Google Analytics should be every online publisher’s best friend … but most don’t have a clue how to use it.

Mequoda Group, a leading consultant to online publishers including The Motley Fool, Consumer Reports, Crain Communications and International Data Group, will be sharing some of its secrets to SEO analytics at the SIPA 29^th Annual Digital Publishing and Marketing Institute, Dec. 12-14 in Miami Beach.

In a special session, Mequoda will discuss its proprietary reporting system using a real world case study from the Project on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. This groundbreaking session is aimed at publishers, audience development directors, analysts and editors, who will leave the session with a thorough understanding of why Google Analytics is important to an online publishing business, where to get the data, how to do the actual analysis once you have the data, and what to do with those results.

Are you optimizing your content and marketing efforts, or are you just guessing? Do you know which metrics are critical to publishing success, and which ones to ignore? Are you doing everything you can to drive traffic and monetize your content, or are you leaving money on the table?

Don’t spend 2013 spinning your wheels. Learn the science of Google analytics from the masters, and jumpstart your year with more traffic – and revenue – than you ever thought possible!

You’ll learn how PON …

• Earned 45 orders totaling $1,875 in two months from just one of their promotions, simply by targeting the right keywords
• Achieved its second-highest organic search numbers in one month, just by adding one word to an article headline
• Increased annual impression averages by about 47,000 in two months by identifying a highly-searched group of keywords

You’ll also see the exact reports and spreadsheets Mequoda uses in its proprietary SEO Analytics method to help PON achieve these results. This is eye-opening material, and you can only get it by attending the SIPA event next week!

Specialized Information Publishers Association event

SIPA’s annual Digital Publishing and Marketing Institute is a must-attend event for publishers, marketers, online managers, sales managers, and entrepreneurs. Doubled in size this year, it includes more than 40 experts – including Mequoda CEO Don Nicholas in three sessions – in tracks on digital publishing strategies, new product and revenues, and web design and technology.

In addition to Understanding Mequoda SEO Analytics, Mequoda will also present How to Plan, Execute and Analyze a Digital Subscription Campaign, and Marketing Website Design: Strategies for Maximizing Traffic, Revenue and Profit.

There will also be two completely new pre-conference sessions on Sales Management for Online Publishers and Social Media and Marketing. It all takes place at the incredible Loews Miami Beach Hotel, and we at Mequoda highly recommend it to all online publishers and their teams.

I’ve known Clay Hall for more than 30 years and have had the pleasure of being his consultant for the past seven. Clay is a familiar voice in our community, having attended seven Summits as both participant and speaker. With the sale of Aspire Media to F+W Media, I think it’s a good time to give everyone an update on his current thinking about digital marketing and publishing before he disappears into the forests and rivers of our great country for an extended period of time.

Clay has been a central figure in the Mequoda community almost since it began. The sale of Aspire Media represents a significant milestone for him, his team at Aspire and us here at Mequoda. I’m very appreciative that he took time to answer a few quick questions and share just a bit of what he has learned during his seven-year digital media Odyssey.

Aspire Media founder Clay Hall with another big fish.

Interview with Clay Hall, founder of Aspire Media

DN: When you think about the company you purchased back in 2005, and contrasted to the company you just sold in 2012, how has it changed the most?

Clay Hall: It has changed in every way. When I reflect on my 35-year career of managing media companies, it seems to me that during the first 25 years, a monkey could have done it. The business is much more challenging and exciting than it’s ever been. In the old days, we were all executing the same strategies and the winners were the best executers. Today strategies are all over the map and the landscape changes weekly. List rental and audience development has morphed into online audience development; print content is now print, video, apps, digital editions, downloads, television, etc.; marketing channels are much more reliant on eCommerce; and on and on and on.

DN: If you were on the other end of this odyssey and found yourself purchasing a largely print media company in 2012, what are the most important initiatives you would begin immediately?

Clay Hall: This depends on the type of company acquired, but in general I would first fashion an organizational structure around the company’s future needs, not today’s people. Then I would seek out the right people (internal and external) to fill those positions. Then I would develop online communities in the image of Mequoda Hubs. And then I would focus on digital content development and eCommerce stores to sell the content products.

DN: When thinking about the interaction between your staff at Aspire and the service team at Mequoda, how would you advise other publishers to think about the resources for digital transformation that they will need from a company like Mequoda Group?

