Category Archives: News articles

Articles appearing in print or online media.

If You Build Remarkable Content, the Readers Will Come – Part II

January 29, 2013 hannahhager Leave a comment

This is the second installment of a two-part interview with content strategy extraordinaire, Rebecca Lieb.

Content is not necessarily a build it and they will come proposition. Content has to be very good for them to come.

It may seem like a basic principle, but according to Rebecca Lieb, many companies still just don’t get it. Rebecca is an author, columnist, journalist and digital advertising and media analyst at Altimeter Group. In this interview she answers some important questions regarding content marketing strategies, going beyond how your organization should create content and into how it should be published and on what channels.

hrh media: So, it can be said that currently there is a content deficiency among companies and brands, especially the kind of content that speaks to and engages prospects and customers. How can this be addressed easily, especially for smaller to mid-sized businesses?

You know, I think that’s almost a chicken and egg question. Is there a content deficiency or is there a good content deficiency. On the one hand, marketers who really haven’t worked enough on creating a strong content strategy do have that sort of panicked, “I haven’t studied for the test, I haven’t thought about what we’re going to publish today on Facebook, on Twitter, on our YouTube channel, on our blog.”

Planning can take away a lot of that anxiety. Planning, along with analytics and listening, can help you determine how to make content that’s good, that resonates, and that’s shared and passed along. Remember, when you’re advertising and making that media buy, you’re guaranteed a certain number of eyeballs or a certain amount of attention. It might not be good attention, it might not even be effective, but you’re out there.

Content is not necessarily a build it and they will come proposition. Content has to be very good for them to come. You know that in a multi-channel universe you’re really only watching one channel at a time on your television set. You’re only reading one book at a time, so the job of the content marketer as well as the content strategist is to make sure that content stands out, is attractive, is professional, is well presented, is compelling and is appropriate to the medium. These are all skills that publishers are very well versed in and require a lot of publisher and/or producer acumen.

hrh media: So one of the top reasons why business leaders shy away from content marketing or content strategy is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of its return on investment or ROI. How would you address this?

In a research report that I published earlier this year called content, the new marketing equation, which by the way you can download at no cost from the Altimeter Group’s website, we developed a content marketing maturity framework, and one of the earlier stages in content marketing maturity is learning how to measure content and learning how to attribute return on investment to content so that you can actually gauge its effectiveness and know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing that’s not so effective.

My favorite hero story of that is a company called Eloqua that had a recently departed head of content marketing, a man by the name of Joe Chernov, and Joe enabled a way to trace all of the downloads of the white papers and free e-books his company made available to prospects. Because you had to fill out a form before you could download this free content, he was able to capture everybody’s title who downloaded the content. His goal was to get content downloaded by Vice President and above titles, and he could demonstrate that that’s who was downloading the content and he could also trace those names and those downloads through a very long sales cycle until he got to the point that he could attribute $3 million dollars in sales that the company made directly to that content that he had produced.

So content really is attributable, it really is measurable, you just have to decide what legitimate key performance indicators there are to gauge the value and the work of that content and then build in a mechanism to measure them. That requires planning and that’s part of content strategy.

hrh media: Thank you for sharing that example of a great success story. On the flip side, are there some key factors or traits that you see companies consistently make that leads to an unsuccessful content marketing strategy?

The companies who aren’t measuring very often are the companies that aren’t listening. They just throw content out there and never stick around to see what’s resonating, what’s being read, what the very basic web metrics say about the use of that content, if and where it’s being shared in social networks, whether there’s discussion around that content in social channels and whether that discussion is positive or negative. If you listen to what consumers say and if you engage in their conversations you learn more about your customers and what they expect from you as a business, as a product, as a service, but also how to better serve their needs. Just like going to a dinner party, nobody likes a one-way conversation. It has to be give and take.

hrh media: In your blog you mention that media conversions or the blending of owned and earned media will continue and intensify in 2013, which you said will spark new technological solutions and skills. Would you mind explaining that idea further in depth for us?

