Social Networking Is On Fire!
March 4, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
Social networking is king. I’ve discussed this before and the latest Hitwise Australia data, Asia Pacific Social Networking Report 2008, adds credence to my rants.
“The 40 leading social networking websites experienced strong growth in the past 12 months in Australia, New Zealand,Singapore and Hong Kong; Australia and New Zealand experienced the highest growth, increasing 62% and 88.6% respectively comparing market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category in February 2007 and January 2008.”
I’m not going to bore the heck out of you with a bunch of figures. But check out the graph below for the figure freaks:
I will draw your attention to a few salient points. Prime among these is that of the traffic moving downstream from the major palyers Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, 89% is sent to second tier players. This means that many folks are maintaining several profiles on different sites. Perhaps, for instance, they display a professional profile on one site, whereas on another they might choose to communicate with close friends and family. This makes me wonder at the feasibility of a site that morphs a professional site like LinkedIn with a Social Networking site such as Facebook. Users could maintain several different profiles in the one space.
It also seems that the major players are attracting different audiences. Well-educated and more affluent types are veering toward Facebook, while Bebo attracts multi-cultural and family groups. Important data, especially if you’re doing WHAT I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU TO DO and integrating your online presence with a social networking facility.
Finally, and this is the boon for me (Watch for that word in my future blog. It’s old; retro, if you like, but I’m big on it at the moment), users are increasingly choosing to communicate with one another via social networks. Imagine the world without email. Imagine the world where people’s social and professional and familial alliances are built around their online profiles. Now dump yourselves right in the heart of that space.
Seek Advertising Rate Hikes
March 1, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
It’s that time of the year again, when job boards ask us to renew our subscriptions…and I get the concept of the price rise, I really and truly do. But how much is fair all round – fair for the providers and fair for the subscribers? That’s what I want to chat about today.See, I put my prices up too, and what I said about prices rises before, I meant. But I kinda expect perhaps a 5-10% rise…so when my friendly account manager from Seek emailed me about the impending rise, I was concerned to see that it amounted to nearly 20%, and then I was challenged – if I didn’t want to pay the extra, I could always trim the number of ads. available in my package – same bucks, in other words, with less bang.So here’s what I did. I decided to Seek out the costs of the competitors (sorry ’bout that one, couldn’t resist it). This is what I discovered:1. At my job level, Seek are now charging me $48 a job2. The number 2 job board, CareerOne would charge me $40 per job – a sufficient difference in price considering their reduced traffic compared to Seek.3. And here’s the good one. The number three player. MyCareer wants to charge me $50 a job!I guess it’s up to the individual recruiters to figure out which job board takes the cake as far as satisfying needs and all that goes, but on paper, I can’t figure out how the heck these prices are devised. Don’t tell me that we’re going to have a mirroring of the print situation, where prices just…keep….on….going….up, all for fewer and fewer applications.
