In and Out of Love with Twitter

2009 saw me as an absolute Twitter evangelist - really enjoying the interaction, connectivity and wealth of useful and useless but interesting info that was out there. The last few months have seen a change in my professional and personal views (i don't pretend here to be giving an industry view - its just my personal feelings and how i use it.)

Professional - why i love it

1. I have a network of people who are not friends(a few are) but people i know and the info we share can be really useful and impossible to get without scouring sites and conducting arduous email conversations.
2. I think its going to be the big thing in recruitment communications - i just know it will (is) work really well - and create a genuine conversation between employer/recruiter without the pitfalls of a site like Facebook
3. We are seeing really nice experimentation - trial and error - low cost pilots. That shows nobody has got it 100% right yet but there will be a good set of data to make some improvements next quarter
4. It really does cost almost nothing - but does require application and thought - the best sort of combination. These digital new things that cost a lot and deliver little are very passe in 2010.

Personal - why i don't love it
1. The chatter has become rather tiresome - the "journey into work" problems interest very few
2. Clearly everyone i follow has a more interesting life than me - their saturday night consists of theatre/abseiling/art galleries/truffle hunting - mine consists of being too tired to switch over from All Star Mr and Mrs
3. Their relationships are great too and their children perfect....(just like mine, he says quickly)

In summary - the personal stuff is all a little self publicist oriented (and yes i know this as i am self publicist extraordinaire)

But the professional side is going to be fascinating and brilliant

Anyway - have to go as need to book my table at The Ivy on saturday night with Brangelina, Michael Jackson and Elvis.

In Praise of MonsoonCareers

I really like how Monsoon Accessorize are running their Twitter recruitment account (let me declare an interest - we work with them on some media stuff - but not this). It feels exactly what a company should be doing at the moment (given budget restrictions)
- posts jobs - but not just bare text
- it has a tone of voice which reflects company and rec team
- it is up to date and busy
- its not trying to blast in and get 1000 irrelevant users - it seems they are happy to organically grow it and let it take (a directed) life of its own

anyway - enough of being positive - i will find something to criticise now