30 Hours To Go On My First Kickstarter Project - A Pre Post-Mortem

My first Kickstarter project, for my card game Widget, will end at 1758 on Saturday April 6 -- about 30 hours from now. The chart below shows the progress to date.

Most people wait until after it is all over to capture their thoughts about the process. I wanted to do something a bit different: Capture my thoughts just before the project ended and then compare these impressions to my more considered ones after the campaign was over.



Best Surprise: The level of support from all sorts of people - many of whom I don't know (or didn't know until this project began). Family, friends, former students, colleagues, other game designers(!), artists, and people I have never met from countries I have never visited have helped get Widget to its goal and well over it. I absolutely love this aspect of Kickstarter! It is incredibly rewarding to work directly with the people most interested in the game. 

Worst Surprise: My level of exhaustion. I am tired, folks -- bone tired. While eminently rewarding, this process has worn me out both physically and emotionally much more than I expected. It is kind of like having your first child. You have no idea what to expect next and your "baby" keeps throwing surprises at you. 

Most Interesting Finding: My total inability to use Twitter to help generate pledges. I spent a lot of time on Twitter and got extraordinarily good responses from people - lots of re-tweets and some interesting conversations. 100s of thousands of people have received tweets about Widget at this point. Return on time invested? 4 pledges, $65. While I am not discounting the intangible value of the experience, it is clear I am either "doing it wrong" (likely), Twitter can't really help in this way (hmmm...), or Twitter can't really help at all (unlikely but possible). Something I intend to think hard about... 

My next steps are to make it through the next 30 hours or so and then get the game printed and out the door. And yes, I am already working on my next project!

How Many Entry-Level Intelligence (Or Intelligence-like) Analysts Will The Business Sector Need In The Next 12 Months?

Good question, right?

If you have direct knowledge of information that might help answer the question in the title or you have indirect knowledge that is relevant to the answer to the question in the title, please take 2 minutes to complete this survey.  

What do I mean by direct and indirect knowledge?

Direct knowledge means that you know personally or have good information concerning the hiring plans of your agency or organization (or at least your section or division).  You might work in HR or be a manager with hiring responsibilities. 

Indirect knowledge is information that is relevant to the question that is not due to your direct responsibilities.  You might have spoken with an HR manager or have been involved in meetings where this issue was discussed. 

We are NOT looking for opinion based on purely circumstantial information.  If you are not involved in the hiring process either directly or indirectly, please DO NOT take this survey.

What do I mean by "Intelligence (or Intelligence-like)..."? 

First, I am not talking about private sector companies that support the US national security intelligence community.  Those jobs have already been covered by our National Security Jobs Report earlier this year.

Second, jobs which require the skill set of an intelligence analyst are rarely labelled as such within the business community.  You will have to use your best judgment here.  If you or your organization employs people that look at the external environment - at things that are critical to the success or failure of your business but are, in some way, outside the control of your business (competitive analysis is one such area, but so is Banking Secrecy Act compliance) - then you are looking at an "intelligence-like" position.

Why are we interested?

Every year, other disciplines announce hiring projections for the year:  "This year's hot jobs are for engineers and chimney sweeps."  That sort of thing.  Entry level intelligence analysts who are searching for a job, on the other hand, receive no such guidance.

We hope to change that.  Working with one of our hot-shot grad students, Greg Marchwinski, we put together this survey to get a better feel for the the job market for entry level analysts for the year ahead.

Once we get enough survey data, Greg will compile it and combine it with the macro-level, mostly qualitative data that we already have and put together a "jobs report" for the year ahead.  I will publish it here once we are done.

Finally, we have already completed our national security jobs report for next year and will follow this business survey with our law enforcement survey.

Thanks for your participation!

Well-known Terrorist Organization Seeks To Crowdfund Operations With Kickstarter

In what could be a preview of many more such campaigns, a well-known terrorist organization with
worldwide ambitions recently posted a preview of its crowdfunding campaign on the popular site, Kickstarter.  Click here to see the campaign now.

While the site is currently not live (i.e. not actively accepting donations) and it is unclear if it will be approved by the Kickstarter staff, the organization claims it is seeking the funding due to recent US activity which has left it depleted and without an adequate base of operations. 

Kickstarter is one of the new breed of sites which allows inventors, artists, dancers, game designers and others to go directly to fans and supporters to seek funding.  Well known projects from the site include the Pebble Watch, popular musician Amanda Palmer's new album and the amazing new card game, Widget.

Social Media For The Soon-To-Graduate (Or How To Talk To Digital Immigrants)

Digital Immigrants?

If you are about to graduate from college, you likely think you know how to use social media.  You have grown up with it -- you are a digital native.

Unfortunately, most of the people who hold the keys to your employment post-college are digital immigrants.  This is particularly true in the business, law enforcement and national security intelligence communities.

