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Yes, we are in a recession and unemployment is hovering around ten percent.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that finding the right talent is going to be any easier.

Potential employees are going to judge your company based on how well your HR rep writes the listings for open positions.  It makes perfect sense to ask for candidates with professional credentials, a certain number of years experience and specific qualifications for the job.  However, there are job board clichés and listing style issues that can make your company look unprofessional.  Here’s my list:

• “Unlimited earning potential” Really?  By selling your energy drinks/advertising space/patented wonder widgets, one could become a trillionaire?
• “Detail-oriented” Don’t ask for someone to be detail-oriented if you can’t run a simple spell check before publishing your listing 
• “Team Player” Is there anyone on this planet who will claim that they are not a team player?
• “Work from 50 states” There’s nothing that screams scam like a “work from anywhere” posting
• “This is an unpaid internship, but course credit is available” If your company cannot pay its people, you don’t have a viable business
• “Rock star needed” Can someone please explain the obsession with finding “Rock Star Sales People” and “Rock Star Developers”?
• “USING ALL CAPS” WE GET YOUR POINT!!!!!  YOU DON”T KNOW HOW TO COMMUNICATE!!!!!

Of course, you don’t have to listen to this advice. Perhaps you want your inbox flooded with generic cover letters from no-chance candidates like this one below:

Dear Hiring Manager:

I’m a detail-orientateded, team player who will be a rock star at your company.  With these people skills and experiences, not to mention my business acumen, I am sure I will be a valauble asset to your organization. Please find my resume attached. 

Sincerely,

Johnny NoCHANCE

These days, if an interested customer searches for your company, or for one of your products or services, they may first find your carefully crafted website along with links to a few of those press articles that your PR person worked hard to earn.  But amongst the media channels you control, there are bound to be user reviews mixed in, right on the make-or-break first page of the search engine’s results.

Many of the comments will be honest but some are bound to be outright lies.  Nevertheless, the consumer might not be able to know the difference.  And unfortunately, just one negative review can offset a slew of positive ones.  A study by Forrester Research found that 47 percent of consumers will seek out an alternative after reading negative customer ratings or reviews about a specific product on a retailer’s site.  Only 26 percent will continue shopping for the product after coming across negative comments.*

So what happens if your brand is attacked by an anonymous internet troll?  Should you fight back against the “brandjackers”?

According to the FindLaw blog, there are legal landmines awaiting if you choose to go after negative reviewers. One business owner’s fight against a negative commenter on Yelp ended up in an offline, physical fight. Another company was sued for false advertising after flooding the web with fake online reviews.  And who could forget the time John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, got busted for trying to drive down the stock price of acquisition target Wild Oats by posting negative comments on a stock forum under a pseudonym?

The best way to fight negative comments is to listen to the feedback and improve the experience for your customers. Eventually, the truth will overwhelm the chatter.

*There is some evidence that mixing negative reviews with positive ones may actually help close the sale, but that’s another story.

This is not another post about the details of the NBC/Conan drama.  Really.  There’s already been enough digital ink spilled over the “war” between the crumbling broadcast network and its former “Tonight Show” host and I’m not about to join the fray with yet another Leno v. Conan v. NBC post.

Nevertheless, the fallout from this show-biz spectacle is a good launching point for another discussion: interpreting the significance of negative social media activity generated towards a brand.

Over at the RedEye, one of those free commuter tabloids, a columnist claims NBC is the “biggest loser in the social media arena” because its executives failed to communicate with fans who expressed their overwhelming support for Conan on both Twitter and Facebook:

…the social media audience won’t forget NBC’s role in all of this.

If nothing else, this will serve as an expensive lesson for NBC in social media customer service. Never alienate your customers, no matter where they are.

Surely, NBC bungled its decision but I don’t think there’s that much to learn from the “social media audience” that signed up for Conan’s Facebook petition.  That’s because this particular social media audience is not the “Tonight Show’s” audience.  Many of these web-savvy “slacktivists” who roam Twitter get their comedy how they want it and when they want it through YouTube, Hulu and links from their friends.  They aren’t watching the lucrative, local news at 11 o’clock and then sticking around for a few minutes of the “Tonight Show” before dozing off.

