Archive for the ‘Recruitment’ Category
Measuring Success
Posted in Leadership, Recruitment on August 11th, 2011
I have always been interested in the concept or possibility that success traits are inherent in the DNA of some. This article by John Leher makes an interesting case for one specific trait, grit.
Life and Higher Education in the Blogosphere
Tags: google, Higher Education, new media, pew internet, yahoo
Posted in Blogging, Higher Education, Recruitment on February 20th, 2009
The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the Internet-from text to pictures, music and video. says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California says “In this new-media culture people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.
This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an Internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. (Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, 2006).
In terms of higher education recruitment, blogging is the new media. It is participatory and it is a new tool that marketers will need to integrate into the marketing mix. With nearly 60% of teenagers creating content and participating in that media, it is easy for a university or a business to create relevant content and function as an active participant in the lives of potential students. The first step in recruitment is relationship building and relevance.
Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, conducted an interview with Terry Semel of Yahoo!. He spoke in depth about portals and blogs serving as the new media and communication tool of choice for college age people. For his first few decades in the media industry-at CBS, then Walt Disney, then Warner Brothers, where he was chairman and co-chief executive-Terry Semel felt pretty clear about what media companies were. Then, in 2001, he left Hollywood and went to Silicon Valley as the new boss of Yahoo!, the world’s largest Internet portal. A self-avowed technophobe who barely knew how to use e-mail, Mr. Semel suddenly found himself in “meetings with a bunch of 23-year-olds”. He already had the ambition to turn Yahoo! into the archetypal “21st-century media company”, but suddenly he was no longer so clear about what that meant.
Mr. Semel has spent the past five years educating himself, including the counsel of trusted advisers such as his daughters, aged 24, 19 and 13. “The first does a lot on the internet, the second does everything on the internet, and the third “lives online” and has so many beeping devices that Semel, who has a New York accent and the kind of humor that goes with it, occasionally wonders “whether she is trafficking”. Between them, they have helped him to work a few things out.
The Internet “is a much larger change than the coming of television” in the 20th century, says Semel. In the past, “someone decided that the news goes on at 11 o’clock at night; people like my wife never even saw the news, because she never stayed up that late. We all grew up when somebody else was the programmer; now the user is the programmer.” That is change number one. To Semel, it means that Yahoo! must do more than provide technology. “We decided to open Yahoo! up, so that anybody using their personalized start page MyYahoo! and can instantly go wherever they want to go,” even if that leads to the web pages of rivals. That credibility, he thinks, will keep users coming back for a “deeper engagement”. As people spend more time on Yahoo!’s pages-news, blogs, e-mail, chat groups, photo and music sites and so on-whether as their final destination or as stops on a journey, Yahoo! can put more and better advertising in front of them.
Change number two, says Semel, is that-unlike in television, say-”you don’t need hits”. Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum-from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche.
Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”. Anderson argues that old-media economics, which are biased toward the hits at the “head” of this distribution, are being replaced by new-media economics, which allow creation and consumption along the entirety of a much longer content tail.
Exchanges become necessary because people need help navigating around this huge continuum of content. In the present century, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future (2006), “you get large by allowing the many and small to gather on your lawn. This is the media equivalent of what eBay, a Silicon Valley neighbor to Google and Yahoo!, has done for the trading of secondhand goods among individuals. It is what Wikipedia has achieved as an encyclopedia. It is also very similar to what, say, the New York Stock Exchange does.”
A university or institution needs to become the great lawn to accommodate the giant Frisbee of ideas and conversations to be thrown about by current and potential students.
I Can See Clearly Now
Tags: commitment, jim collins, Leadership, Peter Drucker, right thing, standards of excellence, Vision, warren bennis
Posted in Higher Education, Internal Communication, Leadership, Non-Profit, Recruitment, Vision on November 24th, 2008
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.
This Johnny Nash song (listen here) always picks me up. So when I heard it the other day, I took a timeout from the task at hand. The lyrics got me to thinking about how leadership’s vision can help everyone “see clearly”.
Authors Jim Collins, Peter Drucker and James Burns to name a few, talk much about getting the right people on the bus in the right seats. Jim Collins specifically identifies one key trait that was held by all successful leaders, humility.
One definition of leadership for your consideration is that of Warren Bennis, Ph.D., “Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.”
Doing the right thing for our businesses, employees, families and ourselves is not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would suggest that they are inextricably woven together. It defines the overall leadership quality of an individual. When you can achieve that balance in the leadership paradigm you have reached the leadership equivalent of nirvana.
