Don't make people SEARCH for you! Be VISIBLE!!!

A few months back I touted the importance of staying visible when trying to accomplish something. Today, I am returning to this concept because it has delivered results. This week I will be starting three different part time positions that I would have never had the opportunity to have if I had not been present in places where connectors hang out.

First, I will be assisting with the coordination of an online show for the next two weeks. How did this happen: 1) I was at a tech networking event and we were introduced and then discussed how I might be able to help him (WIIFY), 2) I followed up the next day by emailing etc. which was well received, 3) Around a week later I sent a request for an update, at which point I was put in contact with the other founders and meetings were setup, 4) Tomorrow I will be attending a walk through.

Second, I will helping with the marketing push for some blogs through the social media blog rating sites. How did this happen: 1) My roommate is one of the writers for one of the blogs of this company and she knows I’ve been looking for marketing work (yes being visible to her is easier, but still relevant), 2) Her boss sent out some traffic stats and a request for recommendations for new marketing coordinators she forwarded my resume in, and I had a meeting with the content managers, 3) After the all important “Nice to meet you email” I was offered a part time (which they claim could lead to full-time after the ever present dot com re-org), 4) I now have a web pseudonym “FunnyWebGoddess” that will be “discovering and sharing all the funny parts of the web”.

Last, but certainly not least, starting Wednesday, I will be the marketing intern at a firm that specializes in web analytics and seo and learning how to tailor fit content to the market. How did this happen: 1) I was introduced to a young entrepreneur who I’ve been lucky enough to see and bond with at multiple tech events, we keep in touch through gchat, twitter, etc., 2) At an event he mentioned to me that I should apply for this internship that he couldn’t do because of a bad commute and personally introduced me (by email) to the CEO who had wanted him to join the team, 3) I responded to the CEO with my interest and cc’ed a trusted employee who I was connected with, 4) Interview, thank you email a few days later, and then a request for update email on the day that the CEO was supposed to decide who he has taking on. 5) 6:30pm on Friday email from CEO inviting me to join the team if I was still interested. 6) After a few emails about logistics, this Wednesday I’ll be spending my first 2.5 hours learning the ropes or Google analytics.

You maybe saying to yourself, why is she so excited about three part time positions that probably don’t pay very much? I would simply have to respond, that I will be learning new marketable skills from leaders in the industry, and staying VISIBLE to them, their connections, and the rest of the tech world while actually getting some cash in my pocket.

It helps if you are associated with connectors. Most people on this list I have been introduced to by Andrew Warner or Daniel Paul, I definitely owe them this shout out.

Per some recommendations from some of the individuals below, I’ve taught myself a little bit of HTML. This list was created using what I learned, and was typed completely in the HTML not visual editor on Wordpress. It took longer but I think it was worth it for the adventure.

List of high level people who were nice enough to give me some time:

1. Josh Spector – Director of Content at Comedy.com
2. Mike Jones – CEO of Tsavo Media (among many other accomplishments)
3. Sean Percival – Director of Content at Tsavo Media (and other sites including LALAWAG)
4. Drew Baldwin – Co-Founder of Tubefilter
5. Marc Hustvedt – Co-Founder of Tubefilter
6. Mark Jeffrey – CTO of Mahalo
7. Tyler Crowley – Director of Business Development, Marketing, and Strategy of Mahalo
8. Eric Stephens – Director of Product and User Experience at Mahalo
9. Mark Geller – Product Manager of Photos at Google
10. Jun Loayza – Co-Founder of Viraology
11. Yu-kai Chou – Co-Founder of Viraology
12. Neil Patel – SEO Expert and Founder of QuickSprout
13. Don Mosites – Founder of Streamy
14. KW Low – Director of Business Development and Strategy at AT&T Interactive (Yellowpages)
15. William Barnes – Founder of WPB Group (and Geeky T-shirt extraordinaire)
16. Shira Lazar – Tech Reporter and Ultimate Connector who blogs at The Pop Report
17. Stefan Goldby – Producer at Chemistry Productions (and former VP at ManiaTV)
18. Hayden Black – Executive Producer of Goodnight Burbank (and on-line video power player)
19. Mike Prasad – Developer of Koji BBQ’s Twitter and GirlGamer
20. Yaron Tilajef – Director of Sales at (mt) MediaTemple
21. The crew at Eblizz
22. Every C level person at AFI
23. And a few other people I’m sure I’m forgetting

Well that’s the end of this post and my HTML experiment. Let’s hope all the href=”" links work

After weeks of talking to people at networking events, tech events, friends, twittering, facebook status updating and google searching, I still couldn’t find the ability to search multiple blog feeds for a specific topic and then have that search become its own RSS feed.

