News on Social Marketing, according to The Wall Street Journal: Algorithm is considered the hiring boss for rank and file jobs of most companies. Computers are now considering factors in determining applicants, as jobs are filled on personality tests and data analysis. Applicants are no longer chosen base on their work history or interviews. Employers are trying to predict if whether a prospective hire will quit too soon, file disability claims or steal.
Xerox Corp., the printer and outsourcing company, is now using a computer program which tells them that personality and not experience, is what matters in a good call-center worker. Data from the software shows that inquisitive people often don’t stick around for the necessary six months while creative types do.
Today, Xerox uses this software to ask questions to its applicants for its 48,700 call-center jobs.
A thirty minute test will screen applicants’ personality traits and put them on scenarios that they may encounter on their job. Then a score of red, for low potential, yellow for medium potential or green for high potential will be released by the computer. Xerox will then hire most of the green score although; they will accept some yellows if it thinks they can be trained.
Evaluating more candidates, gathering more data and looking more deeply into applicants’ personal lives and interests become possible with the use of powerful computers and more sophisticated software by most companies.
Read more at Meet the New Boss: Big Data
News on Google Marketing, according to TechCrunch: in 2007, Google acquired FeedBurner, the dominant product to manage RSS feeds for $100 million. Now, one of FeedBurner‘s main features, Feed stats is currently broken and a shutdown notice for the API was silently issued by Google making its future uncertain and a service shutdown possible. These issues are linked with stats as subscriber counts went down to zero.
FeedBurner was not part of the recent round of shutdowns announced by Google.
Google’s notice was quietly added months ago and the API will be shutting down on October 20. When it comes to stats analysis, developers will be having less flexibility but does not mean that the service is following the same direction.
Even with the emergence of user-friendly and popular services such as Twitter, Flipboard and other comparable services that make RSS slowly lose its popularity, many developers still rely on these technology. Flipboard uses RSS to subscribe to some websites and podcasts have become a mainstream and are in fact RSS feeds with links to audio or video files enclosed in the feed.
Over the years, rivals of FeedBurner that can replace its features are emerging. MailChimp allows for the delivery of RSS-to-email newsletters, MediaFed sells advertising into RSS feeds and Feedblitz serves RSS feeds the way FeedBurner does.
As long as Google doesn’t announce a service interruption, FeedBurner is not expected to shut down but a neglected product is usually not trusted by developers and may cause users to move away.
Read more at FeedBurner Experiencing Stat Issues, API to Shut Down
News on Twitter Marketing, according to All Twitter: stats coming from AllThingsD‘s report show that for the month of August, photos of almost half a million users have been augmented with sepia-toned and retro lenses than sending 140 character messages every day. For the first time, Instagram saw more daily users in the United States accessing its app on mobile than Twitter.
Twitter’s average for the month of August lingered around 6.868 million while an average of 7.3 million daily active users was seen on Instagram. The stats also revealed that the average Twitter user spent 169.9 minutes sending and reading tweets while the average Instagram user spent 257 minutes perfecting the retro-chic veneer they added to their photos.
However, a difference on the number is seen if you consider the total (not daily active) users each app had in August. Instagram saw 22 million monthly unique users over the entire month while Twitter saw 29 million, meaning that Instagram’s users are visiting and are spending more time with the app more often even if Twitter has more total users.
For Instagram, Facebook can earn more if they can control the very active user base and somehow monetize them while for Twitter, working on user engagement and daily visits could help the company increase their revenue since most of their advertising income comes from the ads it serves up on mobile.
Read more at Instagram Beat Out Twitter For Daily Mobile Users In August [STATS]
Other Social Marketing Articles of Interest
Diversity in content marketing a must as more marketers get into the game
Tipping Point? We’re Watching More Web Video on TVs Than on PCs.