my linkedin profile has been viewed of late with people with this job title
so what is talent acquisitio?
the new (perhaps nearly new) job title for recruiters and human resourcers it would appear not. a quick google explains why. enlightening!
Back in 1999 a husband and wife plus a friend conceived an idea based on the US website classmates.com. This idea was called Friends Reunited and was launched in July 2000 after lots of media interest in the year that followed from a base of a few thousand members the site had 2.5 million registered users. The idea of the site was to link people via their schooling, all of a sudden you could look through list of people and old mates that were at your school and see what they were now up to. When I registered I recall seeing names from my school days 14 years previously that turned on a dim lightbulb of memory from my distant past. It seems others were able to rekindle romance from previous teenage encounters and supposedly the site was a cause of numerous affairs and divorces.
Today its been announced that due to lack of active users making the sites upkeep and running non economical the site would close. An awful lot of the 2.5 million members that registered in the early days probably cant remember their sign on details and probably did not even realise the site was in existance. I personally can’t even remember how long after registering I ceased to even view the site.
So what happened to the site born in Hertfordshire? It seems that by 2005 there were around 15 million registered users; a similar site from Australia and one from New Zealand were merged into the site. ITV purchased the site for £120 million with further payments based on its performance up to 2009 which supposedly were £55 million. Quite a success story though even though its founders no doubt became miillionaires overnight its not obvious whether they had gained funding from Venture Capitalists to keep the site afloat and running one would hazard a guess of yes. Though reports suggested they recieved £30 million from the deal.
Interestingly in 2005 News Corp International bought the social network myspace for $580 million; myspace was the largest social media site in the world for the next few years.
Why did ITV acquire the site; It seems combining ITVs userbase would make the user base the 8th largest online presence of unique users which would provide attractive advertising prospects.
By 2009 things had gone sour and ITV sold the site for £25 million ITV had made a loss as a company for the previous year and advertising revenues had collapsed. Even though MySpace had a large user base the newly launched websites of Facebook ad Twitter had overtaken it in terms of users and use. ITV sold the site including Genes Reunited to a company called Brightsolid who already owned fingmypast.com which contained the census from 1901 and 1911.
After a rebranding exercise a few years back Brightsolid no longer considered the site to be integral to its business. It will now close.
Friends Reunited was a site that delivered what was misisng at the time but never really reinvented itself to compete with the multi functional new generation sites of Facebook, Bebo et al.
No visitor number have increaed substationally since the announcement. So what does it mean for the data it holds; analysts believe the data is outdated and no longer relevant as the majority of people have not kept their cotact details updated for many years. It would be a shame to see the site go offline completely and the school data lost. Perhaps it can be kept alive by an archive site. We will see.
So the final of the 2015 apprentice lineup was between Joseph Valente and Vana Koutsomitis.
Joseph’s business plan surrounded expanding his plumbing business by pitching an idea to become preferred suppliers to property agents to areas outside of his current region
Vana’s business plan was to launch a dating app that combined online dating with game playing. The games would be a form of psychrometric analysis.
Industry experts and Lord Sugar quickly picked up the fact that Vana’s business would require more than the £250,000 investment to get to market. Vana had spoken to an app developer who suggested a basic app with few features would cost £30000 to £40000 to develop and for a more fully featured app would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and would need marketing.
Lord Sugar chose Joseph Valente as his business partner.
In his final summing up Lord Sugar did say he knew technology rather than the service industry, but the required investment for Vana’s idea seemed to be the downfall of her idea. Questioning her further she admitted the £250000 would be used as seed funding to get an app developed and to market and hopefully withing 6 months they would have 100000 users, She admitted she would have to get further funding to succeed but believed she could sell her idea to get extra funding from Venture Capitalists.
Unless Lord Sugar was willing to put in more money this would water down his shareholding so probably was not an attractive proposition. One industry expert implied there were about 15 dating apps coming to market per month.
