If you want to learn how to use Twitter for B2B, read Sean Tierney’s post about using Twitter to generate qualified sales leads over at http://jumpbox.com.  Here’s the link to the post: http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2008/11/22/generate-sales-prospects-with-twitter/ 

Monday, Monday… I’d love to say we’re back to work after a long weekend, but the truth is that we’re still at work after a long weekend. The upside is we’re getting some things done. We’remaking moves.

Hopefully you have seen the new homepage compliments of our own Brett Farmiloe and Jobing’s incredibly talented Kristen Zirkler. I’m really excited about the the look of it but more importantly what it could mean for our visitors in terms of increased usability. It’s not done yet but it’s certainly an already improved work in progress. The new breakdown for interviews is a la career cluster, something students and teachers alike should be able to appreciate, and there is now a link to our featured video and write up on the front page. The career links are not fully functional yet, but if we didn’t have some developmental hiccups it wouldn’t be PTP.

In addition we’ve got an all new career profile for you featuring Joy Estes, Insurance Agent and Entrepreneur. Now, Brett and I are aware that the insurance industry has some stigma attached to it. But as someone who recently spent time in an emergency room, take it from me, coverage and courage share a symbiotic relationship. Joy’s also got a great story. The first female ever excepted to West Point Military Academy she has rebuilt her business multiple times until it looked and felt exactly as she had envisioned.

Let us know what you think of the new video and homepage. That’s the beauty of the internet, instant feedback can yield nearly instant change.

Talk to you soon and until then pursue your passion. With coverage.

It’s Monday and I’m back from a full week of vacation in Colorado, fully rested yet slightly worse for wear. Not out of step with my past precedent I managed to dislocate my shoulder on the first day of my vacation turning my snowboard retreat into a 3 run warm up and 6 day cool down. Alas it’s hard not to enjoy yourself in one of the most beautiful places in the world and my despair about lost days on the hill was forgotten in the face of good food, friends and long snow shoes.

Optimism aside, today’s video will continue to highlight the lost opportunity of the coming weeks due to my negligence on the hill. This weeks interview is with Bird Academy Golf Instructor, and former LPGA professional Shirley Furlong. Shirley had some great advice that can be applied to any pursuit requiring discipline and fierce competition. In fact it is not uncommon for golfers to make allusions relating lessons learned on the links to life’s more enigmatic questions.

It doesn’t look as though I’ll have much oppurtunity to swing a club in the coming weeks, more qualified to drive a cart than a golf ball. I’ll just have to spend my March afternoons in the desert kicking back, reading a book and enjoying a brew. And as Dean Martin said, “If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”

A-hoy-hoy and happy Monday everyone. I’m sure you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting for the next Pursue the Passion video and we intend to deliver, in fact we intend to over-deliver. (thank you Rick Barrera)

This week we interviewed some employees over at Rainbow Studios, creator of the new Nintendo Wii game “Deadly Creatures”. Notice I said “empoyees”… that’s right, this week we’re releasing several video’s profiling several different employees in Video Game Design. The primary video (which is currently running on our home page) gives you a look at the individual and their job title. To find that persons full length video simply look them up on pursuethepassion.com or Jobing.com.

There is also a running contest that those of you who don’t receive the newsletter (shame…) don’t know about. Anyone who submits an interview referral for someone we end up interviewing receives a free copy of “Deadly Creatures” and poster with autographs from all the designers. So get crackin’! Por Favor.

Yesterday Brett and I took a trip to Phoenix’s own Rainbow Studios creators of the new Nintendo Wii game “Deadly Creatures”.  Many of us like to romanticize the video game industry.  Imagine how cool it would be to work with creative people, use the newest technology and have our hard work manifest itself in the form of a glorified toy.  Well, many of us would be right.  Working at a video game design studio is awesome.

With this said, it’s not easy and it’s not and the work is not comparable to playing video games.  Some of the more talented people in their own specific creative discipline work for video game design studios.  This means that not only do you have to study harder than anybody else and network like it’s you job.  You also have to have to be insatiable in your pursuit.  Side projects, outstanding portfolios and non traditional education are paramount to getting a job with a cool studio.

With this said, if you’ve got the drive it’s worth pursuing.  Yesterday was a refreshing reminder that if we have a goal to accomplish we CAN make it happen.  Nobody is gonna do it for you, but that’s what you want.  The power to accomplish anything lies completely in your own hands and nobody can take it away from you any more than they accomplish it on your behalf.

So start deciding what it is you want to do and make it your life.  We’ll all be glad you did.

Good morning and happy Monday! Today we’re sending out another Pursue the Passion Career Profile. Anyone who needs career advice, inspiration or an excuse to watch youtube at work can shoot me an email (zach@pursuethepassion.com) and we’ll get you subscribed to the weekly feed.

