Week Five - Social Networks and Job Hunting

Marketing today has dramatically changed from previous years. Most of marketing is now making the transition directly into Social Media Networks. Marketers use social networking sites to find out a plethora of information about their consumers as well as to send out information about their products and services. Marketers are also now beginning to use this world of social media networks to recruit new employees and also market at the same time. Thus, job placement sites are actually becoming a united facet of social networking sites and now marketers are creating a new avenue for companies to locate employee candidates and for people to locate job listings.

One example of how this would work is the process by which marketers are now hiring “brand ambassadors.” 

 “Marketers select their brand ambassadors very carefully, based on customers’ devotion to a brand and the size of their social circles. They sometimes search blogs and online social networks to identify individuals who are already functioning as brand advocates. Once selected, the ambassadors are trained with real brand knowledge to go along with their passion for the brand. The ambassadors then tap into friends, family, groups, and broader audiences through personal conversations, blogs, live events, and online social media. For the ambassadors, it’s often a labor of love more than a paying job. Rewards include product samples, gifts, discounts, and token cash payments. Perhaps more important to many brand enthusiasts, they get insider access to company information, such as new products or services in the works.

Brand ambassador programs leverage the power of peer-to-peer communication. Consumers hear about products and brand experiences from others just like themselves—people they trust—rather than from commercial marketing sources,” (Armstrong/Kotler p. 143).

These “brand ambassadors,” or, people who and endorse the companies product are found online on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Craigslist. Their position consists of them being surveyed themselves and also talk to and interview people about the product, and to promote it and be compensated with possibility of future job opportunities and promotions within the company. This is an absolute breakthrough in the job market. We now have this huge world opened up to us. However, at the same time, is this also a bit more taxing on our privacy and personal lives?

            This quest that marketers have to examine consumer behaviors is becoming extremely personal and almost infringing upon our very independence. The true test will lie on the future growth of Facebook.com. “Beginning next week, the company also plans to pilot a new Facebook application that will allow them to search for candidates on BranchOut Inc.'s Facebook app which, similar to BeKnown, builds a professional networking layer on top of Facebook and has more than 2.6 million monthly users, according to AppData.com,” (Joe Light, Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2011).  Only time can tell if this is a genius new advancement, or if it is another step toward losing individual rights to preservation of privacy.