Clay Hall: Needs of companies vary greatly and Mequoda is designed in a modular way where customers can take what they want/need and not pay for what they feel they don’t need. For most media companies going this direction for the first time, I would encourage them to look at Mequoda as I did … as an extended staff, taking it all. My biggest lessons learned were (1.) don’t silo online marketing or online content development – make sure digital skills are held enterprise wide; and (2.) help the team get a quick win if online marketing is new to them, before insisting that they drink the Kool-Aid hook, line, and sinker.

DN: If you went back to visit the folks at Aspire Media in five years, what would be different than it is as you depart the company in 2012?

Clay Hall: Much as it looks today except that it will be a much larger business where print is a very small part of the equation.

DN: What’s one piece of advice would you give the new owners of Aspire Media?

Clay Hall: My daughter has taught me a lesson about the inappropriateness of giving unsolicited advice so I will stay uncharacteristically quiet on this one.

DN: I think all the folks that have heard you and heard about you over the past years appreciate your willingness to describe what they may be facing on the path ahead.

Clay Hall founded Aspire Media LLC in 2003 and served as its Chief Executive Officer until the company was sold in 2012. He has owned, operated, and advised magazine publishing companies for 35 years.

The site editor is responsible for the successful day-to-day operations of the site, with the goal of making it a top information destination for the industry.

The ideal candidate has five years of experience overseeing editorial operations of a website, experience handling editorial budget, knowledge of seafood-related material, demonstrable success editing technical content and prior experience with multimedia.

For the detailed job description, essential job functions, and information on applying, take a look at the online editor job posting here.

It is increasingly difficult to convert visitors into subscribers. Many feel the fatigue of being on social media and email lists, and occasionally overlook the opportunities to subscribe.

However, there are still audience members around who want to be engaged with our content. The following suggestions are for digital publishers creating calls to actions.

When using buttons to call users to action, what do the buttons look like? Are they the standard social media buttons seen all over the web? If so, you may want to try a customized approach. If people see the same buttons throughout the Internet, they are certain prone to button fatigue. They may lose interest in taking such an action if they even pay attention to the button. Seeing the ordinary type of button constantly may even lead to button blindness.

When you call your audience members to action, you need to be prepared to fulfill the expectation immediately. For instance, if you are calling your visitors to register for your website and receive a free download in return, an email granting access to that download should be sent immediately.

Place your calls to action in the most practical locations, but don’t be too overbearing with the process. It can be frustrating if all your pages are covered with calls to action to buy products or sign up for email and social media updates. It is of course important to have calls to action though – they just need to be placed properly. For sales letters, put calls to action at the end of sections, making it easier for interested users to register or purchase. The end of blog articles is a good place to offer sharing options since readers would have just finished the article and are more likely to be engaged at that time. Having the buttons at the beginning of articles has helped get tweets from people who are particularly interested in the title and topic.

Do you have other tips to share on calls to action? Please use the comments section below.

Starting tomorrow, Kim and I get to spend three days with online publishing and marketing professionals in New York City. The mix of individuals includes an amazing diversity in job titles. One of my favorite parts of this three-day program is the welcome conversation. Because the group is so small, we can take the time to meet each of the individuals in the program in a group introduction. We do it in large part so the attendees can get to know each other. To be honest, the job titles don’t often help the group know what an individual actually does inside their organization. So, we routinely ask them to “tell us what you do.” Almost without exception, each individual will tell us their job title and their organization. While some stop there, most go on to tell us what they do on a day-to-day basis. Unsurprisingly, many have rather diverse job responsibilities that include everything from creating content to managing people, and sending email to analyzing audience engagement metrics. The smaller the organization is, the more diverse the job responsibilities.

What do you do?

It occurred to me, that I might get some really interesting responses if I asked you the same question: what do you do? While I’m curious to know for my own edification, I’m willing to bet that other readers will also enjoy hearing about your daily job responsibilities. Your response may be as short as your job title or as long as a job description. Feel free to share your name and organization, or not. At the end of the day, I’d like you to do whatever feels comfortable for you in this little community development exercise.

Thanks in advance

Chris and I will monitor your comments for patterns, questions, and other interesting bits of information that might pop up with the goal of sharing what we discover in a future post. Chris and I are also working on a new, free online publishing job description white paper that may benefit from the information you share. When the new white paper is ready to go, you’ll be the first to know about it and have the satisfaction of knowing that your comments help us put it together.

Online publishing jobs are evolving so quickly that it can be difficult to come up with either job titles or job descriptions that seem entirely appropriate to what we actually do for a living. Let me close this post with my answer to the question: what do you do?

