okay. forgive me if this post comes off as slightly rant-y, but i have a lot to say and i think it might just spew out.

here goes nothing:

what’s the deal with companies being so stubborn? now, before you write me off as another twenty-something griping about who knows what without anything to back it up, keep reading.

i understand the generational gap between, say, myself… and most organizations out there. the majority of firms are owned/run/managed by folks that aren’t twenty-somethings, that aren’t gen-y. i get that. (cough, cough, another testament to the fact that you need me, cough)

what i don’t get is why on god’s green earth are these people so difficult to convince?

i’d figure that if you’re running a successful company, you’ve gotta be a pretty smart guy (or gal). pull your head out of the sand for long enough to realize that traditional marketing, recruiting, and business practices simply don’t cut it anymore.

my roommate works for a large international corporation (who shall remain nameless), that just this past summer, launched a standardized global brand for the first time ever. completely aside from that, she asked me to brainstorm with her today about their recruitment advertising. apparently, the multiple organizations within the global brand use different standards and practices when promoting job openings and recruiting candidates.

putting behind me the fact that i can’t wrap my mind around WHY they all use different ads and agencies, i tried (not so successfully) to help her develop a survey to distribute to marketing and hr across the board of the entire corporation… how do you advertise? where do you advertise? how much do you spend on recruitment advertising?

you get it. moving on.

she said something that inspired me to click straight over to woley.net and start rantin— er, blogging.

“they want to appeal to young college students.”

okay, really? i had just finished saying that they should just scrap recruitment ads all together and use craigslist… because it’s effective… and free. she basically told me that [her big corporation] wouldn’t dream of advertising on craigslist. go figure.

well, you big corporations, you… continue spending thousands of dollars recruiting at career fairs and on your own website. don’t bother using linkedin (free), or facebook (free), or twitter(free), or craigslist (free)… keep advertising jobs in newspapers, stuffy magazines, and whatever other traditional tactics you crazy old (forgive me!) folks like to stick to. you’ll keep reaching the same kind of people.

moving on to my company… er, well… the company i’ll be working for until november 21.

we’re primarily B2B. we cater to the education market, to universities and other like institutions. we’re not a big company, and most of the people running the show here aren’t old sticks in the mud (most… hate to say it, sorry). we’re hip and trendy, have a great logo and great branding potential but we’re just not doing it.

what’s up with that? hi, by the way, to the folks from work that are reading this, how ya doin’?

for the past year and a half, i have been relentlessly pushing facebook as a means to target students. i mean, hell. if students latch onto our product and petition their institutions for it, that’s a success right? i think so.

anyhow. my company is a media company… we’re tech people. don’t you think that it’s just a given that we should be utilizing media and technology to promote and sell our product? again, i think so.

our ultimate consumers (not customers… those are the universities themselves) are students. ultimately, students are the ones using our product, shouldn’t they be getting some of our advertising dollars too?

not only does our product benefit faculty and staff, it benefits students tremendously. how much better would you have done in school if you had the ability to go back through your lectures word for word and slide for slide when you were doing your homework?

someone please tell me why this company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on trade shows and no money on marketing to students?

like i’ve said countless times before: my generation wants to be reached.

yet, we’re overlooked because companies think it’s difficult to reach us. i wish i had had the product we sell when i was in school… it would have enriched my education enormously. too bad no one took the time or money (which would cost pennies… come on, people) to tell me that this product existed… because if i had known, i would have been in front of the administration that very day with a proposal and petition for lecture capture technology.

anyway… as i expected, this is getting rant-y… so i’m going to stop. read this article for awesome insight on the benefits of using social media in business… smart. very smart.

here are some numbers, for those of you who like cold, hard, proof: a recent survey shows that 55 percent of 120 surveyed small business owners believe that online social networking — such astwitter, linkedin and facebook — can be beneficial to their businesses (surepayroll) one out of every five of the small business owners polled have obtained at least one new customer as a direct result of using social media.

36% of online users think more positively about companies that have blogs (universal mccann).

85% of business owners participating in social media for business are doing so by way of blogging online (surepayroll).

almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media website, 25% interact more than once per week (cone business).

93% of americans believe a company should have a presence in social media (cone business).
echo360 has great ideas and incredible potential… and hopefully, one day, when i’m likely long gone, they’ll realize how right i was and how easy it really is to get the students on their side.
sources:
jennifer leggio
alex moskalyuk