Week 5 EOC - Social Networks and Job Hunting

In the past few years job marketing itself has greatly changed thanks to social media sites. Companies now use a combination of recruiting techniques to not only find new employees, but people to help promote and market their brand for them in the form of brand ambassadors. “Marketers select their brand ambassadors very carefully, based on customers’ devotion to a brand and the size of their social circles. They sometimes search blogs and online social networks to identify individuals who are already functioning as brand advocates. Once selected, the ambassadors are trained with real brand knowledge to go along with their passion for the brand. The ambassadors then tap into friends, family, groups, and broader audiences through personal conversations, blogs, live events, and online social media.” (Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file.) Another location they find brand ambassadors in is “[m]arketing agency RepNation identifies and manages college student ambassadors for companies as diverse as JetBlue, Microsoft, and Macy’s.”(Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file.) The employee recruitment changes have gone from the more well-known sources as Linkedin and other famous job recruitment websites to being more in favor to Facebook recruitment. “Facebook's use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.” (Wall Street Journal, Recruiters Troll Facebook for Candidates They Like, Joe Light, 8/8/2011) I don’t know how accurate the article itself is, nor have I ever personally seen a company recruit people through Facebook for hiring services. As a previous manager I personally wouldn’t look for Facebook to be a hiring reference, nor would I expect someone to let me impose on their personal privacy in order to hire them. I believe in keeping work and personal life separate as do most other companies to some extent and therefore I believe that there needs to be separate places for finding professional experiences in comparison to the personal feelings and random things that are on most peoples’ Facebook accounts which do not show their professional capability in any way, shape, or form.

Week 4 EOC - Making a Smartphone App

I personally don’t use smartphone apps and think that they are a complete waste of time. The internet can give you pretty much all the same things that a smartphone app can, except for games from Facebook that everyone and their mother are literally playing. Since I have to come up with an idea for a smartphone application anyways, and ignoring the fact that I would never take a job requiring me to make or market said apps, I would probably come up with an application that involved something useful and ready to have for select individuals who had very specific needs. I would personally make an application for tips and tricks to deal with mental health issues in any situation that people could take with them to remind themselves how to process and deal with the issues at hand that they deal with on a daily basis due to their mental health problems. I would include some of the most common diagnoses along with some of the more rare ones, but all ones that would fit within the parameters of a mental illness that would allow a person to still function within society who may not have access to constant mental health care and help on a consistent basis depending on their personal situations. The app would not only include a medical staffs professional input into what to do for varying situations based off of your mental disorder diagnosis, but would also include various quotes from people who had the disorder and have been considered to successfully handle it in their own ways through the proof of published books, blogs, etc. I would also set up a contact form and include all of the various information about helpful resources including numbers to the free help hotlines for suicide prevention for extreme circumstances. However, most people with mental illnesses know how to find websites with all this information already posted from national and international government agencies, and I still don’t see a point in needlessly recreating the wheel.

Week 3 EOC : My Demographics

My Demographics are as follows:

I am a Millennial (or Generation Y). What this is said to mean is that they have a massive amount of combined spending power, and grew up in the fluency and comforts of digital technology. The Millennials were the first generation of individuals who grew/grow up in a world filled with computers, tablets, mobile phones, satellite TV, iPods (and other handheld music devices), and social networking. Currently the millennials tend to be the highest targeted marketed audience.
On top of this the generation is in the center of the non-traditional family time of life. The majority of these households are more and more commonly non-traditional households which vary from living situation to living situation. The majority of the households have both parents working full time and the generation is built on easy access to everything including ordering groceries online and having them delivered to your door while you work. The other parts of the population involves telecommuting and working from home through your computers and internet connectivity. This changes the way that even city and housing markets are affected because you no longer necessarily need to live in an area to work in an area. This generation of individuals also includes the highest educated rates of all time, and has increased diversity throughout the country.

 The increased diversity involves an adaptive marketing strategy that encompasses marketing to different cultures and generations within that culture as well as the main-stream marketing techniques. “The U.S. population is about 65 percent white, with Hispanics at 15 percent and African Americans at a little less than 13 percent. The U.S. Asian American population now totals about 4.5 percent of the population, with the remaining 2.5 percent made up of American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, or people of two or more races.” (Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file). The increased diversity in the market isn’t entirely racial either. There are a ton of new marketing campaigns to include exclusive lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender targeted advertisements by a large scale of varying companies.

As for how my demographic fits with me personally – it matches pretty well with a few flaws here and there. I did grow up with computers in the household and school, but I didn’t actually have them in school or in the home until I was in my teenage years. I did learn the content quickly because it was required not because it was an everyday occurrence but because it had become common practice for all my friends. I myself didn’t have time and didn’t use technology outside of a mobile phone until I was in college. I only used a cellphone because in order to help my parents support me and my siblings I had to maintain a full-time job in hours outside of school or starve. That is the main factor that doesn’t agree with my family compared to others. We didn’t have money growing up, and my parents frequently couldn’t make all the bills and therefore as soon as I turned 16 in order to help feed my siblings I had 3 jobs, worked 40-50 hours a week and went to high school full time. I never had spending money, and didn’t have time to go out with friends much.