Two Cents

2009 was a tough year on the career front for many Australians. Redundancies were widespread as companies endeavoured to cope with an uncertain economic climate.
 
The employer marketing and recruitment advertising sectors were highly sensitive to the economic slowdown, with reduced marketing budgets calling for smarter thinking, greater ROI and diversification across the board. The job market had taken a big hit, shifting the dynamic for HR professionals who had previously been dealing with skills shortages and a candidate short market. Inevitably, print media suffered a free-fall in advertising revenue.

From our own agency experiences with employer marketing, the job market appeared to be in recovery late last year – hopefully a barometer of an improving economy – even prompting expert comments of forthcoming skills shortages in some sectors. The credible medium of print, still preferable for sourcing the elusive ‘passive’ candidates, should continue to perform when targeting the baby boomer and senior executive markets but for the rest, the migration to online looks set to continue.

Companies and recruiters alike are continuing to use popular job boards such as SEEK, CareerOne and MyCareer to advertise vacancies, as well as many other niche and industry specific boards.

Mirroring a shift in B2B and B2C communications, we are also seeing social media assist recruiters in candidate vetting and appraisal (so watch those privacy settings on Facebook!). Equally, job seekers are using networks such as LinkedIn – where it really is in their interests to publish (rather than hide) as much relevant information as possible – all to improve employment prospects.

A recent innovation, Brazen Careerist, allows the modern professional to not only showcase their CV but also share ideas and engage with peers in their field, giving them control in a social network that they are happy to share information with.

Another interesting site is KODA, the imaginatively titled “opportunity community”, where employers can take a closer look at young professionals with talents beyond posting a CV in Word format.

This brings me to the latest example: Hire me, HeadBlade (which unsurprisingly led to the sequel, HeadBlade Hired Me!).

This recent success story in how to score your dream job in the new economy is further proof that people can create their own cut-through in competitive fields if they treat job seeking like an industry project or campaign. The bottom line: identify what it is you want to do and where you belong, and go the extra mile.

With innovation and increased usage of social media channels by job seekers, so too increases the need for businesses (as employers) to understand and be actively using these channels to their benefit to source the best available candidates. As the economy improves and, if as predicted, skills shortages make their presence felt, so the spotlight will turn back on employers as they strive to position themselves ahead of the competition. We might then see increased traffic to employer review sites such as JobVent, Glassdoor.com or Vault – and a return to larger budget employer marketing websites and campaign microsites as employers work harder to attract the right candidates.

As every employer would be aware, their human capital is the most important asset they have.

Steve Jennings is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

As public-generated news content continues to flourish online a lot has been said recently about the future of journalism. This is understandable given the closure of many newspapers worldwide.

An interesting not-for-profit venture called Spot.Us offers a new perspective and hope for journalists everywhere. Basically this is crowd-funded reporting where the reading public gets directly involved in supporting news that’s relevant to them. For example, imagine that 50 people want to expose a particular issue. They each contribute say $15 or $20 to hire a journalist to investigate the issue and develop a report on their behalf. The stories can come from citizens who flag issues they’d like to see investigated or from journalists who might say “Here’s my story idea, is anyone interested in helping me develop this?”

The story is pitched via the Spot.Us website which acts as a marketplace where people can meet to determine what stories should be developed. The site provides a list of stories and funding updates so interested parties can get on board. Once sufficient funding has been raised and the project approved, the journalist outlines the deliverables that contributors can expect for their money. Donors stay involved through regular investigation updates.

The amount that any individual or organisation can contribute is limited to avoid the possibility of pushing a particular agenda. Stories must be developed in response to a community saying “this is an important issue for us that we’d like to see investigated”.

As the content is commissioned by the public it is owned by the public so it can be given away via a creative commons licence to any publisher to re-use. The exception is that if a news organisation wants first publishing rights then the original donors are re-funded in full and the story is on-sold.

