The grass is always greener

Job hunter. That’s my new title, along with Student-again and Wife. Three new roles. Some I am better at than others. Considering I got an A on my Emerging Media class (somewhat due to this blog), and my husband would endorse my new role as a wife as being successful thus far, I’m not sure how successful I am being at Job Hunter. It’s also something that I do not enjoy doing, so there’s that.

My friends are jealous thinking that the idea of not working is better than working, but like the heading of this blog suggests, it’s always what you don’t have that you want. And I want a new job! So far I’ve had one interview, one impending interview, updated my resume about 15 times and applied to about 30+ jobs in the past month.  Admittedly, this is not the best time to try to find a job, with the holidays everyone has been on auto-pilot and their minds were elsewhere in offices across the country. I was in the process today of rewriting my resume yet again, with the help of the Harvard Business Review‘s blog and thought I’d see if anyone else was in the same process as me and wanted to talk about it. It’s also been very lonely since I happen to be the only jobless person I know in my immediate circle of family and friends! I keep myself busy with my impending move so there’s been lots of packing, going to the Goodwill, and catching up on reality shows I didn’t know existed, but I know all of this cannot keep me busy forever! So if you’re out there and reading this, what’s been working for your job hunt?

“You know you really don’t need a damn forensic team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook you’d have invented Facebook.”

Right now my life is way different than I thought it would be when I was 22 and graduating from college. 3.5 years later, I do not have a job anymore, I’m moving to Maryland, am married, and am not sure what my next step in my career will be. If I could go back in time, I would go to when my 15 year old self and tell myself to start boning up on web page design so that hopefully 3 years later when I was in college, something similar to this scene would have happened:

But alas, Courtney Prior is not Time’s most influential person of the year and I’m not donating 50% of my salary to charity (which to reiterate, at the current time would be $0). So what will I be doing, what in the next 3 years will I look back and say “I bet when I was 25 I didn’t expect myself to be doing this.” When I’m asked in interviews what the 5 year plan is, the answer is just that I hope I am doing something I love, and what I love is the opportunity to be creative and doing so in a way that helps people. Yes I amp the response up more than that, but this is the heart of it. I work in sales and marketing right now, and would one day love to turn that more to just marketing. But I think that having this experience in sales right now will be helpful whenever I do make this transition. With 2011 quickly approaching, this is what I have been giving a lot of thought to recently, and what I will inevitably be toasting to come Friday night.

I am currently in South Africa, but give me your bank account # and we’ll work something out…

One time in College I was working as a tutor in spanish and decided to try to get some more kids to tutor. One easy and free way I thought of was posting about my services on Craigslist.com. I was very excited, and when I got my first email in response to my posting I couldn’t wait to read it! At first, I was taken aback by how long the email was. Then I started to read about how this man who lived in South Africa wanted to send me his child to tutor her in everything and she would live with me. He explained how he was going to pay me some exorbitant amount of money, I just needed to get him my bank account information so he could go ahead and start sending me the money. And his english wasn’t perfect, but he was clearly so distraught over trying to find a tutor for his daughter, what can you expect really.

Luckily, I was able to distinguish that this was a fraud, and the only other emails I got about my tutoring services were spammers. My husband and I were recently looking for an apartment and again turned to craigslist. We would send an email about an aparment listing and about 3 times out of 5 we would end up getting something back that was obviously a fake. In the end we stopped using craigslist, there’s no way to tell if something is going to end up being fake so why bother. In Inside Craigslist’s Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers it talks about a tool called the CL Auto Posting Tool which posts to Craigslist automatically and it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam efforts.

Spam begs the question: does it work? It must, there is so much out there and it’s overwhelming and never-ceasing that there must be money in it. One thing is for sure, if Craigslist.com doesn’t get control of the amounts of Spam on its site people will stop using it. But that doesn’t mean spammers will stop, they’ll just move onto the next thing. If this blog can tell you one thing let it be this, and I’ll put it in caps and make it bold to try to imprint it on your memory: DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR BANK ACCOUNT INFORMATION TO ANYONE! NOT TO YOUR MOTHER, YOUR TEACHER , A MAN IN SOUTH AFRICA AND DEFINITLEY NOT TO THIS GUY!

