Yesterday I sent an email to journalists about our SourceThatJob media jobsite. I guess on reflection it was a bit silly to send a message that said ‘advertise your jobs here’ as much as it said ‘look for jobs here’, given the tranche of editorial redundancies we’ve had in the last few weeks.
So it wasn’t surprising that a few recipients vented their disapproval of my poor judgement – a few Guardian journalists made the point most poignantly on Twitter.
Interestingly, I sent an email to more or less the same people two weeks ago that was purely a ‘recruit here’ message, yet there was no such response. Clearly the world changed in this short space of time.
Anyway – it was a fair cop, I shouldn’t have been soliciting recruitment advertising on such a broad scale so soon after so much bad news in the media.
However – and here’s the big ‘but’ – the whole experience was very educational.
The incident was an excellent example of how Twitter works as a brilliant customer feedback tool. And it was also an example of how stats often only show part of the picture.
On the face of it, the stats show it was a very successful email. Out of about 20,000 emails sent approximately 27 per cent viewed the email, better than the previous email which had a 23 per cent view rate. The click-through rate was even more dramatic – out of those who viewed the email 28 per cent clicked through – compared with 9 per cent on the previous.
But of course these stats did not tell me I’d misjudged the tone of the email – the Twitter media community did that for me. This is the power of Twitter as a customer feedback tool. Thanks tweeps. (Are you on Twitter? Follow me.)
Sadly though, the click-through stats did appear to reflect the real world in one sense. The ‘advertise jobs’ link generated 26 click-throughs, whereas the ‘look for jobs’ link generated 1,275.
So, to stretch the stats a bit (I know I shouldn’t…) for every editorial job there are nearly 50 jobseekers. That’s a crude extrapolation, but it probably isn’t far wrong in the current climate.
Note: These stats are correct at 16:00 on 3 December 2008, people are still clicking on the email
