Given that one the one hand, the majority of what we do is being posted online in some shape or format (creating a sort of virtual portfolio) and on the other hand, there are an increasing number of tools that allow recruiters to trawl the web to find high quality candidates for free, what I would expect to see is some bright spark creating a system that continuously trawls the web to find candidates that match an organisations needs, and then track their progress, flagging up when the candidate achieves some pre-set goal. Like winning and award or gaining a particular accreditation. If you think about it, what I’m proposing is simply an extension of the process already adopted by many of the big consulting and law firms to identify top talent at key universities and graduate schools.

So this week’s mail is dedicated to highlighting different techniques that candidates are adopting to get themselves noticed.

The world’s first augmented reality CV?
Thanks to Craig who spotted this one. It had to happen sometime: the blending of new and old world technologies to create an immersive CV. David Wood (one of the top 100 most influential technologists), the co-founder of Symbian and television presenter Jason Bradbury teamed up with CWJobs to create the world’s first AR CV. Now, not all of us can afford to have a TV presenter to help walk people through our experiences, but given the rise in the number of people who are able to competently use video and web technology, it’s not such an onerous task as it initially seems.

Far from the madding crowd
A copywriter, Ed Hamilton, has come up with a creative way to stand out, while showing off his worldliness and tech skills, mapping his CV to Google Maps. Using Google Maps’ ‘My Maps’ feature, he created a custom map with text posted to personalized placemarkers. Alongside the standard information you would expect to discover about his skills, experience and capabilities, we discover that Ed is an “armchair Fiorentina fan”,  who is “fascinated by Chilean geology” and was once tasked to write an HIV awareness commercial by the government of Trinidad and Tobago without using the words Sex, Condom or HIV. It’s an ingenious use of the channel and one that shows a clear understanding of the mechanics of search, web 2.0 and most importantly, communications.

Paint yourself pretty
There is a great moment in a film called Legally Blond where the fusty professors of Harvard come across the CV of our ditsy heroine, Elle Woods. Written on one side of A4 paper, her CV is bright pink and scented to “give it a little something extra”. It certainly stands out, promoting an amusing debate amongst the professors about the sort of candidate they are looking for, resulting in the acceptance of our heroine to the prestigious law school to “inject a little life”.

Now I’m not advocating that we all go and spray our CVs with perfume, or adopt the use of lurid backgrounds, but there are an increasing number of tools that are being created online that allow candidates to customise their CVs to help them stand out. I’ve mentioned Visual CV in previous mails and LinkedIn is another great example. Candidates could also use Google Profiles and the more inventive could even create an entry in Wikipedia. In this context Innovative Resume doesn’t really seem that innovative – for me it’s the online equivalent of the CV template in Word. But it represents something more fundamental: an acceptance of the need for a customised brand presence for individuals. Expect to see more such offerings.

Epic win or epic fail?
With a stated aim of injecting “the adventure back into your life,” EpicWin is an iPhone app that converts a to-do list into a game in which each completed task advances the player in an ongoing quest to level up, gain riches and develop skills. The game can be downloaded from the App store, and users select an avatar  and then upload their daily tasks. As tasks are completed over the course of the day, the avatar develops skills and moves ahead on a quest map, with rewards each time they level up. Tasks that become overdue, meanwhile, are shown on opening the app. Players can share their progress via Facebook and Twitter.

It’s an intriguing combination of incentivisation schemes, geo-location, mobile technology and task management. Part of me can’t help but feel a little sad that our focus an human beings appears to have diminished to the point that we need to be incentivised to complete mundane tasks but hey, I can easily imagine some bright spark extending this to Outlook.

Eco Zoo – Form and function combined
A while ago, we featured a site called Ecodazoo as a beautiful example of Flash craftsmanship. Well, its back and upgraded with new characters and some lovely design features. Look at the pop-up books and just imagine if we took this approach with some of our graduate brochures.

Mock-ups made easy
One for the creative bods. A simple way to create iPhone mock-ups in Illustration or Pencil style. The Ronseal of design websites.