My name is Don Nicholas. I am the lead consultant for Mequoda Group and editor-in-chief for Mequoda Daily. I teach writers, editors and publishers how to produce successful websites.

Thanks again for your help!

The 2012 results are good

After postponing my annual ophthalmology checkup twice, I finally made it in to get tested. I was in no hurry as the condition is still supposed to be untreatable and the annual measurement has brought nothing but bad news for the last couple of years. Much to my amazement, my vision has not declined in the last 14 months. While the right eye is still beyond measurement, my left eye is holding steady at 20/150 and is still correctable using the same prescription to 20/70.

Change is everywhere

I have dramatically changed my lifestyle to reduce stress and am continuing to learn to live in a low vision world. Over the past 24 months, my partners and staff have completely rebuilt the business to allow me to do most of my consulting via WebEx on a 27-inch iMac. Every other month on site client meetings have been replaced with monthly two-hour reviews that are analytically driven. For 2012, I will spend less than 60 days on the road and much of that will be to our own events. After more than 20 years of being a traveling consultant, I was dubious about the new paradigm. My team was right and I was wrong. The new system works. Most of my legacy clients are still with me, and my total client base has gone from 16 to 26 over the past 12 months. Personally, I think that has also been a big stress reducer for me. I wear sunglasses whenever I’m outside to protect my vision, and I pay even more attention to good nutrition and ocular vitamins and CoQ10 are part of my daily regimen. My ophthalmologist believes that all of the above are factors in stopping the disease from progressing over the past 14 months.

As I’ve begun to share the above with a few trusted colleagues, I’ve also felt much less alone and very much supported at every turn. The one comment that sticks with me more than any other came from my friend and client Cindy Carter, “We all have or will have handicaps as we grow older, you just got yours first.” Those of you who know Cindy probably can hear her saying the words. She’s a no-nonsense person who deals with life head on. I like the philosophy.

Technology to the rescue

WebEx and my 27-inch iMac are a Godsend. I’ve also come to rely deeply on the text to speech, and speech to text software that is built into my iMac, iPad, and iPhone. The software does occasionally produce some really odd interpretations. Kim says she’s been able to figure out what they are by reading them out loud and looking for what I really was saying versus the text laid down by the Dragon software program. Kim laughs when she says this such that I actually believe her. Having low vision has become much easier as I’ve been able to deal with it directly with my colleagues, friends and family. I’m not dying from this thing and it does have some funny side effects. I’ve always been a Monet fan, and my new lack of ability to see fine detail gives my entire world an Impressionist filter. On a recent trip to Paris, Gail and I spent a lot of time with Monet’s work. I found the experience very comforting.

Traveling with others

By many standards, I still travel a lot. For the most part however, I am traveling with others and often spending several days in the same location. Compared to the new city every night by myself routine I had done for so many years, I actually now find travel to be a stress reducer. Most of the time Gail and I will spend a few extra days hanging out. I’ve also decided to place a priority on relaxation and stress avoidance. Parker, our two-year-old pug, is my constant companion and reminder that life is just not that hard. Parker likes to play, eat and sleep. He’s very inspirational. Last weekend, we caught the first good sailing trip of the year up the coast with a 14-knot breeze. My friend Jack Dresser remarked on the trip that there is just something about the sea air that relaxes the soul. Since my time in the Navy, I’ve always found that to be true.

New house, new neighborhood

While moving is supposed to be one of those stressful experiences, I found it to be just the opposite. Earlier this year, Gail and I sold our suburban home, and purchased a new townhouse that is part of a plan mixed-use community called Wayland Town Center. While my 20/70 corrected vision entitles me to a Massachusetts state drivers license, I choose not to drive for my own safety and the safety of others. My visual response time is slower then I think it needs to be for safe driving in anything but ideal conditions. So, living in a community where I can walk to practically anything was sufficient motivation for me to not get stressed out about selling our family home of 18 years. Gail is taking a bit more time to adjust.

Recognizing friends and colleagues

As my central vision has deteriorated, I’ve lost the ability to recognize people by their faces unless the lighting is perfect and they’re pretty close. To compensate, my hearing has gotten pretty good at recognizing voices. So the next time I see you, give me an extra heartbeat to match your voice with your name. Looking forward to seeing you soon and for many years to come.

Thanks for all the kind words and support.

