Aquent whiffs on making connections

Aquent is a made-up word and an online talent agency. They introduce people looking for work to people looking for workers, and take a cut of the action. Or, in their own words:

Aquent is a professional services firm that specializes in helping companies all over the world, across a variety of industries, make use of people, processes, and technology more effectively than ever before. Since its founding in 1986, Aquent’s pioneering approach to staffing, consulting, and outsourcing keeps the company a step ahead.

They’re on my mind today because a friend sent me a job listing today from Monster for an Internet Marketing Analyst/Specialist. The ad is from Aquent. They’re looking for someone to develop and manage an online marketing program for recruitment for ‘one of the big 5 global consulting firms’ for one year from a remote location.

My friend thought that the job looked like a good fit for the Work Industries network of web marketing professionals, and, glory be, he darned well could be right. So I investigated.

The ad says to apply for the job on the Aquent website, using the reference number m-01470-tm-27009. Okey dokey, I thought, we’ll see what we can do. I clicked through from the ad to the Aquent homepage. I got a 404 error. There was a mistake in the link, a comma included with the .com.

I corrected the mistake and finally found the Aquent homepage. I stared at my choices: creative staffing and services, marketing staffing, marketing IT services, healthcare consulting and financial services. Now where would a Internet Marketing Analyst/Specialist be hiding?

I visited my first choice - marketing staffing - found the search fuction and searched for m-01470-tm-27009. No results. I returned to the Aquent homepage and tried the same thing with two other segments of the website - marketing IT services and creative staffing services. No results in both cases.

So where is this job listing?

I went to Google and searched for Aquent m-01470-tm-27009. No results. I mean none at all. It seems that either the job doesn’t exist or that it’s very hard (impossible?) to find. Is it at all ironic that they’re looking for a Internet Marketing Analyst/Specialist? Too bad it’s for a client and not for themselves.

So: a lesson. When trying to appeal to a group of people, consider their sensitivities and predispositions. Consider the context you’re working in. And when advertising for marketing and technology people, make your marketing technology work.

Please, Aquent, you can do better. Learn to not suck and you’ll attract much better talent for your clients. Continue to suck as you do and you’ll get no one applying for your jobs.

Update: Aquent called me to talk about this post and I’ve summarized our conversation in Aquent update: me, my big mouth and our conversation.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Marketing • Web Communities
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How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

Tuesday night I presented at the first ever CaseCamp Vancouver. So what is CaseCamp?

Think of Bar Camp and shorten it and make it about marketing that uses technology, not just about technology. That’s Case Camp.

Presentations are 10-minute, rapid-fire case studies that tell a good story, in 10 minutes—tops!

The title of my presentation?

How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

or

The biggest thing I know so far about building marketing in a group

I’ve added my speaking notes below, which may or may make sense to you. If you were there, you have a distinct advantage. (Okay, I added a little explanatory information too for this web post.)

The speaking notes go with my CaseCamp presentation movie (464K, .mov quicktime file). Coordinating the two at once is up to you. Bonne chance!

slide 1
“Introduction to me and my idea: see title.”

slide 2
“I started to work with a company a few years ago and they told me that they were very analytics driven. They had specific key performance indicators (KPIs) they used organization-wide to make decisions. I thought that was a good thing.”

KPIs

• alright!
• analytics!
• the web rocks analytics!
• My brag: Google / Yahoo in 2000 / 2001 my team managed the largest ad spend in Canada

slide 3 and 4
“They used this chart to make their marketing and advertising decisions.”
(slide of cost per response (CPR) and (CPA))

“This was their holy grail, I was told. Their advertising decisions all hinged on these simple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs!).”

“Their brands are listed down the left-most column. The next two column, going left to right, show the web cost per response over the course of the year and at the end of the year, once you’d hired me and we’d optimized the campaigns. The second-from-the-right column shows your cost per response averages across all media - TV, print, outdoors and the web. The right column shows the difference.”

