Tales From the Digital Side

I ain’t measuring it no more! I know, You probably just got comfortable with using it to compare your digital campaigns. But the truth is, click-through rate (CTR) has little to do with the effectiveness of your campaign. If it is your sole measurement of your campaigns, you are probably not making the best decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

This is already very useful. Google has launched the ability to place different bids on different audience segements on their content network and placement-targeted buys. You can place different bids for age and gender segments that work well for your campaign target. This will also be great for diversity strategies, since you can now target women across Google’s networks. It may also make Google more useful for college recruiting, since you’ll be able to target the 18-24 age segment.

More info form the Google Blog:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/01/demographic-bidding-beta-test.html

Yup, you heard me right. I’m getting sick of vendors and industry experts presenting search engine marketing (SEM) as a very complicated tool that recruiting professionals couldn’t possibly understand or manage thenselves. The truth is you could handle it yourself (if you only had time). However, although you probably need a vendor to help manage it from a time and adminstrative perspective, SEM is a rather simple tool. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long, long time since I had the time to blog. My poor neglected blog has been the casualty of a very busy fall planning season. However, I’m on a trip, sitting in a hotel, waiting for room service to bring me a bite to eat and have a bit of time to write down some thoughts.

I’ve been working with a lot of account teams and clients over the past several months to take advantage of the millions of digital advertising oppotunties out there. I’ve come across a lot of hype around behavioral targeting and wanted to do my share to educate recruitment advertisers on how this should and should not fit into their strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

This news made my week. According to this WSJ article, Facebook is working on a system that expands their already pretty nifty Flyer program. The Flyer program is a texted based ad that can be targeted by college, location or some limited demographics (age & gender). If they expand to include occupation, industry, interests, ethnicity, and employer - this will be huge for recruitment advertisers. Even some of these targeting options could get it to a “must include” status for recruitment media plans. If the program ends up being self-serve, as the flyer program is now, it will be even better, as there will not be barriers due to minimum buys for companies with smaller budgets.

Clearly it doesn’t take much to get me excited - but this could be an excellent source for recruitment marketing.

There has been a lot of discussion about Second Life and virtual career fairs. From Job Fairs in Second Life (here and here), with many differing opinions regarding the value of such an initiative. Personally, I’m less enthusiastic about job fairs in Second Life, than I am about the branding opportunities.

However, I do very much believe that companies can leverage virtual recruitment to significantly enhance their ROI in Real Life. And that is by using chat technology to either to run a virtual career fair or as a recruiter chat function on the corporate career site. Why do I believe in this model?
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If I had a nickel for every article, blog post, and question I’ve received in the last month or so about video resumes, I might be getting rich. There is so much buzz about this topic, and I’m actually surprised that the concept has gotten as far as it has.

First, I’ll admit that I think the concept of video resumes is pretty cool. If I hadn’t worked in the recruitment space for the last 9 years, I’d probably be pretty enthusiastic. But unless that guy from Heroes shows up to erase my memory before I finish this post, I think I’m going to have to say that I think the concept won’t ever catch on.
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Second Life (SL) is probably one of the coolest marketing vehicles out there. It’s way more fun to research than your average media buy with the boring* rate cards, the comScore MediaMetrix or @plan audience profiles, Quantcast data, and lessons learned from past campaigns. In Second Life, I get to fly around, teleport, I made myself a business suit (if you’ve been in SL, you know this is possibly the lamest thing anyone has ever done in there), I’ve made some friends, scoped out some office space, I joined some groups, I visited Dell Island, American Apparel, and Millions of Us (THE experts on using this medium) and I acquired a bed, a desk, a Dell Computer, a bikini, some T-shirts, a chair, some dance animations, and some beer.
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Ask anyone. Especially any of the creative teams I’ve worked with. I am slightly (no, that’s a lie - extremely) obsessive-compulsive when it comes to optimizing the interactive marketing campaigns my clients are running. I can often improve ROI by at least 100% by carefully reviewing metrics and optimizing the creative for each buy on the media plan. It’s not brain surgery, but it does require some attention (and maybe an anxiety disorder) to get an interactive campaign to produce significant results.
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First of all, I promise that not all my images/posts will be skiing related. But while riding the chair lift up to the summit of Whiteface and then skiing down, I came to some realizations about interactive recruitment. I’ll start off by admitting that I am not always the most empathetic of those that don’t get interactive. But on this trip I started to think about some of the similarities of skiing and interactive recruitment.
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