If you haven’t already seen this blog, postings of real cover letters sent in by job applicants, you should peruse it. Not only for the comedic value, but to understand a little better what it is recruiters go through, just a little, with all those resume and cover letters we see.

The key to avoiding finding your cover letter or resume on sites like this? Avoid slang. Offer clarity in what you seek, and what you offer, not confusing chatter. Less is more. And so on.

Long time no post, sorry, we’ve got lots going on now that summer appears to be starting, finally. But I have made a note of articles which our readers here may find interesting, so let’s start a conversation, shall we?

• Ryan Paugh things that Henry Ford’s management style will not work in today’s Gen Y driven work culture. I think he’s right.
• Mike Drexler and Rochelle Geller think those brought up in the traditional agency media role of building relationships and younger, more strategy and impact focused Gen Y’ers can learn to work together to shape the face of the new media department. They’re right, too. But change is hard to bring in at the top. Many agencies find success bringing in change at lower levels, standing quietly behind them and helping them pick the right battles, and growing those people into the management of the future.
• Steve Rubel thinks that many social media jobs won’t exist in the future. This guy thinks he’s wrong. All I know is, this conversation is from March, and we’ve only seen social media get bigger.

There’s more to come. Jump in. Tell us what you think is interesting.

The Story of a Bogus Blog” starts an article published in last week’s Adweek magazine about a PR class project gone awry. Last spring, a class of PR students built a blog around a girl who’d had her Coach purse stolen and returned, only to discover the returned one was counterfeit, and then launched herself into a semester long tirade against counterfeit luxury goods. All of this sponsored, of course, by Coach.

When the story broke, PR people got all worked up, academics got all worked up, but so far, the social media people are just standing back and watching to see what happens next.

Social media is a learn as you go mentality. How could it be that wrong to try something new and then have it cause such problems? This is where the movement overall gets a little tricky.

Various people quoted in the article think its a huge problem, the tricking of consumers in order to further a brand. But is it new ground? hasn’t guerilla marketing and viral marketing been kicking in for a while now?

No, of course not. Tricking the consumer has always been part of the deal, for many brands. The morality of advertising has been called into question for decades and generations. The difference is, in this time of social media, the consumer is smarter. And more cynical. What about:

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla campaign
• Lonelygirl15
• Ticketmaster creates fake friends on Facebook
• Does this wrinkle cream really do this?

Seriously, what’s the problem here? Is it because this idea was concepted in an educational, academic setting? Is it because it was a PR campaign, and the PR profession thinks it’s less morally corrupt than advertising? As one student says at the end of the article, “Public Relations people, in general, have very little morals when it comes being completely honest with the consumer…We were supposed to be working for Coach. If there was anybody who should have stopped it, it should have been Coach.” Ouch.

Are you twittering? Are you a twitteratti? Do you retweet from here to there? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Or are you out of bandwidth for just another form of social media timesuck?

Get over it. Twitter is the new black, if you’re a marketing person. If you aren’t talking social media to your clients, who do you think will?

Dustin Jacobson, Technical Director at Barkley here in Kansas City, gave a presentation on Twitter yesterday, and posted it on his blog, Shake Gently. Its valuable, I think. Even behemoth cable companies have figured out how to use it. And coming soon, more people will be using it to find talent.

Are you on top of where this is all going? Can your agency, your clients, your management, afford not to be?

You can follow us on twitter here and here.

Jennifer Patterson of La Communidad wrote a nice article for AdAge today about interviewing and finding the right people from the perspective of a small agency. Sometimes asking the right questions is the key to finding the right people.

Make sure people are a culture fit. Culture fit is about more than hiring people you’d want to have a beer with. It’s about work styles, drive, belief in the agency vision. We’ve all worked with that one person who didn’t pull his weight. In a big agency, there’s (arguably) room for this — there are enough people rowing so that one non-committed rower won’t sink the ship. But we’re not talking about those Viking long ships at a small agency. We’re talking about two to three people in a dinghy.

How does your agency make sure you’re hiring the right people? Do you focus more on making sure they can satisfactorily answer all your questions about doing the job? Or do you try and get a feel for personality, common goals and vision, and where they want to take their career? We tell candidates here all the time, its not about what you need as an employee, its about what you can provide to solve that agency’s problem. But that’s a two way street. As the employer, its not always about making sure thhe person you hire can do the job. It’s also about what you do as an agency to make that person part of your team, and make sure your job solves their career needs. We call it “mutual need fulfillment.”

Find the entire article at Small Agency Diary at AdAge.

What does your bag say about you - High-powered female executive, or Mommy CEO? Is it the traditional Coach briefcase? The super fancy look-at-me-I’m-a-Mommy designer bag? Maybe you carry one which can manage both baby and work things? Or quite possibly, you’ve given up on style and just haul around the free one they gave you at the hospital?

