Marketing Headhunter

JOB POSTING: Director of Web Analytics & Decision Support

PHILADELPHIA - In September 2006, I was very blessed to place Carol Steinberg with DavidsBridal.com as their new VP of Ecommerce.  For those of you who don't know Carol, she's an extraordinarily talented ecommerce executive who led DavidsBridal.com onto Internet Retailer's Hot 100 List of the Best Retail Websites for 2007.

Currently Carol seeks a Director of Web Analytics & Decision Support to help her grow the company by "helping management ask meaningful questions about how to improve our relevance and intimacy with our customers -- and collecting and using the right data to support that effort."

If you are a talented multichannel analytics executive who wants to make a difference with your work, you should seriously consider this role.  Strong six-figure base + 15% bonus + relo assistance, and a super nice boss who will take a real interest in your professional growth.  This one's a no brainer.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.
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Death Star Spells Trouble for Viral Marketing

SAN FRANCISCO - Hat tip to Mark Hurst, author of the excellent book Bit Literacy, for this man-on-the-street footage of the Death Star and starships as they hover around San Francisco.  Mark thinks ...

This is now the end of video as evidence of anything.  In a world saturated by bits, what's real? What can we believe? Not the bits themselves - a one is easy to flip to a zero, especially with widespread tools. There's an easy answer, quoting Kevin Kelly: "the only way to believe an image [or video] is to trust its source, rather than its content."

So, for example, you should believe a video from the WSJ or the Economist because they have earned your trust.  For everything else, it's important to know the source of any digital file.  (Mark Hurst is highly credible, btw.)

Will increased consumer cynicism effect the ability of viral marketing campaigns like Will It Blend to achieve the kinds of success they have enjoyed in the past?  Maybe.

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JOBSEEKERS, READ THIS:

ATLANTA, GA - Since 2005, I have acquired a portfolio of some of the best domains in the $130 billion staffing and recruiting industry.  ManagementRecruiter.com is a fine example.  According to Google's Adwords tool, the phrase "management recruiter" gets 33-52 clicks per day, and I'm at #2 in the organic rankings in every Google datacenter (I think).  But creating content is very time consuming.

SO HERE'S MY PROPOSITION:  If you want to blog at ManagementRecruiter.com, send me an email and we can send you a login to the site.  If enough of you take me up on this, eventually I might revamp the site to look more like a real group blog.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU:  An accelerated job search.  Remember that the people who search for a management recruiter are almost always the same companies who NEED people like YOU.  In fact, their need for talent is so dire that they are prepared to actually pay a recruiter 20% for it.  (Horrors!)  So, not only is there an opportunity to improve your own online brand through blogging -- but you might actually get a job out of it from one of the blog's readers.  Anything can happen when a highly motivated buyer can actually find you.  I'm living proof of that.

The same offer applies for my blogs SearchEngineExperts.com, LogisticsRecruiter.com, and FinanceRecruiter.com.  And before you dismiss the idea, realize that I own EcommerceConsulting.com -- and Sally McKenzie is doing pretty well for herself in the organic rankings for that phrase, thank you very much.

BONUS:  We will feature the best guest blogger submission in our October newsletter, which is read by more than 10,000 subscribers -- including some of the most powerful decision makers in ecommerce.

Let me know.  Limit three writers per blog.
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Happy Jay Abraham Day!

ATLANTA - Because I don't monkey around when it comes to searching for information on the web, I use Copernic Agent Professional.  I like to be prepared for my calls with clients and candidates, and I want my candidates to be completely up-to-speed on my clients and hiring managers when they interview.  Information is power, especially in a down-economy job search.  It's war out there.

What's Copernic?  It's metasearch software that can access more than 1000 business information sources in 120 specialized categories, providing searchers with the most complete and relevant results available -- all in one handy user user interface.  There's a lot more to the web than what Google serves up.  A lot.

Plus, and this is huge: It allows you to eliminate duplicate results so you don't browse the same results over and over.  It costs 80 bucks, but it's worth it.  And I'm not making a dime by saying so.  You'd be amazed at what's buried on the invisible web, if you know how to find it.

Anyway, from time to time, I like to use Copernic to troll the internet for Adobe files by my favorite marketing heroes, like Jay Abraham.  (I am not an affiliate, btw.)

In the last 25 years, Jay Abraham has consulted with over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries, and he has dealt with every type of business you can imagine.  Jay has studied and solved just about every kind of marketing question, problem, challenge and opportunity there is -- to the billion-dollar benefit of his clients.

