Backing Down In The Face of Twitter

The end of 2011 saw big reversals by major corporations in the face of public outcry. First was GoDaddy, who came out in favor of SOPA and was quickly persuaded by online outrage into switching positions. The second was an even faster about-face by Verizon Wireless. Verizon thought they’d quietly slip-in a $2 bill payment fee, only to find the public reaction so seething that they cancelled that bright idea before potential shaming by the FCC. Two up. Two down. Is there something to be learned here?

It might be possible to dismiss either or both of these incidents as the obvious corporate toe stubbing that occurs from time to time. But when you add them to a stack of other news stories this past year that fall into the same category, there’s a pretty obvious pattern that emerges.

What other stories? How about the “Arab Spring” demonstrations that swept many countries in the Middle East and prompted regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt & Libya and ongoing protests in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Jordan? How about the “Occupy” movements that have been dubbed an “American Autumn” by some? How about 100,000 demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin that included tractor parades and farmers dressed as cows circling the Capitol last February? By this summer, it may culminate in recall of the state’s Governor.

How does all this disparate activity tie together? The common thread is the Internet. We are living in a new age of the empowered individual that is different from anything we’ve seen before in one important aspect. Thanks to technology, that empowerment is nearly instantaneous.

Time was, if you didn’t like something you always had the option to write your Congressman or the editor of your local paper. You could call or write a company to voice your disapproval. If the results weren’t satisfactory, you always could discuss matters with your friends, even escalating your group efforts into a demonstration or protest march. The civil rights movement and student protests of the 1960’s can certainly be said to have changed the course of American society over a period of turbulent years.

For those of us old enough to remember 1968, there is a certain resemblance to Zucotti Park and UC Davis. One difference is the way we hear about these things and see the images. In the 60’s, you tuned in Walter Cronkite from 5:30 to 6 PM or you went without video. There were always AP wirephotos in the Sunday newspaper or color pictures in next week’s Time magazine.

Compare that with watching the live feed from Tim Pool's cell phone as he walked through the crowd in New York City, interviewing people involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests as he went. What’s it take to be such a citizen journalist with your own audio and video remote broadcast facility? In this case, a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone and an unlimited 4G broadband account from Sprint feeding into a Ustream account called “The Other 99.” Would you like to broadcast live video to a dozen friends or tens of thousands of interested onlookers worldwide? The Ustream.tv channels are free. You can feed them from your desktop, laptop or smartphone with wired or wireless broadband connection.

Social media is said to be a major theme for business in 2012. The social media revolution has already become mainstream activity for individuals everywhere. In WWII, desperate messages came out of countries under siege via Morse Code sent from hidden short wave transmitters. In 2012, that’s text messages and tweets from some of the billions of cell phones in service worldwide. Think this can be stopped? Just who is going to round up all those billions of phones or cut off the Internet or texting for very long? There are so many interconnections that if you need to send a message anywhere on Earth, you can probably find a path in short order.

It’s more than the power of motivated individuals. Social media and the readily available tools that feed it allow those motivated individuals to quickly, almost instantly, join forces with others of the same mind. In hours, minutes, perhaps seconds, group efforts can be mounted to address nearly any issue. This is what doomed the ill-fated initiatives from GoDaddy and Verizon before they ever got solidified. One disgruntled customer on the toll-free service line can be placated or ignored. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand in concert bashing your business on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, YouTube, blogs and email are a force to be reckoned with. Once they get the attention of the mainstream media who monitor those social channels looking for newsworthy material, the game is over ... even if it only started a few hours or days ago.

Job Posting Tool Offers Free Trial

It’s time to think about hiring again. Perhaps you are already in need of qualified candidates, but are none too anxious to wade into the snowstorm of resumes and phone messages that result when you run a job ad. Then there’s the cost of advertising and the dedication of staff time to screen applicants. The improving economy can seem like a mixed blessing unless you have a way to make the hiring process more efficient and less painful. Here’s one you should consider.


ZipRecruiter is in the business of improving the job posting and candidate review process. They have created an online-based system that takes a lot of the burden off you and your staff. If you like it enough to give it a test drive, you can try the system free for four days. Keep all the candidates you acquire during that trial period. If you want to continue with the product, pricing is very attractive.