As conversations go regarding the Mommy Wars (working moms vs. staying-home moms, and the My-Way-is-Better catfighting between them that the media likes to propagate…), there are really only two topics. Do you leave your career permanently and dedicate the rest of your life to raising your children? Or do you maintain a career and raise a family? Is one a martyr and the other selfish? No. Either stance holds truth and consequences. And nevermind that there is actually a spectrum of choices in between the two.

Technology has brought us the Mompreneur, the Mommy-blogger who makes money from her ads, and a new generation of party consultants like Pampered Chef, Passion Party and Arbonne that make Tupperware and Avon look like relics from the June Cleaver age, a modernizing problem both are trying frantically to solve. And corporations have changed in these modern times, too, offering more employee-focused benefits like flex-time, job-sharing, and providing laptops and crackberries for free, actually increasing productivity by making their employees available to work 24/7. It is possibly to do both career and raise a family, and live to tell about it.

But when the conversation turns to “taking time off” to raise kids, with the intention of going back to your career someday, most opinions become negative. Most people believe leaving work for a few years to stay home full-time and raise kids is career death. But then why are so many doing it?

Many of the best and the brightest women choose to go home in the middle of their high-earning years (between the ages of 37 and 42), says Myra Hart, a professor at Harvard Business School. Fifty-seven percent of them are considering going back to work, reports the Boston-based research firm Reach Advisors. How hard is it for them to get rehired? To read some news accounts, it would seem that once women quit, they’re off the job path permanently.

The trouble with returning back to work after a mid-career break isn’t finding a new job, most studies show. Its finding a new job which will give moms the flexible time they think they need in order to maintain the accessibility for their families that they enjoyed while not working. But here, we go back to the same issues surrounding getting hired into any job, at any point in your career. Its not about your needs, its about how you solve problems for that employer. If what you bring to the table solves the right problems for that employer that no one else can, you can get what you want.

However, most companies won’t negotiate upfront what you want or need in the way of flexibility and family priorities, unless its clear upfront what you bring to the table. They want to know that as an employee, that you are focused on their needs, not your family’s. Most companies want you to prove your worth, first, and then after a trial period may be prepared to offer you more flexibility. So be prepared to go back full time, normal office hours, just like everyone else in that office who doesn’t have kids (or have responsibility for them). Get daycare lined up, it won’t kill them (it may even help their immune systems). Or if you have family in town, get them to help with the kids. Do whatever you have to do to be able to accept a full time job that puts you back on your original career path.

The question really is, how dedicated are you in returning to your career, given the things you have to do in order to get there? Do you really want to commit to it at the level you did before your break, or are you just bored and want some adult interaction? The difference between getting a job to get out of the house and returning to a full-force career can be enormous.

If you are still deciding whether to quit your day job and stay home to raise your kids, and how it might effect you later, consider this:

In research conducted nationwide in 2005 among 2,443 college-educated women of all ages, the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWP) found that 74 percent of women who want to go back to work do manage it. … “We’re finding that women who want to come back are having great success,” says Eliza Shanley, a cofounder of Women@Work Network, a resource center for women looking to reenter the workforce. “This is not the story of the woman with an MBA who has to work at Starbucks. You can come back.” Headhunter Julie Daum, from the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, echoes, “It’s important to realize that leaving for a few years is very different from dropping out.”

Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin are the authors of Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-At-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, a book offering strategy and advice to women resuming careers after extended time at home with children. One of their key points? Network, network, network. It’s more important than polishing up your resume.

So plan your staying-home exit strategy, just as you would with anything else. If you know you will one day want to get back on the career train, stay in touch with your network, have lunch with work friends and close industry affiliates regularly. Offer to consult or freelance for the company you are leaving, and through your network, you can gain other consulting projects, too. Keep getting the trade magazines and email newsletters and stay up on industry trends. Go to industry functions once in a while, and show you still know how to present yourself in a professional environment, regardless of the fact that you mostly run around in your yoga clothes and a ballcap.

And when you’re ready to get back in, you can work those connections that never got dusty to land the job that will work best for you, and your family, too.

Adage.com reports today that at the recent IAA Conference in New York, Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy and Dentsu Chairman-CEO Tateo Mataki told the International Advertising Association’s World Congress that advertising agencies need to create and adapt a new business model in order to stay relevant to their clients in the brave new world of consumer brand interaction.

[Mataki] “The business model in which the agency’s sole function is to create advertising and buy media is no longer viable,” he said. “We need a new model. We need to develop relationships where both parties share risks and rewards equally. Rather than just accepting assignments, we must be proactive. To manage change, we must take risks.”

