Lately, I have been thinking about the unemployed and underemployed as a pool of talent. I’d argue they are one of the most undertapped economic segments.  Of the global working population, 6.3% is unemployed.  In the US, the long-term unemployed are better educated, older, and more likely to be professional workers than the mean unemployed population.  These workers are particularly held back by age discrimination and high wage expectation.

I am reasonably familiar with this market because a key component of the Circle of Experts‘ strategy is to tap the knowledge of people in transition.  Working with this community excites me because the unemployed are people facing significant challenges.  While they are wrestling with finding a job, we are glad to pay them a competitive rate. 

Particularly now as layoffs increase, there are significant entrepreneurial opportunities in creatively tapping the time and talents of the unemployed and underemployed.  The expert
network business, the fastest growing sector of the investment research industry, is a prime example.  Other successful startups working in this market (broadly defined): Accolo, TheLadders, Notch Partners, and ProfessionaLink. Who else would you add to the list?

I just spoke today with Andy Lopata, who wrote an interesting piece on CEO networks.

I recently learned about an entrepreneur with a very clever business model: Thorkil Sonne, founder of Danish software testing company Specialisterne.  The 55-person firm’s clients include CSC, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Specialisterne claims to be the world’s first company focused on leveraging the unique talents of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).  Sonne started the company in large part to ensure that people with ASD—including his own son—would have employment opportunities.  ASD, the most common form of autism, affects close to 1% of the population, but only 10% of ASD adults obtain any form of employment.

Software testing is a repetitive role which requires high attention to detail, and is an excellent fit for the typical ASD personality. 75% of Specialisterne’s testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of ASD.  Sonne estimates that 1% of all the tasks executed in a given large company are suitable for autistic workers.

What I particularly like about this is that Sonne identified a community of talent almost unused by the labor market, and has built a successful firm on that insight.  From the point of view of both profit and of social welfare, he has built a powerful model. He is now expanding internationally.

Comment spamming is bad, shilling is worse. Why? Because automated filters detect 99% of comment spam. The spam filter here on The Virtual Handshake Blog has caught over 750,000 spam comments in the past couple of years.

But shilling… shilling is hard to detect and often goes unnoticed the first or second time. Someone leaves a comment… a decent, on-topic comment… but then at the end throws in the mention of some product or person that has little, if anything, to do with the post on which they’re commenting.

And then you get a second post a week later from a different person that follows the same pattern. Maybe they really are just raving fans of some new product that you’re not "in the know" about.

But then you get a third post another week later, and you start noticing little things like the fact that all of the commenters have @Yahoo.com addresses. Maybe you investigate a little bit further and find that there’s a similar pattern on other web sites. Sooner or later you realize that you’ve been spammed all along and didn’t even notice it. And unlike the 750,000 comments that got automatically deleted, these three really tick you off. Why? Because you’ve been deceived.

What’s even worse is when you find out that the person behind it all touts themselves as an internet marketing expert.

Want to hear the whole story? Check out James D. Brausch, Glyphius and Shilling.

Entrepreneurs — looking to grow your business?

Starting this Thursday, June 5, you can learn some of the most current techniques for growing your business in the Escape 9 to 5 Teleseminar Series.

I love what the organizer, Melissa Gerdes, has to say about the series on the registration page:

Why are we doing this? It’s simple. We love our lives and we love helping other people experience the realities of entrepreneurship. So we want to see the wonderful life you create for yourself. (Mostly, we do it because it’s fun.)

The teleseminars will be held on various weekday evenings in the coming weeks, and the first one is…tomorrow! I’ll be doing mine on “Winning on the Social Web” next week. So go ahead and register now so you don’t miss anything.

Remember the good old days? Back when you had to log on to one email system at work and then at night dial up your favorite BBS’s one by one, replying to all of your emails while you were logged in? (I’m showing my age - if you don’t actually remember that - just use your imagination)

But then along came the internet and the idea of a universal email client — one application from which you could handle all your email across multiple servers. And you didn’t even have to be online to read and reply to email — you could do it at your convenience.

Remember Usenet? The same thing happened there. You used to have read in real-time while logged in, but before long came aggregators that allowed you to subscribe to the content you wanted and read it at your leisure. Eventually Google pretty much took it over and turned it into Google Groups.

AOL became the largest ISP at one time not just because they spent millions on marketing, but because they offered a simple, unified interface to the internet, accessible to the typical user.

As the web grew, it became apparent that it was far too complex to simply navigate via hyperlinks from one site to another. There needed to be a centralized directory of web sites. A couple of smart people realized that they could monetize that and Yahoo! was born.

While no one might ever have imagined it was possible, the web became so complex that it outran the capacity of a topical directory, and along came search engines to fill the gap. Was Google really THAT much better a search engine than all the others? Or did the "I feel lucky" button that promised one-click satisfaction have something to do with their success?

Some of the web’s biggest brands have been built around a fairly simple aggregation concept:

• Amazon provides access to the pretty much the entire library of published books (and more, now, of course).
• eBay aggregates individual buyers and sellers.
• craigslist aggregates all types of classifieds, not just buy/sell.

And now the web is social. OK, it’s always been social, but now it’s mostly social. According to Comscore, "The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users." In some countries, such as the UK, social networking sites account for more than 75% of all web traffic.

So where’s the super-aggregator for the social web?

Facebook wants to be it. So does MySpace. Google too. A host of startups are aggregating social networking profiles, online video and more - even multiple Twitter and Jaiku accounts.

