Everyone is looking for a way to make their resume stand out in today’s job market. One way to do that is by giving your resume some visual appeal. Well-designed resumes with color and images can attract attention over those with plain old text.
That’s not to say everyone should add pictures to their resume. A graphical layout might not be for everyone, nor appropriate for every profession and industry. And if you don’t have an artist’s eye (or a favor to call in to a graphic designer), attempting something like this might not work out to your advantage.
But if you know what you’re doing, and need a little inspiration, here are 10 digital resumes with some very cool visuals.
1. Give the Reader Your History
A key element of a resume is your professional background — where you started, where you are now, and the places in between. Resumes with maps or infographics provide the same chronology of information, but with a bit more flair.
Michael Anderson’s infographic resume turns his employment and academic history into a colorful visual journey.
Ozgur Alaz thought to plot his job history on Google Earth rather than on a list of text bullets.
2. Aesthetics Matter
In traditional resumes, the formatting and layout are important. Readers gravitate toward resumes with eye-pleasing fonts and structure. They also lean toward resumes with ample white space throughout the document. Resumes that visually feel like they will take a long time to read usually get put aside.
These graphical examples use design compel the reader to explore it now, rather than later.
Pau Morgan turned her CV into a clean, modern chart that is engaging, yet easy on the eyes.
Graphic designer Tudor Deleanu brings color and texture into what would otherwise be a simple list of previous employers.
3. Make It Personal
Traditional resumes can be “humanized” by a well-written cover letter. Graphical resumes can add a whole new dimension by visually introducing the person behind the experience.
Federico Moral went with an anthropological theme, placing his skills into the timeline of human evolution.
Francis Homo turns his own silhouette into a frame for his achievements.
Brandon Kleinman adds a really creative twist by making a short presentation out of his Facebook photos.
4. Use Graphics to Inform
Images can be used to tell an employer something about the resume before the first word is even read. The message could be “I’m a game designer,” or “I work in the food industry.” An image related to the profession or industry sends a message right away and can encourage the reader to learn more.
Illustrator and animator Sean McNally pours his gaming roots into this clever CV.
Designer Jason Takeuchi built this artful resume template around food — a great way to introduce yourself to those in the restaurant biz.
Conclusion
Deciding between a traditional text or graphically designed resume really depends on your profession and industry. Just throwing an image on the page will do little to set your resume apart from others. There has to be some thought behind the message you want to send. When incorporating design elements, remember to keep on task and consider the reader’s first impression.
What other resume design tips are important to keep in mind? Leave us your comments.
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
For food and drink brands, crowdsourcing new products and flavors makes perfect sense. Not only does it increase engagement, it gives the people that consume the products a say in their development. That interaction makes them more likely to shell out cash when the item hits shop shelves.
Thanks to social media, it’s become easier to to ask your customers to contribute to product development or collaborate on other creative endeavors. Not only is it doable, it’s been done, and with great success, by major brands.
“This trend is a direct reflection of the new meritocracy caused by the rise of the social web. Now everyone had the same power to not only consume but also produce things,” said John Winsor, founder of Victors & Spoils, and the author of Baked In and other books about co-creation. “Brands can use the power of their digitally connected consumers to co-create new products or face the wrath of those same consumers as they go into competition with them.”
We spoke to three major brands — Ben & Jerry’s, Coca Cola’s vitaminwater and Dunkin’ Donuts — to find out more about their recent crowdsourcing campaigns. If you are interested in the new people power that connected consumers wield, then read on for some delicious insight into how each campaign went down.
Ben & Jerry’s is no stranger to fan feedback; some of its best-selling flavors were born from customer suggestions, but in 2010 it took the concept a step further with the “Do the World a Flavor” competition.
Fans were able to invent their own variety of the popular ice cream via a fun online “Creation Station.” Finalists won a trip to the Dominican Republic to see a sustainable fair trade cocoa farm and the winning flavor was produced as an official Ben & Jerry’s product.
The specific aim of the contest was to raise awareness for fair trade ingredients, and with around 10,000 new flavor suggestions from the U.S. alone, Ben & Jerry’s achieved that goal. We asked Sean Greenwood, “grand poobah” of public relations for Ben & Jerry’s about the “Do the World a Flavor” competition:
Why did you opt for crowdsourcing for the campaign?
