interbiznet.com
Electronic Recruiting
News
Our Rate Card
LIST OF TECHNICAL RECRUITERS
LIST OF EXECUTIVE SEARCH FIRMS
interbiznet BOOKCLUB
interbiznet LISTINGS
OUR HOME
|
|
ERN |
Bugler |
The Blogs |
Blogroll |
Advertise |
Archives |
Read Today's Bugler
Read current Blogging News: BERT
Blogswap 1
(July 12, 2006) We've agreed to help the blogosphere by publishing an article from a guest writer each week as a part of the recruiting blogswap. As you know, a number of bloggers have banded together to promote each other.
Our part is to give the whole thing a much wider audience. It's important that these voices get heard.The first input we got is posted below. It is from Julian Gude and Shannon Seery who write a blog called Exceller8ion.
They write about interactive marketing and online recruitment advertising.
We usually discover that the people who give us the hardest time about our methods are really reacting to their own approach. It's interesting that this piece is so rude and enthusiastic. It reminds us of ourselves. While we have never had an interaction with them, we're fans
of the public forms of youthful naiveté. We loved the passion and hated the emulation.
We don't need no stinkin' blog metrics…we need a new stinkin' yardstick
As part of the recruiting blog swap, we're guest authors this week on John Sumser's acclaimed site. The last time we got involved in a conversation with John it was indirectly through the trouble he stirred up with Heather Hamilton from Microsoft on the
subject of blog metrics. We disagreed with John's methods more than his message, although we
agreed wholeheartedly with Heather that it's impossible to fully measure a blog's value by metrics alone. In thinking more on this topic since that time I think we've refined our position and we figured that this was a perfect venue to re-engage in that conversation with John's readers, and the man
himself.
Page views, unique visits, number of new hires generated directly from your blog
Many of us continue to struggle to explain in measurable terms the business value of our blogs. The legions of companies starting blogs to market their jobs and companies to talented candidates are no exception. Having spent our careers in sales and marketing you'd think we were a huge proponent of
metrics…and we are, but not of the blogging metrics we've seen used to date. At least not the typical ones we've all pulled out of you know where for lack of a more intelligent solution. Metrics, just for the sake of metrics, are stupid. We think the time to get these measures of value right, is
right now and that we need to stop accepting poor representations of value – kind of a 'Just say no!' to irrelevant metrics campaign.
Where do we start with creating meaningful new ways to value blogs? Good metrics for measuring a blog's ROI have been elusive because we don't yet understand all the reasons why blogs are working. We 'get it' to some extent in our gut, we feel it, but the value of a blog is still an intangible that is
hard for us to define. Let's throw out the typical online yardsticks and start with good old-fashioned research, testing and validation from an unbiased source to determine exactly how blogs influence us. If we focus on trying to better understand why blogs connect with people, won't the metrics that we
use to measure a blog's value become self-evident?
Meaningless Metrics
I was reminded of the continued use of meaningless online metrics in another area recently – online ad impressions (impression = the amount of times an ad is viewed). I was talking with a good friend who took over my job managing the ad network for a major U.S. news publisher with forty web
properties, who told me that these forty sites are currently pumping out about one billion ad impressions per month. If you compare this number to how many banner ad impressions MySpace serves in a single day, it is mind-boggling. MySpace hits a billion ads served by
about, oh let's say 5:38AM of any given DAY; equaling the ads served that a major, forty-site publisher serves in an entire MONTH. According to Nielsen/Netratings, one of every ten ads viewed online in October 2005 was viewed on MySpace. Their numbers are so different that it reminded me of the gross
irrelevancy of the metric 'ad impressions'.
As an online publisher when we run out of ad inventory and are in need of more 'impressions' – we can just stack more ads on a page or just segment existing content and force users to click and load more pages in order to get at the content. Bad user experience. The good publishers (then and now) create
engaging new content and tools, forge new partnerships and actually market their product – the result being more traffic and greater product value (which in turn creates more ad inventory). You'd think the method described above where we force users to click thru to more pages with no added value went
out with the first dot-com bust. But there's still strong evidence of using this tactic – case in point, MySpace. Mike
Davidson , CEO of the user-generated news site – Newsvine, wrote about the effect on total
page views and revenue for MySpace if they were to undergo a site redesign to make their site more user friendly:
"Here's a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here's what the graph would look like. That's right. I hold that at least
2/3rds of page views would disappear."
