Monster moved their marketing program on to seemingly greener pastures by replacing Joan Blackwood with Ted Gilvar as Chief Global Marketing Officer. I met with Joan recently at the Monster Customer Advisory board, 6 months after I was critical of Monster’s new branding campaign. She and I discussed the circumstances of the campaign and both agreed that the timing was pretty poor. Monster hadn’t upgraded their product in months, so the promises of the campaign were not well delivered by the product. I can only imagine the pressure she was under to launch something new. The quick hook (14 months tenure) further bolsters the volatility of the CMO position, and ought to scare the crap out of anyone looking to move up in the marketing profession.

I know that Monster has some pretty extensive product changes coming down the pipe, so perhaps Mr. Gilvar’s original campaign vision will come to life. I can’t wait until our first meeting.

photo by dospaz

Last week Hudson launched IT Hire Wire, a blog targeted at professional-level IT candidates. For me, it is the culmination of nearly 10 months of work to test a more transparent way of doing business online for Hudson, and an intense bit of learning in my marketing career (check my tweets along the way). Before I get to outlining the project and some of the lessons learned to date, let me first encourage you to visit the blog, read some entries, and leave any comments that you’d like regarding the project. I appreciate any feedback received.

Making the Case for a Recruiting Blog
IT Hire Wire originated through the same strategic process that brought about our Web Video efforts. As I mentioned here,

…our global marketing team convened to discuss new media and the social web phenomena. At the time, recruitment on Second Life and MySpace was grabbing headlines, while YouTube and blogging were creeping into corporate communication strategy. The common themes were transparency, authenticity and audience control of the message.

On a limited budget we agreed to test one or two new media channels to begin to participate in this movement. While not ideal to choose a channel before defining goals, we knew that a certain amount of experimentation would be required to remain competitive.

To shepherd the project, I started by getting more knowledgeable about blogging than I ever had been before. I familiarized myself with the latest tools like WordPress and various social websites like MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us, RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook. This resulted in my new personal blog and a blogroll filled with competitive sites that I admire.

With this as a backdrop, I lobbied hard for the blog project when budget season came around. I wanted the help of an agency to make sure we set the cultural groundwork properly within Hudson, and to have enough resources to complete the project on top of an already heavy load.

Enter Cowboy Advertising
In November of 2007, we contracted with Cowboy Advertising to assist with our blog effort. From that time until our launch, the Cowboy team was instrumental in getting our internal group of bloggers aligned with the project mission. Together we chose our IT practice to pilot the program because we felt the target audience was most comfortable with blogs. At the same time our IT recruiters were likely to be the most blog-savvy of our employee population.

Creative Direction
Cowboy helped to facilitate conference calls as we concurrently decided upon a creative and technical direction as well as got our bloggers up to speed on how to write content. We wanted to differentiate the site’s look from the many tech news or gadget blogs out there and, at the same time not take ourselves too seriously. We ended up with a theme that evokes the balance of work, life, and the technical knowledge it takes for a successful IT career.

The Cost of Blog Development
None of the agency-provided services came without cost. While the theory is that you can do a blog for practically free on any public blogging platform in an evening, the reality is that involving an agency cost us significant dollars. I do believe that it bought us excellent creative, and a thought out editorial process that will be crucial to our long-term success.

I’ll provide updates on further development as the project progresses. For now enjoy the blog, and let me know what you think!

Check out more of the Poetic Prophet, m0serious on YouTube. He raps about the nuances of Search Engine Optimization, paid search, and link building and campaign conversion. I actually get more information out of listening to his raps than most “real” webinars. I think it’s because very few words must be chosen to get across big ideas. This is not a skill most public speakers have mastered.

Hat tip to Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.

At least that’s what I take away from Lauren’s latest post in Wired and Hired. When comparing her female candidate interactions with male counterparts, Lauren had this to say.

Unexpectedly, I find men are more difficult to deal with when it comes to the prospect of leaving their “homeland”…I have a male candidate telling me he can’t move because he needs to be around people who understand him and that he can’t go anywhere where he doesn’t have friends.

I’m not actually surprised that this is what she finds as a recruiter. I’ve seen plenty of guys who cling to friends as their source of identity and comfort. Similarly, with wanting to be near your family, hometown, favorite sports team - whatever, men often struggle with leaving the comfort zone to get ahead.