Holy cow! Art made simple
A few years ago, cows started to permeate the global landscape as part of what was touted as the largest public art project in the world. For those of you who don’t remember it, back in 2001, hundreds of blank, life-sized glass-fibre cows were painted, set up at prominent sites around London, then, after several months on display, auctioned off. Recently, some bright spark in Norway has created a site that allows you to create your own cow art and upload it to Facebook. It’s good fun but require that you either speak Norwegian, or are happy to experiment. (Hint: If it is anything like Swedish “Jeg vil lage min egen ku” probably translates as “I will make my own cow”…)

Canada says “no” to drugs by encouraging teens to experiment
This is a weird site. See the effect of certain drugs on human beings, by choosing a drug and watching its impact represented by a human eye. It takes a while to load (the pre-loader is at the top of the screen)  and features games, videos, and some pretty intriguing effects. The site may seem irreverent and distasteful to some, but personally I think it is extremely clever – talking to teens in a language they understand without being patronising. And by language I don’t simply mean copywriting, but in the overall approach to communicating about drugs.

It’s been a week of surprises; both on the populist culture front and on the business front. First, we saw Susan Boyle shoot to instant stardom, courtesy of a breathtaking performance of ‘I dream a dream’ from Les Mis on Britain’s Got Talent, which was immediately uploaded to YouTube and has already attracted over 17.5 million views throughout the world, attracting comment from celebs like Ashton Kucher and Demi Moore. Then we have the photos of anti-capitalist Nicky Fisher who was ‘brutally attacked’ by an unnamed police officer, all conveniently captured on video/camera and sold to the highest bidder for c£50K (I thought the whole point of anti-capitalism was that money was the root of all evil?) Nokia, the once darling of the mobile phone world, fails to curtail growth forecasts and suffers a 90% downfall in profits, citing the popularity of the iPhone as one of the principal reasons. Finally, a couple of employees at Domino’s have become infamous for shifting the perception of the brand from positive to negative in a couple of days (according the market research firm YouGov) by releasing a ‘day in the life’ video on YouTube, which shows them doing inhuman things to food in preparing it for general consumption. Domino’s went quickly into damage-control mode, inevitably firing the employees and producing its own video of apology and reassurance, as well as succumbing to the inevitable and delving into Twitter. All too late.

As you can see, our theme this week is about the viral element of campaigning. We live in such a short-termist society, that a well-planned and well executed viral can have a huge impact on a campaign; something that marketeers have recognised over the past few years, but struggled to implement consistently. The great thing about using the web as a medium to drive viral campaigns is that the advertising regulation isn’t as stringent, so you can push creative boundaries a lot further. The challenge is that is can be extremely tricky to know what will and what will not take off. Given the rise in prominence of brand response advertising in HR Recruitment, it is something we should all start thinking about, so I’ve got a couple of sites to help get you started.

Viral Video Chart (http://www.viralvideochart.com/)

I’ve seen Jim sneakily peeking at this site during his lunch hours and aside from the guffaws/sniggering it induces (well, it’s better than his mobile ringtone) it is a pretty useful site. Imagine YouTube with tracking capability. The site allows you to deconstruct the popularity of a video by tracking how and where people are talking about it – just click on one of the video links and look at the data on the right hand side. Great stuff.

Viralbank (www.viralbank.com)

Once the darling of the viral world, this site has fallen by the wayside of late, but it is still a useful repository of videos, microsites, emails, photos and games.

PotNoodle (http://www.potnoodle.com)

Pot Noodle are the kings (or queens) of viral and can often be relied on to come up with engaging, weird and whacky campaigns to keep us on our toes. The most prominent from last year was PotNoodle, the Musical but I can’t get the link to work (www.potnoodlethemusical.com) So I’ve sent you a link to the main website. I love the fact that there is a section of the site called ‘Nutrition’ that, when you actually look at it contains two facts about the product and then some general useless tat.

Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com/)

Part of your planning approach for viral campaigns will be to understand what is current and how to adapt it. Twitscoop is a site that provides a live feed on topics that are being discussed. The site trawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here). Quite often you will find that you have access to hot topics way before the they actually hit the mainstream information channels! For those of you who remember how accurate Google Trends was at predicting the outbreak of ‘flu epidemics, just imagine how much more potent this is…

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