Monster moved their marketing program on to seemingly greener pastures by replacing Joan Blackwood with Ted Gilvar as Chief Global Marketing Officer. I met with Joan recently at the Monster Customer Advisory board, 6 months after I was critical of Monster’s new branding campaign. She and I discussed the circumstances of the campaign and both agreed that the timing was pretty poor. Monster hadn’t upgraded their product in months, so the promises of the campaign were not well delivered by the product. I can only imagine the pressure she was under to launch something new. The quick hook (14 months tenure) further bolsters the volatility of the CMO position, and ought to scare the crap out of anyone looking to move up in the marketing profession.

I know that Monster has some pretty extensive product changes coming down the pipe, so perhaps Mr. Gilvar’s original campaign vision will come to life. I can’t wait until our first meeting.

photo by dospaz

Live and direct from the Hudson homepage today is the 3rd episode of the online video magazine that has been a labor of love for me. The shoot for this video was a ton of fun. I had never been to Philly before, so visiting a new city and catching a ballgame was awesome.

I also really got to know Ed Caufield, the highest quality human you could meet - seriously. Not many people are enthusiastic about having a camera in their face while they do their job, but Ed embraced the project wholeheartedly. Whereas some people need directing, Ed had the locations for the shoot planned out for us. Ed is also Mr. Philadelphia. He is such a genuine and likable person, that he knows everyone in the building from the top manager to the parking lot attendant. When he walks down the street people honk their horn and say “Hey Ed what’s up!”. He’s just that nice, and that much fun to work with.

So, enjoy the vid, and let me know what you think.

Last week Hudson launched IT Hire Wire, a blog targeted at professional-level IT candidates. For me, it is the culmination of nearly 10 months of work to test a more transparent way of doing business online for Hudson, and an intense bit of learning in my marketing career (check my tweets along the way). Before I get to outlining the project and some of the lessons learned to date, let me first encourage you to visit the blog, read some entries, and leave any comments that you’d like regarding the project. I appreciate any feedback received.

Making the Case for a Recruiting Blog
IT Hire Wire originated through the same strategic process that brought about our Web Video efforts. As I mentioned here,

…our global marketing team convened to discuss new media and the social web phenomena. At the time, recruitment on Second Life and MySpace was grabbing headlines, while YouTube and blogging were creeping into corporate communication strategy. The common themes were transparency, authenticity and audience control of the message.

On a limited budget we agreed to test one or two new media channels to begin to participate in this movement. While not ideal to choose a channel before defining goals, we knew that a certain amount of experimentation would be required to remain competitive.

To shepherd the project, I started by getting more knowledgeable about blogging than I ever had been before. I familiarized myself with the latest tools like WordPress and various social websites like MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us, RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook. This resulted in my new personal blog and a blogroll filled with competitive sites that I admire.

With this as a backdrop, I lobbied hard for the blog project when budget season came around. I wanted the help of an agency to make sure we set the cultural groundwork properly within Hudson, and to have enough resources to complete the project on top of an already heavy load.

Enter Cowboy Advertising
In November of 2007, we contracted with Cowboy Advertising to assist with our blog effort. From that time until our launch, the Cowboy team was instrumental in getting our internal group of bloggers aligned with the project mission. Together we chose our IT practice to pilot the program because we felt the target audience was most comfortable with blogs. At the same time our IT recruiters were likely to be the most blog-savvy of our employee population.

Creative Direction
Cowboy helped to facilitate conference calls as we concurrently decided upon a creative and technical direction as well as got our bloggers up to speed on how to write content. We wanted to differentiate the site’s look from the many tech news or gadget blogs out there and, at the same time not take ourselves too seriously. We ended up with a theme that evokes the balance of work, life, and the technical knowledge it takes for a successful IT career.

The Cost of Blog Development
None of the agency-provided services came without cost. While the theory is that you can do a blog for practically free on any public blogging platform in an evening, the reality is that involving an agency cost us significant dollars. I do believe that it bought us excellent creative, and a thought out editorial process that will be crucial to our long-term success.

I’ll provide updates on further development as the project progresses. For now enjoy the blog, and let me know what you think!

It’s time to play help Kris with an annoying bug in an application he uses. On today’s episode, we’ll be adding a New Link to the Quick Launch bar within a WSS 3.0 Sharepoint site. When he adds any url that starts with “p” after the “http://” such as http://pstime.hhgroup.com, Sharepoint magically changes the URL to an “https://” URL. This therefore makes adding a link to that site very difficult. A URL beginning with any other letter does not do this.

I should also mention that our Sharepoint instance is on a secure https:// server if that makes any difference at all. Would anyone in the development world care to point me to the right place to submit this bug, or can they point me to a place where it has been addressed? I don’t even know what to search on or where to get a response to this. Thanks for your help!

