You may have also heard this one: Advertising is changing. There are many advertising tools that used to “work” that are becoming outdated. People are so numb to things that they are no longer consciously noticing the messages that are being hammered at them.

Our creative agency has only one tool, and we try to use it like an ever expanding Swiss army knife. A company that sells hammers is constantly looking for things to nail. We prefer to think of ourselves as custom tool builders. You may have a task that needs to be approached creatively, like advertising your product or service. You may be looking at your box of hammers and saying, there has to be a better way of doing this. The reason you wont hear us talking about the tool before we know the desired outcome is the tool may not have been invented yet.

Creatively marketing your business requires stepping away from the toolbox and letting your imagination run wild until you have some good advertising solutions. This is why the services we list on our website don’t include graphic design, media buying or outdoor advertising. We may suggest that our client use one of these tools, but the service we provide as creative agency is creatively delivering the message of your business, and the way we do that has to be effective. The measure of our effectiveness is usually selling product, but that product may be a good, service or an idea. In order to do that we always make sure that our customers are using the right advertising tools.

Hammers aren’t effective at chopping down trees, so if you’re looking for hammer and you need a lumberjack you might get frustrated with the hammer for not doing its job. It’s not the hammers fault, you just needed a chainsaw.

Here are the portions of a resume and how we think they should be utilized.

Education:
If you have a formal education you should list it here, but what you should really be highlighting is the things you have done to continue your education after your formal schooling. We like books and a lot of our employees read frequently to increase their knowledge in the areas of their choice. Some people like to take classes. Whatever you are doing, let your future employer know how you are continuing to educate yourself. List the important books you have read. List the classes you have taken. List the relevant things you are doing to make yourself better.

Experience: Work and Volunteer History:
This is where you list the list of things you are doing with your time. You could have been going to school full time, or you could have been working at the gas station. What an employer is looking for here is the type of experience you have so they can determine if you are a good fit for their needs. If your experience doesn’t match up with your education, there should be a good reason why. Once again, this doesn’t have to be limited to the things you have done to make money. You may be amazing at fundraising for your favorite non profit, a skill that is very valuable and most likely doesn’t pay. Putting this at the bottom of your resume or leaving it out all together leaves out a very important part of information about yourself.

Skills:
From your education and your experience comes your skills. The first thing you should know is that in this list, and probably at the top of it, should be “easily learns new skills quickly and is willing to do so”. Why should this be there? As your job grows and the world grows you will most likely need to grow. An employer hates having to find someone new when they like the people they are already working with. If you have a great team today, that team needs to grow with the marketplace. If the rest of the team grows and you don’t, you could be left behind. So make sure you are willing to grow and your future employer knows it.

That said, your skills should be the product of your education and experience. Most people list here the types of software they know how to use (and some that they don’t) and that is all fine and dandy but we recommend breaking these out into three categories: Ones that are required for the job, ones that are above and beyond and skills that aren’t relevant to the job at all. We feel the most aware of your skills you are the better and listing them all honestly will let your future employer know you are honest with yourself about your abilities.

A note about backing up your claims:
We have to say one thing about backing up your claims. If you have a skill that has to be seen to be believed (like breaking boards with your forehead) and that skill is needed to get the job, then you should attach proof of that skill to your resume, or at least leave instructions as to where that proof can be found. In the creative world this is called a portfolio. You can look at our’s here. You don’t have to prove every skill, but make sure you back up your claims when it depends on you getting the job or not.

My Social Accounts:
Here is one that is not traditional, but we feel is a good addition for the future. Most people who are up with the times have social media accounts and most employers who are up with the times are trying to find yours and look at pictures of you out partying with your friends. To save them time, make sure your public presence is readily listed on your resume. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or whatever you use. Even if your accounts are all listed as private, let them know where they can find you. There are a few reasons for this:
1. That way they actually find you, not the other party animal with your name.
2. An employer can see how you act in public and know if you are an asset or a liability. If a company has 10 employees, then you are a good percentage of the face of that company. If you list yourself as employed at Company X, then you are contributing to the social media brand of that company. A good company will want to make sure you aren’t going to make them look foolish on the internet.

