Homely.com.au, the revolutionary new real estate website combining Australia’s most beautiful search experience with free property listings is on track to record 4 million visits in the year up from 2 million in the previous 12 months.

CEO Jason Spencer said, “homely.com.au is growing, and growing fast. In 12 months time we have doubled the number of people on our site. Every month hundreds of thousands of people are looking for their next home and uniquely for the seller and agent it’s all 100% free to list.”

Spencer believes the growth is attributable to Homely’s unique positioning, one very much built on social and community, on people talking about where they live. “Our research of buyers and sellers is telling us we are easier and faster to use than the established portals especially without annoying banner ads.”

“We know that consumers have a habit of using the established portals and it takes time to break that. Obviously they have been around a lot longer, but the numbers are very exciting.”

Unique to Homely is the volume of visitors from overseas. Almost 25% of visitors are people from other countries looking at unique content to learn about the schools, the locals, the safety and vibe that a suburb brings. Homely has the largest collection of suburb and street reviews in Australia.

Homely has recently switched it’s focus to growing it’s consumer base, launching it’s first consumer outreach with billboards, direct mail and digital campaigns. To continue this push Homely has appointed Canadian executive Marty Stanowich who brings close to 20 years experience growing and marketing technology companies.

The first 18 months have been about adding agents and showing our support for the industry. Rocky Bartolotto, Homely’s National Sales Director commented “Agent’s love our free to list model and now 90% of agents have signed up to our service. We continue to show our support with many industry and franchise group sponsorships. We are here to stay.”

“It’s a long game and one that we are ready for” said Spencer. “We spent 7 years in our previous business StreetAdvisor.com.au collecting over half a million street and suburb reviews from all around Australia so we are prepared for the challenge ahead. We have recently scaled up our people, added a team focused 24/7 on Consumer growth and moved into new offices.”

Any remaining agents looking to list on Homely can do so can upload their listings for free at agent.homely.com.au/

About Homely
Founded by Jason Spencer and Adam Spencer, Homely.com.au is a free to list, banner-ad free real estate website that helps people find their next home. With a focus on beautiful design, community engagement and innovative marketing platforms for real estate agents, Homely.com.au helps people make better decisions about where they choose to live.

The company is based in Melbourne, Australia.

For further information
Jason Spencer
jason@homely.com.au

The post Homely.com.au sees record visits, doubles traffic in 12 months, appoints key executive to head up growth. appeared first on Business 2.

The Oxford Academics place the probability of real estate agents being replaced by computers at 86% – only 1 in 7 chance of survival.
The robots aren’t about to come and change the locks on the real estate agent’s office, the change is going to be much more subtle.

Mistakenly, some commercial real estate portals see replacing the old world of print advertising as mission accomplished. However, the conversion from print to internet is only the opening round in an ongoing war on commercial sales and leasing processes. There are plenty more changes to come, only some of which we can imagine. It’s a common human failing to see rapid change in the past as a one-off. We all tend to think the future will be stable with no big changes. Remember how revolutionary your Nokia mobile seemed at the time? It couldn’t get any better. Someone forgot to tell Apple.

What’s the evidence that we are starting to see the next couple of internet disrupters?

There are four commercial real estate portals that consistently appear on the first page of Google Search results in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

It’s difficult to find a reliable comparative website ranking tool, however many advertisers like to benchmark their rankings based on Alexa, an Amazon Inc. website tracking tool.

The surprising observation is that there are two distinct levels of property seeker engagement between the four main commercial property portals.

* Site Visitor Engagement Metrics (Alexa.com)

Both commercialpropertyguide.com.au and the News Corp’s RealCommercial are moving towards the next levels of property seeker engagement, with visitors spending nearly twice as long on these sites as with Fairfax’s CommercialRealEstate and the REIV’s CommercialView.

This is in part due to the these two sites providing quality content to users, from tips and advice on commercial property to general market trends and insights. The portal experience moves beyond the transactional and into something more valuable to the user.

1. University of Oxford ‘The Future of Employment – how susceptible are jobs to computerisation’?

So what are visitors doing with the extra time on commercialpropertyguide.com.au and RealCommercial websites?

Clients are doing more and more research before that first moment of truth when they contact the real estate agent. Website visitors need information. We have seen that withholding the price, address and other key details limits the time a prospect spends on that listing webpage. Looking at the 360 degree Google Street View is surprisingly popular with commercial property seekers, something you can’t do if there’s no address available. A client’s trust in an agent grows with the agent’s enthusiasm. Other critical trust builders are sufficient professional photos, avoiding “cookie cutter” descriptions and steering clear of cliché headings.

What shapes a prospect’s view of an agent on the web? It comes down to two elements – being enthusiastic and not being tricky. On commercialpropertyguide.com.au there are lots of good and bad examples. To us, tricky looks like withholding the address and displaying “contact agent” for the price. “Come into my web says the spider to the fly”, then I’ll tell you the price and location.

Clients themselves build trust in their chosen real estate agent long before they make contact. When a prospect communicates for the first time, the agent’s task is not to build trust but to reinforce the perception the client already has.

Commercial property agents need to build trust at every stage of the sales and leasing process. Their trust building starts long before their prospect’s first contact. Commercial agents need to focus on their portal presence, especially on commercial portals with high levels of client engagement.

Simon Rose
CEO, Commercial Property Guide

The post Computers vs Real Estate Agents – friends or foes? appeared first on Business 2.

Upon graduating from college (from what turned out to be an excellent, small, liberal arts college), I didn’t land that highly desired job in consulting or investment banking. Those jobs primarily came from colleges more elite than my own. So I fought and clawed my way into situations where I would learn and grow, eventually creating this blog not as a public space, but as a place to record my thoughts so I’d remember them in the future.

I now have the pleasure of helping my clients understand how strategy can impact all manner of HR , talent and service delivery outcomes. One of the most interesting in recent years has been a focus on understanding staffing outcomes in the college recruiting area. The old conventional wisdom has always been to get the most elite candidates from the most elite colleges. After all, these are the best and the brightest, and what CEO does not tell the world that they have the best and smartest team in the world? Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom does not work out for all it’s cracked up to be.

My favorite case study comes from a global financial analyst firm. This organization recruited from one of the Ivy Leagues for years, but ultimately they ran some analytics and discovered that the Ivy League candidates not only didn’t perform better, they often performed worse than candidates from “middle of the pack” schools. The most successful candidates (those promoted into management and eventually reaching executive ranks, those who had long tenure rates, and those who became great leaders and people managers), were often from public sector universities in “Po-dunk, Middle-of-Nowhere.” The analysis revealed a single striking characteristic difference: the sense of entitlement.

It turned out that candidates from elite schools were indeed smarter, but they also had in their belief system that they could do better – no matter where they were. There was not only a continuous striving to get to the top faster, but a sense of discontent no matter how good their present state was. This ultimately lead to early voluntary terminations in less than 2 years, and a striving for job/title inflation that was counter-productive to real experiential growth.

