February 2009 Archives

Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, with the purpose of completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for Amazon's internal business processes. Over time, the marketplace for this kind of task completion grew and external companies were allowed to post projects, too. But other than the obscure needs of a handful of businesses, what other uses does Mechanical Turk have? I wondered this when I returned to the site recently to play with the application. I already knew the app could be used for less than great purposes such as spamming and social bookmarking, but I discovered that Mechanical Turk could also be useful for image tagging and transcription, like those from Casting Words.

Two weeks ago I read a post on ReadWriteWeb about a company named SmartSheet and their new Smartsourcing tool. While I have used Google docs and a few other online document sharing services, I had never heard of SmartSheet. Even after using the application I still don't care about the online document management as much as the simplification, automation and ultimately, streamlined process for submitting and gather results of HITs. After reading that post and returning to MT, I had an epiphany: I could use SmartSheet with Mechanical Turk for real tasks.

So, how does it work? Recently, we had a list of names that we wanted to compile email and postal addresses for some outreach. While we could have spent the time to research each name and find the data ourselves, we tested the project out with Mechanical Turk. After the very easy data submission process, the results were fast and pretty cool: data started flowing back into the spreadsheet and one by one, our spreadsheet was filled with the email and mailing addresses we needed. There's no need to get the data from Amazon and manually enter it back in, and there's is even a nice little utility to reject what MT finds in case it doesn't meet your requirements, and it sends it back out for work.

While I'm sure SmartSheet is doing lots of cool stuff, and in some cases even better than stuff than Google, I don't care about that. Why? Because the draw of the application and their best source of revenue will come from the integration with Mechanical Turk.

Bottom line? SmartSheet better start promoting this and getting people hooked before someone comes along with a nice little tool that does the same and uses Google or another online document system as the backend.

I don't remember when I found Wordle but as soon as I did, I bookmarked it thinking it would be fun to play with. As many bookmarks do, it sat there for a while, untouched, until I thought I would dump some content in there and see what came out. The results were actually pretty interesting.

Wordle allows you to dump a body of text into it and then pulls out the most common terms from the data. For example, we had a ton of user feedback about GotVMail's website and service--over 4000 submissions organized into 'promoter' and 'detractor' categories. When I dumped those two sets of data into Wordle, I was able to see which terms appeared with the most frequency. The bigger the term is in the Wordle "cloud," the more it appeared in the data. This allowed me to see quickly what the two data sets had both in common and what they didn't.

Below see a quick Wordle image I created from a draft document for new user help content. As I expected the word "extension(s)" was the largest, followed by "greeting" and "edit." Think about the text data you have that would benefit from being inserted into Wordle--what patterns do you identify and do you find it useful?

About a week ago, I went to a breakfast talk featuring Richard Branson, who happened to be launching the new Boston to Los Angles Virgin America route the very same day. Having been interested in Branson and his success at building the Virgin brand into over 400 companies, I was very much looking forward to the talk. Unfortunately, soon after the talk began, it seemed as though most-- if not all--of the questions had been rehearsed ahead of time. Disappointing, but I did get some key takeaways:

• Branson structures smaller divisions of his company as separate entities and as entrepreneurial ventures. Branson spoke only for a few minutes about this, although I wish he went into more depth. He discussed how his companies are structured as independently run businesses, each with their own goals, advisors, and employees, with the common tie being the overarching brand. By keeping tabs on the number of employees in each "company," he can keep them from getting too big, and losing the entrepreneurial perspective. Very powerful concept of creating self-sustaining companies all of which further the brand.
• Branson got the audience to participate and interacted with them, too. Any public speaking book, seminar, or course will tell you to get the audience to participate, and when speakers take a question, it's recommended they acknowledge the question in some way. Branson did something that was very interesting that although might not have worked well in the large forum of this particular event, was very effective in engaging the audience, and acknowledging people: after answering a question from a member of the audience, he posed another back to that same audience member. This meant fewer questions were asked by audience members overall, but it was effective in producing more substantive comments.
• Simple solutions for complex problems. As of late, Branson has been interested in using his success not only to further the Virgin empire, but to do good in the world, from stopping global warming to halting food shortages. His approach to complex socioeconomic problems is ridiculously simple: bring together the best minds in the world, free from constraints bureaucracy can impose, and they innovate solutions to a wide range of problems. When they're proven effective--on private companies' budgets--they hand over the plan to various governments for implementation around the globe.