It’s tempting to interpret a social media flurry as a movement and then over-react by diverting precious resources to put out the fire.  But it’s always worth questioning whether the “crisis” will actually affect your company’s bottom line.

• Are these social media users my current customers?
• Are these social media users my potential customers?
• Are these social media users in a position to influence my customers?

Sometimes it’s better to not enter the social media fray because there’s a chance that a backlash could bubble up to the traditional media channels that one’s customers actually see.  If NBC, like any other business, uses this feedback but focuses on delivering a better product, rather than dwelling on the past, then all will be forgotten soon enough.

When was the last time you chose free instead of paid?

Look hard enough and you can find a free pair of shoes, a free microwave, a free car.  You can even find some poor sap who will work for free these days as an unpaid intern.  Yet faced with so many options for the same type of good or service, we rarely choose the cheapest or free one.

That’s why I think the New York Times’ decision to start charging its online readers makes sense. According to a report in New York Magazine, the prominent news organization is set to announce some sort of metered system for its website. Occasional visitors would get a couple of free stories per month while regular readers would eventually have to pony up.

Although the Times’ website has become one of the English world’s most trafficked, the online ad dollars have not caught up and I doubt the site will ever be able to fill its inventory with buys from premium brands.  Advertisers simply get a better deal going through third party ad networks run by companies like Google.

To preserve the quality of its editorial product, the Times can either find another source of post-print revenue or continue to cut costs.  Sure, it could shutter its print division, and get out of those union paper production contracts, but then it would lose the revenue it still needs from print.  And if it outsourced reporting to PR flacks and unpaid citizen content farmers, it would be just another Huffpo,* a low-quality, high-volume site with millions of readers that few advertisers care to reach.

The Times has an incredibly loyal readership of millions of American influentials who are pulling for it to survive.  But would they all pay now after feasting for free for so long?

The conventional Web 2.0 wisdom claims “content wants to be free” and whichever publisher gives away the most content and attracts the biggest audience will win in the long run thanks to advertising dollars.  If one site puts up a paywall, the thinking goes, its readers will all migrate to the free choice and that organization will wither away after losing its relevance.

Many pundits point to TimesSelect, the Times’ own unsuccessful paywall experiment, to prove that a pay system can’t work.  Columnist Thomas Friedman, for one, explains why that particular scheme didn’t work out so well for him:

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

However, as I see it, Friedman’s backward argument does nothing more than demonstrate how warped news management thinking has become: People in India and China can’t afford to pay for my materials, therefore, we should give it to them for free?

A pay system works on sites like the Wall Street Journal because it makes people pay for its original reporting, which is of the highest value, and lets anyone read the columnists, opinion articles and general interest, national stories.  This keeps the paper relevant and competitive with the Huffpos of the web while properly valuing its strongest assets.

While it is possible that the Times’ audience will escape to USA Today, or whatever news property stays free, I just don’t see it happening.  The quality sites will bulk up thanks to the direct support of their readers while many of the free news sites that live off ad dollars will fade away. The difference in quality could become so extreme that an educated member of society simply has no choice but to pay up for at least one quality news source.

Yet 99.9 percent of publishers do not have enough quality content to justify a paywall.  I hope the remaining .1 percent, especially since they tend to do the heavy lifting, public service journalism, realize that many people do prefer paid over free.

*I probably should have mentioned that I am/have been a Huffpo contributor, although like the thousands of other bloggers on that particular site, I am not paid a cent for my opinions there. Therefore, I have no real interest or conflicts with that organization. Nevertheless, in the name of full transparency, I figured I should add this note anyways. Thanks!

Attention recessionistas and “mini-Madoff” victims. Want to know the first step towards recovering from the recession?

