“My daughter and I would like 2 men…”

 Spot someone across the room, sweaty palms, dry throat, wobbly knees; this is the dating I remember.  This method has gone the way of $.50 gasoline.  Let’s take a look at today’s online dating.  Your journey begins with sites like Match.com, eHarmony.com, AmericanSingles.com, okCupid.com, chemistry.com, or PlentyofFish.com.  If this is too limiting, Google lists 2,210,000 others.  Once you arrive at the site, you will be asked to complete a profile.  Watch out! There are a lot of key decisions very early in this process.  The first is choosing your user name.  Something like “punkrockrider’ or “monkeytoes” might not make you think of the mate of your dreams while “sweetandsassy” or “lonelyteddybear” might make promises that will remain unfulfilled.

 The next key step in your marketing plan – make no mistake about it, this is marketing – is to choose a headline.  This is the phrase that appears next to your email address and over you picture and message.   This is the grabber and they will run the gamut from pithy, to coquettish to confused.  Some headlines don’t appear to know why they’re there and some are very explicit.  Some examples include; explicit – “Divorced woman seeking man”, declarative – “honest girl”, and pleading – “Lonely Guy”.  Then there are the romantic – “Seeking to share love and life” and “seeking someone special” right next to the desperate – “please God, one more try” and the demanding “You gotta be a flosser!….” As an observation, women seem to get the hang of this a lot quicker than we do guys.  How enticing is this? “free man again, just divorced, looking for friendship and or whatever” compared to “I’m just a lil southern gal looking for that someone special, who loves kids, his family, and a good baked potato!”  Maybe the two of them will hit it off

To complete the profile, you must next go through a checklist describing yourself and your perfect match.  Along with a special section on tattoos and body piercing are smoking, drinking, and exercising (how much and how often).  This is followed by what kinds of exercise and sports you enjoy along with common interests which may include cooking, fishing, gardening, and video games.

There is one site that serves a familiar audience.  At www.farmersonly.com, founder Jerry Miller says, “Instead of asking what your astrological sign is, at FarmersOnly.com, I ask if you raise or breed alpacas, horses, cattle, chickens, dogs, goats, rabbits, sheep, grow crops, or if you’re an organic farmer, student farmers, cowboys, cowgirls, or just a farmer wanna be!”.  Recent startup Farmersonly.com bills itself as a “Free online dating & friendship finder for America’s Heartland”.  I did a quick search and found 2,405 women and 1,605 men who have joined this site looking for a friend/date with an agricultural bent.  As would be expected, the passwords, headlines and profile all emphasize a love of rural life. 

Putting another spin on this matchmaking phenomenon is Zogo who has taken this matchmaking process mobile.  Just fill out your profile on your mobile phone, take your picture and upload it, and you will be out there for the mobile world to see.   Once you have registered, you just scroll through a list of pictures on your phone and click on one that interests you.  Once selected, Zogo will send that person your picture and profile.  If they like what they see and read, they can connect and the two of you will be talking without either party knowing phone numbers, location or anything you don’t want to share.  As amazing as that is, their next generation will enable a process that was previously impractical.  Zogo will be using the GPS (global positioning systems) in phones to localize the process.  This can work one of two ways – you can be alerted if someone fitting your perfect match is within 100 yards or for those that are impatient, you can limit your scrolling list to whoever happens to be within 2 or 3 miles. 

 [For the past few minutes, the editors of CropLife have been wondering how I am going to relate this to agriculture.]

 One of the most important things you do in business is hiring the right people.  Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, says recruiting is the most important thing he does – he regularly spends 20-30% of his time in this area.  So it would seem that finding someone to reliably and ethically represent your business would be an important task that deserves your attention.  How did you recruit, interview and hire your last employee?  A referral, a friend of the family, responding to a newspaper ad, a sign in front of your building?  All of these will work, but what if you used some of the technology that these dating services provided.  Wouldn’t you like to see if the candidate’s likes and dislikes make them more or less suitable for a specific role? 

 The people we hire may not be as important a decision as who we pick for a spouse, but your employees will have a dramatic impact on the success of your business and that deserves some critical evaluation.

 As for the widow and her daughter in Ohio, I hope they find what they’re looking for.  They certainly wrote an eye catching headline.  Right now I have to remove my accounts from all of these sites, I only received a 3 day dispensation – all in the interest of journalistic research.