After the talk Branson left for Logan Airport, where he dressed in drag to launch the new Virgin route from Boston to Los Angeles. Good times. Check out this video from CrunchGear:

Job postings can play an important role in finding candidates for specific types of jobs, however, when recruiting in highly competitive markets and for individuals with specific skill sets, it requires much more than a job posting. While I'm no recruiting expert, I've researched, experienced and learned a lot about the field over the past few years because of my involvement in GotVMail's recruiting process. As a result, I've learned a lot about what it takes to find the right candidates.

There are a lot of components to a good recruiting strategy: employment branding, authentic relationships, networking, process, among others, but for this post I am going to focus on creative sourcing techniques found "in the wild" that will put your company in front of the best off-market or "passive candidates."

Here are some examples I have seen that are really creative, ones I'll use to re-formulate our first concept, which will launch soon.

• Red 5 Studios - "Golden ticket"
  In 2007, Red 5 Studios was starting out and wanted to build an amazing team to develop online games. The company identified 100 of the best candidates with the exact skills they needed and sent them a package with a set of five nested boxes and a personalized iPod Shuffle. This generated a great response from prospective candidates, a load of media coverage, and is still referenced on their company website as generating great new candidates because of the enormous buzz it created.
• Fog Creek Software - "Get them in college"
  Joel Spolsky is well known for writing about his views on software, but an Inc. column he wrote in 2007 provides great insight into his process for finding the best college interns and paying them to work on production code and cool things in a true audition for a larger role (aka, a job with Joel after graduation). What I found particularly striking was Spolsky's description of how the company rolls out the red carpet for these interns, and makes sure the experience is amazing.

• Google - "Problem solving billboard"
  Remember how in the movie "Good Will Hunting" the MIT professor leaves a math problem on the blackboard in the hallway outside his classroom, and the janitor, played by Matt Damon, solves it in the middle of the night after washing the floors? This is a great example of a how effective a tactic like the one Google has used a number of times can be: ask for solutions to problems only people with the certain skills can solve, in a very public place. For example, in 2004, Google created a billboard that displayed a problem, and directed people to a website. Once on the website, visitors were then directed to an even harder problem. This was a clever way for Google to find people smart enough to solve such problems, and therefore, qualify them to work for Google.
• TokBox - "TokBox wants Yahoo's best"
  Yahoo announced a layoff of 1,500 people and quick-thinking TokBox, which recently raised money,decided this was an opportunity to get some of the best talent. They parked a taco truck outside of Yahoo to give out free tacos and job applications. This got some attention for sure-- maybe even the unwanted type from Yahoo security (!).

In our current economy, tons of people are looking for jobs. However, some of the best people are still employed, so you want to target that group as well. Creative recruiting becomes more important than ever if you have a staffing need that isn't being met by the traditional job posting. Here at GotVMail, we're trying to come up with a campaign that matches our culture and the type of people we want based in part on the aforementioned examples.

Have you seen a great recruiting campaign like the ones above? I'd like to know about it. Post your comments.

Part of our effort to further our "goals culture" was to put in place a performance review process that was valuable to both the individual team member as well as the team. I spent a lot of time reviewing performance management systems--all of which focused on reviews--looking at everything from huge companies to tiny start-ups. During this process I discovered that the human resource software market is a very odd one, and one that is mired in old-fashioned ideas and process. In short, many companies acquired products in an effort to provide an all-in-one solution, but the end result was the creation of many companies doing many things, but not doing any of them well.

