Special Offer or Spam?

Whilst you may not agree with everything I write, betcha no one out there is gonna raise a holler about my bagging of spam. Hate it. It’s illegal. And in this world where time is a highly-valued commodity, a spammer’s almost up there with drug-pushers, politicians and parking inspectors as the lowest of the low.

Having said that, it’s interesting that Jobs (powered by JobX) has decided to walk the rocky boundary between legitimate communication with registered clients and plain old stinky spam.

I get a plethora of emails like this from Jobs (note that, rather ironically, one is entitled “how much is your time worth”.

A bit of research on my part has revealed that they have been sent by convicted spammer Wayne Mansfield.

Officially, these emails are not spam. But they smell the same.

Geoff – How Much Is Your Time Worth

SPECIAL OFFER to JOBS registered clients

As part of our continuing Value Added Offerings to our clients, we have negoatiated a special rate for Australia’s most popular Time Management seminar – Effective Time Management.

If you act quickly, you can secure your place at one of the seminars being presented across Australia from September 8th through 11th, 2008 at a 33% discount to the normal recommended retail price. So instead of $167 you pay ONLY $111.

Claim your discount by entering this code in the space usually provided for your web address on the online booking form: JOBSSEPT2008

Offers expires September 2nd, 2008 5pm Western Standard Time.
______________________________

__________________________

“Burnt out, stressed out, rundown and tired? Out of balance; out of control?
Frustrated with wheel spinning? Too much to do; not enough time to do it.”

What you need is a way to learn….

EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT

 

Blah, blah…

Business Seminars Australia
Excellence in Business Education
Perth Western Australia… as close as you get to Paradise on Earth
Email: wayne.mansfield@gmail.com visit us at wayne.mansfield@gmail.com visit us at www.au1865.com or
www.waynemansfield.com
Australia’s best seminar schedule is at www.stumpjump.net
Phone: (+61 9221 0922 Fax: (+61 9221 0933

http://www.linkedin.com/in/waynemansfield

Business Seminars Australia
Celebrating 21 years in Business Education
ABN: 45 119 694 558
Postal: P.O. Box 6Ø99, East Perth W.A. 6892
Phone: (Ø8) 9463 78Ø7 Fax: (Ø8) 9463 78Ø8

Business Seminars Australia Plus Offers Update
The Maverick Spirit

This is being sent to: ??????@gmail.com
This advice is being sent to people who have registered at a JOBS
website and therefore have supplied their contact information by
subscribing to one of JOBS or its asscoiated companies services.

This particular communication is a special offer to people who have
registered at a JOBS website.

 

 

 

 

Office Yoga

Ooooooooooooooom.

Oh. You’re here. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude, just getting into the spirit of things. It’s Krishna’s birthday this weekend. Big celebrations around town – and I’ve given a spot of yoga a go. Got me thinking…

This has nothing at all to do with New-Age propaganda. It’s a well-established idea that stress interferes with cognitive function and behavior. Put simply, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you probably aren’t too nice to be around and you can’t solve problems as well as you normally can. And your muscles react. They clench up into balls and send additional signals to your brain telling it that you are stressed. A vicious…vicious cycle. Ooooooooooooooom.

Get your yoga balls out, team. They were all the rage in offices in the early nineties. And if you feel like a frootloop sitting at your desk on a slippery big ball and prefer the chair, try this exercise, designed especially for the covert yogi.

Drop a pen on the floor. Tuck your pelvis under (you do this by pulling your belly-button in), extend the arm which is on the opposite side to where the pen is and swing it around and to the ground to pick up the pen. keep your spine straight all the while. Repeat for the other side.

While you’re down there, check for lost coins…Ooooooooom.

Feeding The Hippo

Here’s a sign of the times. I spotted this question from an employer in the PageUp People forum.

We are considering using Hippo.com as an advertising medium to attract candidates for our call centre. (along with other mediums).

Has anyone had any experience with them, if so would appreciate your feedback?

It got me thinking. A little flush of excitement rushed to my cheeks as I considered how intrinsic the internet is now to the way we communicate.

Of course, folks have always chatted to one another about their satisfaction or otherwise with products and services they’ve used. But I can’t recall a time in the history of humanity when we’ve chatted to a reader or listener who is unknown to us. Not only that, we are then prepared to take the advice of that unknown entity and, presumably, act on it.

Prior to sources of information such as Hippo, a person interested in their service would have had to ask someone they knew had used the service, or they would have had to read some form of advertising propaganda published by the company.

