Enjoy!

A

An industry oldie (by virtue of being around more than a year), Glassdoor is one of the most popular P2P review sites on the web. Users can anonymously comment on the organisations they work for (or have worked for) giving advice to senior management about how things should be improved – a useful pulse survey for firms and researchers alike. They can also post their salaries and questions that were raised during interviews. Whilst this does raise a challenge for recruiters, levelling the playing field in terms of salary negotiations and making it difficult to get under the skin of the people they are interviewing who have had plenty of time to pre-prepare responses to questions they are likely to be asked, my view is that this should ultimately be a good thing. I’m curious as to what will happen to Glassdoor – will it become just another job board, or is it a hot prospect for a takeover. My suspicions say the latter, as the content it owns is far too valuable. Time, as they say, will tell.

A new contender on the block, the Job Crowd sounds curiously similar to an award winning TV comedy. However, the content and features it contains are no joke. Targeted at graduates and early stage workers, there are plenty of articulate and useful reviews about a range of jobs and industries, with added features like ‘Similar Reviews’ (akin to Amazon’s ‘People who liked this also liked’ feature) and a surprisingly large following. The business model is nice too, as every review added generates a donation to the Shaw Trust, a leading employment charity.

The brain child of a couple of entrepreneurs from Loughborough University, Rate My Placement has been firmly establishing itself as THE favourite contender for Graduate advice. Its business model has it working closely with employers, careers advisors and university placement officers, generating input from students that will hopefully provide real-life insight into what students and graduates can expect from working in a company. With competition forcing employers to start the engagement process earlier and earlier in the student lifecycle, it is easy to see why this site continues to do so well. It’s  first-hand knowledge and experience of the student placement and internship process, aligned with a dedication to relevant, up-to-date, student generated content that has allowed RMP to identify and fill a growing gap in the market and understand the needs of our users and clients. Another hot prospect for takeover.

Talking of early stage recruitment, I thought to take a look at an early stage P2P site that allow students to rate teachers and schools. Rate My Teacher is an intriguing prospect although  I’m curious how long such content will be allowed to be posted without accusations of libel and slander (reading today’s news about Google being successfully sued for the way that its search algorithm can place negative words next to an individual’s name is a stark reminder). However, the site does have plenty of content and uses Facebook ‘Likes’ to extend its reach across multiple channels. As a parent who is seriously considering about investing in education, it is reassuring to see that some teachers can still generate a hugely positive response.

Finally, I saw this site and had to post it as a great example of opportunistic capitalism. Faced with a throwaway society, where having the latest toy and gadget affords children playground status and a consumer cycle where ‘latest’ can now be expressed in months and weeks, rather than seasons, it is no wonder that an exchange marketplace has risen, phoenix-like from the ashes of a discarded toy mountain. Stork Brokers is a trading exchange for parents who want to get some vestige of value from barely used toys. It’s similar to eBay with more targeting and a much better moniker.

Enjoy (and travel safely)

Davos debates
Last week, we featured the Pepsi CSR initiative and this week we see a similar approach from the brains at Davos (not to be confused with Dr Who’s nemesis, Davros). Rather than financial gain, the prize in this case is intellectual – tickets to Davos. The competition is over (all submissions had to be in by the 4th Jan) but I thought it was an interesting initiative to see: low cost, quick to set up and creates involvement through participation, as opposed to dicatat. Which, I suppose, is the point.

Thank you for the music
Quite a nice government-led initiative that I saw just before Christmas. From a creative standpoint, there is nothing new or overtly complex here, but it is nice to see a public body getting involved in a broader sphere of work than brochureware.

Submariners
As we are in the midst of a long term pitch to be one of the agencies ‘privileged’ enough to work with the Armed Forces on recruitment, I’ve been looking for examples throughout the world of how other Forces are recruiting. This is a nice example from Australia. The components are nicely stitched together, the campaign makes good use of the media (rather than simply relying on copy) and there is plenty of opportunity for user interaction.

Brand Analyser
One for our Solutions/more strategic clients. I’m constantly on the lookout for tools that analyse media to make an intelligent judgement about organisations – the Google Insights tool was one and this, which I came across in December, is another. Enter a brand name (for example one of your clients) and it will allocate that brand a score based on its use of social media, with a pie chart showing the breakdown. Enter two names (for example a competitor) and you start to have a competitive index. I’d be wary about using this in isolation, but it is useful as part of an overall competitive analysis.

P2P trading for airmiles
A nice initiative, which makes me wonder why someone hasn’t come up with the idea before. Does what it says on the tin.

World news has been completely overshadowed by the death of Michael Jackson. The YouTube vid above is an interesting way of seeing how quickly the information was picked up on Twitter and then became a Storm. As an interesting addendum, MJs videos have stormed the viral video charts, to represent the entire top 20.

Odds on a Top 10 mainstream chart of Michael Jackson videos by the weekend? It would be worth taking a punt, certainly…