Yesterday afternoon, Facebook did what everyone expected: It filed for an IPO.

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranchOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site, Glassdoor, announced its own Facebook connection at midnight earlier today.

Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals — yet compensation doesn’t seem to follow along.

Here’s something I don’t get: take a look at the average sourcer job description, and what do you see? The average sourcer is expected to have:

• 3 to 5 years of prior experience in recruiting and/or sourcing
• Specialized knowledge of a specific Industry (software, healthcare, financial, etc), combined with the knowledge of how resources of those industries are located across different geographies.
• Deep and continuously updated knowledge of searching techniques (online and offline)
• Innate ability to develop strategic approaches to develop candidate pipelines
• Working knowledge of Applicant Tracking systems and collaboration tools in use by other areas of HR and business at large
• Wonderful written and verbal communication skills
• An uncanny ability to apply all of this at lightning speed, as it is typical that sourcing is a timing game and the first to find and submit a candidate is the one that wins.
• Costly certifications that give an official stamp of approval to all of the above.

And the demand the profession is commanding: it is not about two or three openings out there. A quick search across aggregators throws back 300+ openings for sourcers across the nation (at least as of mid-January 2012).

So, as the subtitle of this article clearly states:

Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals…

If that is the case, can someone explain to me why would it be justified to expect to pay a professional of this caliber who is in such a high demand $20-30 dollars an hour? Or even worse, $6.25 an hour with offshore resources in countries with much different labor conditions than ours?

The problem here is education: few people (even among us) truly understand what a sourcer must be capable of doing. This isn’t about keyword matching (which is surely what you are going to get with $6.25 an hour). There are automated tools that do that today and will do it even better in the near future. Look at the list of qualifications above: a sourcer goes well beyond keyword matching. She has such an in-depth knowledge of the industry and target candidate being sought that includes even looking for skill matching that goes well beyond the job description. She gets to understand the organization where this candidate will work and can look for cultural fit. She has such excellent communication skills that your candidate will be positively impressed to have her/him as the first line of communication representing your company. She has such great collaboration skills that instead of wasting time making you sort through hundreds of improperly matched resumes will weed out and deliver the 100%-qualified candidate (or as close to that as possible) …

I have had a long and blessed professional career. Across the years I worked at multinational companies that span the world and touch millions of end users. I also worked for slim startups that had to make every single dollar and opportunity count. Regardless of the differences, I always enjoyed the feeling that comes with helping the right person converge with the right opportunity within the right organization. The  sourcing profession brings a pleasure that is equivalent to what is experienced by the culinary artist when she combines the right flavors, textures, and colors, or the graphic artist who brings together color, shape, and depth. However, it should and it must also bring us the deserved monetary compensation for the value it delivers to our employers and as retribution for the considerable investment we have had to make ourselves to be at the professional level that is expected of us.

This is a call to my peers in the sourcing profession as well as those who seek our help. To the former I say: educate people about the value of our craft and science, and demand to be compensated for the effort you had to invest to reach the proper qualifications. To the later I warn: be careful, as you get what you pay for, if you want quality and experience you should be willing to compensate accordingly.

Editor’s Note: next week, we will be releasing the results of our Sourcing Salary Survey. Stay tuned!

The virtual workplace is different.

The setting is different; cubicles don’t divide the virtual space. Neither do city lines, time zones, or continents, for that matter.

The employees are different; without that immediate group feel, employees have no other option than to be more independent and self-starting than their on-site counterparts.

And, above all else, management is different. When dealing with such an unconventional and independent staff, it becomes abundantly clear that “traditional” workplace motivation and efficiency strategies simply aren’t going to be effective.

Guidance through a computer screen

As we ease into 2012 and the pace of work is evolving, virtual employees are the first to struggle under the rigidity of outdated management practice.

Herein lies the problem: as a manager, how can you amp up and guide your staff through a computer screen?