Stop using these empty phrases to describe this period of empty wallets:

• “New Normal” At the Brookings Institute, the “new normal” refers to a change in consumerism as Americans adjust to a thriftier lifestyle while over at McKinsey, the phrase means we are living through a fundamental “restructuring of the economic order.” However, until lines form around bread instead of Apple’s new “must-have” gizmo, I’ll have a tough time believing that this “normal” is going to be all that different from the last “normal.”
• “Shovel Ready” Just asking: How many of these public projects were sound long-term investments and how many involved work on roads that didn’t even need to be repaired?
• “Not in this economy” I first heard this cop-out phrase when I was screening job candidates at a company with which I am thankfully no longer associated.  When I asked how we should respond to inquiries from applicants we had already interviewed, someone scoffed “We don’t owe them anything.  Not in this economy!”
• “Staycation” As if your friends and family haven’t heard enough about your economic woes, you can take a “staycation” to remind everyone at home that you still don’t have the funds to drive out of town.
• “Recession-Proof” What do dental assistants, online dating sites, designer jean retailers, and Texan cities like Austin and Dallas have in common?  Apparently, they are all “recession-proof,” according to our finest economic sages.

Do you agree with my list?  What other recession-related lingoes should be left behind?

Please share your thoughts below.

If the alumni of universities with big football programs would rather donate to the athletic department than say, scholarships or academic research, that’s their choice.  Alums have every right to weigh in on how their hard earned money is going to be spent by their alma maters.

But should donations to the athletic department get the same tax deductions as those that go to academics? And why should Johnny and Jane Taxpayer end up footing the bill for “amateur” football?

Let’s take a look at the college football bowl series, which wraps up on January 7th when Alabama and Texas travel all the way to California to battle for the national championship:

• “Unsold bowl tickets cost schools and their conferences $15.53 million last year to participate in the combined 34 bowl games” (via the San Diego Union Tribune)
• “In 1988, Congress effectively overruled the IRS, passing a special law allowing an 80 percent deduction on the ticket-qualifying donations…In 1997, Congress reversed an IRS ruling that corporations could not take tax deductions for naming rights on college athletic facilities” (via the Austin Statesmen)
• “[F]ootball-generated revenue does not cover the operating cost of the football team at 44 percent of the institutions playing major-college football” (via the Washington Post)
• “[S]even bowls received more than $21.6 million in government aid between 2001 and 2005″…taxpayers from states like Minnesota and Connecticut dumped over $100 million into new college football stadiums (via the Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

And finally, taxpayers end up indirectly subsidizing the bowl games when bailout beneficiaries like Citibank somehow have money left over to sponsor the Rose Bowl as well as the national championship game.  Even though some of this sponsorship money gets redistributed to the teams, many schools, including top-tier contenders, ultimately end up in the red after travel expenses and unsold tickets are accounted for.

Don’t believe me?  Well, the presidents of the big football schools do.  Fewer than 25 percent think spending on intercollegiate athletics is currently sustainable, according to a survey conducted by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

What do you think can be done to end the taxpayer subsidies and reduce costs while maintaining the best traditions of college football?  Please share your opinions below.

Toby Young, the son of the Briton who coined the term “meritocracy,” reflects on how close we’ve come to a class structure based on effort and intelligence, rather than inherited privileges, in a recent edition of the UK’s Prospect Magazine.

For the record, meritocracy was originally a pejorative term, since one system of economic and political inequality would be theoretically replacing another.  There would still be elites that would get to hoard the lion’s share of economic rewards—they’d just be nerds instead of kings.

Oddly though, in Young’s view, despite the widespread belief in Britain and the United States that we are entering into a meritocracy, since his father’s satire, “The Rise of the Meritocracy” was written fifty years ago, social mobility, even amongst the professional ranks, has effectively decreased while economic inequality has actually increased.

So why do the folks on Main Street put up with a system that’s rigged in favor of those who rule from Wall Street?

Young argues it’s the rise of the “celebrity class” and its relative meritocracy of Top Chefs and Top Models that keeps the populists in their place.  According to this line of reasoning, poorer people oppose taxing the rich and other egalitarian policy measures because they honestly believe they are an American Idol audition away from joining the wealthy.  Even if professionals have no ambitions to try out for reality shows like the Apprentice, Donald Trump’s billions seem like they’ve been earned and are therefore justified, by years of hard work and his shameless self-promotion.  But you’d be rich too if you inherited your daddy’s prime Manhattan real estate like Trump did.

Young’s analysis suggests that consenting to the current system is as irrational as buying lottery tickets.  Yet there is a reason that all those failed dreams don’t make us miserable.  For many in America (and I assume Britain too), it is the pursuit of a goal and the shared experience with friends, family and coworkers that brings happiness, rather than the end reward in and of itself.

