Kevin Micalizzi

I was talking to my better half last night and I had to admit I’m loving the job hunt process. It’s been an excuse to meet incredible people, no idea why I hadn’t been getting out there in recent years. This week has started off very well and should only get better.

Another interview

Had the opportunity to do a call yesterday with DD Ganguly, co-founder and CEO of Dimdim. The call was a very open conversation, rather than just rapid fire questions. It gave me a good feel for the company culture and values. Very exciting! I’m feeling more like this is the type of culture I’ve been looking for. I’ll let you know how it progresses.

Practical Conversations Launched

My new blog project, Practical Conversations, has finally launched with my first interview, “Interview with Christine Major, High tech PR pro and social media junkie“. It was great of Christine to help me out by being the first interview I post. Give her a follow on Twitter (@CMajor) and thank her. I have a few more interviews lined up, but need to more aggressively find people from a variety of jobs/perspectives who are managing online conversations. If you know anyone, let me know!

Upcoming events

Wednesday, 10/5, I’ll be heading down to Foxboro, MA for the Closing Keynote of the New Marketing Summit by Cynthia Gordon, Networking and De-Brief of the summit by Chris Brogan, then the Social Media Club panel on Corporate Social Responsibility in the Digital Age. I should be in Foxboro from 3:30 pm to 8:00 pm or so, from there I head home to NH, get a little sleep, then (early) drive down to Cambridge, MA for Social Media Breakfast 9. An hour after the breakfast I’ll be heading over to meet up with John Cass and interview him for Practical Conversations on how he is managing his online conversations. I’m afraid Friday is going to seem very dull after all that.

I know what you’re thinking, why aren’t you attending the entire New Marketing Summit? It’s a valid question. Not working gives me plenty of time for meeting new people, but requires me to keep to a stricter budget than I’m used to. I’m watching the tweets from #nms08 and I’ll get a taste of it tomorrow with the free activities, the full summit just wasn’t in my budget this time.

-k

Two interviews today. One from the comfort of my home office, the other in Burlington, MA. AND an email from the company I interviewed with a year ago. (and yes, it’s too long to write “What’s new for Kevin update” for every post. At some point I’ll get to “Kev update” — figured I’d introduce it gradually.)

Interview 1 – Dimdim

Steve Chazin, CMO at Dimdim took an interesting approach to this interview. I met with him and their CTO, Prakash Khot via Dimdim meeting. My task was to deliver a presentation on how I would generate “Huge, rampant, stupendous awareness and buzz!” for Dimdim (what I would do in my first six months.) I intentionally approached the presentation trying to avoid the word-heavy PowerPoint approach I’ve been seeing (and sadly presenting myself) for years. The presentation was mostly images that I talked to. It even gave me a chance to use, with permission, Fred Cavazza’s Social Media Landscape. I won’t give away the details of my strategy, but I wanted to introduce a process and keep it light: 1. Target; 2. Engage; 3. Measure & Refine (iterative process, obviously.) With the goal being happy engaged customers.

We met using Dimdim, which was cool. I’ve been running web meetings for many years. What was great, since my slides weren’t actual PowerPoint files, I generated a PDF of the slides and shared that. Dimdim actually gave me a view of the previous page, the current page, and the next page — while participants only saw the current. If I had known (didn’t practice with that scenario) I could have skipped printing out my cheat sheets to help me keep my speaking organized.

Doing the meeting from home was fun. Wore a dress shirt and tie so it would look more professional over the webcam I was sharing. Took the phone out of my office to avoid any random telemarketer calls (being home during the day I now see how many we get. Pretty sad since I’m on the Federal Do Not Call. I’m sure most of the calls are political so they can get away with it.) Since I knew I had to take the dog out to the woods (to do her “business”) again after the interview, I was still wearing jeans.

I’m particularly proud of the tie – I managed to get my half windsor knot on the first try.