On the other hand, candidates from “Po-dunk” were so excited for the opportunity, happy they were in New York instead of “Po-dunk” and genuinely appreciative that they somehow got into one of the elite financial firms, that they worked their butts off and formed long term relationships with their companies. Ultimately, sticking around and putting in some real effort ensured that many of the “Po-dunk” graduates made it into executive ranks, probably as quickly as the elitists did (after 6 company changes).

Another customer, an engineering firm, found that not only did the school not matter (which would seem odd in engineering), but what did matter was how well this organization could form high quality relationships with Ph.D candidate advisors. A high quality relationship with a professor guiding many engineering Ph.D. candidates was a significantly better predictor of the new hire’s desire to put in hard work and stick around. After all, if your Ph.D. advisor got you and many of your predecessors an opportunity at a job, and they are all experiencing success, aren’t you going to do the same thing?

The point being that the old conventional wisdom isn’t the formula for recruiting success anymore. The pressure high school kids face these days to get set up for life by getting into the best colleges is also creating very bad precedent and expectations. Just the idea that they think they will be “set up for life” by getting into the right schools is turning off employers. More and more of my customers are doing deep analytics to understand where their top college candidates come from, and increasingly it’s not the elite schools. If you’re still following the old conventional wisdom, it might be time to revisit your strategy.

7th April 2015- Homely.com.au, the revolutionary new real estate website combining Australia’s most beautiful search experience with free property listings has today launched their ‘Pay-My-Rent’ sweepstakes, giving Australians the chance to live at home for free.

One lucky person in Australia will have their rent paid for by the Homely team for four weeks up to the value of $5,000, allowing them the chance to save money or use the savings as a chance to indulge. The competition is open to all Australian residents as of now.

CEO Jason Spencer was extremely excited to launch Homely’s first national sweepstakes. “Home ownership has been the Australian dream for as long as I can remember, however with a tight economy, and properties being snapped up by investors a lot of people are being pushed into the rental market.”

“The Pay-My-Rent sweepstake is a great way to help those wanting a chance to get into the market by helping them put away a little extra for a deposit. One of the biggest challenges renters face is saving money whilst covering rental costs, so we think this will be a huge help!”

Entrants can enter very simply by following two steps:

Visit: http://woobox.com/v9cxg6

Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/homely.com.au

Enter their details for a chance to win!

Entrants can enter as many times as they like, with a winner announced on the 7th of April, 2015.

Enter Here

About Homely

Founded by Jason and Adam Spencer, Homely.com.au is a free to list, banner-ad free real estate website that helps people find their next home. With a focus on beautiful design, community engagement and innovative marketing platforms for real estate agents, Homely.com.au helps people make better decisions about where they choose to live.

Contact:
Todd Schulberg
todd@homely.com.au
+61419331548

Download PDF Here

The post Homely launches national ‘Pay-My-Rent’ campaign, allowing Australians the chance to live rent free! appeared first on Business 2.

Real Estate Events Plugin for Agents.

Seo for Real Estate in conjunction with Agentpoint has developed a plugin that adds the inspection and/or auction times in Google organic results for a property an agent has listed. Using Laing and Simmons in Double bay as a test case we are able to successfully list these times on a Google search for any one of their properties.

How Google Displays the Inspection and Auction Times.

Fully Automated Real Estate Events Plugin.

This is a first for any real estate agent in Australia. This is a fully automated feature we have added to the www.lsdb.com.au website. It will help protect their number one ranking for the search term real estate agent double bay. We install the plugin or script onto your site and it picks up all your open for for inspection times. If the property is for Auction it will gather that information as well and display it. The times displayed are a direct link back to the property that is listed on your website.

The post Google Events Plugin for Real Estate Agents appeared first on Business 2.

In HR ’s pursuit to get better at catering to the business, it has pursued a variety of programs including implementing technologies that provide “insights out of the box” and governance programs that promise to clean data so that HR has more credibility.  But these programs don’t increase HR ’s ability to deliver an insight – they only allow HR to deliver something they should have had 10 years ago.  THis presents one of the significant problems HR has with data – in the lack of having adequate capability, HR thinks that bigger is better and the shiny new toy will solve all problems.

Just as when 5 years ago “social” was the shiny new toy (that HR was afraid to tackle), today HR looks to big data to assist with capability shortcomings.   HR reasons that if their organizational data is paired with external data, instant benchmarks can provide immediate and deep insights for leaders.  They think that bringing in data from non- HR systems within the organizational firewall will help them identify human resource attributes like productivity that were previously off limits.  These assumptions can be true, but only if HR staff has a capability already to grapple with data problems and create insights of of those problems.  Shiny tools that help visualize make it easier to create insights, but the beginning and end to the problem is and always has been about data oriented people.

HR should not go big – in fact, HR should probably go smaller to the smallest segments of data that they already have but don’t use effectively.  Rather than looking towards big data to solve problems and introduce new complexities that they are unready to deal with, HR should be taking the current HR data already in possession and looking at unused meta-data to tap into new insights.  There are things going on within our organization that HR has not even thought about, but impact the future of the workplace and how employees get things done.

HR Meta-Data Use Case 1:
Within almost every good HR system is the ability to track data about each transaction.   HR already reports on mundane transactions like job changes and trends about who goes where and how long the average person takes to get promoted.  But embedded within each of these transactions is the meta-data that tells us when managers are performing these transactions (date and time stamp), and sometimes what type of device they are using.  Purely hypothetical, an organization could find out that managers typically perform HR transactions outside of normal work hours, presumably because they are busy with their “regular” jobs between 8 to 5.  Or that managers who have had tablets deployed to them and have a better user interface approve transactions faster than their counterparts.  In today’s world, HR is consumed by administering the employee record rather than understanding how work gets done more productively.  The meta-data can tell us how a transaction got done, not just what the transaction was.

HR has plenty of data, especially now that Talent Management has been in full swing for almost a decade.  Meta-data by definition is “data about the data.”  For years, HR has not cared about this type of data and has almost completely ignored it.  Indeed, the purpose of meta-data seemed to be system oriented rather than business useful.  As HR data sets have grown however, use cases have increased beyond just understanding how managers are doing their work, to increasing insights about the employees themselves, and how HR can improve their own programs.

HR Meta-Data Use Case 2:
Most employers provide some form of total compensation statements with the objective of increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.  It’s hard to correlate the simple presence of a total compensation statement with satisfaction without meta-data.  Combining meta-data with employee engagement survey data, HR can make real correlations between employees that log into total compensation statements to view them, and that populations’ engagement scores.  Are people who look at their compensation all the time more or less engaged?  Is checking total compensation a predecessor activity for voluntary terminations?  Taking the meta-data to another level, the volume of logins per employee might )or might not) yield even greater impact to engagement.  This activity could be extended to payroll and benefit portals as well.  Given real data regarding correlation, HR might elect to develop marketing campaigns to increase traffic to benefits portals among older employees, total compensation among mid career employees, and learning portals among younger employees.