It’s always a tremendous opportunity for us to tap into our fan’s passion, creativity and their own interpretation of “Peace, Love and Ice Cream.” Our incredible fans come up with some great flavors. Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, Chubby Hubby? Ever hear of those? Yep, all from our fans. The crowdsourcing offers an opportunity for fans to participate and create some fun, and as Jerry says: “If it’s not fun, why do it?”
How was the campaign a success for you?
It was a tremendous global opportunity for us to talk about our belief in the fair trade model. Since then, we’ve been hard at work making our own flavors using still more fair trade goods and communicating Ben & Jerry’s commitment to transition to using all fair trade ingredients, globally, by 2013.
Do you think crowdsourcing will be big in the future as a way for fast moving consumer goods brands to engage their audience?
I think any chance that companies have to connect with their fans in a fun manner is golden. For us, in this program, crowdsourcing was the hot fudge, whipped cream and nuts on top of our sundae!
Dunkin Donuts has run two very successful “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” contests in the past, allowing fans to design their own perfect pastry product. Last summer they tried something a little different.
To promote the “mixology” potential of its Coolatta drinks, Dunkin’ Donuts asked fans to collaborate on a playlist of summery songs that would go well with fan’s favorite Coolatta flavors.
The campaign netted 300,000 new Facebook fans while over 40,000 Pandora users added “The ultimate Coolatta summer music mix!” to their list of stations and spent nearly 14,000 hours listening to the station.
We quizzed Ben Smith, interactive marketing manager for Dunkin’ Donuts, about the “Flavor Boogaloo” project:
Why did you opt for crowdsourcing for the campaign?
Allowing our Facebook fans to help us create an upbeat custom Pandora channel dedicated to playing, “The ultimate Coolatta summer music mix!” was a great opportunity to connect with our fans in a meaningful way while highlighting Coolatta mixology.
We leveraged Pandora as the home to the “The ultimate Coolatta summer music mix!” because of its reach and appeal.
How was the campaign a success for you?
The campaign was designed to raise awareness of Coolatta mixology and encourage Dunkin’ Donuts fans to try our Coolatta products throughout June and July, while also increasing engagement on the Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook page. We found the greatest success engaging with fans through sparking fun discussions of the best songs of summer and Coolatta mixology on Facebook and Twitter. As a result, Dunkin’ Donuts was able to achieve and sustain a high level of engagement throughout the campaign.
Year over year, Dunkin’ Donuts has seen double-digit growth throughout its frozen and iced beverage category.
Do you think crowdsourcing will be big in the future as a way for fast-moving consumer goods brands to engage their audiences?
Before jumping into the conversation on our social media channels, we always listen to what our fans are saying. Social communities are interactive by nature and listening to what our fans want to hear is how we have been able to engage with them in a meaningful way. By listening and participating in an ongoing conversation with our fans and followers, we have developed programs and promotions that are fun and interesting, while also encouraging brand advocacy with our fans’ and followers’ network of friends.
We will continue to provide our fans with a superior social media experience, and if we remain authentic and committed to listening to our followers and engage them as we have, I see our number of followers continuing to increase, especially as we continue our brand’s growth and expansion throughout the country.
Coca-Cola-owned Glaceau brand vitaminwater gave its fans the vote with a “flavor creator lab” on its Facebook page. The goal was to come up with a brand new variety of drink. Fans could vote for their favorite flavor, play games and answer quizzes to help determine which “functional benefit” the beverage should offer and even have their say on the design of the label.
The winning flavor — named “connect” — hit shop shelves in 2010, after 40,000 Facebook users had created unique label designs via the lab. Participants spent an average of approximately seven minutes engaging with the application. Matt Kahn, Senior Vice President of Marketing for vitaminwater, reveals the thinking behind their social strategy:
Why did you opt for crowdsourcing for the campaign?
Vitaminwater has always had a very loyal, interactive fan base and once the brand joined Facebook we heard more regularly from our consumers. At the time, the vitaminwater flavor creator program was a natural next step — it allowed for us to bring more exclusive content and real programming directly to our fans.”
How was the campaign a success for you?
The vitaminwater flavor creator was a three month, three step program that allowed us to have a two way conversation with our consumers. We gave our fans the tools to help develop something they were passionate about — in the end, we heard loud and clear what it was that they wanted when it came to vitaminwater.
Do you think crowdsourcing will be big in the future as a way for fast moving consumer goods brands to engage their audience?
Vitaminwater was among the first companies to use social networking to give fans such level of control over product innovation — a variety of vitaminwater was actually made by our fans, for our fans. Crowdsourcing was a great way for us to tap directly into our consumers — we were able to get them information faster and interact with them directly.
