I Create Jobs - Email to send to Technology Companies

Thank you for helping spread the word about the i.c.jobs campaign and the i.c.stars Social Media Manager service. Please feel free to customize the text below in your outreach to colleagues. Thank you!!

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Dear Technology Vendor,

I am writing to introduce (re-introduce) you to a local non-profit where I have volunteered called i.c.stars.

i.c.stars provides a rigorous technology-industry workforce development and leadership training program for low-income adults, developing Chicagoland’s most promising information technology talent with leadership goals and connecting them with career opportunities through a social enterprise and partner organizations. Since inception in 1999, participants have seen an average annual earnings increase from $9K/year before the program to over $31K after the program. In addition, 95% of graduates have been placed in the technology field.

i.c.stars is now offering outsourced services to help technology companies enhance sales effectiveness. They do this through raising brand awareness with blogs, discussion forums and email newsletters. Cultivating interest among the ‘weak ties’ in employees professional networks has been talked about for years, and i.c.stars has discovered it is achievable using LinkedIn and blogging.

The service works best for clients who are busy professionals with a lot to say and not enough time to manage their own blogs and social media presence. They also do not have enough time to analyze the data and results to capture the value or forward prospective leads to sales teams.

i.c.stars has been operating this service with 15 clients since January of 2011 with tangible results. Included among their clients are several local technology companies and associations: SIM, ITA, Capax Global, Geneca and PointBridge.

In addition to solving the pain of social media management at a cost-effective price, participating as a client provides you with a well-timed and powerful PR story about creating jobs that aligns with the Obama Administration’s partnership with the Aspen Institute Skills for America’s Future program.

I strongly support i.c.stars and think this service might be of considerable value to you and your firm.

1) If you are interested in learning more about our social media offering - please tell us a little about your interest and challenges with social media here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/smm
OR
email Carey Smith and Eric Lannert via careyanderic [at] icstars [dot] org

2) If you’d like to read more about our offering and its results you can visit our website here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/services/socialmediamanager

3) If you’d like to learn more about how to get involved in the i.c.jobs campaign visit our website here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/icjobs/2011

Additional PR Context:
i.c.stars is positioned with the board, CIO network and organizational resources to scale this offering to create several hundred jobs in the Chicagoland area and several thousand nationwide. These are brand new job classifications that did not exist 5 years ago and a demonstration of the kinds of new economy jobs that are now being created.

Participating as an i.c.stars Corporate Client creates jobs, not by increasing your w2 headcount at the corporation, but through strategically purchasing services from organizations like ours that are intentionally making new opportunities.

The i.c.stars social media specialists are w2 employees of i.c.stars and are required to attend night school at one of the City Colleges of Chicago to pursue their Associates Degree in Computer Information Systems. This too aligns with the goals of the Skills for America’s Future program to help leverage the community college infrastructure to develop tomorrow’s talent.

Additional Service Details - How it works
We manage each of our clients through a repeating 4 week process to capture and leverage the content and insights from our clients’ busiest professionals. We call this process our Content MachineTM:

Week 1. Capture - blog content
Using a monthly 30 minute phone interview format, our specialists are able to regularly and predictably capture, write, and edit the perspective of your most important professionals. Blog entries are designed to be short (500-700 words) and structured to ask a thought provoking question that gets the audience engaged in a dialog. Our specialists are experts at identifying the topics that will resonate and become infectious conversations.

Week 2. Share - the content via newsletter/twitter/linkedin/employees
We share the blog via an email newsletter and drive additional traffic to the blog through linkedin status updates, Twitter, and an automated system that rebroadcasts the content through the employee network to their existing networks on linkedin and Twitter.

Week 3. Engage - participate in the discussion
Our specialists get conversations started around the blog content by using linkedin “answers”, and Quora in addition to the conversations that take place on the blog itself.

Week 4. Report - analyze results and plan for next cycle
We assemble the data generated from the activities of the month and distill into a one-page dashboard to understand how the results of the current month compare to the goals and prior months. These simple insights help our clients learn what content is resonating with their market.

1) If you are interested in learning more about our social media offering - please tell us a little about your interest and challenges with social media here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/smm
OR
email Carey Smith and Eric Lannert via careyanderic [at] icstars [dot] org

2) If you’d like to read more about our offering and its results you can visit our website here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/services/socialmediamanager

3) If you’d like to learn more about how to get involved in the i.c.jobs campaign visit our website here:
http://ww2.icstars.org/icjobs/2011