The solution is a lot closer than you think. All signs point to social goals:

• Use social goals to connect the workforce on what matters, keep everyone in sync.
• Help workers self-manage.
• Allow workers to keep up with the chaos of the modern workplace or place order to it.
• Allow workers to get updates in real-time about the focus of your team or organization.

Social goals: an effective solution for the virtual workforce?

Social goals are a lightweight, nimble solution to an otherwise rigid workplace. As the pace of work changed, the chaos of work changed. We can’t all wait for next week’s meeting or the conference call. We need to make effective solutions now.

When remote employees are as independent as they are, their objectives and priorities need to flex with them (whereas projects and tasks remain stagnant), so there is an increased need for management to become nimble as new focuses and priorities become important.

Ultimately, a social approach works because the information is spread to the worker from every employee they follow or the team as a whole. They are always in sync.

Social performance steers management away from rigid projects and enables employees to set goals that are lighter and move by priority buckets as well as longer term goals. In this vein, goals are employee-created, allowing your staff to align with the focus while you can focus on the bigger picture.

How can you manage a virtual workforce with social goals?

• Make the shift. Find a platform that works for your company, like WorkSimple. You can connect, support, and accomplish more with familiar interface that serves as a visual way of setting your direction and focus.
• Engage and empower. After engaging your employees on direction, get them to set some lightweight goals to start. Instead of telling them how to get from A to B, show then B and let them come up with new ways of supporting your objective. The key is to get your employees in on the action. Collaboration and informal feedback also ensures for a happier, more productive staff.
• Seek happiness. Ultimately, it is your responsibility as a manager to make your employees happy. Fortunately the equation is simple — combining equal parts of enjoyment, meaning, and income is a sure-fire recipe for work happiness.
• Maintain. Just like everything else in the world, a socially managed workplace needs to be maintained in order for it to run smoothly. As you practice social goals, it will become the “norm.”

What do you think? How do you think a virtual workforce can operate with social goals?

In 2010 I had the opportunity to put a sourcing workshop together for a group of local recruiters.  As I began to formulate a sort of “wire frame” for my presentation, it became obvious to me that I needed to make some decisions about how to adequately cover what I felt were the base components of good, comprehensive sourcing strategy and training.  My audience had a wide range of background and experience – what would tie it all nicely together?

As I reflected on my own background and observations, I realized that I wanted to help the newbies catch hold of a true sourcing philosophy…a “true north” that they could stay focused on.  I wanted to give the senior recruiters a different, upside-down perspective that they had not considered before.  And to the managers, I wanted to convey a bigger sense of aptitudes, collaboration, and far reaching strategy to help them build and develop competent teams.

In the end, my little workshop developed into a 4-hour, 2-part series, and the “binding glue” became a discussion about our view of “Knowledge Capital” and “Information Management.”  In short, I presented this observation to the group:

If you (and more importantly, your senior leadership) do not place a high value on collective knowledge capital and information management practice, then the advanced tools and techniques portion of my training (or any training, for the matter) will have little value for your staffing effort going forward.   

I saw gears starting to turn with a couple of them, and so I continued by fleshing out some definitions:

Knowledge Capital:  businessdictionary.com describes Knowledge Capital this way:

Know how that results from the experience, information, knowledge, learning, and skills of the employees of an organization. Of all the factors of production, knowledge capital creates the longest lasting competitive advantage. It may consist entirely of technical information (as in chemical and electronics industries) or may reside in the actual experience or skills acquired by the individuals (as in construction and steel industries). Knowledge capital is an essential component of human capital.

Information Management:  businessdictionary.com describes Information Management this way:

Application of management techniques to collect information, communicate it within and outside the organization, and process it to enable managers to make quicker and better decisions.

