Todays Reads … i enjoyed

• A Rich Father-in-law Wanted
  If your father is a poor man, it is your fate but, if your father-in-law is a poor man, it’s your stupidity
• The Secret Ingredient of a Successful Company
  Almost all organizations in the world are started on two basic premises. 1) To change the world and 2) to make lots of money and create wealth for its founders and shareholders. So how does one do it?
• An appeal to Telenor
  Jehan Ara’s iPhone is not working ….
• Drink up, MicroTards
  Check out this fantastic shot of Bill Bumblaster, one of our top OS and developer tools guys, making an emergency pit stop

Guest Post by : Shair Khan >> shair.khan[at the rate of] gmail.com

A week ago I received a mail from rozee.pk informing me to register on their job fair, which (like rest of the guys on rozee), I always do when ever this event is held. So this time I made the mistake of registering and actually wasting some of my precious time to visit this so called fair. Now once I was there I saw a huge group of people standing outside in a queue. Thinking of it as some sort of security check I stood in the line showed the guys my entrance ticket and entered the area designated to job fare. When I entered I had an image that there will be some sort of booths of different companies where we can go and drop our CVs. But what actually happened was that I met another line which was three times as large as the one I met outside and the first question that came into my mind was “what the hell is this?” so I decided to ask an organizer the same question and the answer I received was that we are checking the entrance tickets over here. I asked the guy, what was the previous checking for (as they did the same at the entrance)? He obviously had no answer. Not satisfied by the guy’s attitude I asked another organizer the same question and he said there is no SPACE inside that is why we are holding everybody out here.

Well my question to all the companies out there who were at the job fare is…..If you guys are seriously looking for good talent do you really expect them to wait in an unorganized queue just to throw in their CV’s. OBVIOUSLY NO. People who know their stuff and have applied for executive jobs or senior positions do not have the time to stand in queues. That is what you do when you go to a bank to pay your utility bills.
This was the most unorganized event I had ever attended. Even the Horse and Cattle Show (Qaumi Sanati Numaish) is better organized than this. All I want to say is GROW UP GUYZ if you expect us to be professionals we expect the same from you and in future ORGANIZE an event then invite people

Written by Shair Khan
shair.khan[at]gmail.com

As mentioned previously, Rozee the job portal of Pakistan is holding its 4th job fair which is invite only bases, though i didnt apply for any job on Rozee.pk but some how the nice people at Rozee send me an invite of the job fair, so yes probably i would drop by now:

Things rozee mentioned me to do :

• Print the invitations and bring it along hmmm tough one i dont have a printer
• Dress formally .on SUNDAY get a life people i prefer my summer shorts wont it be fun : ) .. 
• bring 10 coppies of my cv ….. comon i dont have a printer its a digital world i can email 100’s of them

Things i have to do

• Convince some of my lazy friends to acompany me there on SUNDAY chances 99.9% a 4ka from friends ..
• Probably try to find out which of my good friend have a printer i can use
• Damit i just realized its on March 2nd i.e. comming sunday

Bloggers are connecting, there is a session on “Starters Insiders” being hosted in LUMS,(more news on GreenWhite) so far this seems to be one of the best thing PASHA could have ever done, the purpose of such session is to brings CEO’s, Venture Capitalists together with entrepreneur who can present up there idea of any innovative application and get funding for it. No doubt its a great event to help people build up there business, learn from experts and if this country gets gifted with entrepreneurs things will change. This session of “Starters Insiders” will focus on three questions

1.  Who is my customer ?
2. How do i find him ?
3. How and what do i sell ?

As usual i wont be able to attend this even due to my over tight schedule, but i guess the answers to these questions are related to marketing, how to market your product online ? Unfortunately there is bit lack in that field as well.

If i have to answer these question, my response might be a little different to what others perceive of marketing / selling and finding your customers,  if i talk to an average Joe about Marketing a CRM or a Web Application, people usually recommend using SEO, Google Adwords & currently very famous in Pakistan E-Mail Marketing. I am not against these but there are other ways as well. Some techniques work on some products, and some work the other way around.

The key i believe is to convert your product to a news & understand the power of bloggers,  at Bramerz when we launched buzzvines a social blogging platform for people one issue we faced was its marketing, initially we optimized the SEO, then started telling friend & family on it but it didn’t pick up pace, we needed a jump  and then on 14th August we organized an event “I still love Pakistan” with just a post and a small banner (with the words which people can post on there site), we contacted all the bloggers, our members, friends and every single person with a web presence and informed them about the event, tagged them and asked them to share there views on our site, put a our banner on there blog to celebrate 14th august. The idea picked up within few hours the buzzVines event became a news, people responded, shared and a few were offended to from the word and then end result was buzzVines traffic tripled within days, many people noticed us our membership base increased and we had a steady growth even after that event.

The same technique was latter adopted by Pak Spectators, after running a blog on blogspot the team at pak spectator initiated taking interviews of the bloggers, every blogger who got his interview published told his friend, mentioned on his blog and pakspecator ended up having traffic and audience, they also improved there content and placed stories which were controversial and still interesting.

Social networking sites are yet another base for spreading the word, in the past a band from Pakistan “Jal” got its jump start from online marketing via forums, chat rooms, and a few social network sites like mySpace at that time. But today even social network sites are clear labels as to which site you should hit for what type of customers you are looking for like LinkedIn, Xing for professionals, Facebook for college / young people and so on… i ended up having few client references from digg but ofcourse i used my profile there to publish my business services as well.

So far smart marketing & an innovative product are the key ingredients for a successful launch.

Rozee our favorite and the only Job site in Pakistan is holding another Job Fair 2008. Today i received an e-mail from them informing me of the upcoming job fair which will be hosted in three cities Lahore, Karachi & Islamabad.

One thing good about this years event in Lahore is that its invite only, previously the Job fair invited tons of people to the Job Fair as the Lahore’s have nothing important to do so to cut the time people just turned up for the event for the sake of it, weather they need a job or not. This turn over did seved its purpose for the advertisers and sponsor and Rozee according to some resources made a business of more then 2 billion, but the purpose of the Job Fair failed. The massive turn around didnt help the candidates to score a job neither it helped the companies find good candidates.So this year Rozee have placed a strict policy in Lahore only, only those will enter the Job fair who get invitations.

So how to get invitations, well its quite simple first you log in to rozee or register for a free account, then once you do that you will see a list of employees i.e. big time companies who have listed there jobs there, all the detail of Job’s is hidden except for designation, you apply for the Job’s if you CV is found eligible you would be invited for the Job fair and probably an interview will be conducted right on the spot.  This step is really good as this will filter all the people who are visiting just for the sake of it, all the people turning up for the Job fair will definately be professionals and the companies who paid heavily for the booth will definately have a good turn over of Positive CV’s and potentially good candidates for the job.

So far i haven’t decided to visit the job fair but part of me seems interested so most probably i ll try to grab an invitation if i get one. If i get an invitation and i go there i would definately cover up the event on my blog with pictures / updates of the live Job fair so keep checking .

For More Information : http://www1.rozee.pk/jobfair/index.php