According to some widely quoted recent research, one in three job seekers make over 100 applications. For 48% of those polled, 100 applications has resulted in less than three interviews, and for 31% none or one. Whilst these statistics could be indicative of the still struggling economy, it’s unlikely.

When anyone carries out an activity 100 times and has only a 3% success rate, one has to wonder whether they are hearing the feedback the system is giving them. For spam email, a 3% response rate might be really good. But when you’re looking for a new job, a 3% rate is a signal to change what you’re doing. Every system has built in feedback – whether it’s the reports which get rejected because they are in the wrong format, the look on your boss’s face when you present your idea, or the complaint calls from the customer.

The problem is that many of us don’t hear the feedback, and if we do, we pretend we didn’t, or we leave it for another day to do something about it. And soon, we’ve done something 100 times with only a 3% success rate. Far better to respond to the feedback and continually adjust.

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/one-in-three-jobseekers-make-over-100-applica…

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. — Thomas Edison

There comes a point when being a business owner gets really hard (and I mean really hard). You’ve come up with your big idea, you’ve done all the initial legwork to set it up, and now comes the hard part: Getting the word out about your business and, more importantly, hanging in there while you get the word out about your business. The hard part now becomes not giving up too soon.

The Real Work

When you start a business, when you start a new product or service, when you launch anything really, that’s when you feel like you’re working really hard. That’s when you’re willing to stay up late and get up early to get all the groundwork completed so that you can start making money. As hard as it can seem during this time, you generally know what to do, or you can at least figure out what to do, and you just plow through getting the work done. Then you finish the work. (Cue sound of crickets.) Now what?

All right, now you figure out that you need a marketing plan. Great, that gives you something else to do! You finish the marketing plan and begin implementing it. (You believe in this plan. You’ve given it a lot of thought. You feel really confident about it. It’s going to generate the business you need.) You run through your plan for several days, maybe even several weeks, and then … nothing. Nothing happens, and in our instant-gratification-seeking world, this is where things start getting testy:

• When you’re over the rush of your big idea,
• When you’ve completed the work of creating it,
• When you need to pay the bills, and
• When it feels like you’re sitting on your laurels.

When you’re doing all that initial setup (building your website, creating the product, etc.), it feels like real work. Marketing doesn’t feel like real work, and it gets harder to justify and explain to those around us, particularly those who don’t have businesses. Marketing? What’s marketing? Building a website people get; that sounds like real work. Marketing? Marketing on Facebook and Twitter? All right, now you’re just playing around. Those are the conversations you have, both with yourself and with others, for justifying what you’re doing.

Writing posts for your blog, replying and posting on social networks, doing interviews, commenting on other sites and forums, searching for opportunities to guest post — all these things don’t feel like work, but they’re very necessary for building a successful business, and sticking with these activities for the bulk of your time each day for the six months or year it’s going to take you to gain some traction seems impossible.

Not Giving Up

So, how do you do it? How do you avoid giving up too soon?

1. You make a commitment. Do you want to do this? Are you willing to bet the next 6-12 months of your life on it? You have to be willing to say, “This is my commitment. These are the milestones I intend to reach. This is my intention.”
2. You maintain discipline. Each and every day, you have to say, “This is what I’m committed to doing. These are my top priorities.” You have to focus on what you believe to be the “highest and best use” tasks that will get the word out about your business and start generating income for you. You stay focused, not only on what you’re going to do, but also on what you’re not going to do (compulsively checking email, surfing the Internet, taking a dozen breaks each day, etc.).
3. You trust your plan. You’ve given a lot of thought to the best way for promoting your business, and now you just have to believe in it. Don’t keep switching plans and changing things up. It’s going to take time to see results. Give yourself at least a 90-day test with your current plan before doing any tweaking.
4. Be willing to stay up late and get up early. Although it’s not easy to think about, success isn’t just going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work to get things going. No one’s going to do it for you. As you start to get more successful, you still have to continue getting the word out, and juggling priorities can be a challenge. Know that handling incoming work and generating opportunities for future work are equally important.
5. Find support. Get an accountability partner to help you stay the course. It’s a lot easier to waiver when you don’t have someone else holding you responsible and accountable for your original plans and intentions.