Add New Link to Sharepoint including “p” as first letter in URL

The URL changed from http:// to https://

The second installment of our online video series launched a few days ago. As I promised on my video #1 reflections I thought it would be useful to dive deeper into what we have learned during production.

Piggyback Your Shoots
Hudson has offices spread out all over the US. Coordinating the production of a video shoot in those offices on a monthly basis could become a full-time job. It takes a lot to schedule hotels, and flights, schedule the subjects of the videos, etc. So, at Cantaloupe’s suggestion we chose to shoot 2 locations that are in relatively close geographic proximity (New York and Philadelphia) to capture content for 2 videos at once. This has been immensely helpful as we have refined our email marketing approach and other promotion tactics instead of being in the field shooting video #3.

Get into an Editing Rhythm
We went through a lot of iterations in the editing of video #1. Having never done a series like this, we spent a lot of time trying to establish the tone and overall storyline for the series. Much of the back and forth was properly setting up the viewer to know what the series would be all about. With video #2, the editing process was FAR easier. The production team knew what to do with the second story based on learnings from the first piece. Their initial edit was 85% of what we needed, and we had only some minor tweaks from there. We knew the team was in a rhythm, which made things much more smooth.

Use a Video Timeline
In the editing process, I found it really helpful to build a full timeline of the video with minutes/seconds counters and text explanations of the scenes. It was then extremely easy for everyone involved in providing feedback to reference specific times and sequences in the video.

Track Video Effectiveness
Cantaloupe provides us with a really compelling backend tracking tool called Backlight. Within Backlight, we can see exactly how many people have viewed the video, how many viewers made it through the piece and how many dropped out at what point in the video. This helps inform us on the right length for the segments and where we may have missed the mark on content. Have a look at the graph shown below. You can see how many seconds into the video users start to trail off and stop watching.

Screen capture from Cantaloupe Backlight stats tracking.

Promote the Video via Email
Of course, once you spend time creating a video masterpiece, you’d like to attract as many viewers to it as possible. Part of it is to regularly email prospects and customers about the video. We send out nicely formatted emails to people who hopefully “follow” the series to let them know another video is out there. I thought the promise of seeing video content at one point in the web cycle would have caused astronomical open and click through rates. The first piece we sent we received a 15% open rate and 20% of the opens clicked through to watch the video. I don’t have any idea yet whether those are good or bad stats. If anyone has that information, please let me know.

The email marketing teaser to encourage you to watch the next video in the reality series

I’m excited that Video #2 is live because it shows the real story of Hudson’s people in a very real way. Now that we’ve hit our reality stride, I can’t wait to see where this takes us.

photo from Jackson Fish Market

I’ll be on vacation until Friday on a family fishing trip to Canada. We’re headed to Cabonga Reservoir, a tradtional spot for the Rzepkowski family. I’m hoping to land a few walleye and maybe a monster pike like 2 years ago. I’ll see you all next week.

A London Business Trip Stream of Consciousness
Here I am in Chicago for my 4th straight week of business travel. My mind is mush, and my body is losing muscle-mass by the minute. Nonetheless, I thought I’d recount last week’s trip to London for our Global Marketing Summit, stream-of-consciousness style. Aided by my tweets and augmented by a few pics, I should be able to recall the highlights as the jet lag clears.

Tuesday May 6: The Long Voyage to London
It’s 3:45am, I just woke up for the flight. I didn’t sleep well last “night”. I never do when I need to go international. My iPod hard drive died last night for some unexplained reason. The replacement is my wife’s retired Dell Axim that I quick-loaded with a few MP3’s.

The Rochester Airport wasn’t crowded this morning for some reason so I breezed through check-in and security. The UAL flight to Washington was great aboard a CRJ 700 - one of the only regional jets that have comfortable, wide seats, stand-up height, and enough legroom. Wendy’s for breakfast at IAD. What possessed me to order a “Frescuit“? I can’t even pronounce it. It was flat awful.

I head for my 9:30am London connection. Aboard the 777, I get a window seat jammed next to another guy with very wide shoulders. I’m always surprised that the meals aboard the long-haul planes are decent. I’ve seen Cloverfield and Jumper now plus I’ve written 2 blog entries for my work project. The batteries are dead on all of my portable electronic devices by the time I arrive. It’s now 12:30pm London time, a full 15 hours since I got up. The London cabbie is a cheerful woman who takes me to the Beauchamp Hotel. Apparently a new mayor was elected recently in London because I heard all about it. It takes me forever to wind down. I call Tricia and the kids (they are 5 hours behind) and fall asleep by 2am. Wake up call is 7:00am. Can’t wait!

