Monday 27 April 2009

How Twitter has affected me

1. Proved to me once again that i can occasionally be 100% wrong about the adoption of new products in this marketplace, i slagged it off before succumbing in June 2008. I now love it.

2. Has provided me with yet another distraction from doing "proper" work. And with Twitter i can pretend its work - sort of.

3. Has made me blog less - despite how it seems on my blog sometimes - writing a decent interesting blog post takes time and effort. A tweet requires neither. I would like to think the quality of blog posts has improved.

4. Has shown me again the difference between business and social networks - i like having lots of connections on Linkedin - i restrict it hugely on Twitter - i use the following rules
Nobody
who tweets too much
who exclusively uses it to promote business in a dull way
who uses it constantly to say how busy they are
Very few
celebrities (occasional temporary exception)
people i don't know in some connected way

It may not be how others use it but it works for me

5. Has made me question again the role of job boards ( i think central to the candidate attraction piece but others disagree) - i am not sure about job aggregation via Twitter but have a strong view but i want to know a lot lot more over coming months.

6. Has driven me to create an approach where clients can get benefit from Twitter while investing little more than time and effort or our time and effort for fee. I like saying to people that we think this is the right way to use it now but this is likely to move so fast and in odd directions that in 3 months time this may all change!

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Public Sector Time Bomb

doing some market analysis at moment - and following Barack Obama being more positive about stuff thought i should drag everybody down (particularly the battered print industry).
As we know Public Sector vacancies have been relatively robust at present and this has consequently meant that their share of the total market has grown from 20%(2007) to 40% (2009).
Now whatever government is in power - vacancies have to collapse as spending is cut in next few years to restore some semblance of sanity to government finances.
Sadly this will impact most hard on local papers as it is one area that has not taken a huge dive for them in last 2 years and online migration has not happened as quickly in other areas.

Lets all hope that the private sector's green shoots turn into full blooming economic recovery to mask the public sector recruitment dive.

Tuesday 14 April 2009

Search Engine Marketing Bull

More often than you think we are engaged to go in and sort someone else's mess involving a digital recruitment initiative/pilot/launch etc and one has to be very careful not to get stuck in a mindset of other companies are rubbish and we are great. There is some outstanding work done both internally and by other suppliers in this market and occasionally we have to say to clients we would love to work with "actually your current supplier is doing the right stuff in the right way at the right rates - so stick with them".
However - we got called in for some remedial SEM work by a big corporate that had been done by one of the leading players (they would say THE leading player in the industry) and it was an absolute piece of Mickey Mouse work that really stunned me with how it could have been set up that way - tracked in that fashion etc.
The problems this causes are a complete lack of confidence in SEM (and consequently business/social network pilots) and lack of faith in all companies in this sector.
I felt myself coming over all PeterGold and ranting about those who claim to be "experts" when they are no such thing.
Now i know that this SEM company are extremely competent (if expensive) so what happened? probably boring old factors like a bad account manager, too busy, being oversold to customer, too big a spend in first couple of months and then always playing catch up while dealing with an unhappy client relationship. I am sure there may have been some customer issues too but i guess we will find out more over next few months but the key thing is to keep the spend down while those lessons are learned - well that's our approach and we are sticking to it.