Selling just under 300 books per week in just 20 days

Posted on | August 24, 2010 | View Comments

I’m glad to announce that my book on recruiting with social media in just 20 days is now ranked 17,367 out of 424,793 Kiddle books on Amazon.

According to fonerbooks.com that implies that the book is selling just under 300 books per week on Amazon.com alone based on the graph (below) and multiplying a factor of three (as suggested by) Morris:

“Amazon announced in July of 2010 that Kindle sales are running 3X the rate of the first half of 2009, so you may want to triple the numbers on the sales/week axis below”

Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and thanks for the support! If you haven’t bought a copy, you can download a free first chapter of the book.

My book ‘Recruiting with Social Media’ out 3rd August

Posted on | July 21, 2010 | View Comments

I’m glad to inform that my book Recruitment with Social Media, Social Media’s Impact on Recruitment and HR is out on 3rd August 2010, published by Que/Pearson Publication. You can buy a copy from Recruiting with Social Media (Que eStore).

About the Book

The book highlights the power of recruiting people with Social Media! Social Media is not only an effective marketing tool to get candidates and customers onboard but also a tool to help decrease costs on communication, interaction, knowledge management/ transfer inside a company and externally with suppliers and customers.

Book Information

11 Famous Brands and Hidden Information Contained in their Logos

Posted on | July 9, 2010 | View Comments

Logos are a key aspect of a Brands personality and recognition. A lot of effort and thinking goes into building a good logo, which has a deeper meaning. Here are 11 logos and their hidden meaning.

Amazon.com

Fedex

Continental

Toblerone

Baskin Robins

Sony Vaio

Carrefour

Unilever

Formula 1

Sun Microsystems

NBC

Digital Product Placement (incl. Twitter) in David Guetta’s new video

Posted on | June 18, 2010 | View Comments

As a keen YouTube and dance music fan I was watching David Guetta & Chris Willis ft Fergie & LMFAO – Gettin’ Over You music video and was almost surprised to see how three products i.e. Samsung Wave (iPhone competitor), Twitter and EverestPoker.com were embedded in the video, watch the video below.

Impressive how the product placements like Aston Martin/ BMW / Omega Watches in Bond movies, Courvoisier in Busta Rhymes video and other luxury goods have been replaced by websites and multimedia devices. There is much more to come, I believe in the future we will see a whole heap of social media, gambling and online services sites.

Are we ready for the digital revolution?

Windows offers Google Doc equivalent, do you care?

Posted on | June 8, 2010 | View Comments

Windows yesterday (7th June) posted a message launching their Office web apps on Skydrive in UK, US, Canada and Ireland. I had a quick play around with it and compared it with Google Docs, see screenshots below:

Microsoft Office suite

Google Docs

The question I am trying to ask myself is why would someone using Google Docs for say less than three years be interested in migrating to SkyDrive? There is a OneNote document feature, which is different but possible a glorified Google Document? I am probably judging Microsoft without giving them a fair chance.

I would love to know what are the next steps for Windows to improve their SkyDrive offering? How can brands and developers use their web apps? What would be it’s unique selling point (USP) in the next 3-5 years?

Our experience of launching Internal Communication Platform

Posted on | May 28, 2010 | View Comments

We  (The Actualize Group / @actualizelabs) are a 130+ employee company providing IT services to premium banking, insurance, telecommunication and technology customer based in London, Spain, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.  We believe that communication inside our organisation is a key aspect of developing a healthy environment and working relationships. Further the more the company’s employees speak and interact, the greater are the opportunities of building a positive vibe and giving/receiving more out of employees.

In addition to creating a positive impact within the company internal communication is also the first step to building a sustainable innovation strategy. Without having an internal community it’s almost impossible to build an external community around the organisation. Having an external community would help push the concept of developing products, getting feedback on products/service, innovation etc to the next level. A bit like Twitter, where once 70% of it’s usage was seen from applications built by other developers.

