I would like to introduce Stuart Mease of Virginia Tech University to all of you. Stuart is a member of the {grow} community and flat-out one of the brightest guys I know. He made a name for himself with creative applications of social media to economic development and I’m pleased to present this timely guest post today:

This recent headline in The Wall Street Journal caught my eye: “Some firms struggle to hire despite unemployment.”

So let’s dispel this unemployment myth right now. There are jobs out there and plenty of them … unless you’re part of the Unserviced Workforce.

That may be an unfamiliar term to you.  There are three distinct job seekers in today’s labor market – white collar professional workers, blue collar skilled workers, and the Unserviced Workforce.

Unemployed white collar professional workers are being serviced by private third-party groups (headhunters). Their skill sets may be in high demand and companies are paying a premium for their services. Professions such as health care, engineering, information technology, and accounting are all in high demand regardless of region.

The blue collar skilled workers are being serviced by public third-party agencies (community colleges, workforce investment boards, employment commissions, staffing agencies, etc.). Typically their skill sets are also in high demand because companies try train a constant pool of candidates for these jobs. Professions such as manufacturing, trades, technicians are all in high demand.

The Unserviced Workforce is caught in the middle. Neither the public nor private sector is helping this group find jobs.  This segment is characterized by younger people with potential or upside; has some  higher education; good (but not billable) skill sets, and are looking for a “professional” job paying a salary between $25k-$50k, depending on the region. This is the critical mass of knowledge workers who are underemployed, over-educated, or who are leaving smaller regions for larger metropolitan areas in search of better employment opportunities.

Here are seven possible outcomes for the Unserviced Workforce:

1) Acquire new skills and move up

This will require continuing education and a commitment to the acquisition of demanded skills.

2) Humble yourself and move down

This will require accepting a lower standard of living and the realization that there is a surplus of people with the same skills sets in the market.

3) Start a business

This will require taking risk by starting small while still looking for a job, going to school, or working a platform job, and identifying government programs to assist you.

4) Move laterally between jobs in the Unserviced Workforce

These people will most likely not make an investment in continuing education or start a business. They may think they are better than blue collar jobs. Typically younger, these workers will bounce from job to job and never “get ahead.”

5) Remain unemployed

These people are still not humbled or motivated to get out of the unserviced workforce because they are waiting for the economy to turnaround and/or family/spouse supported.

6) Leave the region

These people believe “it’s not me” but the place I live that’s the problem. They are typically unattached or younger and are more capable of leaving or are forced to leave due to the severity of the regional economy.

7) Retire

These people are focused on years of work experience rather than result-based metrics. They are frustrated by perceived age discrimination in the recruiting process. They will re-enter workforce at a later time, perhaps working only part-time. Their decision depends on their nest egg and lifestyle.

If you are a job seeker and are reading this post, I challenge you to get out of the Unserviced Workforce by seeking Outcomes #1, #2 or #3. Inaction will leave you in Outcomes #4 and #5 and poor attitudes results in Outcomes #6 and #7.

There are jobs out there.  No public or private-sector program is going to create a job market equilibrium. It’s solely up to YOU — the job seeker — to stay out of the Unserviced Workforce.

Stuart Mease’s mission is “connecting people” to create mutually beneficial relationships. He is currently serving as the Director of Undergraduate Career Services in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @stuartmease.

I just read a fascinating (and lengthy!) report from McKinsey on tech-enabled business trends to watch and thought it was important enough to summarize for our community.  Here are some highlights from this excellent report:

1. Crowd-sourcing moves into the mainstream

In the past few years, the ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 percent of executives recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities.

• Intuit hosts customer support communities for its financial and tax return products to lower customer service costs by 90 percent.
• P&G created a social network of influential mothers (Vocalpoint) to drive word-of-mouth marketing. In markets where Vocalpoint influencers are active, product revenues have doubled.
• Facebook has marshaled its community for product development, recruiting 300,000 users to translate its site into 70 language. The entire French Facebook site was translated in one day.

2. Making the network the organization

Companies are pushing substantially beyond crowdsourcing to build and manage flexible employee networks that extend across internal and external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility.