What does ZipRecruiter do that’s easier than doing it all yourself? The leverage the power of automation to improve productivity. Sure, you can post to all the job boards online, one by one. ZipRecruiter will do that posting for you to the most highly trafficked free job boards on the internet. We’re talking a collection of resources that draws tens of millions of job seekers every month. You click once. your job gets posted to multiple boards.

Now brace yourself for the response. With the job market just recovering, there is a lot of excellent talent out there. There are also a lot of desperate, but unsuitable, candidates to vie for your attention. Don’t let the perfect matches get lost in the shuffle. One way to reduce resume spam is to ask your candidates real-world questions about your business. ZipRecruiter lets you set up an optional online interview so you can review candidate response along with the resumes they submit.

You’ll probably want collaboration with your colleagues before you commit to the time and expense involved with bringing someone in for a face to face interview. With the ZipRecruiter tool you can rate the candidates and share notes all in one place. There’s a tab to view the resume and another to quickly view the candidate's answers to your interview questions.

You know that social media is the way to connect these days. This tool has social networking capability built-in. It takes just a couple of clicks to spread the word about your job openings on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Buzz.

This is a customizable job posting tool with a hosted company job page that promotes all of your job openings in one place. You can simply link to this page from your company website instead of having to build and maintain a completely separate job listing resource.

Want to manage your candidate data offline as well as online? No problem. ZipRecruiter makes it easy to export your candidate to an Excel spreadsheet.

Does this sound a lot easier than doing it all manually or coming up with your own proprietary tools? You bet it is. But why not decide for yourself by getting a free trial of ZipRecruiter right now? See how fast and easy it works for you. You probably won’t go back to the “old” way of posting jobs and evaluating candidates.

Integrating Social Media And Reality

We live in two separate worlds, with one foot in each. There’s the virtual world of texting, email, online shopping, Internet search, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN. Then there’s the real world of food, shelter, family, friends, and work. The two intersect, but they’re not tied together in any robust way. Well, at least until now.

It only makes sense that someone would come up with a solution to link the virtual and physical worlds we live in. That solution is something called Poken. As you might suspect, it has both physical and virtual components.

The physical component is called a Poken. It’s an electronic gadget packaged to look like an avatar or a flash memory device. The business end of the device is encapsulated in a white four fingered hand that has a button in the palm and lights that glow from within. What you can’t see is a coil antenna, microprocessor, USB drivers and a watch style battery.

The way you use Poken is to carry the device on a lanyard around your neck or clipped to your jacket, backpack, or bag. When you encounter someone else with a Poken you can request an exchange of contact data, much the same as requesting or offering a business card. Touch the hands of the Poken together and they’ll sense each other’s presence. After a wireless exchange of links, both hands will pulsate with a green glow to announce their success in the encounter.

Now for the virtual component. You plug the USB connector of your Poken into your computer and automatically upload the day’s contacts to your Poken Hub, a personalized online portal. After entering your ID and password, you can see your contacts organized in lists or displayed as virtual business cards along a timeline. Unlike paper cards or scraps of paper that you’ve used to jot down names and phone numbers, the Poken Cards show a photo of your contact.

Being able to see pictures of the people you’ve met displayed along a timeline makes it easy to remember where you met someone and who else you met at the same time. But that’s just the half of it. Those Poken Cards, the virtual representation of a business card or address book entry, have names, phone numbers, addresses and website links. It’s whatever information you and those you meet have chosen to share. The popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN have familiar link icons on the card. There’s also room for hyperlinks to other sites, such as your blog or business website.

This is how Poken tightly integrates the process of meeting people in person with meeting them again online at the familiar social networking sites. You don’t have to think about who goes with what site, because it’s all tied together on the Poken cards you’ve collected.

Poken Around For Business Leads

How do you approach business networking situations? Is it still the old handshake and business card? There’s a new, more edgy approach. It involves leveraging technology to exchange and organize your day to day business contacts. If you’ve been thinking about bringing social media and viral marketing into your business plan, don’t make a move until you discover Poken.

Poken is both a device and a process that upgrades the traditional business card. In the days when your name, title and phone number were king, the little paper handout was all someone needed for their files. But now that everything is computerized in databases and online, business cards, Rolodex files and address books fall short. There are devices out there that will read your card and create an electronic version. But why not go electronic from the start?

