LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

Wow, the previous blog entry I made was in March; don’t think I’ve ever left it for so long.

I think – like others – I was sorta kidnapped by Twitter; meantime though a number of things happened in regards to the LatinOcean practice. Allow me to make a recap:

1. Despite the GFC (remember it?) there were a quite a few clients keen to make investments in their staff education, reviewing processes and sprucing up internal and external systems. They were able to take advantage of their revised/lower opportunity costs (e.g. consultants less busy, more negotiation power with vendors, etc.).

2. What also helped us keep a steady path re. ‘business coming in’ was the expected growth of career management and transitioning/outplacement services from our larger clients. To leverage of this part of the cycle, we adapted our sourcing and recruitment focused offerings into the services from HR outfits that were preparing retrenched professionals for their next move. Our contribution had a lot to do with personal branding and reputation management on the web.

3. At the end of June, LatinOcean was sold to Jabor Holdings. Jabor Holdings is a private company in which I am a director. Our expectation is that LatinOcean will continue operating for as long as our customers want us around. If anything, we plan to explore how we can use the materials and IP developed over the last three years to expand into other professional services verticals.

4. Jabor Holdings is also owner of Digital Reach a new venture that came to life at the beginning of this year; focused on the online advertising industry, this startup needs lots of love and nurturing which is what hopefully we will be giving it.

This post is making me look back and now I understand why I haven’t blogged in such a long time.

In the meantime though, there have been interesting/encouraging topics/trends emerging; on which I can only hope I will be chipping in more proactively. For example:

- Less observers and more doers online; in particular more actual recruitment consultants walking the talk re. online sourcing, etc. and bringing insights from the real world. Greg Savage and Kelly O’Shaughnessy come to mind.

- The ever growing quality and volume output coming from the thinkers. The discourse and reports like Phillip and Michael’s sources of talent study opened the room for debate, discussion and further refinement outside the echo chamber.

- The ongoing tinkering with services and technologies supporting recruitment, sourcing, engagement

- The social recruitment meme, which was undergoing a stylish discussion entanglement until someone looked at the time and said that it was time to get back to work (just being facetious; I am always keen to listen and contribute to concept-shaping views on this topic)

Look forward to getting back into blogging shape. Thank you for sticking around

In the industrial era, Big money was spent on Big research that spawned Big products; the early adopters for such wares (planes, guns, mainframes) were either governments or well-funded, large corporations. Subsequent to that, mass-production-driven economies of scale allowed for diminishing marginal production costs through automation, cheaper labour, amortisation of R&D expenditure. The consumerisation of products was the result of its massification.

In the post-industrial period, comparatively small investments of time and money are dedicated to launch new tools and services that are firstly thrown into the hands of individual users, generally for little or no money. When this offering reaches or gets close to the proverbial tipping point, corporations and governments start to pay attention. Consumerisation effectively acts as a huge proof of concept.

The first example that comes to mind is ICQ; it supposedly started with pimply kids flirting and talking about music, right? Next thing, intranet based IM applications are vanilla services in business. Same for P2P, even email if you want to go that far back. The music discussions and flirting (may be) are gone but the design stayed.

So, next time you feel like rolling your eyes when someone tweets what she had for breakfast, may I kindly suggest you have a Stella, relax and reflect that in all likelihood the trivial stuff (maybe) will fade away from twitter, but its infrastructure will certainly remain.

- What is the current theoretical value of 50% of career one? Any guesses?
- Sounds like this is take 2 of ‘feed the monster’ strategy (with resumes, that is) which might just put another local resume database product out there
- I guess the product and tech guys at C1 if any, are now gone / redeployed to other properties? Therefore, only local sales teams? Any local systems support people? Hope they ensure the service does not deteriorate
- Will there be a s**t fight for the revenue of the proposed offline/online product bundle
- Careermonster – or Monsterone – might go back in rankings before it gets back to number 2 or better
- The new site might be cheaper to run, therefore more profitable operation

Just as it gets to be less simple to be hired in Australia (it’s a Thursday, that’s as witty as I can be before the week’s end), Simply Hired launched this week their local Australia site – together with other English-based sites around the world.