Responses on Twitter included Google Reader, NewsGator, RSSReader, just to name a few. They are all great services that allow individuals to view the newest posts on the blogs that they care about, with bolded numbers to tell the user when they’ve missed something. There is generally the ability to search an individual blog or even multiple blogs for a topic of choice.

There are also a number of readers that you can purchase to have as an application on your computer. I’m not sure why you would want this with the free options out there, but who knows. Additionally, now your company can actually control which feeds they are sending to you. There are new sites out there like Streamy, Feeds2.0 and Trackle which are in Beta testing and might be able to do some cool stuff, but right now they aren’t exactly ready for use. My favorite suggestion was PopBandit, which is now out of business.

So I kept asking and asking different people. When all of a sudden last night, I gchatted a blogger friend of mine to see what she used for aggregating the blogs that she reads. She mentioned that she used to use one site but now like the vast majority of the population, she uses Google Reader. Amazingly enough, the site she no longer uses actually does EXACTLY what I needed. Enter Bloglines.

Reasons I love Blogines:

1. It allows you to subscribe to as many blogs as you’d like. Including the feeds from twitter.
2. You can search the whole library of blogs or just your feeds for any topic you choose.
3. You can even use AND or OR functionality to refine or expand your search.
4. Similar to Twitter Search , it then can create a new feed from just your search.
5. Even as you add new feeds to your list, the permalink for your defined search within your feeds remains the same.

Only problem with Bloglines, their TOS isn’t clear about whether or not I can use their technology for my application and either way the new search feeds seem to be protected for non-users. At least I can show my developers exactly what I want to happen, and maybe we can recreate some of the technology.

Hooray for listening to Jason Nazar and continuously talking about the technology I want to create, one never knows where the answer to your questions will come from.

When at a networking event with alcohol available, each of us struggles with how much to drink.

As a rule I tend not to drink around people I don’t know. Maybe it’s a single girl security issue, and maybe it’s my knowledge that I’m a bad driver to begin with. Either way I rarely drink more than one drink if I don’t know that someone’s around who has my back. This is one of the ways I save money while traveling also. When traveling on a budget, alcohol is not a necessity.

But what about if you are there with people who you trust enough to make sure you get home safe? I say MODERATION!

In How to Become CEO: The Rules of Rising to the Top of Any Organization, Jeffrey Fox mentions the importance of avoiding being under the influence in front of business contacts, but takes it to another level. He has a whole chapter (XII) titled “Skip All Office Parties” which maybe a little extreme, but drives home the point. It’s important to keep business contacts as business contacts when you can.

That being said, a very important part of today’s socializing in business surrounds alcohol. Therefore, when networking, don’t avoid all bars, you’ll have very few events to attend. Simply, control yourself and your drinking at the bar. A VP level executive I know doesn’t drink at all, and it doesn’t stop him from joining contacts at bars, he just has soda. I’m not sure if it’s an LA thing, with all of the AA meetings available, but no one judges you for saying you don’t drink.

If you’re actually going to have a drink, how much should you drink? I took a Twitter poll and over 70% of respondents said they have less than 3 drinks at networking events. That seems like a good policy, most people can handle 2 drinks without getting sloshed, obnoxious, or loosing control. You also won’t have to have an embarrassing conversation with someone you’ve just met about how you are getting home.

Here are some tips for keeping the number of drinks low:
1) Pay in cash. Opening a tab is nice when you’re treating others to drinks, but paying in cash will limit the number of drinks you’ll imbibe. If you really want to buy someone a drink, you can always pull out the plastic and close out immediately.
2) Drive to the event. Most adults are smart enough to not want to wreck their vehicles (it’s often the first or second biggest investment people have). If you drive, you’ll be easily able to refuse additional drinks by saying, “I’m driving.”  Peer pressure tends to fold when you’re actually being responsible and logical. In LA a DUI is a right of passage that most of us would prefer to avoid.
3) Drink slowly. This should be a no brainer, but if you drink slowly not only will you not need another drink faster, but the ice will melt a bit and the watered down beverage will help you avoid drunkenness.
4) Have plans. Whether it’s dinner later that night, or an early morning meeting have another event that you need to be alert for. This means that you’ll have an excuse to leave before the “party” really gets started, and a reason to self-regulate on not getting wasted.

If you have drinken a lot unexpectedly, here are some things that will make this better:
1) Taxis. In some cities these are harder to find, have a taxi number in your cell phone to call when you need it.
2) Water. The feeling of being drunk is actually very associated with dehydration, alcohol has no hydrating effect on the body only the reverse. Drinking water will help sober you up and if you add a lime to it, no one will know you’re not having straight up gin or vodka.
3) Leave. Hop in a taxi, visit the ladies room,  go home with the first co-worker you see leaving, or just walk outside. If you’re drunk, it’s better not to be seen or heard, because it’s always the person who you don’t want to see you under the influence that’s there. If you’re not there, they can’t see you.
4) Eat Something. You should have done this before you started drinking, but even if you have, eat some more! Don’t scarf down all the appetizers in site, but grab a few crackers or pretzels they’ll help absorb some of the alcohol away from your liver and give you energy to keep moving… out the door.