In 2010, Symantec built a study called the 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey.   At first glance, this survey did not interest me that much with regard to sourcing, because it speaks more to the way corporations tend to get rid of or archive old data.  But, the more I thought about this, the more I realized that a large percentage of corporations struggle with management of their basic tangible information.  Maybe this is why they really struggle to manage that intangible but critical “real world” knowledge locked inside the head of each employee.  After all – if you can’t develop best practice around simple digitized data, what must it be like to grasp a 5-year span of knowledge (KC) carried in the noggin of one of your best marketing application engineers, or your top sourcer?  Now, If there is a silver lining to the discovery that your corporation does not have a sound information management process, then it would have to be the fact that you are not, perhaps, the worst offender.  You’re just one of many according to this Symantec study.  Nice little consolation, huh?

The short version of my message is simply this:  As professionals within the talent acquisition sphere of our corporate organizations, we must be proactive change agents with regard to how our company views Knowledge Capital and Information Management.  We have to become champions of “Big KC” and “Big IM.”  And, we cannot assume that because we work for a large Fortune 100 company that this is all being “taken care of” by smart people in another department.  I would like to suggest here that talent acquisition leaders who build teams and create policy and practice around a high value of KC and IM will find that their resulting talent acquisition organization will be better prepared to not only receive training but also to internalize it and then practice it as a fine art form.

Useful links for further reading:

• Measuring and Managing Knowledge Capital
• 12 Principles of Knowledge Management

The sales process is a step-by-step layout of what actions must be taken to turn prospects into customers. Regardless of how you look at it, recruiting is pretty much the same as product or service sales. The only difference is that our ‘product’ is a job opportunity and our ‘customer’ is a prospect (who hopefully turns into a candidate). As such, we approach the sales cycle in much the same way: targeting prospects, selling them on feature/benefits, closing a deal, and (hopefully) follow-up and account maintenance.

If you look at it through a recruiting lens, substitute sourcing for all the pre-sales activities, recruiting for sales and closing, and HR for account management.

It’s really that simple.

Depending on who/what you reference, a sales funnel will typically look something like the image above.

Just move a couple of these things around and – voila! – you’ve got a hiring funnel that includes sourcing, recruiting, and HR.

New Opportunity

This is when a new req is opened. Or, for more progressive and proactive organizations, this is the point in time when you’ve identified a future need and know that it’s time to start pipelining. That’s when the sourcing portion of the funnel kicks into gear.

Sourcing

Fact Finding

In a sales funnel, Initial Communication comes before Fact Finding, but when you’re hiring, important to do some digging first. We also call this competitive intel gathering or pre-research. This is where sourcers can really shine – this step in the process can yield information that can be beneficial to the entire organization. For example, let’s say you’ve recently identified the need to hire a team of engineers to design an updated version of an existing product. You find out that your biggest competitor has recently released a number of employees who were working on a product that would compete with yours. Not only does this provide you with some excellent potential candidates, but it also gives you some knowledge about what’s going on at your competitor – perhaps they are abandoning their product, or perhaps they are working on something new that your company should be aware of. A good sourcer will take this knowledge to other parts of the company and share it – it benefits more than just the team that needs to hire engineers.

Initial Communication

After a fun fact-finding mission, during which a good sourcer will discover additional information about prospects that can be used to ‘warm up’ the conversation, initial outreach is made. Check out this article that shares a very successful initial email that can be sent out to prospects. The more you discover during your fact-finding part of the process, the more success you can expect when doing initial outreach to your prospects.

Sourcing/Recruiting Handoff

Develop Prospect

At this point in the funnel, the line between sourcing and recruiting can get a little blurry depending on how your team is set up. Let’s substitute the word “Solution” for “Prospect” at this step in the funnel, because they are still not a viable candidate. Sometimes, it is a sourcer’s responsibility to ‘develop’ a prospect – which means they must conduct pre-screens to determine if basic qualifications exist. Other times, sourcers lob those prospects who’ve indicated interest to their recruiting counterparts to be screened for potential candidacy. There is no right or wrong answer here – it depends on the structure of your organization and where you choose to draw the line.

Something to keep in mind here: the funnel gets narrower the further into the process you get – making sourcing responsible for too many things too far into the funnel will make the job overwhelming and result in less quality at the top of the funnel. Please take this into consideration when deciding where the handoff point is between your sourcers and your recruiters.