Finding a way to hang in there and not give up on your vision can be the hardest thing you ever do to see your business to success, but you have to figure out how you’re going to stick with it for the time it will take to gain some momentum and start seeing results.

In the past, how did you find ways to hang in there until your idea took hold?

Photo by Flickr user ground.zero, licensed under CC 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

URList is a simple but very useful service that lets you create a list of links to share via a single URL. For example, perhaps you’d like to provide your team with a list of links to give them some background information on an upcoming project, or you have a collection of inspirational blog designs that you’d like to share with your followers on Twitter. That’s where URList can help.

Just head to the URList website and enter the address of the first web page you’d like to add to your list. You’ll then be taken to a page with a unique, Twitter-friendly short URL (e.g. http://urli.st/PF5). You can use this link to share your list with others. Plus, you can add as many links as you like to your list, and you can also give it a title.

Where I think URList gets really interesting, though, is that you can elect to let others add to your lists. This ability makes URList into a very useful tool for teams. They could use it to create a collaborative “live” list of links for reference, training or research, among other options. Lists can be added to over time.

URList is a free app. In order to open up your lists to others, you have to be signed in using either Google or Twitter credentials, but the basic service can be used without signing in.

What tools do you use for shared bookmarking?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Social media calendars are being created, modified, enhanced and utilized on an ongoing basis to better manage blogs, microblogs and social network content and messaging. Previously I wrote about these behind-the-scenes planning tools in “Why You Should Have a Social Media Calendar” and “Elements Of a Social Media Calendar,” where you can see some early iterations of these content grids.

As you are looking to fill in the blanks in your social media calendar? Here are some ideas you can use to develop the content for your blog posts, tweets and status updates.

Start with some “Marketing 101″ questions:

Next, you want to think in terms of “big picture,” longer-term items, then narrow your view to the more immediate and daily. Here are some questions you can answer to start filling in those blanks:

Annual, Quarterly and/or Seasonal

Start by thinking of “big picture” umbrella events and messaging:

• What events are taking place six months to a year out that inform your marketing efforts?
• What other marketing efforts do you have scheduled — or do you need to schedule — including press releases and social media releases?
• What are touchstone issues for your company that can inform messaging that expresses your company’s values?

Monthly

Concentrate on you want to achieve each month, including date-specific events that you can use to anchor your messages:

• What are you promoting?
• What actions do you want your audience to take (particularly ones that are measurable)?
• What’s happening with your company this month?
• What’s happening in your industry this month?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic this month you can comment on?

Daily

Here are some ancillary ways to keep conversations moving and draw out the lurkers in your social networking communities:

• What are you reading?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you doing?
• What do you want to know about your audience (i.e what questions you can ask them)?
• What’s happening with your company today?
• What’s happening in your industry today?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic you can comment on?
• What are your friends, fans and followers saying that you can repeat?
• What are your friends, fans and followers doing that you can acknowledge publicly?
• What calls-to-action can you announce to attract attention and stimulate conversations and participation?

Also think of the types of conversation starters you can use to achieve particular goals while taking your community’s needs into consideration. Here are some ideas for posts, tweets and updates:

• Brand-related: Something about your company or brand to establish values, tone and “personality”
• Fun facts about your company or industry
• Press releases with specific company news announcements
• Coverage of real-world events
• Creation of online events
• Hybrid online/offline events
• Customer service oriented
• Crowdsource a FAQ for your company
• Ask for feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Ancillary but relevant or related topics
• Current news (relevant but not too controversial)
• Twitter trending topics
• Customer recognition (birthdays, accomplishments, etc.)
• Quizzes, polls and surveys
• Quotes (but make sure they are relevant and don’t overuse them)

An important thing to remember when you are filling in your social media calendar is to stay focused on useful messaging, but even more important is to be present and genuine. No amount of planning can ever take the place of those spontaneous moments in your social networks when you act or react in the moment and your friends, fans and followers respond in kind.

How are you planning for the content you produce and messaging you publish in your social media channels?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

stock xchng image by user tome123

According to an article in Recruiter Magazine, the era of candidates causing themselves to not get jobs by having inappropriate Facebook pages is over.  The research they quote says: last year only 0.01% of candidates whose CVs impressed potential employers, failed to secure job opportunities due to questionable social networking profiles, compared to 0.1% in 2006.

