The Orange County Marketplace is the world’s largest outdoor swap meet, drawing crowds of 15,000+ Southern California residents every weekend.  While not an elegant business, the Marketplace has a solid reputation for delivering good values, high customer satisfaction and a variety of family entertainment.

The recession has hit California hard costing many jobs, fouling consumer sentiments, and driving politicians to seek revenues from any possible source.  One notion that is being considered is selling state fairgrounds where the marketplace takes place every weekend.  This would end the 40 year tradition of the marketplace, and put over a thousand independent entrepreneurs who rely on it as a source of income in dire straits.  The challenge was to make the marketplace too important to fail.  The plan we devised was to launch an on-going job fair at the Marketplace, and provide free space to any employers offering jobs, and to provide free entrance to any job seekers.  This overcomes a common complaint of job fairs… that they are too infrequent, and that the cost of attending job fairs which are normally hosted in hotels is unappealing to both employers and job seekers.  The Marketplace offers free parking, affordable food, and would be very happy to welcome an additional influx of people every weekend.

The JobFair will be supported by extensive media outreach, and extensive web and social media activity.  An email auto responder will deliver updates to job seekers of available jobs and the companies that will be offering them, SMS messaging services will deliver the same information via text messages.  A Facebook page is being created to list the companies represented, and will include video from the event as well as links to the companies participating.  Job updates and promotional contests will run on Twitter and there will be computers onsite to link to companies not able to attend a specific event.  The project is in the organization stage, as area companies will be contacted to participate… giving them the opportunity to bring the jobs they have available to the residents who need them, and affording them outstanding press impressions for their efforts.

We have begun the process of identifying bloggers in the Southern California area, and have been collecting twitter addresses for an enormous range of media personnel, political and community leaders and other key influencers in the area.  We believe this effort could begin an effort to bring forward employment opportunities that are sorely needed in Southern California, and that will identify our client as the organization that is a the center of the effort.