeing your accomplishments as projects is a great way to communicate exactly that. Whether you worked somewhere for one year or ten doesn't matter. Almost any job, especially in the worlds of design and marketing, can be described as a single project or a series of projects. The cool thing is that doing so allows you to package your experience in discrete, easily digestible chunks of real-world value and revenue-generating impact.
Now, dish up a heaping platter of these tasty morsels and tell your next employer it's suppertime! Bon appetit!
Image Courtesy of Lady-bug.
 Ever since I spoke to Erik Hauser last year I've been looking for an opportunity to speak with him again. He's optimistic, he's infectiously enthusiastic, and he has a lot to say on a lot of different topics almost any hour of the day or night (as anyone who follows the Experiential Marketing Forum knows).
Long story short, I asked him if I could interview him for this here podcast, and he amicably agreed. Rather than asking him to define "experiential marketing" for the umpteenth time, I thought instead it would be more illuminating to talk about emotionally connecting with brands, using experiential marketing techniques when searching for a job, and, of course, Gene Simmons. So that's what we did.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. You can do so by clicking on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. Finally, this and other Talent Blog Podcasts are always available on iTunes. Heck, you can even subscribe to our podcast there!
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A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:59 - Gene Simmons: The Genius
05:19 - You need a 3rd Party to serve as "Keeper of the Brand"
10:04 - You want to raise demand? Decrease the supply! (From Hydrox to Polaroid)
12:01 - The "outside perspective"
14:45 - The EMF: How moderating discussions increases their value
16:08 - Keys to nurturing a vital online community
20:05 - "Experiential" is a methodology, not a tactic
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 Upon reflection, I found my last post glib and platitudinous, and I apologize for that. Having experienced unemployment and under-employment, I know that it doesn't have to be a worst-case scenario for it to be pretty lame. Looking for a job because you really need a job can be stressful, frustrating, and even humiliating. Funnily enough, when I was in those situations, I generally found work through temp agencies. Although they didn't often find me work from one day to the next, they usually did have me working within a week or two. And that was a good thing.
Of course, a source of semi-regular income does not a career path make, nor is it the high road to personal fulfillment. To paraphrase Citizen Kane, "It's not hard to make money, if all you want to do is make money." The questions that I glossed over - "What do I want to do?", "Where do I want to work?", etc. - are really the hard questions. Finding any job at all is infinitely easier than finding the job you want. In fact, finding any job at all can often be easier than figuring out what you want to do in the first place. Which is why my last post annoyed me. Everyone knows that planning for the future will give you more control over your life, that networking is the best way to get a job (better than responding to an on-line job ad, for example), and so on, but that's not the point. Along those lines, it's easy to say, "Think of 5 people you could call on to help you find a job." It's not even that hard to actually do. In fact, it's probably just as easy to think up 5 people who could lend you money in the short term to help you make rent. Coming up with 5 people who can help you get exactly what you want, given you know what that is, then actually calling them, actually asking for help, actually getting them to help you, and all that, is, well, easier said than done. At this juncture, I could say, "Which is where Aquent comes in. If you're pursuing a career in marketing or design, we ARE the people who can help you get what you want." But I'm not going to, because that would be cheap and marketing-y. Instead, I wanted to take a second and advocate "the easy way."
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 The other day I came across a query on ProfNet from a journalist who was writing an article on how one should manage one's time after losing one's job. Specifically, she wanted to know if people should take time off, immediately start looking for a new job, or possibly get a temp job just to pay the bills.
I sent her my thoughts on the subject which boiled down to, "It all depends." That is, it all depends on whether or not losing your job is a "worst-case scenario," an overcomeable inconvenience, or a blessed relief. In the latter case, unemployment might give you some time to relax, reflect, and enjoy a life of leisure. In the intermediate case, you may need to get your resume in order and call around to see what's cooking, but you aren't really in a state of panic. In the first case, you've got a problem. But what exactly is the nature of that problem? As fate would have it, I've been thinking a lot about worst-case scenarios lately thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness. As far as I can make out, what distinguishes the worst-case scenario from your run-of-the-mill unpleasant situation is the fact that is, ideally, improbably rare, but for all that, overwhelmingly devastating. Its devastating character makes it a rather severe problem, but its rarity makes it all too easy to overlook, ignore, or otherwise pretend it won't happen to you. Which in a way is my point. What will tend to make unemployment a worst-case scenario is the false belief that it will never happen to you.
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 The other night I was talking to a friend of mine, Peter Dixon, about his cool new cd, "Shady Planet." It hasn't been selling as well as he had hoped, so I, as Mr. New World of Marketing, was suggesting some things he could do to promote it.
