 It's not a revolution if nobody loses. - Clay Shirky
I just finished reading Clay Shirky's masterpiece, Here Comes Everybody, and feel compelled to recommend that you read it. It's thoughtful, insightful, and well-written. It also a "business" book that is so rich in detail and far-reaching in implication that you can't easily reduce it's thesis to a powerpointable sound-bite.
Although ostensibly about technology - "social media," broadly speaking - the book's focus falls less on the geeky details of wikis, blogs, and tweeting, than on the way these technologies facilitate the organization and actions of groups in an historically unprecedented, even revolutionary, manner. In the words of His Shirky-ness, "[W]e are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations."
If you feel like you or your business could benefit from greater participation in the social media revolution, or if you feel that these new, powerful, group-forming-and-coordinating tools pose an existential threat to your business or occupation (as the rise of the printing press did to medieval scribes), then you can't afford not to read this highly readable book.
Image - "Everybody was here" - Courtesy of {dpade1337}.
 We've been creating desk calendars featuring work by Aquent talent for years now. Turns out that it's time again for us to explore the many and varied portfolios of the people we represent in order to find art for this year's calendar. (The image to the left was created by Renata Zolcinska, represented by our Paris office, and included in the 2008 calendar.)
If you would like your work to be considered, you should make sure that you're online portfolio at Aquent.com currently contains your best work. You can update it by logging in to your account here.
We will be starting the selection process next month and contacting the people whose work we would like to showcase in the early fall. If you have any questions, please contact me.
 Aquent now features a referral program that not only rewards you for the referral itself -- regardless of outcome -- but continues to reward you when we conduct an "official" interview of the individual referred, and then keeps on rewarding you for every hour that that person works during their first year with Aquent.
Here's where the rubber hits the road:
For every 1000 referral points you earn, you can get $250 from us.
There are, I'm told, terms and conditions, etc., but the set-up is thankfully simple and straight-forward-seeming (you'll be the judge, of course).
Check it out for yourself here, or just download this description of the program and talk to your local Aquent office to find out more.
I think this is an idea whose time has come and it just might be a game-changer.
Image Courtesy of zorilla.
 Looks like we're in a recession, my fellow Americans (if you happen to live somewhere else, more power to ya!). Home prices are dropping and foreclosures are up. Over 500,000 private sector jobs have evaporated since November 2007. We're even seeing runs on banks. If you want to know how bad it could get, but also get some reassurance that things aren't as bad as they could be, check out these graphs provided by the New York Times.
Then yesterday, Google shares lost nearly 10% of their value after reporting earnings that disappointed investors. When the public radio show Marketplace reported on this, they made two interesting points:
On the one hand, they emphasized that Google is not a tech company, with Martin Pyykkonen explaining,"At the end of the day, in terms of running the business and how they get paid, it is through advertising.pointing out that." That statement was followed by this comment, "And we all know what happens to ad budgets in a weak economy -- they get cut."
In other words, things could continue to get tight for people who have jobs related to advertising. Not to put too fine a point on it, this means many of the folks - graphic designers, copywriters, etc. - that we work with and, frankly, us!
On the other hand, things are going OK for companies in the hardware business, like IBM, primarily because they have a lot of long-term service contracts in place that act as a recession buffer.
Bringing it all back home, I think the trick will be for folks who write and design to position themselves and their skills as a necessary, even critical, kind of ongoing service to their clients.
Is this realistic? Can it be done? Are you doing it? Are we?
Image Courtesy of Brent and MariLynn.
 We recently conducted a survey of internal staff asking them to name the marketing piece or campaign we've run that they liked the best. The most popular item named was a direct mail piece we sent out some years back that everyone refers to as "the fuzzy postcard" (pictured here).
The card was "fun" (the question on the back read, "Are your design and production projects getting a little hairy?"), quirky, and memorable. Several staffers recalled seeing the card prior to working with Aquent and others mentioned seeing it on display in client offices. That members of the design community thought enough of this card to hang on to it is, methinks, not nothing, and, in fact, quite an enviable fate for a bit of direct mail.
Two questions, however, immediately spring to my febrile mind:
1) Is there a marketing, advertising, or promotional piece that Aquent has used that struck YOUR fancy, dear blog-reader?
2) Since our marketing (in every sense of the word) is moving more and more web-wards, how can we replicate the shag-rug tactility of this piece in a realm where sight and sound are the reigning senses?
 When you have a dream worthy of mention, it's best to write it down immediately, otherwise it disintegrates beneath the day's remnants.
Case in point, I had a dream on Sunday night in which Seth Godin made an appearance. The details are hazy. I kind of remember standing at a buffet with him. I might also have been trying to engage him in a conversation about Stanford, which we both attended.
I don't know what happened next, but I clearly recall making a conscious decision, in the dream, not to mention his action figure. I envy him this tiny idol so much, if we had talked about it at all, I would have waked up screaming.
Image Courtesy of C+H.
 The ranks of Aquent bloggers are set to expand. In addition to this blog and that of Aquent's LA office, our international arm is going to be launching a blog, if I'm not mistaken, and I've been working semi-feverishly on providing our local offices with some plug-and-play tools that should greatly facilitate blogging efforts at street-level. Aquent is going to be "joining the conversation" on a planetary scale, world, so step back!
To top it off, it appears now (finally?) that a right honorable member of Aquent's management team is standing on the verge of getting his blog on. I don't want to say too much about it just yet -- the proof of the blog is in the pudding, as we all know -- but I did want to use him as inspiration for today's post.