Lauren’s got some harsh words for us more sensitive types. Get a load of this riff:

…I don’t even want to send you to my agencies at this point because I get the feeling you are going to try and make them have cry circles after work where you discuss your feelings. Weird. You should have known when you got into this business that it would require moving at some point. However, don’t call me telling me you really want a job, anywhere, and then when the client is interested start pouting and giving me your stream of consciousness over the phone about all of your insecurities. I do not specialize in breathing exercises and co-dependency management. What I do specialize in is getting you a job that translates to a promotion and more money…

Wow Lauren! When it comes to being a recruiter, if you have to read a guy’s ‘feelings journal’ and get them to leave it on the night stand before an interview, you should do it. Good luck finding candidates that need no counsel when making a job change.

To the male job seeking masses, the tough love should be a point well taken. We are competing against strong candidates who will do whatever it takes to get ahead. So, take off your diapers and stop your whimpering when it comes to moving. If you’ve made the decision to change your life to get a new job, what’s the big deal about changing your location?

Have a look at a nice example of a job ad that reflects very well on the staffing industry. Jim Durbin posted this ad on his blog and tweeted it out to his network.

VP Marketing Role In St Louis

The job ad has the following things that all staffing firm recruiters could do:

1. Admit right up front the relationship between the recruiter and the client. For seekers really naive about recruiters, it might even be good to link to a definition of contingent search.
2. Make a short statement about the company in your own words instead of some marketing boilerplate about ’startup with IPO potential’. Jim really builds trust that he has a relationship with the client and has internalized it enough to boil it down to a meaningful synopsis for his candidate audience
3. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Jim doesn’t bother with what’s in it for the candidate. He goes right in to ‘What I’m Looking For’. It actually better reflects the fact that recruiters are acting as candidate agents with a responsibility to present the best/right fit for the job. You get the feeling that what he’s looking for isn’t from some internal job description that lists one hundred requirements and ‘desired skills’. He has crafted three profiles from his candidate research that he can effectively sell into the client.

Perhaps if Jim were working for a large staffing firm, or if this weren’t a VP level job, his approach may have been different. Maybe he wouldn’t have had as much knowledge of the client. Had this not been for a marketing job would he have taken the same approach? I’m not sure. It does strike me as a much stronger case for working with a recruiter than the majority of the schlock out there.

Apparently the future of customer relationships is empowering the rank-and-file to act as a conduit of the brand message within the online socialscape. This is suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece via Scott Monty. If that be the case, and we also agree that the job is less about ‘managing the message’ and more about interacting in the community on behalf of the company, then marketers better get into the education game quickly. We need to become fluent in online community and social media to the point of being able to teach it to the rest of our organizations.

Here’s a case in point. My wife wrote a scathing rant on her blog about an awful experience with our local Sears retailer. She followed up that missile with the typical phone runaround with varying levels of drones and retail managers until the issue was resolved. It is likely that this heated piece of prose will sit in net space for a long period of time, in all of it’s Google-optimized glory just waiting for other outlets to pick it up. Were the marketing team within the Sears hierarchy able to train every employee to use Google Alerts to find these gems, the response could be swift and genuine. We need to train our people to fight the company’s battles on the customers’ turf, out in the open. Those that do so, ultimately are going to win. There is a HUGE opportunity out there for new tools and new roles in teaching every employee to do social-media marketing. The content must shift from ‘What is Facebook, blogs, wikis, etc’ to ‘How to respond to a negative blog post about our company’.

This is an excellent presentation by Jake McKee, a former LEGO employee who currently runs a social media consultancy. He relates the work of interacting with the adult consumer community of LEGO to the tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I was riveted to the content, one because it was about LEGO, and 2 because it touches on so many of the new and challenging principles of marketing that must be grapsed. To me, it is crystal clear that marketing is fast becoming the art of managing the community not controlling the message.

Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter.

There is so much in the marketing world about the interaction between customers in the blogosphere and the companies that make products or services for those customers. From the iPhone, to the Dodge Challenger there are robust communities all over the web making or breaking products through the power of word-of-mouth stimulated by social media. Very little of this interaction is sponsored by the makers of the products, but these voices no doubt affect the direction of the products, and future marketing decisions.

Jobs and labor are no different. In fact, one could argue that the transparency of company and consumer attitudes toward labor, from the advent of labor unions, to the existence of F*ed Company has a far more rich history than some contentious discourse about your crappy computing device.