Certainly. Again, I’ve written another research report on the convergence of paid, owned, and earned media that is also available as a download from our website at no cost, so anybody interested in diving in can help themselves. We’re noticing a trend, as our environment is increasingly multi-screened and multi-media that consumers are making very little differentiation, or much less differentiation between paid, owned, and earned media. By those terms I mean paid media is advertising, that’s media that you as a marketer pay for; earned media is what consumers, influencers and journalists are saying about you. You don’t control that, but it is listening to the chatter that’s out there. Finally, owned media is content. It’s the content that you control both in terms of its creation, its production, and the channel that it lives on. You own your Facebook page, you own your website, you own your blog, etc. We’re finding that as budgets and attention move to social media, which is largely earned, as well as owned media channels, these are becoming much more important in the marketing mix than paid media-advertising; which until very recently was the boss of everything, pretty much by the fact that it cost the most.

hrh media: Before we wrap up, is there a content medium today that is perhaps receiving less attention than it deserves, but is primed for the future?

That’s a great question. When I was conducting research earlier this year I asked close to 60 marketers, most of them at major multi-national global corporations, what content channels matter now and what channels are going to matter three to five years in the future. Over and over everybody said, “video and mobile.” Content channels that were noticeably diminishing importance were channels that were written word, so online press releases, blogs, media kits, press kits and white papers. Interestingly I interviewed all of these marketers, and not a single one mentioned e-mail, which is very definitely a content channel and very definitely something that every single company I know is doing. Only one of them mentioned search, and we all know that SEO is a very important component in content marketing, so while I’d be reluctant to single out one specific channel as being overlooked, I will accuse marketers of what I like to call bright, shiny object syndrome of looking at the newest, coolest, most gee whiz technology, perhaps at the expense of the basics and fundamentals that underpin campaigns.

We’re now finding that the creative ideas that surface in content and earned media, the conversations around those pieces of content, are forming the creative seed for advertising. So whereas advertising messages used to rule everything, they’re now, in a way, subservient to content and social chatter. That said, from a grand perspective, it’s incredibly important to unify this messaging. So as consumers slip across screens, channels and media, they can consistently recognize a brand as it appears on paid, owned and earned media. I’m certainly not suggesting advertising is ever going go away, it’s not in our lifetime, but the people who work on advertising now almost work very closely with the people who work on content, the people who work on social, the people who are handling measurement, this needs to be a much closer collaboration, because as these walls between paid, earned and owned become more porous and these media channels overlap the distinctions that exist within the organization in terms of who controls what are coming increasingly meaningless.

News articles

Finding the Reality of ROI within HR

December 22, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

Ask yourself: Are you measuring activities or achievements? Are you focusing too much on HR training and learning and not enough on what’s driving the business? David Cohen, Founder and Senior Consultant at Strategic Action Group, Ltd., challenges human resources professionals and upper management leaders to define ROI in the way it was originally intended. Read on for more insight from David.

hrh media: How can human resources professionals sift through the multitude of metrics available at their fingertips to determine which are the most beneficial for their organization?

This is actually a simpler answer then one might think. The problem is sometimes we think we have to ‘prove’ too much to certain people. What we need to focus on are the analytics that will like the results of the interventions with their impact on improving the execution of the business strategy. Too many people are focused on measuring things that are interesting to human resources or training and learning but are not focused on what drives the business. The other important thing to remember is that we sometimes start measuring the activities and not the achievements.

hrh media: Once determined, how can organizations measure the effectiveness of these metrics?

Again, the effectiveness of the metric is looking at the impact it has on the business plan by looking at the results prior to the intervention and then look at the success level of the business execution after the intervention. The unfortunate part of that, especially for leadership development, is behavior change does not happen over night. It takes some time to be comfortable with the new behaviors, and as a result even more time before the change in behavior has a positive impact. So, getting the final measurement that proves the value of the intervention might take a year or more.

hrh media: How can human resource departments help upper management understand the long-term benefits of these measurements and ultimately turn the department from a cost center to a business driver?

I think that the issue is when we define ROI in the way ROI was originally intended, you are trying to do an estimate based on impact starting with how a new piece of equipment will have on productivity and profitability. This you know prior to making the purchase. When you are dealing with people measures; first, you will find estimations only an educated approximation. Second, you will never know for certain if it was the activity alone or something else in the internal or external environment that actually caused the impact, positive or negative, to the results of the activities.

