yourpeoplemarket.comBased in Milton Keynes and founded by a team of recruitment experts, yourpeoplemarket.com is a new fixed fee online recruitment marketplace that connects employers and recruiters. Designed to take advantage of competitive market conditions, their online recruitment marketplace puts employers in control of the recruitment process, posting jobs at a fee they set, engaging with a recruitment community based on performance and complete transparency, and achieving significant cost savings.

As a company that has not only put marketplace transparency at the heart of recruitment – employers can, for example, rate recruiters on a range of criteria based on their own experience of using their services – www.yourpeoplemarket.com has brought a new approach to the online market whereby easy, quick data capture and the effective management of client communications is key to maintaining competitive advantage.

Yourpeoplemarket launch campaign emailIn light of this, yourpeoplemarket.com has adopted the services of Virtual Viewing’s EMMA (Email Marketing Assistant) email campaign and newsletter management system. Indeed, their use of EMMA has been both critical to the success of this young business and sophisticated in the use of some of EMMA’s more advanced features.

After initial consultation, during which we provided analysis and review of the initial yourpeoplemarket.com system build (focusing particularly on usability and functionality), we developed an HTML email newsletter template design that reinforced the website branding, and created an EMMA account.

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From the outset, the world wide web was designed to be a medium for collaboration and interaction: indeed, one of the main triggers for its initial development was to allow scientists to share their information and research with each other online.  This line of thinking has been traced back to a historically significant essay, As We May Think, written in 1945 by Dr Vannevar Bush, the US Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (a copy of this essay is still available online). Having directed the American scientific community to support the wartime effort, he was concerned with the peacetime application of technology to more constructive means: his ideas included a (hypothetical) model for a ‘collective memory machine’. The video clip below shows an animation – itself made in 1995 – that shows how his machine, the ‘memex’, might have looked and worked: it’s hardly as coolly iconic as an iPad, but modern technology has still barely scratched the surface of some of the ideas his essay contained.

We usually accept that widespread take-up and adoption of different technologies can be unpredictable (we’re still using fax machines, for example, but the idea of micro-payments has been explored for at least 20 years with little sign of mass take-up), but the speed – or lack of it – with which we adopt them can still be surprising. Sci-fi writer William Gibson once memorably observed that “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”, and a look at the invention dates of many everyday items does prove his point (sms messages, 1992; digital camera, 1975; GPS, 1978; credit card, 1950; mobile phone, 1947; microwave oven, 1946; robots, 1921; radio, 1895; battery, 1800).

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As you may have already read on our blog – or on theirs – our long-term clients, Lumbers Jewellers of Leicester, are undertaking an epic adventure to raise money for charity: they’re rowing – yes, rowing – from Lands End to John O’Groats. Or, as their strapline would have it, “1097 miles, 12 oars, 6 men, 3 weeks – and 1 boat!”. Celebrity Row, as the epic journey has been christened, is being undertaken in aid of four richly deserving charities: Rainbows Childrens Hospice, The Princes’ Trust, The RNLI, and The Samantha Dickon Brain Tumour Trust.

As one of the sponsors for this laudable endeavour, Virtual Viewing has been lending a very technological helping hand. We’ve set up a dedicated micro-site (click here to view in a new window), with its own blog (click to view), and its own Twitter feed. Since the crew set off on 29 June, we’ve also been sending out an email newsletter to over a 1,200 people to keep them up to date on their progress, and cross-referencing all this activity in Lumbers’ own email newsletters (compiled and despatched by Virtual Viewing, using our EMMA EMail Marketing Assistant service) and blog (also created and maintained by us).

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Milton Keynes Business Resilience ForumOne aspect of business life that is often overlooked is Business Continuity and Resilience – the planning and operational procedures that will ensure that businesses are not unduly vulnerable to external threat from a wide range of factors that range from fire or flood to terrorist attack. Vulnerability affects not just the companies concerned, but has knock-on effects across the local business community where customers or suppliers are otherwise critically affected – a lesson that is important to Virtual Viewing’s MD, Stewart Bailey, who has recently been appointed to the Lead Team of Milton Keynes Business Resilience Forum (MKBRF). Piers Benn, Strategic Risk and Business Continuity Manager, Milton Keynes Council, welcomed the appointment, saying: “Stewart Bailey will bring valued insight and expertise to the Team”.

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360 Play website Home PageVirtual Viewing has already worked with local children’s entertainment centre, 360 Play, since their launch in 2008, designing and developing their original website and subsequently introducing them to the power and possibilities of our EMMA Email Marketing Assistant solution to help them manage email marketing campaigns to promote their latest events and special offers.

We are proud to say that our partnership continues with the launch of a completely redesigned website (now online at www.360play.uk.com). Virtual Viewing worked closely with 360 Play’s branding and design managers to redevelop the site, which vividly expresses the colourful and playful world that greets visitors to the centre.

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If you follow the media’s coverage of the media itself, you’ll be aware of plans for some daily newspapers – currently available to read pretty much in their entirety free of charge online – to put their content behind ‘paywalls’. There are complex business reasons at play: newspapers are struggling financially as more of us get our news from the web. Google and other search engines make it easy to browse not just the country’s but the world’s newspapers in an instant. Indeed, people use Google – making Google profitable – to access newspapers online, who make nothing from the transaction. Old business models are being outstripped not just by technology, but by the way we use it.

But listening to James Hewitt, editor of The Times, being interviewed on The Today Programme recently, he raised a point that is hugely relevant to all websites – whether or not they charge for access beyond their first page. That first page – usually your Home Page – is not just a gateway: it’s also a lure to tempt people to explore further, and an advertisement for what they will find inside. Hewitt drew the comparison of a newsstand: customers see only the front page – and usually just the top half of it. That view must tempt them to buy the paper, confident about its content.

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Virtual Viewing has been working with Istropolitana Ogilvy, a Slovak advertising agency that has been acquired by Ogilvy & Mather, on a nationwide campaign for t-com – known as T-mobile in the UK and one of Slovakia’s major mobile telecommunications service providers.

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If your business operates in a crowded and competitive marketplace, how can you make sure your website really stands out from the crowd and serves you best?

The shortest answer to this question is probably “think it through”. Although we now accept the idea of the web being an interactive environment, too many businesses still treat it as a ‘broadcast’ medium – “here’s our online brochure, please admire it”. But there are simple pieces of sound advice that might help you to kick-start your thinking:

  • analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ sites to – are they clearly laid out or cluttered, easy or hard to navigate and use, what features and functionality do they have (and learn from this)
  • focus on what your audience want/need to know about as much as what you feel you have to tell them: to engage them, it is your audience you need to address – you are not your own customer (and remember, they control they mouse)
  • play to your strengths – your web site is your ‘shop window’, and you need to present yourself in the best light.

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