The Director of Online Publishing and Interactive Media will manage CSPI’s online content publishing Web site, www.NutritionAction.com. A business plan and strategy are in place for this highly visible online presence for CSPI and Nutrition Action Healthletter content, and this position will regularly measure and report on key program metrics and adjust the strategy and plan as necessary.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Manage and report on annual business plan – including financial budget and growth goals – for online publishing unit, working within the established organizational structure.

• Collaborate with other senior staff to build, develop, and promote the online publishing unit.

• Directly manage all business and circulation development efforts in the online publishing unit.

• Manage the development and quality of all of the products and creative concepts produced to support the online publishing unit.

• Oversee the daily management of all online customer programs and foster trust, satisfaction, and customer growth year after year.

• Recruit, train, manage, and grow any required staff, interns, vendors, or contractors.

• Effectively utilize all organization‐wide operations support services, working within required processes and parameters (human resource and benefits management; technology support; financial and contract management; editorial creation; project/program‐specific content creation; creative oversight and direction; public relations).

• Support team structure of entire organization and actively promote positive team behavior in all assigned staff, interns, or vendors/contractors.

• Communicate regularly with marketing, IT, customer service, and production/operations staff to ensure proper integration of the online publishing unit with print/off‐line efforts.

• Manage and direct an extensive e‐mail program to communicate with customers and prospects, ensuring organization compliance with the highest ethical and legal standards and industry best practices.• Actively participate in online publishing industry associations and events, for organizational visibility and continuous education and training on rapidly changing best practices.

• Engage and develop outside partners, to promote and build the online publishing unit.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience with online marketing communications. Including ability to seek and use information that leads to marketing insight, and understand and communicate market position, products and services to key constituencies.

• Demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the details and roles in the publishing process from initial creation through printing or online posting; and the details and roles in the creative project process from inception to completion.

• Successful strategic planning experience with ability to establish programs and criteria to support organization’s project goals; marshal appropriate resources; and establish both hard and soft program measurements to ensure program objectives are met.

• Excellent public speaking and presentation skills with ability to effectively articulate ideas, strategies and recommendations, in both written and oral communications, to internal and external constituencies.

• Demonstrated staff and consultant management experience including ability to recruit, train, motivate and evaluate staff and interns.

• Strong financial management experience including reading, preparing and maintaining financial records and documents; ability to create financial reports for finance department and executive management; ability to negotiate contracts, budgets, and fees with vendors, freelancers/consultants and internal staff.

• Ability to work both independently and in a collaborative environment; strong analytical and problem‐ solving skills; and ability to effectively manage multiple priorities.

• Computer proficiency with MSOffice, specifically Word and Excel. Familiarity with social media and online publishing software and systems. WordPress content management system experience is preferred.

• Strong commitment to CSPI’s mission.

To Apply

Please send a cover letter indicating relevant experience and interest, and résumé, to: Center for Science in the Public Interest, Attn: DOP, 1220 L Street, NW #300, Washington, DC 20005; e‐mail to hr@cspinet.org.

CSPI is an equal opportunity employer. Minorities, women, and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply. Please visit www.cspinet.org to learn more about CSPI. Posted: June 2012

Rachel Yeomans, marketing director of social media for Astek—and the person who helps us run our Wednesday noon (Eastern) Twitter Chats (today’s topic: SEO)—is a great study in “what’s happening now.” In one of her recent posts on the Astek blog, she went through her daily routine—and this was not your grandmother’s, or even father’s, or even older sister’s routine. But it is very much worth taking note:

Morning
iPhone: Alarm clock – I have the “Strum” default option, which sounds like a fun yet low-key guitar beat; iPad: Check that email and Twitter stream! Oh yes, and Daylite for the to-do list and calendar of the day’s activity.
Afternoon
MacBook: Email, multiple browsers (and oh so many tabs), Tweetdeck, Pandora, Adium, Skype, Evernote…the list goes on. iPhone: Siri, I heart you – my lifeboat when running between meetings; always around for the conference call! iPod: Yes, I like having my entire music collection in one place
Evening
MacBook: Blog updates and paperwork; iPad: “How to Cook Everything” app is my standard cook-something-gourmet-and-have-it-be-easy-and-quick app. Seriously it’s amazing. Download it! Email touch-base (I try to turn off my MacBook mail after the end of the workday—this is my “cheat”). Netflix streaming and so on. (There was a Dr. Whoreference but that’s for another article.)

