Target shoots itself in the foot

According to the New York Times, Target (who are a US retailer) have an official policy not to reply to bloggers. Shaping Youth, who discuss marketing’s influence on youth, were complaining about a rather unpleasant ad run by Target - and were given the response that:

“Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets … This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest”

Oh dear. This incident has caused some waves across the blogosphere as blogger after blogger picked this up. And now here I am commenting on it - from across the Atlantic. Bad publicity certainly goes far!
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7 steps to Yes: do I want to work here?

Last time I suggested some ideas to help your prospective recruits find out something about what your company does.

Their next step will be to decide whether they would like to work for you.

Step 2: “Would I want to work for this company?”

Answering this question is a chance to sell your corporate culture. What is so special about your company? Why would someone want to work for you, rather than for your competition?
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7 steps to Yes

Yes!

The letter from Princeton is an old standard now, but I mention it again to emphasize that the goal of a recruitment process (from both points of view) is to get to Yes.

Or perhaps Yes-Yes, because the goal is to get to Yes on both sides. (Yes-No or No-Yes are both mismatches resulting in disappointment. No-No is usually less of an issue).

To get to Yes, the prospective recruit has to find the answer to a number of different questions, and go through 7 steps:
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Put your brochure in their pocket

Have you considered using podscrolls to communicate more detail about you?

Podscrolls are like presentations, or brochures, and are composed of a series of images, but they are read using an iPod or other personal media player with a colour screen rather than on paper. These were first used by travel guides (Rough Guides), but potentially have a lot of different applications.

Accenture are using them in their Careers section to enable prospective candidates to download brochures for reading later - on their ipods.

I can see that this might work for documents or presentations that you’d like people to review, re-read, and think about, and it is certainly convenient - no need to carry about a document in case you’d like to have another look later.

However, the pixel size is small (320*240) so you probably wouldn’t want to put your annual report or financial statements on podscroll.

But do you have manuals - either for your end customer or for your staff - that it would be helpful for them to have available in a size that would fit in a pocket? Or price lists? What about other presentations that people could download and read on the bus without having to get out their PC?

I’m going to be looking out for interesting uses of podscrolls, so if you come across something, do let us know.

Want to talk to Coca-Cola?

I have now managed to get onto Coca-Cola’s new mini-site (launched on Wednesday, apparently). I couldn’t find it before because the link from the press release didn’t seem to work - now there’s something that should always be checked - but Google found it for me. Of course.

Do you think this site is designed only for the British? It has a UK URL, and the audio clip used of their focus group contains some quite strong northern British dialects, which maybe people coming across this from abroad may struggle with. It reminds me very strongly of the Nick Park adverts for electricity … and if it is UK only, why?
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