Dot Tom

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Last year as the recession took hold my employer took drastic action cutting back the marketing team.  I was out of a job. In 25 years of working, it was the first time in my life that I needed unemployment benefits. While I didn’t keep an exact count, I suspect that I applied for over 300 jobs in the past 11 months. I’ve worked with at least 20 recruiters; done 150 phone screens and probably 100 face-to-face interviews. Today, 347 days after my search began, I start a new job with a great company that I’m very excited about!

Understanding how difficult the job hunting environment is now I would like to extend a hand to those who are currently looking for a job with 5 recommendations that I hope will help.

1).  Make Every Moment a Learning Opportunity
While I’m writing with a focus on the online marketing world, I think this applies more broadly as well.  Every conversation, all the research you do on a prospective employer, all the vendors they use, and every strategy they employ is an opportunity to add to your toolkit once you’re employed.  However you don’t unearth any treasure without digging.  All of the prospective employers I spoke with ask for feedback on their site and some required a formal presentation. Peel back their source code and look for analytics packages, advertising partner tracking codes and vendor partners; evaluate their PPC programs, Affiliates, CSE partners; evaluate their user experience, key site features, third-party tools used, taxonomy, key products, pricing, value proposition, branding; use tools like Compete.com to get a sense of their traffic and evaluate the best of their competition with the same rigger.

Undoubtedly in your interview you’ll share what you’ve learned with a viewpoint on the pros & cons of what you’ve found.  But equally as important, ask questions that probe more deeply and give you further insight into the business strategy and tactics.  If their doing something innovative that’s working, take note.
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Yesterday was “#FollowFriday” on Twitter.  It’s a great chance to tell others about the most interesting people you follow on Twitter, the practice is growing in popularity.  I took the opportunity to visit a number of new and interesting people and came across @UtahNewsGuy, Leo Dirr.  @UtahNewsGuy doesn’t have a huge following on Twitter, although his following is huge compared to my own, but it’s clear that he’s one bright guy who thinks like a marketer!  When I saw a Tweet referencing a blog article by @UtahNewsGuy, Anatomy of a Successful Tweet, I couldn’t resist.  In simple language Mr. Dirr offers a very interesting strategy and analysis of a tweet he did which points to an article he wrote on the future of newspapers.

It’s clear from the blog post that the web site where his original article was first posted experienced an increase in traffic specifically from Twitter.  Any analytics package will capture general source stats.  Nevertheless, as a marketing guy I can’t help wanting to measure a little more precisely.  People use TinyURL.com all the time to embed a brief URL into twitter posts.  What’s really cool about TinyURL.com is that since you’re abbreviating the URL it doesn’t matter how long the original URL is, so adding tracking codes to the URL is a simple and powerful way of getting precise information on the impact of a Twitter post.

Regardless of the analytics package you use on your blog or web site you can tag a URL with tracking codes that will allow you to see exactly the traction your getting on that specific post.  Suppose for instance that @UtahNewsGuy’s publisher was using Google Analytics to measure results.  He could take the existing URL and add the following string: “?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival”.  This is captured in Google Analytics identify the Source, Medium and Campaign Name with accurate stats on the user sessions generated by that URL.  By take the combined string of the original URL and the tracking component and it would look like this:

http://www.utahstories.com/utah_newspapers_decline.htm?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival

By plugging this string into TinyURL.com I get:

http://tinyurl.com/cs53oh

As long as UtahStories.com is using Google Analytics (which they are) @UtahNewsGuy doesn’t need any technical assistance to add this string when he does his Twitter post.  All he needs to do is ask the analyst at his publisher to update him on the results captured in Google Analytics.  In fact by my creating this Tiny URL and you clicking on it, you’ll be automatically compiling UtahStories.com traffic data in their Google Analytics Reporting Suite.  Just remember that each analytics suite is a little different in convention but the principles remain the same.

I’ll post a tweet about this using @UtahNewsGuy’s technique with Google Analytics Tags myself and let you know what happens!  Visit me at @TomStockwell.