In the last several years, people have become more sensitive to the intrusion of privacy that governments can exercise.  From the NSA tracking who we are talking to, to our cell phone providers tracking where we are at any time, meta-data has gotten a bad rap for being a tool of “big brother.”  Indeed, HR has actually been using meta-data since the dawn of “personnel administration.  Simple headcount reports are not about the HR data itself, but a count of the data.  Turnover reports are similarly not about the data, but a count of a specific type of transactions.  So looking deeper into meta-data than HR has in previous generations should not be a surprise.

HR has a wealth of data already at its disposal.  In its attempt to find meaning within that data, expanding the data set and making it even harder for HR to craft new insightfulness would seem to be a mistake.   HR already has more data than it can consume, and finding meaningful ways to use and interpret that data is a better bet than trying to create entirely new data sets while existing data sets stagnate even more.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could apply a cheat code in our work lives?  If there was one, it can’t possibly be as simple as a game where you just google to see if a cheat code exists.  In real life, cheat codes are incredibly hard to find, but perhaps they do exist somewhere.  In the world of technology deployments, we certainly know what are NOT cheat codes.

• Lift and shift deployments.  Let’s say you have a user experience problem and you want to implement a new core HR system and have much better cloud systems that employees interact with.  The reality is that you will end up with a much better UX, but when your employees log into the new system, they are not going to be any happier with the experience if you did a lift and shift implementation.  Simply going in and changing the technology without any of the other foundational factors really does not help you.  It turns out that other factors like your process design, your portal and content management, and your approval chains are still an obstacle.  Let’s say for example an employee has moved homes.  The fact that they still can’t find documentation in the portal that tells them an address change is only the first step, and payroll/state tax changes might need to happen, or how benefit pans are impacted is still a problem.  Sure, getting into a more beautiful system might give them incremental happiness, but it’s not enough to overcome the significant shortcomings in your overall program.
• Radical technology transformations only.  In addition to #1, many organizations do radical technology transformations and completely forget the amount of change management they will need, or they defund the change management work stream after the first change order comes in.  It’s always sad to see an organization that has spent millions of dollars implementing technology that users don’t adopt because there was a poor change strategy.  Often there is nothing wrong with the technology, or the processes.  But when a user finds something hard the first time because they were not coached on the new process, the repeat user is hard to come by.
• Saving costs by changing your processes only.  At the end of the day, you do have to realize that your users really are dissatisfied with your technology too.  Yes, they do hate the process because it takes too long and involves too many people that don’t matter to the outcome, but the interface is terrible and hard to navigate.  I’ve seen company after company implement new processes on top of really old technology and then wonder why the end users still complain.
  The moral of the story here is that people (change), process and technology all matter, and it’s hard to have huge successes if you don’t transform all of these three components together.

The good news is that there actually are some valid cheat codes.

• Cloud.  Wait, didn’t we just say that you can’t just do technology alone?  Yes we did, but the facts are that today’s best cloud technologies allow organizations not only to shift cost and headcount resources in a highly efficient manner by removing in-house technology management, but process design is simply so much easier than it was with legacy platforms.  We’ll still need to remember to have good change management, but cloud really also makes adoption easier since the UX is so significantly better than older platforms.  Compared to legacy on-premise software, cloud platforms accelerate people, process and technology components and serve as a game changing cheat code.
• Crowd.  I’m not seeing crowdsourcing in HR yet, but I think it’s a major cheat code for whoever can figure it out first.  We have build such huge and costly infrastructures around shared services, but today’s social technologies combined with metadata/tagging structures have the ability to let end users manage their own inquiries with the corporate cloud.  Imagine the employee who moves homes and asks the corporate crowd what to do, and receives multiple answers from the crowds with links to the address change function in HR , payroll tax forms, and benefits enrollment.   HR now plays the content curator role rather than the source of all content.

The thing to remember is that these cheat codes only are available for a short period of time.  At some point, everyone else figures what the cheat code is and everyone has the advantage.  The early adopters can leverage an advantage for a few years, while laggers suffer higher costs, lower adoption, poorer UX, and slower processes for years to come.

During this year’s HR Technology  Conference HCM roundtable, it was fascinating to hear what everyone was working on (it was the first question posed to the group, and I’m not trying to bash any vendor, but I am representing my opinion of the answers).

• What was fascinating was that 2 of the vendors were talking about a great user experience (Oracle Fusion and Ultimate).  Wait a second.  We’re still talking about UX?  How did these 2 vendors get a seat at this panel and only have UX to offer up for what’s new in the product.  It’s unfortunate.  Y’all gotta do better than that.
• 2 of the vendors talked about machine learning.  (ADP and Workday).  Machine learning was part of an overall theme of the conference, and there was a follow-up conversation in this panel about it, but these 2 vendors were the ones who brought it up as a focus area in their opening comments.  When I think about social HR 7 years ago, I think that machine learning is what the next few years might be about and it seems like 2 vendors want us to know that they’re on top of it.  What is surprising here is who the vendors were – and it shows us that there can be surprises.  It wasn’t Oracle and SAP with their deep (and legacy) analytics engines and mountains of programmers.  It was ADP (wh-wh-wh-what?!?!  I LOVE that ADP is thinking about this as they have the largest client/employee base to run analytics off of.  Maybe I don’t give them enough credit.) and Workday (ok, maybe predictable since they seem to be thinking/innovating faster than the others).
• Last up was SAP.  Can anyone say “extensibility?”  Actually, SAP was gearing up to talk about some really cool metadata and object architecture that will create extensibility, but they got cut off from a time perspective.  Leave it to SAP to make things more complex, but if we can get to configurable extensibility, that’s pretty cool.  Honestly, I would have expected Oracle to be on the extensibility bandwagon based on their application architecture.

I’m hard pressed to say whether machine learning or extensibility is what’s next, but I’d think that all the vendors should be working on both of them.  UX is table stakes, and you should not be allowed to talk at the table (or panel as it was) if that’s what you’re working on.  My guess is that SAP will have some chops in the machine learning space, but it just was not what they wanted to focus on.  It’s also interesting that ADP and Workday were not on the extensibility front as it’s clearly a focus area for the very large customers that SAP has as its client base (but maybe that’s why SAP is so focused).

