Tuesday 9 August 2011

RiotBalls

The current riots are terrible and depressing and i am sure very scary if you are in the middle of it. But here are some other things that have depresed me about this topic.
1. my twitter stream being a little too full of some people almost getting excited and spreading rumours of troops marching down whitehall, bank of england being stormed, london landmarks ablaze etc. Some social media rubernecking definitely occurring.
2.Academics/socialists impossing their middle class motivations for the riots (its about the cuts, social inequality, Hacking, MPs expenses) onto a bunch of scumbags who want a new telly and to act like the big men they are not.
3. People criticising police for doing too much, doing too little, over physical, not physical enough. we get the police force we deserve and the downside in living in a society with human rights, innocent till guilty and habeas corpus is that they have an impossible job right now. Its a society problem (not police) and unless society backs them to use the force we see and are shocked about from foreign locations - then live with their apparent impotence.

Anyway back to digital recruitment....

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Scammed by Charity - Let Down by Agency - Same Effect

I took my daughter to some play group thing last week and got a visit from 2 guys doing a charity collection (treeofhope)- now i don't normally give unprompted to charity collectors for two reasons
1. I carry a cynical attitude that it will all go in overheads or its a dodgy charity area that should be covered by state etc
2. I am basically quite tight! (charity begins at home...)
However - due to everyone else there chipping in £5 i did same. And felt good about myself.
and then i read the leaflet
- it was full of words like "children", "Sick", "care" "generosity". But i could not work out what the hell they actually did.
- and then the killer - "34% of money collected will go to charity". Jesus - so £3.33 of any fiver goes to collectors etc.

This experience has obviously stopped any future impulsive donations stone dead.

So - what has that got to do with the agency world - well, i come across clients all the time who bought an "SEO solution", "facebook campaign" "behavioral targetting campaign" a year or two ago and received nothing that we in the industry would recognise as such under those headings.

They spent £xxxx on a social media launch - and got a facebook page, a couple of articles posted on their site and posted on an unloved twitter feed. In essence - they felt ripped off like me above.

net effect - they dont want to invest again and run risk of being let down again and it prob delays by 1.5 - 2 years properly adopting really effective ways to recruit/engage/commuincate with their audience.

What i really like about the stuff i see out there from suppliers now (the one's i admire anyway!) is sensible objectives, realistic estimations of level of commitmemt needed internally and budgets that enable good work but not out of whack with other priorities in client.

result - happy client, quality results, more investment, open to new ideas.

I did meet a nice woman in the street at lunchtime though who seemed very nice and i think she must have worked for Oxfam as she had a branded bib on and a direct debit is so easy to set up....