There are some rather off-color jokes we can make about Bill Kutik’s content being pervasive on the internets, but like Andrew Dice Clay once said, “Going blue is for $#%&@$”. The truth is, Bill’s one of the most sought-after names in Human Capital, across the board. HR practitioners seek his advice on best practices, technology implementation and new tools to help them do their job more effectively. Human Capital software and service vendors pursue Bill’s sage wisdom when deciding what new features to add on to their solution and how best to improve their existing software. Most famously, years ago PeopleSoft hired a general manager for HR products who thought HR meant “home run,” so they flew Bill to Silicon Valley for the day to explain it all to him! M&A and Venture Capital honchos want his insight to help them weed through and find the best companies.

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How many HR professionals know what your company is paying in Federal and State Unemployment Insurance (UI) Taxes?  How many of you know enough to know you should really care about this?!  UI is the proverbial step-child of whatever function or department in your organization it happens to land. But the step-child wants to be heard and is screaming at the top of its lungs in all fifty states.  So if you haven’t heard it, don’t wait for someone in the C-Suite to ask you what all the noise is about.

If your organization saw UI benefit charges go through the roof in 2009 and now have been blind-sided in 2010 with UI rate increases, then prepare to be steamrolled in 2011 and beyond.  In today’s economic environment of unemployment in double digits in many states, company UI program improvements made now will not be realized for several years…..but they need to be made!

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What are your predictions for Human Capital in 2010?

I am not in HR but have marketed into HR & recruiting for many years now.  I’ve also been an employee and a job seeker and I believe HR really needs to learn to “listen” to those not in HR…so here goes:

• Smart companies abandon the “profits at all cost” mentality and begin to realize that short term gains with great employee turnover is counter-productive.  And so begins the shift back to taking care of employees who in turn take care of the company and help it grow and be profitable for the long-term
• The recruiting function breaks from core HR and works more closely with marketing/PR to build and promote the brand.
• Core HR continues with the “we can’t do that” mentality and continues to get by-passed by job seekers who will use linked in and other tools to find “friends” to network their way to jobs…without applying through HR.

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In 1987, Gordon Gekko said three little words (“Greed is good”) that would allow an entire generation to rationalize what conventional wisdom told us was bad. Today we propose a new rationalization…Gossip is good. Aside from feeding the schadenfreude demon in us all, gossip gives us a baseline, an anchor to which we tether all things relevant. So, it is with great excitement that we promote our good friends over at HRExaminer because with the launch of this webzine (and future magazine?), HR becomes a topic of gossip. We don’t know who, but someone once said “If they’re not talking about you, you’re either dead or boring.” Well, HR is neither, and it deserves an inquirer as talented and relevant as Mr. John Sumser himself. HRExaminer is the Page 6, DrudgeReport and DailyMail all rolled into one, keeping you up-to-date on all the key players (both companies and individuals) in HR.

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First let’s consider what the market will look like – the external forces that will create the climate we deal with.  I’m reading and hearing a lot of people that sound optimistic about it.  I’m sure we all are hearing it, “The worst is over.”  “I think we’re entering a recovery.”  “We now have job growth for the first time in a long time.”  Funny – even the most optimistic report puts the average job growth across the 50 U.S. States at -.2%.  The most optimistic estimates on overall U.S. economy growth are coming in at 1 to 2%.  I think one word will describe the marketplace in 2010:  FLAT.

Flat ain’t so bad.  Flat is predictable.  Flat is an opportunity for smart companies to innovate, grab market share, and grow.  So – the practitioners in our space working for the right companies, and the smart vendors in our little niche here – they all have an opportunity.

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One of the things I love, love, LOVE about people is our seemingly unlimited capacity for feeling smart while doing really stupid things.

Of all the things that make humans special—from our command of fire to our capacity for creative genius—I think our ability to keep our chins held high while we mess things up that truly defines us best.

Take the business world, for example, where we have gotten so good at implementing bad ideas with speed and agility—and at making good ideas languish—that the very symbol for when things are going well is a bullshit!

