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Articles from Diggings

Don’t Count Newspapers Out Yet Says Richard Siklos 2007-10-23 18:16:26 The debate over the future of the daily newspaper industry (whether the industry’s eventual demise will occur rapidly or more gradually) remains one of the most fascinating discussions within a wildly turbulent media landscape. There are plenty of solid arguments on both sides, and I myself have gone back and forth on the issue (contradicting myself with posts like this and this). As plenty of people have pointed out over the past year or so (here), the decline of the daily newspaper industry in this country will be a long and slow process. While it will feel sudden and dramatic in some markets, especially the first major metro to lose its daily altogether, some dailies are doing terrific things to adapt to a dramatically changing landscape (NYT, Washington Post, Scripps, and Washington Post). The fact remains that, despite the meteoric rise of the web as a media platform, print media remains the most dominant advertising vehicle in the country, and is still an extremely popular ...

SEO Tip #2 For Corporate Career Sites 2007-10-23 10:00:14 Our webmaster, Eric Caron, wrote an excellent white paper for the ERE show we were at last week. The paper provided 10 simple steps to help companies optimize the career section of their company web site for search engines. While these SEO tips are probably common knowledge for some, we discovered last week that many HR professionals are still learning about the concept and the specific tactics that can be utilized to improve a site’s SEO characteristics. As a result, I am republishing the 10 tips here for the next weeek or so. SEO Tip #2 - Visitors should be able to browse all job openings and get to a specific job in 2 clicks or less Many career sections require a form to be filled out before jobs can be viewed. Though jobseekers may have little difficulty filling out forms, most search engines have no idea how to complete this task that blocks them from seeing or indexing your jobs. This is why a ‘Browse All Jobs’ link is very important – it helps search engines find and ...

Tip #1 For Effective SEO for Corporate Career Sites 2007-10-22 12:00:59 LinkUp was at the ERE conference in Washington, D.C. last week. From all accounts, it was an excellent show with terrific exhibitors and thousands of attendees from all over the country representing employers of all sizes and industries. At our booth, we handed out a white paper with 10 basic tips to help companies improve the visibility and usability of the company’s career section on their company web site. These Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips will be common knowledge to SEO gurus, but they were well received at the show. I will be posting the 10 tips in this blog for the next 10 days. Tip #1 - Label the section ‘Careers’ and include it on your homepage. The best thing to always remember about improving the traffic to your career section is to make everything blatantly obvious. The fewer clicks it takes to get to your jobs, the faster jobseekers and search engines will find it. And the most obvious spot to put it is on your home page! Jobseekers get frustra ...

LinkUp Aims To Be The Best Job Site On The Web 2007-10-18 10:00:34 Over the past year or so in writing this blog, I’ve tried not to promote our company too heavily, focusing instead on the industry we’re in, the market(s) we serve, the competitors we face, and the evolution of products and services that help connect job seekers and employers. I realize that highlighting the demise of daily newspapers, for example, is still self-serving, but what blog isn’t self-serving in some manner? At any rate, today I’m temporarily abandoning this self-imposed constraint and am going to blatantly promote a JobDig-operated web site that we’ve been working on for over a year called LinkUp. LinkUp is an online job board that lists only those jobs taken directly from company web sites themselves. The site currently lists roughly 350,000 job openings from 9,000 companies around the country, and we’re adding more jobs and more companies every day. Because the job listings are pulled directly from company web sites and updated regularly, they are often not a ...

