I’ve seen several speakers recently comment on the fact that it is coming to a world where everyone has access to ALL the contact data. The concept was furthered in saying that since everyone will have all the data, the playing field will be leveled as everyone will have total access, ergo, it will come down to the ability to network as the sole determiner of success.
The second part of this concept, (ability to network) has always has been dead on. A poor salesperson or recruiter will not do well even if given a great list. A great networker can do wonders starting with one point of contact.
However, the idea about everyone having access to ALL the data… This is a pipe dream of the uninformed. It may be a great material to pontificate on, but it is pure fiction. The science and trends behind information and going the opposite direction. I don’t know where this concept was started, but it’s taken off with all the indications of mob mentality (great conviction, but little facts to back it up).
Some facts:
The Internet and information in general is growing faster than our ability to index it.
Corporations are starting to silo their own data, vs. use public databases. These are closed systems that are not being shared and the are diverging like mammals and marsupials.
A UC Berkeley study from 2007 details that search engines like Google index less than 1% of the Internet. (when I find this link, I’ll post it..too late right now)
Who are these people that have access to ALL the information? Methinks it’s the great Oz.
1984 is not here yet. Good networking starts with your own unique knowledge of where to start your research. Dig in and roll up the sleaves. Being given a great database does not make you a great recruiter, being able to create a great database makes you a great recruiter.
I am behind the times. Kicking back tonight I caught the Apple TV commercial that you can now access facebook with the iPhone. My facebook profile needs updating. I do love my iPhone, so I jumped on and learned that AmyBeth Hale was having coffee with her bro and that her space heater was on the blink. Not the information I was looking for, but, the ease of accessing it made me think (I am a fan of AmyBeth, so don’t say any different).
The biggest explosion of the social networks will be when voice recognition nears 100%. Yes, everyone types, but we are just putting up with it because we don’t have something better. Think. Microsoft software is now in cars. It does voice recognition. Microsoft invested in facebook. Soon we will be seeing in AmyBeth’s profile that she just took a left turn on the drive over to the next SourceCon event. AmyBeth won’t have to type it in. It will all be controlled by a set of preferences. If she does not want the world to know her whereabouts, that option gets turned off. Technology converges and then excelerates. The key elements are (1) Superior/intelligent input devices and (2) rules to determine what to do with the input. We will see it.
Back to the stream of thought: Ease of access to information. Back on facebook. Political commercial on TV. Check out how the candidates are doing. Search on each candidate. Stats found:
In race John McCain 59,902 facebook supporters Hillary Clinton 113,248 facebook supporters Barack Obama 515,332 facebook supporters
Mike Huckabee - not on first page of results for “Mike Huckabee”
Not in race, but worth mentioning Ron Paul 84,145 facebook supporters John Edwards 32,630 facebook supporters
Wow. The Internet cannot, will not be ignored in this election. Ignore it or don’t leverage it is political death. It will be interesting how the numbers affect momentum and final results. Businesses and consultancies will be built on the analysis of this information and how it affects the real world. Keep in mind that this is the presidential election and we are seeing it many months in advance. Closer to election day we will start to see the congressional candidates more visible as well. They are there now, we just don’t see “facebook groups” for state and local elections popping up. We will.
On the other hand Ron Paul is doing better on facebook than John McCain, but he is out of the race. Interesting variables. Where is the buzz to influence ratio? Ron Paul, buzz, McCain has the support of the voters. I take no sides here, I just find it interesting. I’m curious.
This data can and will be data mined. What will be done with this information once it is stored? What information do you add to the social network? Who will cross reference this data with national cell phone databases? Who will I be getting calls from on my cell phone come November?
Has anyone thought of a version of the do-not-call-list for data stored on social networks? One repository with permissions for usage of data. Google has their Open Social system for working with many social networks. Maybe someone can leverage it.
Never know where a blog is going until I’m done. Meeting with my adopt-a-blogger Dan Hughes in the early am. Should I spend time posting my appt on facebook or find a facebook appointment interceptor widget? I vote widget.
I am in Disney World. My 4 year old daughter crashed in the hotel room after a non-stop day of fun. It’s a happy place. I’m happy. I quickly check my email and what do I get? Blog spam. Lots of it. Ok, good, I’m happy I’ve got a bunch of readers now. For those of you who leave comments email me directly, thank you. I enjoy the feedback, positive and otherwise, as long as it is thought out.