It does make you wonder how people with ideas can become successful in the internet/app world. The average person could not easily provide the funds that are being suggested. Most successful apps are free and people seem to expect them to be free. In app purchases seem to work but there has been numerous negative reports of how easy it is for people to run up very large bills to use the app or if a game (progress further). This is especially true of apps aimed at Children.
Up until recently adverts were fairly non existant on apps and users were using the app version more tha the browser version of sites. Today apps now do show adverts but numerous ad blockers exist to stop ads from being displayed though these apps are being outlawed by the app stores; even some websites have been coded so that they show a banner to users if they have ad blockers installed in the browser and wont let them use the site unless the blocker is disabled.
It seems that perhaps bedroom technologists will be lucky to succeed; though this is no different to what happened in the video games industry as todays video games have budgets that are in excess of hollywod feature films. The likes of manic miner and pacman just dont get developed today
It will be interesting to see if Vana does launch her app.
The UK General Election of 2010 was the first to be embraced by social media. The demographics of social media use then though was predomininately the 18 to 25 years olds. Since then more widespread uptake of social media by the general population will mean that there should be more coverage across the social media platforms.
The question though is have your local candidates embrassed social media? are you following them for updates? or are you following the parties as a whole.
Lets look at my local area of Woking to see what the state is.
For the general election according to the local council website see link shows that apart from the usual 3 main parties of The Conservative Party, The Labour Party and Liberal Democrates there are candidates for UKIP, Green Party, Magna Carter Conservation Party Great Britain, The Evolution Party and Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol (CISTA). I must admit that even though I keep myself up to date the last three are new to me.
As to be expected the main known parties have a full website and social media presence but what about the 3 lesser known parties. For simplicity I will look for a website, facebook and twitter account at party level.
Magna Carter Conservation Party Great Britain
Website: http://snobgoblin.com/magnacartaconservationparty/
Twitter: @tweetportraits no updates since Dec 2012
Facebook: none found
The Evolution Party
Website: none found
Twitter: @EvolutionPa2015
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Evolution-Party/1377555392551170
CISTA
Website: http://cista.org/
Twitter: @CISTA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CISTA2015
If I look at the current MP for Woking Jonathan Lord who is standing for relelection he does have a twitter account , i presume this is his account , its disappointing to see he has only posted 2 tweets.
It is quote disappointing to see the lack of social engagement. For the smaller parties this could allow them to reach out to the electorate on a regular basis and cut the cost of their door to door mail drops; though it does mean they would alienate certain demographics that a) do not have internet access; b) have internet access but are not socially engaged; they also have no means of knowing who in their electoral region have actually seen their infomation.
Presumably for the national parties there is also a party social policy to avoid gaffes with the consequence of party embarressment and potential deselection and job loss.
If parties want to engage the younger generation 18 to 25 year olds who are very socially aware then disregarding social media does not help persuade this demographic from being involved.
On election night twitter the election will be trending I am sure the main trends for the UK that nught will be majority election related. The hashtag #ELECTION2015 for starters will be one of the main tags and it will be impossible to follow the level of tweets on the night and with the naked eye is impossible to filter any relevant infomation from the mass. No doubt there will be data processing companies that will be monitoring many many hash tags for trends.
Will Election 2015 be a social success only time will tell
Just before Christmas 2014 Mark Wright was announced the winner of the apprentice and picked up £250000 backing from Lord Alan Sugar for his business proposal for a digital marketing agency. His plan centres on digital marketing and search engine optimisation to help push businesses up towards the top in online searches.
Marks Company was to be called Climb Online;
As is to be expected the web sphere went into overdrive with criticisms of his idea and credibility.
His company from day one even though registered with companies’ house it would appear in June 2014 had no website. In fact the domain names for climbonline dot com and climbonline dot co dot uk were already taken. Both if not surprisingly by rock climbing companies. Marks Climb Online domain was to be climb-online.co.uk which was registered on the 16 Jun 2014, along it looks like .uk, .com. as both redirect to the .co.uk domain. Much criticism is to be found on twitter around the fact he has a hyphen in his domain name as it is seen as a kiss of death.