Is The Jury Still Out On Yahoo’s Alliance With Daily Newspapers? 2007-10-17 14:08:26 In a Reuters story last week, Robert MacMillan makes an argument that the wave of alliances negotiated in the past few years between online job boards and daily newspapers, and especially between Yahoo! and a consortium of roughly 400 dailies, have not yet proven themselves one way or the other. While the cross-selling arrangement has helped the dailies gain some traffic to their sites, the economics are tough to evaluate given how little is known publicly about specific terms of the deal. As the article also points out, much of the program’s ultimate success depends upon Yahoo’s development of technology to sell display ads across the network. We’ll see. Given the continuing deterioration of classified ad revenue among the dailies, it’s certainly clear at this point that the alliance has done nothing in the short-term to alleviate the erosion of daily newspaper market share in the classified ad space. And I’d still argue that it won’t help in the lo ... Yahoo

U.K. Takes Stand Against Smokers; Imposes Restrictions On Surgery 2007-10-16 11:09:19 As reported in Human Resource Executive, the National Health Service, The U.K.’s publicly-funded healthcare system, will deny smokers some routine surgeries unless they agree to quit smoking for a month before the surgery. The move comes in response to research that shows that smokers take longer to recover from surgery than non-smokers. Whether or not insurers in the U.S. follow suit, some have already started charging smokers higher premiums, and the trend in the U.K. may have implications for how some U.S. employers address the issues raised by smokers in their companies. Tags: Corporate Smoking Policies, National Health Service, Health Insurance, Health Issues Related To Smoking, Anti-Smoking Policies, No Smoking Announcements ...

A ‘Blog Action Day’ Environmental Post… 2007-10-15 09:32:15 Blog Action Day has designated October 15th as the day that all bloggers on the web should dedicate their posts to the environment. Because I’m, at best, an amateur environmentalist (despite having worked for an environmental non-profit for 3 years about 15 years ago), I’ll simply link to some  articles and sites that do a far better job than I could ever do in contributing to what is, without a doubt, the most important conversation taking place in the world today. 1. The best article I could find that combines the environment and media 2. Green collar jobs will become a common, household phrase within 2-3 years 3. A New York Times article on Al Gore 4. My favorite environmental blog - No Impact Man Tags: Green Collar Jobs, No Impact Man, Al Gore, Blog Action Day ...

Life Advice from Tom Gimbel In A Jobing.com Video: Pick The Right Shirt Before Going Out At Night… 2007-10-08 22:00:54 I will preface this post with the frank admission that I am slightly biased against the guys at Pursue The Passion (PTP). They approached JobDig this past spring about sponsoring their trip around the country during which they would be interviewing people about their careers and finding passion in their work. The concept seemed to be an intriguing one, and we began seriously considering the idea. In the middle of these discussions, we were informed that PTP had been approached by Jobing.com and they were going to work with them instead of us. Since then, I have been checking their site periodically to see the results of the trip and the videos of the interviews they had conducted. Today, I came across this video of an interview with Tom Gimbel, the founder and CEO of the LaSalle Network in Chicago. It starts out as a seemingly decent interview with some fairly mundane comments from a founder/entrepreneur. But then Tom starts talking about the Gwyneth Paltrow movie ‘Sliding Doors& ...

Blog Examines NBC’s The Office From Employment Law Perspective 2007-10-08 09:43:03 For anyone in HR that likes The Office, I’d recommend adding “That’s What She Said” to your RSS feeds. It’s a pretty humorous site that analyzes Dunder Mifflin’s risks and liabilities resulting from all the statements and actions of the Scranton branch employees (mostly Michael). Also included are the estimated litigation value for each episode. It’s pretty amusing to read. Tags: The Office, NBC, Michael Scott, Employment Law, That’s What She Said, HR Blogs ...

Freaky Aliens Have Kids! 2007-10-03 10:25:22 In the latest installment of the all-time worst ad campaign in the history of marketing, it seems as if the freaky aliens who read daily newspapers apparently also reproduce. Their offspring are even uglier than the adult aliens and, like their parents, are also dependent on NASA garbage circa 1950 for survival. The other shared genetic trait of this strange species is a horrendous fashion sense. Unlike the dad alien that wears a speedskating uniform under his coat and tie, however, the freaky son prefers hideous tie-dyes and Zubaz knickers. But the best part of the ad is the proposition, attempted to be put forth, that 18-24 year-olds read the paper. They don’t. The average age of a newspaper reader is 55 and rising, which is why the ad doesn’t actually say that demographic reads the newspaper - it says they like ink on paper. Nice grammar, too, by the way- “Study shows…” - is it a study, some studies, all studies, the study, a new study? Apparently the ...

