Feed aggregator

Larry King his talk show will resume this summer on the new digital network Ora.TV.

Solspot plans to serve up ads and editorial content tied to visitor preferences and geographic location. The company, recently named as the official surf forecaster for the 2012 American Pro-Surfing series, will launch the redesigned site Monday.

Sportskool, the U.S.-based sports training and entertainment television network, has launched YogaSessions.TV a new on-line channel dedicated to daily yoga practitioners.

Consumers who sued Hulu for alleged privacy violations are urging a federal judge to reject the company's argument that it isn't covered by the federal video privacy law. Hulu's contention that the Video Privacy Protection Act only applies to brick-and-mortar stores is "disingenuous at best," the consumers argued in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

Is there more to General Motors' decision earlier this week to pull its paid ads from Facebook than meets the eye? Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser thinks so. He postulates that GM was signaling that it's willing "to walk away from any negotiation with any media owner." Another takeaway is that social media is a highly lucrative business for ad agencies.

What do marketers pay for when buying click-to-call mobile ads? Up to 76% of mobile display ad calls are accidental clicks or "pocket calls" that can waste a brand's budget, according to a Marchex study. Only 14% come from existing customers, and 10% from new customers.

A top Nielsen executive said the company's fledgling Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) product is heading toward an industry standard in tracking Internet consumption with metrics similar to TV.

WPP's Possible Worldwide has bought a majority stake in Grape, a Russian digital agency. Like most holding companies, WPP is bulking up on its resources in faster-growing markets like Russia, with predictions of 13% to 14% annual spending growth there through 2014.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Romney campaign is known for its hyper-disciplined approach to the news media. Question-and-answer sessions with reporters are rare. Aides avoid on-the-record briefings. And the candidate’s latest outrea ...

HONOLULU – Beginning Monday, May 21, a new Hawaii Edition of USA TODAY will be printed locally by The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. The edition will include all four sections of the mainland editions of USA TODAY – News, Money, Sports ...

Eugene, Oregon (18 May 2012) – Freelance journalists Matthew LaPlante and Rick Egan and the founders of the Yancey County News, Jonathan and Susan Austin, were presented the 2012 Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism yesterday at the U ...

For those who have $600,000 lying around, there's reportedly a new way to spend it. Amazon is said to be courting advertising agencies to buy ad placements on the Kindle Fire's welcome screen, according to Ad Age. The $600,000 would reported ...

For those who have $600,000 lying around, there's reportedly a new way to spend it. Amazon is said to be courting advertising agencies to buy ad placements on the Kindle Fire's welcome screen, according to Ad Age. The $600,000 would reported ...

By the time you read this, the Zuck and his various expat cronies will have so much money that they can tell GM where to put their ad money for the next 20 years. But one wonders if Facebook's loss of paid advertising from the back-from-the-brink-thank-you-American-taxpayers automaker will encourage other marketers to rethink ads on the social media behemoth.

As the investment world watches Facebook’s historic IPO today, marketers are beginning to wonder if advertising on the 900-million-member social network is going to yield anything close to the bonanza of its initial stock offering.

Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”

The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”

For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically. 

There’s even doubt Facebook has staying power. An AP-CNBC poll found 46 percent of respondents believe the site will fade away over time, replaced by something else. (43 percent believe it will survive.) Surprisingly, among its young adult users, while 51 percent say it will stay around, 35 percent say it won’t.)

Whatever its fate, social media as a whole has been embraced by the recruiting industry in a way that’s entirely out of proportion to what it gives back. Every survey I’ve seen on source of hire puts social media so far down the pecking order that it neighbors with print, career fairs, and walk-ins. That is, assuming the survey got that detailed.