References:
Here is our beef with references: people can’t really say anything negative about you and you wouldn’t really list people who would say something negative about you so this section is useless UNLESS you have a large amount of people here. Let’s say that number is 10 and the title of the section is: Here are 10 people that will say that I am awesome. Also, make sure the people you list are relevant to what they are saying about you. Your friend Chuck will say you are an awesome computer programmer, but unless he has used you for a huge project or works in the industry he is probably useless as a reference.

To sum things up, your resume is a list of your education, experience, skills with a little bit of social proof to back that up. Our last point is transparency. We feel that the more honest you are about who you are, the more likely you are to get a job that you like. If you are going to have a core value conflict with your employer then its better to know that up front. Don’t apply at places that you would hate working and be open enough with your resume so that your employer doesn’t have to hire you if they won’t like you. We realize that its against the law to discriminate based upon creed and what not, but thats not your problem. The reality is people judge others for stupid reasons. If you let people know the truth up front, you can avoid people trying to back out of a decision because they are biased. Just be honest about who you are and the rest will take care of itself.

Lastly, this is not a resume designed to make you look better than you are. If you are lame, this resume will be lame, so make sure you are awesome and this resume will get you a job. Need to make it look better? Check out this article on fontografist about designing your resume.

What does this have to do with advertising? Getting a job is all about advertising yourself, and you can use creative tactics to let people know you will be an asset to their company. We also want to throw up the disclaimer that we are a creative agency, and if you take our suggestions we can’t guarantee it will help you get a job. It might even hurt your chances. The goal of any resume should be to stand out from the crowd and let the user know that you are worth talking to. With that in mind, it’s up to you to take our suggestions and make it work.

We look at the resumes that come into our office and sometimes get quite frustrated. It’s hard to tell if the person is a good fit from a piece of paper or PDF that has a list of things someone may or may not have done. Luckily, we can look at a person’s portfolio and see if they have the drive and skill to fit here. This may not be the case for the job you are trying to get, so we are going to suggest a general content improvement that you can use to land a job. But first, we have to say a few things about strategy. For the general formatting of the resume, you can read about resume design on the fontografist blog. We suggest three strategies:

Strategy One: Research the company you are submitting to.
The person reading your resume will know if you have submitted to 50 companies in rapid fire fashion, or if you spent the time to request a position as a specific company. We realize if you need a job really bad you may see yourself having the time to research, but if you submit to 50 companies that you researched and followed strategy two then you will be out of work for much less time.

Strategy Two: Customize your message for the company you are submitting to.
Your resume is about you and you don’t change right? Your resume is about how your skills would be a good fit for the company you are submitting to. From your research you can develop the message of your resume, so there is no doubt in the person who is reading your resumes mind that your are worth calling for an interview.

Strategy Three: Deliver on the content of your resume.
The first place you are going to have to deliver on the content of your resume is the interview, and if you get the job you will have to continue to deliver. We shouldn’t have to say this, but too many times people beef up their resumes to get an interview and either waste the interviewers time or worse get past the interview and miss on the job. Don’t be this person. If you only have a few skills, make them sound really awesome. If your only skill is learning new skills quickly then make sure that your resume says that and that only.

In short, know your prospect. Research them and then make sure when they read your resume they get an accurate picture of who you are. In our next blog post we will talk about the content of the actual resume and how you can customize it for the job you are trying to get.

Search Engine Optimization and Search engine marketing has been looked to as a very viable alternative to Direct Mail Marketing. An search engine optimized website can bring you just as many clients as direct mail for a fraction of the cost, and even more insights into the behaviors and demographics of your customers.

Of course, the massive potential of SEO has brought an onslaught of SEO spammers who have flooded the internet with marketing copy designed for Search Engine Optimization that isn’t really bringing a lot of value to the person that finds it, but provides value to the marketer. There is a balance that needs to be achieved if you want your website to be effective when people arrive at it.

One area where a lot of businesses are still spending money that could be shifted to SEO is local yellow pages ads. Many companies could benefit from re-allocating the monthly amount spent on yellow page advertising over to search engine optimization and see a greater return on investment

We like to promote a balance between good SEO practices and quality content. It’s a sure way to make sure that the people that do find your company get something of value from visiting your website.

We’ve taken suggestions from some of our clients and added some new features. If you are familiar with our old site you’ll notice the changes and we kept some of your favorite creative things, we just hid them a little deeper.

Hope you enjoy the changes.