Interview 2 – Mzinga

I did wear the suit for this one.(sorry, didn’t take a picture of it, you’ll have to wait for the next interview.) Ran down to Burlington, MA. I commuted to that area for almost 10 years, so I automatically padded in travel time. No traffic meant I arrived almost an hour early. I camped out at the Starbucks around the corner from Mzinga to catch up on a few emails and finish reviewing my notes for the interview.

Had a few minutes to talk with @alexa before going in to meet with @patrickmoran. Alexa and I met briefly at a Tweet-up back in August, so it was nice to chat a bit more.

Met with Patrick, we ended up talking a bit longer than an hour, but it was a great conversation. Not to butter him up at all, but it was nice talking to another CMO who “gets it” (Steve Chazin fits in that category too). We talked about some of the challenges someone in the Web Director role will face. It was great conversation and I’m looking forward to talking with him more.

And an email

Received an email from the company I had interviewed with a year ago. Without going into specifics, they are interested in talking with me again. I replied to let them know where I stand with the other interviews, but that I’m definitely open to talking. I remember my interviews with them before and they some good people. I wouldn’t mind talking to them again.

Overall great week. Didn’t get my first interview up on Practical Conversations yet, I’ll have to work on it over the weekend.

Have a great weekend!

Since yesterday’s post, I have another interview scheduled an odd email and one rejection.

Another interview scheduled

I’m heading down to Burlington, MA tomorrow to meet with @patrickmoran at Mzinga. Very cool to have a chance to sit down with him. I’d discovered the Mzinga podcasts a few weeks ago and started working my way through them. Very excited about the potential to work with the thought leaders behind We Are Smarter. Spent a few hours today doing my research, but still more to do. I’ll let you know how the conversation goes tomorrow.

Hopefully Patrick doesn’t mind my mentioning it. You don’t mind Patrick, do you?

An attempted poach?

Received an email today from the CMO of a Dimdim competitor. I won’t share the name or company, but here’s the message:

Hi Kevin, I am enjoying reading your blog! Best of luck for your job search with DimDim. I am the CMO of **** – which is quite frankly, the best free instant web conferencing service out there! If you were in the SF Bay Area, I would love to meet up and have the opportunity to persuade you to come and join us instead! Keep in touch.

How did I respond? I told him SF Bay area isn’t out of the question and to let me know what type of help he is looking for. I’m interested to see if the conversation goes anywhere. (Personal note: I hesitated about posting this part, but if my blogging through this process is going to be useful for anyone, I have to make it more public. Steve Chazin, if you are reading this, I still love Dimdim and would love to work with you!)

A rejection

The recruiter who setup my interview with that Boston-based startup for the web product manager role called a few minutes ago. Unfortunately they’ve decided to pass. The only feedback was they felt it was not a good technical fit. It sucks is always tough to hear that someone doesn’t want you, but in the end it’s their loss (and I’m lucky enough to have friends who constantly remind me of that). All I can do is try to learn from the experience to improve future interviews.

I think part of my challenge going after product management roles is the lack of product management roles/titles in my work history. I’ve always focused on the experiences and skills I could gain, rather than on what title I’ve held. In the end it may make selling myself to the next company as a product manager a bit more difficult.

Now, back to my presentation for Dimdim and my Mzinga research…

It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s been 3 weeks since my last ‘What’s next for Kevin’ update. More interesting updates since then. It’s been nice to stay busy while still enjoying the change of seasons and being home with my faithful sidekick.

Interviews

The process with Dimdim for the Web 2.0 Marketing Specialist and Community Manager position continues. I have a follow-up this Friday (10/12) to give a presentation answering one question Steve Chazin, CMO, posed, “How would you help us achieve huge, rampant, stupendous awareness and buzz?” Been working on the presentation since last Thursday, still refining it.

On September 11, John Cass published an interview with me on his PR Communications blog. It’s called “The Interview: Kevin Micalizzi “. Not a job interview, but a great opportunity to talk with John and to be a part of his blog.

Received a call shortly after my last blog update from a recruiter I worked with when I was at Avid Technology . He noticed from a status update I made on LinkedIn that I was looking for work and reached out to me. (I’m using Ping.fm to update my status simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace). He got me an interview Sept. 29th with a Boston-based startup for a web product manager role. I think the interview went well and they have some hot technology, but they were getting ready for a product launch and wanted more time to discuss internally what exactly they need in the role. I hope to hear back from them this week. Here’s a pic of me heading to the interview.