Recruiting

Propose Candidate

Once prospect development has taken place and the prospect has been converted into a candidate, it is obviously the job of the recruiter to pitch the candidate to the hiring manager. Note: if your sourcers are making hiring manager introductions, then they are actually recruiters!

Candidate Evaluation

At this stage in the game, you can also switch around Candidate Evaluation and Propose Candidate depending on how you work with your hiring managers. Some recruiters like to pre-pitch candidates to hiring managers to share some highlights of the individual and determine if there is some interest prior to digging deeper into the evaluation/interviewing process. Other recruiters like to conduct these interviews before sending a candidate to the hiring manager. Again, there is no one correct answer here – it all depends on how you’ve chosen to structure your team.

Recruiting/HR Handoff

Negotiation (Offer)

While Recruiting is fully responsible for getting both the candidate and the hiring manager to this stage, it’s time for HR to step in and become involved in the process. If the recruiter has done his/her job up to this point, there should be very little haggling over compensation, benefits, and so forth, therefore making the transition from Recruiting to HR from here relatively easy. By recruiting and sourcing partnering up earlier in the process (at the development phase) and recruiting continually “checking in” with candidates to see where their thoughts are regarding the opportunity, the majority of candidates reaching this stage should be ready, and willing, to accept.

Purchase (Hire) and Account Maintenance (Onboarding and beyond)

These two stages in the funnel should be predominantly be handled by HR, though the recruiter should be involved with the actual hire itself and, if a good relationship was established by the sourcer, keep the sourcer looped in up to this point. From here on out, HR should lead the charge with ‘account management,’ but recruiters (as well as sourcers) should continue to maintain communication with the new hire – after all, new hires are excited about their new opportunity and can be an incredible source of referrals. And for corporate folks, they are your new co-worker!

Conclusions

No part of the funnel is more important than the other.

While this hiring funnel provides a great visualization of who is responsible for what and where, remember that every single component in this machine is important for the successful functioning of the organization as a whole. Without sourcing, there would be no prospects to recruit. Without recruiting, there would be no new hires for HR to onboard. And without HR, there would be no further career development and a lack of continuity in the whole process.

Duties are separated, but it takes teamwork to make a hire.

When deciding how to best work with your recruiting and HR counterparts, consider this as well as the sales funnel. By working together as a team and not saying, “That’s not my job!” you will have more success in bringing the best people onboard. They’ll see how well you work together and think, “I want to be part of a company that works so well together!”

Happy Sourcing!

The role of sourcers is changing as quickly as the role of marketers and in very similar fashions.

The times when marketers assumed that customers would buy a product because they needed it (or be brainwashed by advertising into believing they did) are rapidly vanishing. Today, as consumers, we expect to build a relationship with a company. We expect an experience – a positive experience, not the “bad” experience that makes us return products and try competitors – as well as vent our disappointment on social networks or other public venues such as Groubal.

In today’s competitive business environment, consumers demand personalized attention before and after any transaction. So do job seekers. They don’t want to be treated as interchangeable pawns, even for lower positions. People are not job-fillers… They are people first – and if they are unhappy, they’ll just look for another opportunity. Let’s keep in mind that the vast majority of people who look for or are open to a new job already have one!

It’s time to start looking at things a little differently. 

Staffing departments, just as all other departments must rewire the way they work to succeed in a world where brands are no longer what companies alone shape up, but are equally what customers/users declare to their friends and peers on social networks as “great” or “poor.” When our friends speak ill of a brand, do we rush to buy from it? No. We look at the competitor.

Candidates are just like customers. In fact they are customers, not wretched creatures who can be talked to condescendingly and should be happy to be offered a job no matter what. If they don’t like your brand, if they don’t gain sincere insight on what it’s really like to work for your company, they’ll go next door. You will lose that top 1% that all sourcers want to find, regardless of what this top 1% represents — whether it is the cool kid who has the potential to be an amazing administrative assistant, or a brilliant, tenured engineer.

