Since the agents are paying franchise fees, should the traffic generated by an agent that subsequently clicks open the franchises corporate site be Free traffic to the franchise? Or should the franchise reward the agent for generating traffic to their site?

Free Traffic Means Franchises Receive Free Home Loan Leads

Most franchises now have their own home loan department & potentially the franchise can generate more revenue from their home loans than they do from franchise fees paid by their agents.

If a real estate franchise wants to increase its profile on the web they could provide a reduction in franchise fees for agents who include links to their corporate website or they could build in a monthly pay-per-click incentive for the agencies who send lots of visitors across to their corporate website.

Just think, if a franchise is prepared to use pay-per-click advertising on Google to generate traffic, then wouldn’t a click from one of their agents’ websites, blogs, twitter/facebook accounts have a similar value?

If the Real Estate Franchises adopted this concept they could reward their own agents instead of paying Google for leads.

I’m sure some franchises will frown upon this idea, but the forward thinking real estate franchises should see that this provides a real incentive for their agents to build a larger web presence, send more traffic to the franchises corporate website & build a bigger corporate brand which could help to generate more real estate offices & increase the franchises home loan revenue.

I feel that anything which reduces the running costs of an agency & helps to encourage agents to increase their web presence at the same time is a good thing. What do you think?

I’m going to simplify things, and speak in the generalities of 3 major regions. The Americas (usually the U.S. based business, but also encompassing at least North American partners) has reached a maturity in global business where they have a decent understanding about how to deploy global systems. U.S. multi-nationals have realized that good adoption of a global system will include early interaction from the global business partners. Even then, the U.S. is highly region-centric and doesn’t get the cost and complexity of trying to integrate global requirements into a single HRMS , although they generally really do try (now). And all of this is if a U.S. based business is calling the shots. More on the U.S. as a non-HQ region in a second.

EMEA (usually just a European business) justifiably think that they are quite unique. In fact, most American’s simply don’t understand the complex business environment that exists in EMEA. American’s tend to think the labor laws and financial requirements that exist in the U.S. must far surpass any complexity in EMEA, but that is far from true. EMEA is insanely difficult as you deploy languages, compliance requirements, differences in dealing with unions and work councils, and cross borders (lots of them). When EMEA is the HQ country, Europeans are a bit behind the U.S. in understanding global HR requirements. I’ll use the SAP system as a general example. SAP was always far behind any other HR systems in formulating their HR requirements. They simply didn’t see them as important, and the functionality was lead by U.S. based software companies. It really was not until the early 2000’s that SAP started to understand, but by then, other software companies had a decade head start. Even today, U.S. based
software companies seem to be far ahead in the area of advanced functionality.

Asia/Pac seems to be its own annoying world. Not only are they fairly antagonistic to “West-lead” initiatives, but they often don’t agree with the approach. I’ll have to give Japan a release on this one, but countries like China are becoming an integral part of global enterprises. Unfortunately, China is a prime example of a country that can literally hire 100 people just to run manual processes and still have a positive ROI versus implementing automation. Still, Asian subs and business units seem to like to do things their own way.

The core problem with global data is not about the technology. In fact, it’s really not even about the peculiarities of the HQ cultures. Instead, there is a global problem that simply points to the fact that each HQ places prime importance in the requirements that are most visible – their own. Alternative requirements don’t have as lofty a place, and when global systems are then implemented on top of biased priorities, you end up getting really unhappy region and business units.

In March this year a strange thing happened in the US when searching on Google. Websites that have never ranked on the front page for highly competitive keywords started to climb the rankings and replaced sites that seemed entrenched in the top 10 results. You might think this happens all the time but it doesn’t. Getting into the top 10 results for a competitive keywords takes a significant investment in SEO.

Using our industry as an example, ranking well for such highly prized keywords like real estate, property, homes for sale and other is not a very easy thing to do and the first thing you notice is that realestate.com.au is first for all three searches. However what a lot of people don’t realise is that out of the 30 results across all three searches very little of them are taken up by any of the major real estate groups or their members.

Obviously some of the other portals were on the first pages for all three searches and they fill another 13 of the the 30 positions. This means nearly half of the premium spots are filled with what I call minor sites with very good, or very lucky SEO.

To give this some perspective the private sales website, PropertyNow.com.au ranks a very commendable 4th position for the term “Real Estate” for pages in Australia on Google. This is behind major industry heavy weights that don’t even rank on the first page. In fact only the First National corporate website is the only group that appears on the first page as it comes in at number 6.

Using Google Trends to display their respective search traffic (http://bit.ly/qXF0k) we see that Propertynow.com.au is punching well above its weight. In fact it does not even show on the graph against Ray White and LJ Hooker even though they could only manage pages 2 and 5 respectively on the Search Engine Results Page.

In March Google rolled out what has been now called as Google’s Brand Update in the US. What happened was well known and popular brands started to appear high in the search engines results replacing those smaller sites that have elevated their position due to clever SEO work.

In the past week Google has also rolled out these changes to the UK. This article has a great explanation of it all here – http://www.seobook.com/google-branding and for a recent update on its rollout in the UK you can read this http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-brand-update-hits-the-uk/

It seems natural to assume that major brands are going to get a boost in search engine rankings at Google for Australian searches so pretty soon we are going to see a shake up in the traffic generated to the major real estate groups.

This spells trouble for the FSBO sites and other smaller property portals. Those members of major real estate group can probably see the upside of this article… but on the flipside I am sure the independents and those in smaller franchises and groups are probably seeing it in a completely different light.

When you start doing suburb and regionally targeted searches then the impact will really be felt by the independents and those in real estate groups not identified as being an industry brand. If the offices aligned with major real estate groups start to get a boost the traffic to many independent’s website might start to slow up.

In spite of recent pressures on the major portals, something like this MAY make the role of the major property portals even more important especially for the independents which I believe make up the majority of the agencies in Australia….. Well that is as long as Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au actually get the benefit of this change.

Nobody actually knows what Google is going to consider as a brand and how it ranks those brands. It is certainly possible that Google may not consider portals or data aggregators like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au as brands under real estate at all.

If google determines exactly what is an industry Brand based on what people search then all the portals may be in for troubled waters. Whilst they generate a lot of traffic very little of it would would be generated on searches by the public actually searching for them or about them. This post looks at the relationship to Google Brand Updates in the UK and what people actually search for http://bit.ly/1ap0Iy and if its right then the portals might be getting nervous.

To prove this I used Google Insight for the top two portals of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and Ray white and LJ Hooker and you can see very view people actually search for the portals by name. See this http://bit.ly/mLNqx

If on the other hand they base it on how many visitors each website gets then you would have to think they will be considered as the industries top brands. One thing is for sure, there is going to be some nervous people at the portals until we find out just which side of the fence this is going to fall because this is the last thing they need.

Major real estate groups seem to be the only guaranteed winners and independents as the only guaranteed losers. With the UK update just released it will be interesting to see if any of the UK portals start losing traffic as this might be the best indicator of how the change will effect us once it arrives, as it surely will.

Mobile phones are similiar to personal computers and they have an operating system that provides the phones with their core functionality and that runs on specific hardware and you can install software to your phone. Again in a very similiar way to computers, the mobile phone hardware manufacturers are often different from the makers of the operating system.

Apple is the standout exception to this rule as in both their computers and their mobile phone they manufacture both the hardware and the operating system.

It is only natural to compare the Magic to the Apple iPhone but that is not as easy as it first seems because there are three different hardware versions of the phone with only the last two officially offered offered in Australia. With the latest iPhone 3Gs only just released it now comes with a greatly updated operating system which fixes many of previous issues and introduces new features that bring it much closer to the HTC Magic.

Of course the iPhone community has been going for a lot longer and there are more than 10 times the available add on applications and many websites have developed iPhone specific websites.

What is Android?

This review is as much about the Android Operating System as it is about the HTC Magic handset.

Android is a Linux based operating system for mobile phones and mobile devices. Reports are coming out with media players, GPS units, photo frames and even desk phones that use Android. Whilst Google originally developed the Android operating system it has handed over the continuing development of the OS to the Open Handset Alliance which is a collection of 50 companies that are now responsible for its development.

On top of Google the list of those involved with Android includes mobile phone heavyweights HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Erricson and and major players from the computer and allied industries including Intel, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Garmin, Asustek, Acer and Nvidia.

This pulls together a huge amount of the mobile phone market on one project and apart from Apple the obvious industry stand out missing from this list is Nokia. If Google can pull it off they can do for the mobile phone operating system what Microsoft did for the PC. the difference is that Google built android up to what we see today after buying the original company who developed it, and then handed it over to the industry for the greater good releasing most of the code as open source so the alliance could develop it further.

The next 12 months will see an explosion in the number of android based handsets as manufacturers release new models. I have read somewhere that there are 19 different versions due for release prior to the end of the year.

The HTC Magic Handset

The HTC Magic is available through Vodaphone and Three. I am not going to get into the finer specifications of the phone but if you want them they are available on the HTC website. Opening up the package I was pleasently surprised with what I can only call a sleek black handset. I always felt the iPhone was just too big and heavy but the Magic seems a good comprise. It is only just smaller than the iPhone in size but it it fits my hand size perfectly.

The screen quality is simply amazing and it has the same resolution as the iPhone although in an ever so slightly smaller screen size. There is nothing worse than clicking away on a mobile phone and you have to wait till the phone catches up. The responsiveness of the Android operating system to commands is the best I have used and can probably only be matched by the very latest iPhone model which I have yet to have the pleasure of playing with.

Smartphones traditionally are a bit kludgy to operate and the first two iPhones suffered a little with this. . What I mean by that is if you click on a button there is that pause before something happens and sometimes it seems like an eternity. The Magic on the other hand feels and reacts quickly, very quickly.The latest iPhone version adds an “s” to the model to denote the extra “speed” in this new version to differentiate this new model from its slower predecessors.

Most of the commands are done on the touch screen but there are key buttons at the bottom for specific functions, namely Home, Menu, Back, Search, Answer and Hangup. The magic also provides a tiny trackball which gets occassional use acting as a small mouse on the screen when your fingers are just too big for the finder adjustments.

Because the operating system was designed by Google its integration with the Internet, Google programs and websites in particular, is amazing. When you start up the phone you have to enter your Google Account information or create one on the fly.

Whilst the camera on the phone is a fairly decent 3.2 megapixels, you wont be buying this or any mobile phone for its photography skills. Leave that to a dedicated camera, but for outdoor emergency shots at least, the HTC Magic is going to give you a reasonable photo.

Like all smartphones battery life is going to be a challenge. When you are running quite a powerful mobile computer with bluetooth, wireless and gps functioning it sucks power and the HTC magic is no different. Forget any talk time statistics that you read on the web, because that is with all the connectivity features turned off and if that’s really what you want to do then why are you buying a smartphone. Expect to be charging the phone at least at the end of every day and putting it on charge at your desk or in the car if you need to throughout the day to keep it topped up.

The Good

The android market operates very similar to Apple’s and allows you to add any one of thousands of features to your phone in seconds. What is addictive is looking through all the available programs to make sure your not missing out on anything outstanding. At the moment there is under 4000 options but before long it will be approaching the huge numbers available to the iPhone users.

I got the Three version of the Magic primarily because of the higher onboard RAM. The onboard Microsoft Exchange sync that it also features can be added to the Vodaphone version through the market.

Internet functions are a dream and the inbuilt web browser handles everything I have thrown it so far. I can even do secure banking natively in the browser. We had our “boys day out” deep sea fishing yesterday and I authorised all bank transfers and the pays right from my phone as we moved from one fishing spot to another all while surrounded by water and with the Gold Coast in the distant.

Unlike the iPhone the Magic and Android combo handles multi-tasking beautiful. Listen to music while you browse the internet and then quickly check on a new email or sms that came in. Switching between programs is easy and natural. The iPhone on the other hand does one thing at time in a very linear and static mode. That always amazed me given Apple’s pedigree with their computers.

The lack of a physical keyboard cuts down the weight and the onboard keyboard is remarkably easy to use. After a couple of days use I only very rarely make a mistake on the keyboard now.

Because of Google’s heritage Android is not as restrictive as the iphone from a programming perspective. This allows some very unique add on solutions. The Locale application allows you to predetermine a number of the phones settings based on several criteria such as your physical location, calendar item, battery life, time of day or contact calling. You can program any of these triggers to change a range of the phones settings including wifi, bluetooth, ringtone, screen brightness, ring volume and a few other things. I have a range “situations” in my locale settings but one of them is based one when the phone detects I have arrived at work it will change my ringtone to something more acceptable within an office, it changes my wallpaper, increases my ring volume level, bumps up the brightness of the screen and turns on wireless networking if it was turned off.

I have another situation that triggers at midnight and runs till 7 am where it turns the volume of the ringer right down and drops the brightness of the screen. The ringer volume of a phone during the day can wake the whole household if it goes off at 4am and a bright screen is very hard to focus on when you just open your eyes up. The situations you can build seem endless and this features whilst technically are within the iPhones abilities are locked out because of the restrictions enforced by Apple.

Google runs its own database of wifi access points around the world and when combined with mobile phone towers it allows your phone to have a low power way of knowing fairly accuratley where it is without even firing up the GPS. Android will detect those access points and transmit the location of them back to the database ensuring it is kept up to date. Locale uses Google’s location database as well as another source which allows you to submit access points you regularly connect to or at least that your phone identifies.

The Bad

The battery, the battery, the battery. Smartphones are just mini handheld computers with a dialer built on to them so they do a lot of processing which eats battery life. All smartphones have the same problem and the HTC magic is certainly no exception. Having had a smartphone before I am use to it, but those who are use to charging only a couple of times a week on less powerful and basic phones are in for a surprise. The HTC Magic can be charged from the either the included wall charger or by plugging in to any usb port with a standard mini usb plug. The same plus that is used for digital cameras and lots of other peripherals.

Whilst Google Maps is fantastic as of today there is no actual commercial turn by turn navigation software available for Australia. The CoPilot version for the US and Europe has just been released and they have confirmed that the Australian maps are due out next month.

Whilst multi-touch capability is built into the hardware it is disabled in the operating system until the issues with Apple and their claim to an over riding patent is dealt with. Multi touch is not an Apple invention but try and tell them that! I have read different accounts as to when this feature is suppose to be officially unlocked but everyone seems to agree that it will be and sooner rather than later. There are dubious ways to get this working, but for my mind waiting until it is official will be the way to go.

Because you are always connected to the internet and there is background data happening all the time make sure you have a good data plan on your phone. Three provide all owners with a 50% discount on all data packages which means that a 1gb or 2gb data plan is quite reasonable and should be considered as a minimum.

HTC Magic and Android for the Real Estate Agent

The operating system is easy to use and understand and if you are in the market for a smartphone to assist with selling real estate then this has to be up for serious consideration. In fact I would go so far as to say that it is one of only a handful of contenders that are worth looking at right now and they include the iPhone, the latest Blackberry and possibly the Nokia N97 which has only just been released.

Browsing the mobile versions of real estate websites like REA and Domain is a breeze and because of the screen size and brilliant built in browser it is still fantastic for non-mobile versions.

Google Maps integration is brilliant and Android even allows you to use the “My Maps” feature on your handset for future attention. You can even conduct voice searches for hands free searching.

Syncing emails, tasks and calendar items with your Microsoft exchange server works perfectly and you are presented with a full html version of your emails unlike Nokia’s exchange syncing which provides a cut down text only version.

The HTC Magic and Android combo handles viewing pdf and Microsoft Excel and Word documents with the included copy of Quickoffice. The android market includes a huge array of additional software to customise your phone to your heart desires. Some of the other apps suitable for an agent include mortgage calculators, Twitter and Facebook integration, conversion tools, compass and Twilight which is a fantastic application to show the best time for twilight photography.

You can even get VNC clients to control computers in your office and a full RDP client is about to be released. There is a a number of instant messaging clients for all the major instant messaging services and there is even a Jabber client which will allow me to connect to our office’s instant messaging service.

The Google Latitude service allows you to share your location with anybody you authorise. This allows location sharing amongst the sales team and property management team. Before you start thinking Big Brother there are very good ways you could use this application and every person involved has full control of whether they are sharing their location with everyone else or not. They can turn it off or they can even manually send a location (let your team mates thinking your visiting the Trevi Fountain in Rome for the afternoon). One of the most valuable ways this could be used though is for personal security. The dangers involved in the industry especially for female staff have been highlighted in recent years. Allowing the office to know the location of all staff, but particularly the females has a real security benefit.

The android market provides you with an endless amount of customisation. If you deal with overseas clients a lot, then you can have a live currency converter application on hand. If you use permission based marketing like Twitter and Facebook, then you have a range of applications to keep your fans and followers up to date. If you do your own property photography the Sunrise/Sunset application will make sure you know the best time of day for those amazing twilight shots. Access an application to convert hectares to acres, metres to feet, or etc etc.. the list seems endless.

Conclusion

The HTC Magic is truly an incredible phone that has seriously impressed me. Its not perfect by a long shot but nothing available is. There are very few phones that can even come close to it on a feature for feature basis and since most of the people who want an iPhone already have one its biggest competitor, at least in the short term will probably be other Android phones soon to be released. Its a stylish phone, but it’s not something you buy to be trendy, rather it is something you buy because it is so functional.

8.5 out of 10

Resources

Android @ Wikipedia

The Google Experience on Android

Google Mobile Blog

HTC Magic @ HTC

Android Phone Tips

Android Application Reviews at www.androidtapp.com

Android Home Page

Was this a merger, or an acquisition? Well, to be honest, my first reaction to this was that Wyatt got the upper hand. I think I’m probably mistaken on this though. It really does seem that just about everything is being split 50/50. Each gets 50% of board members, the partners at each firm get 50% of stock, etc… However, Wyatt did indeed get the CEO. I’d generally say that this makes good sense since Wyatt was previously public and a CEO who understands how to operate in the public environment certainly has the upper hand. Towers CEO now gets to be president.

What do I think of the retirement industry? Well, combining Wyatt (who I have long assumed was the largest actuarial firm out there) with TP really creates a behemoth in the retirement industry. I have no idea if this is a good thing or not. Sure, the new company will get the lions share of any new work available (which won’t be much), but the retirement industry is dying a slow death. On the other hand, that slow death is obscenely slow. Realistically speaking, if every plan shut down today, you’d still have to make actuarial valuations on an annual basis until the last plan participants died. That would be decades. In the mean time, this new company has an incredibly stable base of revenues. It really does not matter what happens to the markets and recessions like we have right now. When the plan needs an actuary, they will pay for it. Even if retirement work declines at 3-5% each year, there is still 30-40 years of very steady income.

What happens to HR service delivery and technology work? This is probably the area I’m most concerned about. Really, the Wyatt-TP merger presents an opportunity to the smaller players in the industry. I always saw Wyatt as more of a mid-market player. Actually they have some really good people, but just don’t have the depth and bench strength that TP once had. In the last year, TP ended up completely removing its SAP and PeopleSoft practices and severly cutting much of the technology practitioners as the economy went shouth. Certainly as we have discussed on systematicHR, this is consulting business that is subject to the swings in the economy. Still, the merging of a mid-market player with an organization that has seriously trimmed its service delivery and technology capabilities does not make for a HR technology think tank. I think that the Hewitt, Accentures, and Delloittes have it best right now. While Accenture and Delloitte have not been the strongest in HR consulting (IMHO), they have been the best at integrating HR consutling with other functions like finance and technology. Hewitt on the other hand has probably the best grasp of H operations from their HRO ventures. I’d also say that small boutiques have been getting a much larger share of the HR technology and strategy market for several years now, and they are in better position now than ever before.

The site has a number of new features. Users of the site can search for listings in a particular suburb and then refine the listings down using the various option, the map reloads and only the listings appear with your search (as little icons on the map). Users can then review property information via map pop ups and then go directly to the agents listing from there.

Currently there are a number of listings driven from Homehound, Harcourts and other groups, however Domain and Realestate.com.au have yet to send their listings through the free service from Google.

You can send feeds via the API or from a variety of Feed types and research this by clicking here. Talk to your feed provider about getting your listings on Google, its free and it should bring your business some pretty good leads as Google Maps has some pretty good research tools already built in.

Business2.com.au will write a review in next few days. Below is the press release from Google Australia.

Google today announced the addition of a real estate search feature to Google Maps in Australia. The new feature allows real estate agents, franchise groups and portals alike to upload their listings directly to Google Maps at no cost, making them more easily discoverable by the millions of Google Maps users in Australia.

Increasingly, people are starting their search for a new home online – Nielsen research shows that 87% of Australian home buyers use the internet to research properties*. Google saw more than 35% growth in real estate-related searches from Jan/Feb 2008 to Jan/Feb 2009**.

“We know that many Australian home buyers already use Google Maps to help their house-buying and renting decisions, especially driving directions and Street View, and by making real estate listings available right in Google Maps we can drive qualified buyers directly to listings,” says Andrew Foster, product manager, Google.

“It’s a simple and free way for real estate companies to make their listings even more discoverable, and have them seen on an easy-to-navigate map.”

Real estate agents can visit http://maps.google.com.au/realestate to find out more information about how to work with Google to have their listings appear on Google Maps.

The new feature lets potential home buyers enter a city or suburb and see available listings represented by markers or small circles on the map. They can then refine their search by price, type of property, bedrooms, bathrooms, and parking. The map will automatically update with relevant listings when panned or zoomed to another suburb, and when the search criteria is changed. Clicking on a marker or a small circle will provide more information about the listing, as well as the contact details of the listing agent and a link to their website.

President of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, Rob Druitt, said agents and property managers in WA would welcome the opportunity to have their listings searchable on Google Maps.

“The real estate profession, perhaps more than many others, has become strongly focused around IT and the use of websites over the last decade. The evolution of the internet has transformed the sector, such that buyers, sellers and renters are much better informed and have easy and quick access to images and contacts. Indeed, this is now the high expectation with property consumers.

“Agents are keen to embrace this, as they are always looking for new and different ways to increase exposure of their listings without runaway expenditure. The opportunity presented by Google can only help in this regard,” Mr Druitt said.

The original Google Maps prototype was invented by four engineers in Sydney: Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, all of whom still work in Google’s Sydney engineering centre. All over the country, Australians use Google Maps to find addresses and local businesses, see satellite imagery, obtain driving directions, and create and share personalised maps, making it the most popular online maps site in Australia according to Nielsen NetRatings (May 2009).

Note: Google Australia will answer all reasonably related questions if you clearly include them in comments below.

Whilst I still believe that real estate agents should be using Facebook for marketing themselves & their real estate business, after reading this article about Facebook Click Fraud it may be better for agents to proceed with caution if they intend to use the Pay Per Click advertising section.

Many companies use Facebook’s Pay Per Click Advertising platform because the demographic information collected about Facebook users enables companies to target their marketing campaigns within the social media environment.

Some companies also prefer using Facebook’s Advertising rather than waiting for the SEO on their site to kick in and/or they feel that it’s better value than having to compete for expensive keywords within SEM campaigns on the search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.

Facebook advertising generated $280 million in revenue in 2008 & they are expecting $550 million this year. But with the grey cloud of Click Fraud hanging overhead, Facebook will be keen to rectify these issues very quickly.

For the moment, agents may be best to limit their Facebook marketing to the 3 Free strategies.

1. Building your personal Facebook profile
2. Creating a Facebook Fan Page for your company
3. Creating a Facebook Group

Ah. I love it when a plan comes together.

Other adaptations of social networking techniques create new takes on a traditional job board. Online Recruitment owner Geoff Jennings says he runs a number of different Twitter accounts that “feed” (provide updates to) “followers” (people who agree to receive his messages) a one-line description of particular categories of jobs, followed by a weblink to the job ad on a different website such as Careerone.com.au. The information he uses is collated by a third party, a website called an aggregator (www.recruit.net), which “scrapes” information off a number of websites and collates it into a single-line description called a “news feed”. Jennings takes this news feed, combines it with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from other sites than ban aggregation, and mixes in a few of his client’s positions that he is contracted to fill. He then broadcasts the jobs on Twitter, under account names such as ITjobsbris and ITjobssydney and gamerjobs.

“At this stage I am just testing the service. My company is not yet big enough to draw a large following on Twitter if I only put the jobs my company was recruiting for. But if I put many jobs on I can feed to a broader audience,” he says.

“That’s my strategy, anyway. I am very up-front about it (on those accounts).”

He maintains a personal account under his own name: “I don’t flog jobs in there, it’s to brand me as a recruiter. But on the other accounts, people don’t want to see me in there among the jobs.”

He says while he doesn’t get a large number of inquiries from Twitter to his company’s positions, the response so far is promising.

“I do get a lot of people ‘re-Twitting’. That’s when people pick up my Tweet and put a RT in front of it and send it out to their network. Then you get that community-based thing going. From that, I have had emails saying ‘I am interested, tell me more’.”

Social networking expert and author of Connection Generation Iggy Pintado says Jennings could possibly represent the future direction of Twitter.

Despite this difficult Q1, we believe the market is going to come roaring back in Q2 or Q3 of 2009. Most of the private companies we talk with (Plateau, CornerstoneOnDemand, Learn.com, GeoLearning, Halogen, and others) tell us that while they had a weak Q1, they have seen tremendous growth opportunities in Q2.

First, the mid-market and small enterprise segment of talent management is starting to grow rapidly.

Fourth, there is still tremendous demand for talent management software. In today’s rapidly changing workforce (from layoffs to restructuring to rapid growth), the value of this set of software is greater than ever. While Q1 was tough for vendors, most buyers only postponed their purchases – giving themselves more time to evaluate options and improve their own businesses. In Q2, Q3, and Q4 these companies will buy these systems.

So my thinking on the slump basically reflects back to 2001 when the dot-com bubble “burst.” When that happened, basically, HR technology spending totally dried up. It actually took about 3 years for HR technology spending to come back, and when it did, spending came back with a vengeance. My theory on this was that when spending cuts happened in 2001, HR technology was among the first to be cut. Then as the recession ended and things got better, neglected business critical technologies were upgraded, implemented, and restored. Things like CRM or supply chain that didn’t get needed upgrades for months or years got the first funding dollars.

As we all know (or think), in most companies HR funding is a lower priority than other business functions. I don’t see any reason to see this to be any different as the economy recovers this time. As organizational revenues recover, employees will be rehired or returned from furloughs, business critical applications will be maintained first, and budget cycles will still lag a year behind needs. Before an organization goes out and spends $100K or even $1M on any HR application including talent management, there are a whole lot of other unspent business critical dollars that will probably come first. HR budgets that got slashed in 2009 will still remain slashed in organizations with any governance at all. Perhaps some organizations will get dollars in their budgeting cycles at the end of this year, making dollars available in 2010, but I’m guessing that 2010 budgets will focus in other areas than HR .

Perhaps Josh is a better judge than I am though. It may indeed be possible that certain talent applications will actually fare better than most other HR technologies. Performance and Succession ran such high profiles in the last few years that we can only hope executives remain enamored with those technologies. I’m not a big fan of looking at vendor pipelines for guidance on future sales. Every vendor (application, outsourcing, or consultancy) has great looking pipelines right now. Salespeople seem to be sandbagging as much questionable prospecting into their pipeline portfolios as they can right now, as much to remain optimistic as to try and keep their jobs. Pipelines are also more robust in number of prospects, but smaller in terms of deal size. The mega deals that have kept vendors going for years will be slower to rebound. I think that most organization will have to deal with the technologies they were able to install in the last couple of years and hope they continue to work for a couple more years.

Referral Building

One of the recognized methods that Search Engines use to rank websites is by placing preference on what they consider authoritative websites. One of the key methods to assess your authoritative value is by analysing your website content, but we will discuss that in a future article.

The other way they calculate a websites authoritative value is by checking what websites link to you and to a lesser extent what websites you link to. The search engines understand that if popular well visited and quality websites who cover your website’s topic link to your website then there is a very high chance that you are also a quality website on that same topic. It conversely stands to reason that links from low quality off topic websites will provide no authoritative value at all, and in fact can impact negatively on your ranking. A link from a highly ranked website is like a “vote” and the more votes you get the better. The seo value or “vote” a website passes to another with a referral link is often coined “link juice”.

PageRank

Google uses a page quality ranking system called PageRank which covers the popularity of a page or website. PageRank is only part of the whole equation but it is a useful way to determine how popular a website is with incoming weblinks. Just remember as far as google is concerned PageRank is only one of the ranking factors of why your website is top of the list. A good PageRank (abbrieviated to PR) for an agency is 3 or 4. Anything higher is probably an unrealistic goal given the traffic and exposure an indivudal agency can generate… but there is no harm in trying.

So one of the most important parts of improving your SEO strategy is to build quality referral links back to your website. These links back to your website will create a level of traffic in their own right but their real value from an SEO perspective is the “link juice” they pass to you allowing you to rank higher and get more traffic from the search engines.

There are several ways to build referral links to your website but the easiest quickest place to get your site listed on Interent website directories. That’s what we are going to concentrate on first but I will discuss other strategies of building website links later in the article.

Website Directories – Paid or Free?

In the early days of the web very few web directories charged as they all tried to build up their website’s content. Over recent years things have changed and now a few web directories have started to charge to list your site. They built up high PageRank rankings for their websites when free and then changed a “fee” to websites to get themselves listed on a high PR site. Google recently applied a manual override to many directories “selling” links from their websites for what they considered as an excessive charge.

Even though paying a reasonable amount to get your listed is probably not out of the question, for my mind there are very few websites that are worthwhile paying for at the end of the day. There is one major exception for that rule though and that’s Yahoo.

Get Ready

Before you start submitting your website some thought has to be put into exactly what information you submit. Other than your website address and email you are going to require two other pieces of information for just about all directories you submit to. You should prepare these for two reasons. Firstly its very important that you use the right keywords as it will help your SEO and secondly it will speed up your submission process when you can cut and paste the information every time.

Website Title

It is important to include your primary keywords in the website title but ensure you don’t include promotion terms.

“Nerang First National Real Estate – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent” might be acceptable but

“Nerang First National, the Gold Coasts Best Real Estate Agent” would not be.

Description

It is important to cover the range of services on your website. Different sites will allow different length descriptions of your website so create one default description and change it if you have it or you can create a small and a large version.

“Specialising in residential real estate services for the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park, Worongary and the surrounding hinterland of the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia. Website features include property for sale, property for rent, real estate guide, free advisory guides to download, local community and business directory, email newsletters, blog and more”

might be ok for a directory submission but something like

”Nerang property for sale and rent” would be very poor utilization.

Selecting the Right Category

When you submit to a business directory it is vitally important that you submit to the right category. Submitting to the wrong category will at best slow down your acceptance but at worst will mean that your submission is not even considered at all. Some directories are sorted by suburb or city. Some are just sorted by state.

I will try and make some recommendations along the way but do some research and make sure you place your submission in the best category. Some directories will even let you submit to more than one category so when you can maximize your exposure and select as many as you can. On the directory pages look for words similar to “add your site”, “add your url”, “add your business” or something similar

The Top Tips for your submissions

1. No words in CAPITALS
2. No promotional language – ie. Sydney’s Best Real Estate Agent
3. Remember to use keywords that buyers or sellers would use.
4. Read the submission rules and follow them.
5. Submit to the right category

Major Web Directories

There are two web directories that are essential in SEO and are the single most powerful things you will do throughout this whole series.

DMOZ or Open Directory Project

This is one of the most powerful web directory and your listing in the directory will provide you an instant boost to your SEO. Why is it so powerful? “The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.”

This directory is used directly by nearly 150 other sites on the interent as their own directory. In simple terms you list once on DMOZ and if accepted you will automatically get listed on nearly 150 other high quality sites. Even Google itself rebrands the DMOZ directory data as its own Google Directory. Because of this sheer power and the fact that every single submission is checked manually by a real person, the directory is held in very high regard.

You are only allowed up to 30 words as a description so make them count. Browse to your geographic region first. Ideally submit your category into the real estate section of the business section under the locality but if one does not exist yet, just submit to the business section or even the locality category. Do not submit to state or national real estate sections as it will not be allowed unless you deal with the whole state and will just delay your submission.

Yahoo Web Directory

This is the only directory that I would suggest you pay the listing fee without question. Listing in the yahoo directory is very important SEO wise and like DMOZ every submission is manually checked. Unlike DMOZ that is a community maintained, the Yahoo directory is a business which is why there is now a listing charge.

Browse to the category of your local area and then add your listing to the real estate section if it exists or else just add it there

Other Important Directories to Submit To

Google Local Directory

For some search types (and real estate is one of them) Google includes a map section at the top of the page when you use their search engine. This information is populated directly from the Google Local Directory. The default data is now drawn from the Yellow Pages but DO NOT rely up on this. Creating your own listing is easy and will get you on the top of the list on the front page plus it puts more information in the directory listing.

ZoomInfo

This is a well regarded business directory and although US centric, most of the search engines are based in the US as well.

Other Directories to submit to include:

• Hotfrog
• International Real Estate Directory
• Property Listings Australia
• Come on Aussie
• TrueLocal
• Brownbook
• Start Local
• YourEstate.com.au
• HouseHunters
• Real Estate Guide.net
• Just Real Estate

Link Exchanges

There are many websites that will list you in their directory if you link back to them first. If it’s a good quality site and its about real estate then this may be worthwhile. Don’t bother unless it is about real estate. If you decide to exchange or swap link then you will first need to setup a links page on your website. Call this page, Links, Real Estate Links, Real Estate Resources or whatever you want but its purpose is to provide links to other real estate websites. Search “Real Estate Link Exchange” on google and you will find plenty of contenders.

Dont base your whole link building efforts on these exchanges but they are good to bolster your numbers.

Local Directories. Do a search on google to find local business directories to submit to. As an example searching for “Gold Coast Business Directory” and “Gold Coast Website Directory” identifies a number of local web directories that we can submit our agency website to.

Other Link Building Strategies

Here are some ideas for building other links back to your website, all of which will help your SEO.

• Include your link on everything off the net, especially if it is published online as when it is it becomes a link back to you. Things like job ads, print magazines, press releases and many more things end up online.
• Because Government (gov.au) and Educational (edu.au) domains are unavailable to just anybody, getting a link from them is very good for SEO and one of the best ways to get this is to sponsor your local school and get them to link to your website from the schools website.
• Get everyone from the same real estate network and the same area to all link to each other.
• Make sure you comment on blogs and forums and use your web address.
• Create your own blog. Other people will reference your blog posts either in their blog or will book mark it in many of the social bookmarking sites.
• Setup accounts on social bookmarking sites like Delicous and Stumbleupon and bookmark your own websites but don’t just stop there
• Create a Google Profile, Linked In Profile, Twitter Account for you and then a Twitter Account for your agency, Facebook Account for you and then a Twitter Page for Your agency. Each of these accounts allows you to link back to your website and to each other.

So Who Should You Link To

Since what sites you link to also improves your own authoritative value why dont you consider creating your own link section by linking to other websites about real estate and about your immediate area. Setting up a local business and community section on your website and a real estate guide will help find a home for these links. Government and education websites also have extra importance here so dont forget to link to those sites. Things like state industry bodies, local schools, universities, local businesses.

Dont go crazy and link to every single website you can find on the topic and dont link to everyone that links to you. Most experts agree that a link from someone that you dont reciprocate to is worth more than a link you do. Some seo experts suggest Site A links to Site B which in turn only links to Site C which links only back to Site A.

When you create your own link exchange pages you will get others contacting you to ask about exchanging links with you. Why not get a little proactive about it and set the rules on your page for how to exchange links. Something like these:-

If you wish to be considered for addition to this links page :

1. All websites are to be for sites on Real Estate, Property, Property Investment, Nerang or the Gold Coast
2. Links are not to include no follow attributes and if you remove your link so will we
3. Please create a link on your website that can be accessed through your homepage (no orphaned pages) with the following link “Nerang First National – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent – specialising in residential real estate services in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park and the Gold Coast Hinterland including property for sale and property for rent”
4. Please send the location of our link on your website and the link text you require to linkexchange@nfn.com.au

WARNING ! Do not participate in a Link Farms or link building system.. ever..

A link farm is a collection of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of links to other websites through an organised link swapping. The links are not natural and each particpant has the same links page on their website with virtually the same links. This practice is frowned upon and you will probably get a negative impact on your SEO. Link farms certainly use to work when authoritative value was first introduced but now they do not.

At least one self styled Real Estate SEO expert is still pushing his link farm matrix as some magical form of SEO even though it has realy helped nobody else and all major search engines strongly warn in writing against participating or running a link farm. It is believed that a possible link farm trigger will be raised with search engines if you have any more than 100 links on page. If any page is even approaching this limit split it into multiple pages. If someone promises to give you hundreds or thousands of links for a price remember, if it sounds too good to be true… IT IS.

Link building should be done manually which is time and effort.. but you only have to do it once for the link work for you for years and even decades.

Next Article

The next article in the series will cover Keyword Research and working out exactly what sort of keywords outside of the “<<Suburb>> Real Estate” and “<<Suburb>> Property” normal ones you should be targeting.

Further Reading

The SEOmoz article Search Engine Ranking Factors is the results of a survey covering this very topic with 37 SEO Experts. It ranks common SEO strategies, how the experts rank each strategy and rates the agreement between them all. SEOmoz also produce a fantastic “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” at . You can even download the guide and print it out for later reading.

The truth of the matter is that data warehouses are inherently bad at being data hubs. An essential part of the data warehouse is the ETL engine. ETL stands for Extract, Translate, Load, and it’s the translate part that gives us problems. When the translations occur, what is actually happening (simplistically) is the data goes through a transformation so that when you report in the end stat of a data warehouse the data definitions are the same. The transformation is really an alteration of the data so that analytics are made simpler and possible at the same time. However, transformed data does not really work well for integration.

Let’s take salary grades as an example. When you do a global analysis of salaries, you would probably load in global employee salaries, currency conversion rates, and then perform a calculation to convert the data into the home currency. The report then might look at the distribution of salaries across several bands. These bands however, have been transformed into global bands as opposed to using the home country’s salary grades. In many cases, the original salary grades may not have gotten into the data warehouse intact. (just an example I thought of off the top of my head).

I would suggest that to be a true data hub, you would want to have the original data from the original system. Let’s say that you need global employee data from many sources to load into a single global succession system. Not only will you be taking employee indicative data, but you’ll want performance scores, education, goals, etc… Once again, the problem with a data warehouse here is that performance scores in each country may utilize different rating scales, etc. The normalized data out of a data warehouse may not be suitable for the succession application depending on the decisions you make when you implement.

The alternative is to use what is usually called the ODS, or the Operational Data Store. The ODS often exists within the DW application, but is a loading area (after the E in ETL, but before the TL). The ODS is not ideal because it’s really just a storage tank before translation, but does hold untransformed data from all the systems. While not intended as an interface engine, its tables could be used for it (I suppose), but the actual transformed data tables are simply not appropriate for use as an interface engine in my opinion.

In this policy, REA state that their “business model focuses upon licensed real estate agents as our primary customers”. It also states the “entity does not obtain at least the range of agent services set out above, REA will consider that such a listing is a “private listing”” and that “REA has made the decision not to allow private listings on its website”

However this is where the Hypocrisy starts as one hand forgot to tell the other what it was doing. REA forgot to tell Hubonline just what the rules are and even though REA owns and operates both realestate.com.au and hubonline they are working against each other.

Hubonline created the website for www.myhomeisforsale.com.au which in turn uploads and continues to upload their listings to realestate.com.au but these listings are in clear breach of realestate.com.au’s “Private Selling Policy”.

From the website of www.myhomeisforsale.com.au – “My Home Is For Sale is a professional property advocacy company which holds a real estate license. We work with you to sell your home, providing you with the tools to sell your home without paying agents fees.”

When you see realestate.com.au’s sister company is guilty of flouting the rules, you can understand why nobody else in the past seemed to have been forced to follow the rules and stop uploading private sales.

So what does all this mean..?? First of all, let be clear… you can’t blame websites like www.myhomeisforsale.com.au and the others. They are just trying to make a buck and if REA does not enforce its own rules you can understand why they continue to upload private sellers to the system. In fact given that it was hubonline that built their website you could argue that it was given some sort of implied approval at least. In fact, if that website turns out to be pointless for their business model I reckon they should be able to ask for their money back as Hubonline should have known the concept breached REA’s rules.

A few of the comments in the other posts have focussed on the ACCC getting involved with this whole issue based on anti-competitive grounds. Till now I personally thought that was stretching it but when an REA business builds a website that is outside of the rules of another REA business, then there may be an anti-competitive case to answer after all.

One things is for sure…. Websites like www.happeningrealestate.com.au and www.place2live.com.au which I mentioned in the first article have had to change their offerings substantially. There products they offer are vastly different that those they promoted in April. They are now marketing themselves only as discount real estate agents and are not offering a service for private sellers. From this I can only conclude that realestate.com.au is now actively enforcing the rules right around the country but to be open and fair they need to have their own people follow the same rules or else someone might argue that it is anti-competitive!

Naturally this issue polarises opinions especially when you have some serious money involved. Real estate agents watched their impact on realestate.com.au being diluted with more and more private sellers popping up every day. REA had $1,000 per month per client on the line. Just www.myhomeisforsale.com.au had over 200 clients being charged $295 up front and then $79 per month so private sellers represented a fantastic income stream for those online agents. No wonder the FSBO sites were so upset!

REA made its bed with an agent only, no private sales policy and in the end they had to lie in it because agents helped to create realestate.com.au where it is today. The moral and right thing to do was to start properly enforcing their own rules again, which to their credit they did.. after a push, a shove and a nudge.

I suspect that this issue highlighted has fallen through the cracks and will be rectified shortly, as they seem to have fixed the problem with the other companies. Whilst they may not have cleaned up every incidence just yet it is probably well on the way.

The issue of private sellers on realestate.com.au will probably raise its head again one day. As an agent my preference is that private sellers be kept off the portal.. but IF it was ever to change, I really dont think it will make that much of a difference. Some.. but not much. I know many agents will consider that as blasphemy but lets look at it another way… Google’s entry (Where the bloody hell are you?) could mean that they become a major player in presenting listings to prospective purchasers and anybody can upload to Google Base.

This all got me thinking about what everyone’s preferences would be over the matter…How many would agents would accept private sellers if www.realestate.com.au decided to allow them? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Feel free to forward this around via email/twitter/facebook etc and ask real estate agents and salespeople to complete the poll.

EDIT: It seems that the deadline for the updated Private Selling Policy is still to come which goes a long way to explain why www.myhomeisforsale.com has not been updated. I think we can expect to see policy enforcement very shortly … Glenn 26/7/09

Core HR is more of a commodity than ever. Truly it has simply turned into a specific set of functionality, and that which made it strategic before has been ripped out of core and placed into other applications or engines. First, let’s look at commoditization. At one time, the ability to provide table driven data validation, full effective dating, and robust compliance was the domain of a few major players. Now, these functions are a part of almost all major HRMS solutions offered at any price.

Second, we look at functionality that used to make core HR solutions strategic. I’ll call these workflow and analytics. From the process standpoint, end to end solutions no longer exist in the HRMS application. Indeed, end to end workflow barely exists at all. Point solutions have virtually disabled the ability to flow work and approvals through multiple products with different approvals in each. While it is possible to utilize a workflow engine to accomplish this, the cost is prohibitive to all but a few very large organizations, and I have not seen HR a high enough priority anywhere to deploy it. Analytics on the other hand have almost been fully removed from the HRMS application. Value can’t be provided by core HR if none of the talent, payroll and benefits data sits in other applications or outsourcers. Indeed, as the value of analytics comes from cross functional data analysis, business intelligence is really the domain of massive data warehouse applications.

Third, the old employee and manager self service systems are mature and ubiquitous. Having employees enter in their new phone number is not very exciting anymore, and the real self service functions of performance reviews or compensation processes are generally removed to the talent systems. Instead, we move to massive portal environments that remove the existing self service functions from each individual application and centralize the user interface.

If indeed the HRMS application has been commoditized in terms of functionality, then the lowest price point that offers scalability and good data architecture (not all applications out there are very pretty from the backside) would seem to suffice. Scalability obviously so that your organization can not only grow, but store greater amounts of employee effective dated rows over time. Good data architecture because the ability to port data into data warehousing applications as well as integrating to other point solutions will be made much simpler.

The initial look and feel of the application is a much needed improvement on the mobile phone website which Domain currently provides property seekers (which is far inferior to that of REA’s). The layout, design, functionality and speed of the application is excellent highlighting some time and thought has been devoted to developing it.

A few features worth noting include:

• Option not to include surrounding areas - Unlike Domain’s website, the user is provided with the option not to include surrounding suburbs in search results.
• Results Ordered by Latest Listings - By default, search results are ordered by latest listings rather than featured properties.
• Show More Results - Similar to how Twitter limits tweets. Search results are limited to 10 and at the bottom of the page the user has the option to select further results, reducing the time it takes for the page to load.
• View Images - Users can view images in a slide show and can zoom in or rotate images, alternatively they can view all images in a thumb grid.
• Add to favourites - Users can save properties they are interested in and quickly switch between favourites and search results.
• Distinct Call to Action Options - The user has a number of options available to contact the agent. These include email, call their mobile and through their land line, making it extremely easy for the user to make that next step.

Any improvements needed? The application could pinpoint the users location through the phone’s GPS so the initial search can more quickly be performed. They could also include the property location on a map, an option to email a property to a friend and some way to email your favourites to yourself or another person.

There are a few teething issues. On a few searches it returned zero results, whereas I searched the same fields on my PC and I received 23 results. From my preliminary investigations this seems to be because of a property type issue as they are grouping types. This needs to be sorted out ASAP.

I really like how Domain have focused on the user’s experience rather than whats best for generating advertising revenue, resulting in an application which is a pleasure for the consumer to use. Lets hope they transfer some of this technology over to their mobile phone website!

RE/MAX claims:

“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”

RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.

Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.

The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.

They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.

How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online

Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.

• Share the videos on Facebook, MySpace, forums, etc.

• Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.

• Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.

• Tweet about the video on Twitter.

Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.

If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.

In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10’s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.

Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.

The new features include:

• Cleaner home page and site design: The realestate.com.au site has been refreshed to give it a cleaner look and feel.
• Improved navigation: The navigation menu has been simplified to drive more people to search your OFI and Auction times
• New page layout for OFI and Auction Times (beta): The new page layout appears in a list format, making it even easier for potential buyers and sellers to see all the upcoming OFI’s and Auctions in their selected suburbs.
• New ‘view results by inspection times’ (beta): The search results page can now be easily filtered by OFI time – property seekers can quickly sort the search results page to order the listings by the date and time of the next Open for Inspection.

The homepage looks a lot crisper with smaller text used for less important areas and JavaScript to control links. It appears they are trying to more easily allow the user to navigate to property pages rather than the non real estate and marketing pages. Adding OFI and Auction Times as an option in property results pages is great for property seekers as they can easily print or short list properties they are interested in viewing.

As indicated in their press release we can expect further updates over the next 12 months. It has been a long time between website updates at REA, which should make the next 12 months a very interesting time.

I hope they’re no applicants out there, on tenterhooks, waiting for news.

http://www.cedarcrestone.com/survey/systematicHR.html

Continuing and New Research Areas For 2009. This year’s survey covers questions about the following:

• Adoption of talent management, business intelligence, service delivery, and workforce management applications as well as SOA and Web 2.0 innovations
• Deployment options and related expenditures (on premise, software-as-a-service, hosting, business process outsourcing, etc.)
• Comprehensive metrics such as employee/HR staff ratios, administrative costs per employee, links between technology adoption and financial performance, and many others

And it’s no wonder. Even the folks who should be supporting MyCareer aren’t advertising with them.

Fairfax NZ is advertising for a Acquisitions and Retentions Manager . Where did they place their ad? Seek.

Then there’s Online Marketing Group, the folks who boast in their job ad that “Fairfax Digital is a strategic investor in our company”, have posted a job for a Online Account Executive position. Guess they don’t have much faith in their investor. They chose to advertise exclusively on Seek.

Dear Geoff,

As you may know SEEK reviews pricing structure at this time each year.

I want to let you know that there will be no price rise of SEEK products in 2009.

This decision has been made in recognition of your ongoing loyalty to SEEK during an extremely challenging economic period for all Australian businesses, and as a demonstration of our support of your business and our industry during this time.

SEEK remains absolutely committed to supporting your business by delivering:

* Australia’s largest job seeking audience
* Products that better suit your needs & attract a more relevant audience to SEEK
* Superior customer service and flexibility

Thanks again for choosing to use SEEK and for your support.

I wish you all the best for the coming year.

Kind Regards,

Joe Powell
Managing Director
SEEK Employment

I think I was wrong.

Perhaps my being wrong has nothing to do with our NOT being smarter. Perhaps we had every intention to continue to prepare our HR infrastructure. But that fact of the matter is that cash is tight. Nobody is lending money, and few people are making enough money to spend freely. With that, HR budgets are being reigned in and once again, HR technology spend is down.

The money multiplier is a simple macroeconomic theory. For every actual dollar (unit of printed currency) in circulation, there is a multiple of that dollar that becomes a portion of GDP. For example, if HR has 1 dollar to spend on software, a software vendor will in turn spend a portion of that dollar on R&D, which in turn may go to HR consultants, etc. The idea I’m trying to put forth is that in a good or bad economy, the money multiplier fuels the HR industry.