Conclusion
For savvy brands, product development has moved from a sterile lab to the social web and become a fantastic marketing opportunity. If brands want to engage today’s connected consumer, they need to get social and start listening.
“Today there is no choice. It’s either collaborate with your consumers using co-creative and crowdsourcing tools or perish,” Winsor said. “There will be collateral damage for those who don’t want to play.”
Did you take part in any of the campaigns above? Do you see crowdsourcing playing a big part in the future of food and drink product development? Have your say in the comments below.
As marketers focus on optimizing their social media programs this year, return on investment is going to be a huge consideration. As a result, marketers will — and should — take a more calculated approach towards budgeting for social marketing initiatives. Prioritizing spending on particular social activities, though, is a task that hasn’t quite been mastered by most companies.
Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Founder Charlene Li of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, released a report on Thursday about “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets.” In short, the report concludes that budgets should be based on the maturity level of a corporation’s social business programs.
Altimeter interviewed 140 corporate social strategists to create a standard for categorizing programs into novice, intermediate and advanced maturity levels.
When asked about their programs, about half of respondents identified their programs as intermediate, while the rest were almost equally split between novice and advanced. The below graph is an overview of the priorities that each type of program should focus on. Read on for a more in-depth look at these goals.
Assessing Your Social Program’s Maturity Level
The report includes an assessment guide for figuring out where your corporation stands in the social world. The assessment covers topics such as leadership and organization models, processes and policies, education programs, measurement techniques and technology adoption to rank where your business ranks in maturity. Check it out on page seven of the full embedded report below.
Novice Programs
The average budget for novice social programs is $66,000, and an average team includes about 3.1 people in a centralized format, according to the report.
Programs in the novice stage are often just testing out or experimenting with social media. Altimeter’s report suggests that programs in this stage focus on organizational models, staffing and education programs. Here are some top tips:
Organize for collaboration: Organize a team dedicated towards leading the company’s social initiatives. This centralized, core team should be tasked with creating social media policies, deploying education programs and implementing collaboration tools, with the overarching goal of helping team members share best practices and communicate effectively internally.
Iron out response processes: Before launching elaborate social initiatives, like Facebook Pages and corporate blogs, take time to develop a triage system, which details who responds to customers in certain situations, and what they should and should not say.
Invest in social monitoring: The beauty of social media is that it breaks down barriers between people. Now, more than ever, brands can easily see what consumers are saying about them online. That’s where listening comes in. Businesses in novice stage should invest in brand monitoring tools and act accordingly. Check out Alterian, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymfony, Radian6, Scout Labs and Visible Technologies, for starters, the report suggests, and Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, SAS Social Media Analytics and Sysomos for a deeper dive into customer insights.
Intermediate Programs
Intermediate level social programs enjoy a budget of slightly more than $1 million and a team size of about 8.2 employees. As programs move into this stage, the focus should shift to scaling, getting community members more involved in social programs and increasing efficiency through social media management tools.
Focus on scaling: As buy-in increases across a company, the core social team should aim to morph into a “hub and spoke model,” in which one central team (the “hub”) provides guidance to multiple, cross-functional “spokes,” who implement programs related to their own business units. This allows social programs to permeate throughout a business’s culture and become a part of each business unit’s programming.
Invest in community programs: Inevitably, a brand’s community is larger than it’s social media team. In the intermediate stage, social programs should focus on empowering customers to “do the work for you.” Altimeter suggests identifying key influencers in your community through these activities and formalizing an advocacy program. Centering around word of mouth is generally a much more effective strategy than tasking a handful of social strategists to tweet away from headquarters.
Adopt social media management systems: To manage content production and deployment, intermediate programs should scope out and adopt social media management systems. This will allow for more efficient dialogue with customers and among staffers. With these tools, creating highly engaged communities across the social web will be much more manageable.
Advanced Programs
While advanced programs often entail having many more teammates (20.8 on average), their budgets aren’t much higher than those of intermediate programs, at around $1.3 million, according to the report. Larger corporations have the ability to support cross-functional teams, instead of fostering smaller groups of direct reports, which explains the huge leap in team members, but lack of proportional budgeting.
Once a social program becomes more advanced, the core goal should be increasing social media integration throughout the entire business. Here’s how to do that:
Prepare for total permeation: Whether a social program spreads to just key members in all business units, or to everyone in an entire organization, social media leaders should be prepared for social business to become a part of how every area of the business operates. Education will be key — businesses need to empower employees to get involved, while also clearly communicating guidelines and policies. Social education, then, cannot be an after-though — it needs to be part of standard employee on-boarding.