But 50 blog spams? Ouch, I didn’t sign up to be an administrator and a human spam filter. (please oh experienced bloggers out there, tell me what you do to avoid this.)
The blog spam gave me an idea. It is a cool one. I have often received spam at my private email address even though it is one I never have given anyone. This private email I use to register for sites that I never intend on using again. (newspapers, register for white papers, etc). The strange thing is that the spam I get in this email account has nothing to do with sites I registered for. Someone is selling my information. Are they breaking the terms of service for their site? I don’t know.
A discovery process. Here is what I am going to do:
Step 1: Setup
-create a fictitious company
-register a new domain.
-not use my real name & make whois information private
-add phony names, titles & emails to the site. VP of sales, Director of Marketing, etc
-add some basic content to the site and make sure the search engines can find it.
Step 2: Seeding
-Register for as many sites as I can. For each site, I will use a unique email and name that is not printed or listed anywhere for the fictitious company domain. In addition, I am going to save the privacy terms of each site in a database.
-Save every email for each unique email address. Each email should only be getting email from one source.
-Let the experiment run for a period, it might be 6 months to a year.
-I will make sure to include all the major email services (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) and I will always select “NO” to share my information with partner companies (when that option is available)
Step 3: Publish
-all sites registered for
-dates & sources which each unique email received email from
Who is breaking terms of service? What is the implication of registering on various dot com sites? It should be an interesting experiment. If something like this has been done already. I would like to see the research.
hmm, on second thought, this seems like a darn good deal of work.
Now I think I’m looking for an intern who wants to do a research project. Anybody have a referral? I’ll give them full access to the Broadlook set of Internet research tools.
To many ideas, too little time. Daughters awake, back to the magic kingdom. Time for fireworks!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been asking every new prospect and client, how many Internet passwords they have to remember. The question has several levels.
“How many places on the Internet do you log into on a regular basis”, I ask
Usually the answer is 4-8.
“What about associations, alumni sites, facebook, myspace, LinkedIN…sites that you may not access every day?”
Usually the answer is “another 10 sites”
“Ok, what about sites that you have signed up for, but may only need to log into once in a blue moon. Examples, account management for your cell phone provider, your 401K account, sites like classmates.com, etc”?
Usually the answer is “10 or more”
“Lastly, what about sites you signed up for and you do not expect to return to in the next year. Althought you still may need to access the it in the future to update account, billing or contact information?”
Typically I get 20, 50, no idea, or “lost count”
This is when the average sales rep or recruiter realizes they have anywhere from 25-100 (or more) places they have have passwords to. (Personally, I have well over 200 and I’ve lost count).
Then it gets fun.
“Do you use the same password?” I ask
95% of the time I get a …….YES.
This is a security nightmare. What happens if facebook or myspace or one of these well trafficed sites gets comprised? Then someone has YOUR password to all the other sites you use.
Yes, there are password managers. I am not a fan of them. You can’t take them everywhere and computers do crash. Today, I present a humanistic solution to password management.
It’s a simple concept I call password schemas. It starts with picking a core password and then modifying it based on the attibutes of the place you are using. I am going to use my dog’s name as an example of a core password. Her name is Captain Janeway, so the core password is CaptJane (for those of you thinking it…no, I don’t use my dog’s name).
Password schemas, used badly, can be dangerous. You could expose all your passwords should someone figure it out. However, using a schema is far superior to using the same password everywhere. The more creative you get with the schemas, the better your protection is.
Here are some schemas: (I just made up names for these). For each schema I am going to use mail.yahoo.com as the site example
Alpha front/end: using the first letters of a site in front or end of your core
yaCaptJane CaptJaneya ( “ya” comes from first letters in “yahoo”)
Syllable front/end: use syllables of the site in front or end of your core
yhCaptJane CaptJaneyh (”yh” from first two syllables in “yahoo”)
Keyboard replacement: In the password below, I used the key above each of the letters “CaptJane” on the keyboard. Example: the “D” key is above the “C” and the “q” key is above the “a”, etc. Downfall here is that may need the keyboard in front of you to remember your password.
Keyboard wrap: if the site name starts with a “y”, start with y and use the next 7 additional characters to the right. If you hit the last letter, wrap around to the other side of the keyboard.