Advancing the right thing requires effective vision and the ability to communicate. Henry Kissinger said, “If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.” It’s important to note that your vision is not the same as the company’s mission. The vision is where you are going. The mission describes who the organization is and what it does.
Behavioral research scientist and author Burt Nanus suggest that there are four characteristics of effective vision.
Attracts Commitment and Energizes People
People are willing, even eager, to commit to worthwhile projects. An effective vision inspires people by transcending the bottom line.
Creates Meaning for Followers
People look for and find meaning in their work lives. When groups and organizations share a vision, individuals see themselves not just as sales clerks or assembly workers or whatever else their job demands, but as part of a team providing a valuable product or service.
Vision Establishes a Standard of Excellence
Most people want to do a good job. A shared commitment to excellence provides a standard for measuring performance. Establishing a standard of excellence, helps followers identify expectations and provides a model for the distinctive competence of a group or organization.
Bridges the Present and the Future
By bridging the present and future, an effective vision transcends the status quo by linking what is happening now with what should happen in the future. This is why many are calling Barack Obama a transformational politician. His rhetoric has consistently linked the present with the future.
As James Collins and Jerry Porras explain in their book, Built to Last, organizations with a well-articulated vision that permeates the company are most likely to prosper and have long-term success. And isn’t that what we all want?
Look all around, there’s nothin’ but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin’ but blue skies
What’s Your Brand Promise?
Tags: american marketing association, Brand Promise, corporate culture, customers, execution, expectation, greatness, Internal Communication, promise, vendor communication
Posted in Branding, Communication, Copy/Content, Creative, Customer Service, Employer Branding, Internal Communication, Marketing, Recruitment on October 20th, 2008
The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a ”name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.”
I like to simplify that by saying that a brand is a promise. And since it is a promise, then it must also be an expectation.
It is critical that your brand promise is clearly defined and articulated to internal and external stakeholders. Stanford professor and author Jim Collins, speaking on how to develop the brand said, “First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.”
In a down economy, buyers of products and services can’t afford to take a risk. They will stick to the brands that have kept their promise. Although noted here previously, it is worthy of repeating. A well-executed branding campaign delivers a myriad of dividends including:
Giving people permission to buy
Reinforcing preconceived notions
Establishing your promise deep in the subconscious of your audience
Helping you recruit and keep the best and brightest talent
Enabling you to charge premium pricing
Thriving during economic downturns
Easily extending into new markets
Branding is too important to leave solely to the marketing department. Branding is the delivery of your promise. It is why you worked those long hours in a garage before bringing your product to the market place. It is your vision. It is your passion. It is what gets you out of bed every morning. Whether you are the founder, partner or captain of the ship, it is critical that the team understand your vision of the brand promise.
Getting your organization to embrace, proselytize and consistently deliver your brand promise, starts at the top.
Define Your Brand Promise – According to Derrick Daye, managing partner at Brand Strategy, “the brand promise must meet three criteria in order to be effective. The promise must be unique, compelling and believable.”
Identity Must Support the Promise – Your logo, colors, tag lines, sell sheets, press releases, all must reinforce your promise.
Do Your Customers Connect - Assuming that you are targeting the correct customers and prospects, how does your promise affect them? Market research and your employees can help determine the relevance of the promise.
Internal Communication – Can your employees fully articulate the brand promise and the value to your customers? Have your new hires been fully educated on the brand promise?
Partner Communication – Do your channels understand your brand promise? And better yet, have you chosen channel partners that are aligned with your promise?
Corporate Culture - Does your corporate culture support the promise? Critical to success is that all members of an organization live the promise in thought, actions and deeds.
Measure Your Efforts - Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Internal surveys, customer benchmarking metrics and peer review, will tell you if you are moving the needle in the right direction
Top Down Execution - It’s your promise. Be sure that you align your communication and activities around your brand promise. Champion your promise with unbridled enthusiasm. You’ll find that it is a highly contagious way to ensure adoption and execution by your team
According to Collins, “focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.” If you stay true to your brand promise, which is uniquely you, then you are not guaranteed success but you will be on the right path to earning success.
SEO – Changing the Marketing Mix
Tags: linking, Marketing, SEO, web 2.0, Website
Posted in Communication, Recruitment, SEO, Website on July 28th, 2008
At a recent conference on consumer generated media there were huddled groups of marketers lamenting the good old days of traditional media. While others were talking wildly about how web 2.0 is changing marketing methodolgies faster than imagined.