In a few vendor comments unrelated to the HCM roundtable, the HCM vendor space is going to start reaching parity in the next year.  Oracle and SAP are picking up steam and finally starting to look competitive.  First of all, lets agree that I HCM software in vendor demo booths while I was at the conference.  The following is an aggregation of vendor demos and conversations I had with conference participants.  Here are a couple of comments around gaps or deficiencies that I’m still watching out for based on those conversations:  (alpha order)

• ADP:  I was really quite pleased to see their new UX.  I can’t remember what it’s called, but they’ll be rolling it out to all of their products so that no matter what you’re on, you’ll have a similar experience.  My concern is really still around the back end.  ADP’s ability to stitch together a common front end on top of multiple back end (and still mainframe?) systems is pretty good, and perhaps when you’re outsourcing everything but the core HCM to a best in class payroll and benefits vendor, it might not matter what the back end looks like.  Maybe.
• Oracle:  The main question is in the UX.  It’s simply not seamless, and it goes to the point of why they were focused on UX in the panel. It’s way better than the last couple of years, but one goes from the cool “mobile apply” look and feel into a slightly different transaction screen, into a completely non-appy environment in just a few clicks.  The first couple pages are well executed, but it just feels like they didn’t finish the job as you continue through a manager transaction.  The second question is in their customer base for sold Fusion Core HCM .  As I talked to conference participants, they were getting numbers from the Oracle booth anywhere between 400 to 600 (note to Oracle, please get your story straight).  There are still a lot of conference participants wondering why Oracle is giving Fusion HCM licenses away for free if they have market demand in the 100’s of customers.  It’s just not adding up, and nobody I talked to could figure out the story.
• SAP:  I’m pretty sure that SAP is on its way to filling a few gaps.  Certainly per the above comments, if they are working to fill extensibility gaps that its large enterprise clients will need, they are also going to figure out benefits administration, timekeeping and payroll.  I talked to one conference participant who was told that benefits administration will be available to demo this quarter, and another who said they were told it would be in Q4 of 2015.  Either way it’s coming and that’s good news.  I think SAP’s original philosophy that payroll, time and benefits get outsourced, but for the top 250 clients in size, that’s a hard position to maintain.  (I don’t consider SAP cloud payroll to be comparable to Employee Central in architecture, agile configurability, or usability, so that’s why I harp on it.  I know that SAP would disagree).
• Workday:  Everyone has been uber positive about Workday for years.  The questions among conference participants seemed to be around the viability of their recruiting module.  Granted this is their newest module, and the top vendors seem to have the capability to innovate rapidly over a couple release cycles.  Just as I’m confident SAP is going to figure out benefits quickly, same goes for Workday recruiting.

Having said all of this, I’m actually quite pleased with the vendor space.  The last couple of years (no matter what Oracle and SAP say) have been relatively uncompetitive.  There has been one clear winner in the market, and the fact that I don’t have to say who it was is a good indicator that it’s true. I think 2015 will get a bit more competitive, but 2016 will become an all out war.  This post is definitely “negative” about what my concerns might be, but what I don’t mention is the huge progress that all of the vendors have made and the very long lists of things they have done well and right.  I’m going to get in trouble from the vendors over this post anyway, but either way, I think 2015 is going to be interesting.  More viable vendors is always a good thing.

(Last comment.  I thought long and hard whether to post this.  Some vendor somewhere is going to be pissed at me, but at the end of the day, there were only 5 HCM vendors on stage, so any exclusion is not mine.  Also, each vendor chose to talk about what they talked about.  Perhaps they didn’t have enough time, but again, if Oracle really wanted to talk analytics but didn’t get to it, that’s not my fault.  Each vendor decided what they wanted to focus on by themselves.  The opinions in the latter half of this post are based on talking to other conference participants and seeing each of the vendors demo at their booth.  Posting this also saves me the effort of writing a year end post.)

The point being… that was 10 years ago.  If you are not already in the cloud, you’re somewhere between 5-10 years behind the times.

None of us can imagine being on our 2004 Motorola flip phone, so why is it ok that we’re still talking about deploying cloud technology today?  I still go to clients that tell me they are getting ready for PeopleSoft 9.3.  A recent conversation with a large employer informed me that a client on Oracle EBS had no intention of getting off of it.  If you are on-premise for HCM , chances you installed it between 1998 and 2008.  I tell you what – you can have your 10-15 year old technology.  Send me your iPhone, and I’ll send you a 10 year old flip phone.  It’ll be great.

By the way.  PeopleSoft was founded in 1987 and the underlying architecture has remained pretty much the same.  Where were you in 1987?  I was just starting high school.

The point being… your employees and managers hate you.  

You really think they don’t know that their employee and manager self service technology predates Amazon.com’s initial user interface?

Wait, if I’m telling you to get over the cloud, where exactly are you supposed to be?  All the cool stuff right now is in consumer driven technology.  Think Uber.  I don’t call a taxi service that controls where the cabs go.  I get on an app and the consumer controls the experience without a middleman.  Same with AirBnB.  Come to think about it, same with Quora.  Ask anything and a community of users will tell you how it is.  Hang on, we’ve been rating products to help other consumers on Amazon for years.  How many of us read the product description on Amazon?  Maybe a few of us, but pretty much 100% of us check the consumer star ratings first.

The same thing is happening in HR .  Companies like Careerify are helping employees control the recruiting process.  Instead of recruiting organizations pleading with employees to provide referrals, the technology advises the employee putting them in complete control.  Companies like Betterworks are making goals and feedback real time, collaborative, and truly valuable.  At the HR Technology conference this year, ADP and Workday were talking about machine learning where their tools will help employees predict what to do next faster and better than your HR people.

The point being…   HR isn’t the facilitator anymore.  If you are, then you’re not adding value where you should be.   HR should be sitting around analyzing what is happening, not managing it.  The power to create, transact, and collaborate is squarely in the hands of employees and managers now.  Time to give them the technology to do it.  

And if you’re still not in the cloud, you’re 10 years behind your competitors.

8th December 2014– Homely.com.au, the revolutionary new real estate website combining Australia’s most beautiful search experience with free property listings, has today announced that it will be displaying all of the homes for sale and rent from the First National Real Estate group.

Off the back of a successful sponsorship of First National’s annual golf day on the Gold Coast, National Sales Director, Rocky Bartolotto, said the authority had been secured to syndicate all listings from the 300 plus offices nationally to Homely.

“First National are one of the most reputable real estate brands in Australia. The addition of their listings does two things; it provides great exposure for all of the First National Offices and it helps us in our mission to have 100% listings, nationwide. We are very excited to be welcoming all of the offices to the Homely family.”

Bartolotto mentioned that the increased exposure for offices across the country, and the ability to keep listing costs down, were both essential in inking the deal to syndicate to Homely.

First National West Ryde Director, Nick Matulic, mentioned, “Homely has really shaken up the market place. For our business, the ability to display our listings on a beautiful platform and keep costs down meant it was a very easy decision.”

The positives of joining Homely are already evident for offices in Sydney’s Inner West who have been on Homely since June this year. Virginia Nicoll from Harris Tripp First National, mentioned the timing for a new portal, which offers a unique search platform and an affordable option to agents, is welcomed and required, if the industry wants to ensure competitive pricing pressure is put on the larger portals.

Nicoll mentioned, “Homely.com.au is offering all of this, with an exciting number of new features to be released in the future, which our office is confident is going to be well received by buyers and sellers.”

First National’s support comes as Homely nears completion of all of the major networks using the site to display their listings. Current supporters of the free to list site include LJ Hooker, Ray White, Belle Property, Laing+Simmons, Elders, Harcourts, Professionals, Starr Partners, PRD Nationwide, Raine & Horne and thousands of other independent offices.