(I know there is plenty of disagreement over the entire “source of hire” metric. Chris Brabic at Smashfly quotes Master Burnett on the subject, and CareerXroads this year chose to title its annual study, “Sources of Hire: Channels That Influence.“)

Other surveys, less subject to the hand-wringing uncertainty of where a hire came from, show Facebook produces less of the results marketers care about than does Google or, for that matter, the Internet generally. Based on some 11,000 campaigns, Webtrends found Facebook’s click-through rate for banner ads to be .051 percent, half the industry average of .1 percent and way less than Google’s display network average .4 percent.

The AP-CNBC poll found 57 percent of users never click on a Facebook ad.

Employers haven’t much experimented with banner ads on Facebook, though they have spent on SEO and Google’s AdWords. An average click-through rate for an AdWords campaign is about 2 percent. Some rates can be considerably higher, depending on position and subject.

Recruiters who put at least some marketing dollars into improving their position on search engine results pages (SERP) can expect to get the highest click through rates of all. Slingshot, an SEO company, says getting the top position on a Google SERP gets you a click through rate averaging 18.2 percent.

What this says is that in a choice between spending on ad campaigns and search engine positioning, go with the SEO (search engine optimization).

But getting to the heart of the matter, Facebook at this time just isn’t delivering. It’s heresy, especially on a day when the social network is making millionaires out of many and billionaires out of a few. However, the reality is that the number of hires sourced directly from Facebook is all but negligible for most companies. (As they say in the car ads, your mileage may vary.)

The CareerXroads survey, this year asked the recruiting leaders of a few dozen major companies — companies that typically have the resources to manage a significant social media presence — what impact Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and social media sites generally have on their recruiting.

The short answer is: not much, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Twitter actually fared better than Facebook for direct sourcing. The full results in the accompanying charts plainly show that with the exception of the company profiles, Facebook otherwise doesn’t deliver a whole lot.

LinkedIn, which I maintain is a job board dressed up for a social, did, on the other hand, have an impact; an especially significant one when recruiters used it to source candidates by searching the profiles.

The only other high value social activities were search engine optimization and marketing. That fairly confirms what the click through surveys show.

Before moving on from this, one more stat from the CareerXroads study is worth noting: 20.1 percent of the external hires came from job boards. Only referrals yielded more.

If that doesn’t make you wonder about your priorities, I suggest it should. Silkroad, which surveyed the data from 700 of its ATS customers, confirmed what CareerXroads found, and said the fremium board, Indeed.com, was the best at sourcing external hires.

Not for one minute am I suggesting you abandon your social media presence. You should be there because you are expected to be there by the next generation of your workforce. And social media is an ideal way of building a community of interested potentials, and developing or reinforcing a brand.

The problem I see is that too many employers and recruiters think a social media strategy consists of tossing up a company profile that reads like something from an annual report, and then posting jobs.

Those of you squirming uncomfortably right now, I am talking about you. The essence of social media is conversation, not distribution. Conversation is two way, and it includes things we would rather not hear, as well useful information we share with our friends, fans, members, or audience.

Treat Facebook that way, and you won’t be disappointed that it isn’t a stronger source of hire. At least stronger in the sense that you can directly measure its impact.

However, with a limited marketing budget, Facebook would not be where I’d make a big play. The data says employee referrals and job boards yield better results. The company career site, as dismal as so many are, warrants a much bigger investment than many companies make. A PotentialPark report says even college students about to enter the workforce go there for information about the company. To make it easier to find and improve its position on search engine results pages, spend on optimizing the site.

And connect it all up with your social media presence, which, by now, you know needs personal contact.

It’s interesting to note that years ago, founder Mark Zuckerberg suspected Facebook might eventually be a recruiting tool. In an email in 2004, an irritated Zuckerberg blasted co-founder Eduardo Saverin for launching a job board and running ads for it on the fledgling Facebook:

You developed Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs. This was pretty surprising to us, because you basically made something on the side that will end up competing with Facebook and that’s pretty bad by itself. But putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean.

Mean? Who knows. Ineffective, looks like it.

Sensing an opportunity in developing content around subcultures, Ben Silverman and IAC's Electus have partnered with Tyrese Gibson's HQ Productions and new production studio DiGa to bring the lives of a group of Asian-Americans to the masses in a new online video series called "K-Town."

