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(Alternate title for this post: "If you shout your job-ad in the forest, will anyone hear you?")
A great Utah County company, Mozy, recently held a competition to find and reward top local programming talent with a $10K prize.  Their intention was to use this as an avenue to locate potential employees.  It's a great idea.

However, in the shakedown, we can all learn something interesting about marketing to and attracting talent and how important it is to get in touch with people through the channel they want to listen to.

Mozy went through great time and (I'm sure) expense to market their showdown, dubbed 'deathmatch' to as many programmers as possible. 

• A highly visible billboard was placed along I-15, the only major freeway through Utah County--and seen by hundreds of motorists/hour. 
  
• Local T.V. and Newspaper news outlets covered the story deeply, a credit to Mozy's PR chops.

Yet, when local PHP Programming whiz Jon Jensen, partial winner of the $10K prize, blogged about his Deathmatch experience, he teaches us an important lesson about the upcoming professional generation--just because it's on TV doesn't mean your audience is listening.

Last Friday I found this gem—a local programming contest with a $10K grand prize. This was the first I'd heard of it, even though it had received quite a bit of local media coverage. So I went to mozy.com and registered for the competition, and the next morning my $10K quest began.

How interesting is it that, with all the media hype--and the expensive billboard--this co-winner of the event found out about it NOT from the news, NOT from the billboard, NOT from a traditional method at all, but from digg, a relatively new social-bookmarking tool wildly popular among the >30 professional/technical set.

Mozy, who has a blog, didn't leverage it.  And after all their marketing and expense, it was this article by techrockies, which they self-dugg, that Jon picked up on.

Some other interesting notes:

• Take a look at the search string Mozy Deathmatch in Google.  Three of the top 10 results (including the #1and #2 results) came from BLOGS, not the company itself or traditional media.  The 10th one (as of this writing) is from Digg.
  
  
• It may or may not mean anything, but Jon notes that "[He] was going up against college faculty and professionals with far more experience and knowledge than [himself]".  Is it possible that Mozy attracted this class of people because of how they marketed their event?  Just a thought...
  
• "Utah Brian" was also a finalist and heard about the event the day before.  He doesn't share how he heard about it.  Note the interesting discussion in the comments area of his blog between Brian and Jon (who I've written about all-along, above) and others. 
  

Bottom-line: In hiring, especially in a tight market, the people you are looking for are not looking for you.  Make a serious study of how the people you are targeting are engaging information and sharing it among themselves.

I purposefully used the title The Revolution Will Not Be Televised to reference an interesting book of the same name showing how Internet communication has radically changed how people are collecting, consuming and commenting on information.