A Logo is a symbol

A logo is a symbol that is used, an icon created by a graphic designer or graphic design company, to stand in the minds of their customers. To make their sign stand out. So people recognize their advertising. A good logo can make a difference, and there are many companies out there with horrible logos that have a very strong brand. Brand recognition may start with having a strong logo, but brand equity comes from managing every interaction a customer has with your brand and leveraging your marketing to remind them that you exist.

Brand Equity comes from action

When starting up a new business, most people are concerned with getting a logo in place so they can trademark their name and image so people cant steal any over their brand value in the future. But this doesn’t mean you have a brand. This is the start of a long branding process that hopefully ends with people perceiving your company as the go-to brand for your product or service. We would like to give you a branding formula that anyone can apply, but there is really only one universal rule. Make your customers consistently happy and you will always be the brand of choice. That is Brand Equity.

Build your Brand Equity over time

Good brands aren’t built overnight. Good brands start with a message that you deliver consistently to your customers, and then act in accordance with that message. Over time, the marketplace will start to trust your company and the image of your brand will be consistent with your message. The people will have come to expect what you deliver. Deliver a good message and you will have a good brand. Deliver an inconsistent message or worse and people will lump you in with all the other businesses, the ones that have great logos.

Riding on the coat-tails of other people’s ideas.

People without creativity have been taking other people’s ideas, probably since the beginning of time. While there is rarely an original idea, it is important to make sure you look to other people’s work for inspiration and not imitation. Whatever creative services you are offering, whether you are talking about graphic design companies, advertising firms or a branding agency, to have your own source of creative inspiration is imperative to success.

A prime example is the “got milk?” advertising campaign. This is creative advertising at its finest. Pure and simple. Two words that are grammatically incorrect, yet are so effective that they have been branded into the minds of almost every American. So good in fact, a lot of smaller graphic design companies thought it would be good for their clients marketing, and we started to see all kinds of variations on the phrase “got milk?”. So many, that people started to become immune to it and now we see advertisements like “got lawn?”

The point is, taking someone else’s idea or a variation on someone else’s idea and pretending its your own is lame. Unoriginal people do this not because they can’t think for themselves, but because they think it would be more beneficial to ride on the coat-tails of other people’s great ideas. The reality is if people put just a little effort into their brand strategy or brand positioning, they would find that they have what it takes to come up with branding that is original and exciting.

We don’t want this to be taken negatively. We think that everyone has the ability to be creative in their own way. Some people are good at creative advertising. Some people are good at graphic design. All people are inspired by the work of others, but we think it’s important to make sure that your final product could survive if the first product wasn’t so awesome.

We want to tell you about a service we have used called Litmus. They provide a massive value to digital creatives working with web technologies, as their service allows us to test websites and marketing emails for bugs, saving our clients time and money. Most web companies and applications provide great service, but offer a very impersonal relationship experience. Not Litmus. To our surprise, we received in the mail a package containing a notebook, a handwritten note and a one month free referral card that can be given to one of our friends. This is building our trust for their brand because not only do they provide a very valuable app, they care enough about us as a client to reach out to us personally. Remember: Good Customer Service is the best form of Branding.

We thought it might be beneficial to point out that times are changing. People are connecting in new ways, and with new forums comes new forms of etiquette. When you engage in social networks like Twitter or Facebook, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to exit gracefully from a mis-connection or a waning friendship. Here is a list to help you avoid committing a ridiculous faux pas (and we say ridiculous because we think that these faux pas are silly)

1. Deleting people on Facebook or Myspace because you are mad at them.
People get mad at people, we get it. But unless they killed your father then you will probably find a reason to make up later. We think its a good idea to keep your life clean of poisonous people, but before you delete your Facebook friends in anger, just put them on privacy mode for a bit while you blow off some steam.

2. Leaving nasty comments on peoples profiles.
Would you slap someone in public? Probably not.

3. Creating Hate Fan Pages.
This is the Social media equivalent of standing on the side of the road wearing an “end is nigh” sandwich board, or lecturing with a karaoke machine downtown on a Friday night. You know who I’m talking about.

4. Deleting your personal profile to hide from a stalker
We have to admit, some of us have done this here at the Samurai, but as the social media world learns more about the social rules of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and others have made it very easy to privatize your life in times of turmoil. Sure, it makes it hard to increase your followers on twitter, but sometimes we have to sacrifice for a little peace of mind.

What are some new social rules you have noticed pop up out of social media?