These are just a few ideas of password schemas. One of my favorites is to replace vowels with full words: example A=Alpha, B=Bravo, C=Charley. The key thing is to sit down with a paper and pen and create your own. Be creative, have fun and come up with something that you will remember. Make sure it would be hard for someone to guess your password by looking at a few examples. The combinations are endless.
Captain Janeway & Donato
(she thinks she is a lap dog)
I’m taking a redeye back from San Francisco after attending Salesforce.com’s tour de Force and the rollout of force.com. We are all familiar with the Software as a service model (SaaS). Many of the successful ATS vendors in the recruting market have grown their businesses with the SaaS model. Salesforce.com is now taking SaaS to a new level. They call it Platform as a service or PaaS. Salesforce.com has a new development environment that allows developers and companies to base applications on the same infrastructure that salesforce.com is built from. This is significant event, here is why.
With the Force.com framework, you can build applications that look nothing like salesforce.com or you can create “mashups” that combine salesforce.com, Gmail, Yahoo Maps, etc. I have seen many email systems from ATS vendors, some are very very good. But none of them come remotely close to Google’s Gmail.
Ok, what am I getting at? Imagine this: An army of developers writing bolt on applications. Job posting mashups, resume parsing mashups, search engine aggregator mashups, objection-response mashups, etc, etc. Basically, an entrereneur can now create a complete ATS system and not have to worry about core software, hardware and datacenters. Most of the basics are covered by salesforce.com and Google applications. Yes, the workflow and business logic will have to developed, but taking a job order is not that complicated. I should mention that there is even an open source ATS system right now, CatsOne, see it here: CATS.
The playing field has been leveled. APEX, the salesforce programming language is similar to JAVA. Salesforce has over a million users.
Why was I at tour de force? Broadlook is salesforce.com’s latest partner. We just launched our Contact Capture for salesforce.com on the salesforce appExchange. We use our Broadlook Universal Exporter (BLUE) to send data to Salesforce.com. What that means is that ALL Broadlook applications, now work with salesforce.com. So if any company or entrepreneur want to create their own ATS system, it will be 100% compatible with all Broadlook applications day 1.
This is a trend we will continue to see over the next decade. Barriors of entry being continually reduced. Exciting stuff.
If is also amazing that this idea of mashups came up recently on the recruiting animal show. Someone said that the company that creates it will make a zillion. Well the platform is here, salesforce is the first mover in the space, but I predict that we will see additional offerings from other vendors, google, microsoft, etc. The end result is that everyone wins.
While salesforce is the first mover, they will not be the only mover. The real message here is
1. PaaS will distrupt Saas, due to ease of entry
2. The barrier of entry for someone to create a SaaS model has been significantly reduced and it will continue to become easier.
3. Look for PaaS from multiple vendors. (ie Recruitingblogs.com is based on Ning.com) another example of PaaS. This was not available 2 years ago.
Having your own custom search engine (CSE) via a Google coop can be a competitive differentiator. This is a free service that you can access by navigating to www.google.com/coop. Why would you want to create a CSE? What is the value?
How about stomping your competition? Is that enough? If so, read on…
At the basic level think of it this way: The World Wide Web is very large, too large for you to type in a term like “medical devices” into Google and get a manageable set of results.
What if you wanted to only look for “medical devices” inside university research departments? You could try and use Boolean expressions (university and “medical device”). Right? Wrong…This is pedestrian. Yes someday when search engines can guess what you want, maybe this will be possible. Semantic search is not there yet. We’re at the pre-cock roach stage in artificial intelligence.
So what is wrong with searching for University and “medical device”?
(1) search engines are keyword-based
(2) therefore they are limited to the keywords you type in so
(3) the word “university” may not be on every page of a university where medical devices is mentioned
(4) your search will have partial results from the good potential results
(5) you will get millions (2.49 million…I checked it) of web pages across the Internet that happen to have University and “medical Device” on the page.
(6) you will think Google sucks and get frustrated
CSE to the rescue! A simple solution.
Google is searching everything. Why not limit it to a smaller set of websites? That is what a custom search engine is all about. ** Limiting **
“Custom Search Engine” sounds complex, but it is actually easier to work with a CSE than it is too work with massive one-size-fits-all engine.