Transparency is Coming to Legal Staffing
In the past year, this issue has come to the forefront for more legal staffing firms. Employees are not so afraid anymore of getting fired for blogging, even though this, this, and this suggest they should think otherwise. While online conversation had been the perview of IT workers since Usenet, it seems fairly recent that legal professionals have taken to blogging en force.

I first started to look into the online presence of legal professionals in 2005 when I noticed a small website, paralegalgateway.com sending a bit of traffic to Hudson’s websites. Upon further review I found that it was Jeannie Johnston’s site (a Hudson employee at the time) who through a small link in a blog post, had driven some traffic toward us. I was very curious to see one of our own interacting in a very meaningful way with a targeted talent pool from which she would recruit. This sparked more curiosity in me as to where blogging and online community were taking place within the world of our legal staffing practice. I knew that entry level legal professionals were hanging around the Monster Legal channel that we helped to establish in 2007. Still, there didn’t seem to be a voice of the practicing temporary attorney who was doing the large-scale document review which was becoming common.

The Awakening of 2007
With the exception of “Tom the Temp” who started his blog in late 2005, it seems that in mid-2007 the temporary attorney blogosphere became more populated and interesting. Joe Miller posted his first JD Wired entry in August of 2007, as did another anonymous temporary attorney in Washington DC. All of these blogs bring a very real voice to the marketplace that is useful market intelligence for legal staffing firms.

The good (from Tom the Temp):

Anonymous said…
reality check has the right of it. I’m an attorney working at the Newark site, and the original post couldn’t be a bigger bunch of bs. The Hudson people are courteous, pay on time, treat us like professionals, and have made the environment as pleasant as possibly given some constraints by the client (i.e. no phone use in the coding room). Whoever gave you the info for the original post either was fired on the first day for being a slobbering idiot, or needs to work on his fiction.

I’ve only been to this blog for a few weeks, but I already can see it’s just a bunch of WATBs. You cry babies have probably never worked a single day of your pampered lives at a real job. Whah whah whah.

$35 an hour plus time an half for coding isn’t good enough for you? Go get a “real” job then. Most firms aren’t looking to bring on board pouty, bitchy juveniles who think the world owes them, but hey, you might get lucky.

The bad (from Tom the Temp)

I really hope this is true. It’s time for some structure, people. The firms, temp agencies, predatory banks, and TTT law schools are continuing to eat us alive. How much more non-dischargeable law school debt will they be allowed to pile on top us? For the fifth straight year, will you just sit back and allow them to yet again “deflate your rate”? Will you lose yet another P.T.O. (not just any P.T.O, but one belonging to Dr. King), while profits per partner continue to soar? I hope not.

The ugly (from my attorney blog):

John Smith Says:

December 13th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Hudson totally screwed me out of referral fee because I was not staffed with them at the time. What a joke! I will never refer anyone to that agency again.

While marketers base their reputation on being publicly accountable for their thoughts, it appears that temporary attorneys see the opposite. Much of the commentary on these blogs as well as message boards like JDUnderground is anonymous and incendiary. To some extent this helps you get a pulse of the industry better than any employee survey could. Salaries and benefits are down, demand is less than supply, and work conditions are sometimes less than ideal.

I will admit that reading the content is entertaining, although somewhat like watching a car wreck. Hudson has put hundreds of satisfied people to work that are already speaking on our behalf within these social media. So far, my role is to know what is being said - to listen. Not only that, but Hudson’s front-line staff are listening. The real question for an interactive marketer then is how to join the conversation in a meaningful and beneficial way.

photo by mr oji

The game was great. Much as it pains me to say **hurray** when a Giants team that at one point in its history put a dagger in my heart (Wide-Right), I did in fact jump out of my seat when Eli Manning played Houdini on one play, then hit Plaxico Burress wide-open in the end zone for the game winning touchdown.

The ads were less than great. The ‘follow your heart’ spot was a provocative stunt which definitely got people talking…mostly in the way they would talk after leaving a movie with gratuitous gore. The ‘Firefly’ ad was dopey. For some reason it took me until my second and 3rd viewing today to really grasp the punchline. I think it was a lot of story development in 30 seconds, and my slow brain just couldn’t keep up. It could also have been that it was later in the game when fatigue and beer had already set in.The CareerBuilder ‘08 SuperBowl ads plus 2 others in the series are posted here.

Let’s see what the market has to say. I’m very interested in a lot of aspects to the campaign. I’ll list them below and continue to update this post as I find out more and more.