• At one global energy services company, geographic and business unit boundaries prevented managers from accessing the best talent across the organization to solve client problems. Help desks supported engineers, for example, but rarely provided creative solutions for the most difficult issues. Using social-network analysis, the company mapped information flows and knowledge resources among its worldwide staff. The analysis identified several bottlenecks but also pointed to a set of solutions. Using Web technologies to expand access to experts around the world, the company set up new innovation communities across siloed business units. These networks have helped speed up service delivery while improving quality by 48 percent.
• Dow Chemical set up its own social network to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. To broaden the pool of talent, Dow has even extended the network to include former employees, such as retirees.
• Other companies are using networks to tap external talent pools. These networks include online labor markets (such as Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk) and contest services (such as Innocentive and Zooppa) that help solve business problems.

3. Knowledge worker productivity

Knowledge workers typically are highly-paid employees, so increasing their productivity is critical.  Collaboration technologies are emerging to do just that.

• Video and web conferencing are expected to grow at a rate of 20 percent annually.
• At one high-tech enterprise, the sales force became a crucible for testing collaboration tools. The savings on travel were four times the company’s technology investment. Customer contacts per salesperson rose by 45 percent, while 80 percent of the sales staff reported higher productivity and a better lifestyle.
• The US intelligence community made wikis, documents, and blogs available to analysts across agencies (with appropriate security controls, of course).
• Bechtel established a centralized, open-collaboration database of design and engineering information to support global projects. Engineers starting new ones found that the database, which contained up to 25 percent of the material they needed, lowered launch costs and sped up times to completion.

The next leap forward in the productivity of knowledge workers will come from interactive technologies combined with complementary investments in process innovations and training.

4. Growing the ‘Internet of Things’

With RFID technologies, products themselves are becoming elements of an information system, with the ability to capture, compute, communicate, and collaborate around information — something that has come to be known as the “Internet of Things.”

Embedded with sensors, actuators, and communications capabilities, such objects will soon be able to absorb and transmit information on a massive scale and, in some cases, to adapt and react to changes in the environment automatically. These “smart” assets can make processes more efficient, give products new capabilities, and spark novel business models.

• Auto insurers in Europe and the United States are installing sensors in customer’s vehicles. The result is new pricing models that base charges for risk on driving behavior rather than on a driver’s demographic characteristics.
• In medicine, sensors embedded in patients continuously report changes in health conditions to physicians, who can adjust treatments when necessary.
• Sensors in manufacturing lines for products as diverse as computer chips and pulp and paper take detailed readings on process conditions and automatically make adjustments to reduce waste, downtime, and costly human interventions.

5. Experimentation and big data

Data are flooding in at rates never seen before — doubling every 18 months— as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from the social web and these newly-deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as “big data.” Companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.

• Web-based companies, such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Google, have been early leaders, testing factors that drive performance — from where to place buttons on a website to the sequence of content displayed — to determine what will increase sales and user engagement.
• Capital One continues to refine its methods for segmenting credit card customers and for tailoring products to individual risk profiles. Financial analysts, IT specialists, and marketers conduct more than 65,000 tests each year, experimenting with combinations of market segments and new products.
• Tesco gathers transaction data on its 10 million customers through a loyalty card program. It then uses the information to analyze new business opportunities—for example, how to create the most effective promotions for specific customer segments — and to inform decisions on pricing, promotions, and shelf allocation.
• Ford, Pepsi, and Southwest Airlines analyze social web data in real-time to gauge the immediate impact of their marketing campaigns and to understand how consumer sentiment about their brands is changing.

6. Wiring for a sustainable world

Information technology’s share of the world’s environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world’s data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. The use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.

• Businesses are adopting “green data center” technologies to reduce sharply the energy demand of the ever-multiplying numbers of servers.
• IT manufacturers are organizing programs to collect and recycle hazardous electronics.
• Smart buildings embedded with IT that monitors and optimizes energy use could be one of the most important ways of reducing energy consumption in developed economies. And powerful analytic software that improves logistics and routing for planes, trains, and trucks is already reducing the transportation industry’s environmental footprint.

