Employer Branding – how Virgin added ‘Virginess’ to Virgin Active

I love employer branding and when done well it can revolutionise Government Departments, large and even small businesses.

Always on the look out for businesses doing this well, I was excited to find this fantastic presentation by Elaine J0bson, where she shares the principles on how Virgin successfully took the old Health and Raquet club brand and changed it to be part of the distinctive Virgin family.

The key take aways for me from this presentation that can easily be applied to your business or department are:

1. Good is the enemy of Great. You can have a good business but unless you do something different and push the boundaries you will never have a Great business.

2. Culture is everything.  People will be attracted to your business because of your culture.

3. Combine Employer Branding strategies. The service and people strategies need to be combined in order to create a great culture.

4. Create an over arching theme.  For Virgin, they started by having an overarching theme that they called their Love Strategy with a goal to be the ‘Worlds Most Loved’.  They then changed their language around each part of the employee process / experience.  All employees were refereed to as humans and the Virgin brand was in a ‘relationship’ with everyone of them.

• The recruitment process is called Flirting.
• Falling in Love with the brand is the first 90 days.
• The Being in Love phase is where the employees are looking for substance – asking themselves, is this somewhere I would want to stay long term.
• Staying in Love – 12 months plus – is the brand taking their humans for granted?, are they still helping nurture learning and growth?
• Happily ever Active – is a place Virgin have created for people who are scoring a 9 or 10 promoter score and have been with the business over 12 months. It is a place where things just happen – random acts of love.

Very inspiring and very achievable. All we need to do is stop and define the strategy that will take our employer brand to the next level.

Yours in Employer Branding,

Belinda

         
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Posted by Belinda Vesey-Brown on May 18, 2012


   

Advertising People Vs Normal People

Ever wondered if we ad folk live in a bubble? This infographic explains it all. haha :)

         
Filed Under: Advertising, Business, Communication, Community, Design, Design Resources, Facebook | Comments Off


Posted by craigb on May 16, 2012


   

Awesome work spaces

Employer branding is the ‘promise of an experience’. It’s about creating an image of your business as a great place to work and, in turn, attracting the right people to the business. When a business employs the right people it succeeds. And when employees enjoy coming to work they succeed…and stay. Research has also found that that having fun at at work greatly improves productivity. Google are well known for their well designed and interactive offices. Their Sydney office includes a bean bag meeting room, cubby houses, a games room, masseuse and free cafeteria. Here are some other awesome examples of engaging and inspiring work spaces.

Google Offices eating area with slippery dip
Google breakout area pods

Google

Redbull office cricket pitch
Redbull office basketball court

Redbull

HOK, London office picnic lunch area

HOK, London

Thinkgarden office space
Thinkgarden office space with desks amongst trees

Thinkgarden

We can’t all have slippery dips in our office…but we can dream! When it comes to employer branding, even small investments can provide great financial benefits to employers.

Yours in office envy,
Andrea.

         
Filed Under: architecture, Employer Branding, Uncategorized | Tagged , , Comments Off


Posted by andrea_r on May 16, 2012


   

TED Talk – Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll

In 1993, while a student in England, Drew Curtis began sending links to his friends. Over time that grew until he founded a website for the links: Fark.com. The site has now grown into one of the largest, and most irreverant, news aggregators on the web.

Drew Curtis tells the story of how he fought a lawsuit from a company that had a patent, “…for the creation and distribution of news releases via email.” Along the way he shares some nutty statistics about the growing legal problem of frivolous patents.

Quotes by Drew Curtis:

“Don’t negotiate with terrorists; patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history, every year.”

“Don’t fight the patent, fight the infringement.”

Yours in patents

Angie Rapisarda

         
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Posted by Angie Rapisarda on May 11, 2012


   

Using LinkedIn for Recruiting

If used to its full potential, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in your recruiting process. If you’re not already using LinkedIn for your company, why not?

Setting up a company page on LinkedIn allows another avenue for you to represent your company culture and employee brand. Once that presence is set up and running, you are already in a prime position to reach out to the employees that are already attracted to you and want to work with you. Having team members on board who actually want to work with you in your business because they have been following what you do makes everything so much easier and cheaper in the recruitment process.

One of the best things about attracting team through LinkedIn is you can see the details and interactions of potential candidates also. And if they are already ‘linked’ to your company page you have an opportunity to even choose someone to chase after before there has even been any advertising of positions. So there’s another clue for candidates, follow the companies you want to work for!

Don’t get me wrong, using LinkedIn will not magically solve your recruitment and employee branding overnight. There will still be the need for screening, phone calls, handshakes and interviews but it will make a noticeable difference to the way you ‘used’ to do recruiting.

So what do you need to do?

First step: Learn what LinkedIn is:

 

Second step: Create a Company Page

 

Third step: Visit http://talent.linkedin.com/ to see how you can best use LinkedIn to attract the right people.

Yours in recruiting,

Paul Vesey-Brown

 

         
Filed Under: Branding, Business, Community, Employee Branding, social media | Tagged Comments Off


Posted by Paul Vesey-Brown on May 9, 2012


   

Google, incentives and looking after your staff.

Google is awesome. Not only do they supply us with endless amounts of information and social and communication tools, they also know how to look after their staff.

One of the perks of working at Google is their healthcare plan, which includes on-site medical staff. If a team member feels unwell whilst at work, he or she has access to see a doctor at the Googleplex.

We all know that work at times can be stressful. Google recognises this too and they offer their staff a subsidized massage program. For a reduced fee, employees can receive a massage from a licensed therapist in one of Google’s massage rooms.

For something similar, cost effective and closer to home, there is a service called 3 Minute Angels. They come to your business in work hours and give your employees a blissful 5, 10 or 15 minute massage.

