Elearning - February/March 2009 - (Page 13)

Marketing Tips for A Lousy Economy If you’re a business owner, you’re likely already lamenting a new year filled with nail biting and money woes. But authors Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby want you to stop worrying and start working on a multi-channel marketing strategy that will have you generating revenue rather than cutting expenses in the upcoming year. “Once you’ve cut your expenses to the bone, you must get back into revenue-producing mode,” asserts Tribby, co-author of “Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business.” Multi-channel marketing — combining new concepts, such as search-engine marketing and social media, with tried-and-true methods like direct space advertising and public relations — can reach a wider customer base, build customer loyalty and increase sales. Social media are a good way to maximize investment. When used correctly, social media allow you to put your message in front of potentially huge numbers of people. You can create outbound campaigns to blogs and forums and chat rooms. You can start your own blog. You can stimulate conversation on social media sites about you, your business, and/or your products by publishing special reports or covering news or sending out surveys or questionnaires to specific groups. If you do these things gradually and organically and with a solid message, you can win over the users of these sites and build profitable relationships with them. “Your company Website is a great place to start,” says Tribby. “Build a strong social forum by giving customers who visit the site interesting articles or study results and inviting them to share their thoughts and feelings. The customers in your forum will tell you what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong; there’s no need to waste money on a customer survey. Heeding the advice you receive is likely to translate into dollars for your company.” 10 Steps to Competency Management Success As the foundation of a talent development strategy, your competency model guides the end-to-end management of your organization’s talent base — from performance assessments and goal achievement, to training and development, workforce planning, and recruiting. However, as our economy shifts focus to delivering knowledge and services, core competencies become harder to recognize objectively. Is your existing competency model still relevant? How do you leverage competencies to drive results from your performance management system? Where do you start? In the whitepaper, “10 Best Practices for Successful Competency Management,” you’ll learn: >> how to prioritize and focus your competency management project; >> >> how to make the leap from core competencies to proficiency level assessments; how your competency model drives performance management, career development, and succession planning. To download the whitepaper: http://www.2elearning.com under resource center. IT Employment Drops After appearing to be largely resilient to the macro-economic trends that have devastated the broader employment market through much of 2008, IT employment finally succumbed to the inevitable. In November of last year, IT employment dropped by almost 34,000 jobs or 0.87% — the most significant one-month drop in over three years. Despite the precipitous drop, IT employment was still up 2.1 percent over the past year. “Given the continued deterioration of broad swaths of the economy, the marked drop in IT employment was not surprising. While IT employment continues to outperform the general employment marketplace on year-over-year basis, that is small consolation for those companies and individuals affected,” commented Mark Roberts, CEO of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (www.naccb.org). Elearning! February/March 2009 13 http://www.2elearning.com http://www.naccb.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Elearning - February/March 2009

Elearning - February/March 2009 Contents Editor’s Note News Social Networking Popular Learning Needs Technology On Competency Management IT Employment Drops Trendlines Deals Learning Roles in Talent Management Informal E-Learning and Web 2.0 Cover Story: Learning Your Way to Profits Collaboration Trends, Strategies 12 Wishes for LMSs, LCMSs Tips: Recession-Proofing Your Job Case Study: Military Training Case Study: City of Arlington, Va. New Products Pop Quiz Last Word

Elearning - February/March 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.