Tag: loyalty

Trends and Impacts of Digital HR

Trends and Impacts of Digital HR

gamification·

Many companies have already switched to a more digital system for various work sectors among their departments, and this includes Human Resources. For a long time, HR has always been thought to be more of a human job, thus requires HR managers to do various tasks manually with as much human contact as possible. But this might not need to be the case. While an HR manager is still welcome, the use of solutions or platforms could help streamline and perhaps improve many of the processes.

The Trend of Digital HR Activities

69% of companies in the US believe that Digital HR is becoming an important aspect of a company. Over 83% of Southeast Asian companies agree. Of course, these would include:

  • Using crowdsource recognition data to substantially increase performance review accuracy
  • Using AIs to better improve multiple aspects of HR
  • Digitalizing or using online recruitment platforms to streamline hiring processes
  • Doubling down on people analytics efforts to get better employee data

Many more trends, of course, exist such as using onboarding platforms, networking with employees, and using an employee’s digital work signature to monitor their performance. However, among the many digital initiatives one could apply to the office, how will it impact the behavior around it?

The Impact of Work Culture

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A company’s work culture is something very valuable and one might even say that it is what defines the soul of the company. With something corroborated so tightly with HR, it will also be affected should a more digital HR system be implemented. Be it for automation of employee data, recruitment or even onboarding, companies have been known to even go to the length of redesigning their whole organizations. And such lengths are undergone for the sake of adapting to a more digital business model.

The main impact on a good digitalization of your HR processes shouldn’t simply be to streamline processes (although it is part of it), but to also improve retention rates of your employees. After all, the reason you ease HR processes is to ease your HR managers to keep your employees cared for and satisfied with your company.

Why Digital HR is Helpful to the Company Culture

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During a survey, it was found out that only 72% of the respondents do not understand their company culture that well. Although this seemingly feeble, it may eventually lead to a breakdown on a psychological level. Many employees undergo the provided work culture without knowing any better. In the meantime, they might not know that they’re subjected to something bad at all and thus stay silent while their stress builds up. This could result in an eventuality of employees resigning or relocating.

Digital HR Use for Welfare Management

With the shift in how welfare management is being approached, a Digital HR could help in this regard. The current shift in trend, that HR practitioners are starting to look into and prioritizing the employee’s mental health as well as physical. This could benefit highly from a proper two-way communication.

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A Digital HR not only helps with creating a more efficient environment but communication as well. An instantaneous feedback or survey system can easily help HR managers and the employees reach a better understanding of how the company culture should be molded. By doing so, it is expected that it would help to create a true two-way communication and, in turn, create a more stable environment and culture to maintain the mental well-being of the employees.

Benefits of a Digital HR System

A digitally-enabled HR system would create a much more improved work environment for your employees and managers alike. Such improvements would include:

  • Innovating and Streamlining Processes would help transform time-consuming administrative tasks.
  • Providing Data and Analytics to process more accurate and detailed employee information within all HR activities would help improve decision making.
  • Improving the Workplace by digitally-enabling the work environment would help employees become more flexible and efficient.
  • Providing Instantaneous Feedback and Service to your employees would help them and HR managers collaborate to create the ideal culture to increase their retention rates.
ARG’s Power to Spread Brand Awareness

ARG’s Power to Spread Brand Awareness

gamification·

You may be wondering how exactly can an ARG bring forth so many people to collectively work together or to individually pursue such great lengths for what is essentially a game. Our previous two articles explain the fundamentals of ARGs’ potential and the impact it had on the past. But in this article, we’ll be seeing how exactly said impact is made. Right now, in the present and how said potential will continue to grow in the future, especially for marketing brand awareness.

How ARGs Gains Their Reach

Alternate Reality Games, in its essence, are puzzle solving games where the players would need to work as a collective to solve. Even ARGs targeted for individuals to solve alone like recruitment ARGs still encourages a sense of community within the players, collaboratively increasing their knowledge-base through networking. Therefore, it is through that collective process that ARGs spread like wildfire. Especially in this day and age, where sharing information through something like mainstream social media is only 1 click away.

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However, that is not the only reason an ARG can quickly become so popular. An ARG like the Twitter account The Sun Vanished makes use of surreal story-telling elements. An ARG is a narrative playground. If you can create a story for the ARG that would evoke a sense of interest alongside the challenge it provides, you can have yourself a viral hit ready to be sent out.

