LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

- checkster is inviting to alpha test the service. Founded by Yves Lermusi of Taleo/Ilogos fame, it intends to flip the war for talent tortilla and making sourcing, matching and ancillary career management activities significantly more individual-centered. Recruitment professionals and phychs/career management advisers might want to follow up on the site’s progress and how it materialises its promise to focus on the candidate.

The email announcement includes a podcast on the thinking behind this start up over at Total Pictures Radio; check it out.

- zapr (nee zingee originally spotted as a startup selected to go to demo 2006 back in February) is now Mick’s (ex-Kazaa’s Michael Liubinskas) blog sheds a bit of light on this. There is also a zapr anchor to a myspace page. Interesting huh

- simplyhired is monetising

it just hit me that as far as I am concerned, I tend to write about stuff that I consider non-basic; non-basic being defined as what I feel can be of value add to my 4 readers, being of value defined as a thought on which they can build, or new news, or somn kinda original.. you get my drift.

thing is I have been speaking to a few business people about stuff that bloggers and blog readers know about and do (or at least I think they do know and do) which for them is absolutely new news; which prompted me to kick off a number of experience/activity based hints on how to hit the web for your benefit.

The list might get a bit more structured and perhaps more focused on recruitment/tech/marketing, but no promises. I might also look up richer resources too. What I’ll do though is focus on behavior as opposed to recommend tools (or is that only half the equation? – we’ll see)

So maybe what you do with this post is send it to someone who is not a blog reader, not-that-web inclined for a number of reasons, and maybe we can get someone’s attention today with the basics. Contributions and derivative posts are more than welcome.

…the hints list:

1.- google/Yahoo!/Zoominfo yourself – you don’t have to be a megalomaniac to want to know who’s saying what about you or your company, or how you are being portrayed online. if you come across a conversation or opinion, you may want to intervene and add to it, correct it if it’s wrong, do something about it if it’s accurate and not good, cheer yourself it’s it’s great, or ignore if you please. Thing is, now you know and you have a choice to participate in the exchange, whether it is a comment thread or recommendations website, whatever.

2.- Register for new web-based products/services whenever you can – this is a bit of an exercise not dissimilar to the local fairs when you are offered a stack of brochures from charities, small businesses, etc. Pick everything and then select and discard what grabs you, what you care about. I’ve come across a number of beta offerings which have produced business for my company, for their company, and even personal friends.

3.- Get the address – there are a lot of urls plastered all over buses, billboards, mags.. i got to hear about a vertical job board that way; come on, feed your curiosity, don’t dismiss it, put in on your cell, or write it down and check it out later

need to go now, I’ll push some more through…

I am seeing long tails everywhere man; thing is, for online jobs ads you don’t have to look hard. Advertisers that could never get to page 555 in the paper now can have their ads published like never before. Similarly, there is now a wide choice of outfits to take your ad, whether it is a general,board, a niche one, a social software based site, etc. Budgets previously dedicated to print advertising are now slowly moving (too slowly for some – well there’s always the old media fight-back via display ads, so don’t sell your shares in the daily bugle yet) to the interactive realm.

On the job seeker flipside, the idea was also to provide increased availability of opportunities. There were always more good jobs than those plastered in the EGN section. In this context, volumes and usage increased hand in hand. Then size, supposedly, became an issue.

Size is a two-dimensional challenge in regards to online ads as I see it, the two being interdependent. Ceteris paribus though:

1 – Large databases run the risk of overwhelming/boring/disengaging job seekers with choice, as the choice massively increases, with no improvements on search or filtering facilities.

2 – The decreasing quality of the large(r) databases is exacerbated by the low cost of publishing and no ‘perceived’ effectiveness loss for the publisher due to the lower database quality (e.g. no issues if I spam people with the same job thirty times, applicants are still streaming through).

The corollary from this is that niche boards are not exempt from facing the same risk as a generalist job board. Like everyone else, niche sites need to pursue content and volumes to drive the momentum required to get the community going (brett. pls jump in to complete or negate this point)

My takeaways from this limping rant:

Large is not a problem per-se
Niche is not a panacea per-se
Database Quality drives a sustainable revenue/business model
Site functionality and Price are two tools to mould publisher behavior
Site Functionality and content – both contributing to improved searching and filtering , may get your visitors to stick around a bit longer

HT Michael’s post on the topic and the ancillary comments generated

I got a report on a broken link for the blog. It was one to the simply hired blog. Hours earlier, I had been belatedly reading Jeff Hunter’s pre-announcement that something was cooking and later on that he was going to start blogging for SH. It seems to me though that he will do more than that: based on what you can read at Talentism he might end up influencing the direction of the company’s product/service… well that’s just the baseless speculation done by a fan from afar. Others with respectable opinions appear to want to follow him too.

There isn’t much yet on the new areas; the new blog(s) – hence the broken link – is(are) split for job seekers and hirers, or combined, in case you are hiring and wanting to make a move, which is not unusual at all – is it?

Update: Jeff kindly followed up on a comment I left in the new SH blog. it might be of interest to you to participate in the conversation or follow the thread

Greetings

I was going to start with an ‘apologies for not having written lately’ but the simply hired guys just did it for all the blogizens that stop for a reason or other

so what’s it been? actually spending quite a bit of time away from the pc, enjoying the family and talking to people (more on that in upcoming entries)

other highlights, to get back into the habit:

reading:
- at the beginning of
* naked conversations, with imho clumsy writing but it may have a few nuggets
* life of pi for the third time
* queen the early years mercury is what elvis is for the boomers, period

- in the middle of
* you’re in charge now what you never know
* the mistery of capital – why the usual structural suspects do not fully explain the failure of capitalism in third world countries

- finished
* liars very accessible; i just hope that sweeping statements that sound true have been really checked out
- long tail a more academic tone and we have ourselves a textbook – interesting thinking and online economy modelling, tho based on anecdotes
- your blog(s) and emails, some of which have an outstanding reply

listening:
- thievery corporation versions dubbed out versions of previous releases some ot them better than originals as it usually happens, which sucks as far as early buyers go
- federico aubele gran hotel buenos aires guitarist living and hiding his huge argentinian ego in washington – just joshing…
- radiokijada samples, a project by gotan’s christoph mueller and paris-residing peruvian rodolfo muñoz
- herbert scale (heard a bit from their presentation at the hollywood bowl – trippy)

watching:
- the pentagon papers with a skinny james spader being the victim of a watergate entry drill
- high fidelity which makes me rekindle my vinyl days and the desire to work for a record shop – one day, one day
- the princess bride to watch with the kid, and also to check if i sound like the spaniard who’s trying to avenge his father’s death (I don’t Katy)
- thank you for smoking effective because it takes the p**s of itself

checking online:
- emurse, which has crept in function quite a bit since the days when first reported; and also sporting a revenue model. Hey Alex: do start ups license their technology, or do they consider it suicide in the early days?
- farecast, a predictors of airfares for travellers (now oracling for LA!)
- a random sample from Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List

Now, is this a derivative post or just lazy? non derivative, non derogatory non derided comments welcome as usual