A new approach to sourcing

So what can sourcers learn from what the social media groups in marketing and customer service departments are doing? How can they combine their efforts to engrain “social,” engagement, and relationship marketing into the corporate modus operandi? The urgency for such cross-departmental collaboration is all the more obvious as sourcers are in charge of identifying the job candidates who will be the flag-bearers of the “socialized” brand and the representatives of the new corporate behaviors.

Below are examples of conversation starters that sourcers can use to start learning from their social media and marketing counterparts:

• How is social media redefining the company’s brand strategy?
• How can we combine efforts in relationship marketing?
• How can I/we become a digital leader and empower teams into digital leadership?
• How is social media impacting key performance indicators?

In truth, sourcers are poised to become critical touch points in the “social” economy, for sourcing is where it all starts. Sourcers must immerse themselves into the engagement culture that will be able to spot and attract the socially connected who in turn will help companies to migrate from the 2000′s to the 2010′s and beyond.

By engaging and remaining connected with candidates, whether or not there is an available position for them at a particular point in time, sourcers have the power to turn potential job seekers into fans, and provide them with a sense of belonging and relevance. And just as marketers, sourcers will have a critical role in building the value and the equity of a brand within social networks, because social is a key differentiator. In the years to come, social capital will become a major indicator of companies’ performance and impact their market cap.

Sourcers and marketers have all the reasons in the world to share insights and collaborate in order to better adapt to a fast-changing business environment. They work for the same company and can only benefit from the success that can be found in combining forces – start the process of cross-company education and start learning from one another!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis is a Silicon Valley executive and serial entrepreneur. A graduate from l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in France (philosophy), she started her entrepreneurial career in France, as the founder of ACI (now 4th Dimension) and launched the first bestselling relational database (4th Dimension) on the Apple Macintosh in 1986. She was one of the first European women to start a company in the Silicon Valley where she co-founded ACIUS with Guy Kawasaki in 1987. She later became the CEO of Exemplary Software (a spin off from HPLabs), a lean supply chain management system (acquired by Persistent Systems in 2005) and Brixlogic, a platform for the native implementation of XML Schemas (acquired by Diebold in 2006). Throughout her career, Marylene has assisted about thirty young companies as a shadow CEO, board member, investor, advisor, M&A facilitator, or management consultant, including Atomz (acquired by WebSideStory/Omniture), CitizenLogistics (maker of Groundcrew), Lyatiss (a spinoff of INRIA) or Objective Marketer (acquired by EmailVision in 2011) to name of few. Marylene has translated books by Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Hugh McLeod into French for French entrepreneurs, as well as written prefaces for these books. She is also a Silicon Valley contributor for Atlantico and has her own blog, Grade A Entrepreneurs.

A couple of things have happened in the word of search in recent weeks that were overshadowed by some of the legislature going through the US House of Representatives as well as the US Senate: speculation of an Amazon cloud search, and announcement of major changes to Google’s search functionality, otherwise known as Google ‘Plus Your World.’

Amazon Cloud Search?

Last week Sarah Lacy (formerly a senior editor for TechCrunch) broke news that Amazon was possibly preparing to launch a cloud search service. According to Lacy,

Amazon’s cloud search will compete with Google’s site search– but from what we hear, it ups the ante significantly…It allows startups to pass their data through it and get any results they want. And since many startups are already hosting their databases on Amazon, that link is even more direct. Companies can run any query and get immediate, easy results. It’s possible that the guts of this product are from the old A9 search product, according to sources. Amazon spent time getting the design right, and the people we’ve spoken to think it’ll be a game changer.

Disappointing to search engine geeks (myself included), the January 18 announcement ended up being about Amazon DynamoDB, a “fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.” Still — the speculation is there; will Amazon be jumping into search engine land? I’d certainly be interested to see that happen.

