Competitive use of social media

Competition, survival of the fittest, that’s the essence of business. It inevitably spreads to everything that is associated with business, and with social media being new, it’s about to start appearing there. I would love to see that happen and you should be excited too. Imagine a world where your complaints that are made in the “privacy” of your phone are heard and answered. Imagine writing a quick restaurant review and being invited to a competitor down the street to dine for half-price.
There is an abundance of advocates of social media in business and they are a resilient bunch. As an example,  a few months back I was expecting a delivery from Purolator during the Canada Post strike and I needed to contact customer service. I was dreading the call to the service centre and having to deal with the automated machine and waiting on hold. On their website I have noticed the option to contact their customer service on twitter and I tried it. It was pretty great, I got the answer that I was looking for without using the phone. Here’s the transcript of the interaction  
          

                safinr: @purolatorhelp Can you please tell me where is Toronto (North) depot located?  
                PurolatorHelp: @safinr This is Vincent. To avoid making a mistake, can you email me your tracking number and I will verify? customer.care@purolator.com          
               safinr:  @PurolatorHelp Hey Vincent, it's been awhile what's the status on the Toronto North Location?  I received the needed response shortly after.

Customer service is awesome, but marketing is another area that is great with social media. One of the ways that you can use it competitively is by contacting the dissatisfied customers of the competing business. For example, if you are Second Cup, and you want to offer product to the angry Starbucks customers. What you do is jump on twitter search (I recommend using Hootsuite.com) and look for someone mentioning Starbucks and one other word (damn, messed up, ruined, pissed of, fuck). There’s a good chance that someone will post this disgruntled tweet right after negative experience happened so emotional words are very likely don’t be afraid to search for it.
Here’s an screenshot of the search that I did.

Take a look at the tweet circled in blue, she seems like a great candidate for a competitive marketing campaign. Why not contact her and give her a free drink coupon to Second Cup? She might end up switching to Second Cup for coffee, or will tweet about this positive experience, or will come to Second Cup with other paying customers.

Now take a look at the tweet circled in red, she is talking about intention to switch, why not give her an extra incentive to switch to Second Cup instead? Send her free coffee too, and good things will happen.

I personally don’t have a preference for any coffee dealer, mainly because I make a mean coffee at home.

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Free Software Options: LibreOffice Calc Pivot table tutorial

Pivot table is an extremely helpful way of manipulating data in Excel. It's open source/free alternative also has this option. It's called DataPilot. I found this video tutorial/introduction on youtube that would help people get familiar with the basic functions. I understand that switching to this software may not be for everyone, especially if you have developed habits or procedures that are complex and are dependent on many Microsoft Office features. The main concern being, it may take up plenty of time to figure out in the new software. This is an option for people that are not too deeply involved with the mainstream king of the office.

Here's part 2

If you want to find out more about this great free alternative to Microsoft Office, here's the link to their website: http://www.libreoffice.org/features/

Expat HR Consultancy middle management compensation

I've come across an article that quoted the results of a survey in regards to the salary of expatriate workers, and I was impressed by the numbers that they highlighted.

A survey by human resources consultancy ECA International found that based on overall pay, expatriate middle managers in Hong Kong receive about US$249,814 (S$301,201) a year on average. Even though the whole compensation package includes benefits such as housing and school fees, expats there are still paid much lower than Japan’s US$351,516 (S$423,824) and India’s US$269,176 (S$324,538).

http://humanresourcesonline.net/news/28315

I always get curious about the source article once authors start throwing averages at the reader. I feel like an average could be a very deceptive interpretation of data, particularly in the case of surveys as it doesn't address the range of data. I've decided to look further into the details of the expatriate compensation by going to the source article. I have found this interesting graph that shows the components

of the compensation and their value. (Source: http://www.eca-international.com/news/press_releases/show_press_release?ArticleID=7434). I believe that the original article had made a correct suggestions to the people that may be faced with this decision, that is to do the research. Looks like the ECA-international is as good a place as any to start that research.

The results, free to participants, enable companies to benchmark their expatriates' actual salaries against the market. 234 companies took part in the survey covering 119 countries and over 10 000 international assignees.

ECA's MyExpatriate Market Pay Survey 2011 is now open. Details can be found here: http://www.eca-international.com/myeca/surveys

I am not really familiar with the actual number of expatriates to assess the appropriate population, but that sample size of 10 000 seems appropriate for a compensation survey. 
Fortunately I also found this youtube video of the rep from ECA-international talking about the survey and explaining the results.