Craigslist Killer

All That I Want

While this is the title of one of my favorite Christmas songs (by the weepies), it also is how I’m feeling as we get closer to Christmas. What do I mean? The most commonly asked question this time of year is, “what do you want for Christmas?” I was researching what to get for my sister and brother in laws, when I got distracted by Youtube and started watching old Christmas commercials. Here’s an example of one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUQycfgCjr0&feature=player_embedded

I love these old commercials! I still have no gifts for my new family, but I don’t feel like it’s been a waste of time. When I consider how we advertise today, if we wanted to sell razors we’d use half naked men or women who are seemingly receiving the best shave of their life with the product. While I am studying emerging media, and so focusing on what’s new and great that we’re on the cuff of discovering or using to it’s full potential, it’s still important to take a step back and see how it used to be done, and what used to be “emerging”. It can help us as we go forward, to keep in mind what got us to where we are today.

Mobile trends changing our lives

2010 has been a big year for mobile technology.  One example in particular, 4G wireless communications is one area that really has the potential to revolutionalize the way we use our cell phones. Currently it’s not perfect, the pockets and gaps in the service areas are significant. It probably won’t work on mountains, indoors or city to city, BUT it’s potential is huge and one day soon it will help us multi-task with our phones. It has the ability to not only download huge presentations, play videos without a hiccup and do mobile videoconferences, but do several of them at once.

From our cell phones one day everything is going to literally right at our fingertips. Building this 4G network is the framework for a lot of great technological advances that are coming up, and while again it is not 100% now ready for everything we want it to do, soon it will be. And this is just the beginning.

Twitter Gone Wild

If you give everyone the capability to just say whatever they want, whenever they want, no filter, what’s the worst that could happen? Sadly, people’s ideas of what other people want to know about is usually wrong. People compare Twitter to a cocktail party (like these people) where there are many different conversations going on at once and you can partake in as many as you want. The only problem is, your inability to see these people’s reactions to your contributions to their conversations. When you go to a real cocktail party, you can pick up on body language and social cues to let you know whether or not people actually want your input on what they’re saying.

There are a few examples I want to share of people who could have used some social cues before they type www.twitter.com into their computer. One comes from the great state of Colorado, where a reporter was sent out to cover a funeral, live via twitter, for a toddler who had recently been killed. Tweets included “The father is sobbing over the casket” and play by plays of the coffin being lowered into the ground. I personally do not want this guy or his editor butting into my cocktail party conversations because obviously what they think people find interesting is in fact, not.

The next example, while not nearly as egregious as the funeral, still falls into my category of Just-Because-We-Can-Do-Something-Doesn’t-Always-Mean-We-Should. A surgeon in Detroit (like they don’t already have enough problems) decided that not only was he going to remove a cancerous tumor from a man’s kindey that fateful day, but he was going to tweet during the surgery about the surgery. The surgeon wanted to get the word out that when removing such a tumor, one doesn’t need to remove the whole kidney to do this. Ever heard of books or medical journals? Which will be around longer and can have access to more medical professionals than your tweets? And are where people commonly go when faced with a question?

Remember, as the saying goes, “Internet: It doesn’t make you stupid, it just makes your stupidity more accessible to others.”

I want…THIS one! No wait, that one!! Definitely that one…WAIT WHAT ARE THOSE?!

Technology. Some days I spend hours pining over the newest “it” gadget, just wishing I could justify the need for an ipad besides just really wanting it. Other days I spend hours daydreaming about watching my computer flying from the top of the tallest building in town and plumeting to it’s unrepairable doom. I got my Dell XPS laptop 2 years ago, and boy was  I excited. I sprung for more ram, gigabytes, extra features than I needed, assuming that since it cost more it must be the best. It has not proven that to be the case at all. My laptop turns off an on without my asking it to, reboots without prompting and thus has to do a “system repair” monthly. Usually, I do not purchase something unless it’s absolutely necessary. And no, I’m not talking about how some people feel that having a new pair of high heels every week is necessary (but they were on sale!) I’m talking, my spatula melts because I left it too close to the burner, so for the next following sets of weeks I improvise using a wooden spoon and what I like to call, “quick hands” (no permanent scaring has occured as a result of such a practice….yet).