1. What is the overall sentiment toward CareerBuilder after it dropped the motherlode to buy those ads?
• Answer #1. USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter ranks ads 38th and 45th. Wasn’t this the metric that got CB’s Ad Agency fired last year?
• Answer #2. Nancy Colasurdo, Life Coach at Foxbusiness.com thought the CareerBuilder Ads Send an Important Message. Hmm…I don’t think most watchers are as cerebral as she.
2. How much web traffic did the ads generate? How many additional resumes, job views, applies, etc.?
   From my CareerBuilder Rep:
   

   Feb 08’, CareerBuilder.com hit a record high in unique visitors (in the Career Services and Development) with 25 million! Most importantly, right after Super Bowl commercials aired (Monday and Tues following)….CB internal data showed a substantial increase in EOI. It increased by 26%. EOI stands for “Expressions of Interest”…meaning # of people applying to jobs. In those 2 days following, there was a 26% increase in people that applied to jobs.

3. With social networking more mainstream than ever, how well does the campaign reach into influential social and professional networks?
   • Answer #1. The recruitosphere, which is NOT the target audience was discussing the ads pre- and post- Super Bowl:
     Why Recruiters Love Super Bowl Ads
     Cheezhead getting busted by W+K for posting the ad pre-bowl
     Cheezhead saying the ad was a flop
     Pamela Skillings really liked them
   • Answer #2. Twitter activity gave real time opinions of the ads. Look what people had to say.
   • Answer #3. Gizmodo (the influential tech gadget blog) rated Firefly the Lowest Kick to Disney’s Balls.
4. How much do the interactive/online components to the campaign contribute to its relative success?
• Answer #1. Charles Armstrong was impressed with Tide and not with CareerBuilder. I agree. Tide blew me away, and I’m getting all sorts of errors with CareerBuilder’s Personal Gruntledness Index today.
• Answer #2. Reprise Media gives CareerBuilder a “Touchdown” for integrating its paid search placement with its ad campaign. Tip o’ the hat to Matthew Grant at Aquent.

I’ll keep my ear to the ground on CareerBuilder campaign happenings as well as on the Monster ones to see who is getting it right, and who is treading water. Ultimately, it has an impact on where we invest our precious marketing budgets. Stay tuned.

CareerBuilder has action, Monster has aspirations. CareerBuilder’s 2008 marketing assault is taking a different tact toward driving job seekers than is Monster’s newly minted global ad campaign. Here’s the agency-created promo that was shown to CareerBuilder employees.

This video is from www.careerbuilder.com/marketinghighlights

CareerBuilder’s ad campaign, just like the rest of their product offering aims at immediacy. It is all about getting the traffic, driving applies, and ultimately delighting the clients who pay them for those candidates. For me, CareerBuilder’s recent success is more about their Recommended Jobs engine. The campaign is only going to augment the effectiveness of that product feature, and ultimately drive staffing firm success.

Case in point. Recommended jobs are present in every part of the job seeker experience. From the home page, to the thank you note you get after applying to a job, CareerBuilder drives users to that next opportunity that is relevant to what they know about you. It is a very Amazon-like experience, a site famous for leveraging knowledge of its customers to provide information about what you should do next. On Super Bowl Sunday, when Sally job seeker gets convinced it’s time to leave her sucky job, she’ll go to CareerBuilder and find 25 targeted recommendations on how to fix that problem. Even if the recommendations based on her zip code and uploaded resume lead her to my competitors, she’ll likely see Hudson jobs that could solve her problem too. Because of CareerBuilder’s product these are the types of seekers we’ll be looking for.

Monster has taken the aspirational high road, choosing to inspire people to find a job they are really passionate about - even if it’s in another industry. I’m not as cynical about their campaign as some, but I do find the following scenario a likely result.

Hmm…my calling is calling. Let’s see if I have a shot at being an executive chef. Keywords=chef + $100k, Apply Now. Ooh…I’ve always thought coffee was fun to drink, how about a career as a barista? Keywords=coffee + training available, Apply Now. Because the site isn’t telling Ms. Aspirational Accountant that the Contract Tax Manager position right up the street is in her wheelhouse, she’s almost encouraged to spread her application to any number of stretch positions. It’s a great marketing message for job seekers for sure, but for over-burdened recruiters and staffing firms with a mountain of unqualifieds on their desk, it’s a nightmare.

I’m eager to see whether the data supports my theory, or if I’m off my rocker. I’m certainly not the only armchair critic this year. Happy Super Bowl everybody.