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Another year, another RADs. But not just any RADs.

Last year’s RAD awards was a special night for us. It was the night that we won our first RAD award. Our #TweetShop created loads of buzz, great results and scooped the Best Ambient/Outdoor prize.

It was a special feeling for us all – and a fantastic way to round off our first year in business.

One year on and we’ve doubled in size. We’ve moved offices twice. And we’ve begun working with a whole host of new and exciting clients.

You can imagine, then, that we were thrilled to find out we’d been shortlisted for three awards this year. Two for our work with Tesco: Best Graduate Recruitment Campaign; and Best use of Mobile for our first-of-a-kind Snap It! on-campus innovation. And finally, Best Recruitment Literature for a new client of ours, Berwin Leighton Paisner.

Being the 25^th anniversary for the RADs guaranteed it would be a special night anyway. And we were hoping to make it extra special by picking up another award.

Well, we’re pleased to say we weren’t disappointed. And nor was our client.

Our work with Berwin Leighton Paisner to turn their graduate recruitment brochure into more of a story with a really human and conversational feel impressed the judges.

You can look at the brochure here.

It really was a great end to an even greater year.

Well done to all the shortlists and winners from the evening, and of course to our clients who’ve trusted us and provided us with the opportunity to deliver some exciting and creative work.

See you there next year.

Picture Time:

Tonic’s Executive Creative Director, Mark Horley, proudly receiving the Best Recruitment Literature award, along with Alan Demirkaya, the Graduate Recruitment and Trainee Manager at Berwin Leighton Paisner. The award was presented by our good friend Nick Francis, Creative Director of Casual Films

Here it is, the award in all its glory!

Thanks to the RAD Awards for making it a memorable achievement with this sticker placed outside our offices. Nice touch!

6 tips to help graduate recruiters bring the party to them

A warm welcome back to tonicthinking. We hope you found last week’s blog on how to find your online audience useful.

So far in this graduate blog series we’ve looked at:

This week it’s all about the laws of attraction and how you can supplement your marketing efforts by aggregating, authoring and helping in a bid to manage reputation and build a talent community around your brand by pulling people to you.

Content marketing is nothing new. However, its meteoric rise to become an essential part of any self-respecting employer’s talent acquisition strategy is down to a number of very valid reasons.

Why, you ask? Here are 10 reasons:

Audiences are increasingly wary of ‘sales pitches’
Push marketing is dead
It’s informative, interesting and helpful
It’s easily consumable on mobile devices
It can communicate values and culture and act as a self selection tool
It’s easily sharable and creates social proof
It increases visibility
It promotes your brand
It positions your brand as the expert authority
It improves SEO organic rankings

But! Content marketing has become a problem for content marketers.

If you’re already creating or perhaps thinking about creating content, then it’s highly likely that your close competition is too. In fact, most businesses are creating content and this in turn creates a problem because, guess what? There’s too much content; we’re being flooded.

You could argue that content marketers have ruined content marketing.

So what does this mean for students?

Negativity and cynicism. Because they’re being bombarded with messages to buy this and that, join so and so or work with X and Y, they’ll once again begin to raise their barriers.

Shame really because the whole point of creating and curating content is to get people to lower their marketing defence shield and allow you to get and hold their attention to deliver a message. If they’re bombarded with sub-standard content all the time, or content that’s “Me-me-me!” what will they think when they come across your content?

Enter Context Marketing!

So what is it? Simply put, it’s delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

Context enables your message to be unique, personalised, efficient, and ultimately more successful. If you’re going to take the time to create good content (which you most definitely should), then you may as well make that content work as hard for you as possible.

Think about your own behaviour for a moment. When you log into Facebook are you in the same state of mind as you are when logging into LinkedIn? Would the same identical content just shared on all the same channels be as effective as something that’s been created to communicate with someone on a 1:1 basis based on where they are, who they are, what they’re doing and how they prefer to consume information?

Of course, the answer should be obvious. However it does mean a little more work as you’ll need to consider that you’ll have to create various versions of content on the same topic. But the results will be worth it.

