Yesterday, Twitter launched what I believe to be the beginning of a very powerful feature set – Local Trends. Global trends, have been available for some time, these include world events, celebrity names, and their associated #hashtags. Now we can dive deeper into local trends by Country and international cities. This is just the beginning, Twitter has the power to dive down to Zip Codes and eventually take advantage of the Geotags that most of us include in our Tweets. Imagine searching for trends, topics and items in your neighborhood, or even street.
Simply Hired and Indeed, so alike that even their graphs and data look remarkably similar. Could there be one glorious RSS job feed hiding out there somewhere?
Both Indeed and Simply Hired were trending down in December for unique visitors (below), but imagine things have been picking up for both in January. Looks like Indeed overtook SH in traffic around June 2009.
Even with their current lead, I find it hard to believe that is that they’re happy to fill their own competitor’s jobs… http://www.indeed.com/q-Simply-Hired-jobs.html. Perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek?
MTV Networks received a little love back in October 2009, from Fox News in an article labled “Job Hunting with Social Networks“. We’ve seen a lot of traction from our Twitter account @MTVNetworksJobs, and our followers continue to grow, almost 19,000 !
We keep those we follow to a minimum since we’re an HR account, and an EEO company – but it’s been a fantastic vehicle for job syndication. We follow all our other MTVN twitter accounts (~ 120 and growing), along with accounts related to Twitter services. (Wefollow, Tweetstats, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite, Twellow, etc). The only issue we face is that individuals are not able to Direct Message (DM), so most all the exchanges with candidates are public – which is probably for the best.
Here’s the video from the article:
We also received some attention from the Wall Street Journal, in an article “A New Job Just a Tweet Away“. Thanks to Sarah Needleman for the shout out, we were mentioned in the article’s lead paragraph.
“As online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, including Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Corp. and Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks, now list job openings on the Twitter microblogging site.”
We’ve seen some good success with Social Media, but you still hear from those worried about the return (ROI) on their social media investment. IT’S CHEAP PEOPLE – and with a little creativity, your brand (business or personal) can really shine through. We’re not talking $400 per job posting, where of course you’d want to be sure that you get what you pay for. We now syndicate our jobs via XML/RSS for free and have analytics via SquareSpace and Google to keep tabs on where people are coming from, and Taleo reporting for who’s getting hired. What’s new is that many of these sources are no cost to us.
The real power is the added (but hard to track) benefits that include branding, awareness, connections, and sharing our company culture (humor, diversity, corporate responsibility) with our applicants. This is hard when MTV Networks does not have a home page, only the Viacom site and our new careers site. Although we have a number of web properties, none give a good overview of our corporate umbrella. Social media gives us the ability to promote and (more importantly) interact with all of our brands.
Ping.fm was ahead of the game for status management across multiple portals and communities. The challenge was getting a feed to ping, but this could be done fairly easily with Twitterfeed.
One of the great things about Ping in the past is that it could post to Facebook Pages, instead of your standard Facebook profile status. This is a very important feature for admins that have a personal account, but may also manage Fan or Corporate pages within Facebook. Ping.fm was the first to easily post to fan pages.
However, the problem with Ping is that it included two bit.ly links when pushing out updates, and there was a dodgy link shortening feature to deal with. Twitterfeed has new enhanced its offerings, and you can easily syndicate updates to Twitter, Ping.fm and now Facebook (including Facebook Pages). This has basically taken away the need to use ping before Facebook, except for powering your LinkedIn profile.
For many of the niche sites, you’ll still need Ping today, but I imagine Twitter feed will be adding multiple distribution channels very soon. Probably a good time to sell to Seesmic.
On a similar note – finally registered a bit.ly account, they’re really giving some powerful metrics in association to both unique bitly URL’s and the Main URL that unique bitly’s represent. For example you can see how many clicks your unique bitly received in comparison to all bitly’s that point to parent URL. It also provides a dashboard of your bit.ly activity instead of using the + (plus sign) tag at the end of a bit.ly URL.