However, another article on money.cnn.com suggests that we may have cleared up our Facebook pages, but not gone far enough. It explains how employers are doing deep web searches which show up absolutely everything you’ve posted on line, from forum comments to your Amazon wishlist, as well as declarations of bankruptcy and other personal information.

Understandably, some people are alarmed at the amount of information employers can gather. But in some ways, we’ve just come full circle. Years ago, the blacksmith you were apprenticed to would have known you since you were born, and your family since before that. And, even if we are alarmed, we can’t do anything about it – except make sure that what we post is appropriate and information is accurate.

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/era-of-facebook-slip-ups-ends/1006343.article

http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/14/news/economy/employers_creepy_web_search…

DA Gets Tough on Child Support Cases – KSBI 52 – … to be able to bring these people to court and make them face their obligations,” says Jeff Wagner, Oklahoma Child Support Services Spokesperson. …

Looking for a really fast way to share snippets of text, notes and files between computers, without having to sign up for yet another app? Check out Write.fm, a new app that lets you store notes and files on a web page. It’s a dead simple service — head to the website and you’ll automatically be redirected to a unique page for you to store your notes on, for example: write.fm/eqfvs8k. Type whatever text you’d like to share or save into the box and it’ll be stored at that URL, ready to access from another machine. If you’d like to upload a file, just hit the “Add file” button” and it’ll be tacked onto the bottom of the page (you can upload more than one file, too).

If you’re not happy with the assigned URL, you can pick your own (e.g. write.fm/wwd), as long as it’s not already being used. That’s pretty much all there is to the app. It is very basic — there are no bells and whistles like text styling controls, for example — and there’s zero security, so if someone guesses or intercepts your URL, there would be nothing to stop them getting at your stuff. However, as a very quick (and free) way of sharing text or files between computers with no sign-up, it works really well.

Write.fm could potentially also be useful for collaboration — you could, for example, upload a file to the page, email around the URL and have people add their comments to the page, or to the file itself. It’s really easy-to-use, so would be a good solution to use for less tech-savvy colleagues. Unfortunately, even though Write.fm auto-saves every couple of seconds, any changes to the page on the server are not automatically downloaded, so two or more people cannot work on the same page simultaneously, limiting its collaborative potential.

Write.fm is a product of Anthony Feint, the developer behind Task.fm, a task management app that uses an innovative but flawed natural language input method.

Let us know what you think of Write.fm in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

An article in this month’s Wired magazine shows pictures of cockpits of various high speed, high performance vehicles. It’s fascinating to see all the knobs and dials in the fast jet and a submersible. What interested me most though, was the the captain’s station of the Oasis of the Seas – the world’s longest cruise ship. The picture looks as I would imagine it, with lots of displays and things to twiddle and turn. In the article which accompanies the picture, the captain says “The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship” The article goes on to say: Those are typically operated by other officers.

It turns out the captain’s job is not to steer the ship at all. How many times are managers and leaders compared to ‘captains steering the ship’? How many times are new CEOs of companies in trouble described as needing to “turn the ship around”? How many times are articles written about staff “going overboard after their captain”?. And now it turns out, that captains don’t steer ships at all. So what are they doing?

The captain’s job, according to the captain of the Oasis of the Seas says is “mentoring and teaching”. In Manager Tools terms he’s delegated the steering of the ship and now coaches his staff to do it well. He manages the ship – he doesn’t actually do the work himself. That’s how you steer the longest cruise ship in the world – not by doing it yourself, but by delegation. Does that make you reconsider a job you didn’t delegate, now you know how big the jobs are that are delegated?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_cockpits/

Man Arrested for Stealing Chandeliers from Church – News On 6 – Wilcoxson was booked into the Oklahoma County jail on one count of Receiving/Concealing Stolen Property and a Failure to Pay Child Support warrant out of … – – and more » – -

Prosecutors charge alleged ‘deadbeat dads’ with felonies – NewsOK.com – … allegedly failing to pay court-ordered child support. “They’re basically stealing money right out of their children’s pockets,” Oklahoma County District … – – and more » – -