My first impression of this activity was that I can’t believe the technical difficulties experienced with things like this. Maybe I would think the CEO of a web company would have a little bit more of a clue about using a web-tool like LiveMeeting. Secondly, I can’t believe LiveMeeting doesn’t have the ability to mute the automatic announcements from the audio as people join/leave the conference call. It would be basically the equivalent of someone yelling out “I’m leaving the room” in a normal in-person seminar at some conference center. It’s in the details folks.
I didn’t get many interesting “aha’s” from Reid’s presentation. The only somewhat interesting service ideas was an “eBay like” reputation system for recruiters to use. There was a lot of hubbub recently about LinkedIn changing their formats seemingly for their business model and leaving their “trusted” network structure and let people purchase premium subscriptions that allow them to contact anyone “in” or “out” of their network. You can read a couple of the posts over at these blogs on the ERE network:
LinkedIn Pro on ERE Blog Network
Linked Out! on ERE Blog Network
The idea is that if you want to maintain your integrity and value as a recruiter and use the service, that you need to be very concious of your strategies in contacting people. If you SPAM everyone blindly and don’t provide details about what you’re wanting to connect to that person for, then you’re basically going to be black-balled.
However, if you do your job as a recruiter like you should be normally for a good reputation, then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about it it really will be a great tool. So, when you contact someone, explain to them why you’re contacting them and why you think what you know about their background makes you think they would be a good fit for the position/company you’re recruiting.
But, back to my introduction, my biggest take away from this LiveMeeting was the need for Microsoft to improve some functionality and “mute” announcements once the meeting has actually started. That and even if someone is a CEO of a large web-company, they may not always know what they’re doing on the web.