Career Space E-zine

Last night I attended a meeting of the HTCE (High Tech Communicators Exchange) with a presentation by Tim Bramwell called “Changing the Mindset: What You Need to Know About Marketing Intelligence To Give You a Competitive Edge.” From the HTCE website:

“About the Speaker: Tim Bramwell is a professional business and market intelligence consultant with a significant record of achievement gained from a 20+ year successful sales, operations and senior management expertise gained over a career spanning Microsoft Corp., Ericsson Canada, AT&T Canada and building his own companies. Tim has been a member of, and has led, sales and marketing delivery teams promoting a variety of technology, consumer and business-to-business products and services.”

I’ve been asking myself the questions lately: how does an organization create innovation and maintain it? How does it lead the way? The key is to go beyond marketing research, which is at times too narrow in scope and is time sensitive to that of marketing intelligence which can predict the behavioural triggers in the marketplace.

Some of the “nuggets” I took away from the talk:

• 30-80% of the an organizations inner workings and communications exist in the heads of the employees.
• email was never intended to be used for complex communications - it was never structured that way and stays contained within the email account.
• Marketing research and focus groups are not broad enough, they are time sensitive and aren’t necessarily adequate predictors of behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
• Marketing Intelligence is a set of tools used to create actionable items.
• Good places to gather intel is at trade shows as well as with vendors and suppliers of your competitors.
• Your own company’s salespeople and customer support are a good source of marketing intelligence.
• There are technology platforms that can gather and scrape data from websites using filters for specific information. Some of the information can be gathered from websites, weblogs and podcasts.
• The big question is “what do you do with the data once you have gathered it?”

When I was 15 I took a drama class in which we would do a number of exercises to stretch our imagination and get our creative juices going for improv. One such exercise was to create a story whereby one student would start with one or two creative sentences and then pass it over to the next person to add to the story and on it would go from student to student creating a collaborative story. It was a lot of fun and it got a little crazy at times.

More than 20 years later enter the wiki novel. The well -known publisher Penguin Books has introduced the first ever wiki novel as a social experiment to see if collaborative creative writing can produce a novel worthy of the book loving masses. The novel is called “A Million Penguins” Read the rest of this entry »

Coming up soon at the Northern Voice 2007 conference Darren Barefoot will be leading a session on Why Do We Blog? In order to gather empirical evidence for his theories he has posted an online survey for his readers to contribute stats and personal commentaries as to why they have been bitten by the blog bug. The link for the survey is here.

A couple of years ago my classmate Terry showed me the blog he was working on. I had never heard of them before but I quickly picked up on the concept. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was perusing the discussion http://www.terminus1525.ca/node/40117 on the collaborative art network website terminus1525.ca which circled around mail art. This form of art collaboration has been going on since the 1950s whereby artists use the mail as a medium sending art pieces via the postal system and the recipient adding to the art and forwarding back and forth as a means to create a unique art piece. Read the rest of this entry »

The Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference is coming up and it’s at UBC. ‘Fess up! Who’s going?

Last Week I finished a course in Media Literacy so I’m quite interested in the Media Education Week (November 19-24) that started this week

From the Media Awareness Network Website (http://www.mediaeducationweek.ca/): “Celebrate Canada’s first ever National Media Education Week! The purpose of the week is to promote media literacy as an essential skill for children and young people. Help make media education happen by becoming involved in activities taking place across the country.”

While this event is primarily aimed at students and teachers there are some interesting resources and tools on the site for us older folks.

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Originally uploaded by pfoster.

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In the latest issue of Wired magazine the editors challenged 33 master authors to create a science fiction story in 6 words or less and brought them together with several graphic design wizards. The results were quite impressive.   

Can a story be boiled down to “word bites”? Earlier today a friend Instant Messaged me with a “C U later.” Everything seems to be tightened down to the minimum. There is something very George Orwellian about this and yet there is something to be said about communicating big ideas succinctly. My favourite is the haiku form, when it’s done well.

I decided to try this new literary art form. Here are my attempts:

• Did he really leave me? Chocolate.
• Patterns in nature and structures converge.
• Tie a can to it buster!

Hmmmm. I think I’ll go back to haiku. I do much better with 3 lines.

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I spent the last couple of weekends shooting some film of different areas in Kitsilano but I will usually bring my digital along as a backup. There have been a couple of time where I had run out of film and it was quite handy! In another case I finished up my film roll and it only rewound itself halfway as it lost power from my batteries. Ack! It was a trip to the L&S store to get them to get my film out in their black box. It was a scary moment as I was shooting for an assignment.  

I truly love shooting with film and I’ll never completely give it up. I think that it’s going the way of the vinyl record. Even though it seems that everyone is going digital there is a lot of popularity with the older style cameras and some cool techniques that you can do with film that you may not beable to replicate with digital: Read the rest of this entry »

This past week I attended an elearning session at UBC about an innovation in social bookmarking to promote sustainability. Last spring UBC approached a local problem and an opportunity for core branding in sustainability. With the World Forum being held in Vancouver and over 350 university courses laying a claim to covering sustainability in their curriculum and no organizer to explore the richness thereof on campus they looked to technology to enable and engage stakeholders in sustainability solutions. They created a system called GUSSE: Global Urban Sustainability Solutions Exchange - http://gusse.org/ which is a social bookmarking system Read the rest of this entry »

Recently the career experts blog at UBC weighed in about the usefulness of functional style resumes vs. chronological resumes. Historically functional style resumes have been recommended for first time university/college graduates and for career changers. According to one commenter on the career experts blog the functional resume had it’s heyday in the 70s as a clever way to display one’s skillset. Now they are seen as a ‘bluffing tactic’ a way to distract an employer from undesirable information such as gaps in work history. And it’s not unusual for that type of resume to end up in the shredder!  

Blue Sky Resumes has some pretty good suggestions for career changers , Read the rest of this entry »