The support from teams such as Nicoll’s and the other 300 plus First National offices has meant that the number of agents taking up free listings on Homely is at an all time high. Bartolotto mentioned, “We have noticed a drastic increase in offices engaging with us to showcase their listings for free, the speed in which agents are joining Homely puts us in a very strong position to tackle the rest of the year and 2015.”

The positive sentiment is shared by Homely CEO, Jason Spencer, “We are working hard on getting a stronghold of the entire real estate community on board and displaying their listings on the site. The support has been overwhelming and we truly believe that agents will appreciate the differences and nuances that our model provides. Our local content, and access to thousands of people looking for local property information, has been a huge help for agents looking to increase their social brand.”

Agents looking to get more exposure for their listings can join Homely at no charge by clicking http://agent.homely.com.au/submit-your-listings/ – with no lock in contracts or subscriptions tying them down.

About Homely

Founded by Jason and Adam Spencer, Homely.com.au is a free to list, banner-ad free real estate website that helps people find their next home. With a focus on beautiful design, community engagement and innovative marketing platforms for real estate agents, Homely.com.au helps people make better decisions about where they choose to live.

Contact:

Todd Schulberg

todd@homely.com.au

+61419331548

The post Homely concludes a successful year with biggest bang yet. appeared first on Business 2.

The team at Squiiz did an amazing job selling themselves and their concept to the industry to become partners in their yet to be released portal Squiiz.com.au. They gained the financial support from most of the national real estate groups and certainly the best wishes from the remainder.   Groups like PRDnationwide, Belle Property, Century 21, Harcourts, IRENE (Independent Real Estate Network of Excellence), LJ Hooker, Ray White, Raine & Horne and REMAX became partners in the venture. 

Because of those connections they launched in Mid November with more than 200,000 properties on day one..

It seemed to me and many others as the best opportunity for an industry owned portal to finally start gaining some traction and thus by default place competitive pressure on the commercial players like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

But its been two weeks now and its clear that something serious has gone wrong. Really really wrong.

They forgot to do even basic level seo on the website and the two main search engines, Google and Bing have essentially rejected them.

You can put up a website today and it can be indexed on google within minutes.  So with well over 200,000 pages on day one how many of those are on Google and Bing some 2 weeks later ?

Google – 34 Pages

Bing – 16 Pages

In direct contrast the industry leader, realestate.com.au has over 20 million pages on Google. The have pages for property for sale, property for rent, property sold, property rented, suburbs. agencies and soon they will have profile pages for each salesperson and property manager as well.

We know from comments made in the past from ex CEO Simon Baker that Google delivers in excess of 30% of the traffic to realestate.com.au.  Squiiz needs to hire an SEO consultant  immediately and get this turned around if it thinks it is going to make headway.

So whats gone wrong? This stuff gets a little technical but for those interested here are some things I found with a 2 minute look.

There is no robots.txt file and no sitemap file.   Now Google and Bing do not need these files  to find and index your site, it just make it easier and quicker for the search engines to find your pages. In two weeks I would not have expected them to be ranking well in the search engines but I would have expected them to have their pages at least in the index.  In my mind this omission shows that very little thought was put into the onpage seo and that is evidenced by the sheer lack of pages they have on the two biggest search engines.

Most traffic driven to property pages from outside of the navigation on the portal itself is when a buyer types in the address direct into the search engine. Squizz does not use address in the page title, page description, h1 or h2 tags or even body copy of the page itself.  It finally shows up in just one place, a lonely h3 tag.

Given the fact that they are not using the suburb or the street address in key points in the seo code means they are going to struggle  to even show up for when people search for the direct address, at least on Google.

If you have agents out there pushing the branding of Squizz when the buyers start searching on the internet if they dont see that brand show up in the SERP’s  then how do you expect them to use the website.  With a name like Squiiz you cant expect them all to remember the exact spelling to type it in themselves bypassing the search engines entirely… even this media release could not get the spelling right . ***Since been updated with the correct spelling***

When you see the handful of properties that have been lucky enough to be found on the search engines you can see why.  Here is how the listing for 16 Milton Avenue, Fulham Gardens, SA 5024 is displayed on Google for Squiiz and for realestate.com.au.

So lets consider that they can even get all of those pages indexed by submitting a sitemap, be honest.. even if the top listing “Large Corner Block” showed up on the first page of Google which it probably wont, would you click on it? It has no indication that it is the property you are searching for.

A deeper analysis of the site would probasbly show much more but the numbers dont lie.. 34 pages listed out of 200,000+ needs to be improved.

Cmon guys.. !!!  We all want you to succeed.

**** Update 08/12/2014   ****

Late last week Squiiz.com.au added a robots.txt file to the website which identified a sitemap.xml file which finally allowed Google and Bing to access all the property pages.  Indexing started immediately and has been increasing every day.

As at the time of writing there are now 38,900  pages on the google index.  Bing is a little slower to catch on but that is typical.

I think the thing to take away from this is the speed that this was fixed once it was identified.  Whilst we cant go back in time and fix it before launch it is my opinion commendable how quickly they fix the problem.  I hope that the team equally prioritise the onpage SEO so they can start generating some real traffic from the search engines.

The post Whats Gone Wrong at Squiiz.com.au? ***UPDATED*** appeared first on Business 2.

Will real estate agents in Australia go the way of those in China — where the number one portal is competing directly against them?

The experience of agents in China shows what could happen here if one or more of the big local real estate portals decides to compete directly with agents.

The dominant portal for people who want to buy real estate in China, known as Soufun.com, has angered agents first by dramatically raising prices and then by going into competition with them.

(Disclosure: I do public relations for Juwai.com, which is the Chinese portal for people wanting to buy real estate outside of China.)

Would Rupert Murdoch keep his portal from competing with real estate agents? Photo courtesy of the SMH.

Agents Rebell

Soufun’s fight against agents got heated in August. Thirteen Chinese real estate agencies, all in the large Shanghai market, came together to boycott the portal.

To put this in Australian terms, imagine 35% of the real estate agents in Melbourne simultaneously pulling all of their advertising and listings from realestate.com.au and/or domain.

Their complaint is that Soufun raised its prices 10 times in just five years, pushing the cost to agents up by a multiple of 10.

The agents said, they “feel like they’re dealing with a monopoly and are ‘held hostage’”’ by soaring advertising rates,” reported the Wall Street Journal. In language that will sound familiar to any reader of this blog, the agents accused Soufun of “unfairly using its market power to raise prices,” they said.

Not everyone took the agents’ side in this battle. Here’s a translation of one social media post that represents the skeptics’ point of view:

“It’s the Internet age and real estate agents who only stick to bricks and mortar will only be dragging out their feeble existence.”

Portals Competing with Agents

Things have gotten considerably more difficult for Chinese real estate agents since that pleasant thought was posted online.

Soufun is still charging high fees, but that’s not all. Now, the portal is also competing directly with real estate agents. This development is being cheered by investors, with Deutsche Bank upgrading SouFun’s stock from “Neutral” to “Buy.”