Wednesday May 7: An English Breakfast and a Brown Finish
I pry open my eyes at 7am and go down for the complimentary breakfast. The waitress asked what I wanted, and I said “Everything”. God bless the English, because out came the following: Scrambled eggs, wheat toast, sausage, back bacon, and my favorite random English sides, baked beans, mushrooms and a tomato. I shotgunned the meal in under 10 minutes. I bet the natives let it rest a bit more than that. I meet the rest of our crew in the lobby, and we’re off to the office. My juvenile sense of humor finds many of the London sights funny. I’m not sure what to expect to drink at the Bung Hole for instance, but it conjures up images of Beavis and Butthead for sure.

The names of some London establishments leave something to be desired

The morning is full of meet and greets and business strategy updates. We’re hearing a lot about Corporate Social Responsibility these days. There is a great update to our corporate capabilities brochure that is sure to please everyone looking for fresh images and an updated showpiece to share with clients and candidates. It strikes me how hard it is to coordinate a global marketing effort in a regionally structured company. I’m chomping at the bit to share our web video launch with the global team, and get some feedback on the creative for our upcoming blog release. The team responds to both with enthusiasm and constructive input.

The meeting is done and the fatigue is setting in by 5:00pm. I sneak in a shower and a 10 minute catnap at the hotel. After a quick check-in with the family I’m off to Browns London for our evening dinner meeting. I’m having Steak, Mushroom and Guinness Pie - how English!

Kris and Ronel: the Interactive Marketing Squad for Hudson

At 11pm the first day is complete. I’m heading back to the hotel to catch up on the work of the day. I’m asleep by 2am because it feels like 9pm.

Thursday May 8: Global Updates and a Speed Boat Ride
I’m still not yet coherent from lack of sleep, but it’s time to head off to the office at Chancery Lane at 8am. Today every global marketing manager is sharing the successes from their region and their upcoming plans. My takeaway is this: It’s an exciting time to be a marketer in Asia, rebuilding time for Australia, maturing time in EU, and experimental time in the US. It is refreshing to know that we share VERY similar challenges aligning marketing to business process, and pushing business process to align with a marketing vision. We’re ending the day by looking forward to our team outing: a speed boat ride on the Thames and dinner at Floridita.

It is clear that we all need some fresh air after being cooped up inside all day. The walk to the boats right beneath the London Eye puts a smile on our faces. We’ve gotten shockingly good weather all week and tonight is no exception. 70 degrees and sunny. We’re talking about London, not Florida.

From Left: Carrie, Denise and Rick walking to the boats

We make it to the docks with time to catch a few pictures of the iconic sites. Then we find out what were really getting into. Apparently the “boats” we’ll be riding in are little dinghies with twin 225hp rocket engines attached to them. We are all very reassured as we don our life jackets and pack ourselves into the raft.

Hop aboard the raft. Keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times

I’m a speed (the rate of movement, not the drug) junkie. When the boats hit top speed there is nothing I can do but smile and take in the breathtaking scenery along the banks of the Thames. We pass Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, the London Bridge, Tower Bridge, and the Royal Observatory (keeper of Greenwich Meantime) to name a few of the sites. Just as fun, though is fearing for your life as the boats probably reaches 60 MPH bobbing and weaving through the huge wakes caused by all of the boat traffic in the river. We are definitely airborne more than once.

Our speedboat ride beneath the Tower Bridge

I’m thankful for dry land after all the speedboat excitement. We go back to the hotel to freshen up, then it’s time for dinner. Floridita is a Cuban cabaret with drag queens doing all sorts of crazy dancing, and killer pomegranate mojitos. A lot of the team from the London office is hanging out with us. We are having a great time talking American politics and testing our foreign accents. By midnight though most of us are turning into pumpkins, and we call it a trip.

Friday May 9: 22 Hours of Case Studies and International Travel
Friday morning, we buzz back to the office and have a morning agenda packed with case studies of marketing ROI in action. From Job Board tracking to integrated campaigns, our team is really working on measuring all of our efforts. We are taking advantage of our last minutes together by recapping the week and setting an action plan. At 1pm Carrie, and I are in a cab (the world’s best in my opinion) to Paddington station and on the Heathrow Express to the airport.

I have to connect to Rochester via Dulles again. This time I’m mesmerized by a Catherine Heigl chick flick, 27 Dresses. Does that surprise anyone who knows me? When I finally settle into bed at 12:30AM on Saturday morning, I’m realizing that I’ve been up 22 straight hours. Yes, that drive home from the airport was risky.

All in all, this was a great trip to London packed with great information and great sights. If you’d like to see more pictures, have a look at the London photo album.

Before you read this blog entry, have a look at part 1 of the video magazine at us.hudson.com. I’d love to know what you think of it. For curious interactive marketers and other onlookers I’m about to outline the rationale of the project, its background, challenges, triumphs, and next steps. First though, would you write down your unbiased answers to these questions?

Your First Impressions

• Did you have any problems viewing or hearing the video?
• Did you watch all of it, or did you bail out?
• What is the point of the video?
• Are you enticed to view the rest of the series?