This presumptive blogger was working up some pre-launch content and he was looking at my blog for something to take issue with. He said, in effect, that he couldn't find anything he didn't agree with on this blog. I was crest-fallen.
I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose. After all, blogging is a personal idiom, and this is a corporate blog. Persons become individuals by differentiating themselves from others; corporations become persons by subsuming the individuals they "incorporate."
Unless you disagree with something or someone, you can't separate yourself from the brute uniformity of Being. You become background noise and eventually fade into oblivion. On the other hand, if you differentiate yourself too much within the corporate context, you enter the brute uniformity of Unemployment.
DARN IT! I DON'T CARE!
I want this blog to be somebody. I want this blog to express itself. I want people, even those super-ordinated to me in Aquent's complex and Byzantine hierarchy, to hear me and disagree with me!
So, here goes: I think that everyone who works for us, including all internal staff and talent, as well as any consultants, contractors, or temps we engage, should have to legally change their last name to "Aquent," as a non-negotiable condition of employment.
Let's see you agree with that!
Image Courtesy of MShades.
 As part of Aquent's sponsorship of the American Marketing Association, I write an "Ask the Expert" column about marketing careers on their site. One question I get a lot goes something like this, "I'm applying for jobs and sending my resume out but I'm not getting any responses. How can I get my application to stand out?"
My standard response goes something like this, "The best way to make your application or resume stand out is to establish some personal connection between yourself and the hiring manager." In other words: network, network, network.
Upon reflection, I had two thoughts about this. One thought was that establishing that personal connection requires time and effort, which is why people turn to staffing agencies like Aquent in the first place. If we have anything to offer job seekers, it consists of the actual relationships we have with hiring managers at companies y'all wanna work at. Saving you time and effort means that we are providing you with a valuable service. If we can't do that, what's the point of working with us?
My second thought was slightly different. I put it to myself this way, "Networking will only help your resume stand out if it already has 'stand-out-icity.'" You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear or get blood from a turnip. Knowumsayin'?
Aquent can't create a match between your skills and a client's needs or your work preferences and a client's actual work environment. We can and should, however, help ensure that your resume reflects your strengths and experience in the best possible light. Helping you improve your self-representation is, again, an actual service and that's where we come in. Ultimately, though, you've got to bring the stuff to represent, and, at the end of the day, the client will decide if that's the "right stuff."
I will now sit back and wait for the folks from PETA to call me on my metaphors. You can feel free to call me on the value of my advice or Aquent on the value of our service.
Image Courtesy of Mandj98.
 Though I can spin things and beat around the bush with the best of them, I tend to prefer "straight talk" (sometimes called "honesty" or "frankness" or "no BS"). For example, while working recently on a survey of our clients, I came across the question, "Are you currently looking for marketing or creative staff?" and I didn't like it.
Since we weren't undertaking a socio-economic study to determine the percentage of businesses currently hiring, it struck me as a disingenuous way of fishing for business. With that in mind, I suggested posing the question this way, "Would you like an Aquent representative to call you right now?" My colleagues passed on that recommendation, but also removed the offending question (as I recall, anyway).
Which brings me to this blog. My "strategy," such as it is, has been to comment on a wide variety of topics in hopes that potential talent and/or clients would find this site, become curious about Aquent, and eventually work with us (or whatever).
Aside from the "wishful thinking" aspect of this approach, am I actually practicing a kind of deception? Is this base, marketing trickery? Dishonesty? Bullshit? Would Aquent, and you, frankly, be better served if the crux of every post here was, "Please work with Aquent. Please tell your friends about Aquent. Please sign up. Please request a client visit. Please, please, please (as James Brown used to say)"?
My gut feeling is that this blog would quickly lose it's value, entertainment or otherwise, if I just dished up the marketing message uncut. It would quickly become boring, kind of annoying, and not a little pathetic (no one likes a beggar, right?).
I'm starting to think that the Godin-one was correct and all marketers ARE liars. But, we're liars because that's what everyone wants - lilies with plenty of gilding.
After all, the truth hurts. Or so I'm told.
Image Courtesy of Cyril Plapied.
 Back in the days when Second Life was being hyped as the future of the web, Clay Shirky quipped that "3D is a crappy way to search." I totally agree, in part because I've often had the experience of looking for something in my house, which came with the three standard spatial dimensions, and wishing I could search these dimensions the same way I search the web: textually.
The shortcomings of 3D search were brought home to me when I stumbled across the Seed Gives Life site. The site itself consists of a semi-explorable faux 3D Flash landscape which looks cool, but is kind of frustrating because, although you can poke around a bit in their pretty pastel forest, there isn't much to actually find there.
Then I found their blog and came across this post, msnbc's Ess feed viewer is pretty awesome." Turns out that msnbc is using an interesting technology, Spectra. which allows you to create a 3D newsfeed. Interestingly enough, since the feed can get kind of crowded, making in difficult to pick out the individual items of interest, they provide you with a tool that allows you to filter the feed view using, tah dah, text-based search.
Promise: 3D can provide a rich and imaginative interface.
Peril: It can be just as cluttered, obscure, and user-unfriendly as reality's own 3D interface.
Solution: Infuse the wonderfully awkward and beautifully frustrating tri-dimensional world (or its digital surrogate) with the awesome power of the hyper-dimensional world (sometimes called "the web").
Image Courtesy of advencap.
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