With a Google Coop I can create a search engine that only searches Universities. Therefore I can search for “medical devices” and I know that the results are coming exclusively from University sites. Easy.
Take-aways:
Using a custom search engine is easier to use than a monolithic search engine (MSE) because you are dealing with a known universe of possibilities
You get results faster with a CSE
It is less expensive to train users to work with a CSE than a MSE
You will get faster user adoption with a CSE
Your competitors don’t have your CSE
Final Thoughts:
The big movement on the CSE front is one of open collaboration. Create a cool new engine and let everyone use it. Since everyone else is writing about this, it’s covered, so I’ll opt out. What about the dark underbelly? What are people not talking openly about? How about creating your own search engine for your exclusive use, a competitive differentiator, a category killer for the sake of sheer profit? I have mine and I’m not talking, but here are some ideas. Practical capitalism.
List of ideas for Google Coop’s
1. Create a CSE that inlcudes every one of your clients. Include the CSE search box at the top of your Web based CRM or ATS system. (google makes this easy to do…review the video in this post). You now have a search box in your CRM that searches only your clients. Possibilities …wow! Broadlook is creating a service that will do this for you. Look for it soon at http://www.broadlook.com/products/engineme
2. Do the same as #1, but for your prospects
3. Compile a CSE consisting of all free resume sites.
4. Create a CSE for all job boards in a specific niche.
Here are some examples of google coop’s already built
5. Green Maven http://www.greenmaven.com
Green Maven is the most comprehensive Green Search Engine. This search engine emphases websites with Green and Social Values, as approved by a team of Green MBA editors. Try these queries: shoes, solar panels
7.Global Voices Weblog Search Custom Search Engine homepage
Search the global weblogs featured on the Global Voices website. Try these queries: Ghana, Sudan
8. Intuit Small Business Site http://www.jumpup.com
Intuit has used their 20 years of small business experience to evaluate and select the most useful small business resources on the web and provide them to JumpUp. Try these queries: taxes, marketing
10. Real Climate http://www.realclimate.org
RealClimate.org provides expert opinions on the science of climate change. Since this subject has become rather politicized, the quality of information available on the web varies. Using Google Custom Search Engine, they have created a searchable subset of the web that they believe provides the most reliable information. Try these queries: Greenhouse gases, CO2
It was 3 year ago when I was first contacted by an offshore research firm in India.
Several of my sole-operator clients loved our software tools, but they did not have the manpower to make effective use of the powerful technology. Our clients hired the offshore firm to run the software for them. As it helped with client retention, I worked out a deal to train the offshore researchers. My relationship was still with my client and I was able to observe and learn from afar. Offshore research can pay huge dividends, but it can also cost you if you don’t what you are getting yourself into. Here are some rules of thumb that I learned from success and failures.
1. Offshore research is a service, not a technology offering. It’s not about efficiency or cost savings, it’s about relationship. The offshore firm should have service, service and service in their DNA.
2. Don’t treat people like a number. This sounds like common sense, the golden rule, etc. However, somehow the terms “offshore” or “remote” has a tendency to depersonalize the relationship. Don’t let that happen.
3. Use their real name. If one of your offshore contacts name is Rajaranan, don’t call him Joe, Bob, or Peter. Call centers started this protocol of giving foreign workers western names. This may work for a call centers, but it is a poor idea for someone you work with on a long term basis. Use their real name, insist on it, you might butcher it, but they will respect you more than if you call then Jimmy.
4. Beware of the over-emphasis on “dedicated” researcher. Want to know a dirty secret? Offshore firms are absolutely notorious for placing 2 workers on 3 accounts. When I learned about this, I was livid. Plain and simple, this is dishonest, and corrupt. If the price is too good to be true, you’ve got a 2 for 3 situation.
5. Have a plan. If you cannot articulate what your current process is. It will be hard for a researcher to achieve any level of success.
6. Make time. In the recruitment arena, an offshore researcher will take about 15 minutes per day of your time to manage them. Sometimes more and sometimes less. Be prepared.
7. Beware of metered results. If you are getting 8-10 resumes per day, every day…something is wrong. When I was a recruiter, some days I would get nothing and some days I would get a windfall of candidates. Wake up and smell the appeasement. This is usually a symptom of firms that do the 2 for 3 trick. Don’t except it, call them on it.