Social media advice for job-seekers

Social media advice for job-seekers. I found this article through an e-mail I received from HRPAO. They always select worthy articles to read, even if I don't always read all of their links.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/09/social_media_advice_for_job-se.html?utm_source=Exacttarget&utm_medium=Communications&utm_term=HRDaily&utm_content=Email&%20utm_campaign=hrdaily091211
Some of the things that I found in common is that most of the people encourage people to have their LinkedIn profile updated and include as much info as possible. They also highlight that professional or interest blogging is well received among the recruiters. I personally have witnessed how the author of one of my favorite blogs ended up getting a job that completely mirrors his interests and couldn't be any happier for him. This was a blog about pens and writing utensils, which was kind of an obsession of mine while in University. He had these frequent reviews of various products, which were always on point and fair. The job that he was offered was in a marketing department of the online store that sells pens, pencils and other related products. I imagine that it must be a great feeling.

My advice on this topic would be transparency. As a job-applicant chances are that the other party will do a search on your name either on LinkedIn or Google search engines. Once you have information on the internet it stays there, someone with sufficient motivation and tech savvy could tap into the wealth of information about any topic. Why not make it easier for them and provide links to the social networking sites that you are on in the application? Figuratively speaking this would open some doors in your house, which would encourage traffic in selected areas. Also this would encourage you to take control of the information and ensure that the privacy settings are appropriate for your profiles that you want to be seen or not seen.  

So I have decided to try provide an optional podcast to this post. It's pretty much me reading this post, so you can multitask and be efficient. 

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Rant: Lacoste Marketing team

So I read this article.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/lacoste-begs-police-please-stop-mass-killer-wearing-our-clothes-2351641.html 

Allegedly Lacoste has contacted the police in Norway, where they keep the mass-murder in jail, in an effort to have him stop wearing their clothes. This is a similar move to what Abercombie and Fitch did with a reality star from "The Jersey Shore". I feel like this is getting ridiculous that these companies would stoop this low for the public attention. This is clearly a PR stunt to get people talking about their brand. I am convinced that there's no way that having a photo of a killer wearing your clothes is in any way damaging to the overall brand popularity.
Rationally it's clear that he is not sponsored by the company, nor do they condone everything that their customers do. Since when does an individual has to pass a certain ethics standards to wear certain designer brands. This just doesn't make any sense. To be completely honest I didn't even pay attention to the brand of clothing that the man was wearing.
I am guessing that athletics wear is really centered on this idea behind sponsorships, where they feel like wearing something advertises it, which it may in a way, however only to the likely minded individuals. For example, if I like basketball I have a favorite player and if he wears certain clothes I may be inclined to buy them. That's it, I don't make any effort to avoid clothing that is endorsed by someone else that I don't like.

The only way that this would make sense to me is that if Lacoste knew something about subconscious association and buyers preference, which actually borders on the edge of brainwashing and mind-control. And since we can refer to companies as people, Lacoste is concerned that their brainwashing tactics may be in jeopardy.

History of Resume

http://mashable.com/2011/09/04/history-of-the-resume/

Get your resume graded

I came across this web tool today that automatically grades your resume. This is an interesting service as it appears to be based on an algorithm that is developed with the input from hiring managers. The great thing about this tool is that after you put your resume through the algorithm it gives you 1 tip to improve your resume. That's great for people that have been searching for a job and want to give a touch up to their resume before sending out another batch. It's a free service and it doesn't ask you for any information (you are already giving them a wealth of it), yet it is asking you if you want to be contacted. Overall a fun little tool that I would recommend people.

http://rezscore.com/

Free Software Options: GIMP (Photoshop-like photo manipulating)

So I've been running Ubuntu Linux 11.04 for about a month now and I am glad that I chose this operating system, as it forces me to learn a few new things about computing and explore a different approach to computing. Particularly the software that I use on my machine is all Free, in both senses of the word. I don't pay for it but it also is not restricted by proprietary rules and restrictions. 

I have tried Ubuntu before and it was decent, but too complicated  and lacked certain little functions that I needed, like MS Word compatibility, which OpenOffice didn't really have at the time, so I uninstalled it after about 2-3 weeks. This time around things are different, my needs are different and the functionality is expanded.

I have recently tried to use GIMP, which in the past was vastly different from Photoshop. Photoshop is without a doubt a standard for photo editing on computers, it does everything and everyone knows how to use it (well everyone who wants to use it). There's a lot of internet support and tutorials for it. It's probably one of the most pirated software packages out there. Just look it up on torrents. Since I was Ubuntu, I didn't want to install through Wine, and wanted to see what GIMP has been up to. GIMP 2.6 blew me away. They have refined the UI and made it more intuitive for a Photoshop user. Which is great for me, I was able to edit a picture and even use Photoshop tutorial, applying a little common sense and ingenuity. 

I think GIMP 2.6 would work well for personal use at home. Feel free to download it and give it a try.

http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-2192_4-10073935.html

New Blogger Interface

Just opened up my dashboard and was prompted to try out the new interface. I see that they are trying to streamline all the Google products to have the similar design, and I love it. Google+ has influenced plenty of pleasant changes. Google Docs's interface is particularly spectacular. I have long been an early adopter of the Google products. I am excited to see the Google Reader update, which is screaming for an updating, knowing that there are plenty of other services that have better interfaces. El Goog!