So this is yet another example of control being handed back to the people. It should provide hope to journos everywhere that, now more than ever, they are a conduit to sharing stories that people actually want to read and hear about.

In talking about the death of newspapers Nicolas Carlson of Business Insider recently supported the thought that journalism won’t go away.

He contends that news reporting was and is about finding sources. Naturally those sources want to go to the biggest megaphone they can find to spread their news. To me all that’s really changing is who holds that megaphone these days.

I’ve seen some bizarre uses for Twitter in the last few months (augmented reality t-shirt anyone?) but this one takes the cake (quite literally). If it wasn’t for the fact it’s now 8 days into April, I thought I would have been well fooled by this one.

It’s called BakerTweet. It’s so simple, it’s almost genius:

BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It’s as simple as turning the dial and hitting the button. All of the baker’s followers get a Twitter alert to tell them that it’s bun-time. Or bread time. Or whatever.

And it’s not just a concept either – it’s up and running at Albion’s Oven in London. You can follow their freshly-baked delights at @AlbionsOven.

Watch a video!

A truly tasty and wonderful way of using Twitter! Really though, something like this says less about tasty treats, and more about what happens when you give clever developers a ball. They’ll run with it. The open nature of Twitter has allowed people to do pretty much whatever they want with it. Which means, thankfully, that way cool stuff like BakerTweet is only just the beginning.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how Australian companies may not quite ‘get’ social media quite as much as they should. Two very recent examples sadly seem to prove this to be the case. But all three are a good lesson for any brand in how NOT to ‘do’ social media.

A couple of weeks ago, the University of South Australia got caught out when they ran a series of videos of students talking about how great the uni was. All very off-the-cuff and vox populi. The only problem was, one of the students was part of the uni marketing department! And was clearly identified as so on the uni website. Silly! It didn’t take long for somebody at Crikey to catch on. There’s no hiding from this kind of thing anymore!

This week, Freeview tried to cover up a Youtube video mocking the upcoming digital TV service. They had their lawyers issue a takedown notice to Youtube. Since the video was doing nothing illegal, it was promptly re-uploaded. The result? Huge amounts of press surrounding the takedown attempt, and heaps more people seeing the video that never would have. The lesson? Don’t try to suppress the conversation, it’s like stomping on an ant’s nest – just manage it more effectively!

How many more Australian brands will need to learn the hard way before learning – listen, engage, influence!

Is it just me, or is the ‘pay what you like’ concept becoming increasingly common? A few high-profile examples in the news over the last week or so have led me to believe we might be seeing more of it in the future.

At the moment, it’s hard to tell whether some brands are offering their consumers the chance to pay the price they see fit as a genuine pricing strategy, or whether it’s just a PR stunt, or both. The most famous example, going back to 2007, was Radiohead’s offer to fans to pay whatever they saw fit for their most recent album, In Rainbows.

In London, a high-end restaurant by the name of Little Bay is serving customers and insisting they pay what they like. He readily admits that he’s doing it as a means of alleviating some stress from the recession, but it’s proved to generate incredible PR. The owner said:

“Even if people don’t pay anything I have told my staff to treat them the same as if they pay £50 or £60-a-head.

“It’s entirely up to each customer whether they give £100 or a penny. All I’m asking is they pay me what they think the food and service is worth.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, Accor Hotels is running a promotion doing much the same thing, but with an online twist:

Through March 15, the pay-what-you-want competition runs during a designated portion of each day, as announced on the hotel’s site. Interested consumers need only sign up as members and make a bid for the price they’d like to pay during one of the announced promotion times. If they’re one of the first to bid, they can win a night at the hotel at exactly the price they offered. Bids have gone as high as SGD100, and the first promotional rooms sold out within minutes of the contest’s launch last Wednesday.

So… is this the start of a genuine change in attracting consumers? A blatant PR stunt? Or a little bit of both?

And what’s next… pay-what-you-want advertising perhaps?