That’s my take.  I’d be happy to hear yours in the comments section below.

Perhaps the biggest social media development of the last year has been the widespread use of real-time status updates and their related feeds to the world, whether broadcasted via Twitter or Facebook and possibly next up, on Google Wave.

Twitter has released its list of 2009’s top tweet topics and reflecting the medium’s use as a news sharing platform, Iran and its elections dominated the top of the list.

Twitter users naturally group topics around hashtags, those searchable keywords preceded with an # character.  Here are the top ten hashtags of 2009:

• 1. #musicmonday
• 2. #iranelection
• 3. #sxsw
• 4. #swineflu
• 5. #nevertrust
• 6. #mm
• 7. #rememberwhen
• 8. #3drunkwords
• 9. #unacceptable
• 10. #iwish

While Twitter is seen as a way to join the conversation with the general public, Facebook on the other hand, tends (although this is slowly changing) to favor closed networks of friends.

Roughly ten percent of Facebook’s 350 users share their short updates with their friends each day.  That’s a lot of data to dissect and its not necessarily as neatly organized as Twitter because of a lack of hashtags.  Therefore, Facebook’s Memology project classified trending words within general categories.  Here’s their list:

• 1 - Facebook Applications Specific words: Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living
• 2 - FML Specific word: FML (This is slang for “F*ck My Life”)
• 3 - Swine Flu Specific words: Flu, Swine Flu, H1N1
• 4 - Celebrity Deaths Specific words: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays
• 5 - Family Specific words: Family, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Kids
• 6 - Movies Specific words: New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity and Harry Potter
• 7 - Sports Specific words: Steelers, Yankees
• 8 - Health Care Specific words: Health Care, No one should have to…
• 9 - FB Specific words: FB, FB Friends, News Feed
• 10 - Twitter Specific words: Twitter, RT
• 11 - Years Specific words: 2008, 2009, 2010
• 12 - Lady Gaga Specific words: Gaga, Poker Face
• 13 - Yard Specific word: Yard
• 14 - Religion Specific words: Easter, Lord, God

Need another laugh? Check out our Business Blunders of the Year.

No year is without its collection of baffling business blunders. But for a year in which everyone supposedly was extra mindful of job security, 2009 was loaded with amazingly boneheaded moves. Did Burger King really run sexually suggestive ad in super-conservative Singapore? Did execs at Amazon.com actually pull a classic book from its store and assume no one would notice? You have to ask, ‘What were they thinking?’ So ask is what we did, in quiz form.

Here are 13 blunders from 2009. See how many you get right.

1. The Price of Bad Management at BofA

Ken Lewis, photo courtesy of Bank of America

Bank of America stock plunged more than 75 percent in the first quarter of 2009 after CEO Ken Lewis engineered the disastrous acquisitions of Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, while neglecting to tell regulators that Merrill paid $5.8 billion in bonuses before the deal went through. How did the Bank of America board of directors deal with Lewis?

• A. Cut his executive compensation by 50 percent
• B. Demanded that he publicly apologize to stockholders
• C. Appointed him “CEO for Life”
• D. Granted him pension benefits totaling $53 million

Click for the answer>>

By mid-century, Whites will no longer be a majority group in America, according to the latest US Census estimates released on Wednesday. That’s mainly because Hispanics could account for 28 percent of the US population by then, up from roughly 15 percent today.

However, as I reported yesterday, a new survey has found that Hispanics are currently proportionally underrepresented at the executive level of many large, American corporations. Even if it takes a few more years for Hispanics to climb to the top of the corporate ladder, many companies, it seems, are already advertising specifically to Hispanics.

When a company decides to target the Hispanic market, one question automatically arises: Should the messages be in Spanish?

It’s worth noting that the majority of Hispanics in America either only speak English or are bilingual. Pew research shows that while 46 percent of Hispanics over 18 cannot really speak English, amongst those under 18, only 18 percent cannot fully communicate in English. I think it’s safe to assume that roughly the same percentage of people cannot read well in English either. And even if English is understood, Spanish translations might make a difference.

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Feel free to also weigh in on the debate below.