After sitting through many demos, webinars, tours, I found SuccessFactors. At that point in time, I was impressed with their focus on performance reviews. Unfortunately, they have since gone down the "we do everything" path, which is too bad. Analysts' reports placed them as the leader in this narrow space and provided some great insight into what made them stand out, from the goals library and writing assistant to easy to use routing of forms. We ultimately decided that SuccessFactors would be the best choice for implementing a comprehensive performance review system.

We set out to create a quarterly performance review cycle that would closely align with our company, department and personal goals, while providing valuable and timely feedback to all team members. Of course, there is overhead in setting goals quarterly, between measuring them and providing feedback around goals and core values, but we feel this investment in our people is well worth it.

It's still a learning process for everyone and each quarter we will get better and continue to see the results. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and the interface is very difficult to use at times, but keeping personal or team member notes isn't efficient, either, and goals were not designed to be completed quarterly. Despite this, we push past these obstacles to make the process the best it can be.

The Snuggie has made the rounds, from TV ads to the front page of Yahoo! becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Here is a great parody video for a good Friday laugh.

At GotVMail, we love testing and optimizing our website. A small investment of time generates significant returns in conversions and revenue. We also learn a lot about our customers and how they interact with the site.

Recently, for one of our test plans, we wanted to optimize our site's sales funnel (each step of the main website navigation). Starting with the first step, the How it Works page, we decided to test the flash video. For the past few years, we've used the video to educate visitors how our service works. It took months to develop, had a custom soundtrack, narration, graphics, the works - and cost a lot of money to make. The two minute video got great feedback in terms of branding. Everyone loved it.

We tested the video we had come to love against a very simple graphic that explained the service in three easy steps: One number - multiple extensions - tons of free advanced features.

The test ran for two weeks with half of the visitors seeing the video and the other half seeing the image. We quickly saw some significant results. The simple image resulted in a 10% increase in visitors getting to the next step of the sales funnel and yielded an 18% higher conversion than the video. So, less work, lower cost, more orders. Not a bad concept.

Do you have a multi-step sales funnel on your site? Ask yourself how you can educate visitors faster and quickly get them to the next step.

Shepard Fairey, famous for his "Andr

I was less than overwhelmed with the Super Bowl ads this year, and it looks like I'm in good company. I realize how ridiculous it is that we've built a subcultural sport of anticipating, watching, and rating these ads, but humor me for a bit. I need to vent.

The one spot that really stood out to me was, curiously, also the worst. The offender? GoDaddy.com. In a masterpiece of repetitive advertising, GoDaddy dragged out the same old tactic they've used for what, maybe four years now, and featured women with their *ahem* assets hanging out. Hey, beautiful women are... well, beautiful women, but honestly, does GoDaddy think this really adds any value? I think not. Just to play devil's advocate I realize I'm discussing this ad on my blog and generating buzz about it. I see the irony in that, and maybe that's GoDaddy's tactic--but ultimately, it devalues their brand and reminds me why I hate not only their ads, but their point of sale process when purchasing domains. It's one of the most frustrating checkout processes I've encountered.

To end on a bright note, I did really enjoy NBC's LMAO commercial for their Thursday night line-up as well as Monster's awesome ad, which I think was the best of the night in terms of originality:

I've written a number of blog posts about our culture and core ideologies. Most recently, I wrote about how to keep these values top of mind and visible, and this graphic came to mind. Trying to visually represent all of these important concepts, link them with our longer term goals ('big hairy audacious goal' or 'BHAG' for short) and to ultimately show how interconnected it all is wasn't an easy task.

In order to take such an abstract concept and make it concrete, we worked with our graphic facilitator to create an interesting graphic that we've since used in company communications, a goals worksheet, and our wiki.

Starting from the left, the core purpose is the first concept, then we integrated all the core values around an apple core to give it some visual appeal (apple core, core values--get it?). Each core value has a few actions or notes next to it remind us exactly what it is.

Our brand promise is next and highlights the four concepts that are most important to us as a company. Finally, tying it all together is our long term goal, or "BHAG" as Jim Collins called it, one million influential entrepreneurs as customers. This creates a very powerful graphic with visual appeal while still communicating very important concepts which are at the core of what we do.