There are many incentives that you can offer your staff to keep them motivated and refreshed. Anything from, a free lunch once a month, to a team social event, there are lots of things you can do to show your staff you care and appreciate their efforts.

Or, if you can create get a massage room with an on-site masseuse, I say do it. Your staff will love you for it.

Yours in ‘wanna-be’ massage bliss,

Justine

 

 

         
Filed Under: Employee Branding, Incentives | Tagged , , , Comments Off


Posted by Justine Clementi on May 7, 2012


   

Employment branding at its best

For those slightly unsure, employment branding is a key part of the equation for long term recruiting and talent management. It’s important that when dealing with any element of your brand that there is a clear and defined strategy to what your brand is and how you communicate this not only to customers, but also to those you will employ. After all, these people are extensions of your brand and at times can act as the face of the brand. With a clear employer brand you can ensure you are attracting not only the best people for the job, but also for the company.

In today’s ever developing world, it’s important to think about the ways in which you can recruit and show your employer brand. Recently here is Australia, IKEA, one of the world’s 20 most attractive employers in 2011, worked with an agency to come up with this brilliant recruitment campaign. The result sure is outside the box and had some amazing results.

In short, they had a new mega-store opening in Sydney and needed to hire quite a number of staff, as you can imagine. A simple ‘career instructions’ was developed and placed into all of their flat packs. Customers literally delivered the mailer to themselves. They could then also share it with friends and family. What I love about this concept and what works so well, is the fact that straight away IKEA are targeting those that already love them. After all when you’re looking to hire employees that live and breathe your brand then it’s essential to ensure that your recruitment process identifies who will be a brand advocate and great hire and that is what IKEA has done. I also love how this simple flyer plays on the IKEA brand at the same time. We all associate IKEA with assembling the furniture with their instruction flyer and this continues the brand essence in a quirky and fun way.

With $0 spent on media and 4,285 applications, resulting in 280 hires, the results speak for themselves.

 

 

Yours in Employer Branding
Dawn

         
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Posted by Dawn Wilson on May 2, 2012


   

Social Media… not just a fad.

Social network sites are growing popularity every day. Businesses can no longer ignore this social media trend. Instead, we should embrace these opportunities as affordable marketing tools for both online and offline businesses.

 

 

Here are some important ways that social media can benefit your business:

  • Create and maintain awareness of your brand
  • Drive qualified traffic to your website
  • Nurture qualified leads
  • Increase your online presence – thus increasing the number of times your brand will appear in search results
  • Monitor online conversations about your brand so that you can manage your reputation quickly and efficiently
  • Learn about your competitors and their activities
  • Publicise your new innovations, awards and business successes
  • Find new business partners, vendors, suppliers and business opportunities
  • Build trust and credibility because it’s an open and transparent communication channel
  • Increase your position as a thought leader with articles and commentary
  • Increase your search engine rankings – social media generates back links and site traffic
  • Support other paid marketing and advertising activities, online or offline
  • Identify customer’s needs, wants and issues and communicate directly with them as to how your products or services can address these
  • Provide a complimentary customer support platform due to the ease of use and real-time updates
  • Find and recruit new staff

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Yours in Social Media,
Tanya.

         
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Posted by Tanya Heading on April 27, 2012


   

Google helps brand marketers with new online measuring tools

For me, one of the most exciting parts of an online advertising campaign is being able to track the success of the campaign using online measuring tools.

Last week Google introduced the first two parts of what they are calling Brand Activate: Active View and Active GRP. With the introduction of these tools which produce better metrics, Google is hoping marketers will feel more comfortable allocating more of their money to online advertising.

I predict these tools will be perfect for a narrow audience as you will be able to understand how your targets are responding in realtime and adjust accordingly. These tools would have been a perfect for our recent sperm donor campaign due to the multiple parameters that contribute to a man being a good fit for the program.   Here is a little more about the tools:

Active View is going to significantly enhance a marketers understanding of how successful their online ads are. As Brian Zeug, Industry Director at Google says, brand marketers want to understand what they receive for the money they have invested.  Google Active will not only report on if the ad has been served, it will capture has the ad been viewed (as defined by the 3MS’s proposed standard, this is a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second). What I like the most about this solution is that marketers will only have to pay for viewed impressions.

Active GRP is taking the offline measurement of GRP (Gross rating point) used by the television industry (which reports on how many people saw the ads) and transitioning GRP for use in online ads.  This new metric will let marketers know who saw the ad, what they thought about the ad and what did they do? What is great about this is that the report is in real time so marketers can make changes and see results instantly.

A further explanation of this initiative is provided in the video above.

Yours in the better measurement of online advertising campaigns.

Belinda

         
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Posted by Belinda Vesey-Brown on April 25, 2012


   

Social Media to the rescue

With so many of us now connected to multiple social media platforms, we are all aware what a powerful marketing tool social media can be. We are now also beginning to realise ways in which we can harness its power to help people.

Social media was a primary source of communication following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In disaster situations, after survival, there is a human need to connect. Conventional telephone lines often go down, or are overwhelmed, whilst internet connections are still active and usable. Thus people found they could use networks like twitter or facebook to send warnings, relay and receive information and news updates, ask for help and let friends and family know they were safe.

As a result, many international organisations are now implementing social strategies into emergency management plans. A great example is American Red Cross who have recently partnered with Dell to build a Digital Operations Center. During emergency and disaster situations, the center will analyse and use social conversation to make decisions and organise relief efforts.

One of social media’s greatest strengths is in the ease and speed that information can be disseminated. There is great potential for Government, council and humanitarian organisations to use it to connect with and build resilient communities.

Yours in realising potential,
Andrea

         
Filed Under: Communication, Community, Facebook, social media, Technology, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , Comments Off


Posted by andrea_r on April 23, 2012


   
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