I’ve just started to test a job posting on Xing. Their site (which is much like LinkedIn) requries that you are a “premium” member before you can advertise jobs. Unsurprisingly, there is a cost for this, but its only a few Euros. Once you are registered you can post your job adverts and set up the budgets. You are charged 49 cents (Euro) per click, but you can cap each advert on clicks. A job is live for 90 days (which might mean a lot of clicks!)
It all seems pretty straight forward, but I’ll do a more comprehensive review once I get some responses to the adverts.
Posting a job on Xing
I read an interesting article by Seth Godin in the Times about the fact that we are in an era of work-change.. no longer will the majority of us be working from an office; more an more of us will be working from home – its cheaper for all involved, less stressful, and better on the environment. And more interestingly, the important jobs will be managing “tribes” or teams of people across the globe, or building and managing online communities. Nearly everything you used to do in your company will be outsourced to someone much cheaper somewhere else in the world. Of course the key thing that this “new way” uses is CrowdSourcing
So maybe we should be thinking about who, where and how we recruit and what we will be doing in 10 years time, and perhaps think about the skills and training we’ll need to get ourselves and our teams to adapt.
When I said last week about Twitter going down., I was joking, but it seems that they’ve been suffering outages over the weekend.. oops.
A couple of things have made me think over the last few days. Things are moving so quickly in social-media-land its hard to keep up. Just as we get used to using a site, it changes, even before we’ve memorised our password, they’ve merged, changed strategies, gone bust, or completely revamped the product. A few examples:
TR.IM – having been used by thousands of people for shortening URLS on their posts, it announced its closing down. That’s gonnaurt a lot of people.
Facebook aquired FriendFeed – and now facebook lite has been announced. No doubt changes all round.
JS-KIT – A great comment, rating tool plugin has relaunched as “Echo” and dropped their rating tool altogether – just as I was about to implement it on PharmiWeb.com. (http://beta.pharmiweb.com) - Argh, now I need to start looking for a replacement.
All this makes me realise that we are putting a lot of trust into the stability and longevity of these tools. Maybe we should get back to developing our own, at least we know it will be around for a while. URL shorteners for example, they are not difficult to develop, maybe every site should include a perma-link generator. Maybe also we all get carried away with the latest gadgets, and wizzy must have’s, without comparing the practical use and benefits against the risk. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, would your marketing or development strategy fall to dust. I hope not.
With the popularity of Twitter, comes the demand for URL shorteners. Long URLs simply don’t fit into Twitter, so a number of free URL shorteners appeared. However there has been concern raised by some about the risks associated with using a free service to link to your valuable online content.
Well, the inevitable has happened… TR.IM is closing down, meaning that unless someone else buys their database, then millions of links will simply stop working after Jan 1st 2010. they claim that they couldn’t monetise the service and they couldn’t compete against Bit.ly.
It is expected that someone will step in and buy the service to “rescue” the links, which will save the day – as long as they don’t re-direct all links to porn or malware sites!
This situation raises the debate about putting your (shortURL) eggs into someone else’s basket. Maybe we should all build shortURL functionality into our website pages, at least then we are in control.
If you are using video on your site or as part of your online marketing (and we all should be) then this is quite an interesting tool http://wistia.com/ Its not free unfortunately, although there is a 15 day free trial. .. but then, why do we expect everything to be free on the web? Anyway, what it does do is show you users viewing your video and the “video heatmaps” show you the hotspots that people re-view as well as the drop off rates. Using this you can determine which bits of your video are retaining viewers and which bits are repelling them. Clever stuff.
I’ve been away for a bit of a camping break in Pembrokeshire Wales. Wonderful place, but so much rain!!. Anyway it did give me a chance to catch up on a bit of reading… Specifically I read.
- Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug – pretty good stuff with a particularly interesting section on usability testing
- Small is the New Big : Seth Godin. Lots of snippets of business insight. Godin is always a good read.
- Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear: Dan Gardner – still reading this one, but some thought provoking stuff about how we perceive fear, how we deal with it, and how its manipulated by media and politicians
I’m determined to read more so if anyone has any good suggestions, let me know