Google “Plus Your World”

I’m going to spend the most time here because I think this is where the heaviest controversy, as it directly applies to sourcing, currently exists. At the beginning of January, Google announced a revision to its search products:

Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

When Google Plus first rolled out, lots of people (including myself) poo-poo’ed it a little bit as Google’s next failed attempt at a social network. However, given the fact that millions upon millions of people have Gmail accounts (and could therefore be easily sourced and contacted by looking at their Google profiles) some started changing their tune. Honestly, Plus profiles to me are nothing more than Profiles on crack, but that’s another story. I do believe Google+ is a good place to be — and a good place to source.

However, Google’s new revisions to search have raised some heavy eyebrows and even made it a target for even more antitrust chatter. Combined this with the fact that it heavily favors Google+ shares in its ‘results’ over more relevant search results (see examples provided by the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land) and the fact that the new “SPYW” search doesn’t include Facebook or Twitter posts in its results (Google shut down Realtime search last summer and its deal with Twitter expired at the same time). According to CNN, Google says that due to “technical limitations that curb its ability to include competitors’ content in Search Plus Your World,” Facebook and Twitter are “shut out” of the process to be placed higher in its search results.

Just as an aside, Bing still has realtime Twitter search results, and Facebook posts are searchable exclusively on Bing.

This is part of why Mat Honan declared on Gizmodo, “Google just made Bing the best search engine.”

* * *

My conclusion from all this?

Average “searchers” don’t like change. So that means you have to embrace it tightly.

The average web surfer won’t care much about Google’s new changes — they probably won’t even notice, to be honest. Which means it will be even more important for you to care. If you are in charge of your company’s web presence and you haven’t created a company page on Google+, time to do so. The average searcher will continue to use Google and thus be more limited in their results. Also make sure you have your own Google profile up to date so people can find you. If Google is going to favor its own stuff over other still incredibly relevant results (at least until it is slapped with an antitrust lawsuit over these changes) then you need to make sure you are where the people are looking.

This doesn’t mean that your other web presences should be neglected. Our world is constantly changing, and while Twitter and Facebook are currently partnering with Bing, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t find some arrangement with Google once again.

Further advice: keep an eye on Amazon. The company has been making lots of big changes lately — and this could certainly include getting itself deeper into the business of search.

Happy Sourcing!

Boy, the Internet itself sure has created a lot of buzz in the last week, hasn’t it?

With protests of  SOPA and PIPA last Wednesday ultimately leading to the shelving of SOPA by its original creator, House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar Smith, you’d think that the collective “we” had won.

Well, not necessarily.

Though this was seen as a major victory, the very same day these two bills were vehementy protested, a new bill was introduced called OPEN.

What is OPEN?

The OPEN Act, officially introduced last Wednesday to the US Senate by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), is an alternative solution for enforcing stronger intellectual property rights for American artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet.

What makes it different from SOPA and PIPA?

OPEN is different because it puts the ITC in charge of fighting online piracy, not the U.S. Attorney General. It also appears to target mainly foreign-based websites and would not include requiring search engines or Internet Service Providers to cease doing business with potential violators. According to PCWorld’s article, the Act would “include an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction.”

How does it work?

According to an InfoWorld article, OPEN would “allow copyright holders to file complaints about copyright infringement at foreign websites with the U.S. International Trade Commission, which would investigate the complaints and decide whether US payment processors and online advertising networks should be required to cut off funding.” If the ITC investigation then finds that a foreign registered website is ‘primarily’ and ‘willfully’ infringing on the IP rights of a US rights holder, the commission would issue a cease-and-desist order that would encourage payment processors and online advertising providers to cease doing business with the foreign site in question. This would cut off financial incentives for this illegal activity and deter these unfair imports from reaching the US market.

Watch out for that old sales trick…

Granted, this new bill is currently backed by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others — all of whom were adamantly opposed to PIPA and SOPA. And the bill is openly viewable — and allows for comments from readers — on its website, www.keepthewebopen.com. But I still strongly encourage doing your own research and coming to your own conclusions; don’t just follow blindly based on what others around you seem to agree upon.

Remember in my article last week I mentioned an age-old sales trick? While the OPEN Act may seem like a viable alternative to SOPA and PIPA, take caution — it’s still legislation that seeks to police Internet use and content. Thus, there are still questions that need to be asked and knowledge that needs to be gained. There are some that are not sure that focusing on online piracy in particular is the right approach. Says Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight For the Future, an online advocacy non-profit:

“Where we need to start is actually getting a ‘User’s Bill of Rights’ together for communication and sharing of culture…We need to defend way people communicate online. Once we get that in place, then we can go forth from there.”

Laws are slippery slopes and once put into place they open doors for more and more regulation. Good legislation is possible, but it needs to come from the people and not just from the wants and desires of elected officials looking to make a name for themselves.

Financially troubled Arbita has closed its job posting service and transferred its remaining clients to Broadbean, one of the leading vendors in the field.

News first broke yesterday when Arbita’s CEO Don Ramer sent emails to customers notifying them of the decision to shut down the OnePost job distribution service. Broadbean, meanwhile, issued its own announcement saying it would take over the balance of uncompleted customer contracts.

“We are excited at the opportunity to work with Arbita’s client base and will, first and foremost, provide a high-quality, stable platform that meets their global posting needs,” Broadbean’s CEO and founder Kelly Robinson said in the company’s announcement.

John Sumser, who wrote about the situation on his HRexaminer site yesterday, quoted Ramer as telling customers that Arbita has been unable to solve the many technical problems with its job posting delivery system. “Accordingly,” Ramer says, “I have decided to close the Arbita posting platform and assist clients in migration to a more robust posting platform.”

Broadbean, a UK company with an office in Newport Beach, California, isn’t acquiring Arbita or any of its assets, according to the post. Robinson says, “The responsibility we take from Arbita is the tech and time they owe to their current clients.”

“Please know that while Arbita’s business has failed and their doors have closed, with their technical operations ceasing, Broadbean is here to assist clients by offering to fulfill the service obligation owed to OnePost clients.”

A company spokesperson said Broadbean did not pay Arbita for the right to service the customers. The number of customers was not disclosed.

In November, after a contentious parting with Shally Steckerl who was Arbita’s executive vice president and leader of its sourcing group, Ramer closed the unit and laid off three employees. At the time, Ramer said Arbita has been “financially stressed and challenged since Q1 2010.”

Steckerl — and other former Arbita employees — say the company delayed paychecks or, in some cases, failed to pay employees at all. Steckerl said he’s owed thousands in company expenses that were charged to his Arbita credit card, but for which he’s personally responsible.

With the closing of its job posting service and the layoff of the two employees who remained there, it’s not clear that anything remains of Arbita. However, in an email, Ramer said, “There has been no announcement of the company closing.”

Regarding the financial issues, Ramer said, “Measures have been taken and processes are in place to assure that all of Arbita’s obligations to employees are responsibly discharged.”

Today, many Internet websites are participating in a “blackout” protest against two bills that have been making headlines recently due to their controversial nature. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP [Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property] Act) discussions have taken online communities by storm over the last several weeks — but do you really understand either of them, or how they may affect sourcing?

Let’s start with PIPA, because it was introduced first and it’s really the only bill that’s still an immediate issue since President Obama shelved SOPA on Monday (why people are still protesting it today confuses me, but that’s another story…).

PIPA

What it is

PIPA was introduced in May 2011 by by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and 11 bipartisan co-sponsors.The bill, which is essentially a re-write of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) introduced by Leahy in 2010, aims to give the U.S. government and copyright holders tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods,” especially those registered outside the U.S. Infringement, in this case, is defined as the distribution of illegal copies, counterfeit goods, or anti-digital rights management technology.

What it would do

The PROTECT IP Act says that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.” In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site.”