Users are starving for this, even if many of them don’t realize it yet. As more and more social networks pop up, particularly those with niche focus, the space becomes increasingly fragmented. A new social network focused on one particular topic no longer competes with just other social networks on the same topic, but with all social networks vying for the user’s attention. And as anyone who’s ever studied GTD or any other productivity methodology knows, fragmented attention is counter-productive.

The inevitable trend is that unless social networking sites make it easier to aggregate their data, they’re going to lose their most active users to social network burnout (it’s already started). A widely-adopted, highly effective aggregation tool could stave off that trend and put the social web back on course to being an indispensable productivity tool, rather than a waste of time and a security risk.

It’s clear from the internet’s evolutionary past that whoever can figure out how to make a simple, unified interface to the social web is well-positioned to make a ton of money. But they’re going to face some significant challenges, and the technology is just one of them. I’ll address those in Part 2.

Image: Aldo Gonzales via Flickr

I’ll be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area May 5-8, and hope that you can attend some of my investor seminars to the Wharton and Columbia Business School Alumni Clubs:

Topic: “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: The Professional Investor’s Guide to Eliciting Information”

Host: Wharton Club of Northern California
Learn how professional investors elicit maximum information in minimum time from industry sources. How do you ask just the right questions to get a CFO to open up and tell you about his company? This training is based on best practices in the intelligence, psychiatric, law enforcement, and journalist communities.
When: Wednesday, May 7th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Location: Perkins Coie, 101 Jefferson Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
RSVP and more details: http://www.whartonclub.com/article.html?aid=901

Topic: “Where are the Deals? Venture Capitalists, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Firms’ Best Practices in Deal Creation and Deal Origination”

Host: Columbia Business School Alumni Club of Northern California
What are you doing to identify companies in which you can successfully invest? Learn about recent research on where institutional investors source their investments; how to identify companies with the earmarks of an attractive opportunity; and how to increase your inflow of worthwhile referrals from both intermediaries and investable companies.
When: Thursday, May 8th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Where: Pagemill Partners Auditorium, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304
RSVP and more details: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=158041

Also, I will be attending the Association for Corporate Growth Grow! Awards on Tuesday, May 6, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View ( https://chapters.acg.org/sv/uploads/events/922FC1DF84A74255B0B429DC3FC81104.pdf ), which may interest many of you.

Authentic social media engagement has the power to transform brands that have a declining reputation for customer service. Microsoft, led by Robert Scoble and the Channel 9 team, reversed their image as a company out of touch with its developers. Dell, spurred on by the public complaints of A-list bloggers like Jeff Jarvis (here’s a recent post with links to the highlights of that story), has now become a case study for excellent corporate social media engagement.

One of the most entries into the field is Comcast. As my business partner Jay Deragon points out in his blog, Comcast customer satisfaction is in the dumps.

But Comcast is stepping out into social media, dealing with customers directly to cut through clunky corporate processes where possible, as Carter Smith (another biz partner of mine) details on his blog. If you’re active on Twitter, you may have seen @ComcastCares doing their thing.

Now I have no doubt that Comcast can start reversing their reputation for customer service, and that social media will be a key component in that strategy. But I do have to wonder about a couple of things:

Scalability - While Twitter has exploded in popularity, it is still very much an early adopter tool at this point. I asked Frank Eliason if what they’re currently doing on Twitter will be sustainable. He said he thinks so, but admitted, "The difficulty is having one voice with others assisting." If it were straightforward to replicate the customer service experience of dealing with someone like Frank vs. the typical customer service agent you get when you call in, Comcast wouldn’t be in the situation they are in the first place. Once people start realizing they can bypass the clunky phone process with a tweet to @ComcastCares, will Comcast be able to maintain the quality of experience there as it gets to be more than two or three people can handle?

The Digital Divide - Sure, Comcast is an ISP and a lot of their customers are online. But what about those who aren’t? Or what about those who are online, but not on Twitter? Not a blogger? How does Comcast engaging in social media improve the customer service experience for those customers? And if Comcast starts giving preferential treatment to bloggers and Twitterers, they run the risk of being accused of simply oiling the squeaky wheel. Do they really want to improve the customer experience, or just improve their visible reputation for customer experience?

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging customers and improving a company’s reputation. But a social media initiative undertaken for PR purposes can’t stand on its own — it has to be an integral part of more comprehensive changes at the company. Improving the experience of your company for bloggers and Twitterers is great, but if you don’t improve it for all your customers, it’s a house of cards.

Is Comcast prepared to make that kind of full organizational commitment? It will be interesting to watch.

LinkedIn launched their blog in April 2007. One year later, how are they doing regarding community evangelism and social media participation?

I’ve set up a simple survey which I hope you’ll take a minute to fill out. For additional background if you’re interested, see my post at Linked Intelligence.

I’ve long been fascinated by the economic approach to human behavior, as described in books like David Friedman’s Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, the popular Freakonomics and the collective work of Nobel prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker.

Prompted by a conversation on MyLinkedInPowerForum about the relative value of LinkedIn vs. MLPF — not to the owners, but to individual participants — I was Googling Becker and discovered The Becker-Posner Blog, a collaboration between Becker and legal/economics expert Richard Posner.

Besides the simply brilliant thinking and writing of these two individuals, the blog is intriguing because it’s also frequently a conversation between the two authors on the same topic, and they’re not afraid to take on some pretty controversial topics, or to take an unpopular stance on them. For example:

• Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility and Posner’s comment
• Posner’s Post-Mortem Critique of William Buckley and Becker’s comment

These guys are also doing an amazing job of sparking conversation. 514 posts have generated 11,840 comments — that’s a 23:1 ratio! Not many blogs have that.

I encourage you to check it out, as well as the Freakonomics blog and David Friedman’s blog.