Meet the pokenPulse. It looks like the USB flash drive you carry around now. It is. In fact, it functions as a 2 GB solid state memory dongle. But notice something else? That white hand on the side is more than just a logo. It’s a functioning near-field wireless transponder. When two of these devices touch, the hands glow green to indicate that a data exchange has occurred. That’s you and the person you just met exchanging electronic business cards. Do this all day and then download the results when you get back to your computer.

The contact data you acquire is securely uploaded to your own private pokenHub, an online storage for all your contacts plus a timeline based organizer. If you can remember roughly when you met someone or who you were with at the time, you can find the contact you have in mind even if you long ago forgot their name.

Poken is about more than just names and phone numbers. The electronic record also carries email addresses and website links. Your contact will not only discover what organization you work for, but can instantly get the personal and marketing information you want them to have. You don’t have to go about stuffing brochures in their pocket. They’ll be getting the links to your online presence at the same time you exchange names and numbers.

Who can Poken benefit? Anyone who meets people as part of their job... or wants to. This ranges from empowered teams, corporate trade shows, salespeople on the lookout for new prospects, edgy companies looking to expand awareness of their products and services, technical experts wanting to connect with other techies, and so on. If you use a computer and the Internet in your work, Poken can probably enhance what you are doing.

Speaking of edgy. The pokenPulse is just one model of the Poken device family. It’s popular with technical people and executives. But if you want attention, consider wearing one of the Poken characters, such as the Ninja, Space Alien, Panda, Cave Man or Vampire. People are going to ask what that is around your neck and that gives you an opportunity to converse. Others who are already Poken-enabled will instantly recognize you as someone in the know and worth meeting. Take a second and give them the “high four” with your Poken character. It will likely turn out to be a valuable exchange.

Going Rogue But Not Rouge With Samsung

Are you a maverick personality who needs a high performance cell phone that won’t quit on you in the middle of its service term? Then consider the new Samsung Rogue U960 Black (sorry, no red) for Verizon Wireless. It’s one hot candidate in a field of competing smartphones.

Does your current phone have one-touch access to your favorite social network apps, like Facebook and MySpace? No? How about the ability to surf the Web, watch YouTube videos and edit high resolution photos on a screen so bright its easy to use even in sunlight? No? Can you stream stereo music to a wireless headset, get driving directions, or message with ease using a real pushbutton slide-out QWERTY keyboard?

Still no? Your phone’s just too out of date to do everything you want to do, with ease, when you want to do it. Well, don’t waste your time trying to put lipstick on that pig when you can trade up to an advanced multimedia messaging-centric phone like the Samsung Rogue. It’s available at an incredible online discount with free shipping right now.

Let’s take a look at this candidate’s qualifications. What the Rogue has that you’ll be hard pressed to find on another phone is the AMOLED touchscreen color display. That stands for Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode. Eventually your TV will have one of these displays, but right now you can enjoy the advantage of this new technology that is incredibly bright and easy to see even in direct sunlight. The Samsung Rogue display measures a generous 3.1 inches with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and the ability to display over 262,000 colors. That gives you a rich, desktop-like Internet experience on your cellphone.

The Rogue’s customizable widget bar enables you to have one-touch access to social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and so on. You’ll be able to surf the Web with the built-in HTML Web browser and take advantage of Verizon’s cellular broadband network that’s available in most populous areas. You’ll also have access to V Cast Videos and V CAST with Rhapsody, if you choose to subscribe to these multimedia services.

The vibrant color display will also be appreciated for viewing the high resolution photos you take using the Samsung Rogue's 3 Megapixel digital camera with flash. It has advanced editing tools and zoom capability onboard, plus it runs in camcorder mode so you can make your own videos wherever you happen to be. Share them with your friends using multimedia messaging for picture and video messages. You won’t run out of storage space if you plug in a microSD memory card with up to 16 GB of capacity.

If messaging is a major part of your communications, you’ll love the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard of the Samsung Rogue. No tapping on the screen to compose messages with this phone. You get real pushbuttons with comfortable size and spacing so you can compose text quickly, easily and accurately. Slide it back in when you are done for a smaller profile phone.

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