I don’t think that measurement alone will move the perception of HR from a ‘cost center’ to a business driver. People have to emotionally feel that the actions that were taken are not worth the risk of living without. If the leaders do not make that emotional, visceral link that these actions provide a benefit to the business, then the result will be that the leader doesn’t wish to make the change of living without that activity. No matter how successful the activity was in positively impacting business results, the leader will not continue to support the initiative.

hrh media: What are some ways that organizations are making themselves more attractive to new and current employees?

This question is not related to measurement or workforce analytics but rather to the alignment of the person with the organization. By focusing on the person/organization fit, coupled with investment in the development of people for the improvement of both the person and the business organization, they will be more successful in making the company more attractive to new and current employees. Unfortunately, many organizations cut back significantly on the one action they can take to improve performance – the development of staff – and as a result people are looking to find places they can receive the development opportunities. This is a particular issue with Millennial employees.

But the issue of celebration of the culture and alignment of people with the culture is something that cuts across all generations at work. We are doing a lot of work with firms on defining the culture fit by defining the actual (not the aspirational) values of the company and employees are motivated and appreciate management paying attention to what actually exists and moving toward the value set that originally made the company great.

News articles

The Top 13 HR Metrics For 2013

December 16, 2012 hannahhager 2 Comments

Human capital is a company’s biggest asset, but it can also be its biggest liability. Businesses can be made or broken by the quality of its employees. Success, therefore, is often a matter of attracting the best new recruits while also ensuring the happiness of current employees in order to retain the strongest personnel.

Human resources professionals are placing a large emphasis on reducing administrative costs while increasing productivity and job satisfaction. Not surprisingly, retention and cost control are at the top of the list of employer objectives, according to the 7th annual MetLife Study of Employee Benefits Trends.

With fewer resources and more pressure to produce, human resources professionals are tasked with identifying what their employees are most concerned about in their work life in an effort to ensure their loyalty. Beyond salary and wages, the most important factor in employee loyalty is health, retirement and insurance benefits. Advancement opportunities and company culture also play a large part in employee loyalty, according to the survey.

So, how can human resources professionals align their employer’s objectives of making and saving money with their employee’s priorities? One way is by the use of human resources metrics.

In order to streamline your company’s goals, human resources should focus on four focus areas; recruiting, retention, staffing and training, and development, according to CoreCentive, a human capital management consulting firm.

Recruiting metrics quantify new hire performance, the impact of a poor new hire as well as turnover rates and return on investment. Retention metrics quantify turnover rates in addition to average tenure and the worth of veteran workers.

Training and development metrics measure training process time and costs and how professional development processes help businesses achieve their business goals. Staffing metrics measure cost per hire, recruiting efficiency ratio and the cost to replace an employee.

Below is a list of the most important human resources metrics your company should be looking into in 2013.

The Top 13 HR Metrics for 2013

Absence Rate – Shows how many days your workers are missing, which could be an indication of their satisfaction.
The number of days absent per month / (average number of employees during a month x the number of workdays)

Benefit Cost – Determine the cost of benefits packages per employee.
(Total cost of employee benefit / total number of employees)

Benefit as a Percent of Salary – Determine the cost of benefits as the percentage of an employee’s salary.
(Annual benefits cost / Annual salary)

Cost Per Hire – How much does your organization really spend per new hire?
(Recruitment costs / (compensation cost + benefit cost)

Performance Goals – The percentage of performance goals met or exceeded
(The number of performance goals met or exceeded / Total number of performance goals)

Return on Investment – What is the organization’s ROI per employee?
(Total benefit – total costs) x 100

Revenue Per Employee – Measure how much each employee earns for the company.
(Revenue / Total number of employees)

Satisfaction – Tracking employee satisfaction is difficult, but surveys can help you gauge this metric.

