"Friends of Ethan Allen Park" Publicity

 

Burlington's own WCAX CH 3

Fox44

 

It is always great to see local media involved with community efforts. And for those interested in joining the "Friends of Ethan Allen Park" feel free to contact me at jciempa@gmail.com.

Friends of Ethan Allen Park get recognized

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the groups that I chair was recognized this evening at City Hall by the Community Economic Development Office to honor their volunteerism. On behalf of the volunteers,

I had the honor of receiving the award, along with David & Ann Arms, which will be hung at the Burlington Department of Parks and Recreation's main office. I decided to post this entry because as I was at the event, I realized that every day volunteers work in the shadows to better a situation. Most, if not all of them never expect to be recognized because they love what they do. 

The "Friends of Ethan Allen Park" are the same way. They are a group of neighbors to Ethan Allen Park that recognized a situation where a historical site was being misused and abused. David Arms decided to create a group that would look after the park, which has now become an group of 17 plus that go up to the tower twice a day to lock and unlock the gate so that the public can enjoy the park and all its perks. (The tower being one).

Groups such as the "Friends of Ethan Allen Park" truly embody the nature of public relations. Each member of the group brings a talent, but it is ultimately up to the groups ability to "communicate" both internally and externally to be successful. In order to get volunteers, one must learn how to market the group. To spread the word, one must become a publicist. To get government aid $$$, one must become a lobbyist.

The below video is an interview with Vermont's Own, WCAX Ch3 that our group landed in 2007. Enjoy  

Fun Ad Campaign from "Tide To Go"

Donations of the funniest kind

Playing around on the internet

The other day I heard about Sprout, an online systems that allows users to build live media content. Curiosity got the best of my so I asked Sprout for Beta testing access and made this neat Test content. It is pretty basic and really not useful, but I just wanted to paly and get my feet wet before attempting bigger things. So enjoy. Also, I realize that in my HR post from two days ago I said that I would be writing about retnetion, and don't woory I still plan too. So for those patiently awaiting that post, its on the way. Check back tonight.

Funny Comedic Skit on PowerPoint Presentations

Hall Radio HR Radio Recruitment Seminar

On February 5th, 2008 I attended a HR radio recruitment  seminar at Burlington's DoubleTree Hotel. The event was organized by Hall Communications, Inc., and featured Chris Stonick of Stonick Recruitment Incorporated, a nationally recognized media consulting and employee retention agency since 1989 who has been featured in HR Magazine for innovative HR practices involving radio recruitment advertising.

All in all, I think that Hall Communications did a great job keeping the seminar informative and non-sales driven. In addition, it was nice meeting Sue from 99.9 the Buzz in person, (someone who I have spoken to many times before over the phone, but until now had not met in person).

During the event I was impressed with a few ideas that I felt would be appropriate to share with "NMO" followers. Over the next two days I will highlight some of those ideas.

In the US the average tenure for an employee is two and a half years. This statistic applies to employees who are considered "active job seekers." The definition of an active job seeker is someone who has been fired, is out of work or miserable with their current job. These are people who HR does not want to hire, but in many cases will hire if they see their employee pool as low.

Passive job seekers are people who are not currently looking for work, but would consider changing employer if a good opportunity arose. These are the people HR should hire and can reach through creative and thoughtful communication strategies.

Passive job seekers are the applicants that tend to have a higher tenure within an organization while active job seekers tend to last only the average of 2.5 years before bouncing to another company.  

To reach passive job seekers, an employer needs to find an avenue that is less direct. While newspaper classifieds offer direct avenues to reach active jobs seekers, radio can offer a way to reach passive job seekers.

Many passive job seekers are not looking for a new job because they are happy with their current employer. This means that they are not looking in the classifieds (and in many cases not listening to the radio). However, radio recruitment reaches influentials in a passive job seekers life. In most cases these influentials are their spouse, family members, friends or acquaintances that are the ones who actually hear the radio ad and then pass along the recruitment information to the passive job seeker through “word of mouth."

Passive job seekers are much more valuable every employers workforce because they are currently employed and are in most cases good at what they do during the workday.

These are employees who are doing their job, doing it well and happy where they are in their current position and with their current employers.  Businesses who want to be profitable and productive should understand that they these employees because they are extremely valuable, harder to recruit, and offer longer tenure to a single organization.

Tomorrow, I will discuss retention of passive job seekers and how that can impact you bottom line. But until then, employers with great employees should realize that they have an asset (their employees) that cost more to replace then to retain.

Opportunities for "new media" in HR

From time to time, emails from job sites that I subscribed to when I was looking for work three years ago appear in my inbox. Back at the beginning of the month one such email came into my inbox and caught my attention. It was for a Campus Manager position with NBC Universal.