7. Imagining anything as a service

Technology now enables companies to monitor, measure, customize, and bill for asset use at a more granular level than ever before. Asset owners can therefore create services around what have traditionally been sold as products, or even by-products. B2B customers enjoy these service offerings because they allow companies to purchase units of a service and to account for them as a variable cost rather than undertake large capital investments. Consumers also like this “paying only for what you use” model, which helps them avoid large expenditures, as well as the hassles of buying and maintaining a product.

• In the IT industry, the growth of “cloud computing” exemplifies this shift. Software as a service (SaaS), which enables organizations to access services such as customer relationship management, is growing at a 17 percent annual rate.
• The biotechnology company Genentech, uses Google Apps for e-mail and to create documents and spreadsheets, bypassing capital investments in servers and software licenses.
• Many urban consumers are drawn to the idea of buying transportation services by the hour from companies like CarShare and ZipCar rather than purchasing autos.  This service is growing 25% annually.
• A number of companies are employing technology to market salable services from business capabilities they first developed for their own purposes. British Airways and GE, for instance, have spun off their successful business-process-outsourcing businesses, based in India, as separate corporations.

8. The age of the multi-sided business model

Multi-sided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges.

• Spiceworks offers IT-management applications to 950,000 users at no cost, while it collects advertising from B2B companies that want access to IT professionals.
• Sermo, an online community of physicians who join (free of charge) to pose questions to other members, participate in discussion groups, and read medical articles. Third parties such as pharmaceutical companies, health care organizations, financial institutions, and government bodies pay for access to the anonymous interactions and polls of Sermo’s members.
• Flickr, Pandora (online music), and Skype not only use this kind of cross-subsidization but also demonstrate the leveraging effect of networks — the greater the number of free users, the more valuable the service becomes for all customers. Pandora harnesses the massive amounts of data from its free users to refine its music recommendations. All Flickr users benefit from a larger photo-posting community, all Skype members from an expanded universe of people with whom to connect.
• MasterCard analyzes consumer purchasing patterns and sells aggregated findings to merchants.

9. Innovating from Third World countries

Disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. In other words, developing nations may be a wellspring of innovation. Some of these “extreme” business models are spreading to traditional markets thereby creating new global competitors.

• In parts of rural Africa, traditional retail-banking models have difficulty taking root. But Safaricom, a telecom provider, offers banking services to 8 million Africans by allowing a network of shops and gas stations to load virtual cash onto cell phones.
• Alibaba, China’s leading B2B exchange, helps more than 30 million members share data on their manufacturing services with potential customers — in effect, offering Chinese manufacturing capacity as a service, enabling small businesses anywhere in the world to identify suppliers quickly.
• Hundreds of companies are now appearing on the global scene from emerging markets, with offerings ranging from a low-cost tutoring service to the remote monitoring of sophisticated air-conditioning systems around the world.
• Some global companies, such as GE, are locating research centers in these cauldrons of creativity to spur their own innovations there. Others, such as Philips and SAP, are now investing in local companies to nurture new, innovative products for export that complement their core businesses.

10. Producing public good on the grid

The role of governments in shaping global economic policy will expand in coming years.  Technology will be an important factor in this evolution by facilitating the creation of new types of public goods while helping to manage them more effectively. This last trend is broad in scope and draws upon many of the other trends described above.

• “Wired” cities such as London, Singapore, and Stockholm have used smart assets to manage traffic congestion in their urban cores, and many cities are deploying these technologies to improve the reliability and predictability of mass-transit systems. Sensors in buses and trains provide transportation planners with real-time status reports to optimize routing and give riders tools to adjust their commuting plans.
• Networked smart water grids will be critical to address the need for clean water. Embedded sensors can not only ensure that the water flowing through systems is uncontaminated and safe to drink but also sense leaks.
• Law-enforcement agencies are using smart assets—video cameras and data analytics—to create maps that define high-crime zones and direct additional police resources to them.
• Cloud computing and collaboration technologies can improve educational services, giving young and adult students alike access to low-cost content, online instructors, and communities of fellow learners.
• Through the Web, governments are improving access to many other services, such as tax filing, vehicle registration, benefits administration, and employment services.