Tenure – Determine the average amount of time an employee has been with the company.
(Average number of years of service at the organization across all employees)

Time to Fill – What is the cost of the time it takes to fill open positions?
(Total days taken to fill a job / Number hired)

Training Development Hours – Streamline your professional development costs.
(Sum of total training hours / total number of employees)

Turnover – Spells out how many employees depart your organization per year
(The number of employees exiting the job during a one year period / Average actual number of employees during the same period)

Turnover Costs – How much money are you losing when an employee leaves? Vacancy, new hiring and new training costs can add up.
(Total costs of separation + vacancy + replacement + training)
Source: Employer’s Resource Council, CoreCentive

News articles

Align Metrics With Your Business Plan to Optimize Human Capital

December 11, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

Shad Raza, a human resources consultant, makes a case for HR metrics in this interview with hrh media.

hrh media: How can an organization integrate HR metrics throughout its entire business plan?

To make a business operation effective, a business plan must be translated into functional metrics without deviating from the sanctity of business objectives. Similarly, HR metrics must be aligned with the business plan for the optimum utilization of human capital. For integration with a business plan, HR professionals can drill down into every aspect of business objectives and align those with people performance.

The success of integration is elevated when it is clearly spelt out in “actionable” terms and is understood by the workforce. Once it is aligned, an organization must accelerate its performance level by providing the right support and organizational system.

hrh media: What are some current or evolving HR metrics that may be unfamiliar to many human resources professionals and why should they make an effort to learn them?

There are various traditional and new metrics such as HRIS, benchmarking, data mining, dashboards, predictive analysis and HR score cards or balanced score cards that are being prevailed and used by HR professionals based on their business needs.

These metrics provide an advantage to HR professionals to not only align to the strategic goals of the organization but to bridge the gap by identifying and fulfilling the performance levels in a timely manner. Hence, they must learn, adapt and contribute.

hrh media: On a basic level, how can human resources professionals use metrics to prove to upper management that their department is a business driver and not a cost center?

If used properly, HR metrics cannot only help an HR professional to enhance organizational performance, but it can also prove that HR is a business driver like other functions, which helps an organization achieve and sustain high-growth performance. Translating HR’s tactical & strategic intents into effective monetary terms is one of the basic tenets of HR metrics. Therefore, extracting the right data, doing the appropriate data mining, converting them into the monetary term, presenting it to the right people at the right time and utilizing these metrics timely is the crux of HR metrics.

Hence, HR professionals must learn, deploy and incorporate metrics in an organizational reporting system, which can drastically change the misconception of HR in upper management. It also improves the accuracy in management decisions.

hrh media: What are some battle-tested metrics that are still relevant today?

HR Score Card & Balanced Score Card are two of the most powerful and proven metrics that can boost organizational performance but there are some organizations where they have synchronized these score cards with Six Sigma too.

News articles

How United Airlines’ Metrics Helped Form A Collaborative Employee Culture

December 5, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

In this interview, Brendan Neuman, Human Capital Metrics Analyst at United Airlines, shares how United Airlines redefined itself as a workforce, and ultimately as an airline, after its merger with Continental Airlines. The corporation was faced with blending two different subsidiaries into a balanced company with a healthy culture and a collaborative work environment.

hrh media: How has the use of human resources metrics changed or shaped United Airlines hiring process?

We relied on metrics extensively throughout the process of merging United and Continental Airlines. We paid especially close attention to ensure that the newly merged company looked like its two subsidiaries in terms of gender and ethnicity demographics. We developed weekly dashboards to provide status updates for each of our operating and corporate divisions.

hrh media: In an industry that has weathered a fair share of setbacks in recent years, would you say United has prospered thanks to its employee-centric culture? If so, how has this culture been achieved and maintained?

We have invested significant effort in forming the culture of the new company. This has been accomplished through a variety of engagement and culture surveys conducted throughout the business. I think our focus on getting the culture right and emphasizing a safe and collaborative work environment will provide us with a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace.

We track the evolving culture with a measurement model that involves looking not only at how favorably people evaluate tenets of the culture, but how consistently groups of individuals share their perceptions of the culture. We plan to continue this approach of measuring the strength and consistency of perceptions over time.

hrh media: Often when employee feedback is aggregated into groups, the measurement can become skewed. How does United Airlines wade through the data to determine the perception of any one employee toward the company or their job?

