Charles Jo gets it

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 3, 2009 in New media | 7 comments

I sent out a request for a recommendation/referral to my LinkedIn contacts this morning for a senior web app dev for Edvisors, knowing full well that there are some recruiters in the list, even though we explicitly state in the job ad that we don’t use recruiters or agencies. More than a few folks sent back pointless commercial pitches or argued about the necessity of their trade, but one guy stood out as someone doing it the right way.

Charles Jo wrote:

Christopher,

Thanks for sending. I forwarded to my network and requested that they contact you directly.

Please do keep me in mind as you start expanding your recruiting/sourcing efforts and when you start using consultants as well.

Best,

Charles

Charles gets it. He put in some upfront effort with no expectation of commercial gain, and for that, if I do need to retain a recruiter or agency in the future, guess whose card I’m going to pull first? Charles.

None of what we do in social media is all that complicated. None of it requires a degree in rocket science. Some of it is just this simple.

You can see what else Charles has available at his Scribd list. Thanks, Charles, for doing it right.

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Marketing to stereotype or reality?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 3, 2009 in Advertising, Marketing | 8 comments

Here’s an interesting question. In marketing, especially mass, B2C marketing, we make a lot of assumptions based on “studies”. I’ll give you an example from the student loan world. When marketing student loans, a number of studies say that if you are going after the Hispanic market, you should use photographs and language that shows multiple generations of the family, as opposed to just parent/student or student by themselves. Some of this dates back to a 2005 study by Sallie Mae on decision factors for Hispanic students in borrowing for college which said that Hispanic students tend to make financial decisions in favor of borrowing with the advice and guidance of parents and grandparents.

The question is, is that accurate? Is using any kind of ethnosocial marketing effective, and if so, how do you determine which studies are reliable?

Do you risk giving offense to a targeted demographic if you’re marketing to a stereotype that came out of a study that might have been less than scientifically valid?

If you do any kind of demographic targeted marketing, I’d love to hear how you handle these kinds of things.

Full disclosure: I work for the Student Loan Network, a student loan company, and anything I say should be assumed to be biased towards my company because we’re awesome.

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