Category Archives: Cool Stuff
The Benefits of Fun in the Workplace
As we close out another week of Wii tournament play here at the KRT offices, I am reminded of the importance of fun at work, and all the benefits it provides – not only directly to employee satisfaction but also to the well-being of a company’s consumer brand.
Thanks to Generation Y, expectations in the work place have evolved with greater significance placed on work-life balance. Moreover, 88% of Millenials want their coworkers to be their friends. So if you want happy employees coming to the office saying “what can I do for the company today,” you’re going to have to do more than provide a 401k and dental plan.
What are the benefits of providing this “fun” factor exactly? Isn’t this just detracting from productivity? No!
March Madness at the Workplace
It only seems appropriate to write a blog post about March Madness, especially with all this talk about employees’ productivity levels dropping during this FANTASTIC time of year (see article here). I wonder if taking time out of my busy schedule to write this post would put me in that category; like Coca Cola continues to state in all their commercials “it’s not your fault that you’re working on brackets instead of working on work…You’re not slacking, you’re just being patriotic.” I might have to agree with that because even President Obama takes time away from his busy day to fill out his predictions for March Madness (see image here: @whitehouse). I bet he also downloaded the NCAA March Madness app to get constant updates during his three day visit to Israel.
Nevertheless, at KRT Marketing, we see March Madness as a time to come together and promote employee bonding (during our lunch hour, of course).
Here’s some of our team yesterday rooting on the Saint Mary’s Gaels!
Tell us how your company celebrate March Madness?
Office Celebrations & Mr. Excel!
Here at KRT Marketing, we have an official Party Planning Committee! In addition to working hard, we like to play hard as well! From Summer BBQ’s at the Boss’ house and SF Giants games, to baby shower celebrations and holiday decorating contests, we like to recognize the special moments in the team’s lives (and really any reason to celebrate and party)!
Last week our VP at KRT Marketing, celebrated his birthday… and what better way to show him how much we appreciate him than decking him and the office out in his favorite things…Excel spreadsheets!!
All the office walls were covered in Excel spreadsheets, pivot tables and pie charts. We go all out at KRT Marketing for birthdays and celebrations.
How does your company celebrate promotions, birthdays and more?
150 Years of Saint Mary’s College of California
In celebration of Saint Mary’s College of California’s Sesquicentennial, a few of the KRT SMC alumni attended the “Jewel of the Bay” Gala. The black-tie event took place on Treasure Island in San Francisco and generated a total of $661,000, benefiting student scholarships.
Mobile Optimizing Your Recruitment Strategy With SMS
When was the last time you were more than 10 feet away from your phone?
With 91% of U.S. mobile owners keeping their devices within reach at all times and 7.8 trillion SMS trillion messages being sent in 2011, It’s no wonder that 66% of U.S. marketers plan to spend between 1% and 24% of their 2012 digital budget on mobile, compared to 50% in 2011. (Sources: EMARKETER, 3/12/2012; Portio Research, 2012; CONVONIX, 04/17/2012)
While there are many ways companies can leverage mobile SMS advertising for their marketing needs, in this blog post I want to specifically focus on how recruitment HR professionals can leverage SMS into their recruitment strategies. The thought for many recruitment professionals of including any type of mobile advertising into their marketing plan seems too expensive and really far-fetched. While it’s definitely not cheap, it is a smart investment into the future of recruitment advertising.
Now with new mobile recruitment technology like Jibe, you can direct candidate from your text message to your career site and apply for a job straight from their phone.
Here are some other ideas that recruitment professionals can use to leverage mobile SMS advertising:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Building Your Pipeline
- Brand Awareness
- Sending Job Alerts
- Promoting a Job Fair/ Event
- Sharing a Story
- Cross Promotion of Social Media Channels
- Can you think of anything else?
I’ve put together the info-graphic below to show you a visualization of how the SMS data gets setup, stored and used.
To learn more about SMS and how it might fit in with your company’s marketing strategy comment on this post or email us at info@krtmarketing.com
A Useful Website for the Time Zone Challenged
Being in the marketing/ad business, the team here at KRT is constantly having meetings and presentations – brain-storming sessions, production meetings, client pitches, strategy sessions – the list goes on. For external meetings, since some of our clients aren’t local, we rely a lot on phone conference services like GoToMeeting or Webex. For clients that have offices in other countries, these services become even more important. A conference call integrating multiple countries and U.S. time zones can sometimes be a logistical nightmare. I recently participated in a meeting that involved India, the Philippines, the Midwest and the West Coast (turned out the starting time for me was 5:00AM – ended up downing plenty of coffee that day).