Or is it just a bull?

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• Monster needs to shape up or ship out…I love my former employer – the brand, the people, the customers – but something needs to give here.  There are ideas we had on the whiteboard 4-5 years ago that were  creative and innovative.  There was a plan to be everywhere all the time in more channels than you could imagine.   But sadly, many still sit collecting dust – maybe because of the changes at the executive level.  Maybe because there aren’t any risk takers or maybe there just aren’t that many people beyond a handful of stars that have the stomach to win.    If you are Monster,  you just have to either flat out “own” the employment brand or sell the business.  Right now, they don’t and they are in decline.If you want to sell out and be a part of the classifieds line item on someone else’s P&L then just do it.  Stop giving away stuffed animals and get on with it or really jump in with both feet.PS – the ad network is a nice, almost cute, but still not truly earth shattering when compared to the rest of the Web 2.0 world.
• Be a better employment brand…The time has come for all companies of any shape or size to take their employment brand seriously.  Why?  There are three great reasons this becomes important in 2010:

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What are your predictions for Human Capital in 2010?

In my job (as Chief Marketing Officer of RecruitingBlogs.com and its growing amount of properties), I see a lot of recruiters, HR Professionals and even a fair amount of career seekers. And since RecruitingBlogs.com sites touch almost every aspect of the human capital arc, from seekers to technology to corporate HR and third party recruiting, you would think I’d have some pretty solid predictions for 2010. But all the demographics and market analysis in the world has very little to do with what I’m going to say next. I’m sure exposure and interaction with 80,000 or so recruiters every day might color it a little but it’s based mostly on common sense and a clear view of what’s been happening in our country, industry and world these past 18 months.

I think people are going to take accountability. What? YEP, accountability. For their careers, their lives and their livelihood. And for those of you who think that doesn’t have much to do with human capital, well…I don’t know what, I guess stop reading. Now for the two of you left, here’s why.

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1. Establish your goals
2. Determine your sample
3. Create your questionnaire
4. Pre-test the questionnaire
5. Choose your invitation channel
6. Launch your survey
7. Collect and analyze the data

Step 1: Establish Your Goals

Surveys can provide insight into the thoughts and beliefs of clients and consumers, but they are entirely useless if you don’t set out goals. Your marketing goals should be determined before you even begin to plan a survey. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish and who you want your market to be. Goals for research surveys can be very far-reaching or extremely narrow. Some goals for research surveys:

Goals determine what questions you will put on your survey as well as the people you’ll survey. If you aren’t clear about your goals, your survey results will be unclear. If your survey results are unclear, you’ve wasted your time.

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What are the preferences of your clients and prospects? Long walks on the beach? Candlelight dinners? Soft music? Oh, uh, we mean content preferences. Well, it’s really the same thing. Your best chance to advance the relationship is to know what the other person is looking for.

Readership surveys can shed some light on these preferences, especially if you focus on the habits, preferred frequency and topics of your audience. You have the chance to get a true feel for what your list members are interested in and increase the efficiency and effectiveness for your marketing efforts. The best time to execute a survey is between your company’s strategic goal-setting session and the preparation of the annual marketing calendar. This allows you to gauge what kind of marketing will help you reach your top prospects.

Know Your Audience

And we mean your audience. In most cases, you should only send your survey to your house list. However, if your house list is extremely small and you’re contemplating increasing your marketing efforts, you can send a readership survey to a rented guest list from a targeted external community. However, this is generally viewed as a poor use of marketing dollars. Response rates are typically very low because the recipients will have little to no exposure to your company’s communications.

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So you want to get an email out. Why not just use a server-based tool like Outlook? Oh … where do we begin?

Some server-based products tout themselves as email solutions, and they could do what you want … and be very detrimental to your business. If you’re not sure if your email solution is using your own servers, here’s a good litmus test: Did you need to install it on your computer or download a file for it to work? If so, it’s probably using your servers. Most third-party email solutions are hosted or offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis.