More Unexpected Discussions

Monday I received a Facebook message from someone I used to work with. He’s with a company I interviewed at almost a year ago. At that time I went through some extensive interviews with them and definitely liked the people. In the end they decided they needed a different skill set than mine for that role. As I understand it, they’ve had some changes to their web team and would like to talk to me again. I’m looking forward to hearing back from them.

Another Opportunity

Last night, I was going through my “tweets” and saw one from @patrickmoran the CMO at Mzinga. They are looking for a Web Director. I met @alexa at my first Tweetup in August, who is at Mzinga, and reached out to her last night. I’m going over my resume today so I can get it to them.

A New Blog

Since leaving Avid back in July I’ve spent a considerable amount of time meeting people online and in person. Most of my connecting / re-connecting has been online and while I’m a lightweight in terms of the how many people I am connected to, I’m seeing firsthand how difficult it can be to stay on top of things. To help me (and of course to help others), I’ve started the Practical Conversations blog. I’m interviewing people who are managing online conversations about ‘how’ they are doing it. I had my first interview on Monday and hope to have it posted within a few days. If you know anyone who has a great system for managing online conversations, give them my contact info or have them get in touch with me –I’d like to talk to them.

A Non-Answer

When I first started blogging about What’s next for Kevin , I had questions I felt needed to be answered:

Should I go after another web strategy role? make the move to product management for an online product/service? is there something I haven’t thought of yet?

As I’ve spent more time in this process, I’ve decided to continue avoiding answering them. I’m finding interesting jobs in a number of areas. Since the web is constantly being refined, I’m going to take that approach myself. Instead of limiting myself from the start, I want to remain flexible to find the right opportunity more than the right title.

-k

Some interesting developments in my “What’s next for Kevin?” work.
Since last week I’ve attended 2 technology events in the Boston area:

Ignite Boston 4 (Sept. 11)

Image from Ignite Boston

Web Innovators Group (Sept. 15)

Boston Web Innovators Group

They were both good opportunities to network.  At Ignite Boston I saw 2 of my favorite Tweeters (@CMajor, @znh).  Got some great advice on my resume from people who saw it on this blog (I need to better illustrate the business/marketing side of my experiences), and met some new people.

The Web Innovators Group was a much larger meeting.  I went for a nice dinner with a friend in Harvard Sq., thinking ‘hey, I’ll be in Cambridge it should be right down the street.’  After dinner, with 5 minutes left before meeting time, I looked at the directions and realized I had to take the train through Boston and back out to Cambridge on a different line.  It ended up being 1 hr after the meeting started when I arrived, which may not have been a bad thing.  A number of people told me the presentations were useless and the networking was the only reason to go.  Not having seen more than the last 5 minutes of presentations, I can’t comment on the quality.

I did get to meet some new people that night.  Two of them were from a company I’m almost 100% certain a recruiter put my resume in at.  After we talked about it, it’s pretty clear that my more “tech-focused” version of the resume I have been circulating didn’t resonate for their Director of Web Strategy role.  It was good to get validation that I’m doing the right thing in rewriting it again, but tough to find out I may have missed an opportunity because my resume wasn’t targeted properly.  Lesson learned.

The most interesting development for me was catching up with a former colleague (Steve Chazin) for coffee early afternoon yesterday.  He and I passed each other about 2 months ago at my favorite Starbucks, but we both had family with us and were heading in opposite directions, so we didn’t stop to talk.  I dropped him an email a few weeks ago, but he’s CMO of Dimdim, so I have no doubt he’s busy.  Last week he dropped me an email about getting together.  So we setup a time to meet at my favorite Starbucks (you remember, the one that voted me customer of the month in June 2008).