I think Mataki gets it - agencies must come up with fresher, more creative ideas to reach that post-cynical consumer. Not neccesarily fresher creative messaging, but creative targeting, and this includes the roles of media, research and respecting the presence of marketing strategy provided by clients who are on the same page. The riskier, the better.

Levy, however, although he admits it’s near broken, doesn’t seem to really think the old model of advertising is all that bad. In his mind, the creative message is still the most important piece, and besides, he would rather change the clients.

Still he cautioned that the agency will increasingly look at creative that doesn’t just talk to a consumer, but enables interaction between consumers and marketers…He suggested the change will give rise to a new golden age of media where walls and silos will come tumbling down and creative is ultimate, but where services provided by agencies may have more value that physical assets. …”To build that new model, we need visionary clients not led by procurement and number crunchers, but people who can understand and appreciate the sheer value of our work, our ideas.

Creative is ultimate? Sure, the silos can come down between departments but everything still takes a back seat to the message and how that message is crafted to speak to the consumer. How is that different from the attitudes of most agencies now? And wouldn’t we all like to have visionary clients who aren’t worried about the bottom line? I mean, jeez, wouldn’t it be nice if the clients would all just shut up and let us do whatever we wanted to promoted their products instead of killing our creative spirit with concerns about things like MONEY and EFFICIENCY?

Maybe this is a prime example of the large scale, stereotypical difference between the Japanese and the French. Take risks, embrace and get ahead of change in the industry, working together, or whine about how clients need to appreciate your creative vision more, relax and turn over their pocketbooks.

And then there’s the American point of view, possibly the most salient of the bunch. Chuck Brymer, president-CEO of Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide, thinks agencies need to change their entire mentality because of how technology has changed consumer interaction.

…technology that allows consumers to communicate with each other increasingly makes consumers behave much like swarms. In this scenario, advertising becomes a two-track challenge of not only influencing the overall herd, but also influencing swarm behavior.

“In the past, we’ve always seen the big eat the small. In the new knowledge-based economy, the fast eats the slow,” he said. “Speed is the new big.”

Now there’s an idea. Acknowledge the speed with which information travels from brand to consumer and back to brand, change the way you approach the route of that information, and you may just be able to stay ahead of it. Brymer offers solutions, not just ideas. Don’t dream it, just do it. A slogan made in America, after all.

Engadget Mobile played some pretty good tricks yesterday, but this one was my favorite.

If you are ready to make a career move, and are open to relocation if needed, then sit down and decide ahead of time what is more important:

• the job
• the money
• the location/lifestyle

Assume you can’t get all three, how would you prioritize those things? Then be prepared to sacrifice something in order to get your highest priority.

Make sure the money that is being discussed is enough to warrant a relocation for you and your family, if you have one. If a company is looking to hire someone in the $75,000 range, and you do the due diligence and know that it will take at least $100,000 for your family to maintain a consistent standard of living in that new city, and money is more important than the job, then this is probably not your gig. Know that before you waste everyone’s time.

If relocation is your biggest goal, then you have to look at it differently, and sometimes there has to be a sacrifice in either money or job opportunity, or both. Companies are not going to pay to satisfy your personal needs, they are going to pay because you can satisfy their needs. But they are not going to pay over and above their local market just to solve a personal issue.

Here’s a scenario we’ve seen many times. You really want to move to a city that is within 10 miles of your parents, who are elderly and need help. There is an opportunity nearby that you find interesting, but not perfect for your career goals, but the company definitely thinks you are the right candidate, you are a bird’s nest on the ground to them, when normally they struggle to find talent who will come to their market. So, they are willing to pay a little more than normal. However, the schools there are below par in your opinion, and you feel you’d have to put your three children into private school at a cost three times the public school system, per child. This opportunity meets only one goal for you: location. But it doesn’t meet your career goals, or the money goals you need. Is it worth it?

Your private school needs are not the employer’s problem, that is your problem, and you cannot expect a company to pay you a higher salary to solve that problem. Even still, you started this, you have to know upfront what the barriers might be.

Here’s another scenario: You want to live in Colorado, so you can ski on the weekends and live that outdoor, green spaces lifestyle. There are a lot of people with the same idea as you, and they are already there. How do you compete for the few jobs that are available? Denver and other Colorado markets were hit pretty hard by the dot-com bust, as many tech companies had spread out along that corridor in their rush to play as hard as they worked in that IPO-crazed time. And just because a hot advertising agency built an office and moved out there so their management could work and play closer to their own ski homes does not mean its an overly healthy advertising community. Denver and Colorado Springs are still pretty small advertising markets, and big, long-standing clients are moving on or consolidating agencies there just as they are in other places.