Of course this form of “word-of-mouth” raises all sorts of questions about the reliability of respondents. They may have agendas around promoting the service, or not promoting it to keep it for themselves. None the less, it is interesting that we are willing to disregard these pitfalls in favor of gathering info.

Anyways. Enough philosophising. For those of you unfamiliar with Hippo, I thought I’d provide you with a few facts.
A quick check on the site shows:

- close to 200 jobs nationally.

- a focus on part-time/casual jobs aimed at young people .

- a large % of jobs advertised are for the hospitality industry.

- ranked number 56th on the latest Hitwise Australia rankings with 0.18% market share. (Seek ranked 1st and has 26.25%).

- $90 per job. (Seek $180+GST)

CareerOne Powers eBay Jobs

CareerOne has struck a deal with eBay Australia to power eBay jobs. This should prove to be a worthwhile partnership for the folks at CareerOne, who’ll get credit from eBay’s 5.3million monthly visitors.

They need all the help they can get. The latest Hitwise Australia market share rankings shows CareerOne at 7.59% – neck and neck for second spot with MyCareer who are on 7.92%.

Call me belligerent. But I love a good scrap.

Job For Simon

Let’s find a job for Simon. Have you met him yet? Simon Baker. Ex-CEO and MD at realestate.com.au (also known as the REA Group)? Ahhhh. Now the coin’s dropped. I think we both heard it make a clunk sound at the bottom of your skull.

So, here’s the thing. A few weeks ago, the folks at REA decide that they could not agree to differ with Simon. He’s taken to a hotel room, and told the grim news that his services would no longer be required. Bummer. No chance to say goodbye to collegues. No gold bloody pen – or watch. Betcha he didn’t even get one of those snazzy red polo tees.

Bummer.

I don’t need to go into how this was an appalling way to treat an employee of seven and a half years (and third largest shareholder). I wanna look to the future. What’s next for a man of Simon’s experience and achievement?

Perhaps his services are required at a couple of of under-achieving job boards – CareerOne and MyCareer. Perhaps this Midas could deliver them their gold – superiority over Seek.

Friday Funny

Got to love the old prank call that goes wrong.

Linkme New Home Page

The team at LinkMe have been busy little bees. They have given the home page a face lift.

There is no doubt that the message to users is simple. LinkMe is not a job board – upload your resume and let employers/recruiters find you.

Although the job search feature is not easily visible on the new home page it is there and has had some attention by the tech team. It even passed my “Account Manager” keyword test.

All up, this simple approach works well here.

Seek Delivers

There’s good money still to be had in the traditional job board model. If you are Seek. They finished the financial year with total sales up 34% to $210.2 million. Nice.

Not hard to see why. Even their competitors are advertising with them…

Marketing Won-O-One

I’m going to call this a poor attempt at marketing collateral by CareerOne. But really, when I say that, I’m just being polite. At best, it’s incompetent. At worst, a fabrication of data. And regular readers will know how it is with me and correct statistical representations…

Let’s play a bit of Where’s Wally.

First up: Where’s the spelling error in this??

Next up: How do you spell CareeeeeerOne again??

Now’s the icing on the cake. This one is more difficult to spot as most folks do not have access to Nielsen//NetRatings data (perhaps that’s what the folks in marketing at CareerOne are relying on).

In the the graph below, CareerOne illustrates its supposed Year on Year growth, quoting as its source Nielsen//NetRatings market intelligence.

The graph below illustrates the actual Nielsen//NetRatings data:

While in both graphs, the CareerOne data is consistent, the results for Seek and MyCareer have been drastically altered in the CareerOne graph. For example, CareerOne represents Seek as having 0% growth for May’08, but the Nielsen//NetRatings data actually demonstrates nearly 15% growth for Seek. Therefore, the representation of data in the CareerOne graph is basically fictitious. This may have occurred because the person who redrew the graph inputted the data incorrectly, reversing Seek’s and MyCareer’s results.

The errors in this advertising denigrate CareerOne’s reputation in the market, don’t you agree?

And the really sad thing is – CareerOne didn’t have to fudge the results. They were leading in the growth stakes anyway…

My advice to the folks at CareerOne would be thus: get yourselves a decent copy editor who at least makes sure your name is spelled correctly in your ads, and don’t misrepresent your competitors.

You never know who’s watching.

JobFox’s New Intro Service

Jobfox has gone a step beyond any other job board and is personally introducing the candidates to employers.

Will MyCareer’s new Head Hunter service (powered by Jobfox) include this new ‘intro’ offering??

If yes, then employers will be getting contacted by MyCareer to encourage an introduction.

Hang on a minute, that’s my job…I am the recruiter!

Next Page »