If you're a marketer and you don't know Jay Abraham, then this is your lucky day.  I'm giving you amnesty right now.  Using the operator ("Jay Abraham" filetype:pdf) I used Copernic to dredge up some of the best FREE Jay Abraham resources on the deep web.

Happy Jay Abraham Day!  And many happy returns ...

1. 21 Power Principles to Maximize Your Business Success.  I always wondered why Jay never charged for this 29-page ebook.  It's like a mini-MBA in marketing, only much better.  Anything I write about this resource isn't going to do it justice, so I'll just say this:  READ IT.
2. 56 Profit Building Lessons I learned from Jay Abraham's Mastermind Marketing Training:  Okay, so this is not by Jay, but these are 100% Jay's ideas.  And they STOMP, so grab a highlighter and some post-it notes.  You've been warned.
3. Jay Abraham: Real Life Marketing Legend.  An interview by Janet Attwood.  Great distillation of Jay's philosophy. Good to the last drop.
4. Jay is interviewed by List Crusade.  More choice marketing ideas, plus some nuggets about selling information products.  For example, using the domain Over50JobSearch.com, I plan to publish an ebook in late 2009.  These ideas will come in handy.
5. Jay Abraham 101.  I downloaded this badboy to my hard drive back in 2006, and now it's your turn.  I love the discussion on page six about the THREE ways to grow a business.  Damn, I wish I'd thought of that.
6. How do YOU and YOUR business stack up?  A self-assessment test.  This is the first time I'm seeing this one, and trust me, you are going to need an oven mitt to get this one off the printer!  Jay poses 87 questions and then gives you a scoring methodology to see how hard your business is working for YOU.  Best if used in connection with Jay's book, which covers topics like "risk reversal."  You call yourself a marketer?  You should own this book anyway.  Hey Rockefeller, a used copy is only nine bucks.  Get with the program!

BONUS:  Here's a 39-page sales letter Jay wrote to promote one of his $5000 seminars.  What's that?  You think 39 pages is stupid?  It's not!  Gary Halbert and Jay always agreed that copy cannot be too long -- it can only be too boring.  Don't believe me?

Have you ever read a 500-page Stephen King novel in one evening?  'Nuff said!
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OASEO is M.I.A.

CLEVELAND - Hey!  What happened to Oaseo.com, the seo jobsite launched by Joel Cheesman in 2006 as an online job community for search engine industry professionals and employers?

I just entered the domain into my browser and was redirected here.  Type "oaseo.com" into your browser and you'll resolve to the new page.  And even a simple Google search for Oaseo yields a different top result than one would expect, even though Joel's new page is already the top organic result for the competitive term "seo jobs."

Evidently, Oaseo has been retired.

I would have thought that if anyone could make something happen in the seo job board space, it would be Joel.  No one understands HR SEO better than the Big Cheese.

What gives?  When did Joel make the change, and why?  Certainly, the demand for SEM talent seems to be going through the roof, as witnessed by the traction my pals at Onward Search seem to be getting.  I thought the name "Oaseo" was clever and quite brandable.  How did I miss this memo?
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Currency Debate: "Shocking MSNBC Poll Results"

NEW YORK - Here are the current results of an MSNBC poll which asks "Should the motto "In God We Trust" be removed from U.S. currency?"  More than three million responses have been tallied.  You can vote here.

As a marketer, how does this make you feel?

My take:  It makes me realize that the days of one big, homogeneous, whitebread, values-cohesive, mass market (a la Mad Men) are dead.  But I guess you knew that already.  Long live the niche market.
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Hey, recruiters! How cool is this?

Today at Seth's blog ...

Lisa points us Fonolo, a company in beta that spiders phone trees at big companies and promises to make it easy for you to go straight to the spot you want.  Then it calls you when the phone is answered and records the call so you can keep a record.

It's about time.
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Ecommerce Strategy and the "Gun to the Head Theory"

CHICAGO, IL - Today I got a call from a friend who runs the online retail store of a major consumer brand.  Mostly, the brand sells through department stores, but they did $24 million online last year and were budgeted to grow by 20% this year to $29 million.  That was until last May, when my friend lobbied the CEO for funds to make long-overdue investments to the company's ecommerce infrastructure.

The CEO had the CFO create a cost/benefit spreadsheet which made some assumptions about how the new technology would increase sales.  These assumptions were debated and blessed in a C-level vacuum and mandated back down to ecommerce, along with a new sales target of 42% growth for the current year (to $34 million).  Like a good soldier, my friend quietly agreed to the budget, and now he regrets it because his current compensation and 2009 numbers are being pegged to the CFO's estimates.