Some programs are essentially email design and formatting tools that utilize the same server your corporate email uses. The risk here is that if your marketing email ever get flagged as spam, any of the third-party watchdog services that watch out for that kind of thing could classify your company’s IP address as a spam server. Hello, blacklist. Goodbye, corporate email.

Also, many server-based programs lack the tracking, metrics and analytics capabilities you need, such as offering email recipients an opt-out option, which is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act. Really, a third-party solution – either email transmission or marketing automation– is the best choice for sending marketing email.

Option 1: Email Transmission

If you are looking for something that is simple, cheap and quick, then email transmission may be the tool for you. Pricing varies depending on the brand, but most are comparable in price and are selected based on specific feature and benefit needs or user interfaces. Users are charged based on the number of emails they send, the number of people in their database or some combination of these variables.

• What’s the benefit? Email transmission enables you to send email to a list and then track how many of those emails are opened, clicked on, bounced, unsubscribed and marked as spam. This tracking helps with strategy for future emails and database maintenance. How else can it help?
  • Dealing with spam complaints. If you have a list that isn’t opt-in and you receive more than one spam complaint per 1,000 emails, your account can be shut down. This may seem a disadvantage, but it is less detrimental to have your account shut down than your whole server. Think of this as a circuit breaker for your server.
  • Making HTML easy. Even with little or no HTML knowledge, an HTML email can be created by email transmission tools by simply plugging in text and pictures. Most will offer a few other features, but rarely more than that.
  • What’s the cost? Expect this to run your company about $10 per 1,000 contacts or emails per month.

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Whether you are thinking back to your high school days wrestling with trigonometry or a visit to the doctor and the latex gloves, the concept of “test” is apt to fill you with dread. However, testing an email campaign is essential to ensure success and generate leads. It’s tedious, it sucks and you have to do it.

There are two types of testing for email campaigns, both equally important:

1. Proofing. This involves testing the technology side of things to make sure your email is delivered the way you intended.
2. Variable testing. This assesses the impact that various components of the campaign have on the success of your transmission. You test for three main components: list, offer and creative.

Proofing

Although proofing isn’t sexy, it’s the foundation of quality marketing communications. If neglected, some of your audience may not be able to read your email, and you can actually hear the dollars being flushed down the toilet. Technical aspects that you should verify include:

• Browser compatibility. Not just how it performs in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but how does it perform in various versions of each.
• IP address variation. Sure, it looks good on your box. Send it to your Aunt Edna, though, and she might see nothing at all. Get out of the office and check the email on a different IP address.
• Email client compatibility. Whether you are using a desktop client like Outlook or a browser-based client like Gmail, make sure your content and images show up the way you want.

Proofing is boring, but if you overlook simple little things like whether or not your images will load, you’ve wasted time and resources and potentially diminished your company’s brand image.

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To quote a great marketing strategist, “Won’t ya, uh, break it down, break it down fo’ me.” No, it wasn’t Seth Godin, it was Nelly. And he has a great point: To get the most out of your house list or any alternative list sources, you must break down your house or alternative prospect lists into smaller groups based on various similarities so those groups can receive marketing communications more relevant to them.

Yes, Nelly knows the value of list segmentation:

• Focusing campaigns that connect with the target.
• Improving response rate because targets are more likely to find the email relevant.
• Increasing ROI because of a greater response rate.
• Taking another step toward one-to-one marketing, meaning the target feels like you are talking directly to them.

Bottom line, the more data you know about the people you want to target, the more relevant your marketing communications will be. And list segmentation has value beyond email and direct mail campaigns. The more you understand about your audience, the easier it will be to develop messages that resonate and make appropriate media buys. But how do you do it? We recommend segmenting your lists by using demographic, psychographic and infographic information.

Demographic Segmentation: Know Who Your Target Is.

To start, demographic information helps you to narrow your search almost instantly and understand whom you are marketing to. You’ll want to know their industries, department names and job titles, for example. These data points are based in fact and are indisputable. Properly used, they can help weed out people who may be unqualified to receive your marketing campaign.

