9 Dynamic Digital Resumes that Stand Out From the Crowd

It’s all about standing out from the crowd when you’re trying to get someone’s attention and get them to focus on you and your abilities.  What better way, then to show off some of your skills or your ingenuity and drive by presenting a more polished and graphic presentation of who you are.  Sharlyn Lauby writing in Mashable.com shows us several eye-catching ways to do that:

1. Give the Reader Your History

Michael Anderson’s infographic resume turns his employment and academic history into a colorful visual journey.

And, jumping ahead:

3. Make It Personal

Traditional resumes can be “humanized” by a well-written cover letter. Graphical resumes can add a whole new dimension by visually introducing the person behind the experience.

Federico Moral went with an anthropological theme, placing his skills into the timeline of human evolution.

Francis Homo turns his own silhouette into a frame for his achievements.

Brandon Kleinman adds a really creative twist by making a short presentation out of his Facebook photos.

You get the idea.  Make it interesting, make it compelling, make it fun. Show employers you are not only smart but creative and a bit driven, willing to go the extra mile.  That should at least take you a long way down the road to your next great opportunity.

For the complete article go to 9 Dynamic Digital Resumes that Stand Out From the Crowd

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Robert Scoble is a one of the thought leaders and innovators on the web today.  He is a smart, engaging guy who gets around to listen and exchange ideas with many of the other web leaders. Scoble’s a great favorite of mine and when he speaks, I listen.  And so do a lot of other people.

On his blog today ,Scobleizer — Exploring the 2010 Web Scoble talks about going back to basics and refocusing on his blog. He talks about what some have called his obsession with Twitter and Facebook, where he has, in fact, been a major player. Scoble explains this by saying “All my fun experiments were over on Twitter, Facebook, or friendfeed. You could see that. Mike Arrington even tried to do a friendfeed intervention last December.”  So now, Scoble is trying to bring that sense of fun, experimentation and real time zest into his newly re-invented blog.  He is also trying to show the rest of us now to do the same, in real time.

(About a week ago I posted From The Mouth of A Guru: Why You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet which has many of the same caveats about the value of focusing your work on your own blog and letting Twitter be your outpost.)

In that vein Scoble lays out what he thinks the future of the web will look like:

“1. It’s real time. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend. You really should watch the video of the panel discussion I moderated on the state of real time search to get a sense of where this is going. That panel discussion will be remembered for years as a key point. One of the panel members runs Facebook search team. Yes, Facebook is working on real time search. (That video is in two parts since the meeting ran almost two hours long. I really do recommend watching it. Part I is here. Part II is here.).
2. It’s mobile. You’ll see this more next week when the Where 2.0 conference rolls into town, but if 40,000 iPhone apps hasn’t convinced you yet, nothing will. On Monday I’m meeting with Nokia to find out the latest.
3. It’s decentralized. Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.
5. It’s social. This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.
6. It’s smart. We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular…

PR People: I even made a place you can pitch me on 2010 web ideas. It’s interesting that a bunch of people are subscribed to that room — probably lots of tech bloggers looking for ideas.”

I put in that last link so those of you who are bloggers could go fishing there for ideas.

I’m certainly going to watching the evolution of Scobles newlly updated blog and trying some of the same tools and strategies myself.  Are you?  If you do, please leave a comment and tell us what works for you and what doesn’t.  We all in this giant web conversation together, now that Web 3.o and the interconnections of social media and dynamic linking have arrived

Jon Morrow , Associate Editor of Copyblogger, who should know, shares with us this pearl of wisdom:

The Oldest Blogging Myth

“Content is king.”

Well, that is pretty discouraging to those of us who focus on producing or discovering great content.  But then Jon explains what, in our hearts, we already know.  In Why No One Links to Your Best Posts And What to Do About It , Jon points out that this is no longer even Web 2.0. It’s moved beyond that.  The era of social media has arrived and that means Friends: Facebook, FriendFeed, the Twitterati. If you want to be popular, you need to start getting hooked up with very popular friends/fellow bloggers.  Or , as he puts it:

“If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

Remember the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?”

Well, it’s kind of true. A mediocre writer that’s friends with every member of the Technorati 100 will become a popular blogger faster than a brilliant writer with no friends at all.

Why? Because bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing tons of brilliant content. It’s also having tons of well-connected friends.

How to Make Friends with Popular Bloggers

So… how are you supposed to make friends with all of these popular bloggers and get them to link to your best posts?

Traditional wisdom says you should link to their posts, hoping they’ll notice you and start reading your blog. Sometimes it works, but in my experience, you need to be a little more creative. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
• Attend conferences that all of the “Who’s Who” of your niche go to and network your tail off
• Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
• Leave lots of truly memorable comments
• Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions
• Join their private membership program (like Teaching Sells) and make lots of smart posts in the forums

Give and Ye Shall Receive

We’re not talking about anything new here. Really, it comes down to one of the oldest principles of persuasion: reciprocity.

Contrary to what many people think, A-list bloggers aren’t islands, separate and self-sufficient. They deal with problems and annoyances, just as much as anyone else. If you can help alleviate them, they’ll thank and remember you for it.