In what might be described as media's long-tail wagging its biggest dog, researchers are tapping social media to help television programmers better understand viewer reaction to and experience with TV content. During a demonstration at an ARF Thought Leader Forum in New York, Crimson Hexagon demonstrated a new platform capable of mining more than 100 billion social media data points to provided detailed -- and sometimes surprising -- insights into the way people watch television.

As Facebook went public came two interesting pieces of news. The first was a CNBC poll that shows that about half of all Americans consider Facebook to be a fad that will fade away as new things come along. The second was an announcement from GM that it plans to stop advertising on the social network.

The auto manufacturer says it no longer believes that the ads produce much in the way of sales. This seems to be supported by the CNBC survey in which 8 out of 10 respondents said they hardly ever or never click on online advertising or sponsored content when using the site.

This has some implications for recruiters using social media as a sourcing channel. With users essentially ignoring ads, job postings are not likely to be effective. Even employers that have accumulated large numbers of fans for the Facebook pages are likely to reach only a small portion of them with their job postings – one analysis found that the average page post only reaches 17 percent of the page’s fans. Five out of six of a page’s fans never see it, unless supported by new likes and comments for every new post. So even if you have built up a large fan base of prospective candidates, the vast majority of them will never see your jobs.

It’s About Engagement

GM is not severing all ties with Facebook. It will continue producing content for its Facebook pages, as a means of engaging with customers. When it comes to social media, success in selling a product or attracting candidates is all about engagement. Facebook’s popularity is entirely based on the content the 900 million (and counting) members create. The site itself is not particularly remarkable, but what keeps people coming back and spending hours on it is the engagement that results from content, much of it spontaneously created. Interesting conversations, often around interesting stories, is what makes it so addictive.

This is what GM has determined works. Just visit one of the GM pages — like Chevrolet – and see for yourself. They’re vibrant communities, full of stories, pictures from buyers, and rich in conversations. It’s real people talking about real things. Who needs boring ads when you can have so much more interesting material that people actually want to read?

Why would it be any different for job postings? We keep hearing about how much value branded career sites on Facebook can do for attracting candidates but there’s little evidence to show such an approach is likely to be successful. What’s likely to work is talent communities.

Talent Communities Done Right

A talent community is like any other community — offline or online — a place where people with shared interests gather to engage in conversations. Think about the communities you belong to and what keeps you going back, and it’s always the same thing: the level of engagement you have.

Developing a talent community requires creating the conditions for engagement. Pick a category of jobs, identify a topic that prospective candidates will be interested in, and start developing conversations around that topic. Great content can kick start conversations. The jobs need to have a high degree of commonality — nurses, doctors, mining engineers, marketing analysts, recruiters. It helps if the prospective candidates like to share stories and learn from each other.

Most people who join a talent community are interested in the community first, and finding employment may be a very distant second. But that’s the precisely the type of candidate we want to attract — the truly passive. Some of them may become interested in a job or may be persuaded to consider one, but it could take a long time. This is a long-term investment, more of a pipeline than a ready source of talent.

The Medium Is Not the Message

One lesson from the CNBC survey is that people aren’t particularly attached to Facebook — as a platform. People like to talk, and Facebook makes it easy to do so, but if something better or different comes along then they may not stick with the site. Look at how fast users abandoned MySpace. There are plenty of contenders, starting with Google+, and Path, which limits users to 150 friends, or FamilyLeaf that’s intended for family members, or Pair that’s a network for two people. Coming soon: Solo, for those who really like themselves.

The point being that a recruiting strategy centered on Facebook may not be a good long-term solution. What’s more important is understanding how to use social media effectively — building engagement, rather than relying on any particular platform.

A new “matching” site, a new social media/employee-referral site, and the negatives of stripping.

Yes, it’s our regular roundup of recruiting and HR happenings, below.