For example, I mentioned starting a blog or, better yet, a video blog, in which he talked about music (he knows a lot about music of all flavors), songwriting (he's a melody machine), the making of this cd, and other projects he's been involved with (one of his former bands, Combustible Edison, recorded for SubPop).
Since writing a blog can be sort of time-consuming, I said he could simply start by hunting down music blogs that talked about his old band, or even his new cd, and leave a comment, start a conversation, whatever. As I put it, bloggers are always looking for content and, in a way, he is content.
My basic message was that you don't need a big record label or a press agent to make this stuff happen; you could do it yourself. But before he acted on any of my brilliant ideas, I told him, he needed to decide what he wanted. For example, if he wanted to sell cd's, how many did he want to sell? His exact course of action will naturally depend on whether he wants to sell 500 or 5,000. I thought he should also create a profile of the type of person who he imagines would buy this cd and start thinking about where these people might hang out (both on-line and off-line). Etc. In my view, the more specific he can get about his actual goals, the easier it should be for him to devise and execute a plan that gets him where he wants to go.
In this case, as in many others, however, the big question is: Where SPECIFICALLY do you want to go?
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We Are All Temps
Jan 7, 2008 @ 11:01 AM · Matthew Grant
 In my last post, I floated out various reasons why people "temp" in hopes of dispelling the notion that people temp because they can't find permanent work. In this post, I want to debunk the myth of the "perm job" itself.
To get all heavy and existential, 'cuz that's how I roll, teachers from Buddha to Heraclitus have taught that change and impermanence are an integral part of existence and cannot be escaped or avoided. This applies to employment just as it does to living bodies and any object subject to entropic flux.
Everyone knows this intuitively, and yet, when we apply for or are offered a "full-time job," while we know that it won't be "permanent" like death, we assume the amount of time we will end up giving to the company is more or less in our control and practically indefinite. Indeed, this implied indefiniteness tends to separate the full-time employees from contractors who, as the name implies, work under a contract stipulating the terms and, more importantly, the length of their employment.
Of course, anyone who has gone through a round of lay-offs, downsizing, or re-organization knows that this sense of indefiniteness and permanence is an illusion.
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 Anyone watching Aquent over the last few years would see that we've shifted the emphasis in our marketing from "the world's largest talent agency for creative, web, and tech," back in 2001, to "a professional services firm that specializes in helping companies all over the world, across a variety of industries, make use of people, processes, and technology" with a "marketing and creative services group" that included a consulting and a technology offering in addition to staffing, to the current positioning of "staffing for marketing organizations" (which is fudged a little in the title of the homepage which reads "marketing and creative staffing at Aquent.com").
These shifts in emphasis have been driven by our desire to grow beyond our origins in desktop publishing and graphic design (both print and web). Truth be told, we still place a lot of folks in these so-called "creative" roles and probably have not yet exhausted the business potential of this space. Nevertheless, the organizational fact of the matter is that creative folk are generally working for marketing folk and creative services departments are frequently nestled within or otherwise adjoined to marketing departments. Given this arrangement, it seemed a natural extension of our business to expand beyond the edges of creative into the broader world of marketing proper and that is just what we've done.
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 It's hard to believe that December is well-nigh upon us, but that is the horrible and shocking truth.
Since this is a time when many companies slow down or halt their hiring activities altogether, it also means that this is a good time for job seekers to take stock of their career aspirations and job-search resources.
It's not surprising that you can find a wealth of job search advice on the Web. There is everything from the copious compendium of job search resources known as The Riley Guide to the step-by-step instructions provided by Job-Hunt.org. And much, much more.
While thinking about the next stage in your career could involve a lot of soul-searching - "What do I want from life?" What is my passion?" "Who am I?" - there are also a number of nitty-gritty, practical steps you can take before, after, or during this self-interrogation. Here are 5 we recommend:
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 Minister of Blogging Enlightenment Matt Grant is out this week, and has thus passed the torch from his worthy hands to me, Alex Weaver, as the new Marketing Coordinator here at Aquent, Boston. I am not taking over as Aquent's new Blogger Extraordinaire. However, my reasons for donning the golden keyboard this week are partly due to my relative inexperience in the field. I have been chosen not because my college days we spent blogging with the best, but because I meandered through four years of college writing papers on dead poets and ancient authors and yet somehow I ended up landing a job in the ever-elusive and seemingly impenetrable marketing industry. How did I do it, you may ask? The short answer, to be frank, was slowly and painfully. But I prevailed, and in the end, came out with a couple lessons learned along the way. So sit back, give your mouse-hand a rest, and enjoy my Top 5 Tips for The Entry-Level Job Search.
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