I kidded Rachel yesterday about knowing everything in this brave new world while asking her whether someone can tweet to just a part of their audience. She proceeded to answer my question—“Unfortunately you can’t segment your tweets to go to a private audience. The hashtag allows those who don’t follow you to see your statements, but those statements also go to your current Twitter audience. This is usually seen as a good thing as it spreads your knowledge and expertise…”—and then kidded that she doesn’t know everything. Hmmm.

Rachel will be sharing her vast knowledge at a social media session on Sunday afternoon, May 20, at the SIPA 2012 Conference in Washington, D.C. Nicole Nigh of Thompson Media will join her, making this a can’t-miss hour. At times, it seems like there is just too much to keep up with. But if you live it every day like Rachel does, it probably doesn’t seem as overwhelming; it’s just life. At a meeting last night, a plugged-in friend of mine started explaining Ooma as a replacement for his land line, and then went on to discuss the merits of the online payment systems for membership in our social group. Amazon, PayPal, FourSquare. Again, he was living it and understanding it.

So what does it all mean? I guess that the more we integrate things like online advertising, mobile delivery and apps into our everyday, the more we will be able to understand—and profit from—them in our business lives. Everything seems intimidating until we have to do it, and then we get used to it and find that it’s not so bad. (Try asking someone to put down their iPad for a day.)

This really is a good reason for coming to our Conference next month. You will be able to talk to people like Rachel, Jim McQueen of Cadmus (ePub Formats), Minal Bopaiah of Anne Holland Ventures (Super-charging Your Content), Jeremy Dempsey of Integrate (Marketing Automation) and Allison Johns of Access (Managing Digital Product Development) and many, many others—and hear what the very latest is. Because if you do not get with the program now, it may just leave you behind.

“Gadgets definitely make a big difference in my day-to-day schedule,” Rachel wrote. “But will I one day have the ability to have helicopter propellers come out of my cloche?” After I looked up “cloche,” I’d say if one person out there is doing this, then Rachel will know. And then so will we.

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Announcing the next SIPA Webinar:
Thursday, April 26, 1 p.m. Eastern
Renewal and Retention Strategies That Work:
How to Deliver More Revenue to Your Bottom Line
(Free for SIPA Members)

Renewal revenue has a bigger impact on your
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SIPA: How did you get into this business?
RYAN: I was a branch manager for Wells Fargo and Originated loans for GMAC. The GMAC office was shared by a company called The Mortgage Market Guide. I was asked to join the MMG team which was just in its infancy with a couple of employees. We grew the business and the company built up momentum. In 2007, 13,000 people were using us for data. I was responsible for building up our customer service operations and sales departments in-house and over in India. MMG was then sold to UCG which merged it with another product that assisted Loan Officers (Loan Toolbox). This was how MSS was born.

What’s your current position?
I manage our sales team, which is focused on corporate sales and individual product sales to Mortgage Originators and larger lending institutions.

Is there a secret to hiring good salespeople?
It’s tough to evaluate who to hire—it’s not like you can easily gauge what motivation a person has to succeed. I like to try and understand what a person has gone through, evaluating the adversity they faced. How long did they have to continue to follow up in order to be successful? Did he or she have to do follow-up presentations, face-to-face sales, cold calling? How many people did they reach out to in a day? Etc.

What’s been the biggest change in the selling world?
Technology. The world is changing drastically and quickly. For us more specifically, however, it is compliance. The Origination world was largely driven by entrepreneurial individuals who utilized systems to help them with their own professional development, marketing and education. Today, corporations are taking much more control of all of these tools. The decision process is now all in the hands of CEOs, COOs and marketing managers for their employees. It used to be much more originator-centric.

What are your keys in the selling process?
You need to evaluate what a company’s needs are—or really, let them evaluate their own needs. We provide so many services—marketing, professional development, presentations, market knowledge, etc.—but the last thing we want to do is put our clients asleep or confuse them with so many options. So if we can narrow down their needs, then we can say, “Okay, here’s what we can do for you.” The big questions are, “Where are you coming up short? And what are the top 4 or 5 things that matter to you?” Example: we may think social media is an important way to market yourself and your company, but there may be a company or bank that doesn’t want its employees using social media. So why waste time?

As you mentioned, there are so many more options today.
Here’s what people don’t get. Most companies operate in a complex selling environment, but they don’t know that. There are a lot of choices to make. All of the details matter and we don’t assume to know what is most important to them; instead we try to get them to be specific in telling us what they need.

