Portal to push tourism

TO GET more Cebu companies to advertise their businesses on the Internet, an online classified service portal will intensify its efforts to promote Cebu as a major tourist destination.

Starting this month, 88DB.com will showcase an improved online page about Cebu, featuring the 4,000 advertisers coming from the province.

These businesses that advertised through 88DB.com’s free media portal are composed of large companies, small and medium enterprises, and home-based businesses.

These include hotels, resorts, business services firms, wedding industry players, restaurants, real estate companies, and schools, among others.

Growing

“We want to grow the present number of Cebu advertisers we have to 20,000 toward the end of 2010. We believe Cebu is growing, so we have to be here,” 88DB.com general manager Racquel Cagurangan told Sun.Star Cebu.

“We aim to enlist more tourism-related establishments, entrepreneurs and freelancers in the site and help them advertise their products and services both to the local and foreign tourists,” she added.

88DB.com, launched in the Philippines last August 2006, has more than 200,000 members, over two million page views monthly, and more than 26,000 site visits daily, she said.

According to its website, 88DB is the newest service developed by JobsDB.com, a jobsite in Asia Pacific.

“88DB extends JobsDB’s service to a new level by creating a classified site for organizations, companies, individuals, clubs, societies and associations to promote and hire services of various kinds,” the website said.

Bloggers

To signal its commitment to promote Cebu as one of the country’s premier hubs, 88DB.com inked last week a partnership with the Cebu Bloggers Society (CBS), a non-profit network of more than 60 bloggers.

CBS also sealed a partnership with JobsDB Philippines Inc., the Philippine arm of the career portal in Asia with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia, among others.

“The Cebu workforce has consistently attracted the attention of employers because of their work ethic, resourcefulness and passion for excellence. JobsDB’s page on Cebu that touched on its industries and human resources was created a year ago to support Cebu’s growth. Our new partnership with CBS, which will increase awareness of job opportunities for Cebuanos, builds on that strategy,” said JobsDB Philippines marketing manager Jane Christine Soco.

Career page

Through the partnership, JobsDB will create a career page for the CBS website, linking it to more than 6,000 jobs that appear on the JobsDB Home Page every day. CBS members will be the first to spot new job openings as soon as they are uploaded; they will discuss them in their posts and spread the word to interested parties.

Soco said they expect more job openings next year, as companies are now starting to recover from the effects of the global financial crisis.

Going up

In the middle of this year, JobsDB Philippines noted a decline in the number of jobs posted. But the numbers have been going up again in the last quarter of this year.

The number of resumes submitted has also increased, said Soco.

JobsDB is now planning to reach out to more students and job seekers, and to provide a facelift to its website. It also intends to provide value-added services like announcements of job opening through mobile phones.