ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Where do you go for jobs and careers advice?

Had a chat today with a friend who was bemoaning the fact that there was nowhere to go for careers advice - I mean advice for someone in their late thirties who has been in employment for the last 17 years.

This is something I have been thinking about and living for the last few weeks. What do you do if you want to explore new types of work, take your next step up, take your skills into new industry sectors.

Well, you can read generic careers advice on job boards but that is exactly what it is - generic. There is a big opportunity for job boards to serve up better targetted content. Or you can go to your professional association - if you have one - as they usually provide advice (take the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's HR careers site, for example).

You can visit a careers consultant - there are plenty to choose from but they will cost you. They can be very good too - as a part of my redundancy package I have had some time with an outplacement consultant which has been hugely valuable.

You can talk to a recruitment consultant - better for jobs rather than careers. But, there is still a tendency to talk specifically about CVs and the jobs they have to fill rather than a broader look at how your skills can be applied in new roles and sectors.

The most useful resource for finding jobs and careers advice that I have found is other people. But not just any other people - people who are in the types of roles I would like or know something about them.

This is where connections through social media are so important. Thanks to Twitter, Linkedin etc and communities such as Connectinghr I have been able to talk to some very interesting people. I haven't asked them for a job, I have just asked advice. If they have not been able to help they usually suggest someone who can. I have found people have been more than happy to give me advice, names of people to talk to etc.Key to all this is finding the right people who you trust to give you decent advice.

From looking around the web, I still think there are big opportunities for up-to-date curated content that would be really useful to job seekers. In the meantime, I'll continue to try and connect with the right people.

I started this post with a question - if you know of good places for jobs and careers advice then I'd love to hear about them.

The Times Word Nerd - simple, shareable and fun way to promote your writers

Maybe I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, but I like the Times Word Nerd - it is a very simple tool that scans your tweets and gives you a score.

For me, it is:

• Quick
• Simple
• I got something back - ie a score and a 'label'
• It is shareable - easy to tweet your participation, share on Facebook etc

BUT, more importantly, Word Nerd is also helping push users to Times writers - see right side of the page . . .

There is a science behind Word Nerd, according to the Times . . .

‘Word Nerd’ tests the distinctiveness of the words you use on Twitter. It works by scanning your last 100 tweets, and comparing the words you have used with those stored in Google’s immense NGram database - a collection of several hundreds of thousands of words Google has gathered from its Books project.

Foreign words, non-words (like ‘Lolz!’), and ‘stop words’ - words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ that are used so frequently by everyone as to be irrelevant - are first removed from the list.

A custom algorithm then calculates the distinctiveness of the words you’ve used by examining how frequently each appears across the books from which Google’s NGram database is derived. (A word that appears more frequently scores lower, and vice versa.)

You are given an ‘overall score’ based on the distinctiveness of each individual word in your tweets, and ranked in one of four ‘performance quartiles’.

It seems to be a clever idea to attract readers to the Times and to its writers/columnists, as Jennifer Whitehead points out on the Wall blog.

Seems like it is taking off . . . 20,000-plus have taken it so far . . . or maybe a few hundred people keep trying to raise their score. Watch out for wordy tweets!

 

 

Some test footage from the 8mm video iphone app

Thougt I'd try out the 8mm vintage camera app from Nexvio. Here are 30 very interesting seconds of my train journey this morning. Like the effect.

Content ideas #1 Personality tests

OK, so I thought I would start this series with something a bit left field. This is an example that I was responsible for so you can blame me . . .

A few years back I was working at Personnel Today, a website for HR professionals. We ran a story that the UK intelligence service MI5 was advertising for new agents. This seemed like a great opportunity to do something fun.

We managed to get in touch with a company that builds bespoke personality tests - Testsonthenet and with their help created a test, based on the job specs/traits listed in the job ads, to find out if our readers had what it took to become a secret agent.

It's a simple idea that worked well (it was a few years back so am going in search of the stats). It was fun, easy to do, interactive and was based on the give and get model of engagement ie the user gives some information, in this case answers a test, and they get a short report. We also incentivised it with a prize.

I have always wondered why jobs boards do not use this type of tool in their content marketing armoury - scrape the job ads (and do it over time to build a more comprehensive picture) and provide short tests to engage jobseekers eg Have you got what it takes to be a xxxxx?

[Picture credit: Mark Hillary]

 

Thinking about a series on content ideas

Over the last 18 months I got an interesting view on how editorial and marketing teams develop content.

An editorial team's USP is to create compelling content that engages with readers and users (and having been a journalist for a number of years this is where my skills lie). Journalists and editorial teams therefore have expert skills at how to deliver content in the right format at the right time. Changing technology and new tools have seen the pace of developing new formats quicken dramatically in the last couple of years - take data mining and data visualisation, for example, or real time news via Twitter.