We are most interested in exploring how groups of individuals perceive the company or their jobs. We have tested a variety of group agreement statistics which allow us to understand how representative a group mean is for the majority of its members. In general, if we determine that members of one group responded very differently from each other, we have less confidence in the average of their responses.

hrh media: Would you mind briefly explaining United’s group agreement indices and how it has been applied throughout the organization?

We have done comparative analyses using a few of the most common indices for group agreement including “rwg” and the standard deviation. What we have settled on, and what I will be presenting at the Summit is a statistic called “awg”. This statistic allows us to compare the variance observed within a group relative to the maximum possible variance, given the group size and group mean.

What that means from a practical perspective is that we can provide our internal customers and HR partners with some context to the data we’re reporting. Prior to using this approach, our customers often wondered if the data were skewed by the effect of one or two extreme scores. Now we can objectively tell them if that is the case.

hrh media: Looking forward, how do you feel the use of human resources metrics will impact your staffing processes as well as those implemented industry wide?

We are currently designing measurement solutions to gather feedback on all individuals who apply to work for United. We are interested not only in the efficacy of our recruiting and selection processes, but also want to develop a benchmark for United’s brand as both an employer and an airline.

News articles

Coca-Cola Serves Up Self-Service and Automated HR Practices

November 30, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

In this interview, Karla Younger, the Vice President of HR Services at Coca-Cola, shares how the company increased its HR efficiency by implementing automated web requests and human resources self-service tools. Coca-Cola continues to be on the cutting edge by building out its interactive dashboards. Read on for more insight from Karla.

hrh media: Since Coca-Cola Enterprises opened its North American HR Shared Services Center in Florida in 2009, the center has evolved with new technology and process improvements. Would you mind touching on some of the most notable of the center’s advancements?

We enhanced the efficiency of our inquiry volume intake and processing by improving the web request form to automatically create a case without Customer Service Rep involvement. We now have forms that automatically route to the assigned group within our case management tool and these automatically create a case as well. Previously, the cases were created manually.
We also launched the ability for associates to check the status of a case through self-service.

In the ESS area we converted all of our remaining state W-4 forms from paper to online. For MSS, we launched new and improved reports for managers and created visibility for managers and the next level up manager of separations that are submitted late. We currently have a project underway to improve the use of our HR intranet to make the customer experience as intuitive and accessible as possible.

hrh media: Coca-Cola is noted for its in-house payroll operation and its benefits, pension and leave of absence-related operations. Could you please explain how the company has used metrics and analytics to take operations to a whole new level?

Since we have quite a bit of the work within these specific operations that route through our case management system, we are now able to measure that volume, understand peak periods of activity where we can shift resourcing strategies to accommodate, and identify where we have gaps in our intranet content and can build it out further to enable to associates to find what they need online.

hrh media: What is planned for your HRIS Reporting team for 2013?

While the team continues to handle internal company integration work and ongoing required reporting needs, there is an effort underway to expand the build out of our HR data into interactive dashboards and reports for HR. The HR Business Partner community has a start on what is needed, but further delivery will occur, as well as interactive dashboards and reports for specific functional areas within HR, such as Employee Relations and HR Services.

News articles, Social media

The 5 Most Popular Types of B2B Content Marketing

October 25, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

Content marketing has elevated beyond a cottage industry and into a necessary marketing tool. As content marketing gains momentum, it’s now more important than ever to get back to the basics of developing a successful content strategy surrounding remarkable content.

Business-to-business marketers are perhaps the most fluent content marketers and content strategists. “On average, B2B marketers employ eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their marketing goals,” according to Eloqua and the Content Marketing Institute.

What are the most popular? We’ve detailed five of them below.

1.Blogs

Thinking like a publisher is huge in content marketing and blogs are the basis to this theory. “It’s where new content gets distributed, conversations are hosted, context for news is provided and personal brands are born,” according to Eloqua.

2.eNewsletters

eNewsletters are still a popular mode of distributing content and should be a part of your strategy as a whole. At the top of the list of tips for running successful eNewsletter distribution is: Do not spam. eNewsletters are “a permission-based means of recurring communication with current and prospective customers.” Always ask for permission to email participants and always offer opt-out links.

