Many of you know JibberJobber is a relationship management tool, designed off of traditional CRM, but stripped down to focus on RELATIONSHIPS instead of sales processes and jargon.

In the last almost-5-years I haven’t seen much news on the CRM front as far as aquisitions or anything.  Salesforce is the 8 billion pound guerrilla in the space, but I continue to hear they are way to complex and way too expensive (I’m sure they have their sweet spot in big companies, doing huge, huge deals).

Today I just read about two deals, though, which are pretty exciting.

The first is for GIST. I was actually on the phone with a GIST person a few months ago… I had tried to get in touch with them through their Contact Us methods but none of that worked. The phone call was okay.  The announcement of their acquisition by RIM (the company that puts out the Blackberry device) just came out yesterday.  No disclosure of how much the acquisition was for but according to TechCrunch they have taken in over $10M of funding… it’s said investors want a 10x return, which means they would have had to sold for $100M, but I’m guessing this deal was between $30M – $60M.  I have NOTHING to base that on, just a guess  No news on TechCrunch on this yet

The second is for Bantam, acquired by Constant Contact for $15M in cash. This is on TechCrunch here.  This is very interesting to me because it is a low purchase point, imo (even though, if they really did raise less than 2M, investors got about a 10x return (less what other owners got)), and because it was by Constant Contact.  My thoughts about CC doing this?  IT IS ABOUT TIME!  CRM is a great add-on for them.  iContact should follow suit and acquire their own CRM package, because this is so, so, so critical to their clientele.

As for me, I’m still plugging along, doing cool stuff with my CRM

After my video guy did the first edition of the What is JibberJobber intro I asked my Twitter people for feedback.  Karin Hermans responded with links to two resources… THANK YOU KARIN!

Here’s a link to Octane’s video, which she really liked.

Here’s a link to a blog post titled The Key to Effective Communications – Scope vs. Detail.  Great stuff there.

And here’s the second edition of the video we created:

I have 10 I’m in a Job Search — Now What??? books that I’ll bundle with my LinkedIn for Job Seekers DVD for only $40 with no S&H.

Total spend is $40.

When they are gone, they are gone. (I have other books I can substitute…. I’ll let you know if we’re out when you order)

First come first serve – take advantage asap before the book is gone.

To pay, go to this payment page and fill out the form (put $40 for the purchase and make sure to put your mailing address in the comments).

On January 13th, 2006, I drove away from my employer for the last time.  I was done there.  It was a bitter-sweet day.

Today, exactly three years later, I open CIO.com to see this, the top featured article:

There is nothing bitter about this January the 13th, 2009!

I recently became a partner of MENG, which is the Marketing Executives Networking Group organization (similar to FENG (financial), TENG (technical), etc.).  I’ve always respected these long-lasting organizations, and it really makes me proud to see this, on the bottom of the main MENG website:

I think that’s pretty dang cool!

One of my goals this year was to have a full article dedicated to me in The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.  This is because I was told by someone that that is where JibberJobber would get credibility – not through any articles I wrote on my own.

I’m happy to share an article that just went live today, which has turned into one of my favorite articles… the title is Boosting Your Sales With Social Networking.  How cool is that?

I just got a call from a guy who is putting on a local job fair… a very different kind of job fair, and wants me to be involved. I don’t have any experience with job fairs (I should say, any positive experiences), but am excited about what they are doing.

Anyway, I asked him, “how did you find me, anyway?” He said he googled job help. So I went to see what I could find. I saw something that was freaking cool…. check this out:

Now, this isn’t as good as being the real second result, but we are right there… I don’t know how else to get into this position, other than nurturing relationships (okay, so it helps to have a product that isn’t cliche).

Thank you Alison!

Many ideas went through my head as I listened to Andy Sernovitz yesterday.  It was cool to have my wife with me, as this was one of the first things that she was able to attend in the 18 months that we’ve been self-employed.  she took 3 pages of notes, too, and we talked about how to apply stuff from the presentation – very cool.

One thing that is foremost on my mind is the idea of the Topic, which is one of the five T’s.  This is the “thing” that people talk about.

They don’t talk about “the career management tool” in normal, non-professional, non-job seeker circles, I don’t think.  What could the topic be?

Liz Strauss and Lindsey Pollak brainstormed this with me earlier this year when they were in town… the thing I remember most from that brainstorm was “take your job with you.”  The idea is that even though we transition from job to job, we still maintain career-important relationships, and we can store them in JibberJobber… hence, just as I take my degree with me, and my experience, JJ allows me to take those contact relationships with me….

This is a hard topic for me, perhaps because I’m to busy seeing the trees, while my customers/users/champions/friends are able to see the forest.  I know that JibberJobber gets word of mouth, because each day I see new people sign up from job networking meetings, which means that people are saying something about JJ in the meeting.  This is good.  Too bad I can’t hear how others are describing and promoting it, that would really help me wrap my brain around the topic.

… and now I’m rambling.  But I will continue to think of what topics are easy to repeat and spread.

On an e-mail list, talking about job search tools, I wrote something about JibberJobber, this is one snippet that I wanted to store for later use:

“It’s not a job board (although you can search jobs), it’s not an advice/article repository (although the blog has been mentioned by the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal), it’s not a social network (although you can take your contacts from various social networks and manage the relationships in JibberJobber) …. it’s just … JibberJobber!”

The fine folks at VCruit.com made this for me :