8. Undergo a process audit. Before connecting a new client with a remote researcher, Broadlook performs a technology and process audit. This has been critical for our clients to understand what their current processes are, and what resources they have to accomplish their goals.
9. Have defined timelines for each task and a weekly schedule outlining what they should do and when. This is more important at the beginning stages.
10. Know how to do their job. This will give you insight into how long repetitive tasks will take and will allow you should budget for them.
11. Host onsite. With todays technology there is no reason for research to be done on a terminal thousands of miles away. Set up an in-house research station and give them remote access to it. You can use logmein for free to accomplish this.
12. Watch them work. Requires in-house research station, but wow, you can really tell something about someone’s efficiency by watching them work for an hour.
13. Work with several firms. When I compared results of one firm against another, I was surprised. All firms are not equal.
14. Get a referral. If you need recruitment research done, don’t use a firm that does offshore mapping services. Most firms will take any business they can get. Make sure you are picking a firm that specialized.
15. Check certifications, training and tenure. Insist on a researcher with at least six months of experience. If you have multiple researchers, it is ok to have a new person as long as the team lead is a veteran. All researchers I work with go through Broadlook’s certification program.
Donato Diorio is a leading authority on Internet Research. Donato is the Founder & CEO with Broadlook Technologies, a firm that “Leverages the Internet” for recruitment, sales and marketing research. Thousand of companies worldwide use Broadlook’s recruiting software.
Massive online databases vs. individually siloed data…lets take a look.
There is a movement going on, right now. Companies are starting to abandon large subscription databases and building their own silos of data. Why?
Lets first examine the general trend of technology. When a new technology first gets introduced, it tends to be (1) more complex, (2) more expensive and (3) centralized. Job Boards for example. First there were the large boards like headhunder and Monster.com, next niche job boards, and then large corporate job boards. Now even small recruiting firms post their own job postings on their own web sites. The trend once a technology matures is (1) less complex (2) less expensive and (3) ubiquitous and decentralized. Less complex because the technology is streamlined and reengineered and less expensive and decentralized due to technology improvements and economies of scale.
Watching this trend has been one of my hobbies, it’s universal like the 80-20 rule. It’s time to give it a name. Expensive-Niche-Decentralized or E-N-D.
An entire series of technologies that follow the END trend. Web based CRM is also starting to follow this curve. Salesforce.com = the early days of monster.com. In the last few years, many new CRM’s specific to vertical markets have sprung up. Recently there is a movement to self-hosted web based CRM. SugarCRM is open source and Microsoft CRM can be hosted in-house. CRM, even web-based, is decentralizing.
Quick post today. We recently completed testing on Broadlook DIVER with support for Google Desktop Search. You can now use Diver to search the web for contacts AND, leveraging Google Desktop Search, you can now search files, emails, and documents on your computer and network.
The Diver integration allows you to actually do something with the information found by Google. Most recruiters have 1000’s of resumes sitting around on their hard drive. Let Google Desktop Search index them, and Diver extract them. I’m looking for final phase testers. First 5 Diver users to call me, get a week headstart on the rest. Press release will be later in the week. Search gurus…start your engines.
Most lists are just plain dead. I waited until December before posting this blog. Back in Jan 2007, I went to inc.com to review the INC 500 list from 2006. What I found astonished me. About 25% of the companies listed did not have a website. I fired up one of Broadlook’s skunk works tools (Grinder) and quickly found out …that out of 500 companies, I could find a website for 496 of them. This was right after the list went online. Keep in mind that the INC list is high-touch. Each company gets interviewed..the works. Yet at the time of publication, the most important piece of information to learn about a company, the website URL was missing.
Fast forward to Dec 2007: I just checked: The list has not been updated. The list is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
This is why real-time data is soooo important. If you work with data from online directories, expect it to be dead too.
Breathelife into a dead list. Using Broadlook tools Eclipse to pull the list in seconds and Grinder to fill in the missing URL’s, I now have a living, breathing list. I can run this list through Profiler and get 5, 10, 50 or 100’s of contacts per company. These names are not going to be found in online databases. Strategic advantage, all from a dead list.
For those of you who have Broadlook’s Eclipse, I’ve included the “enhanced” INC 500 list at the end of the post, with the missing URL’s filled in. You can capture it with the “Get table” command in about 5 seconds.
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