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Dice.com acquires onTargetJobs – $50 Million cash

Dice Holdings, the parent company of Dice.com, RigZone.com, Slashdot, and other properties, today announced the purchase of onTargetJobs, the parent company of Hcareers.com, HealtheCareers, and Biospace.

The purchase was for $50 million in cash, based on trailing 12 months revenues of approximately $38 million.

The acquisition seems to go along with Dice CEO, Mike Durney’s, vertical roll-up strategy within niche job boards.

The question will remain, can DICE extend the brands and increase revenue across the brands, like they have done with Rigzone, or are they going to leave the brands in autonomy, like the recent acquisition of ITJobBoard in Europe.

DICE has a lot on it’s plate right now. Integrating Open Web, it’s social sourcing tool, it purchase 12 months ago, into the Dice.com search engine, and extending that beyond to other brands.

The Hcareers acquisition will put Dice into the hospitality segment, where it has never competed previously. The HealthECareers seems to be redundant based on their acquisition of AllHealthCareJobs a couple of years back.

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How to Build a Social Referral Program (Social Networking + Employee Referrals)

Are you building a Social Recruiting strategy?
Are you trying to figure out how to increase engagement with your Employee Referral program?

Watch the video above and see how you can start getting employees to start sharing your job postings with their professional connections, former colleagues, and friends.

If you already have a employee referral program, with a couple of quick changes, you can build a Social Referral program, that leverages your employees’ social and professional networks to get access to their colleagues, friends, and connections.

The goal is to get your current employees to share your job descriptions with their social and professional networks on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google plus or even other forum or technical related websites.

If you’ve tried this before, and didn’t have any success, don’t give up.
It does work, and very effectively, but there are a couple of steps that you have to take to make it work.

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Open Letter to LinkedIn – The Rolling Updates are Killing Me!

Andrew Brandt – The self-stated LinkedIn Curmudgeon wrote a recent post about his issues as a LinkedIn user and trainer and the rolling LinkedIn Updates / Upgrades.

I’ve had similar experiences, and decided to write the following open letter to LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner.

If you agree, please “Like”, “Comment”, or “Share” this with your fellow LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ friends. Let LinkedIn know if you agree.

Dear Jeff Weiner,

First off, Thank you and the incredible team at LinkedIn for making it easier for us members to network and build our personal brands with our professional communities.

That being said, the Rolling Upgrades are Killing Me!

LinkedIn is now a daily tool used by millions of us users.
Making changes to our daily routines and operations, and how we do our jobs, is very frustrating.

Imagine being upgraded from MS Word 2000 to MS Word 2003, every couple of months!
But, with No warning!
No explanation!
No documentation!
And, no place to go for help, or to understand the benefits of the new features.

And, by the way… I can’t ask any of my co-workers, or cube-mates for help, because they’re still on the old version.

It’s incredibly frustrating for us.
It’s also incredibly frustrating for the greater LinkedIn community.

As someone who speaks, blogs, and trains job seekers and Sales & Marketing teams on using LinkedIn, it’s always a loaded gun dealing with LinkedIn version controls.

The “New Profile”, “New Media Upload”, “Contacts”, and “Who’s Viewed Your Updates!” upgrades have been great, but the roll-outs have been excruciatingly painful!

As someone who has built, tested, and released hundreds of complex website and ERP system updates and upgrades, I understand the level of complexity required for global roll-out.

Rolling out a Global interactive software product is probably one of the most difficult technical events any company can under take… Doing it several times a year is that much harder.

Testing alone is difficult. Updating multiple global server farms, with multilingual support, is a something very few can do well.

Believe us! As members, and users, we get it!
We greatly appreciated and welcome the updates.

As members, now that you have us using the site everyday, please remember that ‘spontaneous’ interruptions in our daily procedures are not always welcome.

All we ask is that major user interface or functionality changes are rolled out in a different way.

Instead of asking us to “Update our Profile” or “Endorse people we “don’t-know-well” for skills that we “don’t-know-if-they-have”, why not let us “upgrade” ourselves?
Once you have enough people for the test, or rollout sample, shut-off the notification.

Give us the option.

If that’s not possible, at least give us the courtesy of a notification of the update, with links to videos and explanations about what just changed!

Writing a blog post is fine, but if I don’t see the update for 90 days later, what use is the blog post?

Thanks for listening,
Jonathan Duarte and the LinkedIn Community

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Infographic – Content Marketing Needs to Convert to Leads

I have a lot of clients who get really excited about the content marketing piece of their online marketing strategy. What’s not to get excited about? Hopefully, you’re passionate about what you are doing!

Content Marketing can work, but just creating content to create content, isn’t the best way to market your product or services. It’s not good for your personal or company brand either… most people would rather get fewer high-value nuggets of great content, versus daily floods of marginally interesting tweets.

Here’s a quick Content Marketing Success Map that I use for deciding what content and topics to publish about:

1. Before you go off writing that masterpiece Ebook, or Video series, take a moment to find out exactly what issues, problems, or questions your ideal prospect is trying to solve. You can do this on LinkedIn, by reviewing the discussions in highly targeted LinkedIn groups (the groups that your ideal prospect is a member of and engaged in). Find the topics that get a lot of comments. Read through the comments. What are the issues? What can you help with? Can you add value to the conversation? If so… then add that topic to your Content Marketing plan.

2. Create a blog post, and if it’s a video, embed it in a blog post. The idea is to provide your content on a site where you can capture leads, most probably through email with programs like Aweber.com or Mailchimp.com. In an SMB or Enterprise, tools like HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-on can help manage the process.

3. In the blog post, acknowledge the pain of the issue. Then, provide a partial solution. (This isn’t about giving away the house, but it’s got to be short and sweet.) Think 90 second video, and 250 words. If you did provide value to your prospects, and they felt more confidence in themselves to take the next step, they’ll willingly subscribe for more info or part II.

4. Now you have them in your Lead Nurturing system… continue delivering small tips that will move your prospect closer to their goals.

A Guide to Marketing Genius:  Content Marketing 

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How to build a Professional LinkedIn Profile that Engages

Social Selling Square One
You’re prospects and clients are on LinkedIn, and they’re looking for Trusted Advisors.

If you want to build relationships with them you’ll have to learn a new way of selling. It’s called Social Selling!

One of the first steps in creating a social selling presence, is making sure your LinkedIn profile entices, educates and nurtures your clients and prospects.

In many cases, your professional LinkedIn profile might be your prospects first point of contact with you.

Buyers have changed. They are reading your LinkedIn profile before they return a phone call or set up a meeting.

Knowing and recognizing this fact, is different from acting on it.

Successful social sellers know this and use their profiles to build trust and authority.

To create a client-centric profile you have to think like your ideal client persona.

Why are they on LinkedIn?
What issues are they trying to solve?
What are they trying to learn?
What kinds of discussions are they having?

If you know this kind of information, it’s much easier to build a profile that match their needs, and opens the door for building trust and authority.

Your clients and prospects want to learn from you. They want to learn about why your products and services are something they should consider. They want to know that you understand their needs. They don’t want to be sold!

5 Quick Tips:
1. Create a Headline that speaks to your prospects. What problems do you solve?
2. Use your Summary section to build relatedness and sell you authority and strengths.
3. Use Rich Media videos, presentations, blog posts, or sales & marketing pdfs to education and engage your prospects.
4. Use updates to share stories and articles that are relevant to your prospects.
5. Make a daily practice of connecting with people in your industry, prospects, clients, fellow employees, and other industry professionals.

In a Social Network environment, your prospects want “subject matter experts” not “revenue producing experts”.