Experience of building Internal Community

Considerations

From the word go, we knew that developing an internal community will not be easy. Given that we are multinational, speaking upto 5 languages in various countries. We also know that developing a paper based communication platform wouldn’t work for us as it is slow, expensive and not nearly as interactive as the online version. Further, we didn’t think that email was ideal for communication as they often get lost amongst the piles of other emails. Further it’s not a systematic way to respond to comments. Hence we decided to engage an online social media platform, where we could manage all the communications at a central point, accessible via web, mobile or tablet.

Result

I am glad to announce that we recently launched our internal communication tool. Within a matter of 18 days we managed to get more than 25% (28% to be precise) of the company on the communication platform. All members have explicitly chosen to join the platform, i.e. they have signed up voluntarily. 70% of all members are actively commenting, suggesting and interacting. Although 20% of members are contributing to 80% of the content, hence the 20-80 rule applies. What’s more impressive is the fact that many of the new messages on the internal communication platform are new ideas and concept for future products and services.

It is fantastic to see that everyone in the company is pushing to re-innovate and rediscover the organization. I must be completely honest and mention that it hasn’t been easy, to get people on to the internal communication channel is rather challenging and requires an internal campaign, but it seems the experience is worth it. Especially in unifying communication and giving employees the opportunity to change the fortunes of the company.

Thinking about Disruptive Innovation?

Posted on | May 13, 2010 | View Comments

Very impressive presentation by Frog Design regarding innovation.

My favourite aspects of their presentation is their take on types of Innovation:

Disruptive Innovation?

Most businesses try to be disruptive innovators but are either just catching up with their competitors i.e. evolving or growing as a company hence just expanding. Truly disruptive innovation requires thinking out of the box, which has it’s own challenges but also potentially opens new doors.

Too many features?

Also, during various parts of the presentation it explains that many companies are knowingly or unknowingly involved in feature creep, although the product or service is truly innovative when one can’t remove anything else from it, to improve it’s performance. So it’s not about more cool stuff, it’s actually about few things which work perfectly.

Why Ning’s Business model doesn’t make sense!

Posted on | April 16, 2010 | View Comments

Recently found out that Ning is cutting is costs inorder to be more competitive , firing 40% of it’s staff. Having run a social networking software company myself. I ‘m well aware of the challenges and opportunities in running a social media shop.

Apart from it’s advertisement supported business model, one of the principle reasons why Ning isn’t making as much money as it should is the chicken and egg situtation they find themselves in. If you give a highly valuable item i.e. the software, to customers for free, there is a good chance that they underestimate it’s power and not fully utilise it. Equally if the company decides to charge for templated social networking service, especially if it’s around $75 per month i.e. $900/year, users begin to question it’s value. Question like, “Should we just get a self hosted social media site instead?” “How do we extend the social network and innovate when it gets bigger” “What if our user’s don’t like Ning’s usability” etc

Ning deploys a tried and tested Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, although we shouldn’t forget SaaS works best for internal communication platforms for example in the case of Basecamp, SalesForce etc. There are examples of blogging software like WordPress or several widget based companies which have done exceptionally well using SaaS, although they are different. WordPress allows SaaS on WordPress.com but also has the option to download the entire software on WordPress.org, where bulk of the goodwill and open source innovation happens. Equally widget based companies are primarily slotting into a bigger web presence i.e. a website, social network etc and isn’t a standalone solution.

In my opinion it’s impossible to find a successful standalone SaaS customer-facing software, without a concrete open source offering.

[Pic] Becoming a Fan on Facebook? :)

Posted on | February 25, 2010 | View Comments

Think this is really funny:

Source: Harry Sethi

Videos interviews with recruitment experts at #TruLondon

Posted on | February 22, 2010 | View Comments

I had some really interesting conversations with people at #TruLondon unfortunately not all videos came out. Technology fail! Never the less some really interesting content  available below.

Social Sourcing and Future of Blogging

SourcerSrini mentions how he is uses social media for sourcing candidates.
PunkRockHR good insight on the future of blogging.

Innovative startup in Recruitment

@James_Mayes talks about innovative stuff they are doing within their new start-up