For example, you may decide to target CFOs because finance departments are usually involved when selling into HR. As a result, you can’t ignore how the financial buyer will respond to you. Using this information can narrow down a list from 20,000 to 2,000 after you eliminate everyone in your house or alternate lists who is not a CFO. With just one demographic select, you can greatly improve the efficiency of a campaign.

Psychographic Segmentation: Understand Preferences And Values

Psychographic data offers you insight into the attitudes, beliefs, interests and values people hold.This information takes you beyond the workplace and tells you how and where to find people outside the office. If you understand your target audience’s interests and motivations, you can get a better sense of publications, websites and events that you need to consider for your marketing mix and then develop messages with imagery and word choices that directly appeal to the intended target.

Continuing the previous example of marketing to CFOs, psychographic data might show that a majority of them play golf and read financial magazines. An interest in golf represents a personal psychographic data point, and an interest in industry-related magazines represents a professional one. Use of this data might lead you to target media purchases at televised golf tournaments or on websites and publications about golf or financial topics.

Infographic Segmentation: Know Where Your Messages Go

After you understand who your target is and what their preferences and values are, you need to understand where your target goes to get their information using. This is done using infographic data. Does your target audience prefer to go online to read about HR issues, or do they prefer to read a magazine? Do they read industry magazines, or do they read blogs? Psychographic data told us that we should be looking at golf and financial themes for CFOs. Infographic data will tell us which specific golf and financial outlets would be best-suited for our marketing goal.

We recommend only choosing the top two or three communities to deploy your campaign because these will reach 85-90 percent of the market. A lot of companies waste resources trying to market in as many as 15 different communities in the hopes of reaching 100 percent saturation. Unfortunately, they are wasting their time and money. The effort and cost involved with identifying and marketing to the other communities doesn’t yield return on investment. Choosing a small number of communities also allows you to focus your message, increase frequency and improve results.

To complete our example, you know that you want to target CFOs and golf and that financial-themed publications, websites and events are consistent with their preferences. Using infographic data, you realize that 90 percent read CFO Magazine and 85 percent watch The Masters on ESPN. Knowing this, you now understand where to spend your marketing budget.

Your New Creation: The List Select

After you have identified the psychographic and demographic information and segmented your list accordingly, you have created what’s called a“list select.”The list select is a segmented version of your house and alternate lists that represents only the people who apply to a specific category to which you want to market.

List segmentation can increase effectiveness and avoid unnecessary spending from your marketing campaigns. It can be a very valuable tool to a marketer if you know how to use it properly, but not if you choose the wrong audience for your campaign. Choose carefully.

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So you think supplementing your existing house list is a prudent move for your marketing efforts? Well, you have three choices: rent, purchase or source.

Step1: Look At Your House List

First, use the sidebar to determine if your house list is insufficient to drive the required number of leads to meet your sales goals. Even if it is, you may believe there is an advantage to exceeding your lead generation goal, or you may feel the need to take additional action to build the house list and generate leads. However, keep in mind that generating more leads than your sales team can follow up with in a timely manner can do more harm than good. It creates a negative experience for those abandoned leads.

Is My List Really That Bad?

Before you make any decisions about your list, you need to understand whether your house list is getting the job done. You do that by figuring out what your lead goal should be. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Establish your revenue goal
2. Determine your average deal size
3. Identify the average percentage of inbound leads that become clients.
4. From these numbers, divide your average deal size into your revenue goal. This gives you the number of deals you need to close to reach your revenue goal.
5. Now divide the percentage of leads closed into your required number of deals. This tells you approximately how many leads you’ll need to generate to meet your revenue goal.
6. Find the average response rate for your house list. Determine, on average, how many leads are generated when sending to the house list at any given time.

Now you can determine whether your house list is sufficient to fulfill the required number of leads to meet your revenue goal. If it is, and there is no advantage to exceed your lead generation goal, stop reading. Your house list is the most effective way to generate leads.