Soufun intends to become a “one-stop-shop for developers”, to the detriment of the agents’ role in new-development marketing.

SouFun has also invested in three large agency networks, including Century 21 China. In its press release, Soufun says it will now give Century 21 “preferred” services over competing agents.

Economic Journal Insight speculates that Soufun wants to “cut its dependence on property agencies.” If it can work directly with consumers, it will get the whole commission check, and not just a relatively small marketing budget.

Soufun’s plan seems to be succeeding. Even before its investment in Century 21 this week, it already earned about one-third of its revenue from the real estate agents it directly owned.

What Is Your Future?

Soufun’s future plans can only include expanding its beachhead on the territory of real estate agents. If it succeeds, there are three obvious goals that would motivate it:

1. Put competing real estate agents out of business.
2. Deskill and cut the employment costs of the agents it controls.
3. Shift more of the real estate sales process to low-cost online interactions that allow for bigger margins.

Soufun’s closest Australian partner is realestate.com.au, which announced an agreement with the Chinese domestic website earlier this year. To be fair, that doesn’t necessarily mean REA will begin implementing Soufun-style changes in Australia any time soon.

REA’s close relationship with Soufun does, however, make one very curious to know exactly how far their partnership will go. Will realestate.com.au will follow Soufun’s path to “cut its dependence on real estate agents”?

If REA did compete with agents, which side would win?

I don’t have the answer to those questions. I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself which future you believe in.

The post Is your future as dark as theirs? appeared first on Business 2.

15th October, 2014– Homely.com.au, the revolutionary new real estate website combining Australia’s most beautiful search experience with free property listings, has seen a strong influx of listings from independent offices, pushing the total office count on Homely to nearly 5,000.

Homely CEO Jason Spencer attributes several key reasons for the growth. “Agents love our free to list model and are telling other agents about us so word of mouth is helping for sure. Strategically we made the investments to ramp up our business development and engineering teams in conjunction with key sponsorships and industry commitments. Ultimately I think people are taking us seriously now.”

National sales director, Rocky Bartolotto credits independent offices for the rapid increase of listings. “Homely was built to provide a solution to both big and small offices. We realised early that to provide the ultimate property search, it is just as imperative to support boutique offices as well as major franchise groups”

The continued rate of expansion including the addition of key account managers puts Homely in a strong position to reach 100% listings within the next few months.

One office to reap the benefits of free listings as an independent office is Time Realty Five Dock in Sydney. Director Frank Sittineri mentioned that “Homely is a fantastic alternative for us to support. It keeps our advertising costs down, which in a time where agents are competing for listings is key to our success. They are providing solutions and helping vendors with their budget constraints. A key concern due to the rising fees on the larger portals”

Homely CEO, Jason Spencer said, “There is so much noise within the industry right now about portals but we have a clear focused strategy, some very exciting innovations coming down the line and a commitment to provide increasing value to both consumers and agents. We know it will take time for Homely to be the first point of call for consumers, but we are confident we can change consumer habit”.
For agents out there looking for an alternative, large or small, Spencer had one message to impart.

“We know agents want change but for change to happen fast, agents need to do their part fast. In most cases agents can show their support and have their homes on Homely in less than 24 hours.”

Agents wanting to list on Homely at no charge can do so at http://agent.homely.com.au/submit-your-listings/

About Homely
Founded by Jason and Adam Spencer, Homely.com.au is a free-to-list, banner ad-free real estate website that helps Australians to find their next home. With a focus on beautiful design, community engagement and innovative marketing platforms for real estate agents, Homely.com.au helps people make better decisions about where they choose to live.

Contact:
Todd Schulberg

The post Homely.com.au reports record growth as agents show support for free to list portal appeared first on Business 2.

Seriously, global payroll is such a PITA.  It’s just too hard to figure out how to get all of your payroll vendors on a single platform or even a single vendor.  Local countries want their own autonomy, but corporate controls want centralized reporting and GL integrations.  Because if the very disparate local compliance issues, it’s incredibly difficult to normalize much of the global payroll environment.  Here are a couple of quick vendor thoughts that have been coming into focus and reality for a couple years:

• ADP Streamline.  I don’t quite understand this service, but Streamline can basically take ADP global payrolls and consolidate much of the payroll data into one place.  This allows for generally centralized reporting and results.  The weakness of this model is that it’s not in the ADP HCM applications and can’t do reporting that has HCM data in it (afaik)
• Ceridian Dayforce Payroll.  I don’t remember the name of their product, but Dayforce HCM is basically able to take Ceridian global payrolls and dump things into the Dayforce application, again providing consolidated reporting.  The weakness of this is that it’s in Dayforce HCM , and not everybody wants to run Dayforce HCM .
• There are other great global payroll vendors that I like (Celergo comes to mind) but I didn’t visit them this particular HR Tech, so I won’t comment.

The idea of having a single payroll vendor doing all of the work in one place is fantastic, but it’s really pretty mythical.  Not one vendor can cover the entire globe, and most companies will have a gap somewhere, even with the big vendors like ADP and Ceridian.  Most organizations will try to get to 2-3 vendors to cover the globe, and some of them use outsourced BPO arrangements like AonHewitt or NorthgateArinso to coordinate these services.  Either way, single consolidated global payroll data is either on multiple vendors, or you spent millions of dollars and years of time consolidating on legacy HCM like SAP or PeopleSoft.

The other observation I’d make is that most global payroll organizations have to stack rank their companies for who is going onto a centralized platform and who is not.  For example, most companies decide on an employee count threshold to determine if it’s worth moving them to Streamline; under 100 employees and the cost of adding a Streamline country may not be worth the ROI .  These smaller countries are often left to their own devices and more manual integrations.

All in all, global consolidated payroll is still a bit mythical, but the last couple of years brought significant capabilities where the major vendors now have the ability to consolidate more than they had in the past.  As country footprints continue to increase, maybe a single global payroll provider is not such a distant future.

Let’s start off with recruiting because…. well everything starts off with recruiting.

User Experiences:  
The idea that you can take any of the older recruiting experiences like Taleo, Brassring, PeopleSoft, etc and wrap a UX around it is fantastic.  Half of the candidate problem is process and interview experience, but it all start with being able to submit an application in the first place.  We all know when we’re in the never ending PeopleSoft application submission process because most of us have never actually gotten to the end of it.  Manager experiences are equally bad, and half of our organizations can’t get managers to use recruiting functionality because it’s so bad.  We have HRBP’s supporting them instead.

• Jibe has been around for a few years that I know of, and they have an incredibly elegant candidate, manager and recruiter experience.    Jibe avoids all of that by cleaning up the experience, making it mobile and easy, and doing for a huge selection of ATS systems.  I do have some concerns with their laser focus on the user experience since at some point the vendors might catch up and make the UX overlay unnecessary, but for now and the next few years, there is a huge amount of opportunity for them.
• Findly is an organization that I just don’t understand their core ATS differentiator, but they also have the ability to wrap a UX around Taleo, Brassring and SuccessFactors recruiting.  At this point they are only doing a wrap around for the candidate experience, but it’s pretty decent.
• Many of the newer cloud ATS (including the ones mentioned below) have great UX – being architected in the last 5 years puts them far ahed of the old generation, and really makes it unnecessary to wrap a different UX around it.

