Thinking about that the other day made me realise that actually, KPI's, far from sorting out and highlighting the good recruiters from the bad, actually muddies the waters and can throw up a smokescreen behind which people who are not cut out for recruitment can hide. KPI's, just like Government statistics, seem so easily corruptible and therefore, are actually counter-productive.
From the mind of a recruiter...
Blogging gives you the best return on investment when promoting your company, your message, your ideas online. Bar None. Anyone not running a Blog on their site is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to someone who is.
The visual above gives some indication into the time it takes to do each of the four primary text-based online content types. Press Releases typically take days to organise, especially if there are 3rd parties involved. News stories typically take half a day to organise since the content has to be extremely precise and fairly formal. Sourcing good media can also take considerable time. Status Updates / Tweets / Micro-blogs are much faster to create but they typically link to external blogs or articles, and do not generate any inbound links of their own.
Blog Posts on the other hand are easy to create and sit at the heart of the world wide web. The beauty of blog posts is that they can be informal, have personality, be rich in opinion or simple statements of facts. They are easy to create so you can create them much more frequently than traditional corporate communications. They are also something that people can follow.
The Blog itself is simply the start. The way the web works today facilitates the distribution of your Blog posts. Affino offers a number of great tools to leverage the posts so that they become the heart of your corporate message:
Search Engines / SEO
Search Engines love frequently updated pages. You can leverage your Blog content throughout your site to provide fresh on-topic content through using highlights design elements.
RSS Feeds / Syndication
All your Blog content can be syndicated. You should use the outbound feeds to seed key sites throughout the web. Users can also follow your latest updates using Google Reader and similar tools.
Newsletters / Content Subscriptions
All Blog content can be dynamically included in automated weekly newsletters or sent out in real-time content subscriptions.
Social Media
Blogs can be instantly promoted on the leading Social Media portals such as Facebook and Twitter. The Social Campaigns in Affino allow you to do this real-time.
Topic Channels
You can create aggregation pages which pull in all the on-topic news for specific topics. Blog content should be at the heart of this since few things come close in terms of the return on time invested.
Wrap-up
Affino allows you to easily create and leverage your Blog, and if your aim is to reach a wider or more targeted audience and to get your message out more effectively then this is the place to start
Blogging gives you the best return on investment when promoting your company, your message, your ideas online. Bar None. Anyone not running a Blog on their site is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to someone who is.
The visual above gives some indication into the time it takes to do each of the four primary text-based online content types. Press Releases typically take days to organise, especially if there are 3rd parties involved. News stories typically take half a day to organise since the content has to be extremely precise and fairly formal. Sourcing good media can also take considerable time. Status Updates / Tweets / Micro-blogs are much faster to create but they typically link to external blogs or articles, and do not generate any inbound links of their own.
Blog Posts on the other hand are easy to create and sit at the heart of the world wide web. The beauty of blog posts is that they can be informal, have personality, be rich in opinion or simple statements of facts. They are easy to create so you can create them much more frequently than traditional corporate communications. They are also something that people can follow.
The Blog itself is simply the start. The way the web works today facilitates the distribution of your Blog posts. Affino offers a number of great tools to leverage the posts so that they become the heart of your corporate message:
Search Engines / SEO
Search Engines love frequently updated pages. You can leverage your Blog content throughout your site to provide fresh on-topic content through using highlights design elements.
RSS Feeds / Syndication
All your Blog content can be syndicated. You should use the outbound feeds to seed key sites throughout the web. Users can also follow your latest updates using Google Reader and similar tools.
Newsletters / Content Subscriptions
All Blog content can be dynamically included in automated weekly newsletters or sent out in real-time content subscriptions.
Social Media
Blogs can be instantly promoted on the leading Social Media portals such as Facebook and Twitter. The Social Campaigns in Affino allow you to do this real-time.
Topic Channels
You can create aggregation pages which pull in all the on-topic news for specific topics. Blog content should be at the heart of this since few things come close in terms of the return on time invested.
Wrap-up
Affino allows you to easily create and leverage your Blog, and if your aim is to reach a wider or more targeted audience and to get your message out more effectively then this is the place to start
Image via CrunchBase
Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.
Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.
If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.
Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.
Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.
And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.
The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.
Below are Wilson’s five areas.
* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.
* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.
* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.
* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.
* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users
Use UnTweeps for Twitter
UnTweeps is a great tool to manage the people you follow. UnTweeps allows you to enter a day range, and if a person doesn’t have any tweets in the past x days, you automatically stop following them (30 days is the default setting, but I typically keep mine at 90 just to be safe). If someone hasn’t tweeted a message in 3 months, there is no reason for me to follow them and just have another number in my “follows” column.
I've been updating the Work at Home Jobs section of my About.com Job Search site and I thought I should spend some time looking for work at home jobs to make sure that finding legitimate opportunities is really as hard as I say it is.
I've written that finding a real work at home job is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is. I honestly don't know how someone who doesn't know what they're doing can separate the scams from the jobs. One thing I learned today though, was that the more specifically you search (and, of course, the more skills you have) the more likely you are to find decent listings.
Searching for "work at home" doesn't cut it. If you have experience in insurance case management or IT skills, for example, it's easier to find home or field based jobs. If you have no experience, you can locate some jobs, but you need to really carefully investigate the companies to make sure that they're worthwhile opportunities and they aren't going to charge you to hire you.
I've updated my work at home job listings page, with the usual disclaimer that I can't guarantee (unfortunately) the legitimacy of the openings - web sites change, companies change, etc. so it's up to you to make sure that you're not being taken advantage of.
Chances are, you are about to join or have joined a company where the stated strategy is basically to, somehow, with meetings (typically), strategy sessions (usually) and goals-missions-targets (daily) is to get you and the other members of your team to perform better and in alignment with what the company needs to get done.
Some people do better in this environment than others. They are perfectly willing to belong to a group, especially one that can achieve more than they could have achieved alone. Sport teams are like this, each team member has his or her role, and they know that if everyone does their job, all win. Think about the baseball team–one missing fielder can spell trouble if that is where the other team hits the ball.
Companies are like that, traditionally. The trick in management has always been to somehow meld individuals into a fine, functioning team. Some management (s) are better at this than others, of course. The successful ones use a variety of methods and techniques, motivation and training to get this group, er, team, to perform better.
Here is the interesting part, at least to me. Too many team members look to management, ie. the team leader/coach/boss, to make the team work. These team members say, in effect: It is ‘their’ job to train me, motivate me, teach me, explain things to me, manage me if ‘they’ want me to do THIS for ‘them.’
Luckily, at my current company, most of the team members are taking personal responsiblity for their skills development. They understand that skill development is the ticket to a successful worklife. Instead of sitting around and waiting for someone to give them the magic secret to success, they are working on it every day.
I hope they know they are actually in charge of this.