The key is finding ways that you can be genuinely useful to them. Make yourself relevant and then use that opportunity to start building a relationship.

Give it a few months, and then start pointing them to your best and most relevant content. They’ll probably link to you anytime you do anything interesting, bringing you lots of readers. They’ll also introduce you to other popular bloggers, giving you a chance to do more favors and expand your network.

It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. If you put as much effort into building relationships as you do writing great content, you’ll have a popular blog in no time.

And better yet, you’ll have made friends with some of the most interesting people on the web. That’s a reward in and of itself.”

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David Spark (@dspark), a veteran tech journalist , founder of Spark Media Solutions, who blogs at The Spark Minute, has done a lot of research to see how people succeed at growing their social networks. He discovers the patterns and dishes the inside how to’s at 12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers.  They are all interesting and helpful examples, but I particularly liked:

Seed Your Network

“For six months and with only 150 inactive members, the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group was languishing. LinkToCharlotte’s goal has always been to connect local businesses and people in the Charlotte, NC area. Founder Andrew Kaplan decided it was time to juice the membership of his group. In June 2008, he reached out to local influencers who could attract others to his local network.

Already having ties with professional sports teams, tourism, and political advisors, Kaplan sent out personal invites to their respective marketing departments to join the group. Quickly seeing the benefits of being part of Kaplan’s local industry network, they in turn sent invites from their lists to join his network as well. Today, LinkToCharlotte’s LinkedIn () group has grown to 2,000, plus it has expanded to include groups on the NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter ().”

Take a look at how the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group , NING platform, Facebook (), and Twitter () all play off each other.  It’s a road map to creating and leveraging your social media assets.

Let me hear what you think if you’ve created or are creating something like this.

Remember when the Net roared on the scene and created new business models not even imaginable before?  “Opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies?”

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software reflects on what’s happening on the net today where, as he sees it…. and it sounds pretty reasonable to me…the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

In, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want toJason talks about how social media has already changed the rules of the game. Here’s his take:

“The days of “have a website and advertise” are over. It’s too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that’s already full.

Social media is the only way LinksFor.Us could get traction. If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it’s visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it’s visible. Once it’s visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It’s still early of course and no one — not even the experts — knows where all this is going. But it’s clear that times are changing again, and those that don’t jump in will go the way of print media.

Want examples?

• In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.
• Fog Creek software makes millions of dollars from FogBugz, a bug-tracking system. There’s hundreds of bug-tracking systems — free, cheap, expensive, open-source, commercial — yet Fog Creek is highly visible and successful with no advertising. How? Because the founder, Joel Spolsky, has built an incredibly popular blog about writing software. He was before his time; before RSS he wrote essays and notified you by email when a new one was posted. It’s widely agreed that without the blog-before-it-was-called-a-blog, Fog Creek would likely have remained an unknown consulting company with a few struggling products.
• Nike allowed people to build and order custom shoes on their website. Skeptics said deep customization is too expensive, design-sharing is too complicated, and people need to try shoes on. Wrong! Once the site took off, Nike created physical stores where you could do the same thing.  Joaquin Hidalgo, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing says those stores now “represent 25% of our revenue.”
• Speaking of shoes, Zappos also sells shoes on the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh is so convinced that their legendary Twitter presence results in sales, he even wrote a popular beginner’s guide to Twitter. He insists that Twitter and other forms of open communication are required for excellent customer service; employees are trained in Twitter. Zappos raked in $1B last year even with the recession; they’re doing something right.
• Oddly-named marketing site Marketing.fm gets double the traffic of marketing.com. One has a blog with useful content and one doesn’t. Guess which is which.
• Zeus Jones describes 16 more terrific examples. (Thanks to David S. Finch for digging it up.)”

Conclusion: better jump in now while you still can and keep leveraging up with social media. Or, as Jason puts it, “Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don’t yet understand it.”

It may seem like Facebook and Twitter are all we hear.  But that’s just a piece of the huge social networking puzzle.  Bebo seems to be one to watch: keep track of friends on other social sites in one place.  I’m giving that a try and also putting together a social network using Ning as a platform… really incredibly simple and powerful.  Here’s Adam Ostrow‘s take on the social scene in The Fastest Growing Social Sites:

• Each month (and often more frequently than that) we take a look at trends in social networking, by the numbers. Recently, we’ve focused on Twitter’s astronomical growth – now up better than 2,500 percent in one year – and Facebook’s climb to become top social network over MySpace ().

  However, this month there are a few other trends within the numbers – provided by Nielsen Online – that highlight a few other storylines within the social media space, as well as continue to put meat behind the trends we’ve been covering over the past few months.

  Here are some notable developments from March:

  Ning, which recently announced that more than one million social networks have been creating using its service, is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property. It’s traffic is up 283 percent year-over-year, and it now reaches a total of 5.6 million people in the US.

  Bebo, which we recently reported saw a one month surge of nearly 50 percent on the heels of a redesign and AIM integration, has grown 148 percent in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US.

