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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Apart from it’s advertisement supported business model, one of the principle reasons why Ning isn’t making as much money as it should is the chicken and egg situtation they find themselves in. If you give a highly valuable item i.e. the software, to customers for free, there is a good chance that they underestimate it’s power and not fully utilise it. Equally if the company decides to charge for templated social networking service, especially if it’s around $75 per month i.e. $900/year, users begin to question it’s value. Question like, “Should we just get a self hosted social media site instead?” “How do we extend the social network and innovate when it gets bigger” “What if our user’s don’t like Ning’s usability” etc

Ning deploys a tried and tested Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, although we shouldn’t forget SaaS works best for internal communication platforms for example in the case of Basecamp, SalesForce etc. There are examples of blogging software like WordPress or several widget based companies which have done exceptionally well using SaaS, although they are different. WordPress allows SaaS on WordPress.com but also has the option to download the entire software on WordPress.org, where bulk of the goodwill and open source innovation happens. Equally widget based companies are primarily slotting into a bigger web presence i.e. a website, social network etc and isn’t a standalone solution.

In my opinion it’s impossible to find a successful standalone SaaS customer-facing software, without a concrete open source offering.

Social Sourcing and Future of Blogging

SourcerSrini mentions how he is uses social media for sourcing candidates.
PunkRockHR good insight on the future of blogging.

Innovative startup in Recruitment

@James_Mayes talks about innovative stuff they are doing within their new start-up