Got any tips???

Thanks for reading, please leave your comments below, and follow me on @tamireiss on Twitter.

Britto art always make me happy

My email signature, which has gotten a lot of notice recently (I think it’s the economy) says “Look at the good you have in your life, your friends, your family, your health and everything else will work out.” Sometimes I read it to remind myself too.

I’m would never claim to be a self help guru, but I believe that a negative attitude helps no one, especially yourself. Not only will it keep you from being successful, it won’t make anyone else want to be around you or assist you.

Today, a friend of mine posted a link to a blog that centers around seeing the glass as half full. Here’s the list of top ten reasons the economy sucking is a good thing for us.

http://seeinggood.com/?p=45

This is called Web Arbitrage… and it’s debatable whether its SEM at its best or worst.

searchengineland.com/search-arbitrage-web-blight-or-brilliant-marketing-strategy-10768

This is not the sort of thing you should do for a single page or two, but in a well orchestrated manner it can be very lucrative. There are a few companies that solely make money this way, and others that have thousands of pages that use this as supplementary income to increase revenue.

I learned at lunch today that the search engines are really not fans of this and that even though they are making money off of the paid search, they often close down accounts for suspected companies. In order to not come off as suspicious, I was told, you should make sure there’s quality content there. That can be a lot of work, so be careful.

You should also consider using that fake page that you’ve now directed people to to simply click on an ad, to actually drive traffic to your own site. Put an link or banner that leads to your site wherever you can, valuable web real estate that you’ve paid to direct people to should always be used to drive traffic to your real sites too. This will increase the value of your actual site, and that’s really what you want to be able to show off… not your fancy arbitrage skills.

CEOs may seem scary, but at some point most of them were in your seat.

I’ve been interviewing at a company over the past few weeks for a position I didn’t want. The position was way to analytical for me, and though I can pull data and make pivots tables and write up reports… I’m a people person and much more than 25% of my day doing that drives me pretty nuts.

My first interview was with the director of finance, he made me do math on the whiteboard.

My second interview wa with the director of product, he couldn’t promise that my day would be less that 60% analytical stuff.

Somehow, these people still liked me enough to invite me back to speak with the CEO today. I guess I’m pretty good at math. Though the position I first came to them for was this overly analytical opening, in my second meeting they mentioned potential marketing openings. I figured, if I met the CEO, and he liked me, chances are he could recomend me for one of those. CEOs get to make decisions like that

So I met the CEO, and within a few minutes we agreed that the analyst role was not for me, and that I was more suited for openings in marketing and web development. He then had the CIO and CMO meet with me… you know because CEOs can do that sort of stuff. I hit it off with both of them, and they are now entertaining the option of bringing me on for jobs that I probably would  never have been interviewed for because they were impressed with my energy, and know that the CEO will back their decision.

Lesson learned… if the CEO is going to meet with you… you show up.

Just Keep Talking!

1) No one else will probably be as passionate as you are about the idea to actually make it

2) If you don’t talk to people, they can’t tell you all the red flags you might be missing

3) Sometimes that how you recruit advisers, partners, and evangelists

Based on his advice and others that agree, I talk about the Iphone apps I’m developing to loads of different people.

Today, I learned an additional reason why sharing is a great idea… it turns out that I can’t be everywhere, I know, shocking, and I can’t read everything, again shocking. But with a network of people who know what I’m doing, when they see things that are of importance, they send it over.

If you’re interested in the newest data out there about Iphone Application usage and why you should probably charge for an app you’re developing… read on….

http://tr.im/gDzu

Today site: cr.am

God I love it when you use the .xx to finish your name, like chi.mp

Cram will shrink your links to very small links, like tinyurl does but they’ll actually pay your site if you add their toolbar and your users start using them. Cool beans.

Alternatively, there’s tr.im which help shorten your urls and can give you great analytics, but no money.

Be warned of burn out. If you’re going to go to every networking event that comes your way and go on every interview, even if you don’t want the position, you’re going to start getting frustrated. Once you get frustrated, you become less genuine, and less effective. This is not good. It also does bad things to your relationships that you’ve had before you started networking like mad.

Concentrate your efforts on targeted opportunities where you will be able to connect with the right people, on jobs that you are properly qualified for an interested in. This will leave you less frustrated, which will make you happier, and more excited to talk to that person who will actually connect you with your dream job.

Oh… and as one of my best friends says… don’t forget to sleep, it works wonders.