This week our video profiles Dan Sabaitus, Director of Animal Management for the Phoenix Zoo. Dan’s pursuit started in high school and took him all over the world to places like Japan and South Africa working with both private and public collections of exotic animals.

He prescribes some great tips for individuals who have a specific interest in obtaining work in the animal industry and outlines why it’s important that zoo employees appreciate interaction with other people as much as the animals.

Visit the video by clicking HERE.

I’d like to use my blog today to bestow belated congratulations on our home town team the Arizona Cardinals. This weekend they did what was long assumed impossible and earned our perennially bad NFL franchise a trip to the Super Bowl.

Phoenix fans often live with the stigma of being “fair weather”. I don’t believe this is a completely accurate statement. The problem is our local sports climate has not been as beautiful as our actual climate. It’s hard to be more than a fair weather fan when your local franchises have failed to show you better than fair weather.

The Suns have long teetered on the edge of greatness yet to realize franchise defining success and still have some of the most beloved fans I’ve met. And while our baseball team did win a World Series they were in an early phase known as expansion. Expansion teams winning, while exciting, are somewhat of a novelty. Without history and struggle the pinnacle just isn’t as sweet.

This is why I’m so excited for the Cardinals. This is a team that Arizonans have worked to love for decades. As a national market Phoenix is relatively new but it’s huge. You give us a team with history and struggle that we can love and it will change the nature of sports fandom in the state.

So good luck Cardinals. Pursue the Passion, work the ground game, hurt em in the air and for god’s sake… laces out!

Good Morning and Happy Monday!

At this point those of you visiting the site have realized… it’s different. This weekend our new site administrator, Mr. Brett Farmiloe, was locked up in PTP headquarters studying code, reexamining the look of our home page and beginning to experiment with some different looks. We’re working to give visitors less of what they don’t need and more of what they do.

To do this effectively we need to know what changes you’d like to see on pursuethepassion.com. More video’s? Community blogs? A daily interview featured right on the home page? There are multiple options involving interactivity, interface and content that we can manipulate to enhance user experience.

So what changes do you want to see? Give us submit some suggestions and you may find that the next time you read this blog they’ve been reflected in the site.

I was reviewing the stats of pursuethepassion.com yesterday and found a few interesting things.

1) Facebook has not only been one of our top referring websites, but the audience stays longer than any other referring site. Four minutes, six seconds. Guess we have to start posting more to Facebook.

2) Google gives pursuethepassion.com about 40 percent of our visits. The majority of the searches come from the word ‘passion,’ or from one of our more notable interviews – D’Wayne Edwards, Samantha Harris, Matt Klentak.Guess we have to interview more passionate famous people.

3) Our average amount of daily visitors was 51.7 percent higher when we were on the road during the 2007 tour. Guess we have to get back on the road…

4) The amount of traffic driven from traditional press appearances pale in comparison to that driven by the almighty blogosphere. Anyone want a bunch of career videos to embed on their site? Go to http://phoenix.jobing.com/video/pursuethepassion if you do so we both can get some more traffic.

Cheers to keeping a close eye and making corrections.

by Noah Pollock

Although our journey across the nation comes to an end, in Tucson in 5 days, our most difficult journey has only just begun. In collecting the information we have collected, in experiencing what we have experienced, we learned to take things for what they are. In examining the trees throughout the forest, and minding not the forest itself, we learned to leave over-analysis behind.

It was not always so. Pursue the Passion set out to find what makes people passionate. Perhaps youthful arrogance led us to believe ourselves capable of distilling conversations to their passionate roots. The first leg of the trip, through mid-August, we faithfully executed our original plan. As we continued, our insecurity in the project’s simplicity grew. In retrospect, to believe that we could meet someone for an hour, cut their passion into a two-minute video, then progress to our next meeting, was a serious overestimation of our own abilities.

Dreaming big is always an overestimation. As feelings of doubt in the project mounted, we surveyed more honestly both the task before us, and our own abilities. It was difficult to come to grips with, watching our initial ideal exposed as somewhat frivolous, but we found comfort in several things. We found camaraderie, on the trip, with each other and those we met along the way. We received emails from readers who found genuine inspiration in what we offered. We found an incredible life experience being lived everyday.

What we have found is broken monotony. We departed as overly serious, business minded adventurers, and return humbled by our experiences. As a group, we have grown to support and nurture each other in a way none of us have ever known. What we have to offer is an honest interpretation of our travels, without presumptions of conclusions, which can help to avoid, or break, the mundane working existence. There is no singular, universal passion. Rather, there is an open-mindedness, fortitude and confidence shared among all we have found that is passionate.