Old vs. New ATS
One of the things I’m desperately trying to figure out is when the new vendors will be ready to fully take over the mantle from the older recruiting vendors.  We still have the old school, behemoth vendors with such robust and rich feature/functionality that deployment and maintenance of the applications just are not agile.  Then we have the new school of recruiting applications that are very agile, but don’t have nearly the depth in functionality.  Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium that allows 95% of our organizations to get what we need and manage staffing practices with the speed at which the employment market changes.

Just to name a few, we have Jobvite with good ATS adoption, but it’s obviously not Taleo in functionality, we have Smashfly who started in the referrals business and is trying to broaden functionality quickly, Hirevue started in interviewing and is also trying to grow into other areas.  All of the systems have gaps, and at some point the gaps are small enough that system viability is unquestionable over the old ATS .  Right now, this feels a bit like 2007 when the talent systems started buying each other ,but there were always clear strengths based on where the vendor’s original functionality was.  it took 5 years before end to end talent was truly viable.

Recruiting CRM:
I’m still seeing a pretty big gap in really capable recruiting CRM systems.  Integration to the truly powerful content marketing engines and really deep CRM that comes close to matching traditional CRM is just not there yet.  That said, there are recruiting CRM systems that do a great job, but there are not that many of them.

I’m pretty excited about recruiting systems this year.  I do think we’re in a transition phase where the old stuff looks a lot older this year, and the new stuff starts looking pretty good.  Next year should hopefully see more maturity and hopefully the start of the changing of the guards.

https://www.BizListings.com.au is the first website in its niche to completely move the entire site over to the https version, otherwise known as SSL (secure sockets layer). Previously, Biz Listings used SSL on member and payment pages only, but since this announcement moved the site over completely.

Google recently announced that SSL (https) is now there preferred format for websites, and websites which use SSL (https) will now receive an instant, but small SEO boost.

SSL allows sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely.

GeoTrust QuickSSL is a popular provider of SSL and reasonably priced, making it an affordable option for online businesses. It is a 256 bit encryption, which is the highest level of security and encryption available, making the connection between your websites servers and the browsers 100% safe!

Since moving to https, we can’t say that we haven’t actually seen a boost in the serps as a direct result, but we can say that the feedback we have received from our clients has been more than positive! This move has obviously given our customers, potential customers and Business Brokers who advertise with us trust and peace of mind when making a payment via our website.

Going forward I believe the SSL ranking factor will receive more of a boost, but most likely in 12 months or so, giving webmasters times to get things organised.

Author : Peter Watson

The post Business for Sale Avdertisers Get SSL Security appeared first on Business 2.

Property portal homesales.com.au has launched a new consumer campaign, promoting its unique investment search engine to property seekers.

Homesales is the only mainstream property portal to have a dedicated investment search engine, allowing property seekers to search for properties based on rental return, capital growth, cash flow and more.

According to Rhett Dallwitz, General Manager of homesales, “When it comes to the real estate market, every property purchase is an investment, which is why it’s important for property seekers to have access to the key data that will help them make an educated decision. We’re happy to be leading the way for all investors, and championing this market in the industry.”

To support the campaign, homesales will make use of outdoor advertising, including billboards and retail sites.

In addition to its consumer facing campaign, homesales is proud of growing agent backing, andhas recently engaged the industry with advertising featuring the message “We’re invested in you”.

Mr Dallwitz has explained that homesales is taking active measures to show its support for agents, including the recent expansion of its agent support team now, with more than 50 account managers and business development managers to service its clients.

“Being part of the carsales family gives us cross-network reach to millions of Australians every day, and we’re committed to helping the industry reach this lucrative audience. Our support team is growing, and we’re really excited about what we have in store over the next few months.” Said Mr Dallwitz.

For more information contact: media@homesales.com.au or 1300 291 914

The post Homesales.com.au Promotes Unique Investment Search Feature appeared first on Business 2.

Sometimes our KPI’s go desperately wrong, even though they seem to make sense.  My current personal goal is to get back to 10% body fat.  For those of you who don’t know me, let’s just say I’m already one “skinny ass dude.”  The problem is that less fat for a person who is generally athletic and out of doors as often as possible sounds like a good thing.  The question is, is it the right thing?  We actually face the same problem in our HCM KPI’s.  Here are a few examples.

Employee Referral %:  

• Employee’s who are referred to us by other employees are our best people.  Right?  Almost all of us would agree that this is true as these employees will have higher levels of engagement, are pre-screened as people we’d want to work with, are capable and smart.  The referrer has a stake in the person’s success, but their credibility is also on the line so they probably won’t be referring crappy people.
• Often, we’ll see that companies want to achieve as high a referral % as possible.  This allows the company to get more great people, but also reduce recruiting costs.  The problem is that there’s also a tendency to refer people who are similar to us.  This is a problem on a couple of fronts.  First of all, there is an ideation and innovation problem.  If you recruit people who are similar to you, who have similar experiences, have worked in the same places, you are not getting your company’s due in diverse thinking.  Second, people like us are not demographically diverse all of the time.  if you have a lot of “white dudes” and you want a 100% referral rate, you’re still going to be a bunch of “white dudes” in 5 years.

Employee Turnover %:

• This one is fun.  Some organizations are SO proud of the low turnover that they have.  I’ll walk into a new project and within day’s I’m inundated with how they have achieved 5% turnover.  I mean, having great employee engagement so much so that nobody ever wants to leave is a great thing, right?  We see targets of 8% and lower all the time.
• Depending on which philosophy to subscribe to, there is such a thing as “desirable turnover.”  Those are the Jack Welch bottom 10%, or in your forced bell curve performance ratings the bottom 5-15%.  Let’s just say that there are 10% of people in your organization at any time that SHOULD leave, and you should be encouraging to leave.  So if your desirable turnover is up to 10%, and your target is less than 10%, something is pretty much wrong.  Right?
• The key is to figure out how to shift the conversation to unwanted turnover rate instead of total turnover rate.  A very high performing organization could have a total turnover rate at 12%, but if their unwanted turnover is only 2%, I’d say they are doing fantastically.

We all want high referral rates, and we also want low turnover rates.  These are great KPI’s, but we take too much for granted and at face value.  Going to extremes just because there’s a number to hit impacts our organizations in a pretty negative way, and in HR , it usually means that we have some of the wrong people working for us.

One of the very few surveys that is just purely robust in it’s data set and is unquestionable in it’s quality is CedarCrestone’s Annual HR Technology Survey.  This is the 17th year of the survey, and we’ve all benefitted from its insights and direction.  It helps us all know what the market is thinking about and if we’re keeping up with everyone else.