The problem is that in a good economy, the HR industry has funding from corporate budgets. In a bad economy, HR budgets are cut to the bare bones for continuing basic operations. HR is not a self funding industry – we rely on the rest of the enterprise to provide is with the cash we need to fulfill our objectives. Without cash from the enterprise, the entire industry goes into a lull. Without the seed cash from the enterprise, the money multiplier stops working.

I’m not sure what happens next. We know that the applications providers have been doing some massive layoffs. We know that sales are slowing. We know that consulting operations for both the vendors and traditional consultancies is slipping. What we don’t know is how quickly the enterprise will start fulfilling our budget requests when cash starts to flow again. I’m still hoping that even if we don’t continue spending right this minute, that ultimately we are smarter than last time. Let’s get in front of budgets and make sure there isn’t a 3 year lag before HR spending comes back. Let’s make the case now that our priorities are still enterprise priorities and can’t wait until 2012 to get started again.

Also: Spammers using photos now. They will try anything to get published.

People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more than embarrassment. The flushing may indicate an increased risk for a deadly throat cancer, researchers report. ¹

What?!? So just because I apparently lack an enzyme that helps to process alcohol, I might be at increased risk for cancer? Read on.

But those with only one copy can develop a tolerance to acetaldehyde and become heavy drinkers… Reducing drinking can significantly reduce the incidence of this cancer among Asian adults. The researchers calculate that if moderate- or heavy-drinking ALDH2-deficient Japanese men reduced their consumption to under 16 drinks a week, 53 percent of esophageal squamous cell cancers in that group could be prevented.

OK – so wait just a minute – I can reduce my risk of cancer by limiting my drinking. ² So let me get the logic straight here:

1. I am an Asian with “Red Face Syndrome”
2. People with Red Face Syndrome sometimes become heavy drinkers
3. Heavy Drinkers have a higher risk for throat cancer
4. Therefore people with Red Face Syndrome have a higher risk for throat cancer.

Call me stupid, but this is the most illogical logic I have ever seen published in the New York Times. Did we stop to think that perhaps all heavy drinkers have a higher risk for throat cancer? And did we measure the percentage of heavy drinkers among Asians compared to other populations? In reading the this from the NY times, I certainly believe that numbers 3 and 4 above are correlated, but I’m not at all sure that numbers 1 and 4 above are correlated in any way. Let’s try this logic on or size:

1. Employees are hired from employee referrals into the call center
2. Employees from employee referrals have a high risk of leaving the call center within 1 year
3. Therefore, employee referrals are a poor source of hire for the call center.

I’m hoping you can see my trouble with this logic. In the employee referral case, we didn’t measure the performance against other groupings of applicant sourcing, nor did we validate that turnover within 1 year was actually abnormal. Here’s all I’m saying. Depending on hour you design your analytics, they could seem like they are telling you a certain story. Hopefully you have someone in your HRIT or analytics organization who has taken a statistics course sometime in her past. Misinterpreting data can be pretty silly.

1. Nicholas Bakalar, March 20, 2009. “Drinker’s Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk.” Retrieved from NYTimes.com on April 18, 2009. [back]
2. Not that it matters – but I don’t drink [back]

So, in an effort to practise what I preach (amen, do you you hear me brothers and sisters?); in an effort to get that particular ball rolling, I’ve decided to have a shot at a couple of social job boards. Here they are: SalesZoo & GamerJobs

Go and check them out. Here’s a chance for the members of the congregation to critique me for a change. Be gentle:)

Now we can debate why A.I.G. felt it necessary to guarantee seven executives at least $3 million apiece when the economy was clearly on shaky ground. Perhaps we will find out these contracts were a bit of sleight of hand to enrich executives who knew this financial Titanic had hit the iceberg. But another possible explanation is that A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people…

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff” the company “if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he said…

“The jobs are terrible,” said Robert M. Sedgwick, an executive compensation lawyer at Morrison Cohen who represents a number of employees of banks that have taken government money. “You have to read about yourself in the paper every day. These people are leaving as soon as they can.”

Let them leave, you say. Where would they go, given the troubles in the financial industry? But the fact is, the real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests.

“The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited,” MS . Meyer says. ¹

So while I understand the whole talent and retention thing, basically we are saying that the people who were arguably behind the largest financial crisis in modern economic history are worth retaining. There is no arguing that these are fabulously talented people. But fabulously talented people can either exercise their talent in either positive or negative ways.

An organization recruiting AIG talent knows two things. First, these people do have a track record for innovation and being very good at what they do. Second, the instruments these people put in bankrupted one of the largest corporations in the world and threw the world economy into a tailspin.

It’s like the concept about marriage and changing one’s spouse. You can assume you will be able to change your partner after you are married, but it never really works. So here, you know you have really talented and smart people, but the idea that you can change the underlying principles and philosophy they operate on seems a bit naïve.

1. Andrew Ross Sorkin, March 16, 2009. “The Case or Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G.” Retrived from NYTimes.com on April 18, 2009. [back]

I personally think it’s fair to say that if you are a global organization in the Americas and EU, you will eventually have operations and employees in other parts of the world. If that assumption is fair, then in my opinion you might as well pursue safe harbors under the US Department of Commerce.

There is quite a nice EU website here¹ to tell you more about model contracts than you ever wanted to know.

1. http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/modelcontracts/index_en.htm [back]

Dear Careerone Employer,

As a valued customer, you are receiving this email as our records show that you have posted a job ad with CareerOne.com.au and we want to make sure your account remains active.

We are currently updating our records to ensure we continue to offer our advertisers the best service and support. As a result, any accounts that have not been accessed in the last 18 months will be deleted.

To keep your account active, simply login to your account today.

Forgotten your password? We can resend it to you.

I appreciate the need to keep business and sometimes the way to do this is to get customers who have dropped off, back on board. I have not advertised with CareerOne for over three years. And I daresay there’d be many others in my position. Is this email going to inspire me to begin advertising with them again? Unlikely.

There’s nothing wrong with a phone call. This seems to be a lazy way of doing a necessary job. Plus, it looks like one of those bank scam emails and I am not about to click and find out…

Here’s where I break it down for the readers: There are two main components to the notion of community. These are: a) common interest b) communication. So, a community is a place where people with a common interest meet to exchange knowledge, discuss ideas or get to know one another.

The demands of our lives are such that, with regard to communication, interactivity is vital. It allows us to achieve all three aspects of communication in one shot. In doing this, we can make informed decisions about WHOSE information we need access to and WHAT sorts of things we want to know. Interaction gives us this. It permits us access to a subtext in the discourse of a particular communication. It does this through commentary, but also through circulation on social networks.

Okay, so where does this leave job boards?

Over the short term, what this means is that job boards will attempt to integrate some form of interactivity into their sites. Sites such as TribeHQ have already begun to do this.

In the long term, however, job boards will not serve the functional requirements of our society. Lacking some of the basic elements of community, they will not be able to satisfy the need to streamline information resources, and they will not provide the social proof required to verify the validity of their advertisements. Seek already have difficulty with this and dedicate a large amount of resources to preventing (sometimes unsuccessfully) fake job ads.

‘Future of the traditional job board’ was discussed together with Thomas Shaw and Diane Lee at the ‘Recruitment Rumble’ recently. Listen to the recording here.

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: