Well, friends I’m nearing the end of the longest web project of my career. When we embarked on creating a new intranet for Hudson North America over two and a half years ago, I would have never predicted that it would take this long. Sure, we wanted to do it right. We engaged an ethnographic researcher to help us uncover the real needs behind the needs of our users. We took those requirements and handed them to a “real” interactive agency to get wireframes for workflows that would address the issues head on. From there, we chose a platform - Sharepoint 2007, no slouch of a platfom to configure, test, customize, and test again. We designed and branded the look and feel twice as the launch pushed through multiple leadership teams and re-branding efforts. It culminates this week with a “Beta” launch of the system via a link from our old intranet, an email from our President and a splashy Camtasia demo I’ve locked myself in my office creating for 4 days.

I’m excited about the prospects of what a “real” intranet can mean for our firm. It can be such a challenge for leaders to wrangle together a cohesive vision from far-flung offices and disparate work processes. Email just isn’t up to the task, and forget about the dreaded weekly conference calls. To create a truly productive and cohesive professional services firm for the long term, I believe your intranet must be robust, comprehensive, and adaptable to the constant change in the business. How else can you retain knowledge in a business with 40% employee turnover? Yet, when you search online for any evidence of staffing firm intranets, there is little to no information. I found a synopsis of Australian Job Board Seek’s Intranet redesign, but I have yet to come across a true staffing service provider’s (If you happen to see any coverage, please do forward me the link).

Is the lack of information an indicator of the staffing industry’s sentiment toward their intranets? Or, is it that everyone believes they have some super-secret formula for success that they are just unwilling to share? I would wager that staffing firms are currently focused on survival rather than productivity, but there are those who will use their intranet to position themselves for long-term success.

Twitter WAS an excellent tool for getting a job the old fashioned way - through word of mouth, networking, and building relationships online. For a few fleeting months, you could go onto Twitter and connect with some really smart people. You could connect with a senior manager, or a drone working the desk at any number of your potential employers of choice. You could build a relationship with a human, and help each other to mutual benefit. It WAS fresh and different. It will now turn into something automated, and dissatisfying.

TwitterJobSearch.com launched very recently. It provides job seekers an easy way to find job opportunities that have been posted to Twitter. That’s not really what it does though. Instead, TwitterJobSearch.com makes it blatantly obvious that there are hundreds of people out there building a mini job-spam empire on Twitter. Clearly, many recruiting firms and job board vendors alike have registered twitter names to game the search engines into believing they are the authority on ChicagoTechjobs, or topjobsinlondon whatever. They load up their twitter accounts with automated feeds from the job board they already have online.

So, riddle me this. How exactly does this make things any better for the job seeker? If TwitterJobSearch.com was aggregating a ton of job related tweets from actual humans working at actual companies and recruitment firms, with actual photo avatars of themselves, THAT would be a great service. Seekers can find plenty of cold, impersonal “job postings” all over the interweb. What they thirst for is the hiring manager at a company who tweets, “We need a marketing mgr to launch a new product for us, RT please”, or the recruiter that says “My client is interviewing for 3 java devs TODAY to build a GPS product by end of Jan, DM me if interested.”

Instead of optimizing FOR all of these automated accounts with “jobs” or “hire” in the Twitter handle, TwitterJobSearch should exclude them on purpose. What do you think?

If you aren’t constantly taking risks in your career, you either a.) don’t work in an environment that encourages risk, or b.) haven’t developed the wherewithal to know that risk is the ONLY way to grow your career. So, I contemplated my career during the dark days of Winter, trying to figure out what my next risk was going to be to keep things interesting.

As if I didn’t have enough big, meaty project launches to do, I decided to figure out how to video blog. This has been a fascinating journey so far, and something that aligns well with the one video class I took in college doing edits on VHS tape. The end result of this fun with the video camera will hopefully be a video resume that I can add to my website. I’m chronicling the journey though as I try to help others accomplish the same.

Here’s my first video blog posting.

You can follow the rest of the series here:
http://ithirewire.com/finding-work/kris-video-resume-how-toproject.html

Enjoy.

Last night, Tricia and I attended the Rochester Social Media Club meeting at Solera followed by the Rochester Twestival at German House.

My reason for attending these events is to get more connected in Rochester professional circles. I work from my home in Webster for my company based in Chicago, so I don’t get a lot of face time with pros at my own company no less others in industry. I just want to feel connected. For Tricia, this was an opportunity to get out and network for her business, and get some face time with her husband away from our 2 kids. Mission accomplished!

We met some awesome people. It’s refreshing to know that Rochester has such a vibrant and friendly professional community. The Rochester Social Media Club, lead by Susan Beebe, Mark Frisk and Nicole Black is a gathering of people interested in the use of Social Media especially Facebook, Twitter, etc. Really, it brings together people with a diverse set of professional skills and agendas. The best part about this group is that no one is pretentious, because really if you share a lot on social media, CAN you really be pretentious in the first place? Nope. I’ll hope that this is indicative of all Rochester business people. I think going to some of these events in bigger cities like Chicago would be a bit more uncomfortable than the people here make you feel.

On to the Twestival
All I can say about that is, what an amazingly well put together event for such a short period of time! There were bands, raffle donations, food, drinks, all in a top notch venue. It rivaled any charity event I’ve been to, and this came together in 2 weeks. Most organizations take MONTHS to put together something like that. Charity:Water for whom this event raised funds, could not be more worthy nor more creative with this whole Twestival concept. The only drawback is that it could have used a few hundred more attendees to justify the time and effort that Matt Ray and his team put into it.

Here’s why I think attendance was light.

1. Rochester to begin with is a small-ish market
2. The bulk of the marketing relied on Twitter whose adoption is still really small even when compared to Facebook. This will only get better next year, and there will be WAY more people that ‘get it’.
3. People may have thought it was more about Twitter, than about a great charity, great music, and people. It wasn’t. Twitter was just the tool that mobilized a great many people.

The Rochester Twestival was a great event that rivaled any other city for its ability to provide a vibrant professional scene that motivates people to want to live and work here. Events like this thrive only with consistency and word of mouth, so I’d bet that next year will be even more successful.

Kris and Tricia at the Rochester Twestival

ROC Twestival image by @MatthewRay

For the last few months I’ve been using Twitter as an excellent learning tool. It has provided this work-from-homebody some much needed “presence” from other smart marketing professionals. It’s as if they’re in my office feeding me their expertise, even though many of them I don’t even know.

Another goal of mine has been to use Twitter to get more networked within the Rochester, NY market. After all, working remotely for a company in Chicago is great, but it doesn’t help me meet local professionals. So, I started following Rochester, NY marketing and IT professionals, designers, Kodakers and people from local advertising and PR agencies. The easiest way to do so was to find people in Rochester, NY on twellow.

Along came a ‘Tweetup’
On a whim, a couple of Steves (Hersh and Boese) called for tweetup at Tully’s on December 29. As it was retweeted about town, I mulled over the possibility of going to a good bar to meet some complete strangers on my holiday break. I haven’t been able to attend similar gatherings by the Rochester Social Media Club usually because of one conflict or another.

photo from Tom Collins

This was a fun event. Not of the epic proportions that Silicon Valley boasts, but a great way to connect with 10-12 great people over beer and good food. A few things I learned:

• If you tweet about bacon, you’ll immediately be followed by the Twitter Bacorazzi. Good to know @sbjet. Also, good to know that you are an HR Technology guru at RIT.
• Highland Park Diner serves peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. I did not know that, @Tom_Collins.
• @y2vonne has a ton of different local business events and blogs to look after. It’s going to take some time to read your prolific bloggery.
• I heard about Fat Pride for the first time from @AmpleAliveness. She has a very interesting perspective on life and size diversity issues. It was cool to connect Coach Ann’s interests with my wife’s Personal Training business.
• @shersh knows much about Oracle systems through his consulting business and shares my disdain for the current state of the Buffalo Bills.
• @KellyMullaney has a lot of web design going on and is starting up a twitter background design service.
• @AnaRC can whip twitter into a frenzy in online events associated with FamilyEden.com

I’m sure I’ll take the time to go to more events like this in the New Year. I’ve got no better resolution than that. Thanks to everyone who attended. I really enjoyed your company. Oh, and have a look at Tom Collins’ recap of the event as well.

Just in time for your holiday enjoyment we’ve launched a 4th video in our Hudson online video series that I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year. In it you’ll find some quality coverage of the people who manage huge document review projects (sometimes 200-300 people) and keep their cool under pressure.

Shot on location in DC, New York, and Charlotte, it is meant to close out the behind the scenes view of our Legal practice, before moving on to some videos of our Financial Solutions practice (coming up in January 2009).

Lessons Learned in Production
The prior video in the “monthly” series launched on July 30, 2008. And here we are in December. I had always assumed there would be some risk with featuring employees in a video project. In this case that risk was realized because 2 of the original ’stars’ are no longer with the company. We hit the editing suite for some creative ways around our missing characters and still managed to maintain the integrity of the original message. However, it cost precious months in the launch schedule.

Here is a good lesson for any video project: expect staff changes. Prepare leadership for the possibility. Do your best to mitigate the risk that having any one staff member leave can cause to your video project, then cross your fingers. Once the video is live, do your best to convince the team that the video remains a viable representation of the company no matter who is featured. It is a snapshot of a team at a time and place in an ever-mobile business environment.

In the spirit of stashing useful web strategy video in a spot that I can remember it, here’s an excellent video interview by WebProNews with Bruce Clay on the future of SEO and how it will move away from ranking and placement.

Here’s the things I learned.

1. Biased results based on web history: No two people will be able to look at Google results and get exactly the same rankings.
2. Intent based search: The engines will decipher your search words and give you results based on whether you intended to shop or do research. How you design a page for one intent or another would affect its ranking in results
3. Universal Search: Search will dive into video and images better than today. Sites with video, for instance will fare better. Doing SEO will be more than just keyword research and writing techniques. Text-based gateway pages would not be as effective, nor will linkbuilding have as great an effect.

Good stuff.

Hat tip to Cheezhead.

I just wrapped up a post on IT Hire Wire on using Twitter to learn within the IT industry. With the majority of Twitter users still being from the Social Media side of the world (consultants, wannabe consultants, gurus, experts, wanna-be experts), I thought it was important to point out to IT workers how valuable an asset Twitter can be for their professional development. Now, to keep the piece short I focused on only a few ways to purely take from the network essentially by following smart people. I’m fully aware that Twitter is even better when you are participating actively. But, I think this level of extroversion and participation is still a turn-off for many. That’s why people should still get into Twitter just to better learn from those highly active members.

The reason Twitter is such a compelling professional learning tool is that you can be a fly on the cubicle wall of the best thinkers in IT. Think of it like the world’s biggest shadow program. Instead of reading another dry Ruby on Rails book, you can follow the guy who invented it, David Heinemeier Hansson, or sit next to Sam Stephenson as he programs with it every day.

Read the entire post here, and let me know what you think.

I was amped today to see that LinkedIn has launched its application platform. The first thing that I wanted to do was add my blogs to the site to enhance their visibility to my business network. I started to use the WordPress application.

I installed it, and within minutes realized that it was only intended for WordPress.com blogs and not for self-hosted WordPress installations. Boo!!! My website, and my current pet blog project IT Hire Wire are both self-hosted WordPress installs.

You can try to enter your self-hosted blog, but you won’t get very far

I tweeted Mario Sundar to see if there is self-hosted compatibility coming. We’ll see what he says.

—UPDATE 10-30—
The WordPress App DOES support self-hosted. They’ve been working out the kinks. Read the tweets from @tellyworth. So far I’ve found that you can only have one feed into the WordPress LinkedIn App. When you add it to your profile, I don’t think it appears on your Public Profile. It also appears before your resume. I’m not sure that’s a great User-Interface. If you add a lot of apps to your LinkedIn profile, it has the potential to cloud your personal brand. I see these apps as additional interesting areas of content to be explored AFTER your review my credentials.
—END UPDATE—

Not to be defeated, I moved on to trying out Blog Link by SixApart. That experience was a whole lot more rewarding, but still has a bit of a caveat.

When you first install Blog Link you’ll notice on the “My Contacts” tab that it immediately goes out into network and pulls blog entries from any connections that have a blog listed as a website on their profile. This was amazing! I found blogs I never knew existed, which just goes to show you that you ought to list yours in your LinkedIn profile. Then I had a look at the “By Me” tab, and I had a couple of hiccups.

Check out your By Me tab and adjust the websites you have listed on your profile accordingly

While the links that I list in my profile for my blogs are for humans to use and get to the front end of the content, the best URL to get a clean feed into a feed reader is much different. In the case of this website, krisrzepkowski.com, the best human readable URL to get to the front-end content is http://www.krisrzepkowski.com/blog/work/, however the way to get to work-related entries into a feed reader is to use my feed URL (http://www.krisrzepkowski.com/blog/work/feed/). Using this, I won’t be feeding my stories of deer hunting and hanging out with the kids into my LinkedIn profile.

With IT Hire Wire, the best feed to get my postings on the multi-author blog turns out to be a feedburner URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItHireWireKrisRzepkowski). Again, this is not the human-readable content URL I would want someone to click on within my profile. Because Blog Link opted for simplicity (which I admire), by using only the websites you have listed in your profile instead of requesting en explicit feed URL, you need to make a choice.

I’d prefer Blog Link to request feed URLs for the entries it shows in By Me, and allow your profile website to be separate. One last question on Blog Link. What do the up/down arrows do? I can’t for the life of me figure that one out.

Does anyone know what this does?

—UPDATE 10-29—
I figured out that arrow thing. It actually scrolls the entries, it’s just an unconventional control, and depending on what is showing on your screen, it is difficult to see that anything changed.
—END UPDATE—

Let me know what your thoughts are on the new blog integrations with LinkedIn. The intent of these apps is noble, and will build a significant traffic stream of business related readers the likes of which we haven’t yet seen.

My good friend Marc Krolczyk did a nice interview on the Official Kodak blog 1000 Words. He has been a fixture in the Rochester design scene for more than 10 years, dedicating his Masters in Communication Design from University of Buffalo to a long career at Xerox as a UI designer. Recently Kodak wooed him away to apply his talents on digital cameras and other new digital products. It will be great to see Marc’s touch on the Kodak Product User Experience. He has an endless supply of innovative ideas for how products and their interfaces should work in our everyday lives. I know he’s pumped for the new assignment, and I can tell his mates are pumped to have him there. Marc Krolczyk. Real American Designer.

Marc beta testing a new “Monthy Python” image quality setting on his camera