The top 5 Interview mistakes people make

I've done my fair share of interviewing and am known for giving tough interviews. Depending on the position and individual I try to assess their capabilities while also giving them an honest perspective of what the work will be like. I always try and remember that an interview is a 2 way street. The interviewer is trying to assess the individuals attitude, aptitude, and skills while the interviewee is trying to assess the company and the answer the questions well at the same time. Over the course of my career I have noted the following mistakes that candidates make when interviewing.

1. Don't know who is interviewing them - Knowing your audience is key. What are their goals and their passions. I'll give you a great example. At one point in my career as a product manager, I was interviewing to be the Director of Product Development and I was being interviewed by the lead technical writer/information architect. Before the interview I spent some time on her linkedIn profile and the profiles of her team members. I saw that she had a passion for DITA and I was already familiar with DITA from a previous job. During the interview I made sure to highlight my experience and interest in DITA. You should have seen her face light up! I guarantee you I was probably the only person she interviewed that connected with her in that way.
2. Don't do any research - Research the company and team you are interviewing for. Your interviewer will ask you if you have any questions, if your question does not appear to be informed or is too generic, it will show. Also, as you are interviewing you can indicate and ask questions about the market, competitors, etc. This will help you get a feel for your potential new employer and will give them insight into the depth of your knowledge vs. other candidates who did not do their homework.
3. Don't dress appropriately - This is an easy one. People form their first impression of you very quickly. One thing I like to do is to ask the recruiter what is typical and their expectations. Their goal is to get your hired so they will give you good advice. My advice is that if you are interviewing for a leadership position, suit and tie is best. If it is more informal, then a jacket with no tie is probably OK. For me personally, jeans are probably not OK.
4. Don't show up on time - There are a lot of factors at play. It is likely that I've never visited this company's location before so I'll of course get a sense from Google Maps of the distance. I'll also note the time of travel (i.e. will there be traffic?). I like to try and get to the interview location at least 20 minutes early. I can then sit in the car for a couple of minutes and review my notes and talking points. No need to feel rushed going into an interview.
5. Don't smile and have fun - Interviewers pick up on nervousness. Being relaxed, having fun, and smiling will show your enthusiasm for the opportunity and give you confidence. No company will ever hire a leader who is not self-confident. Just have fun and be honest. If they ask you a difficult question like "How many piano tuners are there in California?" Use a pen and paper and think out loud. Can come up with an answer, then give it a guess or range. Either way, don't feel defeated, have fun with the question!

Let me know what you think!

Creating a Facebook App with the new Open Graph Part 1

Part 1 - Creating the FB Application

So I attended the Facebook F8 Conference last year and got really excited about the expanded open graph and authored this byline in Mediapost (click here). I think Facebook and social media is in its early stages of development. The expansion of the Open Graph will continue and I think there are many great opportunities for businesses to expand their social media footprint to drive traffic and grow! But enough with all of this marketing speak, let's get to it!

Being a former developer I thought I would give it a shot with my blog using the new action "read" and the object "website". This blog post highlights the learnings and challenges I faced creating (Part 1) and adding the application (Part 2) to my Google Blogger blog. Hint: adding the application to my blog was WAY harder than creating the application.

Facebook actually makes this easy (click here for the steps), but I'm going to walk you through specifically what I did.

Step #1 - Create your application

This is actually the easiest step. Since this was a FB app for my website I put in the URL for my blog for the "app domain" and "site URL" fields. The site URL must begin with an http or https. I made up a namespace (which must be at least 7 characters long) and a name. The key here is to make sure you copy and paste your App ID. Trust me you will need it later for Part 2. For this type of application you don't need to host it anywhere so don't get confused by the Hosting URL or Cloud Services section of the page. I also would recommend selecting your image an logo at this step.

Step #2 - Define your Actions and Objects 

Click here for a great explanation. Essentially these are the nouns on which your actions (e.g. verbs) will act. For my blog, the object is a website. As you type in the 2nd text field, you'll see the website option appear. 

Here's what you should see now (expect for a different title at the top)

For some reason I was able to create an object type of Website with an action of Read, but now Facebook is forcing you to have an Object Type of Article if you pick Read as your Action. My guess is that they changed this between the time I originally created the application and the now. You can also create custom object types, but for now we'll stick to the predefined object type of Article.

Now let's dig a little bit deeper into the Article Object Type by clicking on the Article link.

Once you do that you'll notice some object properties. It should look something like the picture to the right. These are the properties of the object that you can/should specify so that when the user reads the article they and others will have information about what they read.  You can see a preview of this on the same page.

Step #3 - Define your Aggregation

At this step your are defining how you want the information to be displayed on the FB timeline. For example do you want to show the title and description, or the title and time it was read, etc. You are essentially determining the UI for how it will be shown on the timeline. The Object Properties you defined earlier can be used to help provide additional details about what was read. You can see the screenshot below which is a default aggregation.

The sample data is there so that when Facebook prompts the potential app user the first time for permissions they have an idea of what will appear on their timeline. For now I just left mine blank. If you click the Read Aggregation you'll see what I did as noted below:

As you can see the aggregation will appear as a list sorted by the most recent article first. The title I specified isn't too descriptive, but good enough for now (you can always change it later). The Caption Lines are the most important part. In this case I'm saying that I want the title and author to appear in the aggregation.

Now the fun really begins...creating your object page and publishing your actions. This is when integrating with Blogger got challenging. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post (Part 2) on that step!

Let me know if you have any tips, the more folks that comment and respond, the more likely I'll finish part 2 sooner :)