A marketing team's USP is to sell the product (that's a broad definition, I know, but that is ultimately what it is all about) and that requires a range of skills from copywriting for web sites to email campaigns and adverts. Content for the marketer was always focussed on selling product.

Historically, editorial and marketing teams never made good bedfellows. They should have done but the idea of using editorial content to sell anything seemed too much for journalists and marketers would probably have found the copy too direct.

Now these two disciplines are starting to talk the same talk as technology and user behaviour has changed - marketers want to create content that is useful for users and that helps build engagement. Sounds like the same kind of aims as a journalist to me.

Marketing and editorial teams have a lot to learn from each other, which is why publishers are in a great place - both disciplines exist within their businesses. Are they making the most of this? Of course not, well not where legacy ways of working exist.

For those outside the publishing world, there is now a need to create useful content to attract and engage users - otherwise known as content marketing. We are all publishers now etc etc.

It is this emerging discipline of content marketing that fascinates me. Marketers have written some great posts on what makes useful, engaging content. However, I feel that it's time to get in on the discussion because I have spent years creating or enjoying others create really effective, interesting formats for content. This is not going to be a top 100 as I m not sure there are 100 - it will be a look at they types of content that work well at engaging people.

Final thought - I am wondering whether apps will sound the death knell to many of the most engaging non-mobile web content formats. Maybe in time, but I think there is still plenty of milage to be had in more standard (desktop) type content formats.        

AOL's content strategy revealed

Anyone who works with content on the web (particularly publishers) should take a look at AOL's content strategy.

This is a big document that needs a lot of digesting. However, it provides a great insight in how major publishers on the web are approaching content. Check out the associated article for highlights of the document.

Core to AOL's considerations for content are:

• Traffic
• Revenue
• Quality 
• Speed

Interesting to also see the emphasis on design . . .

• Every page of every site should look amazing
• Pixel perfection is the goal - always we be asking, "How can we make this better?"
• Constantly test new arrangements of page elements

As I said, there is lots more - the tools they use to measure content demand, profitability of content and other tools to help producers identify the right topics and to know when to keep pushing them (if demand is good).

Final point, there seems to be no mention of mobile in there.

[H/T Lakey for the link]

Video: less is more for the user

Why it pays to recycle ideas

Interesting to see that food producer Yeo Valley has reported increased sales that it attributes to its Live In Harmony marketing campaign. This campaign included this hugely successful rapping farmers video . . .

More interesting is the fact that the video was not an original idea. Check out this video from some Canadian rapping farmers from more than a year ago . . .

What Yeo Valley has demonstrated is that great content delivered in the right way can be really engaging - it also helped to run the ad in the first ad break of a new series of X-factor. 

Here is another example of using a great example to your own advantage. This time Sesame Street did a great job of jumping on the Old Spice bandwagon.

 

Ideas are invariably recycled - it's just how you execute them that counts. For Yeo Valley it has been a very worthwhile exercise.

[Many thanks to Tim Relf and Adam Tinworth who shared some of these thoughts at an Elevenses session I curated on viral video].

 

 

Redesigning medical data into actionable content

A great talk here from Thomas Goetz, exec editor at Wired, looking at how Wired redesigned medical data to make it more accessible and engaging for patients - if it is more accessible and engaging it will help behaviour change (eg the redesigned data shows you are at risk and it also clearly tells you what you should do next).

This is a great example of how content can be redesigned to really engage with the user. And with medical data the stakes are higher as easy to understand information can help patients to take action.

An interesting theme here is personalisation - turning data into content that resonates for the reader, it addresses them directly. I'm sure there are other pools of data out there that could be redesigned in similar ways.

At the heart of this project was the user - the patient. Put the user, your user personas, at the heart of what you are trying to achieve with your content and you will be much better placed to engage with them.

This project is a really good example of exposing data that has very limited relevance to the reader - in this case patients - and transforming it into something relevant and useful (ie engaging).

H/T @stephenanderson

Phone, Twitter, audio app, blog and cupcakes - content on the fly

I love it when someone else's post kicks you into action. A bit of Friday fun over at XpertHR's Employment Intelligence blog care of Michael Carty and the fact I was meeting HR Zone editor Charlie Duff - whose cupcake pictures featured in XpertHR's post - provided me the opportunity to interview Charlie about cupcakes. Here is the interview . . .

I love the fact that with an i-phone, Audioboo app, Twitter and a blog I have been able to quickly and easily publish the interview and have a chat about it on Twitter. Easy, fun - a great way to create content on the fly. Thanks for the interview, Charlie - those cakes look and sound amazing!