Whew. That was quite a long post!  Let’s turn it over to you and your thoughts on these megatrends …

I’m a judge on the International Economic Development Council’s annual website competition this month and I’ll be featuring some of the amazing best practices I’m witnessing in some future posts.

I’ve been impressed with some of things Calgary, Canada has been doing for some time and I really love this new marketing angle they’ve developed for their city — positioning their community as place that enables the new economy by making it easy for people to work from home.

Although working from home isn’t a new concept, making it part of a city’s brand is … and I thought this upbeat video treatment gets the unique  point across nicely. Calgary has done done also done a beautiful job with their “Live in Calgary” website.”

If you market to governments and governmental agencies, a new social media directory may be extremely useful to your efforts.

Microsoft just launched a site called Gov2Social, a directory that aims to list state-by-state for the social media participation for elected officials, state government agencies, cities, towns and counties.

The project is counting on users to input their government’s social media participation.  It currently has about 500 entries so it’s usefulness is pretty limited at the moment but keep an eye on it if you market and sell to governments.

When the website is populated, it will be possible to sort and analyze top government social media users by city and state.  Microsoft also plans to add add podcasts, analytics, case studies and best practices.

On a webinar last week, I briefly covered an idea I call the information eco-system (or social footprint) and received a lot of questions about it.  This is a critical concept for businesses today so I thought I should expand on the idea.

If you did a web search for you or your company three years ago, the result would have been a list of websites.  If you conducted the same search today, you may get LinkedIn profiles, YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, maps, perhaps even tweets from Twitter.  In fact, as the social web has emerged, visits to traditional websites have declined dramatically for many companies.

The implication is that if you have a website and think that’s all you need any more, you’re not understanding the social web.

People have the opportunity to find you (and your competitors) in lots of places now and you should have a systematic, mindful strategy to populate this information eco-system with content that will support your business objectives … and hopefully drive people back to your website. Put your information out there where the people are. Then give them a reason to go back to learn more at your website.

Let me give you a dramatic example of this in action. Recently I posted a slide deck on SlideShare for the convenience of my college students.  I went back to the site an hour later to make sure the slides had uploaded properly and 251 people had already viewed the deck.  None of them were my students, since they didn’t know about it yet!   Those 251 visitors to my deck were vitally interested in a presentation called Social Media 101 and were high potential contacts for me, right?  I added a slide at the end directing people to visit my website, blog, follow me on Twitter, etc.

Another little example: I recently gave a talk to economic development leaders and asked them what they would get if they googled their cities.  If the answer is YouTube videos of drunken conventioneers, they better get out there and populate the social web with videos that tell their story THEIR way.  If you don’t systematically populate the web with your story, you’re abdicating the brand management for your organization.

So, create and own the social footprint of your brand everywhere you possibly can … or at least to the extent that your resources can support.

Does this make sense?  What ideas do you have about this concept?

I’ve had the great privilege of teaching a college-sponsored class on social media marketing and as usual, I’m learning more from the class than what they’ve learned from me … but that will be our little secret, OK?

As I was providing examples of how you can leverage content across various channels to increase awareness, I had to admit that I didn’t practice this very well myself.  Why?  I just don’t have the time.  

My marketing consulting practice has been very strong, and as I strive for an ideal work-life balance, something has to give.  Time spent on incremental efforts like Facebook and Twitter has to take a back seat to family and customer needs.  

This may seem like heresy from somebody who lives and breathes marketing, but I think this will be reality for more and more people.  As the economy heats up, unemployed, or under-employed, individuals spending vast amounts of time on the social web and networking will have to make new choices as they return to work.  

Here’s my hypothesis:  The growth of social media will slow as the economy improves.  And in areas where the economy is doing extremely well, social media usage may actually decline slightly.

Other possible implications:

• As people return to work, the prime activity level on social media will be more heavily-weighted to the evening hours, since many companies restrict social media usage in the workplace.
• The number of channels in which people participate will narrow. This may hasten the decline of some platforms like MySpace.
• There may even be a slight shift in advertising budgets BACK to traditional media (drive-time radio?) since access to Internet-based impressions will be limited in a workplace.  How do you see a Facebook ad when you’re working a construction job?