“I also mentioned the other factors the web had going for it as an advertising medium:

• superior scalability - we could be practically all the traffic we could handle until it cost too much to buy
• superior cash-flow - you get your placement, get your click throughs, have a chance to convert that traffic, then, 30 days later, get invoiced for the traffic that’s already been delivered and you’ve already (potentially converted into buyers).
• superior flexibility - you can ramp up and down your ad spend in seconds on an ongoing basis, you can roll your learnings from the campaign into the ongoing campaign as long as you want and as deeply as you want, you can stop the campaign
• superior tracking - every step of the customer acquisition process you can track to see where people are falling off, not converting, and address that issue
• pay for performance - you only pay for the people that click on the ads - those that see that ads but don’t click on them but still get your ‘brand message’ (ugh!) - you don’t pay for

I thought that made for a pretty self-explanatory case for an increased budget for the web marketing team. We could deliver more customers for cheaper.

slide 5

“That’s not how it worked out. The feedback I received can basically be summed up in three tactics of response:”

Dispute

• I showed them this
• They didn’t believe it
• If this could be so much better, why hadn’t they discovered it
• ‘This is theoretical,’ they said. ‘Not real.’

Disparage

• No, these aren’t real numbers.
• We discussed the origin of the numbers
• They concluded the numbers were not accurate, for any channel
• The process they were gathered through was flawed
• All the numbers were flawed. How could they make decisions with flawed nubmers!

Misdirect

• Those people you say came from the web, they discovered our brand through other channels, through our TV ads, through our print ads
• We do way more TV advertising that web
• The web is coasting on the coattails of the TV ads
• When customers are searching how do you think they know what to search for?
• We told them in our TV ads!

slide 6

“I didn’t get it. What was I doing wrong? They must need more information.”

slide 7

“I showed them the Internet was exploding in popularity and global reach.”

slide 8

“I showed them that people loved to get involved in the Internet and contribute content, not just get information.”

slide 9

“E-commerce was experiencing immense year-over-year growth.”

slide 10

“Our industry was experience some of the strongest growth.”

“But nothing worked. Why?

slide 11

“People make emotional decisions and then justify them with reason.”

“Decisions get made way back in the emotional centre of the brain, in the places where fear and anger and hunger reside. They don’t get made in the reasoning, high-order functions areas. Those are just for window dressing and justifying the decisions of the emotions.”

slide 12

“So what did I learn from my spectacular failure to understand how decisions get made? Focus on these things.”

Me Lessons

1 - Trust

• Don’t try to convince people to do something
• show them what they could do
• earn their trust bit by bit
• seed trust through external sources of validation: articles, books, etc.

2 - Religion:
Religions have been around for as long as cultures. Use their tactics.

• spread the word, beat the drum
• give people a simple story to believe
• appeal to people’s fears and dreams
• prosthletize: watch Sunday morning religious TV to see how to do this - seriously

3 - Attraction:

• make your ideas other people’s ideas
• use proxies for your arguments
• depersonalize the decision
• sex up the proposal

4 - Quit:

• move on before you stop believing in yourself
• once you stop believing there’s no way you can make others believe
• you have to be able to eat fear

Questions…discussion.

slide 13

“This is a pretty good book at explaining the diverging forces in the world, how we’re stubbornly subject to the same flawed human belief systems and superstition at the same time as we’re reaching out technologically and technocratically: Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber.

And guess which one will always trump the other?

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Strategy • Web Marketing • News • Harebrained Ideas
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How luck and timing influence success

James Surowiecki has a great article in the New Yorker entitled The Fatal Flaw Myth that pierces the received wisdom of the airline manufacturing industry.

I like the article because it acts also as a cautionary tale. Sometimes the patterns we think we see are only short-term happenings. Sometimes the real causes of events and fortunes only become apparent in the longer term. Most importantly, we must resist jumping to conclusions based on hearing a story that reinforces and fits our world view.

Recommended reading for anyone thinking strategically and critically about our world.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Strategy
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My Basecamp feature request: view by person

To manage all the different Work Industries projects I use a web-based project management tool called Basecamp from design firm 37 Signals. 37 Signals are widely known as proponents of simple, clean software. In fact, they say as much on their front page:

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use. We pay enormous attention to the details, interface, and overall customer experience of our products.