Step2: Determine Your Budget

If you decide your house list needs a shot in the arm, your next consideration is determining your budget. Depending on the money you have available, some list building options may not be viable. Based on average response rate (and from most expensive to least expensive), your best options are:

1. Renting
2. Prospect Sourcing
3. Purchasing

If budget is not an issue, prioritize your efforts as listed above. Whichever option you choose, be sure to test before going all in. We’ll talk more about testing in Chapter 23.

Step 3: Complete A Universe Study

Before you select a rented or purchased list, you need to complete a universe study that gives you a glimpse of the big picture. The universe study should help you discover:

• Where your target buyer is most likely to exist.
• What costs are associated with various lists, including the cost for a minimum order.
• Which industry sources prospects read.
• How different lists let you test. If testing isn’t allowed, that’s a big red flag.
• What selects are available for people you want to reach, such as geography, department and position title.

Selects allow you to create the most targeted and therefore smallest list available. For example, you can choose only those people who live in Texas, are in the HR department, and are VP and higher. While most list vendors charge for each select, you most often recoup those charges because you weed out the unqualified groups and produce a smaller, less expensive list. Another suggestion is to explore readership communities and find out where your prospects get their information. Research those publications – both print and online – to see if they rent their lists. You’ll find that most of them do.

Step 4: Choose Your List

There are many variables to consider when choosing a list. To help you make your choice, carefully consider the pros and cons of each list type:

List Renting: If you choose to rent a list, get started as soon as you can because you’ll need to get on the list renter’s campaign schedule. Contact a list broker. First decide what type of list is needed, such as opt-in or double opt-in, and how often it’s sent. Then, find out what costs are associated with it. An average list costs 50 cents per name with a 5,000-contact minimum order.

Pros:

• The list owner allows you to see the list’s statistics, such as average response rates and average amount of leads generated before you rent.
• Rented lists usually generate a 1-2 percent response rate.
• The list owner manages the number of times the list is sent out, which prevents overuse.
• After the email is created, the owner will send it for you.

Cons:

• You don’t own the addresses on the list; you only get the contact information of individuals that take part in your offer and fill out one of your forms.
• A fee is charged each time an email is sent.

List Purchasing: When you purchase a list, you pay a one-time fee, usually about 10 cents per name, to keep a physical copy of the list. When purchasing media, keep in mind there are no deals to be found. You absolutely get what you pay for. The more expensive the list, the higher quality it is and the less it has been sent out.

Pros:

• You own the addresses on the list immediately.
• This is a shortcut to instantly boosting the size of your house list.
• You can use it as many times as you want.
• After you purchase it, sending to it again is free.

Cons:

• Purchased lists are rarely opt-in.
• Purchased lists are not targeted. Think shotgun versus rifle.
• The chances of your communication being marked as spam are higher because it is unsolicited.
• If there are too many spam complaints, your risk of being blacklisted is higher.
• The list can be sold to many people, which puts it at risk for overuse.
• Purchased lists have a much lower average response rate– around 0.5 percent.

Prospect Sourcing: This includes searching for new clients, collecting contact information, and adding it to the house list via several online data collection methods. The process of collecting this information is difficult and most good prospect sourcers have over 10 years experience doing just that. If you don’t have access to someone with that knowledge, ramping up can be an insurmountable obstacle. You also need the proper technology to be effective.

Pros:

• After technology and ability are acquired, there are no additional costs.
• It helps expand your house list; you own the data you collect.
• You gain contact data for specific companies you are interested in.
• It can augment your house list at any time with new data.

Cons:

• Addresses are not opt-in.
• You can gather outdated email addresses.
• The process is time consuming if done internally.
• The skills needed require considerable time to acquire.
• The necessary technology is expensive.

Before you dive into any of these options, test them out. Make sure the list you’re planning to use is legitimate before sending out an actual marketing campaign. There’s nothing like a homegrown house list. But if you need help reaching that lead generation, renting, purchasing and prospect sourcing are excellent options to explore.

