Given the current state of the economy a lot of folks are looking for work. They're calling recruiters, searching through job ads and combing the internet. To help job seekers, TopGrading Solutions, an executive search firm, recently conducted a survey to determine how candidates should seek out out new positions.

Their research showed that 38% of successful candidates in the last four months found their last job through word of mouth or referrals. 29% of candidates found their job on the internet, and 24% were helped by recruiting firms. Only 9% were successful using newspaper ads and walk-in applications.

This just shows that word of mouth is a powerful tool for getting noticed, especially in uncertain times.

Everyone's talking about using Twitter as a marketing tool, but it's not always easy to figure out how to do that. With only 140 characters to work with, how do you promote yourself without sounding like advertisement?

Luckily, Chris Brogan has put up a very helpful list of 50 ways to use Twitter for business.

Our favorites are:

1. ...start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor's names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
   
   
2. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
   
   
3. Instead of answering the question, "What are you doing?", answer the question, "What has your attention?"
   
   
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
   
   
5. Share the human side of your company. If you're bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
   
   
6. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone's talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
   
   
7. Commenting on others' tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.
   

Twitter is great for connecting customers and companies in a less formal way. The key is just figuring out how it can work you.

Head over to Chris's post if you want to see the others.

Labels: Twitter

Remember when sales and marketing would fight and bicker like fourth-grade kids on the playground and customer service didn't even get to play? Well it looks like customer service is the cool kid now. Now that consumers are empowered with information, they don't need sales chatter and marketing to make an informed choice. In these Google days customers learn from other customers. They don't buy from sales they buy from other happy customers. Who in your organization makes customers happy? take a look at Andy Ridinger's post on Sales 2.0 Social Media- Support is the New Marketing.

Amidst the busyness of designing our new space and packing up our stuff, in preparation for our big move next week, we came across this article from the Southwest Journal. According to the article, Wowza is moving to the most creative zip code, 55408. Cool, huh?

Only 15 days after receiving our first Mashup of the Day Award (for Tweet Volume), we won another Mashup of the Day Award, this time for Site Volume!

Check it out:


Site Volume allows users to enter a few words or phrases and find out how often they appear in sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.