Looking for a ‘Community Manager’…ASAP

Posted on | March 15, 2011 | View Comments

Location Work Remotely occasionally travel to Madrid, Spain. All expenses paid

Salary £25-30k £30,000+ based on experience.

Position Full Time

About Actualize Group

The Position

Essential Requirements

Apply

Please send your CVs and a brief covering letter to ranand@actualizegroup.com

Recruiting with Social Media recommended by Recruiters

Posted on | January 27, 2011 | View Comments

Recruiting with Social Media: Social Media’s Impact on Recruitment has had glorying reviews from recruiters and HR professionals. I found some on LinkedIn today and wanted to share them:

Andrew Meehansee Recruitment Researcher at Prudent Recruitment

Comment: “A must read for any forwarding looking recruiter”

Christos Tsaprounis Resourcing Specialist at Co-operative Financial Services

Comment: “I recently bought your book on Recruiting with social media and it has given me lots of ideas on how to take a project at work forward! Thanks and well done – its really good work!”

Sebastian Haire Senior Digital Talent Consultant at Dylan London

Comment: “…Currently reading your work for an internal presentation…. fantastic read.”

Also Recommended by

Roel Broodssee profile »

Consultant at Werk en Vakmanschap Weert

Nokuthula Nyonisee profile »

HRM ,Generation Y social media recruitment enthusiast

Blackberry’ homepage 2002-10 and key learnings about their strategy

Posted on | December 14, 2010 | View Comments

The home page of a website tells us a lot about the marketing strategy and product lines. No better example than Blackberry, which has constantly been working on it’s offering and audience. It began as a completely business focused (see 2002), although over the years it saw uptake from regular users and tweaked it’s message. 2006 onwards individuals became a significant market for it’s mobiles. Compared to 2004 the company focused on selling business to business (B2B) by focusing on individual industries like financial, health-care, government and other verticals.

In 2005 they concentrated on markets based on their geographical locations, providing various products to fit the local demands. 2006 onwards individuals became a very interesting market for Blackberry. In 2008 it was the main focus of the company, even more than it’s business users. 2009 marks an important shift in Blackberry’s branding strategy to go from a very corporate look and feel to a very consumer focused. First time ever, Blackberry could be considered as a end user focused product, from the branding perspective. 2010 clearly shows off it’s social features, solely focused on the consumer. The corporate image has completely disappeared from it’s homepage. It’s now competing heads on with iPhone/Android as a user friendly social device.

2002

Corporate market centric, reflecting branding of it’s time.

2003

Blackberry integrating it’s offering with Microsoft and Lotus’s software packages

2004

Blackberry brings some life into it’s offering by focusing on bright colours and product, as oppose to it’s audience. Blackberry also categorises it’s offering to various industries, very typical for a B2B enterprise.

2005

Blackberry get’s more involved in developing new product range and focused on it’s markets based on it’s geographic location

2006

Individuals become very important to Blackberry’s market

2007

2007 showcases a role back on it’s strategy to focus on businesses

2008

Blackberry was back focusing on individuals before businesses.

2009

Important shift in strategy, making Blackberry a end-user focused brand competing with Apple/Google

2010

Blackberry is all about the user, highly social via integration with social media tools.

The rise of the new Social Media Smarphones

Posted on | September 9, 2010 | View Comments

Social media and networking has become an international obsession, with Facebook accumulating more than half a billion users and microblogging site Twitter growing from humble beginnings into a powerful tool which can be used to build political movements or get its users in trouble with the authorities. Some analysts predict that social networking sites like these will soon overtake standard search engines like Google as the most popular means by which internet users discover information. People share news stories and links to interesting online content with their friends and people can become overnight stars just because they have become popular in the world of social media.

Dawn of the Smartphone

It is possible to draw a line between the growth of social networking and the dawn of the smartphone. Mobiles have become steadily more advanced over the years, but whereas in the past the focus was on ever-improving hardware, these days people are more concerned with the software and connectivity options offered by mobiles. Smartphones are no longer the preserve of the most affluent users, because even pay as you go models can go online and even connect via Wi-Fi networks using dedicated browser software.

The growth of social media on the mobile platform has been fuelled by the popularisation of applications, which in itself has only come to the attention of mainstream users thanks to the success of the Apple iPhone (and the enormous growth of Android) and its various iterations. Users of Facebook access the site in their hundreds of millions from dedicated apps or via mobile web browsers each and every month and it is regularly the most visited mobile site on the planet according to mobile browser developer Opera.

Multimedia on Mobiles

The multimedia features of mobiles are also taken into account by social networking functions, with most phones coming with built in cameras which can shoot video and stills that the user can then upload directly to their social networking profile or to video sharing sites like YouTube. This allows users to instantly transmit the latest information from their life in a visual manner, distributed to a potential audience of billions around the globe. Location-based social networking services like Foursquare, Google Latitude and Facebook places have also only become possible because of the GPS technology which is commonly integrated into even the low to mid range mobiles of the modern era.

Mobile phone manufacturers now choose to hardwire social media and social networking features into mobile phones, rather than forcing the user to rely on third party apps which must be accessed separately, disrupting the natural flow. The likes of Motorola`s MotoBLUR, HTC`s FriendStream and Sony Ericsson`s MediaScape are all examples of how the disparate threads of different social networking services are being drawn together so users can get all of their notifications and in a single place. It is also significant that the three examples of cross-platform mobile social media services given above are all built on mobiles running the Google Android operating system, which is fast becoming the go-to software for consumers who want a low cost way to stay in touch when they are out and about.

