I hope everyone had a great 4th of July holiday and enjoyed great weather like we had in Seattle.  Every year, Kirkland has a big 4th of July parade complete with bands, floats from local businesses, and political candidates kissing babies.  The parade is preceded by a kids parade where children and their parents walk the parade route.  It is a site to see as wagons, strollers, bikes, and scooters make their way down Central.

We met up with some friends ahead of time and that is the reasoning behind my title for this post.  Good friend Nathan D'Ambrosia is a great software product manager that is looking for a new gig so he decided to take the opportunity to stand out and bring a bit of creativity to the job search.  The pictures below show his t-shirt which lays out his situation (front) and his credentials (back).  He even had a pocket full of business cards summarizing the same information with a link to his Linkedin profile.

He handed out a few during the course of the parade and definitely got a few comments about both the creativity and cleverness of the approach. 

I think this is a great example of how to differentiate from others.  It shows the creativity and determination of the individual plus makes for great conversation.

If you are looking for a rock star software product manager, let me know.  Or contact him directly – here's his Linkedin profile.

I have been enjoying using CoTweet for the past couple weeks after pleading for beta access.  As I am the point guy on Gist’s beta program, I try to grant quick access to those who make the effort to reach out or make some noise about the product so was happy that after a couple of tweets I got access from the CoTweet guys.

My Twitter needs focus on the act & engage dimension of the aforementioned listening framework (I will post more broadly on that shortly).

I needed to main things from CoTweet:

1. Manage multiple Twitter accounts through a single interface
2. Some marketing capabilities in the product (list management, analytics, etc.)

CoTweet delivers on both allowing me to set up a couple accounts – @Gist & @RobertatGist in my case and use them together. 

One really cool feature of CoTweet is the ability to write a tweet and schedule it for sending at a later date.  Really helpful if you are promoting something or want to share the same info multiple times over a couple days.

I also like the fact that you can see analytics on the links you share (and can shorten through the interface).  How many clicks, where they clicked from, etc.  Cotweet also allows for searching and capturing query results as an RSS feed – which I can add to my Google Reader for easy review and action.

I look forward to continuing to use the product and to seeing what comes next.  I’m also a fan of Tweetdeck and their most recent release allows for both multiple account management and the ability to post to multiple accounts simultaneously.  It is a slick AIR application vs. Cotweet’s web-based one so we’ll have to see how the cloud vs. the client battle shapes up.