All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in early October 2014. The first 100 respondents to complete all questions will receive a $5 Starbucks card. The 17th, 117th, and 1,017th respondents will receive a $100 Visa gift card in celebration of our 17th year. All who complete the Survey will be entered into a drawing for an in-depth Benchmark Service.

SystematicHR.com used to be one of the leading blogs in terms of how many responses this website generated versus other blogs.  In fact, at some point we were the top blog, but we slipped last year.

First:  Fill out the survey.  It’s worth doing just from the standpoint of helping out the industry.  Second, use this link!!!

We’ve been experimenting with the idea of standardization for decades, but more so in the last 15 years as our organizations have gotten more global and those global populations have kept increasing.  The evolution started with zero standardization.  it was really step one as global organizations just did whatever they wanted to.  There were shadow HR systems everywhere, country specific processes, and inconsistent delivery to the business.  Local HR organizations provided generally adequate service to the business, but corporate HR organizations couldn’t get simple head counts let alone anything that was actually useful.

Many organizations have moved to the next stage of evolution, the corporate mandate.  Corporate HR organizations tried to make some sense of this mayhem by implementing core HR systems and mandating that all countries around the globe had to have their employees entered into the common HR system.  This did nothing except ensure that country HR double entered employee data but kept their own individual way of processing transactions.  In almost all cases, the shadow systems (usually spreadsheets) still existed.  The problem is that most organizations think that there is a way to make the corporate mandate work, when really this is as much a failure as the mayhem that existed before.

We’ve also gone down the road of “the only modifications to standard processes will be for local compliance needs.”  Basically, we’ve told the local HR organizations that the local practice is not acceptable and we’re not going to cater to them unless there is a law involved.  Personally, I can’t think of much that less engaging.  Some things make sense, like if we’re transferring an employee, it should not be that different across the world.  Especially if transfers are across country borders, we really do want some consistency.  But when we get to things like how managers work with employee performance or the allocation of spot bonuses, there will often be some local flair that could be important.

What I’ve found is that the corporate HR mandate is just as dysfunctional as the mayhem of no standardization.  This is because the corporate mandate does not solution for local needs in any way, or even admit that local needs might be different.  It’s a totally selfish view by corporate HR organizations that the need of central authority, consistency, governance and data override everything else.  If we treated our personal relationships this way, we’d have no friends.  Luckily, we seem to have some sons socially in our personal lives.  Not so much in business though.

Here’s my solution.  At the end of the day, it’s about the business.  We need to let the in-country businesses decide that they can standardize and want to standardize.  This actually means de-standardizing for them.  In some cases, it’s as simple as providing them with the localizations they need (and that we promised them for compliance reasons, but for some reason we never came through on that promise).  In other cases, it’s giving in on the one extra level of approvals they want for the salary increase process.  In simple terms though, you almost never get what you want by mandate, you get it by partnership.

These days, the new HR systems all pretty much come with packaged localizations, so it’s not like the old days when you had to purchase the country pack and install the thing.  I’ll admit I’m not a fan of massive process customizations for every country – this becomes impossible to manage.  I’m really not a fan of anything other than the minor token tweak.  What we’ve found over time however, is giving in on one or two battles that are genuinely important to the local business will leave you from ten other battles that could have happened.  At the end of the day, it’s about finding that middle ground that gets you the desired results for both corporate HR and the local business at the same time.

INDEPENDENT DIGITAL MEDIA TO LAUNCH WEDDING SITE THEKNOT.COM.AU

Independent Digital Media (IDM) has announced a significant step in the creation of its high-quality women’s lifestyle portfolio of websites with an innovative, one-stop wedding site, TheKnot.com.au, set to launch in October 2009.

IDM has entered into a license deal with the world’s #1 wedding website TheKnot.com, which has an average of 2.3 million unique browsers globally per month, to launch the hugely popular site in Australia.

“TheKnot.com already boasts more than 31,000 monthly Australian-based unique browsers, which gives us a strong local audience from day one,” said IDM’s Publisher Marina Go.

“IDM differentiates itself from competitors through innovation and elevating both the user experience and the advertiser experience, and this new site will be a perfect example of this approach.”

The site is set to become the most comprehensive and integrated wedding site in the country, a mix of locally produced editorial and international content.

Former Westfield’s whatswhat.com.au Editor Alicia Richardson has been appointed Editor, and Conde Nast New York’s former Accessories Editor for Modern Bride Magazine Tania Riddell has been appointed Fashion Editor.

“We’re so excited to be working with such a strong editorial team. Together we’ll collaborate to combine our vast archives with fresh local wedding planning content, creating an inspirational and practical resource for Australian brides,” said The Knot Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Carley Roney.

TheKnot.com.au will join IDM’s beauty site PRIMPED.com.au, which launched in August last year and is now considered Australia’s leading premium, dedicated beauty website.

“Our goal is to launch five key online lifestyle brands. PRIMPED.com.au has beauty covered and we are confident TheKnot.com.au will become the market leader in the bridal category,” said IDM’s Deputy General Manager James Hannan.

“With the Australian wedding market worth $5 billion, 110,000 weddings a year and the average price of an Australian wedding at $30,000, TheKnot.com.au not only has broad appeal, but will cater to a relatively recession-proof market.”

Site features include:
• Unique format of searchable directories of everything from gowns to jewellery to flowers to honeymoons
• Photo galleries of ideas for all wedding elements from engagement to reception
• Advice on etiquette
• Planning tools covering budgets, guest lists, gift registers and seating plans
• A virtual scrapbook
• Community forums
• Real Weddings

TheKnot.com.au landing page, live from 3rd August, features a competition to win a Palazzo Versace escape prize; and a there is a display advertising package to be won for clients who sign up to join the directory with an enhanced listing from launch.

From: ##### <…..>
To: Seth Yates <….>
Sent: 27 March 2009 12:38
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Are you still there?

The person cannot be found

The person you are looking for might have been removed, had their  job changed, or be permanently unavailable.
——————————————————————————–

Please try the following:

* Try send your email to someone who still works at ###COMPANY NAME REMOVED####.
*If you sent this email by clicking a link, contact the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is obsolete.
*Click the Back button to try another link.

HTTP Error 404 – User or recipient not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

——————————————————————————–

Technical Information (for support personnel)

*Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 404.
*Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages.

Ilya Grigorik of Igvita has proposed and built a collaborative Map Reduce system in JavaScript that allows browsers to dive in and use their CPU to do some things.

Christian Johansen has released Juicer a very nice Sprocket-esque tool for packaging and managing your JavaScript AND your CSS.

It has taken all of the best practices and put them in one tool, including:

• resolve dependencies for JavaScripts and CSS files
• combine files
• add cache busters to URLs inside CSS files
• cycle asset hosts for URLs in CSS files
• minify files (currently only with YUI Compressor, later others as well)
• check syntax of JavaScripts with JsLint before they’re minifyed

The cache buster feature is quite cool. Take a look at the output of these commands: