The other way to look at it is that I go into a powerpoint hole starting today - probably for the next 10 days.  So this is exercise and your active participation in slide week is basically a way to empathize and share the joy.

So what is it that product managers do? This presentation covers the broad strokes fairly well.  The most important slides are 9  on bridging the organization and 11 which cites brand at the first item.

Hope you enjoy “Slide Week” here at spatially relevant, I’ve found some many interesting ones I’m going to post throughout the week.

Other articles

• Sarah Lacey: Beyond Branding
• Make sure none of your brand’s future social media profiles can be stolen

• Seven Steps to Smarter Hiring
• Escape from Cubicle Nation: Great way to start the new year: set up a personal board of directors
• The Shame of Luxury?
• How to create your own Personal Brand?
• 9 Ways To Make Twitter More Useful For You

My goodness, the requests for LinkedIn recommendations are coming in a fairly good clip and I suspect they will just keep coming in the next quarter.  From my perspective, those impacted by the economy are good solid folk with skills and long term employment histories and for many this is their first layoff and it can’t be fun.  This also can’t be a good sign for the economy and it is interesting how LinkedIn has become a bellwether for the economy.   Clearly times are tough and marketing yourself and differentiating has to be a challenge in this job market.    I was watching CBS early and they had a “job search expert” on, Susan Morem, who authored a couple of books on the topic and she had at least 1 good idea.   So here is the Top 5 Tips she offered in total:

“The average job search is 3 months, but could go up to 6 or 9 months”

• Create a Plan - “Know what you are going for - but also know what you will settle for, not a time to be picky”
• Treat Finding a Job like a Job - “Always be on”
• Practice Interviewing
• Market Yourself - “Think about yourself as a product”
• Get a makeover - “You want to look your best… taking time with your appears can make all the difference”

I definitely think the product concept is the right way to look at it, however I can see the allure of a makeover.  Just like a product, a job search is marketing with the same marketing mix which needs to be balanced.  Think about it - you have a target market and a product.  How you position, price and promote your capabilities are critical to landing a new gig.  Take a recent piece I saw in one of those lifestyle news pieces on TV that reinforced the promotion reality of marketing your capabilities -   an experienced MIT graduate was resorting to standing outside with a sandwich board till he get a job.

There a lot of good folks with talent, experience and education competing for jobs so ya gotta do something.  Resumes, experience and skills are abundant and alone won’t do the job in a competitive marketplace.  The marketplace is getting more competitive everyday!

I was talking to Sheryl who does a little writing here, she’s does mainly contract marketing work, but on the side she does some resume writing for friends and she has been a little busy lately on that front.  At this point in time, Sheryl’s resume queue overfloweth.   If Sheryl’s queue is any indicator, I suspect that demand is up across the board.    While Sheryl’s focus is writing resumes for executives, she claims that it is becoming increasingly evident that resumes no longer carry the weight they once did.  That’s assuming they ever did and most jobs aren’t placed due to relationships, but when most of your network is on the street and part of your competition that kinda sucks which is the reality for several folks I know.  Ultimately you have to standout somehow and the standard resume just isn’t going to do it, neither will a makeover.

Take the sandwich board guy, Josh Persky, who I couldn’t find in LinkedIn, he just resorted to a different tactic.  Josh created a promotional campaign to standout from the masses.  Josh’s plan was to literally stand outside and pass out resumes.   What a new and innovative approach, albeit low high tech.   Josh just needed to differentiate himself, gain a little visibility and get a foot in the door.  To do this, Josh effectively took a social approach to engaging folks which went viral.   While this may reek a little bit of desperate it was a differentiator for him as a  job seeker and got him some national/viral press along the way.

If you go back to the product concept, a proven MIT executive type resorting to standing on the street handing out resumes must be cheaper today than he was last week and probably 15-25% cheaper than his previous salary, so price might have played a role in his placement.    With the right degree (features), a dense population (placement) and some film (promotion) you can make this work, but not everyone will get on national news with their job search.   Even without TV, this requires certain geographic attributes - population and traffic. So if you are an EMU grad in Montana you probably shouldn’t try this tactic, but you might try it in Miami.  Accepting that this might not work everywhere you may need another plan.  Good news for those of  you in far flung places without top tier educational pedigrees - YOU have social media!

Engage In A Social Search: Add Inbound Marketing to the Promotional Mix

Where is your resume? Monster? Career Builder? That’s a lot of overhead for the job seeker and I’m not sure it works.  10,000 of thousands of resumes, hundreds of applications and a bunch of quirky to odd intro letters.  Social media might even makes a guy in food service look interesting.

Or show the passion and desire of a college student in Ireland:

Both of these presentations show passion and creativity, in absence of experience in a given field.  Something that never can be seen on a flat word document or pdf.  The power of social media, is it not only enables the jobseeker with options to differentiate, it also offer employers the opportunity to research, validate and see just what you are about. Dishonesty is easily figured out and your experience/execution can validated on LinkedIn with recommendations or the lack of recommendations.

A Social Search

The recent financial crisis has thrown literally millions of people out of work.  In the tech space alone, TechCrunch reports over 300+ layoff events and 115,000+ folks laid off.  Now that’s a bunch of skills in the marketplace.  Standing out in this kind of supply glut requires some thought.  So how can you differentiate yourself from all of the other job seekers out there?  One way is to embrace your social media activities and use it as a differentiator.  A recent Wall Street Journal piece validates that using your social network and social technologies, are at least good so social media jobs, at least for 1 person Alex Scordato, who got a job a Mzinga.

What you write, what you link to and where you are online and your actions are easily visible so try and create coordinated effort to leverage these to your advantage. Things to ponder:

• If you take your writings, rants and tweets and look at it in context of your resume and career goals what would that say?
• What conflicts to your resume would it surface?
• What would it reinforce?

So your blog, your Twitter profile, visual resume and your LinkedIn profile and what ever else you have out there just might provide a way to differentiate or minimally provide more options for discovery (placement).   Basically you need to create a integrated strategy for managing your personal brand/product in the job search which allows for multiple inbound channels and discovery options.

Articles of Interest

• How I Use Social Media in my Search for Work
• The Silence of Tweeting Sparrows
• Marketing Consideration for Social Media Types
• Leveraging New Media to Get the Message Out
• One Less Person Vying a Job [Silver Lining]

The search for the new Twitter use case wasn’t a waste, I did learn some stuff along the way and find a couple of folks who are now in my RSS reader which is upside.  The one thing I did notice is how the tips and ideas posts are targeted at various levels of user participation and Twitter awareness.

To that end,  I took some time to create a hype cycle view of using Twitter based on the tips and tricks I found during my clicking around.

Related Twitter articles by Zemanta - I just kept clicking since there were so many

• 10 Creative Tips to Improve Yourself on Twitter
• The power of Twitter (clients) exposed
• See a Washing Machine Use Twitter
• Keep up with Loud3r on Twitter, and we’ll keep up with you
• About My Twitter Hiatus
• Top Bloggers Lead Top Twitter List (to no surprise)
• Business Bloggers Group on Twitter
• How to tell your mom what Twitter is
• Twitter for Business
• Ann Handley: B2B, Twitter and Me
• My Ten Favorite Tweets - Week Ending 122608
• Job: Monetizing Twitter
• Why you should be on Twitter - and how best to use it
• Using the Hype Cycle to your advantage

So a recent set of ad placements thanking the American public for a loan is causing a little bit of an uproar, at least in some cirlces.  I’m not sure that the response in the video below on the Chrysler and GM’s ad placement is warranted.  I would like to get just a little more facts on the ad placement than I have, without it, I can only use deduction, reason and logic.

So to put it in context, one of the largest spends in the advertising industry is by the automakers, so it may not be that bad of an idea to help prop up that industry or live up to your contractual obligation.  I suspect Chrysler and GM may of had a contractual commitment which required some placement of an ad, so to view this as incremental spending could be tough.  So the question for the brand managers and marketing folks was more than likely, something like: “So we can place another ad on 0% financing, the latest GPS features or thank folks - what should we do?”

Without the facts around the placement, it’s hard to draw any real conclusions.  Missing from the Fox “Outrage” piece was someone confirming this wasn’t already paid for or a resource confirming the $200,000 spend for a full page in USA Today. Without that type of validation, this Fox news report doesn’t have the necessary diligence to justify some of the assertions. Sensationalism may be what they wanted at Fox, rather than news on this piece.

So here is the video which provides an overview of the ad spend and general information for your review:

In an Effort to be fair and balanced, a couple of questions based on the video:

1. So was it $200,000 per ad or $250,000 per ad? If it is 200K, then how do you get to half a million?
2. Who are the 10 autoworkers whose jobs would be saved via avoiding a $400K spend since they make only $40,000 fully loaded?
3. Why would you take out an ad in Detroit thanking america, since the Detroit papers aren’t all that national?  Shouldn’t the Detroit ad be something like “WE DID IT!!!! Your cousin gets to keep his job for now”?
4. What marketing executive would think it is reasonable to spend an incremental amount on a thank you ad in this highly charged economic environment?
5. From a proportional impact perspective, do you think YouTube would really have reached the right taxpayers?

PLEASE NOTE: I have no validation that the spend was already under contract, but I have no reason to think otherwise, as I don’t think any reasonable business types would spend so much money with media outlets and NOT have a contract with negotiated non-standard/discounted rates based on annual commitments and monthly placement requirements.

Related articles:

• Chrysler gets $4bn emergency loan
• GM gets its $4 billion, Chrysler still waiting
• In the Nick of Time: Bush Announces Auto Bailout
• Chrysler sputtering in China, too

I’m not sure where guest2739cfb from slideshare gets his or her ideas, but Product Management training should rarely involves the ability to actually use MS Project, read reports maybe, but not use it.   The only way that should be an important skill is if the Project Management Office is somehow managed by Product Management, which isn’t that good of an idea - kinda a church and state thing.

In the end it’s just math and process, plus it’s always a good idea to instrument your processes anyhow and prioritize deliverables or the market, the business and your existing customers.  While Olsen’s position that Product is in the middle of the market and development covers the main concept, the reality is Product owns the interface across all functional groups where it relates to their given product.  Even with that concern with the presentation, which starts early on, it is a very accurate way to look at how to define meaningful metrics on Product Management execution and putting an important variable into the mix, the customer.  As an aside, slides 29-38 can be ignored, I’m sure the talk track makes it more meaningful, but it transitions into some UI wonkiness and online specific design uses cases.

Articles of Interest:

• CEOs Don’t Understand the Role of a Product Manager
• Product Management Reader: 4Dec08
• Users can’t predict what features they “need”

• Enemy of SaaS? The End of Product Management
• Thriving on Social Media Network Effects
• Strong Employer Brands Pay Attention to Corporate Social Responsibility
• How to start or run your business for free
• The year in review blog style…
• The Cost of Financial Illiteracy Part I