  This is significant because Bebo is known mostly for being big overseas, but insignificant in the US. The next few months will tell us if this was a one-time pop thanks to AIM integration or a continued trend thanks to some innovative things Bebo is doing with Socialthing.

  LinkedIn () continues to be one of the quickest growing social sites and has more than doubled its size in the past year. It now reaches better than 15.8 million people in the US, ranking it 3rd in total size behind Facebook () and MySpace. It’s no doubt being buoyed by the weak economy and high unemployment as people turn to the site and their connections to find work.

  As for “the big three,” the story remains much the same:

  Twitter () is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565 percent. In total, it reached more than 13 million people in the US during the month – and that’s just on its website (i.e. – not counting clients like TweetDeck () or Seesmic Desktop ()). Next month will likely see this total continue to swell, thanks to huge mainstream media events like Ashton Kutcher versus CNN and Oprah jumping onto Twitter.

  Facebook continues to extend its lead over MySpace. In March, it saw 69.1 million visitors, versus 55.9 million for the News Corp-owned social networking site. In fact, MySpace was the only social networking site measured in the Nielsen survey that saw its traffic decline year-over-year.

  So, while not much changed at the top of the social media landscape in March, there are certainly a few new storylines emerging that will be worth watching going forward. The full report – sorted by growth rate – is embedded below:

  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alexsl

“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers such as those pictured in the Radian6 screen shot below.

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube () channel are all on the first page of search results.

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

Whether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination like a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links and outreach activities like blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.”

It’s all about results.  If you don’t measure you won’t know what your results are.  If you try this, let us hear how you do and what you’ve learned you’d like to share.  In social media, we’re all in this together

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog, I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get.  I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Google Gadgets For Your Webpage offers you everything from mundane functions, like clocks and weather, but also gadgets which can make your site a lot more interactive, like Desktop Chat, Google Talk, Twitter or Facebook, right from your own page.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with Google’s customized RSS feed, which can bring your favorite “stream of news and updates” from your favorite sites to your own webpage. It’s very simple.  You just grab the code or tweak the colors, size etc., then grab the code.  I started first by installing several customized RSS feeds, in different colors, or “color coded”, putting up social media, tech news and updates, and “5 minutes for Mom” on my site, AdvancingWomen.com.  I am so pleased with that, I put on Twitter and Facebook.   Next I will be adding Google Talk to a number of pages.  Well, I’m pretty blown away with what Google offers so easily.  I can tell you I’d been wrestling with some other RSS feeds for awhile, and having trouble to get them to look and act quite the way I wanted.  So the simplicity and dynamism of Google’s Gadgets was a big hit with me.  Give it a try.  And let us know what you think and what gadgets worked particularly well for you.

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these changes as “the business model that moves [the company] from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.”Thus, it’s not surprising that Facebook is starting to do more to reach out to brands that might benefit from using revamped Pages. The latest example is (fittingly) a Facebook Page that the company has setup to promote “Facebook Marketing Solutions,” complete with case studies from a number of large brands using the tool, tips and how-tos, and discussion with marketers.

The brands that Facebook is featuring include household names like Adobe, Lionsgate, and Ben & Jerry’s, but there are still some useful tidbits for those with slightly smaller budgets. For example, Ben & Jerry’s implementation of Facebook Connect is something that any website could deploy with a bit of coding work and zero marketing spend.

• It lets visitors to Ben & Jerry’s website select their favorite flavor and share it on Facebook. Then, that user’s friends see the flavor selection on their homepage, and also get a link to Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page where they too can become a fan.

  Meanwhile, for brands looking to spend money on Facebook (), namely by promoting their Page, the Marketing Solutions group shares a number of different types of campaigns. For example, Adobe’s “Real or Fake” campaign includes a game on the company’s Page, where users guessed whether an image was real or Photoshoped.

  Adobe describes its results: “About 10% of our page visitors played the game and, of those who played, 6% clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6% clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game. Due to this game and media placement, our page received over 6,000 new fans too.”

  For Facebook, sharing this type of information using a Page is a great example of a company eating its own dog food so to speak. It’s also good to see that they’re both sharing tips that anyone can do – without spending significant money on Facebook – as well as case studies clearly designed to get big brands to spend big dollars on marketing their Pages.

  ---

  Additional Facebook Resources for Brands

  ---

  - New Facebook Pages: A Guide for Social Media Marketers

  - 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

  - 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence

Explore the various sections of Nambu for OS X here, and click on the sections you are interested in learning more about.

Move between different possible views: single column, accounts with messages, or multiple columns.

Manually get new messages, or let Nambu adjust to grab them as quickly as possible.

Send a new message anytime without wasting space on a open window.

Extensive Twitter support: Mentions, Direct Messages, Favourites and more.

Separate people into special groups for distinct, more timely following.

Start a persistent Twitter search to track what people are saying.

Enter a live keyord filter to find that set of tweets you are looking for.

Act on any message with the operations menu: retweet, reply, and a lot more.

See actual website names for shared links to know where you will go.

Monitor your persistent searches for new entries or keep up the latest trends.