How Your Brand Can Tie to an ARG

With some ARGs, it seems almost impossible to put the face of your brand into it. But the key here isn’t to put your brand blatantly to the game. That takes away the intrigue of it all. Your potential consumers must know that your brand is an ever-looming presence in the game without being intrusive about it. Below are 2 examples of how a brand is implemented within a viral ARG.

I Love Bees, Halo 2 (Game) Marketing Campaign

In August 2004, hints of a website were dropped everywhere but were first advertised by a hidden message within the game’s trailer. When taken to the website, the players then uncovered that it was apparently being taken over by an A.I. and through this campaign, foreshadows and context of the story for the game is slowly uncovered. From the people that found it, spreading it, and reaching out for help, the campaign eventually reached out to over 3 million visits and players around the world. This campaign, titled I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft for their upcoming game, Halo 2. The campaign itself received many awards for being innovative and incredibly unique at its time. Although the ARG weren’t too blatantly obvious that it was a Halo 2 marketing campaign, the people that paid attention to its updates and the participating players never forget.

Why So Serious, Batman: The Dark Knight (Film) Marketing Campaign

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Some marketing ARGs are a bit more obvious as to what it promotes. The Batman: the Dark Knight’s marketing ARG titled Why So Serious. This campaign was a viral hit not only due to it being in the shadow of the big movie title, but also for its way of fan-service. The puzzles were simple enough, thus it doesn’t require super intelligence to solve but also hard enough to invoke many people asking questions, thus the sense of community. This campaign sparked over 10 million people to be immersed in a world-wide puzzle-solving agenda. And with a lot of the orders were to take pictures and share it online, it leads to a domino effect of intrigue and an ever-growing audience.

The Power that ARG Gives

Besides having the power to spread your brand and product, ARG has the capability to give a power as well. And said power is ownership. One of the key aspects of gamification is to make something done and worth the effort feel like it’s the player’s. Thus, they’d have a sense of bond to said experience. And with it, a bond with the product and/or brand.

“The experience must transfer ownership to the Audience, make it feel like it’s theirs”
Susan Bonds, 42 Entertainment President & CEO.

Alternate Reality Game for Recruitment

Alternate Reality Game for Recruitment

gamification·

Companies and even certain government organizations have been using Alternate Reality Games to mask scouting processes since at least a decade now. And each time, through specific tasks, it almost certainly gets the organizers true quality employees. But some thinks that ARGs are limited only to harshly complicated and cryptic riddle-based activities. Well, this article will aim to tell you how that might not need to be the case while still getting you highly capable recruits.

How ARGs Were Used for Recruitment

As ARGs are often more collaborated to cryptic puzzles and conspiracy theories, most of the time, recruitment through it often is for positions requiring elite-level intelligence. Below are 2 of the many notable uses.

Can You Find It?

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In 2013, this ARG was promoted by the British Intelligence to fill elite positions within the GCHQ. And with it, GCHQ hoped to find coders fully capable of cracking such codes that may have been self-taught, doesn’t have the proper degree, or even simply never found the chance. This method proved incredibly effective as the challenge (not even the reward) proved to have attracted the attention of hundreds if not thousands of capable mathematicians. Some of them even joined a community to discuss it with each other such as this Reddit thread in the UK Subreddit.

Cicada 3301

Exploding the world wide web with the biggest scavenger hunt the internet has ever seen, at 2012 was the mysterious organization nicknamed Cicada 3301. Some would say that Cicada 3301 is the pinnacle of an ARG. Combining mystery with elaborate puzzle hunts both on the internet and in the real world. Players would need to solve puzzle after puzzle. From fields of cryptography, steganography, and other related fields. Those puzzles would at the time lead you to find posters spread throughout the world. After the game is complete and Cicada finds their sought after individuals, it would at times repeat again the very next year. Though there is no way to know how many players actually participated in the game, it is safe to say that the count goes up to at least millions.

What We Can Learn From the Examples

Despite the two examples given the sound more elaborate than what a regular company might need, there are some very valuable points to take from them.

  • Can You Find It proves that you can be more direct with your intentions to draw in interested parties.
  • It also proves that such an ARG are an incredibly efficient way to grasp the attention of hidden talents that may even prove more capable than those that have official titles.
  • Cicada 3301 proved that a phenomenal ARG can attract the curiosity of countless throughout the world.
  • While at the same time, it may not need to cost more than you think.