Here’s 6 tips to remember when it comes to creating content that works:

Be strategic – one-off content doesn’t make a strategy
Be passionate – if you don’t care about it, who will?
Be helpful – create content that will make others lives easier
Put yourself in the graduates shoes – everything starts with their needs, challenges and behaviour
Be authoritative – you understand your industry better than anyone, so make sure that knowledge aligns with those looking to forge a career path in it
Be tough on yourself – you’ll know if your content is lazy

To create content in context you’ll need to be a dab-hand at audience segmentation. And that’s something that we’ll be sharing advice on next week, so follow our blog using the follow button (top right) to receive an email when our content lands.

See you then!

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch to discuss how you can manage reputation and bring the right talent to you, drop us a line on 020 7183 2556 or email tam.salih@tonic-agency.com to set up a coffee.

http://www.tonic-agency.com

Being Less Predictable on Campus

On a certain level, law firms are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. Work a 100-hour week at one firm or a 96-hour week at another and the bags under your eyes are just as big. Magic Circle firms, in particular, are as hard to tell apart as chunks of gravel.

The problem is that every firm is trying to differentiate itself in the same way: the work; the values; the social life; the prospect of working abroad in a ‘truly global’ firm; the comps and bens; the accumulation of past experiences rather than the potential of future ones. All of these are useful, and vital considerations for candidates, but they’re not the magic formula.

People today are looking for more emotional connections. They’re not simply looking for a job or a programme, a type of client or a list of benefits. They’re looking for somewhere they will love working at.

That’s why when Berwin Leighton Paisner asked us to help them Be Less Predictable, we knew it was exactly the sort of project we love to get involved with.

We redesigned the trainee brochure to make it less of a predictable list of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ and more into a classic story of the hero’s journey – the graduate, stepping out into the world and, after successfully taking on challenge after challenge emerging triumphant.

To accompany this, we also created the BLP Sound shower experience on campus – something that really stood out at law fairs and engaged students in a totally unique and innovative way.

If you’d like to stand out from the crowd and build those all important natural conversations with the right talent, why not drop us a line and we’ll explain more about how we can help.

Call 020 7183 2556 or email tam.salih@tonic-agency.com to set up a coffee.

5 tools to help graduate recruiters make sure they’re not a proper Charlie.

A couple of weeks back, there was a party that Charlie and Jon decided to head to. Neither of them knew anyone that was going, except for the host of course.

As they arrived they got into the swing of things. Charlie, who was loud and gregarious, jumped right in – he started doing the rounds, interrupting people’s conversations to introduce himself, talking about his job, his girlfriend, where he lives and so on.

Jon however was a little less sure of himself. Being the shy type he was not so keen on interrupting people mid-party to talk about himself. He wanted to make a good impression, but he decided that maybe listening and understanding these people – background, personalities, preferences – was perhaps the more intelligent approach.

The night was going great, the two friends were enjoying themselves, the music was good and the drink was flowing. Jon had lots of people around him, engaging in good conversation, laughing at his jokes and buying him drinks. They wanted to spend the evening with him because they felt he understood them. He was connecting so well with other guests.

Charlie however was not having such a great time. He was speaking to lots of people, sure. But nobody was really listening. He found that after 5 minutes people would wander off and he’d be left looking for the next group of guests he could start talking to.

Jon left with a whole load of new friends and even a girl’s number…the lucky rascal.

Charlie on the other hand didn’t – and he couldn’t figure out why.

We see a lot of approaches to social from a broad range of employers who ask us to plan their strategy and begin conversations. The key trend we always seem to spot is that they all want to jump right into the party, much like Charlie. They want to use social media as a megaphone to shout about their message. When what they should be doing is taking a leaf out of Jon’s book and using it instead as a set of speakers to listen to what people are saying.

Social listening is quite literally that. Listening to what’s being said about your brand online within social communities – blogs, forums, corporate pages and social channels. It can help you understand where you’ve been mentioned, and in what context. You can then begin to compare that to those you compete for talent with which is incredibly useful for benchmarking your strengths and weaknesses.

