Even while facing a shortage of skilled labor, senior execs are watching their modern workforce rapidly outdistance the capabilities of traditional human resources departments.

• HR has fallen behind on connecting employee engagement with customer engagement at the cost of corporate performance.
• Employee and executive surveys show that HR is falling short on trust, efficacy, and use of the social technologies driving marketing and collaboration today.
• For companies that understand the relationship between employees, customers, and long-term profitability, the CMO should run HR, or at least work with HR managers to transfer core skills needed to transform the department from resources management to talent development.

The post Why the CMO should run HR appeared first on Gigaom.

And yet television viewership is at all all-time high. Programming is as diverse as it has ever been, and viewers’ choices are driving new opportunities.

Media-measurement oligarchs are struggling to keep pace with seismic shifts in video-viewing behavior. Advertisers demanding accuracy are forcing programmers and distributors to cobble together what one industry leader calls Frankenmetrics. Driven by a combo of consolidation and new players, a fragmenting audience, and social media technologies, TV ad buying and selling is facing major disruptions. Advertising techniques that arose in online media are finally having an effect on traditional television. Trends are clear, while the TV industry response is less so:

• Online video spending is peanuts, and mobile is just getting started. Nonetheless, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) estimates that multiscreen ad spending will grow from current level of 20 percent to 50 percent of budgets within three years.
• Social media’s titans are achieving audience reach that may surpass that of U.S. TV networks’, and the social networks are emerging as sources of several TV-enhancing services including combination buys, increased audience engagement, and media metrics.
• Lack of industry standards for cross-channel performance measurement is hindering broad adoption and market growth, and it is frustrating all constituents of the television supply chain. But multichannel video distributors are well-positioned and able to collect real-time click stream data analogous to web and online media channels.
• The first-place digital-derived TV techniques will play out in any sort of volume is for addressable inventory on cable-owned local spots and video on demand.
• Intelligent cross-platform media buying and planning is in a maturation phase. Key challenges still lie in the methodologies for data aggregation and standardization for things like de-duping viewership and the impact that has on impression valuation (for ad buyers) and viewership metrics (for buyers and sellers), but advertisers and program networks are moving quickly to adopt where they can.

The post How advertisers can keep pace with the changing television landscape appeared first on Gigaom.

The professional social network leader has added to and refined its business over the past two years. What will LinkedIn do next? What opportunities lie ahead? What are the risks? In this research note, we will pick up where we left off in “Post-IPO strategies for LinkedIn” by examining the company’s post-IPO growth, current business model, and its role in the larger professional social marketplace.

Looking ahead:

• LinkedIn’s focus has been, and continues to be, end-user content consumption and advertising and business marketing and recruitment tools. As competition increases for time and media dollars, will LinkedIn be able to find new products and services for the enterprise and compete with the likes of Oracle?
• LinkedIn has reinvented professional networking into professional branding but at the cost of the company’s talent solutions, arguably its bread and butter.
• It is too soon to tell whether LinkedIn’s acquisition strategy is adding or distracting.

The post How LinkedIn is evolving its media business appeared first on Gigaom.

• The pressure of the recession on marketers and agencies to do more with less and on publishers to provide deeper levels of transparency and accountability in order to fairly value their advertising inventory
• The global adoption of online and social video networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Hulu
• The rapid penetration of smartphone and tablet technology in the U.S. market, which has accelerated the fragmentation of consumers’ media consumption

Companies like Nielsen and Arbitron continue to invest in new measurement methods, shoring up existing infrastructure and exploring new ways to connect advertising performance across the most important media — TV, online, and mobile. These incumbents must marry their various audience panels in order to enable cross-platform reporting to ensure their own long-term revenue growth. They are the central providers of both measurement and the currency by which ad inventory is valued, but it can be argued that they have not kept up with client-side demand. Channel conflicts and competitive market pressures have forced adaptation but not necessarily innovation. As a result, up-and-comers including Bluefin Labs and Trendrr have been garnering the attention of CBS, NBC, ABC, and other major media channels by creating new success measures, including most tweeted, number of conversations, and friend-of-a-friend stories (FOAFS).

Within the next 36 months, the measurement of cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars from TV to online viewing, the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, and another political and Olympic cycle. As marketers focus on measurable media dollars in the digital-advertising arena, market-level standardization will stall, as will the maturation of social TV and media cross-platform measurement.

This report takes a broad view across the ecosystem that is media measurement for brand advertising and explores how that ecosystem is struggling to solve the correlation between the two media-viewing behemoths, TV and online. It looks at the different challenges players face and offers an appendix detailing the important new players. Finally, it shines a light on the complexity of the impact that social media and mobile have on the media-measurement supply chain.

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