Everything is so replaceable nowadays too. I’ve thought about getting a new motherboard, or taking it to a computer repair man, but everyone always tells me, “Don’t waste your money, you’re going to spend more trying to repair it than you would if you just bought a new one.” Which is probably true, my husband just got a great deal on a Sony laptop and it was $600 (and it runs perfectly). I don’t know how I feel though about how replaceable everything is in our society now, my grandparents still use a TV from the 80′s and it works just fine for them. My Dad pays for them to have a cell phone, and they’re always confused when he tells them it’s time to replace it. Their way of thinking is, why? This one works fine, it’s a phone, I like it, it does what I ask…but this line of thinking (no offense Grammy) is dying out. I have a blackberry that when I compare to other phones on the market is old, big, doesn’t do half of the new fun things, and is only a year old!

Going into marketing, with how fast technology changes, and how one day you’re the top of the line as far as products go, and then literally 6 months later, you’re not cool and fun any more, it’s a bit daunting. You have to keep things ever ready to move on to the next best thing, always have creative ideas flowing about what is new and great in the world.

If it sounds too good to be true…

…then it probably is, right? So what if I told you I can lower, nay, EXTINGUISH your cell phone bill? That’s right, you open up that bill in the mail, and the amount owed is $0. A big whooping nothing. All you have to do is use your cell phone watch ads for companies on your cell phone willingly. I throw in the willingly because, well, I never willingly choose to watch ads. Never. Ever. But, if it’s going to save me a few bucks, then maybe…

The whole point though is that they’re not trying to save you money in the long run. They want you to think that you are, so you will choose to watch say a Tide ad on your phone so your monthly cell phone bill goes down. But they are obviously hoping that the next time you’re buying laundry detergent, you’ve got Tide on the brain. If this isn’t something you’ve heard of before, check out this article . With an estimated 5 billion cell phone subscriptions across the world (in a total population of 6.8 billion no less), this type of mobile advertising is a smart way to make sure they get in peoples most personal tool. While you can walk away from the TV when ads pop up, a cell phone is like an extension of most people that never gets put down and is usually never separated from it’s owner.  So the end user is more than likely going to see your ad this way, and they’re getting an incentive to choose to watch the ads.

There will always be ads, and they’re always following the consumers and trying to infringe on the things they enjoy using… at least in this model the consumer gets an instant benefit!

Widjamajig

Last week for class I read “Responsive Web Design” by Ethan Marcotte and it got me to thinking about web design and it’s future. The future of  web design is no longer just what’s in front of you at your desk, nor is it necessarily what’s in your pocket, it’s just about everywhere. So many companies are working on ways to use web design to get their brand in front of you no matter what you’re looking at, soon you’re literally going to have to stick your head in the sand to be free of it. Ok not literally, unless that is your way of escaping our ad-filled world! I am merely saying that you’re going to have to find a way to tune it out, if we will even want to tune it out. Now if you’re like me you’re thinking, of course I’m going to want to tune it out. But, marketers are working hard to not be as annoying as before, and really hone in on their audience and what it is that they want so they can give them that. How are they doing this?

 One of the biggest ways is by utilizing Widgets. Per the article Widgets: The Future of Online Ads, it talks about how there are just a giant number of websites that people utilize on a daily basis that we need some way to help us manage it all. That’s where smart companies are swooping in to the rescue.  They come in, make it easy to book our flight to Denver, all without having to leave the other page and doing the other things I was doing at the same time as booking this flight. It’s all about knowing your consumer and what it is they need, and then giving it to them in a creative way that, more than likely, will promote your brand and the consumer won’t even consciously realize it.

 At the same time, it will help reduce the annoyingness we all associate with anything popping up at us