Roughly translated, this means that search engines and other sites that link to content would become responsible for removing, disabling, and redirecting traffic away from sites violating copyright and trademark laws. Websites could still be reached by their IP addresses, but links or searches using a domain name would not reach it.

SOPA

What it is

SOPA was introduced in October 2011 by House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and 12 bipartisan co-sponsors. This bill, which builds on the PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding PIPA Senate bill, would expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

What it would do

The main goal of this bill is to protect the intellectual property of content creators as well as indirectly to prevent the sale of mis-branded or counterfeit drugs online. The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek legal action against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. This could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would also make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime punishable by prison time. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Why sourcers should understand these bills

Everyone should understand these bills — but there are some things that would certainly affect Internet sourcing. There are good intentions behind them (protecting intellectual property and discouraging copyright infringement), but they do come with some consequences.

Communities

The greatest impact would be felt in communities driven by users. Essentially, these bills would give the government authority to shut sites down if any of the content (including that posted by community participants) were deemed to infringe on copyright or trademark law. Site that could potentially be targeted include resources I’m sure you enjoy using for sourcing efforts, like Ning sites, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, and even linking and search results via Twitter and search engines could be affected. It gives new meaning to the phrase, “One bad apple spoils the barrel.”

Even though some say that it’s not meant to affect the majority of Internet users, like Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) who said, “Nobody’s talking about taking down someone’s personal website because they happen to use a copyrighted photo,” it is still a slippery slope and baby steps down the road to a censorship scenario like what the Chinese experience with The Great Firewall. Like the old saying goes, you give an inch and they take a mile.

Technology

Possibly the most interesting side effect of both of these bills doesn’t really get discussed by the general population. The structure of the Domain Name System (DNS) calls for all domain name servers around the world to have identical lists. With these two bills, servers inside the U.S. would have records different from their global counterparts, making URLs less universal. This in turn could force companies to find ways to work around these restrictions, either by developing solutions like Mozilla’s MAFIAAFire Redirector which redirects users to an alternative domain when a site’s primary domain has been seized or by offshoring servers to countries with fewer restrictions.

As sourcers, we completely understand this concept of innovative workarounds, as we go about our business peeling back URLs and finding ways to gather information from websites using rather creative methods. Some network experts believe that hackers would offer workarounds to private users to allow access to government-seized sites, but that these workarounds might also jeopardize security by redirecting unsuspecting users to scam websites. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, as necessity is the mother of invention and censorship in other parts of the world has led to the development of some creative new ways to keep people connected. But the idea of censorship having to be in place for this to occur just isn’t appealing to the average American.

Final Thoughts

Don’t fall victim to an old sales trick

My colleague Lance Haun posted on Google+ yesterday,

Why am I cynical about SOPA/PIPA passing in some stealthy, crappy form later down the line, regardless of what the protest tomorrow demonstrates? Because this version of the NDAA was passed, signed and everyone just shrugged their shoulders. And we’ll still choose the same a-holes that did it at a 80-90% rate of re-election.

This is a common practice in any negotiation situation: ask for a ridiculous price, and when the buyer balks the price is only lowered to where the buyer feels he is getting a sweet deal. Notice that both bills are revisions of bills that had not been passed, with only slight adjustments to ‘refresh’ them. Their roots go all the way back to 2008, in fact. SOPA was shelved on Monday but PIPA is still up for a vote on January 24. And just because SOPA is shelved doesn’t mean it wouldn’t become an issue again in the future.

Educate yourself

As sourcers, either of these bills could have an adverse effect on the Internet’s accessibility and thus it is important to educate yourself on what they entail. Whether you support or protest either SOPA or PIPA, you must do your due diligence and research the details in order to form your own opinion. That being said, both of these bills have some serious flaws in them and, in my personal opinion, should both be scrapped. But don’t just take my word for it — read, ask questions, and come to your own conclusions.

If either are passed, SOPA and PIPA will certainly impact Internet sourcing. Whether it’s mostly good or mostly bad remains to be seen. What are your thoughts?