Employ boutique social agencies: Instead of relying on traditional agencies for social media guidance and deployment, advanced social programs should begin scoping out the landscape of niche agencies that focus specifically on social business. These agencies can help with social management, campaign building and even change management.
Integrate social into technology deployments: As an ongoing effort, advanced social programs must integrate social into each digital touchpoint across their businesses, including social customer relationship management (SCRM), social sign-on on corporate websites and social aggregation and curation.
This overview is just a taste of how businesses should begin budgeting for corporate social media programs. View Altimeter Group’s full report below for a deep dive into best practices at each social program maturity level:
Like many who study the struggles of developing countries, Steve Bratt has done the math on the potential of mobile phones. The United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union estimated that at the end of 2010 there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide and that a full 90% of the world population now has access to a mobile network. In contrast, only about 2 billion people have Internet access.
The high prevalence of mobile phones (even in developing countries, penetration rates were expected to reach 68% by the end of 2010) has led many non-profits to choose mobile networks as tools for positive change. Mobile banking in Kenya has helped farmers increase their incomes, 300,000 people in Bangladesh signed up to learn English through their phones, and many consider mobile phones the key to developing nations.
But Bratt, now the CEO of The World Wide Web Foundation, came up with a different hypothesis when he looked at the 3.3 billion-person gap between mobile phone users and Internet users. Theoretically, he thinks that the two numbers could one day even out as people use their phones to log onto the Internet.
The problem is that for a person in a developing country, the current Internet is nearly useless.
“Maybe they can look at scores from the playoffs, but if they want to find a local doctor, if they want to understand which crops to plant or how much money they can get for their crops, if they want to be able to teach their kids a language other than English or French or Chinese, there’s just nothing for them there,” Bratt says.
Why the Developing World Needs the Internet
Yacouba Sawadogo created an orchard in the middle of a desert. With a better mobile web, he could more easily share his techniques with other farmers. (Photo courtesy of Anna Bon)
Yacouba Sawadogo’s family migrated south when several periods of drought in the 1980s made their land in the Sahel increasingly useless. But Sawadogo stayed. And unlike many farmers in the area, he was able to develop effective farming techniques that have started to restore the land.
“He just created an orchard in a place where there’s nothing around him but dessert,” Bratt says.
Other areas in Sahel face similar challenges with their land, but few of them have been as successful as Sawadogo in developing techniques to meet those challenges. Sharing Sawadogo’s knowledge with other areas would have immeasurable value, but so far the effort to do so has been restricted to face-to-face exchanges, including busing in farmers from other areas to observe the techniques. Unfortunately, this method is slow and limited to a handful of farmers at a time.
The World Wide Web Foundation thinks that the mobile Internet could be a “digital bus” that would help share this information.
Where the Current Internet Falls Short
Applying the Internet to farming or any situation in developing countries is easier said than done.
All of the farmers that Bratt has met in Africa are illiterate. All of them have mobile phones, but they try to keep calls as short as possible to avoid expensive charges — sometimes even hanging up before a charge registers in order to use a “flash” of the phone to communicate. None of them purchase data packages that would enable them to access the web.
In order to see how the mobile Internet would be effective in this situation, it’s important to rethink the Internet.
The World Wide Web foundation wants to develop voice browsers that would allow people to make short calls in order to access answers to simple questions or important information, like the where to find a doctor.
As far as the added cost, Bratt is hopeful that the benefit would outweigh it. If a farmer can get $20 more for his crops by knowing which markets he can get the best price at, how to improve farming techniques, and what to expect from the weather, than he’ll be willing to pay $5 for phone calls or a browser. The cost will still be much less than a fixed broadband subscription.
“Why wait until everyone has broadband and computers, and why wait until everyone is literate to empower people through information that could be available on the web?” Bratt asks.
A Question Worth Asking
Farmers with mobile phones in Bandiagara, Mali
In addition to the farming project, The World Wide Web Foundation has about 6 other projects aimed at making the web more useful for people in developing countries.
One of the most important is an entrepreneur program that will train developers in Africa to code simple web services.
The organization’s prevailing hypothesis is that as more people in developing countries add content to the Internet that is delivered in their own languages, relevant to their lives, and is accessible to all levels of education, the increased demand for the Internet in these areas will drive increased investment by telecom companies, bringing down data costs to a point that is affordable to more people in the developing world.
The Foundation launched just a little more than a year ago, and the projects are still in their planning stages. In February, the first entrepreneur mobile workshop will begin in Ghana.
“We’re going to learn something from it, at the very minimum,” Bratt says.
Jim Kerr is the vice president of strategy for Triton Media, where he assists in the strategic growth and integration of all of Triton Digital’s portfolio companies and partners.
Ask any media company about their mobile strategy, and one of the first things they’ll discuss is their fantastic content strategy centered around their app. Dig a little deeper, however, and the frustration starts to show. Do they develop just for iOS? Do they add Android and Blackberry? Is Symbian dead? What about feature phones — should they just ignore these?
The answers are problematic for media, because if you peel back the excitement and dazzle of mobile tablet and phone device innovation, you find the kind of chaos that makes strategic planning nigh impossible.
The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was a microcosm of this broader issue. Like many, I was dazzled by all the new products. But when you looked beyond the hype over the Xoom tablet, the Atrix cell phone or the Entune dashboard, the panels and hallway discussions suggested an underlying hardware ecosystem in significant flux.
Obstacles
I mentioned the difficulty in developing across multiple OSes in the cell phone and tablet space, but this is complicated now by multiple form factors, as well. From a cell phone screen to a 7 or 10” tablet, can you really make one size fit all? This problem of system complexity was addressed again and again at CES and continues to be an industry sore point.
The irony is that as systems have gotten more complex, content strategies have gotten simpler. The recent industry-wide media strategy of focusing on adapting content or cutting it into chunks and providing various pieces for various destinations is now practically dead. “Give consumers the content, and let them choose where to consume it,” is the mantra of the day. Of course, a strategic caveat is that consumers want content where and when they want it. But the “what” is now everything they could expect from other distribution sources, from DVDs to TV shows to radio stations.
This is what makes the underlying device and OS chaos all the more maddening for traditional media. They’ve finally figured out a content strategy, and their distribution strategy is up in the air.
This is true of phones and tablets, but to get a really good taste of these issues, just take a look at automobile dashboards as an illustrative example. There has been a tremendous amount of positive press about the potential for content creators in this realm, but even a quick survey of the digital dashboard ecosystem reveals it to be a total mess.
The lack of standards is an even bigger problem in dashboards, not to mention the very real concern over distracted drivers. Unlike a stand-alone device like a phone or a tablet, in-dash devices need to interact with other car systems, many of which are manufactured by third parties. Car dashboard system standards development has been painfully slow and is still nowhere close to a solution.
The Wild West
It is tempting to just say, “but that’s the dashboard, it’s different.” But UI and OS issues exist across all devices. QNX is a company with a long history in auto electronics infrastructure. At CES, Andrew Poliak, QNX director of automotive business development, basically threw up his hands in frustration over various OS differences. QNX’s solution is to develop an open web-based platform using their own codebase. Interestingly, this is the same OS that will be used by the Blackberry Playbook, one of the hyped new tablets expected out this year. In both cases, QNX parent company Research In Motion is making a large bet that openness and web-based standards will win out — in both tablets and in the dash. Their goal mirrors media content strategy perfectly: A consistent user experience across all devices.
In short, media faces a device and OS environment that is like the Wild West. While the expectations of the users are known, the OSes will change; the standards will change, and device innovation will continue. At this point, no one knows really what is worth fighting for or which UI will be the one that dominates. Will the chaos lead to a consolidation to three or even two dominant mobile OSes in the tablet and phone space? Will it all implode in a return to web standards and applications, powered by HTML5, as quite a few speakers at CES predicted?
Conclusion
For content companies, this chaos requires a deft strategic hand. If you listened to the conversations in the halls and paid attention to the panels, the momentum appears to be in favor of HTML5 and web-based solutions. Content-specific device apps are, at best, going to be disrupted and, at worst, going to be phased out entirely. Accepting this as the reality changes a lot of things for media companies, from the wisdom of large OEM app deals to creating a development team around iOS or Android development.
But this is still far from assured. In the short term, apps are still the key player in the device and content space. Dealing with the mess of cross-platform and cross-OS development is just something media has to do, although hedging their bets away from large-scale investment in one OS or OEM may be wise at this point.
The interesting thing is that it took years for media to realize that their mobile content strategy was ultimately quite simple. At the end of the day, perhaps their distribution strategy is just as simple: Hire a bunch of mobile web developers.