I arrived for the meeting a few minutes early and sat down to wait.  Steve arrived, but had to take care of a call before coming in.  Once that was out of the way, we got our drinks and sat down to talk.  I walked into the meeting with an expectation of maybe getting some words of advice on what he would look for when hiring someone for Web Strategy — at best maybe get him to look over my resume and give some feedback.  Steve started the conversation by talking about Dimdim.  It’s an interesting approach to the web meeting space — and a lot easier to use that the other tools I’ve had to use (and spend considerable amounts of time helping co-workers use.) He talked about the company for a while, then mentioned his ‘soft sell.’  He talked about where he needs help, primarily in search optimization and in developing and executing a strategy for leveraging the web.

I guess I wasn’t quick enough to realize the conversation was heading in a direction other than the one I had expected.  When he started talking about Dimdim at the beginning of the meeting, I thought it was just out of excitement for what he was doing.  A few minutes after the ‘soft sell’, I stopped him and asked him what he was ‘selling’ me.  He was asking me if I was interested in looking at being considered for his team.  Wow, I really didn’t see that coming.  I guess when he called around to ask people he trusted who they would recommend, three separate people suggested me. You bet I’m interested, and I told him.  We’re hopefully going to setup time to talk further in the next week or so.

As exciting as that has been, it doesn’t change the fact that my resume still needs more work.  So enough blogging for now — back to updating my resume to better reflect the depth and breadth of my experiences.

After a minor glitches, the first draft of my updated resume is below.

A couple things to note:

• my goal is to shift the focus of my experience from just technology management to better reflect the broader web management and strategy experience I have
• the formatting is readable, but I’ve had to switch editors and reformat 4 times now, so I’ve given up on going for the truly beautiful layout until a later draft
• I feel like the summary bullets at the top are incomplete. I loosely used Jeremiah Owyang’s web strategy competencies for organizing the summary — does it resonate?
• the objective statement is a first pass — and lacking.  it generally covers what I’m looking for but any advice is greatly appreciated

(the doc is shared with Scribd — use the icon in the upper right to expand viewing area for an easier read)

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks!

-k

**** update 9/10/2008 9:50 am EST ****
Changed objective statement with @jamesrsullivan‘s help from “Attain a leadership position focused on web strategy within an organization that leverages web/online as a core tool to further business objectives.” to “Lead cutting-edge web organization with focus on strategy, in a company that embraces innovation.”  Scribd gave an error on the upload of the revision — had to post it all over again.  Sorry for anyone who saw an error on the embedded doc.

As I’m working through my resume re-write mapping my work experience to the web strategy competencies, I’m trying to be careful how I state my role in the events/projects/initiatives I reference.  I want to avoid exaggerating my work.  Not sure if it stems from my personal standard of ethics or because I’m under-valuing the work I did. Either way, I don’t plan to join the 30% or so of people who over-exaggerate on their resume.

So to keep my ego in check (or to boost it), I’m IM-ing friends and former co-workers to get their perspectives.  Not sure if there is a better way to approach this — it makes the whole process much more time consuming.

The tool I’m most frequently asked for in this job hunt is my resume.  Though I haven’t fully decided what’s next for me, continuing in the web strategy space is a reasonable place to keep looking.

My current resume emphasizes technical leadership with less focus on the strategy side.  The result has been many calls for more hardcore web engineering roles, which isn’t the best use of my talents.  To get the right focus, I’m currently going through a number of sites to find key areas of focus.  Here are the posts I went through:

• The Three Spheres of Web Strategy (Jeremiah Owyang)
• Letters to the Editor: Career Pathing to a Web Strategy Role (Jeremiah Owyang)
• The POST Method: A Systematic Approach to Social Strategy (Josh Bernoff)
• What is a Web Strategist? (Jeremiah Owyang)
• A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008 (Jeremiah Owyang)
• The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs (Jeremiah Owyang)

I’m sure there are many resources I’ve missed (and it’s very Forrester focused), if you have any good ones, please let me know.  I started out looking to build a list of competencies, but for the most part Jeremiah Owyang’s three spheres post is a great way to segment and he’s covered the majority.  I’ve started adding notes to each.