Knowledge is power as they say and understanding the good, the bad and the ugly will put you in a great position to build out a plan of action – whether that plan focuses on being disruptive, challenging misconceptions or outright education – you need to truly listen before you speak.

Here are a few free tools to help ensure you don’t make a proper Charlie out of yourself.

Hootsuite & Tweetdeck – widely used to plan outbound messages, but have some functionality to monitor and allow you to gather data and respond in real-time.

Twazzup – great for beginners looking for a Twitter monitoring tool

Social Mention – allows you to monitor and collect data across multiple platforms with basic analytics to help you measure positive and negative sentiment

Icerocket – specialises in blog searches but has the functionality to watch Facebook and Twitter too

Google alerts – a very basic way to discover when a websites is posting about you. Doesn’t cover social and is probably the least useful in a recruitment sense

We hope you’ve found this little introduction to buzz monitoring useful. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you really listen, then pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com and get in touch.

10 steps to becoming a more attractive graduate employer

Reputation is a funny old thing. By definition it’s a widespread belief that someone or something has a particular characteristic – something that makes it unique.

In today’s employer marketing arena, being unique is a commodity that many simply don’t have. When it comes to standing out from the crowd, being heard and generating real space between you and the competition, many employers think they’re #winning, but in reality they’re out there sounding and acting just like everyone else.

There’s a Dutch photographer called Hans Eijkelboom. He’s created a collection of ‘anti-sartorial’ photographs entitled, ‘People of the 21^st Century.’ He walked round town with a camera round his neck and the trigger in his pocket, snapping people while they were unaware. Sounds a little stalkerish but the way he arranged these photo’s is what we’re focusing on here.

In a world where we all think we’re individuals choosing to look, dress and act in a way that reflects our personality and celebrates our individuality, it’s remarkable just how identical we all actually look.

Have a quick look here to see what we mean.

So where are we going with this?

How can you grab someone’s attention, and keep it, when you’re only as appealing as the next employer down the road? How do you really take that step from aspiring to be different, to truly leading the pack and setting a great example? How do you become the envy of the competition?

In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing 10 pieces of content with you, the graduate recruiter, as you begin to assess your recent performance, define goals and objectives and plan for the year ahead.

Our aim is to make your life easier, so we’ll be sharing success stories, examples of client work and the results achieved, as well as some of the latest thinking that will help you to effectively manage your reputation, persuade and influence your audience and build those all important conversations on and offline.

Follow us on Twitter, Linked In or Google + to stay up to date, or follow our blog using the follow button to the top right of this post to receive an email each week when new content drops.

Of course, if there’s any topics you’re particularly interested in then be sure let us know, and we’ll even create your own personal bit of content around that topic and share it with our wider community to fire up a discussion and get our readers input.

See you next week and have a fabulous weekend!

The team at Tonic

http://www.tonic-agency.com

SoMe Conference preview. What’s the Secret Social Sauce?

It’s the SoMe graduate conference & awards do tomorrow (23rd Jan 2014). The conference agenda looks great; lots of case studies, market data and a bit of looking forward to what’s next for us all too. There’s also the awards event later on in the evening – we’re short listed in several categories for a range of our work. We have our fingers crossed.

With the emphasis of the conference being on whether social is right (we hope that there are very few people that actually need convincing that they need to be active), the channels that can be used to serve content and their various merits, we’re going to take a slightly different perspective.

In the afternoon Tom is sharing the stage with Andrew from Mars and they’ll be looking at the HOW of content provision. How can we use the content generated to build conversation? How can we use those conversations to build community? How can we use social to convey our personality, our human brand, rather than simply pushing content? How does this change the dynamic of employer marketing altogether? How have Mars used this thinking to bring the people they need into the business?

We’ll share the slides we use later in the week but be warned that we’re not going to give away the magic ingredients, the secret sauce. You’ll have to talk to us to get that thinking…

Hope to see you tomorrow.

http://www.tonic-agency.com

+Tonic Agency

@tonictweeting