A part of public relations is internal communications and HR. So from time to time I read such emails to see how other businesses are explaining the job duties of their current openings. This helps so that if a client needs HR support from the agency I work for, I am up to date with how other organizations are describing similar positions that a client may be looking at recruiting for in the future.

Anyway's, when I read the description for GE's campus manager I figured I'd blog about how social media could be adapted to this position.

First, the position requires that the campus manager manage 1500 interns from the United State's east and west coast. HR being my primary interest, I pondered how to facilitate seamless communication efforts at low company costs, and lower the stress level for the campus management team who may now be fielding hundreds of daily emails, and traveling from coast to coast.

The campus manager could develop a podcast that each of the interns could subscribe too. The campus management team could produce a 30 or 45 minute update, once or twice a week, depending on how much information needs to be disseminated to the interns. The podcast could be posted to a private corporate blog where interns could comment, ask questions and offer advice to fellow interns. Plus it would gather a nice historical account of what an NBC intern may have asked in the past so that a new intern could first search the blog before asking an already answered question.

Secondly, the blog would begin to create an online community that would allow other interns to connect with each other from coast to coast. Comradery is what HR is all about, isn't it? ;)

It may seem like that it would take a lot of money and effort to create a podcast, but in actuality, podcasting equipment could be purchased for under $200 and if a corporate blog did not need to be developed (for privacy reasons one may want to consider a private, secure blog) it would cost next to nothing. 

As for the time involved in production, the campus management team would be able to shift how they are currently spending time and spend less time managing emails and focus more on managing a blog where the whole intern community could also pitch in to answer questions (if an intern saw a post that they already know the answer too.)

NBC universal is not the only business that could adopt such a strategy to manage internal communities, and there is more than just blogging and podcasting that could be implemented. I am just on a podcasting kick this week and decided not to address the many other new and social media opportunities that a campus management type position could adopt to facilitate communication and education. I will save that for another day since I am meeting friends out for dinner, and already running late.

Just my two cents.

P.S: Feel free to comment or add to this by telling fellow NMO readers what other businesses can do or are doing to adopt new and social media into their workplace culture. Oh and NBC, if you have something like this we would love to hear about how it is working...  

Cheers, JJ 

Vermont 3.0

While listening to Vermont Public Radio I overheard that on Saturday, January 26 2008 there will be a career fair for creatives and techies. Some of the work we do at my office deals with recruitment from some clients so I decided to check into the site to see what Web 2.0 strategies they are using to spread the word about the event.

I have to say that I am extremely impressed with the fact that they adopted Facebook and used the Fan site option to spread the word to Facebook members.
For bloggers, podcasters, people with their own website and those that might have MySpace I like the way that they developed mini flash and still ads that people can take and place on their website of choice.

Kudos to Vermont 3.0 for their innovative efforts in grassroots marketing and online social networking.

Love 2.0

Time Magazine is one of the publications that I subscribe too. Unfortunately, my day is spent reading many newspapers to see what journalists are writing about and by the time (no pun intended) I get home I lack the motivation and energy to read anything else.

However, today was a little different. My intent was to come home and continue watching my online marathon of "Lost" season 1-3 to get ready for the return of "Lost" season 4 on January 31. But, that all changed when I saw this week's Time cover story, "The science of Romance."

Now I am not some shmupie sucker for romance, and I am not a big player in the game, but why we love and the act of engaging in romance intrigues me. Something about the science of human behavior and the explanations about why we act the way we do, stirs in internal cauldron of my curiosity.

Romance, like any other human behavior, is driven by instinct and requires its own visual, tactile, auditory, and neurochemical and olfactory processes necessary for successful communication.

How these processes work, affect, both positively and negatively, the way we communicate with the one that we are attempting to be romantic with and deliver respective outcomes.

Broken down to our simplest form of communication we use verbal and non-verbal cues to engage in flirting with the desired in hopes of fulfilling our romantic desires. Simple communicative gestures such as stance, a weak smile, scent and tone of voice are tactics used to communicate that you are single, ready to mingle and open to any possibilities.

What I found the most interesting about the articles within this week's "Time" issue was that romance has adopted Web 2.0. In particular, romance has adopted social networking. Since like eHarmony and Match.com offer social networkers a place to go that is focused on finding and delivering romance.

These sites have been around for a few years, but my prediction is that as more people adopt and accept the use of online social networks more people will engage and participate in such eDating communities. 

Some evidence I take from just looking at the amount of my friends that now belong to such services. In addition, during 2006 more sites were developed for this purpose with revenues reaching $649 million.

Let me know what you think of the article. It has some very interesting information.