But what about the metric that we're all ultimately judged by – the Big Kahuna of all metrics – money? MySpace will have revenue of about $200 million this year,
according to estimates by Richard
Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. This is around the same online revenue of that major news publisher we used to work for. Interesting eh?
Back in 2002 we went through just the kind of re-design for that news network we worked at that Mike Davidson talks about with MySpace. And guess what? We changed our page and ad layout significantly (navigation as well) – reducing the number of ads served per page by 40-50%! Did banner revenue drop? Not
a lick – because the junk ads being served on that inventory were either completely unsold or were remnant ads valued in the pennies – just like MySpace. The real value of MySpace is the audience, and the potential influence on their thinking and behavior - not the page views, or number of
ad impressions. Valuing MySpace based on their $200 million in ad revenue and directly linking that to page views going away is akin to valuing blogs based on page views. Rupert Murdoch (NewsCorp) certainly didn't have MySpace's current online revenue in mind when he paid $580 million to acquire MySpace,
he was thinking about the value of the young and influential audience he would gain access to and what they meant to his companies future. Put a metric on that one! He did some would say by paying $580 million for them but I bet if you asked Murdoch in ten years about this acquisition he'd admit that
he got a bargain. Have the MySpace execs figured out how to monetize that audience yet? Not yet, but when (not if) they figure that out – WOW! Same for blogs – we think that when we figure out how to capture their value (beyond what we intuitively sense) we'll all say WOW.
Want to read more about why blogs are a new animal whose value defies simple web metrics, especially for recruitment marketing? Head over to our blog EXCELER8ion [link: http://www.exceler8ion.com] and read the
next post in this series.
We keep updating the blogroll. There are now 148 Recruiting related blogs.
John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved. Permalink . - . Today's Bugler
|
ERN |
Bugler |
The Blogs |
Advertise with Us |
Trends |
Archives |
Contacting Us:
Copyright © 2012 interbiznet. All Rights Reserved. Mill Valley, CA 94941 415.377.2255 Send comments to colleen@interbiznet.com
To receive this Newsletter in Email each weekday, please use the form on the linked page.
|
interbiznet's Electronic Recruiting News
FEATURES:
EMAIL NEWSLETTERS: - Bugler (Sign-up) Daily Industry News
- ERNIE (Sign-up) ERN in Email
RESOURCES:
BlogRoll
Integrated Employment Branding Presentation
Trends Whitepaper
interbiznet Listings
interbiznet Trends
interbiznet Bookclub
Top 100 E-Recruiters
Presentations - Recruiting Then/Now
Recruiter's Toolkit
Seminar In A Box
ERN Archives
1st Steps In The Hunt
ADVERTISING:
Our Rate Card
Demographics
RECENT ARTICLES:
BlogSwap I
It Is Not Paper
Trovix
Website Basics II
Website Basics
What Is Content?
10 Years Ago
Recruiting Blog Swap
Aging Is Not A Disease
Consumer Generated Media
Talent Shortage
Best of the Blogs
Associations.7
Associations.6
Associations.5
Dr.HR / Mr.Recruiting II
Dr.HR / Mr.Recruiting
Associations.4
Foment, Ferment, Froth
Best of Blogs
Associations.3
Bugler Baby Boomer SE
Baby Boomers SE
Associations.2
Go Jasons, Go
Blogging Update
Job Boards
Two Davids
Best of the Blogs
Associations.1
Redefining Retirement
Webby
The Bugler
Jobby
Microsoft
PPC.2 - Search
The Hunt
Pay per Click
Older = Diverse
SE: WorkplaceTrends.
ERN ARCHIVES
Stocks We Watch: Public Companies in Electronic Recruiting
All material on this website is the property of interbiznet (The Internet Business Network: interbiznet.com) You may download a copy for personal use. Redistribution without permission is strictly prohibited. All material on this site is © 2008 interbiznet. All rights reserved. interbiznet.com
|