I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave your answers in the comments on this post. This has been quite a learning experience for me personally, and your comments will just add to it.

Making the Case for Web Video
In April of last year, our global marketing team convened to discuss new media and the social web phenomena. At the time, recruitment on Second Life and MySpace was grabbing headlines, while YouTube and blogging were creeping into corporate communication strategy. The common themes were transparency, authenticity and audience control of the message.

On a limited budget we agreed to test one or two new media channels to begin to participate in this movement. While not ideal to choose a channel before defining goals, we knew that a certain amount of experimentation would be required to remain competitive. Over the next 6 months the case for web video became clear - instead of writing about the “professionalism” of our people we would let their stories demonstrate it.

Enter Cantaloupe.tv
After speaking with a few large agencies who wanted to charge high-end video prices to execute for the web, I was referred to Cantaloupe.tv. Jon DiGregory, one of Cantaloupe’s founders, pitched “disposable video stories” that would be compiled into an online video magazine. What Jon meant by disposable is that the relevance of web video only lasts for a short period of time similar to magazine articles. To attract viewers, the stories should be short and frequent. Jon advocates low budget, medium quality, documentary productions that revolve around the real story. After I looked at a few other client examples of reality shows, I knew we had our video partner. Taking a leap of faith, we decided to build a 12 part video magazine throughout the remainder of this year and into 2009.

Defining the Story
The first task was to define goals that we wanted viewers to take away from the videos. Cantaloupe facilitated a story building session with our marketing team and members from the business that revealed scenarios we could use to build episodes. We decided to focus on one line of business at a time starting with Hudson Legal. The result was a well defined story document that will drive the shooting of our first few episodes.

Shooting and Editing the Video
With a producer and one videographer we shot our first production at a meeting in Philadelphia in early March. As expected, the team being filmed was uncomfortable at first. After a while though the camera disappeared and they were able to function more naturally. The confessionals within the episode laid the groundwork for upcoming shoots and prepped the team for what’s to come.

Editing of the video went through March and into April. The amount of editing between the marketing team, the business leaders, and Cantaloupe surprised me. Getting a video production that everyone is happy with was VERY time consuming, and one of the hidden gotchas of this project.

Framework Build-out
Once the heavy lifting of creating the web video was complete, we needed to integrate it into our websites. The online magazine framework provided by Cantaloupe would be right on our homepage where a static graphic billboard had previously resided. Our theory, of course is that its prominent location will drive the most views and entice users to interact with the rest of the site. We also will feature the videos on our microsite home pages for our different business units when they are featured within the video.

Post-Launch Activities
Now that the first episode is live, there is still plenty to do. In follow-up posts I will discuss our email marketing strategy and some of the reactions, questions that arise as we go down this path, and likely the ROI of all this effort. As we speak, we already have seven tapes worth of footage ‘in the can’ that will comprise episodes 2 and 3.

Check out more of the Poetic Prophet, m0serious on YouTube. He raps about the nuances of Search Engine Optimization, paid search, and link building and campaign conversion. I actually get more information out of listening to his raps than most “real” webinars. I think it’s because very few words must be chosen to get across big ideas. This is not a skill most public speakers have mastered.

Hat tip to Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.

At least that’s what I take away from Lauren’s latest post in Wired and Hired. When comparing her female candidate interactions with male counterparts, Lauren had this to say.

Unexpectedly, I find men are more difficult to deal with when it comes to the prospect of leaving their “homeland”…I have a male candidate telling me he can’t move because he needs to be around people who understand him and that he can’t go anywhere where he doesn’t have friends.

I’m not actually surprised that this is what she finds as a recruiter. I’ve seen plenty of guys who cling to friends as their source of identity and comfort. Similarly, with wanting to be near your family, hometown, favorite sports team - whatever, men often struggle with leaving the comfort zone to get ahead.

Lauren’s got some harsh words for us more sensitive types. Get a load of this riff:

…I don’t even want to send you to my agencies at this point because I get the feeling you are going to try and make them have cry circles after work where you discuss your feelings. Weird. You should have known when you got into this business that it would require moving at some point. However, don’t call me telling me you really want a job, anywhere, and then when the client is interested start pouting and giving me your stream of consciousness over the phone about all of your insecurities. I do not specialize in breathing exercises and co-dependency management. What I do specialize in is getting you a job that translates to a promotion and more money…

Wow Lauren! When it comes to being a recruiter, if you have to read a guy’s ‘feelings journal’ and get them to leave it on the night stand before an interview, you should do it. Good luck finding candidates that need no counsel when making a job change.

To the male job seeking masses, the tough love should be a point well taken. We are competing against strong candidates who will do whatever it takes to get ahead. So, take off your diapers and stop your whimpering when it comes to moving. If you’ve made the decision to change your life to get a new job, what’s the big deal about changing your location?