Digital immigrants often have a surprisingly high level of expertise when it comes to networking but likely have a different definition of social than a digital native.  Likewise, there are a number of digital immigrants who arrived in the future only by way of forcible deportation and still pine for the "old country" where every copy of a classified document is printed and numbered "1 of X".

(A quick caveat:  The advice I am about to give is generic.  Different agencies and organizations, particularly within the three major intelligence communities, likely have different standards or advice.  Obviously, their guidelines trump mine.)

Given this, what should you do?  I think there are four things you can do that will at least reduce your frustration if not actually improve your chances:

Learn to use social media effectively.  Social media can be a competitive advantage for digital natives but few really know how to use it.  For example, did you know that when you apply for an internship through LinkedIn, it will tell you when someone actually looks at your application? Did you know that, in a recent survey, 98% of recruiters surveyed used LinkedIn to research candidates?

These are just a few examples of what I am talking about.  Every social media platform has a variety of bells and whistles that can be very useful to you as you look for a job and throughout your professional career.  Few students take the time to actually study and learn these tools and wind up losing out.

Use different services for different purposes.  Not all social media platforms are alike and some work better for certain purposes.  I like to use Facebook but treat it as primarily a social space.  LinkedIn and various email forums are where I have most of my professional conversations.  Finally, I use Twitter as a way to curate the web in real-time.

Of course, my interests occasionally overlap and spill over into all of the social networks to which I belong.  In general, however, I find using different networks for different purposes allows me to optimize my privacy settings.

Whatever you do, though, never forget that everything you put on a social network is theoretically or actually visible to anyone who looks.  Of all the digital immigrants who have become expert at social media, human resource people are some of the best...

When in doubt, do it old school.  One of the best lessons I learned early was, "If you don't know what the dress code is, wear a coat and tie."  If it turns out to be a casual event, it is easy to take off a coat and tie; it is not so easy to put them on if you guess wrong...

The same thing goes for using social media for professional purposes.  If you don't know what the social conventions are of a particular group on Facebook or LinkedIn, if you don't already have a history with a particular Twitter user, go formal first.  Start at the top and, just like taking off a tie, it is easy to become casual.  Make a bad first impression, though, and you may lose credibility or even access, to a crucial forum for your profession.

Social networking is as much social as it is networking.   No one owes you an internship, an interview, a job or even an answer.  More importantly, social media makes it very easy to ignore or block people who are clearly in it only for themselves. 

Ideally then, you should start early (like in your freshman or sophomore years) to develop relationships with people you can help and people who can help you as you progress in your career.  Ask yourself, "What LinkedIn or Facebook groups should I be following?" or "Who is worth listening to on Twitter?" or "Who's blog is worth reading?"  More importantly, ask yourself, "How can I contribute to the groups/tweet streams/blogs I do follow?"  Simply being a member is not enough - networking is a two way street.

Digital immigrants look at it this way:  Why should I place my reputation at risk for you?  Simply knowing of you doesn't really justify the risk.  I need to know what you can actually do.  Digital immigrants are also a little leery of things like grades and other purely numeric measures of quality.  Most of us can think both of a few all-stars who look mediocre on paper and of some paper tigers that turned out to be worthless on the job.

And if you didn't start early?  Start now.  Resign yourself to the fact that it is going to take some time to build your professional network (and even more time before that network is willing to invest time in you).  You might be able to speed the process up a bit but even if you can't, it makes no sense to continue to delay the development of a professional network.

Advanced Analytic Techniques Is Back Up And Posting Again!

www.advat.blogspot.com

Each spring, I teach a class called Advanced Analytic Techniques (AAT) here at Mercyhurst.  It is a seminar-style class designed to allow grad students to dig into a variety of analytic techniques and (hopefully) master one or two.   

The students get to pick both the topic and the technique on which they wish to focus so you wind up with some pretty interesting studies at the end.  For example, we have applied the traditional business methodology of "best practices" to western European terrorist groups and the traditional military technique of Intelligence Preparation of The Battlefield to the casino industry.

As you can imagine, some of these projects gain a bit of notoriety for their unique insights.  One of my former students, Jeff Welgan, even had his AAT project written up in the book Hyperformance.

Beyond this deep dive that each student is required to do, the class is also designed to teach students how to evaluate analytic techniques for things such as validity and flexibility.  To help with this process, each week we take a quick look at an analytic technique that no one in the class is using in their projects.  

We start this process with a tour d'horizon of the available literature on the method with a particular focus on the literature that is higher up the evidence pyramid and relevant to intelligence analysis.  At the end of the week, half of the class runs an abbreviated demo of the technique using the other half of the class as guinea pigs.  Once we are done, we all sit down and write up our thoughts about the method.  Last week, for example, we took a (quick) look at Decision Trees.  This week we will be examining various forms of crime mapping.

All of this - the summaries and critiques of the articles we have found, and our overall "evaluation" of the technique - gets posted onto the Advanced Analytic Techniques blog each week.  Over the years, the blog has become increasingly popular and I certainly encourage everyone to take a look and, if you have a comment, join in!