links for 2006-07-06

TV Ads by Seek

Australian job board Seek has recently released 3 new ad for TV, you can view them online at a special site call Make Luck Happen (the tag line of the ads). The ads are also available on Google Video and I found one on YouTube, although in an emailing discussion with Leigh Hanney from Seek they all should be on YouTube soon.

Here is the Dictation 60 sec ad:-

Update:- I seem to be having a style issue with the embedded YouTube player.

It seems to be a trend for job boards to create TV ads and then place them on the internet, here is the jobs.com.au ad.

You can loose the company brand because an employee leaves

The tech blogosphere is a buzz with the news that Amanda Congdon has left Rocketboom, just check out TechMeme or Technorati!  Amanda’s farewell video can also be seen.
Whatever the truth is behind the story if an employee is the brand of an organisation, retention of that employee is essentially protection of your brand!

Amanda is already getting job offers, (Via Ben Barren.) so expect to see her again very soon.

If you are an HR Manager and have a high profile employee who has turned into the companies brand you would do well to look at retention strategies and exit strategies in case they do leave.  Given you will be working with companies brand it would pay to speak to the marketing types as well.

links for 2006-07-05

From Del.icio.us to WordPress in one easy step

I am always amazed at the power popular bloggers have and the conversation they create. Back on 16 June 2005 I posted about getting my daily del.icio.us links posting directly to my blog, in an attempt to create a linkblog. I even posted to the WordPress forums about the setting I used and left it at that. Every now and then (about once every 3 or 4 days) I find some links that I feel are worth and add them to my del.icio.us account and they appear in my blog that evening.

Today I was reading up on how to increase traffic to your blog through a post of WordPress and SEO, one hint Update Your Blog Daily, with a link on how to set it up. I clicked and found Kevin Lim’s post From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links. What struck me instantly was at the bottom of his post this “Hat tip to mspecht from the WordPress Support Forum.“ That’s me!

In looking at the post further Kevin has 186 responses to his post, and it has been viewed 18, 506 times! My post on the same subject, zero responses and viewed only a smaller percentage of times in comparison. His post appears 5th on Google for the search “daily del.icio.us posts to wordpress“, where as my post appears at number 24. Kevin also has a Technorati ranking of 3,463 to my 52,445.

Things I have learnt based on this experience:-

  • Traffic tends to make drive more traffic
  • My post title was very poor, something I tend to do quite often
  • I missed an opportunity to provide a “How To” on the topic
  • I completely missed Kevin’s initial post as I do not have a Technorati Watch List for the term mspecht
  • Just because no one responds to a post or idea does not make it void.

Things I Can Do

In a manner very similar to 43 Things and 43 Places Kinan has highlighted a new site called Things I Can Do as a potential Resume 2.0 tool.

While the tool is interesting it really only shows a portion of what a resume needs to cover. From JobWeb a resume is:-

a one or two page summary of your education, skills, accomplishments, and experience. Your resume’s purpose is to get your foot in the door. A resume does its job successfully if it does not exclude you from consideration.

Things I Can Do seems to only focus on the skills and excludes the accomplishments, experience and education.  It allows user to tag their skills provide a brief summary, maybe this could be used to highlight how the skills has been used, and allow people to rate and comment.
It is a good start on building out a framework for the online resume but seems to be focused more on the tagging concept than building an effective job seeking tool.

Tips for virtual conference attendance

SHRM’s premiere event has just finished and we right in the middle of conference season for North America.  All of these conferences now generate lots of discussions online.  For example was a great conversation that has been going on spearheaded by Your HR Guy, then Amitai Givertz then Your HR Guy and finally by Amitai again on networking and the value of conferences etc.

This all got me thinking what can I find out about the conference online, considering we have several hundred bloggers within the HR community and at least a few of them would be in attendance, other than Joel. Could I attend virtually from Australia?

So I set out on a hunt to find out.

The conference this year has been blogged about by a few people, if you check out this search on Technorati for details, there are a large number of press releases in the results so you have to sift through them to find some real content. But it is really hard to find out what is going on!

There are a couple of tricks that you can use to make it easier for other people to find your content. This is best initially promoted by the conference organisers, if you are one TAKE NOTE!

Firstly create a tag for your event, for example SHRM2006 would be a good one for this year’s conference adding the year makes it easier for people to find content year after year. None posted on Technorati with that tag, but there are a few under just SHRM the Cheez being one.

Next promote the use of the tag to all participants. Make sure everything going onto Del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr etc and into blogs has the same tag. Then others can easily get the content, for example

Then aggregate the tagged feeds into a single RSS feed so we can all virtually experience the event. Maybe look to turning this feed into a “River of News” and project it onto a big screen during conference breaks, lunches etc. This allows everyone to see what is being said online.

Other ideas.

Look at having an IRC channel created for discussions both during and after sessions. This provides an additional method for people to participate even if they are not about to physically attend.

Podcast every single session, and post them at the end of each day. This may shock the average conference organiser but you will get a different audience and if you place advertising correctly within the podcasts your advertisers will get benefits long after the conference has ended.  Also support ad-hoc interviews of the conference, and provide attendees and way of easily publishing them.

Let me know if you have any other good ideas on virtual attendance.

Careers & Job Channel at Netscape.com

I have just unsubscribed from the Netscape Careers & Jobs Channel RSS feed after a couple of weeks.

Why?

The content is terrible!  When I say terrible I mean really terrible.  Over the last week the feed seems to now include many of the top stories from the whole Netscape site.  Today the feed included such wonderful posts such as Jessica Biel pulls a J-Lo, My Promiscuous Gay Lifestyle and Beer parodies of famous movie posters!  Not really related to Careers and Jobs.

I am not sure if this is a bug or what but it is very extremely poor quality.  To make matters worse AOL has just replaced the whole Netscape site with this Digg rip off.

links for 2006-06-29