Top 8 Social Media Experts weigh in on Real Time Marketing

Some social media experts have provided management consulting on the merits of real time marketing. Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute feels that it is essential for marketers to start with a certain strategy and not jump ad-hoc. Katy Powell, the CEO of Immediate Future feels that every organization needs to be part of the journey before casting the net wide on real time marketing. Lauren Duggan of Insightful Agency concurs. Author Michael Brenner feels the need for marketers to be relevant. Erik Qualman of Social-nomics and Jason Falls of Elasticity agree with this view. Thought leader Jeff Bullas feels that marketers must embrace big data in a greater way. Author Adam Metz also feels that big data is part of the way forward. 

Medical Tourism a $ 100 billion Industry

Medical tourism is now a massive industry globally and Canada occupies first position in this regard. It receives number of tourists from the USA especially for dentistry. A majority of these American travelers visit Manitoba from Minnesota or North Dakota. The U.K. occupies second list. Israel and Singapore come next. Dubai, Costa Rica and the Philippines have emerged as dark horses, in turn fuelling the enormous growth of travels jobs in these disparate regions. France, Germany and Italy topped the list from their region of Western Europe. South Africa gets good numbers of medical travelers from Africna countries such as Namibia, Zambia and Botswana.

How Data Analytics helped Direct Buy gain new Customer Insights

Direct Buy has been around developing its business over the last forty odd years selling directly to customers and avoiding the intermediary retail markups. Their entire business model has been threatened by e-commerce players such as Amazon and this particularly reflected post the recession in 2008. In order to survive the firm has conducted business analysis using Microsoft software such as R and Rapid-Miner. The team identified 22 channels to arrange business from. These findings and action taken accordingly helped Direct Buy see through some of the toughest times. 

The Dawning of the Age of Flex Labor

The concept of freelancing is gaining ground and increasingly people are working for several firms on part time basis rather than full time at one. This has resulted from two major societal changes. One has been the increased pressure to maintain a work- life balance. More importantly has been the rapid rise of technologies which have enabled seamless space and time shift. Apps such as Dropbox, Skype and Evernote have been critical to the same. This majorly helps firms in talent management as top professionals can continue working on what they do best and lend their services across the board. This concept is also helpful for the white collared workers as chances of them getting totally laid off reduces significantly. Germany, Spain and Canada have already implemented laws to protect freelancers and the USA is on the verge of joining them.

Sustainable Tourism as a choice of Traveling

As per market research conducted across sixteen countries by booking.com, more than half of world’s tourists, are today demanding a sustainable mode of tourism rather than conventional ones. This includes volunteering as well as camping vacations. This trend has particularly caught up in Spain. Majority of sustainable travelers are women between the ages of 35 and 55, traveling alone. This form is yet to catch popularity among the younger lot as sustainable tourism can never be a low cost option. Spain is also receiving fair share of sustainable tourism addicts from countries such as U.K, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Canada and the U.S.A.

Operators look to Culture seeking Tourists

The Maori community in New Zealand is particularly excited about the new breed of cultural tourists who are flooding into the country. This is helping alleviate the community by the generation of tourism jobs. This trend was proven further at a tourism exhibition held at Auckland recently. This genre of tourism is mainly targeting the baby-boomer generation which is by some estimates valued at over US $ 2 trillion worldwide. These kinds of tourists not only seek to visit the country but also immerse deep into the cultural traditions, history and heritage.

How to turn Sustainability into a billion- dollar Business

When we think of sustainability, the first thought in the minds of many, is products within a category which are devised with a primary moral and social inclination. However, the giants who operate in sustainability are those who excel at business innovation and have indeed disrupted the market. Perfect case would be that of Tesla. On the other side exists the case of Kodak who were industry leaders but have slid off primarily because they ignored the more sustainable business model of digital photography and instead continued to be loyal to print and films leading to eventual downfall. Apple seems to have taken a huge slice off that industry through their i-Photo application. 

5 Recruitment Myths: your Talent Acquisition Strategy could be Harmed

Talent recruitment has become so critical, yet many organizations fail at it. A business consulting publication has informed us about some common recruitment myths which must be rectified. It is often wrongly thought that a sophisticated technology enabled algorithm can solve all recruitment woes, yet it must be understood that recruitment is an art and not an exact science. Also many companies wrongly assume that the best talent is making a beeline to join that firm. Recruitment must be a constant process and not one triggered off by panic when there is sudden position to fill. In fact a lot of these task can be better handled by recruitment agencies rather than in house. Even smaller firms require a formal recruitment strategy and not any ad-hoc system.