Jobinablog

Web 2.0 at work, the Generation Y way!

Generation Y are in our workplace now and will be around for a good while yet, so isn't it essential that employers really start to understand what they are like as employees? They do have a different mindset, and therefore will have different ways of approaching work- some good and some bad. Sacha Chua, has produced this slideshow to show what the generation Y take to web 2.0 is within IBM.

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When you have clicked through that, check out an exciting video defining what generation Y -or Media Snackers - are really about. It is a great 1.27 minutes definition!!

How big is your untapped recruitment marketing potential?

As a business you are sitting on a huge untapped wealth of future potential candidates. Sounds mad doesn't it, but what I am referring to is your untapped recruitment marketing potential of your business. Chris Cardell, a recognised business thinker, lists these areas of your business where your hidden wealth could be, and the areas where you have not optimised or maximised your marketing strategies. I have expanded and ammended these to give direct relevance to the recruitment sector.They are:

• Every brochure, letter or email you write that does not build, create or nurture a deep and outstanding relationship with your potential employees.
• Every letter or email that you would like to write but simply don’t get around to.
• Every penny you spend on recruitment advertising that does not work.
• Every penny you spend on recruitment advertising that does not utilise the proven techniques for improving candidate response levels.
• Every job seeker that you don’t thank for their conacting you for employment.
• Every job seeker that you don’t ask for a referral of anothr job seeker.
• Everyone who contacts you who is never converted into a future potential employee or referrer.
• Every magazine, newspaper, radio or TV station that you don’t appear on because you think PR is complicated.
• Every person who visits your web site who you never hear from again.
• Every week or month that goes by without you sending an email to your prospective job seekers/ prospective employees giving them some information of real value to them.

So you can see there will defiantly be something here that your business can benefit from doing. Go on take a couple of ideas and run with them!

10 Ways to promote your new blog

So you have now written your blog and you are really excited about it - trouble is what do you do now? Obviously, you now have to let people know you are out there - you need to publicise it. If you are not sure about that part, then courtesy of Blog Perfume, here are the 10 main ways to promote your blog:

1. Social bookmarking sites
Sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us grab traffic and have it head right for your blog. These are quite easy to use (so long as you don’t vote for yourself) – create a free account, write a description, add tags and the address to your blog, and voila! – With compelling headlines and descriptions, you can quickly have traffic to your blog.

2. Forum visiting
Visiting forums in your niche market is nearly as old as the Internet itself – but this works and it’s free. Participate in the forums with relevant (compelling) information that leads to what your blog is all about. Having a great signature line with a link to your blog is the key.

3. Free eBooks
Writing and offering free eBooks will also bring traffic to your website. Your eBook needs to be compelling, well written and chock full of useful information (otherwise, no one will visit your blog, thinking you’ve nothing real to say anyway).

A corporate blog should now be part of your marketing strategy

Has your business been putting off looking at writing a blog? Have you seriously considered looking at writing one? Well if you need some good reasons why, Jennifer Slegg -  a search engine marketing consultant -  has written this very good article explaining why you should be writing a corporate blog. It is all about being another strand of online marketing.

If you have been sitting on the fence for a while, read this and it will explain why you need to do it!!

Widgets, Long Tail, SEO and Recruitment

You might have heard of widgets, long tail and SEO, but are you really sure how they interact together? Well, Nathan Wood, the SEO Manager from 4Mat has written this good explanation of why these three words are important to your business.

“Widgets”. Attend any online marketing conference and you’ll hear this word, a lot. Why? Because widgets are currently the standard example in the search marketing industry for how searchers will use increasingly more detailed queries to hone in on the information that they want to find. With Google announcing earlier this year that the average number of words per query has risen from 3 to 4 words, the indications are that searchers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their quest for information. "Red widgets" or "big blue square widgets" – to what level do searchers go to pinpoint their results?

Recruiting Generation Y staff the Disney way

Following on from my previous post on using video as a recruiting tool, I wanted to share a post I read today by Bea Fields, whose blog is aptly titled "Attracting the New Workforce".  She looks at attracting the generation Y workforce, and how companies need to address their recruitment strategies accordingly. She has highlighted Disney's new recruitment campaign aimed specifically at generation y college leavers.

What I particularly like about this Disney program is this video, because it taps right into the mentality of different generation y groups. As you might expect from Disney, it is a well polished video, but it gets the exact message across.

59% of people on the internet view one video a week - are you using them on your site?

Video is now becoming a very key part of the online world, as shown by a recent survey by Universal McCann, where 59% of people watch at least one video online per week. Obviously there are the huge video sites like YouTube and similar concepts that have followed their trail. But it is the way that companies are more increasingly using video as a recruiting tool, that should be noticed. The video's may not even be a direct campaign of recruitment, more of an information tool, but they keep people on your website longer.

So is your company using video to attract / entice / inform people about your company? If not then you should be seriously considering the approach. Here is a great post about how a company went through the whole process of producing and publishing their recruitment video.

So you want to write a blog? 10 Tips to help you

We all go on about blogs, and certainly here on Jobinablog it is our focus. So now you have decided you want to write a blog at your company, where do you go for some basic advice? Well fortunately a blog consultant called Mark White wrote some excellent advice on a recent post. So here are his 10 tips for writing a blog:

1. Write posts on topics which interest your readers
I know that we come back to content time and time again, but it really is so key that I’m afraid it’s worth repeating once more here. Write things that your readers will find useful, relevant and interesting! You already do? Great - then concentrate on the rest of this post and the other two in the series because they’ll support what you’re doing every step of the way. If you’re still looking for help then, when you’ve finished here, may I suggest checking out Brian Clark at Copyblogger - recommended. Seriously.

2. Consider the layout of your posts
Try not to have great swaths of text which create an often impenetrable barrier between your readers and the ideas you wish to communicate. Make sure that you break it up, have areas of white space and use subheadings to highlight your points - where appropriate, use bullet points as well and generally make sure that the layout supports your content rather than hides it.

Why you need to use a blog

If you still don't believe in the power of blogs then have a look at these latest figures, recently released by Comscore.

The Top 20 UK Blogging Sites had 33.2 million visitors in February

The Worlds Top 20 UK Blogging Sites had 822.9 million visitors in February.

So for all you sceptics out there, now is the time to start blogging!! After all it is what everyone else is doing!!!

Social Media Promotion

Social media promotion is something that is now starting to become more prevalent. So what does a social media promotion plan look like? Lee Oden wrote a very good post comparing direct marketing plans to social media promotion and showed the differences of each. Whereas with direct marketing you won't necessarily know your audience, there is an assumption that with social media promotion, you will already have some involvement with some form of social community. So here is what one could look like:

• Monitor discussion on social communities and networks for key conversations, keywords and topics
• Identify top concerns relevant to what the company is promoting and develop messaging for solution
• Identify influentials in the social communities, bloggers and authorities - ask them their opinion
• Identify media types most often used with topics and communities - text, video, image, podcast as well platforms for communication: blog posts, comments, microblogging, status updates, social network notes, social news and bookmarking and as possible, direct messaging and IM