Social Referrals

We don’t want to shock anyone, but there is another new site in the social media/employee-referral genre, with one co-founder in India, one in Boston, both grads in computer science. ProMapr is looking for funds, getting good feedback, but frustrated it’s not getting more buzz. Site users earn money for employee referrals, which are shared on Facebook and Twitter.

“We are still learning daily and refining our flow/UI and adding features,” says Kshitiz Anand, one of the founders.

He’s Baaacckk. Sort of.

It was only a few years ago (not quite three to be specific) that one of the must-reads for recruiters was a newsy, noisy, opinionated blog that went by the name “Cheezhead.” Joel Cheesman, its author, gave it a unique voice, rarely failing to skewer industry giants while building the site with a weekly video program, and adding a writer or two. Then, one day, he sold it to a job board, and Cheezhead, the site, was promptly closed.

There are signs, now, that Cheesman is bestirring the stillness. For at least the last few weeks, he’s been sending occasional emails commenting on recruiting industry developments. Here’s one about the LinkedIn buying Monster rumor:

The thought of a high-growth business like LinkedIn strapping on an albatross like Monster is a bit ridiculous if you think about it for a second. So who, one like me must ask, would buy Monster?

As far as I can tell, the answer is: No one.

Yeah, nobody. John Doe. The invisible man.

Does this mean he’s back? Says Cheesman, “I’d go with ‘hobbyist’ at this point.”

The Adverse Impact of Stripping

A society and fashion writer for the Houston Chronicle, fired after her other job as a nightclub stripper got reported in a competing publication, has filed a sex discrimination claim with the EEOC.

The newspaper, says Sarah Tressler, fired her because she failed to disclose her other job on her employment application. She insists it was because the paper was embarrassed. Her lawyer, Gloria Allred, says, “to terminate an employee because they had previously been an exotic dancer would have an adverse impact on women, since it is a female-dominated occupation.”

And yes indeed, she is on the part-time faculty at the University of Houston.

More Matchmaking

The latest of a very long line of “matching” sites, in the spirit of eHarmony, is JobSync, out of Santa Monica, California. Candidates fill out an assessment (which about 700 are doing weekly now). Using its proprietary matching algorithm, JobSync decides which candidates are a fit for your jobs based on their experience, qualifications, and personality, the latter through a partnership with Profiles International.

It costs $350 per job for a one-off, less for higher volume. Right now, Avery Dennison, Kimberly-Clark, and Office Depot are among the companies trying it out.

JobSync is also looking at selling this as a talent management tool. A company would email its employees, telling them to fill out a profile that’ll help them find future internal opportunities. Then that company could send JobSync a job listing; JobSync would look through the profiles, as well as do an external search, and find the best matches.

Worst Practices HR

A lawyer with enough of a sense of humor to do an Elvis impersonation? That’s what we think the big news is here. But Steve Toth, Manpower’s chief legal officer, sees it as a teaching opportunity. Either way, here’s a look at a not-as-far-fetched-as-you-might-think  job interview. There are, Toth says, at least 50 errors (not necessarily EEOC issues) occur in the video below. Here’s a hint: Error #1 is not knowing the candidate has been dead for 30+ years. And here’s the answer key.

Millennial Hiring

From this week’s surveys is one telling us that 91 percent of employers think an internship is essential preparation for college students entering the workforce. Seems reasonable enough. Similarly, says the survey produced by Millennial Branding, 87 percent of employers say an internship should last at least three months for it to be of benefit.

Now comes the money-where-your-mouth-is part: Only 50 percent of employers have actually hired an intern in the last six months.

If you like that little contradiction, you’ll enjoy some of the other tidbits. For instance, 98 percent of employers look for “communication skills” when they hire students. Of course. So where do they do their looking for young talent? Pretty much everywhere except social media, which is just where young people spend much of their time.

Local journalist Scott Cooper has resigned as treasurer-secretary of the Oklahoma Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists amid an internal investigation into unauthorized withdrawals from the organization's checking account. A ...