Job search engines have received some air time a while back (not all of it great, e.g. content snatchers, blah blah), mainly via myspider.com.au, Ansearch’s jobsinoz and recruit.net (for which I did a bit of consulting back in the day).

I think their role in the ecosystem is still in the making (i.e. distribution partner to job boards? to direct employers? alternative to a niche strategy?… well we have the whole economic downturn to work it out.

I hope you are having a nice week

Anecdotal evidence indicates that referrals are a great source of placed/place-able candidates. “Great” is obviously highly subjective, it could refer to a number of variables and scales.

I will forget for a moment that I have not seen systemic/comprehensive empirical of the ‘greatness’ of referrals. Assuming this is a channel worth nurturing and developing, I believe that what enables the message (job opportunity) to disseminate through the channel is a minimum of two Trust relationships:

- 1 between the referrer and referee (colleague, relative)
- 1 between the potential employer or agency (whomever offers the job) and referrer (current employer, family business)

I am not even saying that this trust is well placed, I am only stating it needs to exist so that the message (job opportunity) goes somewhere. Eventually, a third trust relationship – between employer/agency and referee – may develop, even though the candidate is not offered the job.

From this it follows that the core issue with online referral systems like 2vouch and others is the fact that there is no trust relationship between the job poster and the referrer, so there is no comfort in disseminating the message. I would argue that the info on the job posting is not comprehensive enough to compel a referrer to recommend it to a contact.

The accompanying risks are well known: spamming, low quality, lack of ‘greatness’. What follows then is that if I were to run one of these referrals sites, I would dedicate 90% of all my budget to develop at trust relationship between the job poster and the referrer, sneezer, etc.

Do you agree? What else would you do to make an online referral platform actually work, other than the usual (great service, fluid site, blah)?

Have a great week

Act 1: Thursday evening. Jorge is reluctantly watching Law and Order on FTA TV

Act 2: Commercial break. The latest VW EOS ad screens. The song for the ad reminds Jorge of the song that Julia Delpy’s character in ‘before sunset’ sings to Ethan Hawke’s whilst they are in her Paris apartment

Act 3: Jorge looks for the name and artist for the ad song online. Yahoo answers and Answer Bank yield old results – looks like the EOS has a bit of a reputation re. using catchy songs

Act 4: YouTube’s EOS ad clip comments provide the song and singer names

Act 5: Jorge goes to iTunes and buys/downloads the song. Jorge is definitely not going to buy an EOS in the foreseeable future

Act 6: Jorge goes back to the couch secretly hoping that Basia Bulat is paying VW for advertising/royalties, not the other way around

Have a great long weekend

US-based data but it gives you a glance anyway.

Will be interesting to see what is the effect of the content deals, the ad revenue drives and the monetisation of the community in general, on the network

Via techcrunch

This is the 2008 snapshot. There are no Australian companies in there but I think they / you can work out where they might be if they were to be included.

Get the full report from Taleo (free registration)

Brothers and Sisters

Did you know that LatinOcean is among the top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneer blogs? Trust me, it is

Even though I have been delving into online retailing in the last few months, this has not distracted me enough to forget about recruitment. I explain:

When a florist delivers a bunch, it means that it has dispatched the product and that the courier has come back with a confirmation that it reached its destination. Now, you will want to think that this is proof that the intended recipient has received the flowers and is already feeling pretty special, right?

Fact is, sometimes the flowers were not received even though they were delivered in absolute good faith, e.g. the person could not be found and the flowers were left at the back of the house, or someone who was not the recipient just got them, etc.

Delivery and Receipt are not the same. This being the case, Is the service you are delivering being received?

- Are you delivering traffic, churn, eyeballs; whilst recruiters want placeable candidates?

- Are you part of a recruitment service delivery team who is so far removed from the client (because of the way your company is organised) that you cannot see its impact on them

My mini-quest for the foreseeable future is to change from ‘we deliver flowers’ to ‘we ensure flowers are received’. I am sure logistics technology can help with this.

Do you have a mini-quest of your own?