What are you going to give up to get that lifestyle - money, or job satisfaction? Can you afford your goal of living that lifestyle, and skiing every weekend, if you make a lower salary? Can you be satisfied with your career choice knowing that you’ve jumped off the upward mobility track just to ski? Is this really the right time in your life to be making choices based on lifestyle? And did you consider that maybe you should have done that for a few years right after college and then started your more serious career progression when you were more ready to grow up?

A final scenario: You don’t really want to move, at all. Your family is happy, settled, and stable. But your career is going nowhere, and therefore the money isn’t either. You live in a city with a lot of industrial history and a dying housing market, and probably couldn’t sell your house quickly if you wanted to. But opportunities are growing in other cities, and there’s something nagging at you that your career, and therefore your ability to take care of your family might be better off somewhere else. You interview and get an offer for a company in another city, where you have no relatives or friends, but the money is fantastic and the job would satisfy your goal of getting the kind of experience you want for your career. Are you brave enough to make that move? Will uprooting your family destroy them?

I’m not answering these questions for you, just posing them as food for thought. The point is, if you are planning to make a move, whether its for your career or for the lifestyle/location, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Make sure, before you go on that interview that you could commit to making that move if it meets your goals. Otherwise you’ve wasted their time, and yours, and gotten your family worked up over nothing. Do the research first. Make sure you know why you are considering these priorities, and that it isn’t because you feel stuck and lost in your career, overall. Don’t use a relocation opportunity as a time to evaluate your career choices of the past, use it as a chance to continue on the path you started. And if you aren’t sure you’re on the right path anyway? Well, that’s a different post.

It seems like lately, every time I turn around I am being invited to a new social networking tool by someone, somewhere, in a network I am already part if. There are literally hundreds of them out there. Some big, with multinational users across various platforms, some small, just getting started and focused on a specific category. The question is, which ones are actually useful, and which ones just offer a new and different way to suck time out of the workday?

Last summer, comScore released a study showing MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Tagged all increased in June 2007 by dramatically huge percentages.

There’s too many to even name here, so I won’t try. LinkedIn, a business networking tool often called “Facebook for grownups” had over 14 million users back in September of last year when they introduced the ability to add user pictures; up from 10 million in April 2007. But Facebook let in grownups, too, and just seven months later total users had risen by 106%.

Then, to get into more of a niche, there’s NikePlus for runners, Adholes for advertising people, BlogHer for women bloggers, and Pownce for alpha geeks. Just to name a few. And don’t forget Flickr-hoo!. And it didn’t even start out as a photo-sharing site.

More recently, the rise of Plaxo, Naymz, Spock, and Spokeo, most of which are in beta and are really social networking aggregators, trying to get you to use their site to maintain all of your networking contacts. Its almost as if the industry started saying, “You know, with all these networks out there that people have to keep up with, what if we offered a way to collect all of those contacts into one place and then get them to use US instead?

But now, how many aggregators does one need to participate with in order to master the art of online networking? And does having a profile on every single one of them help you, or just make you look like a modern jackass?

So, which if these can help you with your career? Hands down, number one is LinkedIn. As they improve the tools available, almost every day there is a new way for you to interact with your network. You can find people who went not just to your same university or school, but who graduated with the same degree. You can join groups for that university, for agencies you’ve worked for, or clubs and organizations you participate in (or at least list on your resume…).

The key to LinkedIn is you have a searchable profile whether you are actively looking for a new opportunity or not. It’s the best place for people to find you and find out about your background, without the worry that your boss wil find that you’ve posted your resume and are looking for a new job. On LinkedIn, its a given that you and all your peers at work and even your boss have a profile, and probably link together and share networks. It doesn’t imply that you are available to be recruited, even though that’s exactly what’s happening.

Some people think you lose credibility in an online focused workplace if you don’t at least have a profile on the biggest and most used sites. And in advertising, there’s some truth to this, I think. (Not to mention protecting your own brand from squatters…). Probably the number one reason people join new socnets is because someone they respect sent them an invitation, and we all hate to be left out of a party. But plenty of people in the digital world don’t jump on every new and hot socnet tool to come around, and its not always because they’re wildly paranoid about the universe they helped to create. Plus, many of these sites spam a user’s entire address book, not fun. And “social network fatigue” has been on the rise for sometime, in fact, it probably led to the development of the OpenId concept.

So, recognize the timesuck factor. After all, if everyone in your network can see that you’re constantly twittering or Superpokin’ or sending out invitations to join something new, then you’re not probably getting any work done, and that doesn’t exactly make you a valuable employee. You don’t need to be building your network to tell everyone you’re just an empty suit, do you?

In recruiting, the mantra we often say is the best candidates have jobs they love. They are working hard and growing their careers. In an Open Source world, where the job market can go from feast or famine in a hurry, you need to be found and recognized whether you want a new job now, or not. Just make sure you’re spending more time working than networking.