Digital Recruiting

Smoking

I am moving to Stoke - Smoking

smoking kills

Only 3 more days to go until smoking anywhere remotely fun will be outlawed!

Smoking Kills

fun and education in one

nothing to do with this blog but ... well look at it and you will see

Math

A Change In Attitude

While watching a bit of TV I stumbled upon this and wanted to post the link ... it really stood out.

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity:

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/

From looking at this and the clashes you have seen written about on this blog - it does highlight a big issue with the management of digital in our industry. Now I am not going to say one side is better than the other - THIS is to have a discussion not mark sides.

Well when you look at people - this can be the first conflict. The sort of person you need to really challenge and change the way we do things is NOT a typical recruitment advertising corporate player. In fact the exact opposite - how do we handle this? Building teams is always an issue ... especially teams to re-think our business. I would suggest Edward de Bonno, How To Have A Beautiful Mind as a starting point - it is more important to be interesting than to be right (both sides need to think about this).

When you look at process ... innovation does not come from formal business structures. It also does not come from business planning or attempts to talk about the future - you should not impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself (that was actually written by Albert Einstein but it summed up my thoughts). When you look at this the constant attempts to be the first or to do shameless self-promotion is not actually improving the industry. Intelligent collaboration is needed to improve our overall ability to achieve the migration to digital - so how can we work to improve our overall solutions.

Remove the short-term mind-set - I have got to admit I have never worked in an industry that based itself so much on short-term targets. When you look at every long-term debate. Recruitment is getting more and more of an issue for business (the Economist article earlier this year is probably the most important). So why is it that so many media owners and agencies are crying over their shrinking market? Maybe the business models of the past just do not work? If you look at Ralph Stacey, Managing Chaos - he suggests that as the process of change makes long-term planning more difficult then we need new flexible business structure to deal with this. Planning becomes more important - but not in the traditional mindset of 5 year development plans.

My final little point on this is saying we need to use the talent in the industry ... to be honest most brains are wasted on pointless delivery issues - caused by all of the above. Maybe it is time to start stepping up and changing things - it needs a new mind-set from the agency management teams + working together to have intelligent discussions and collaboration on key issues (a trading currency and system integration). I could go on but this is not a rant - I am really interested to see what people think?

interesting video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUkJfg-kAIc

a little bit odd ... but interesting stuff on advertising and hold to build a better relationship with your users ...

FaceBook - Getting Hooked

so who is addicted to facebook yet ???

poking and leaving messages at 3am ? (maybe i am just being strange)

thought you would all find this interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3xmuFtRl74

... a lot more to it all than just this but a great bit of captology

The debate we have been having …

I was talking with a friend from the media earlier today and we were discussing in great depth how an agency had screwed them over. Personally I was shocked when I found out what had happened – maybe I have spent too much time in the nice world of digital (I have only worked in the recruitment side for a few years).  It was the same story that I came across when I first started in media.

On the back of this it has really made me think that it is important to have this debate – it has been going on for a very long time and I think you will find the rest of the media world has grown out of this stage.  Believe me, go and spend some time in the non-recruitment sectors and you still might see the odd temper getting raise but you see a far more professional working relationship.

I am not going to bother going into why this is still going on … the blog is not big enough but it did make one thing really come out in my mind. Here is a list of some of the tactics I working with people on when running media planning/buying training.

1. Do your homework (find out prevailing range of prices being charged)
2. Work out the best balance between long-and short-term buying
3. Allow plenty of time for to-ing and fro-ing
4. Keep ‘em guessing - always have a “Plan B”
5. Tell ‘em only what you want them to know
   e.g. target audience(s)
6. NEVER, NEVER confuse “cheap” with value-for-money

It is that last point really. 

I think a lot of the time people forget that our aim is to get the right people into the right job at the right time for the right price.  So shall we start sorting out these engagement issues and start focusing on what we are should be doing.

Maybe we should look at how manufacturing organisations work with both product design and component organisations to deliver their solutions!

A good bit of six-stigma quality being introduced!

We have got to change it – this debate is great but how do we moving things forward?

IDEAS PEOPLE

more interesting links

before i forget to post this - check out John Hegarty on this link - very interesting presentation about digital creativity - i used a quote in another part of this blog but forgot to share it.

http://video.vividas.com/CDN1/4960_IAB/index.html

Interesting Blog You Might Like

To help the old debate i would suggest reading this;

http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/fastforwarding_to_a_better_understanding_part_1/

Very interesting stuff :-)

John

Web 2.0 is all about the feel-good factor

I thought you lot would be interested in this :-) not written by me so it will make sense

Web 2.0 is all about the feel-good factor

• 02 January 2007
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues
• Celeste Biever

User participation is crucial to the survival of popular websites like YouTube and Flickr. But how do these sites ensure that new videos, photos and comments keep flooding in?

It all comes down to persuasion strategies, says B. J. Fogg at Stanford University in California, who is analysing the techniques employed by websites that rely on their users for content, known collectively as Web 2.0. The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status - spoils that humans will work hard for - to activities that enhance the site, such as inviting new users and contributing photos, he says. "You offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status."

Fogg and his colleagues analysed hundreds of such sites and identified three stages to their success, which they called discovery, superficial involvement and true commitment.

They found that the first two stages are easily achieved, for example by making it simple for existing users to email their friends with something they have posted online. In this way other people discover the site and become superficially involved through activities such as rating a posted video or photo. What separates successful from unsuccessful websites is the ability to get these people to create content of their own, involve yet more friends, and remain active and loyal.

By studying over 150 videos of people using successful sites, Fogg identified key strategies that persuade users to get involved. One incentive is to give people the opportunity to increase their status. For example, the photo-sharing website Flickr assigns images an "interestingness" score depending on how many people view them and whether they comment. This encourages users to email their friends with links to their photos. This is good for the site as it improves the quality of Flickr's search engine by ensuring the most interesting photos are ranked most highly.

Sites also keep people involved by giving them the chance to earn rewards. For bloggers these could come in the form of comments from other users, while on the business networking site Linked-In they might be endorsements that potential contacts can read. Again, these benefit the websites by engaging other users.

The effects of both status and rewards are increased because they are doled out unpredictably - new people joining your friendship group on MySpace say, or a new comment on your blog. This ensures users frequently return to the site to check for changes.

Fogg hopes that by studying how well these strategies work, he will be able to quantify them and discover new ways in which people are open to persuasion. "The web is a huge lab for studying human psychology," he says. "I think what we are seeing with Web 2.0 is which persuasion technologies work and which do not."

From issue 2583 of New Scientist magazine, 02 January 2007, page 30