It sounds like you put a lot on your salespeople’s plates.
Yes, we do, but we actually try to make it easier for them. Take buying a car. There are multiple types of cars. From a sales perspective, you start out knowing nothing [about the customer] besides the fact that they need a form of transportation. However, you don’t know If they have 5 kids or are single. Do they have a long commute to work? Is this for their occupation or leisure? Are you a beach bum, do you want 4-wheel drive? We need to cut through that stuff. Sometimes it’s easier to say we have different types of vehicles on our lot; which could you see yourself getting the most value out of? This allows for the discussion to get narrowed down quicker. This is what we try to teach our sales reps.

Do your salespeople already have relationships with these customers?
Good question. Sometimes. In corporate sales, there is some sort of relationship where many of them already use our services. Some have never heard of us. We do pretty well with trials.

And finally, what keeps you up at night?
Lack of sales and the constant changing that our industry continues to go through. However, both of these present new challenges and create new opportunities.

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Ryan Stillwell and another sales executive,
Rick Longenecker, will deliver what should be
an excellent session on sales at SIPA 2012.
Definitely make sure you sign up for the
May 20-22 Conference and attend that session.
Early-bird prices will expire in 2 weeks!

SIPA’s 36th Annual International Conference
Create. Sell. Deliver.
May 20-22, 2012
The Capital Hilton, Washington, D.C.
Expert speakers, 30-plus roundtables on an array
of topics, certificate programs, awards
presentations and other exciting sessions.
Register today!

“Ask your employees one important question: would you rather work short-staffed or with someone with a bad attitude?” On a video promoting his new book, Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude, Mark Murphy (pictured left) clasps his hands, looks straight at us and smiles. This is going to be good, we think, and we’re right.

“I can virtually guarantee that almost universally people would rather work short staffed,” says Murphy. “And that is one of the major lessons to come out of our new research on hiring. Forty-six percent of new hires fail after 18 months. The really shocking part was why they failed; 89% of the time when people fail in an organization it is for attitudinal reasons—coachability, emotional intelligence. Only 11% of the time did they actually fail for technical skills and that is the shocker.”

Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, is concerned with finding and hiring high performers. He will deliver more of this information as the Monday lunch keynote speaker at next month’s SIPA 2012 Conference in Washington, D.C. “What do you need to do about this?” he asks. “Build your team with people who are going to be high performers and that means they’re going to have a great attitude and all the skills they need—and they’re really going to fit the culture and be great.”

Murphy continues, saying that “we have to understand that each of our attitudes is different. Attitudinal characteristics that separate companies are different. A lot of the hiring approaches we’ve used, the interview questions [here he adopts a passive voice]—tell me about yourself, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, even behavioral questions—have six words embedded in them that really mess them up. “We have to adapt our hiring approaches and recognize that in this new world attitude is predominant, and if we want to succeed that’s what we’re going to need.”

Previously, Murphy has spoken about setting goals in the workplace—“Leaders like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or the late Steve Jobs at Apple, know how to inspire ‘above and beyond’ performance from their people”—handling workplace errors—“Mistakes left unaddressed are likely to be repeated”—and teaching a positive attitude—“New research shows that even complex attitudes like gratitude, empathy and optimism can be learned.”

In his latest book, Murphy offers a new approach to interviewing potential hires, including a new set of questions. He also introduces a recharged system for grading the responses, to ensure that the best attitudes shine through and are recognized. Technical skills are not the primary reason why new hires fail, he reports. Instead, poor interpersonal skills dominate the list, flaws which many of their managers admit were overlooked during the interview process. The study found that 26% of new hires fail because they can’t accept feedback, 23% because they’re unable to understand and manage emotions, 17% because they lack the necessary motivation to excel, 15% because they have the wrong temperament for the job, and only 11% because they lack the necessary technical skills.

“Do technical skills really matter if the employee isn’t open to improving, alienates their co-workers, lacks drive and has the wrong personality for the job?” Murphy asks. One thing is for sure: The May 21 talk by Murphy assures us that SIPA 2012 will haveAttitude!

Editor’s Note: The Road Ahead profile will appear in tomorrow’s SIPAlert Daily

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Murphy is just one of many highly regarded
speakers who will take the stage for SIPA 2012.
Dr. James Billington, Amy Africa, Roy Reiman..
But early-bird prices will expire in 2 weeks!
So the time to sign up is now!

SIPA’s 36th Annual International Conference
Create. Sell. Deliver.
May 20-22, 2012
The Capital Hilton, Washington, D.C.
Expert speakers, 30-plus roundtables on an array
of topics, certificate programs, awards
presentations and other exciting sessions.
Register today!