After a global recession, which put millions out of work, it seems that some jobseekers are having to come up with more innovative ways to stand out from the crowd. Not content to sit back and wait for the right role to be advertised, some are putting the internet to work for them in creative ways, and we could all learn a lot from how they’re doing it.

Alec Brownstein is a great example. In his quest for the perfect job he spent £4 ($6 USD) on Google adwords to reach five creative directors at major advertising and marketing firms: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, and David Droga. Basically he banked on the fact that these directors would be googling themselves at some point, and amongst the search results was his ad which simply read “Googling yourself is fun, hiring me is fun too.” He got four interviews, two job offers, and according to FastCompany.com, he’s now employed at Young & Rubicam. Definitely a slam dunk for Alec!

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Last week, Facebook revealed their latest tool to help webmasters “Socialise” their sites – Facebook Open Graph.

Open Graph is Facebook’s latest foray into search engine functionality and if all else fails, it’s best to think of it simply as the first step towards a social search engine. Facebook is hoping that as people browse the web they will “like” pages by clicking a Facebook button which then informs their friends via Facebook.

Open Graph will enable sites which you’ve never been to before display recommendations and information tailored for your tastes based on what you or your friends have previously “liked”. At surface level then this is just a slightly more powerful version of those buttons you see around the web which enable you to share stuff you like with your friends. But the story of Open Graph is going to be so much more than that.

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Recent Google Webmaster Blog posts highlight the new features in Google’s Webmaster Tools which webmasters and site owners can use to submit information to Google. Also highlighted is the need for businesses to keep an eye on what the search engines are asking them to do, else they risk being left behind their more savvy competitors!

I will be concentrating on Google here, but we can apply the below to other search engines.

A lot of people will already know the basics of SEO

• Create page titles which carry information, rather than just one or two word titles.
• Create the page content & copy with audience and keywords in mind.
• Structure the page using headings, paragraphs and lists in the code.
• Give images descriptive alt text and titles.
• Add metadata descriptions to your page. (This is becoming less and less important, but it is still often used on the search engine results page!)

Following the above guidelines goes a long way to achieving a good ranking on any search engine you care to mention, but any SEO consultant will be at pains to tell you that there’s a lot more you can do.

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A client asked me the other day to provide a cost estimate for some creative work. He wanted a concept that clearly communicates the unique benefit of his product. Something simple, powerful and persuasive. Something like the old Araldite ad with the car stuck to a billboard (ok, we might not come up with something quite as iconic as this but who knows?).

This concept would be used on the website, on newsletters and potentially offline too. Nothing strange in that… but then I realised that this request was actually quite unusual.

The product in question was a medical device to help prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in hospital patients. I thought I’d try and find some other examples of medical devices that use a creative concept to get across their USP. I found very little indeed (there’s a list of the best examples below). Most medical device websites launch straight into the product features, often ignoring the benefits. If you’re lucky, you might get a big photo of the product on the homepage.

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In his book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, the advertising creative James Webb Young proposes a simple 5-step process:

• Gather research and materials
• Go through the materials and allow the mind to “digest” them, generating tentative or partial ideas
• Walk away from your thinking to go and do something completely different and relaxing
• Allow the idea to come to you passively (this could happen anywhere and at any time)
• Revisit your idea in the cold light of day and refine it

The process has been lauded by many creatives inside and outside the ad industry. Even though the book was published in 1965, you’ll see from recent reviews on Amazon that it is considered to be just as relevant today as it ever was. However, what if you are trying to generate ideas for a website? I am not talking about ideas for a simple brochureware website, but a site that truly engages its audience and actively draws them to visit it. Does Young’s technique still apply for generating website ideas?

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Navigation is of utmost importance to your site: visitors expect to achieve their goals in very few clicks, whether those goals relate to contact information, products, or services. If that information isn’t reachable in a short space of time, you are not only wasting your own time, but that of your visitors!

I highlighted examples of well-thought-out navigation in a previous post, illustrated by a handful of sites that were a mix of e-commerce and blogs.

Since then, we have seen a number of new trends in site navigation. We look at three of the most interesting.

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I spotted this whilst reading The Times on the train, and it struck me that this is a static version of the interactive rich media ads you see all over the “glossy” websites. Have print media agencies taken a leaf out of their digital partner’s books?

You can see the print ad on the right (view full-size). Below are some examples of some Flashy rich media ads, where cars, people and products crawl from one box to another, taking over the page:

• Chevrolet smashes up YouTube
• Madden NFL also smashes up YouTube

I don’t know who got there first – this might even be old hat to the hacks of the advertising world – but it struck me as an unusual crossover that works very well.

The internet has been abuzz recently with talk of a new kid in town: HTML5. There has been a slew of articles detailing the new features that this version of HTML offers and what they mean for the web, but the real question is whether or not HTML5 can topple Flash from its position as the king of rich media.

What is HTML5?

HTML is the coding language that the internet is built on. With this in mind, HTML5 is just an upgrade providing some new tricks and features as well as some judicious trimming of the fat and old outdated code.

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Most intranets are largely static sites. On its own, an intranet is essentially a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles or communications. Some organisations use words such as “communication hubs” to describe them, but for the most part that communication is one-way.

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

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SharePoint 2010 is in beta testing, with a probable release date somewhere in Q4 this year. In the new release of the collaboration platform, emphasis seems to be placed on breaking out the roles of people involved in the production of a SharePoint intranet, and the access to resources as needed by people in those roles.

SharePoint 2010 looks to be the biggest update in the Microsoft Office family this year, as all communications so far indicate that other Office applications will only undergo minor tweaks.

So what are the big changes for SharePoint?

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