I believe that use of the social web will still grow overall as people and companies find clever new ways to make the underlying technologies more useful and fun. But I think it is unavoidable that an improving economy will temper this growth.  The best environment for social media growth is when people have a lot of time on their hands and a shift is in our future.  Do you agree?

Note:  In addition to some wonderful comments below, you can find a nice counterpoint perspective on Gregg Morris’s related blog post: http://bit.ly/3tQtiW

NEWS FLASH: If you are not being supported by your boss and you hope to pressure him/her into supporting your nascent social media initiative through a “grassroots” effort, it’s not going to work. Not in the long run. For effective, lasting organizational change to occur, it must be supported from the top. How do you gain that support when your boss doesn’t get it?

Who is the “sponsor” of your social media effort?

Here are six ideas to get the boss on-board:

Conduct a “pilot” program. One of the most effective ways to get something started is to propose a temporary project. For example, go to your boss and tell her you want to try a new idea for 12 weeks (which sounds shorter than 3 months!). Explain that you will do this as an added, incremental effort that will not interfere with your normal job duties, you will measure and re-evaluate at the end of the period, and together you’ll decide whether to continue or not. Once the effort gets going and gains momentum, it’s going to be difficult to stop unless you completely blow it. So don’t blow it. : )

Money really does talk. Whatever you do, don’t go into a meeting with a company executive explaining that you want sponsorship to measure your company’s “quality of conversations.” If you are still buying into the “it’s all about the conversation” hype, read this (measurement and ROI) and this (focus on money). Of course the social web is about relationships, but everything measured in an organization SOMEHOW relates back to money, whether it’s profits, donors or funding. Social media is no different. Be prepared to explain how your initiative ties to the company’s objectives. If you can’t, you’re not ready for this discussion.

Preach fear in the morning and redemption in the afternoon. Scare ‘em. Seriously. Fear is a great motivator: Fear of what the competition is doing, fear of being left behind, fear of missing a trend, fear of making a wrong decision. Then, after your boss is shaking in his boots, explain what you can do to beat the competition, keep your company ahead, and make your boss look great … for absolutely no investment!

Plan for problems. When implementing change in an organization, it’s important to have a counter-measure for every obstacle you’re likely to face. Literally write down every possible argument and reason people will argue against your social media proposal and then formulate a reasonable counter measure to address them. And the hurdles aren’t just money and resources. It could be politics and competing priorities. Get your supporters to help you think-through effective answers to anything your boss can throw at you and be well-prepared.

Now wouldn’t you sell your home through a company like that?

Graphic: Metro Denver’s website is built to shuttle people to meaningful content, wherever it might be.

While every marketer seems to be immersed in Web 2.0 these days, let’s not overlook the changing role of the organization’s website in this marketing mix. If you’re not re-thinking the role of your traditional website, you should be!

Websites began as digital receptacles for traditional print content and slowly evolved to be more interactive and useful. The social web is changing all that … radically. Today, there are thousands of places to store and promote company content, and not all of it is going to be generated by friends. That’s why a new core strategy must be to populate the social web with as much accurate and useful content as possible. In my classes, I refer to this as an organization’s “information eco-system,” and it must be systematically maintained, monitored and nurtured.

Your website is no longer just a “destination.” In this environment, the company website becomes a content engine and quarterback, efficiently directing people throughout the eco-system to the news, information and applications they need to meet their needs, wherever it might be.

In research I’ve been conducting on the use of social media among economic development organizations, I came across a terrific case study in Metro Denver. Denver has methodically populated its information eco-system with rich and meaningful content, including a top-notch blog. Search the social web, and it will inevitably lead you to content that guides you back to the website, which is organized into user-friendly buckets of information. Need to go back out to the ecosystem? Links to social media connections are right on Denver’s landing page. This is a brilliant example of putting customer needs at the forefront of strategy, execution and design.

As you hurtle onto the social web, don’t leave your website behind or your social media presence will be sub-optimized!