How an ARG Could be Cheaper to Make than It Appears

Returning to the point of Cicada 3301, many of the puzzles that they’ve made are intricate. Even the red herrings were intricate. And this sound like it would take a lot of effort and cost-heavy. Especially the part of interconnecting the scavenger hunt to the real life with the posters spread throughout the world. But that may not be the case.

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While some of Cicada’s puzzles were obviously handcrafted by experts, a less hard and more open to general individuals may not necessarily need such things. For one, many free softwares are available online if you simply want to create encrypted messages. And anyone can now hire a number of services to simply do tasks such as placing a poster in certain parts of the world. And it would hardly cost much.

Even beyond that, with the growth of social media today, it is quite easy to make a number of smaller scale ARGs if you prove creative enough.

Closing Point

ARGs are still not within the mainstream but can easily attract the curious attention of the public. With this in mind, the earlier you are to try and use it, the more unique and creative your implementation will seem by comparison. And thus, would draw in more interest.

Using Viral Social Media Marketing

Using Viral Social Media Marketing

gamification·

Using Viral Social Media Marketing

Social Media marketing is something that a lot of brands and companies are looking to these days for what is sometimes a cheaper alternative to traditional advertising. However, should that really be how this initiative is viewed? The matter of the fact is, that this type of marketing has proven to be more than lucrative with the right amount of investment, creativity-wise and funding-wise. Below is how some companies had used social media to their advantage and at times manipulated its virality. And why this method of marketing is essential in this day and age.

What is Virality

Virality is essentially the status of a post’s engagement. When a post is viral, it would drag in hundreds of thousands if not millions towards that single post. But a state of virality is an elusive one. Many companies also try to recreate this without understanding the bases of what and how the youth—or rather, the masses of social media—thinks. This statement is proven in this video that rejects such blatant attempt at virality in a TV ad for Wendy’s. And yet ironically enough, the video itself became viral.

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To a degree, the virality created by the ironic hate of this commercial indeed worked. But at the cost of damaging the brand’s image by the people that resent it. But using memes isn’t the only way to boost your virality. And in fact, that inside joke-like internet culture is better off left to a whole other topic entirely.

Using Controversy and Rivalry

Nothing is better than a little healthy rivalry right? Wrong. The internet is quite the brutal place where most of the time childish humor and backlash actually might help you win the day. An example of using controversy is mastered by the fast food brand Wendy’s. That’s right, where their TV ad fails, their twitter rivalry saves them.

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Wendy’s Twitter account is infamous for being extremely hostile towards rival brands and to back this up, the admin of said account is extremely proficient in dishing out insults. However, what most would think as bad business practice actually played an incredible part towards Wendy’s brand awareness and loyalty from their followers.

And with most other restaurants retorting back at Wendy’s twitter account, customers get to choose sides. And with their pride for their favorites in line, becomes more loyal with each supporting action such as re-tweeting and sharing. While your brand might antagonize some potential customers, it gains great loyalty by the ones that truly love what you have to offer. This helps improve the quality of your customer base for the price of some of its quantity.

Using Influencers and Social Figures

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Another most common social media marketing tactic is to simply pay an influencer to promote your product. This will help not only spread brand awareness, but perhaps earn you the loyalty of new customers that are loyal to the influencer that’s sharing it. And with over 69% of marketers considering this highly grossing initiative, its effectiveness is only further proven. And being that most influencers have multiple channels across the varying social media platforms, you won’t have to worry about missing any.

Through Acts of Charity

Companies sometimes underestimate how moving the force of good really is. This is especially the case when your acts of charity is shared for everyone to see.  And when the charity is crowd-funded, everyone that takes part in it gets to see your brand at the center of it all.

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The act of charity is not only beneficial in spreading your brand awareness throughout social media, however. As the main benefit you earn from creating such a loving and charitable campaign would mean it helps improve your brand image as well. This will be earning you the trust of those that follow your campaign with good will. And of course, you’ll also help many in need as well which never hurts.

Other Benefits to Social Marketing

Not only is social media marketing most of the time remains easier and cheaper, but it also goes by the 30% of people using the internet with an Ad Blocker in tow. Since your advertising won’t be detected as an ad but as content. Though ads in video sharing platforms like youtube remains blocked, it still won’t be if your influencer accounts the ad within their content itself. And yet, besides from that, online videos have other means of generating clicks.

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