Monday, September 12, 2016

No one is going to maintain your career. So, where do you start? Here are some "Resume" and "Online Presence" tips to help.

Imagine you are in the market for a new job, or you're thinking that you want to be on the market. How is your marketing machine working for you? How does your online resume stack up to the competition? How well does your LinkedIn profile match your real skills? Are unwanted people reading your "private" social posts? Can anyone find you online or are you lost on page 43 of a Google Search?

If you aren't certain your potential employers are going to be stunned by your work, or if your answers to these questions aren't certain... you need some help. Let's talk about what you can do to give yourself an edge.

Make no mistake... NO ONE IS GOING TO DO THIS FOR YOU. You have to do this yourself. Immediately.

To get noticed and to get through the screening process, we'll start with your resume. After all, what's a resume for? It's not supposed to get you the job. It's to get you an interview. 

Resume Tips
  • A reader should be able to get the highlights of your experience through a quick scan of your resume. Think 6 seconds. Then... think 2. What ARE you? Can they figure that out instantly? If not, then you have work to do.
  • Your resume must be attractive when you send it through email, print it out, and when you post it online. The best way to ensure that is to save it as a PDF. Electronically, that's about as good as you can get and be able to expect most people to be able to open it. 
  • Your resume must be well-formatted in a manner that is appropriate for this century. I.e. no tables or other graphical weirdness. No matter how cool it looks, these have to be parsed by programs (resume readers) and if the program gets confused, your resume gets tossed.
  • It must be written in a way that is easy to be read by humans
  • Finally it must be edited so it is tight (brevity is important) and so it gets to the meat of your experience quickly and succinctly. No one wants to read War and Peace.
Once you have your resume whipped into shape, you can start getting your online presence aligned with it. 
 
Online Presence Tips
  • Get a LinkedIn profile. You can expand your resume sections here in a more detailed manner. It is an "addendum" to your resume, not a mere duplicate.
  • If you have your own site, make it easy to find your resume. That resume should match your LinkedIn profile closely enough that there should be no questions when the two are compared. 
  • Make sure all of your links work. Nothing says "I'm not paying attention" like having a broken link to your resume, for example.
  • Check the security settings on your Facebook (and all social media). Make sure only the people you want to see your stuff have access. Can't figure it out? If there's something you don't want seen... delete it asap. 
  • Pay attention to what you're saying online. If you don't want the HR manager at your next company to show it to the person with whom you'd be interviewing, probably should delete it. And never write that stuff again!

Okay, that's enough to sink your digital claws in for now. Questions? Just post 'em in the comments!

If you want some personal attention, email me at billyjoecain@gmail.com


Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Capture the Essence. What IS the Game?



One of the challenges of building a video game as a project manager is trying to define the "essence" of the experience. You have to define that essence as early in the process as possible because it is going to help drive every aspect of the game for you. When there is a choice in development, you should always take the path that is most strongly tied to the essence.

For instance the essence of a game like Pac Man could be described as "collect dots and avoid ghosts." Once you have the essence, you write your game around that, which in turn generates the remainder of the features that support it.

The game's essence is inextricably linked to each part of development so that every aspect of the project melds into one. The project manager's role is to continually ensure that the game is on track and to ensure everything supports it, and continually redirect the team toward the goal as the project moves forward. When the team internalizes this behavior, the project begins to take on a life of its own. Your job, as a project manager, is to ensure that their creativity is allowed to flourish as long as deadlines are met.

Additional features in Pac Man that support "collect dots and avoid ghosts":
  • Eating Power Pellets that allow you to eat ghosts
  • Earn additional points for eating multiple ghosts in a row
  • Enjoy mini-cut scenes that bring out the character of the ghosts
  • Collect special items at certain times
Question each of your project's features reason for being. Do they each support the main essence? If not, they gotta go. Or maybe they can be re-imagined. The choice is yours to explore.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Are Videogames Becoming Marketing Machines? Yep.

The Marketing Cycle May be Complete. 
Are games becoming marketing machines? I believe so, and it may just be another evolution of the game industry's business model.

The goal of every commercial game is to attract players and earn income for the developers. To do this, developers incorporate every aspect of marketing possible, so that users want to tell one another about it in some way or another. After all, word of mouth is the best marketing tool.

(Social) Word of Mouth
First, creating a story that interests a customer enough to participate (or creating a place a player can create their own) is core to inviting them into an interactive experience. The better the story, the longer they play. Once players are engaged and enjoying themselves, the game can allow you to share your progress, so those players are your best marketing tool.

How did the Game Industry Integrate Marketing into its Products so Fully? 
Business models in the video game industry have constantly evolved. Beginning with a "buy it once" model with software literally sold in "baggies," over the years there were other evolutions including the "try and buy" and monthly subscriptions. Downloadable content for previously purchased games has added extra revenue to developers after the sale. A very successful model is "Free to Play" (F2P), where customers receive a free game, but to enhance their experience they may purchase virtual goods through real money micro-transactions. This is very prevalent in current mobile titles, where customers prefer free downloads because they can try a game with no financial risk.

Designing in-game virtual goods and a way to encourage but not force (i.e. market them) players to purchase them is the core to turning a game into a business that can support a development studio.

In addition to micro-transactions, there are also opportunities for in-game advertising can be used. Done well, integrating advertisements in games in ways that create more immersion into the experience (Pennzoil ads in a racing game) or enhance gameplay (ask a player if they would like to watch a video to earn additional fuel for a tractor in a farming game) can help game developers earn extra income on F2P games.

The Final Loop?
This leads to an interesting situation... marketing of the F2P game drives players to the game, and once they are playing the game, they are encouraged through play to purchase virtual goods, which are in-turn marketed to the player within the game experience. Adding the ability to socially post those purchases continues the game doing its own marketing. In-game advertising allows the game to market even more products.

So, what do you think? Are games marketing?

Monday, January 4, 2016

My Password Technique - What's Yours?

Is the beginning of the year a good time to change your passwords? Seems as good as any!

Here's my password "plan" to avoid using the same password on different URLs and hopefully prevent me from having to change ALL of my passwords at one time if there's a hack in one of my online profiles, etc.

I use a basic password that I customize for each URL. Then, I take the URL I'm logging into and pull two letters from it, capitalize them, and then add a weird symbol.

For LinkedIn, where my basic password is "pasword24" I would use something like: pasword24LI!

It's something I can remember and has lowercase, uppercase, numbers and a weird symbol. That way, all the passwords are similar and unique (to the point of a 2 letter ID that may be similar on different sites, like LinkedIn.com and Life.com (both start with LI).

You may want to use something that isn't a word or have duplicate or concurrent numbers or letters (which is why I deleted the second 's' and didn't use 21). I've been hit with that before and nothing's worse then having to have a special password once you've started working like this.