Telling Your Story To A Disrupting Marketplace

Editor's Notes

1. Marketing in this environment requires that companies and people be nimble. But while heroic efforts can sometimes handle immediate challenges, they don’t scale, are seldom repeatable and heroes die on the battlefield. Instead, you must approach the disrupted marketplace with 4 Strategic principles in mind: Orchestration, Synchronization, Execution & Discipline. But strategy is useless without tactics. Many organizations have to engage markets that are being disrupted. Field Nation is doing that in the world of work. This is our story, our journey and the lessons we’ve learned. Oh, and FYI: We’re still on the road.
2. Call it Human Resources, labor, employment, call it Human Capital Management if you must. Our marketplace is work. This marketplace is in the midst of major disruption. This is not a simple restructuring, it is a wholesale re-imagining, re-engineering and rebuilding. We are part of that disruption as are others. But it did not happen on its own. There are 2 major disruptions, but to properly understand these, we must first understand the 5 shifts that led to the disruption. Sitting at the nexus of these shifts and fomenting the disruption, we endeavor to implement the 4 strategies. We do this in many ways but we’ll share 3 tactics and 1 vital, empowering and growth accelerating ecosystem that form the cornerstone of our marketing engagement activities on a daily basis.
3. Outsourcing Whets Enterprise Appetite for External Expertise Organizations created new Program Management Offices (PMOs) in house that create or re-engineered business processes and management/accountability structures for engaging remote work forces. The PMOs created new models of interaction and results tracking that became indispensable for coordinating with and ensuring appropriate results from the remote work forces.
4. The Enterprise Expertise Proxy Is Eroded By Actual Individual Experts It is no longer enough to be an organization who knows ABC industry / technology / vertical space Solutions are so highly specialized, customized and personalized that they require deep insight. That insight comes from time and on-ramping. That time and on-ramping is performed by individuals. Hiring companies don’t want to pay for that time / investment twice. Specialized Solutions require deep insight which takes time to develop that companies will only pay for once.
5. Communication & Collaboration Technology Brings Expertise Into The Room
6. A Perfect Storm Of Trends To Spur The Freelance Economy the national dialogue on the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare) brought the terms and concepts of marketplaces back into popular discourse; establishing the context to bring those terms into different (non-healthcare related) discussions. At the same time, Craigslist, Ebay, Airbnb (2008 founded) and Uber (2009 founded) helped consumers and businesses alike become accustomed to searching for and finding specialized local services. In the technology sector, cloud computing and the entire concept of “elastic computing” hit major milestones in 2006 with the launch of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and then in 2009 with the popularity of web based application and platform structures. Mohamed, Arif (March 2009). “A history of cloud computing.”. ComputerWeekly.com. Retrieved 20 September 2014 At the same time, full time traditional W2 employees grew increasingly disengaged and dissatisfied with their jobs. Due to economic pressures, competition for top performers, irregularity in schedules (furloughs, wage freezes, greater demand for coverage of unfilled spots) and expectation-resource imbalances businesses found themselves with a disengagement dilemma. Philippe, Murat (24 Jan 2009). “The Engagement Dilemma: An Investment or a Cost?”. HR Solutions Inc. HR.com. Retrieved 20 September 2014
7. Do What You Love Drives The Hunt For New Opportunity Work is more than where we go. Blurred borders between work and life balance are enabled by technology advances. This leads to an increasing identity crisis amid shifting expectations and businesses attempts to squeeze more blood from the stone. 2005 Apple’s Steve Jobs captured this theme in his commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford University. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. Jobs, Steve (14 June 2005). “’You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says”. Stanford Report. Retrieved 21 September, 2014