If you’re mathematically challenged, there are plenty of apps and websites out there that can help calculate and display time zones to set up a meeting in different geographies. A recent Google search of “time zones” revealed the best one in my opinion, everytimezone.com. The site is well-designed, interactive, visually appealing and amazingly simple to use. You might even want to use it to see what’s the best time to contact a buddy or family member across the country or overseas.
Are there any useful, well-designed sites you use to help make daily life a little easier? Let us know.
Sign of the times? Got a passion for the new and shiny – trade in the old (or not so old)
Saw the notices this week that Apple is encouraging the trade-in on iPhone 4S giving up to $345 on an Apple Gift Card. Just in time for the (new) iPhone 5 to debut. Doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence. Sounds like recommerce to me.
You’ve heard of recommerce, right? Trade in to trade up. Unlock the value in past purchases. Buy-backs, exchanges (commercial or private), insurance plans against obsolescence.
According to TrendWatching.com, recommerce is now increasingly affecting even consumers’ initial purchase decisions. Just as most do when buying a car, consumers are factoring an item’s resale value into the cost of ownership for an ever-wider range of purchases.
Seems like we can’t wait for the ‘Next’. We’ll make do with the ‘current’, but hedge our bets on what’s coming by fixing our mindset to make a change the first chance we get.
If you are interested in keeping ahead of what’s on the horizon, I recommend that you check out the free monthly Trend Briefing on trendwatching.com. It’s an interesting and diverse site with a growing following and translated into eight different languages.
The July/August 2012 Trend Briefing offers up some unique perspectives on Newism that goes beyond the ‘new and improved’ of yesteryear to the genuinely innovative and creative explosion taking place worldwide. Yet another trend to watch.
What are you trading in to trade up? Share your thoughts below!
List of Interesting Social Media Tools, Cool Productivity Apps & More – Part I
I am always asked about the tools we use or that I’ve tested; so I decided to start a blog post series where I will list interesting tools for social media, productivity and others. Some of these tools are more known than others. Some we use here at KRT Marketing, others I use personally and some I’ve never tried but read good reviews and included them in my “tools-to-test” list.
Here is today’s line-up:
Toronto based company that developed a dashboard to monitor Pinterest traffic. Users can schedule pins, receive real time analytics on which pins are most effective, use multiple accounts, and bookmark. It sits right in between Buddy Media and Hootsuite. Free
UPDATE: Pinerly is now Reachli.
Reachli goes beyond just Pinterest, so that we can also track images on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other popular visually centered networks. You can read more info on their blog.
Crowdbooster measures and optimizes your social media marketing by providing powerful, easy-to-use analytics and recommendations on Twitter and Facebook. You can see the best time to tweet, for example. Users can also schedule tweets and posts on Crowdbooster.
They have a free personal plan option where you can track one Twitter and one Facebook page. If you would like to monitor additional profiles you would have to upgrade to one of their paid options.
Litmus tests and tracks email campaigns. It provides you with screenshots of how your email looks like in all major email clients and mobile devices. You can also perform tests on your email vs. spam filters.
They do offer a free trial, but there is no free plan option. Basic plan starts at $49/month.
Free online photo editor that lets you perform the basic editing all the way to advanced stuff like cloning, touch-up and eye-gasmic effects. It also offers cool overlays, textures, and frames. It’s a great alternative for those of us who used Picnik. Right now all features are free, but they are getting ready to offer different plan levels.
Facebook Power Editor
Power Editor improves advertisers’ efficiency in creating, editing and managing a large number of campaigns and ads on Facebook. It allows mass-editing of Facebook campaign settings, targeting, bids, budgets, flight dates, and creative elements across ads, campaigns, and even accounts. You can also monitor ads stats in order to optimize ads and campaigns from within the tool itself. Power Editor can work in conjunction with a spreadsheet application such as Excel. It’s a really dandy free tool. Currently, it only works with Chrome. You can download a pdf with more details about how to get started directly from Facebook help http://bit.ly/K06rbH.
Update: If you like these tools you may enjoy the part II of the Social Media & Productivity tools list. You can see it here.
Have you used these tools and apps? What are your thoughts? Have another cool tool? Leave us a comment.