Selling just under 300 books per week in just 20 days

Posted on | August 24, 2010 | View Comments

I’m glad to announce that my book on recruiting with social media in just 20 days is now ranked 17,367 out of 424,793 Kiddle books on Amazon.

According to fonerbooks.com that implies that the book is selling just under 300 books per week on Amazon.com alone based on the graph (below) and multiplying a factor of three (as suggested by) Morris:

“Amazon announced in July of 2010 that Kindle sales are running 3X the rate of the first half of 2009, so you may want to triple the numbers on the sales/week axis below”

Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and thanks for the support! If you haven’t bought a copy, you can download a free first chapter of the book.

My book ‘Recruiting with Social Media’ out 3rd August

Posted on | July 21, 2010 | View Comments

I’m glad to inform that my book Recruitment with Social Media, Social Media’s Impact on Recruitment and HR is out on 3rd August 2010, published by Que/Pearson Publication. You can buy a copy from Recruiting with Social Media (Que eStore).

About the Book

The book highlights the power of recruiting people with Social Media! Social Media is not only an effective marketing tool to get candidates and customers onboard but also a tool to help decrease costs on communication, interaction, knowledge management/ transfer inside a company and externally with suppliers and customers.

Update (16th December 2010) The book is now available on Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk/ Sony Reader Store / Infibeam.com (Asia)

Book Information

11 Famous Brands and Hidden Information Contained in their Logos

Posted on | July 9, 2010 | View Comments

Logos are a key aspect of a Brands personality and recognition. A lot of effort and thinking goes into building a good logo, which has a deeper meaning. Here are 11 logos and their hidden meaning.

Amazon.com

Fedex

Continental

Toblerone

Baskin Robins

Sony Vaio

Carrefour

Unilever

Formula 1

Sun Microsystems

NBC

Digital Product Placement (incl. Twitter) in David Guetta’s new video

Posted on | June 18, 2010 | View Comments

As a keen YouTube and dance music fan I was watching David Guetta & Chris Willis ft Fergie & LMFAO – Gettin’ Over You music video and was almost surprised to see how three products i.e. Samsung Wave (iPhone competitor), Twitter and EverestPoker.com were embedded in the video, watch the video below.

Impressive how the product placements like Aston Martin/ BMW / Omega Watches in Bond movies, Courvoisier in Busta Rhymes video and other luxury goods have been replaced by websites and multimedia devices. There is much more to come, I believe in the future we will see a whole heap of social media, gambling and online services sites.

Are we ready for the digital revolution?

Windows offers Google Doc equivalent, do you care?

Posted on | June 8, 2010 | View Comments

Windows yesterday (7th June) posted a message launching their Office web apps on Skydrive in UK, US, Canada and Ireland. I had a quick play around with it and compared it with Google Docs, see screenshots below:

Microsoft Office suite

Google Docs

The question I am trying to ask myself is why would someone using Google Docs for say less than three years be interested in migrating to SkyDrive? There is a OneNote document feature, which is different but possible a glorified Google Document? I am probably judging Microsoft without giving them a fair chance.

I would love to know what are the next steps for Windows to improve their SkyDrive offering? How can brands and developers use their web apps? What would be it’s unique selling point (USP) in the next 3-5 years?

Our experience of launching Internal Communication Platform

Posted on | May 28, 2010 | View Comments

We  (The Actualize Group / @actualizelabs) are a 130+ employee company providing IT services to premium banking, insurance, telecommunication and technology customer based in London, Spain, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.  We believe that communication inside our organisation is a key aspect of developing a healthy environment and working relationships. Further the more the company’s employees speak and interact, the greater are the opportunities of building a positive vibe and giving/receiving more out of employees.

In addition to creating a positive impact within the company internal communication is also the first step to building a sustainable innovation strategy. Without having an internal community it’s almost impossible to build an external community around the organisation. Having an external community would help push the concept of developing products, getting feedback on products/service, innovation etc to the next level. A bit like Twitter, where once 70% of it’s usage was seen from applications built by other developers.

Experience of building Internal Community

Considerations

From the word go, we knew that developing an internal community will not be easy. Given that we are multinational, speaking upto 5 languages in various countries. We also know that developing a paper based communication platform wouldn’t work for us as it is slow, expensive and not nearly as interactive as the online version. Further, we didn’t think that email was ideal for communication as they often get lost amongst the piles of other emails. Further it’s not a systematic way to respond to comments. Hence we decided to engage an online social media platform, where we could manage all the communications at a central point, accessible via web, mobile or tablet.

Result

I am glad to announce that we recently launched our internal communication tool. Within a matter of 18 days we managed to get more than 25% (28% to be precise) of the company on the communication platform. All members have explicitly chosen to join the platform, i.e. they have signed up voluntarily. 70% of all members are actively commenting, suggesting and interacting. Although 20% of members are contributing to 80% of the content, hence the 20-80 rule applies. What’s more impressive is the fact that many of the new messages on the internal communication platform are new ideas and concept for future products and services.

It is fantastic to see that everyone in the company is pushing to re-innovate and rediscover the organization. I must be completely honest and mention that it hasn’t been easy, to get people on to the internal communication channel is rather challenging and requires an internal campaign, but it seems the experience is worth it. Especially in unifying communication and giving employees the opportunity to change the fortunes of the company.