The result, in plain old recruiter-speak:  My friend is now "open to new opportunities" and "would consider any reasonable (read lateral) move."

Some thoughts:

1.)  This is a shame for my friend's employer, as my friend is underpaid and will be expensive to replace.  The market for people with his background is 25% higher than what he earns, and recruitment fees and relocation costs will leave a hickey.

2.)  There are three (and only three) shareholder value levers:  Growth, Efficiency, and Capital Optimization.  Increasing shareholder value is what keeps CEOs awake at night, yet CEOs need to be careful about who's telling them what.  CFOs have no business estimating how any investment will drive sales.  In fact, CFOs typically know less about growth than anyone, and I'm not being disrespectful.  CFOs know about optimizing the financial structure of a business.  That's their job.

Had the CEO involved my friend in the debate, the CEO might have realized that if your market is not growing by 42% per year, then for you to grow at 42% means that you will have to dislodge customers from your competitors.  Pie-rearranging competition is much more costly than pie-enlarging competition, even online where switching costs are supposedly low.  Yet these things will impact my friend's paycheck in the coming months and possibly years.  He should have pushed back.

3.)  All marketing can be boiled down to one mission:  Sell more stuff to more people more often for more money.  Ecommerce managers whose job security is tied to growth must do extensive reference checks on their technology vendors to ensure that the investment will move the needle in each of these areas.  Moreover, vendors should be held accountable when there are directly attributable shortfalls.  My friend should have been more diligent back in May.

The moral of points 2 and 3:  "You don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate." Or, as my dad used to say, "Life is a contest of wills."

Beyond that, my friend should stop agonizing over incremental improvements that are only going to make his bosses want more, more, MORE -- and look for a quantum improvement in his business.  Sure incremental improvements are necessary, but big growth comes from big ideas.  Especially in mature markets.

Gary Halbert used to call this the "gun to the head theory."  Specifically, ...

"What would you do if you had to QUINTUPLE your business in the next 365 days, or you would be shot dead?"

Roberto Goizueta of Coke did this when he stopped asking "What's our share of the soda market?" and started asking "What's our share of stomach?"  Only then did Coke get into the hydration business.

The idea is that when you redefine your market so that it's ten times larger than it is today, then the possibilities for growth seem endless.

Something for ecommerce executives to think about.
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Stupid Human Tricks: "Clutter-busting Voice Mail"

ATLANTA - Maybe it's related to the number of hours I spend on the phone.  Perhaps it's tied to the number of voice mails I leave.  But today I discovered what happens when an overworked telemarketer crosses iTunes and an answering machine.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PODCAST.  Very multichannel, don't you think?
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Resume Writing: "No Recent Experience"

QUESTION:  Hey, Harry -- A company in Chicago was nice enough to reply to my resume submission, but wrote back, "We're looking for someone who has taken ideas from conception to finished product."  I politely replied that I'd done that at a previous employer.  My guess is that they only looked at my current job experience and not at my prior work history.  Is there any way, either in the cover letter or by rearranging the resume, to get employers to focus on my best time between 1999 and 2004?

ANSWER:  Not really.  The issue is not how relevant you were four years ago, but how relevant you are today.  Ideally, companies want candidates who can plug-and-play into their current business, based on current industry best practices.  They want to see what you have done in the most recent chapter of your career -- and four years ago is a very long time, especially in "internet years."

PS - About the ATS ...

Understand that when internal and third-party recruiters (like me) receive your resume, the document is often automatically inhaled into an Applicant Tracking System.  The ATS allows us to quickly scan a resume with the keywords from the relevant job posting highlighted.  If your resume lights up like a Christmas tree when viewed in an ATS, then you are "qualified" for the position for which you have applied and we will likely follow up with a phone call.  If it doesn't, then we're on to the next resume.  And this stuff about your blog being your resume is just wishful thinking.

Remember Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink?"   Same deal.

Your best bet is to customize a keyword-specific version of your resume for each job application.  Make sure it's honest, though, because secondary reference checks will expose a sham -- even if the recruiter doesn't.

Secondary references, btw, are those that arise when the reference checker asks the candidate's reference "Who else has worked with this candidate in a similar capacity?  Do you have their number so I can call them?"  Since the candidate has no idea whom their primary reference will identify, they have no way of controlling the spin on their work experience.  Result:  Busted.

Customizing your resume takes effort, but there's simply no use applying for a job unless your resume is properly mapped to the current position.  One-size-fits-all resumes rarely cut it, unless your recruiter specializes in the type of position that happens to match what's already on it.  Or knows you personally.
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