3.Whitepapers

Whitepapers have been around since the dawn of content. They are topical, lengthy reports that address technical issues or subjects that require intensive explanations. Even though they are the “grandfather” of content, they are still essential to establishing yourself as a thought leader. Just remember to send whitepapers in PDF format and consider including a lead capture form.

4.Videos

Smartphones and cheap video cameras coupled with YouTube and Vimeo help content marketers create, publish and share videos more easily than ever. Just remember to not film “talking heads.” Consider a long-term video series and not just a one-shot approach. When you do post your video, always consider posting an accompanying transcription or report, CMI suggests.

5.Infographics

CMI says infographics are a “visual storytelling told through data” and that they “rise above the noise to deliver data in a visually appealing way.” A good tip is: good data=good infographic. Once you’ve completed your infographic, develop a marketing plan around distributing it.

Backstory blog, News articles, Social media

The Top 5 Reasons Big Data Is Valuable to Your Business

October 15, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

Have you started thinking about how your company will value and leverage your big data assets? If not, it’s time to play some catch up.

Cross industry businesses have welcomed big data analytics with open arms after seeing its benefits first hand. As proof, the McKinsey Global Institute delves deep into the benefits of big data in their report, “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.” What they found were five, actionable reasons businesses need to jump into the practice with both feet. Here is what they determined:

1. Big Data Brings Improved Business Models, Products and Services

What’s with the flurry of excitement that accompanies each new generation of the iPad? The folks at Apple are pros at understanding what their customer needs – sometimes even before they do. Manufacturers now use data captured when consumers use their products to improve upon their existing offerings, thereby creating new and improved models that benefit the consumer and push them to buy.

2. Putting A Smile On the Face of Your Stakeholders

Improving transparency leads to improved quality of product and service. Big data can be made readily available to relevant stakeholders, which creates value by reducing search and processing time between departments, according to McKinsey. Big data keeps everyone in your department moving in the same direction.

3. Peek Into Personnel Performance

Upper management will be empowered by the collection of more accurate and detailed personnel performance data that can be reported in real or near real time. Find out instantly your company’s turnover rate or its total number of personnel sick days, according to the report, to try to understand the root causes of certain performance-based issues.

4. Customize Your Customer Experience

You’ve been segmenting your customers for years, but now it’s time to microsegment them. Big data empowers organizations to tailor their products and services to meet the very specific needs of each customer. An example the report gives is tailoring applications on a smartphone based on the owner’s personality.

5. Find the Algorithm Groove

According to McKinsey Global Institute, “Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden.” They site the following examples; tax agencies can flag candidates for further examination or retailers can use algorithms to fine-tune inventories or pricing structures.

Now is the time to jump on the big data bandwagon.

News articles, Social media

Finding news on Facebook

September 20, 2012 hannahhager Leave a comment

Not to toot my own horn, but the number of likes on one of my client’s Facebook page rose 30 percent this summer after I took over branding the news organization.

It got me thinking; how important is Facebook to sending people to news sites? We’ve all seen the newsreaders via The Washington Post and the Huffington Post. It seems to work well for them, if not just to break down their readership by demographic. For my client, the percentage of referral traffic jumped from 9 to 13 percent of total traffic during that time. Sidenote: Google Analytics does not fully report total social referral traffic numbers, so that percentage only represents about 8 percent of the total readership during that time.

I did a bit of research and found that 70 percent of referral traffic from Facebook was precipitated through friends and family shares, ie., if your FB friends are reading it then chances are you will, too. Conversely, only 13 percent of Facebook users receive their news from journalists or the actual news organizations themselves. The goal then would be to encourage your website’s users to publish your articles on their Facebook pages directly instead of solely relying on “shares” and “likes.”

Furthermore, the number of people receiving their news using a mobile device, including smart phones and tablets, has increased 400 percent with my client. Toot, toot. According to a Pew Research report, the number of people receiving their news on a desktop or laptop via Facebook is at 6 percent, a smartphone is 7 percent and a tablet is 8 percent. Remember to always think like your reader.

Direct traffic still results in the largest amount of readership at 36 percent, followed by keyword searches at 32 percent, a news organization’s app at 29 percent and Facebook and Twitter at 9 percent, according to Pew.

Read the full report here.