The domains .co, .org, .eu, .org.uk look to have all been registered during the night of the apprentice final by at least one or two individuals, only the ,org.uk has a website behind it.
.agency also has been registered again with a website behind it though as a form of parody.
The twitter account was registered on the 23rd December 2014 with initial tweets indicating a marketing launch for climb online on 5th January 2015, during this time all enquiries should be directed to a PR agency presumably while the legalities etc. were sorted out; It was not until 2 Jan 2015 did a climb online email account become known, surely this could have been announced along with a site holding page as soon as the winner was announced. His true site did not get launched until 10 March 2015.
Mark Wright it would appear only launched his personal twitter account on the 8th December 2014 which seems surprising given the nature of his work though perhaps previous accounts have been removed. With other candidates quite often they have personal websites and twitter accounts, facebook accounts etc. that are used as holding pages whilst the show is being broadcast and don’t seem to become active until when they have been fired.
Marks proposal was to provide services to SMEs during the Apprentice final he was pitching the service at £3000 a month and that there would be a personal touch/approach with someone who would come and site with the business to work out the stratefy, it appears his minimum charge was reported just after the final to be around £400 a month, presumably that would be for the services of his agency and not include any costings for developing any recommended changes to a companies actual website structure and any recommended online advertising.
Roll forward to April 2015 and interviews with Mark started popping up examples being https://econsultancy.com/blog/66270-apprentice-winner-mark-wright-on-seo-algorithms-revolutionising-the-industry/ , http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/smallbusiness/article-3021370/Apprentice-winner-Mark-Wright-turns-profit-Climb-Online-two-months.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 and http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s108/the-apprentice/interviews/a639378/the-apprentices-mark-wright-my-critics-are-jealous-of-me.html#~p9dbBMnpOfknk6
It appears that in the 3 months of operation Climb Online has turned a small profit, has signed up between 80 and 100 clients and has 10 hired staff and 4 freelancers. He states that his target market are companies with a turnover of around £1.5 million and 10-20 staff so not exactly the small business he initially spoke of. He fully admits that the level of clients he has on board has been helped by his time on the apprentice and that if he was going it alone he would have nowhere near that number so quickly. It would be interesting to know how many of his staff are actively working for his clients and how many are sales people gaining the business. If I recall he pitched that he could hirer seo staff for around £25K a year, I would imagine his sales staff are primarily commission based. Even if we take the lower figure of 80 clients at £300 a month he is turning over £24K a month in fees which currently would put his turnover to staff ratio less than the companies he is targeting his business at and would appear quite tight if things started to unravel. It will be good to see exact figures once he posts his full year accounts and also see how many clients he has then and whether there is any indication of client churn levels.
To support his business he indicates his company is also developing an in-house seo platform presumably funding for this is from the investment he received on winning the apprentice, it would take a while for his in-house product to be fully implemented and used for his current client list. He describes the platform as between Majestic SEO and SEOmozboth of which are chargeable products and probably not aimed at the small company.
Again this article has drawn criticism of his company and there seems to be a consensus in this criticism that he contradicts himself, displays lack of knowledge, his website is poorly designed, lacking in content, he does not practice what he preaches. Its been discovered he is the director of another company wrighton digital ltd which was incorporated only 4 months prior to the end of the apprentice. Whether the criticism of his business is right or wrong I will stay on the middle of the fence you can see both sides. Time will tell I am sure there is room for him and all the others to operate.
He fully acknowledges the criticism thrown at him and readily admits his company has been subject to negative seo attacks and has had to resort to employing someone for four hours a day to combat these attacks. It’s a shame that people who have the guts to put their head above the parapet are open to such attacks by all and sundry as he is only trying to make a living for him and his employees, also it hurts companies that have taken a leap of faith with his company.