Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
One Stop Shop for Docs
There is a new start-up in Southern California that I have been excited about for almost a year now. Docstoc is the latest brainchild of one of my former business school classmates, Jason Nazar and his partner, Alon Schwartz. It’s a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents, ranging from legal to technology to business and beyond. Docstoc announced this week that it has raised $3.25M in its series B round of funding from Rustic Canyon Partners.
Docstoc is a great example of the increasingly transparent world that we live in, a vast database of useful information that is part blog, part social community and part encyclopedia of free information. An interesting attribute and arguably the most compelling reason that this start-up attracted the attention (read: money) of such an esteemed, media-savvy venture firm is that it has popularized the ability to embed documents into any blog or website, a feature that we know very well in the PR world is popular in the blogoshpere and on news sites.
I like Docstoc for many reasons; the site has become my go-to resource for information that I might have had trouble tracking down previously, but I also think that it is leading the charge in changing the way that people use, store and share information. The site is still in beta, the company is brand new, so for me, I will be watching to see what it does with its $3.25M and whether Jason can get another winner off the ground…
Facebook Opens Up Chat For All. No Converts Here (Yet)
Approximately one year ago I thought I was done with Web chat.
I’d moved on to social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and had begun to associate instant messaging more with my social-drama-filled adolescence than new and (hopefully) professional adulthood. But then it slowly began to creep back in…
First I graduated from university and started using Google’s Gmail chat to keep up with the international adventures and job hunting travails of my classmates. I was then converted to iChat as another means of communication by my co-workers, and finally caved to Windows Live Messenger– the chat vehicle of choice for my PC-loyalist parents and siblings.
And now Facebook presents another option. Early this month, it was announced on the Facebook blog that an instant-messaging application would slowly be rolling out across networks. A couple of weeks later, the small and supposedly inconspicuous widget appeared at the bottom of the screen– although I have yet to activate it.
Sure, it’s simple, collapsible, unobtrusive and arguably valuable– serving to make communication even easier among Facebook addicts, but do I really have any need for it? Yes, I use Twitter, and one could argue I don’t have much use for that either, but Facebook chat seems at this point entirely superfluous.
As yet another distraction, I’m sure it will slowly gain in popularity over time much like other recent (and initially criticized) Facebook updates like the mini-feed and news-feed.
For now, however, I am content to stay away — we’ll see how long I hold out.
Resumes Are Sooooo Six Months Ago
A friend of mine recently became a “fan” of Union Square Ventures on Facebook, a New York based tech venture capital firm that has funded the likes of Twitter, Wesabe and Etsy, and home of venture capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson. I followed the link to their Facebook fan page which then led me to the Union Square Ventures home site.
Much like the lovely redesigned LaunchSquad site, Union Square Ventures puts their blog content front and center — in fact, their blog is the homepage of the site. Something caught my eye: a “We’re Hiring” blog post that asked for potential candidates to put their name, email and link to their web presence, in a blog comment. That’s how you apply.
I found it interesting, and probably increasingly required for tech related jobs, that a web-presence is requested and is basically the only significant and descriptive information in the initial application. Basically, your blog, Facebook page or other online presence IS your resume. Don’t have one? Well you’re probably not right for the job. And if you do have one, it might be time to take those beer-pong-night pictures off the old Facebook photo album.
The more I thought about it, it started to make a lot of sense as a way to whittle down the applicant field. On a blog or social network page a potential employer can easily find some basic pertinent information about someone: Do they write well? Are they analytical? Do they think about things in an interesting way? Are they good networkers? Who have they worked for? I wouldn’t recommend this strategy for, say, a corporate law firm, but for a company that invests in social media and other web-based technologies, it makes perfect sense.
My only criticism of this method, which I think is a big one, is the fact that all applicants are essentially making a public statement, via blog comment, that they are applying for a job. What this means, is that the applicant pool will not include people currently at a job that need to be discreet about their job search — a common occurrence and probably where the best candidates would come from. Who does that leave? People who either don’t care if their job knows (probably not a ton of people and says something about the applicant) and people without jobs. Not sure if that’s necessarily the most fruitful crowd to pull from, but, it seems to have worked for the guys at Union Square Ventures before.
FOHBOH: Chowhound and Yelp Meet The Kitchen’s Back Door
I’ve definitely seen my share of niche social networks. Every time I flip through the NY Times Sunday business section, it seems there’s a new article about social network for some group - Irish Firefighters have a little section of Firefighter Nation and Baby Boomers have probably a dozen choices (although I don’t know a single one that uses anything outside of Facebook or LinkedIn). So, when I learned about FOHBOH (”Front of house, back of house”), a social network for restauranteurs, last week, I was pretty impressed, because the network was behavior-driven, like LinkedIn or Facebook, rather than demographic-driven, like some of the new boomer social networks or social networks for children.
This past Saturday night, an old friend asked me, “There are so many new social networks out there; how do you gauge which ones are going to survive?” I think that the ones that are purpose-driven are the ones that are going to make it, long-term. For example, when I want to learn more about a prospective client, I usually turn to LinkedIn. When I want to figure out which PR or social media industry events I should attend, I check out Facebook or Upcoming. Those are purpose-driven visits. (So, advertisers trying to reach me in that way should rely on behavioral targeting.)
I’ve worked in restaurants through much of high school and college; when you’re 18 or 20 years old, making $15 an hour, in cash, is a pretty appetizing proposition. Through working at the Peninsula Creamery Fountain and Grill (still totally awesome) in Palo Alto and the now-defunct Ovens of Brittany in Madison, Wisconsin, I learned how to wait tables, bartend and do some food preparation. And I definitely met some really interesting characters. That’s a little bit of what I see on FOHBOH; it’s a place for restaurant owners, servers, sommeliers, vendors and wine reps to come together, and have really frank conversations. And the place is just vibrant; although it only has a little over 2000 members right now, typically 15 to 50 people are logged in at any one time, and the conversational level is pretty high - when one member solicits feedback on their blog, people respond.
Besides the obvious purpose-driven social networking and business-networking opportunities, FOHBOH reminds me of a very insider version of Zagat’s or Yelp. When you go into a MySpace Group and “eavesdrop” on the conversation, you frequently feel like you’re sitting in the quad of a high school or college campus; when you “eavesdrop” on FOHBOH, you feel you’re sitting at the bar in a restaurant that closed an hour ago, having a beer with the manager. And that’s the kind of totally candid feedback that I want, as a consumer, when I’m trying to get the lead on whether a restaurant is the real deal, or when I have a serious food question.
Jeremy at LaunchSquad turned me on to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; that was the book for the kitchen’s back door. Now, I feel like I’ve discovered where those conversations happen in real time.