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It’s not a newsflash to tell you that people prefer to watch rather than read. Online video has been around for a long time, but it’s only been in the last five years that it’s really taken off, because of faster, more powerful computers and growing broadband access. Now you can find just about any Monty Python episode or Hasbro Planet of the Apes action figure commercial you can remember. And people do. Almost 80 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos for roughly five hours in December 2008.

Marketers have only now started to realize the potential that video offers over direct mail, email and phone calls. After all, most of this online video watching happens at work – it’s the T1 line, baby – with 65 percent of online video views streamed between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

But how do you take advantage of this opportunity to reach potential clients?

• Make it sticky. Video is very effective at gaining and maintaining interest. A memorable video will make it more likely that people will browse your website and come back again. It also enhances the likelihood that a person remembers the intended message.
• Establish credibility. People don’t believe everything they read, but they tend to believe most things they see. Use video to increase the validity of your position.
• Get viewers laughing. A funny video can become very popular, very quickly. People tend to forward videos that make them laugh, which increases exposure. That’s what viral is.
• Increase open rates for emails. Want recipients to get the message? Use video with email. We once got an 80 percent meeting rate with a video email campaign.

Most modern companies are using video in their marketing efforts because they recognize the potential that video has compared against plain text or html emails, direct mail and print. Think about it like this: Are you more likely to do something if you read an instruction, or if someone actually tells you to do something? Video allows the viewer to form a connection with another human being, which increases the likelihood for a response dramatically.

How Video Contributes To Profitability.

Just like any other aspect of marketing, video is a tool that should help you showcase your products or services to bring in new clients and maintain existing ones. Three ways you can use video to contribute to profitability are:

• Pay-per-view. Depending on the importance and availability of the information, people may be willing to pay to view the video. (Think training or consulting.)
• Product sales support. VARs can use video to help better illustrate product use before purchase and to support product use and community building after purchase.
• Branding enhancement. You can enhance branding through the use of online videos that engage viewers, like Taleo’s The HR Guy.

Video Quality: Should You Go High Or Low?

Videos can be shot either in a professional setting or they can be done with little to no budget. The great thing about video today is that in the right context, either way of shooting them is acceptable. The vast majority of online videos are low-quality, low-budget and shot with an inexpensive camera. It’s up to you to decide the quality that you want to shoot your video in.

The level of quality you choose should depend greatly on the medium you are choosing for your marketing vehicle. Also, the nature of the product should come into play. For example, if you are launching a new product and filming a product demonstration, a professional video would be appropriate because it adds credibility to the product and shows that the company takes the product seriously.

On the other hand, if you are trying to create a viral video to raise brand awareness or attract new audiences to the company, there’s nothing wrong with going low budget. For viral videos or videos with a comedic basis, low budget actually work better than professional productions.

Personalization: It’s All About You. And By You,We MeanThem.

No matter the medium, people like personalization. If you get an email with your name in the subject, you are more likely to open the email. If you see mail personally addressed to you, you will be more likely to open it. The same goes for video.

Personalization of a video is often far more effective than personalizing any other medium. When dealing with video, personalization should only be used when you have identified specific clients that you want to aggressively pursue, because personalizing a video requires a lot of work. However, the payoff can be worth it. Imagine your sales prospect actually seeing you saying their name and talking about their company on video. This extra work and attention to detail translates as dedication and greatly enhances the response rate.

Bringing in new customers is all about building relationships. When you show potential customers that you took the time to think about their problems, you demonstrate a level of commitment that most other companies won’t touch.

Distribution:You Need To Get Around

You should host your videos on your company’s website, especially when using them with email. Whether or not viewers actually watch the video, you can draw people back to your website. You should also upload your videos to Facebook and YouTube to increase your brand footprint. Videos on these sites also increase the chances of going viral.

Done correctly, video can be a very effective marketing tool. Plan to include video in your marketing campaigns, and take the time to understand the types of video that best fits the needs of your business.

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