Fresh from a world of pitches, presentations and virtual job fairs, please find enclosed four sites for your convenience. This week’s theme is all about crossing divides. The first and last links are about crossing the divide between Marketing and HR; the second link is about crossing the divide between consumer branding and individual identity and the third link is about crossing the divide between agencies and their clients. It made me laugh out loud.

I guess the message is one we hear often; change is constant. It’s how you adapt to change that makes the difference.

Happy surfing

Coke Happiness Factory
Coke has always been an advocate of innovative advertising. Of late, the company has been afflicted by the general anti-American malaise that has been surrounding big global US companies, so Coke invested huge amounts of money with top notch ad agencies to help resolve this. The resultant campaign, the Coke Side of Life (CSOL), has had mixed results.

I noticed this campaign site because it was positioned as a job site, but in reality, it seems to be an extension of the CSOL campaign. You (the user) are encouraged to apply to work in the weird world that incorporates the plethora of characters from the ad campaign. From a creative and technical point of view, it is engaging and enticing, with some interesting ideas (I particularly liked how they treated the application form). However, it is heavily reliant on Flash, which can be quite irritating at times. Also, I found myself initially confused as to whether it was a real job site or not.

Compare it to the Coke careers site (http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/careers/careers_european_union.html) and you just can’t help but feel disappointed. What does it say to a potential employee when you’re prepared to invest more in creating an engaging experience for consumers than for the employees who work for you? Hmmmm…

Psychometric testing gone mad?
We often see psychometric testing as part of an application process; it is obviously important to understand whether a prospect matches the cultural identity of a company. But have you ever considered the process as relevant in process of selecting a phone?! I find this is interesting because it reflects a social change – we see phones as an extension of our individual personas, rather than as machines, with our choice of colour somehow reflecting a personality profile. Anyhow, the test (click on ‘My Colour Style’) is quick and harmless. And we all LOVE to have a deeper understanding of our personal psychological traits, so it’s got to be a winner…

…actually I was quite disappointed in the end.

Staff management by clients
In the Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki’s core theme was that as a collective, crowds were excellent at making decisions. You just need to know how to interpret the results. So what if you let the general populace decide how to manage your staff? We’ve seen this theme already tested, with Ebbsfleet United, a football team that is managed by its shareholders. Here, as a Christmas present to their clients, AIS built a site that controlled an industrial snow machine, which clients were able to operate remotely (from as far afield as Sydney) to punish any AIS staff who arrived to work late (and hungover). Utter genius…

The Marketing / HR chasm
Seth Godin is a planner and I usually enjoy his blog. However, last week, he posted this article in which his ‘revelation’ that HR should consider renaming itself to Talent Management is positioned as such a new and fantastic thing. Read and PLEASE respond. I was so annoyed I couldn’t.