If The Phrase ‘Freaky Aliens’ Catches Fire, My Blog Readership Will Skyrocket 2007-10-02 15:37:00 Last week, I wrote a post on how writing a blog helps you better understand the phenomena of search and search engine optimization (SEO). I don’t know why, or if it’s common among bloggers, but I am fascinated by the search phrases that lead people to my blog and the impact that various posts have on SEO. I recall reading an article in Wired magazine about Google, where the author described the computers in Google’s lobby that showed, in real time, search phrases being entered into Google’s search engine. The author observed that these lobby monitors served as incredibly powerful, unfiltered windows into the human psyche. It’s a good thing I don’t work at Google, because I’d never leave the lobby and while my pathetic traffic stats provide no such power, I am riveted nevertheless by the search engine-generated-traffic I capture and why. At any rate, I discovered this weekend, in looking at referring URLs, that by searching on the phrase ‘ ...

Scott Adams’ Take On The Future Of Daily Newspapers 2007-10-02 12:57:46 In his blog Dilbert.Blog, Scott Adams offers his predictions about the future of the daily newspapers. As is the case with a lot of what Adams blogs about, his comments are thoughtful and interesting. I especially agree with him that the future of newspapers will entail a greatly expanded relationship with local bloggers who provide a wide range of content for syndication in the daily newspaper, with the paper providing some level of filtering on topic selection and quality. I also think his prediction about the exact timing of the end of printed newspapers coinciding with the 2nd major upgrade to cell phones following the release of the iPhone is an interesting time horizon to apply to the future of printed newspapers. While I think it’s safe to say that at least one decent-sized U.S. market will lose its printed daily sometime in the near future (and perhaps even a number of cities), I happen to believe that printed newspapers will, for the most part, be around for a long time. ...

Superbad Is Supergood 2007-10-01 13:33:53 It’s definitely worth seeing….very good humor. Tags: Superbad, Best Movies In 2007, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill Is The Next Will Ferrell ...

Buzzwords Alone Won’t Fix Ad Agencies’ Proclivity For Old Media 2007-09-28 11:56:24 Speaking on a panel at Advertising Week, Steve Hardwick, the top guy at ad agency Grey, explained how his shop was going to begin dedicating itself to melding and integrating traditional media with new, digital media. Grey was now and forever going to be a ‘tradigital’ agency. Hardwick actually wants to coin the phrase tradigital. Cute. Arguably a decade late, but cute. And as Spongebob calmly says to Plankton after the little one-eyed green guy declares he’s going to take over the world, “Good luck with that.” (Clearly I have kids…) One of the most surprising things I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been in the media and advertising business is how resistant to change most ad agencies are. It’s certainly a truism for most businesses and perhaps human nature in general, but I naively thought that ad agencies, for the most part, would constitute one of the more innovative and dynamic sectors of the economy. And while there are certai ...

Oklahoma State Football Coach Mike Gundy Doesn’t Like Daily Newspapers Either 2007-09-27 09:30:45 We just launched JobDig in Oklahoma, so this story caught my attention given Gundy’s disdain for the daily paper in Oklahoma City, the Oklahoman. In the middle of this tirade, Mike screams out, “That’s why I don’t read the newspaper - because it’s garbage! And the editor that let it come out….is garbage!” It’s a pretty entertaining press conference - right up there with Allen Iverson’s “Practice” press conference. Tags: Oklahoma State University, Mike Gundy, Great Press Conferences, Top 10 Press Conferences, The Oklahoman, Jenni Carlson, Allen Iverson, “We’re Talking About Practice” ...