8. Together These 5 shifts combined to drive the 2 disruptions that affect the global marketplace of work.
9. Awareness of the squeeze their companies are putting on them due to the recession & increasing visibility of conspicuous success by passion-based entrepreneurs feeds growing dissatisfaction. Employee visibility of purpose is comprised of 3 elements: A thriving relationship with the immediate supervisor Belief in senior leadership Pride in working for the company. Culture abhors a vacuum. With increasingly fractured teams and absent an intentional focus on connectedness, belief in Sr. leadership erodes which causes satisfaction and engagement to plummet. 87% Global Disengagement | 70% U.S. Disengagement | 450-550 BN us losses in US alone The Gallup organization finds the disengagement trend is at critical levels. In late 2013 their State of the Global Workplace report found that only 13% of traditional full time workers around the world are engaged in their jobs. That means more that 4 of 5 workers are disengaged at work. The results in the U.S. are little better. In America, 70% of traditional full time workers are disengaged or actively disengaged in their jobs according to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace study. This goes beyond boredom in the boardroom and nodding off in a cubicle. Gallup estimates that employee disengagement costs the U.S. economy between $450 billion and $500 billion in lost productivity. The cost is staggering but the rationale for the disengagement dilemma is sound. Crabtree, Steve (8 Oct 2013). “Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work”. Gallup World. Retrieved 22 September 2014 Sorenson, Susan, Garman, Keri (11 Jun 2013). “How to Tackle U.S. Employees’ Stagnating Engagement”. Gallup Business Journal. Retrieved 22 September 2014 Lipman, Victor (23 Sept 2013). “Surprising, Disturbing Facts from the Mother of all Employee Engagement Surveys.” Forbes. Retrieved 22 September 2014
10. Today more than 53 million people in the U.S. are performing freelance and independent contracting work. In 2006 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that roughly 31% of the workforce was contingent or freelance. In 2014 that number is over 34% and it is projected to grow to more than 40% by the end of the decade. This growth is clear evidence of the shift. The barriers to work and to starting up a business are decreasing at the same time that freelancing is increasing. 36% of Businesses Plan to increase spending on contingent workers in 2015 (up from 24% in 2014) -TEKsystems nov 6, 2014 Elance-oDesk, Freelancers Union, Edelman Berland (2014) “Freelancing in America: A National Survey of the New Workforce”. Slideshare.net. Retrieved 27 September 2014 Weber, Lauren (4 September 2014) “One In Three U.S. Workers Is a Freelancer” The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 29 September 2014 =========== “Data from Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), which counts both IT and non-IT hiring, says reliance on temporary workers is rising overall, and is now at 18% of the overall workforce, a similar percentage to 2013. But the trend is strongly moving up (contingency workers were at 12% in 2009) and is forecast to rise to 20% in two years.” “IT staffing firm TEKsystems, which surveys IT hiring across industries, said its latest data from an unpublished survey shows both full-time and contingent hiring increasing in 2015. Its data shows that 40% of the firms it surveyed plan to increase their full-time IT staff next year, up from 38% this year. As for contingent workers, 36% plan to increase hiring in 2015, up from 24% this year.” http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844580/the-it-freelance-economy-is-growing-but-not-at-large-firms.html
11. Once we conducted a day of the week test and implemented a strategy based on these results, we saw our open rates increase by 2.1% after 5 weeks for our Executive segment and by 1.3% in the technical segment.  We also were able to easily and quickly identify that after 5 weeks we needed to reapproach our campaign strategy with regards to our other two segments, BOTG & unsegmented, as soon as they started to lag behind our baseline numbers.  This also helped us learn OUR audience, which can oftentimes deviate from the industry standard, which allows us to better target the companies/people WE want to target. 
12. Executive & BOTG segments: Open rates for executive segment was highest on Mondays & Fridays - which goes directly against market research that says these days have the lowest open and engagement rates. Technical & unsegmented segment: Open rates held steady from Mon-Wed, but we had the highest engagement rate on Tuesday for the technical segment. We also conducted A/B tests with subject lines and discovered that asking a question instead of offering a value prop received higher open rates, regardless of length and regardless of segment. Additionally, we discovered that email copy length does make an impact, with shorter emails outperforming longer emails with regards to CTR in some cases by up to 11%.  This insight is only available because we designed a profiling process that was testable and we committed ourselves to executing against the data despite our individual “expertise” and egos.  Once we conducted a day of the week test and implemented a strategy based on these results, we saw our open rates increase by 2.1% after 5 weeks for our Executive segment and by 1.3% in the technical segment.
13. Continual Measure, Improve & Grow Feedback Loop Drives Improvement