I’ve appreciated their simple approach to software with Basecamp, but one thing kept coming up for me. There is no way to see in one view all of the contributions of a person on a project. I found I remembered who had done something but not exactly when they had done it or how they had titled it. I wanted to be able to trace back their contributions.

Here’s my note to 37 Signals requesting they consider creating a way to see contibutions to a project by person.

Hi 37 Signalers,

I’m really enjoying using Basecamp and I have one thing that I’d love to be able to do - see the contents of a project by the contributor.

So the files, comments, messages - everything, really - viewed by who did it. I find I’m often (a couple of times a day) looking through messages or files for a particular contributed item that I know who contributed it but don’t know it’s title or when it was contributed. And I can’t always rely on others or myself to categorize things properly. So I’d love to be able to see the project by person.

That’s all. Keep up the excellent work!

~James

I’ll be interested to see what happens. I saw Jason Fried, 37 Signals’ founder, speak at the Web 2.0 conference back in 2004 and his plea for simpler, clearer software really struck a chord with me.

I tried to implement a similar philosophy in my web product management position at the time, but over time realized that the throughput of features was the core way a product manager was evaluated, as if we were in a manufacturing industry shipping widgets to stores instead of designing an interaction environment where each new feature had to be measured against the existing ones. I won’t go into detail about the type of innovations invented to keep the assembly line humming.

Has anyone else found they wanted to see their Basecamp project by person? Or, has anyone found a better way to do this already that I haven’t discovered?

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Strategy • Personal Technologist
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Gliffy is drawing on the web

Last week I posted about Graphical User Interface (GUI) prototyping tools and thought that I had discovered a pretty good list of reference points.

But then I remembered Gliffy, went back to the site and tried it out again. Suffice to say it is the best example of the movement from desktop applications that run on your local computer to web-based applications delivered through the browser. It’s Microsoft’s Visio drawing tool without the installation and license, stripped down and ready to go.

The funny thing is that going back to use Visio once you’ve used Gliffy illustrates how bloated Visio is and how its surplus of features muddles its usefulness. It’s hard to do things because there are so many things to do. Gliffy does 90 percent of the things I do with Visio and nothing more. If you need to draw anything - flowcharts, wireframes, diagrams, floorplans - you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

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Graphical User Interface (GUI) prototyping tools

This is one for the nerds out there - let me hear you scream! - here’s a very comprehensive list of Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced goo-ey) prototyping tools.

So what use could they possibly have? Well, consider that you’re working on a sign up screen for a website or an e-commerce application. You need to test various versions to see how your users respond. The sign up page is a key conversion page and it pays big time to sweat all the small details.

In the design phase to build each full version is a lot of designer and programmer overhead. Building mock ups or prototypes makes tons of sense. You put the mock ups in front of some prospective users and get fast feedback. You take that feedback and roll it into the next designs, et cetera. The feedback loop makes for quicker mature designs that work for people, which is what matters.

For those of you not totally geeking it up with desktop drawing programs, I recommend the cutting-edge technology of the pencil and paper or the whiteboard. Both offer instant visual outputs, sharing, collaboration, extensibility and iterative versioning. Additional users can be added with minimal gains in overhead. Both also work across platforms and without electricity.

Best of all you get to wave your hands, point at things and scribble all over things, in real time. A great addition to communication is gesture, so don’t how back. Get your hands dirty and wrestle with the screens.

See how cool low tech can be?

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Strategy • Web Marketing • Web Content
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Vancity’s ChangeEverything profiled in TechCrunch

Congratulations to Vancity, the folks involved with the ChangeEverything campaign, and Social Signal for a great write up of their project in TechCrunch this morning.

ChangeEverything.ca is a Canadian 43Things clone that will launch this month and is provided by the largest credit union in the country. Sixty year old Vancity credit union won’t be monetizing ChangeEverything, but using it as a branded promotion for its financial services along with other long running community building efforts.

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the ChangeEverything site a few weeks ago as an early member, so I’m familiar with the project and feel like I have something invested in it (my modest contributions), which is how the site is designed to work.

Kudos to Vancity for taking the risk and opening themselves up to the bottom-up world of online community participation. Leadership is something you do, not something you talk about doing.

Posted by James Sherrett | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Work • Community • News
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