Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Happy, snappy tweets

From the New Scientist:
Want to be popular on Twitter? There are plenty of people who claim they can help, but their tips rarely work and many of them are scammers. Now scientists have joined in, boiling down half a million tweets to a few simple rules for gaining a following. 
C.J. Hutto (@cjhutto on Twitter) and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta examined the content and retweeting fate of tweets sent by 500 non-celebrities over a 15-month period. They looked for 2800 terms that convey positive and negative emotions, including slang and swear words, a set of emoticons and common acronyms, like LOL. 
By giving each term a score on a sliding scale of positivity they were able to assess whether Twitter users who used each term gained or lost followers. The keys to success, they found, were to tweet positive messages, write clearly and retweet interesting titbits of news.
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