Community

• User experience (UX)/usability — understand the core concepts and how to apply, test, measure
• information architecture — a large part of my roles since 1997-ish
• social media skills — typically a more active listener than contributor, but working on it
• customer support — where I started my career and a person area of focus throughout career
• community marketing/marketing/product marketing — mostly helped with execution and measurement, though participated in the creation of several campaigns
• ability to listen and be empathetic — a personal strength

Business

• Marketing — understand the core concepts and have participated in the definition of campaigns as well as supporting execution
• advertising — an area requiring more development
• media — strong understanding
• management — 8 years experience
• measurement — understand core concepts and have applied in measuring efforts
• ability to evangelize internally — a personal mission
• process management — a personal passion
• resource management — 8 years experience
• obtain objectives — developed some, extracted the rest
• product development/product management — experience in creating customer-facing sites and applications
• savvy in political maneuvering — develop strong personal network within each organization
• understand the direction and strategy of the company — central to roles for several years
• manage external constituents — managed vendors, consultants, etc.

Technology

• Software Development — strong experience
• Web Development — strong experience
• Web Architecture — strong experience
• Industry Trends — always working to keep current
• experiments with web technology, but understands how to extrapolate and harness a tool — a large part of my passion for the web

My notes on each probably don’t help with my next step — but it’s nice to look at the competencies in relation to how I feel I measure.  Now to start mapping specific experiences to these competencies. More to come soon….

Typically, I take very few risks.  I was taught that you never leave a job unless you already have the next one lined up  Recently I realized my career wasn’t going where I wanted. So, I left my job at the beginning of July….

…and I didn’t have a new job lined up yet.

It was a big move for me, but I felt I needed to step out of the mix to get a better perspective.  I’ve never been good at sitting still.  So, I’m on the hunt for my next adventure.

As conventional wisdom recommends, I reached out to other professionals, my “network.”  I’ve worked with many talented people over the years, so there’s no lack of people to talk with.  I even went to a “Tweetup” near Boston last week and met some great people who were very open to helping me. It amazes me how many people are willing to help.  Everything goes well until we get to the question:

what do you want to do?

Truth is, I’m not sure.

I know it’s hard to find my next great role if I can’t articulate what I want. I’ve been working on the web for a long time. When I started in 1995, it was all about what we could do with the technology. I spent a few years writing applications and supporting web environments. In 2000 I moved into management. Initially responsible just for web engineering, but with increasing exposure and work on the marketing side of the house over the next 8 years.

I’ve seen the move from technology driving business to business driving technology. It’s a good change — I’ve seen too many projects cost a lot of money with little to no return for the business.

My career has also been moving from a focus on technology to business, but I’m not sure where it should go next. Should I go after another web strategy role? make the move to product management for an online product/service?  is there something I haven’t thought of yet?

I haven’t found my answer yet, I’ll try to keep you updated as I sort this out.

A little rant on call centers.  I just had a very frustrating experience today with a Voice Over IP (VoiP) company (I’m going to leave off their name as I like them and this is not a commentary on their service, just their support center).

My cable provider had an outage yesterday, our internet was down for at least 6 hours.  When it came back up, everything worked except our voip telephone service.  It typically takes a few minutes to reset itself.  I waited and it didn’t come back, so I called the support number for the company.  The first person I spoke with walked me through a scripted series of troubleshooting steps (some of which made little sense from a networking perspective).  After about 2 hours the person recommended I go replace the appliance from a retail store.  I did that (about 1.5 hours round trip drive — I live in the country).

On the first person’s recommendation I called in to support again to activate the new appliance.  After about 30 minutes of this second person not being able to successfully activate the appliance it was time to “hook up my computer” and troubleshoot again.  I have been relying on this service as my primary home number for years and trying to do a call over my mobile phone in the country is never easy.  It was exactly the same steps as the first call.  I finally hung up in frustration, went through the online activation and was up and running in 5 minutes.

I sent an email to the company to let them know how frustrating the experience was.  I’ve used their service for years with few problems, but let them know that if I have another support experience like this, I will most likely move to another service.

-k