Digital marketing vehicles like Twitter, My Space, Linked In and You Tube created quite a buzz. The topics that generated the most discussion were Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
In a recent marketing management survey by PR Week, 75% of the surveys 252 US chief marketing officers, VPs of marketing and marketing directors say they expect spending for new media and online initiatives to increase in the next year despite the tough economy. (Sixth annual PRWeek/MS&L Marketing Management Survey)
Search keywords SEO Articles and you will find 1,080,000 hits on the subject. Choosing the right approach is completely dependent on your business model. There are best practices that you can employ that will ensure that you are meeting the minimum standards for visibility.
SEO Best Practices Short List
- The Plan – Get the plan in writing. Expect changes. The written plan provides the benchmarks for measurement. As we all know, what can be measured can be managed.
- Keywords – It’s how people find you. It’s how search engines rate you. Use keywords or phrases based on your prospects keyword searches. This takes some reverse psychology and web analytic tools like Wordtracker.
- Website Content – Often times called SEO writing. The content needs to reflect your keyword research. This is at the core of how search engines determine if you are a credible source.
- Linking Strategy - Make sure that your site has outbound links to respected websites in your industry. Link to an .edu or .org and the search analytics will give you extra points. Have those same sites link back to you and you’ll score a lot of points.
- Articles & Blogs – Articles are considered to be more factual. Blogs have a personal appeal. Both have merit. Decide on an approach and get one or both on your site.
Optimization requires commitment and resources, financial and human. It requires monthly probing of key words, links and updating of content. The key is to develop a strategy that you can employ and then be relentless in the execution. Remember, out of sight means you’re out of mind.
I’ll look for you at the top of my next search.
Blogs Are About Conversations
Tags: Conversations, Higher Education, Long Tail, marketplace, messaging, Recruitment
Posted in Blogging, Communication, Higher Education, Recruitment on February 24th, 2008
Blogs are conversations between two people or hundreds of them. Understanding the need to create dialogue or conversation is central to the marketing of higher education or any business for that matter.
In the book Markets are Conversations, authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger suggest that we typically think of the Internet in the wrong terms. “When you think of the Internet, don’t think of Mack trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships, whizzing by countless billboards.
Think of a table for two. The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers.”
Searls and Weinberger further define the evolution of markets in this excerpt from Markets are Conversations.
The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.
The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.
Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names they were known by: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith.
For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.”
These were the kinds of conversations people have had since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. “Markets were conversations” doesn’t mean “markets were noisy.” It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work. Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by authors Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger discusses the lack of one-on-one conversation relative to marketing and communicating the attributes of an organization or product. Organizations put forth messages regardless of whether we want to hear it or not. This is also an inherent problem with managers who don’t understand the dynamics of communication. It generally ends up costing more to reach the target than is necessary.
“One problem: there is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. It’s the Anti-Conversation.”
Applying this simple and pragmatic approach to communication and in the larger sense recruitment advertising is paramount to the success of the institution. Lynne Bowen-Lowe, Vice President with Quantum Communications, a national nurse recruitment and communications firm said, “integration of one-to-one relationship management strategies must be part of the successful recruitment mix.
Utilizing broad reach media is a given. It is the personalizing of the message that gives an institution the edge over the competition. Prospects feel that the institution knows something about them as an individual by the very nature of the media they elect to communicate through. It all becomes very personal. It’s all about me”
Successful marketing practitioners understand this. Marketers who do not understand this fundamental principle continue to broadcast messages that people don’t want to receive. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a marketing department is colored by the fact that it’s going to a public that doesn’t ask to hear it.
“The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).
A case in point is that people will turn to a website such as Amazon.com or Epinions.com to read the viewpoints about a given product or service that interests them. Angieslist.com is a rapidly growing service that rates local service providers. The ratings are by people who have used the product or service ¬-no commercial endorsement just personal experience. These are all blogs and people are having conversations and making important decisions based on these conversations.
“I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?”
“I’m in the market for a good desk dictionary,” says someone else, and he’s off to Amazon.com where he’ll find a large number of opinions already expressed:
I love the look of this book, and the publisher did a great job; but I made the mistake of buying it without realizing that it was first published over 7 years ago….
I’ve had this book for two days and I keep going back to it. I may not be typical since I collect dictionaries and wanted this when I heard about it last year, but….
These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of the businesses that sell them. The conversation is not limited to just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position, and every other quality that is subject to rising or falling opinion” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).
Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research foundation, believes that “people will become not less but more aware of differing arguments as they become heavier Internet users,” because contradictory views are just a hyperlink away.
Chris Anderson author of The Long Tail says “opinion is a marketplace, and marketplaces work when you have liquidity.” Liquidity is exactly what participatory media provide.
