Top advertisers, listed alphabetically below, are determined by measuring advertising placements across the major monthly HR trade publications, not including buyer guide or product directory listings.

April 2005

ADP, Aetna, Capella University, Delta Dental, Employease, Great West Healthcare, Hewitt Associates, IBM, Mellon Financial Corp, MetLife, Minnesota Life, Mutual of Omaha, Private Healthcare Systems, RESTAT, SHRM, Spectrum, United HealthCare, VirtualEdge, VSP, Wausau Insurance, Weichert Relocation Resources

Commentary and Analysis: For the second straight month, Aetna dominated the advertising placements category with Mellon, ADP and United Healthcare also ranking high. Also in April we noticed a few newcomers to the top advertisers, including VirtualEdge, which ran four (4) full-page ads in HR Executive magazine. This is a significant ad investment by any company and tells us business is good for this enterprise staffing software firm. It's no coincidence that in February VirtualEdge distributed a press release entitled "VirtualEdge Continues Record- Breaking Sales Growth in 2004" describing how the company grew sales by over 116% in 2004.

Ladies and Gentlemen, data mining this information took us all of five (5) minutes using HRmarketer.com and the HRintelligence database. Similar data can be retrieved for over 2,000 HR suppliers. If your company is serious about competing in the human capital space and does not have a membership to HRmarketer, or if you do but don't subscribe to HRintelligence, please call us today for a demo. You are simply at a competitive disadvantage without them. HRmarketer members who subscribe to HRintelligence may access the complete list of HR advertisers as well as the types of ads placed (i.e., directory listing versus inside front cover).

To determine the organizations receiving the most media coverage, we look at the number of non-paid editorial placements across the major monthly HR trade publications.

April 2005

Accenture, EDS, Exult, Fidelity Investments, Hay Group, Hewitt Associates, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Oracle / PeopleSoft, SHRM, Towers Perrin, Wal-Mart, Watson Wyatt

Commentary and Analysis: This month's list includes a mix of HR service providers / consultants and corporate employers (i.e., companies whose media placements are not related to a HR product or service they are selling). For example, you have the mainstays like leading HR consulting firms Watson Wyatt, Hewitt and Mercer, but also companies like Hewlett Packard and Wal-Mart. While often times a media placement for a corporate employer is a result of the respective company doing something to make the news (sometimes good and sometimes bad), it is also common for a company to make the news as a direct result of their own employment branding initiatives or because of an HR supplier they work with. In fact, it is not uncommon for an HR supplier and corporate employer to be mentioned side by side in the same article. Marketing and PR teams take notice - this is no accident. To increase your chances of getting media placements, come up with a compelling pitch and always have a client who is willing to talk to the media about the pitch topic. For help with developing and pitching compelling topics, HRmarketer members may contact their account executive about our SupportPlus services.

People often ask us how we determine the cutoff point for who makes the top list for editorial placements each month. This is normally easy each month because there is usually a significant drop in the number of placements after the first 10 to 15 companies. This month was a little unusual in that after the 15th company with the most editorial placements, more than 10 companies tied for 16th place. Instead of listing 25 companies this month, we chose to include only the top 15. Members of HRmarketer.com who are HRintelligence subscribers can access the entire list. Once again, we'd like to point out that over 60% of the top companies receiving editorial coverage in the human capital space are customers of HRmarketer. Coincidence? We don't think so - it happens each month regardless of the companies making the list.

Once again, we'd like to point out that over 60% of the top companies receiving editorial coverage in the human capital space are customers of HRmarketer. Coincidence? We don't think so - it happens each month regardless of the companies making the list.

Based on the top stories in the major HR trade publications. Visit HRmarketer News for a comprehensive listing of HR news over the last 90 days.

The Most Powerful Women in HR

Although there are still obstacles that remain for women, HR is moving away from being a "male- dominated, union-oriented, security-minded profession" to a field that is attracting more female professionals who are strategic and understand why HR initiatives must align with their organizations' bottom lines. Human Resource Executive highlights the 25 most influential women who are leading HR organizations today.

Employers Concerned about the Bush Administration Pension Plan

Although employer groups agree with the overall way the Bush administration is improving the defined benefit system, they are concerned how the changes will affect plan sponsors. Employers are telling Congress to use a "long-term corporate bond rate with a four-year weighted average to calculate pension liabilities" and to keep improving procedures the administration wants to eliminate.

Training and Development on the Rise for Companies Today

Employee training and development is increasing dramatically in today's marketplace. According to a September 2004 survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, "Measure the Return on Total Rewards," 49 percent of companies plan to increase their training budgets in 2005, and only 2 percent plan to decrease training funds.

The Oracle/PeopleSoft Aftermath: What's next?

The Oracle hostile takeover of PeopleSoft went on for 18 months, all the while making many industry analysts, customers and bitter shareholders unsettled and guessing who would be the victor. Now that Oracle has prevailed, HR professionals are unsure what to do with all the PeopleSoft transplants and customers are asking Oracle tough questions about the future of their HR technology investments. Customers don't know if they should stay with Oracle, find a third-party vendor for PeopleSoft product maintenance and support, or find a brand new HR technology provider.

Credit Unions Now Offering Group Insurance Benefits

For the past few years the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has made it possible for financial companies to sell insurance. Even though credit unions have been selling insurance to their members since the early 1990s, only now are they offering voluntary benefits and may even begin marketing group benefits because of the potential revenue growth.

Finding Out What Workers Want

There are many factors that affect worker productivity and retention: compensation, benefits, work/life balance, etc. And although it can be difficult to measure these aspects and to know exactly what matters to employees, companies know that they must be able to perform these analyses because of the rising cost of healthcare and other employee expenses. In fact, the costs of not having detailed analyses of what motivates employees can be extensive because of wasted spending and underutilized benefits.

Unions Becoming the Largest HR Outsourcers

According to an interview in HRO Today with Andrew Stern, president of America's largest and fastest- growing union (the 1.8 million member service employees international union - SEIU), unions could be America's largest HR outsourcers of benefits administration and other HR administrative tasks. He says that "we have a huge, huge advantage. It's called collective bargaining, which in any other industry would be an anti-trust violation. But unions have anti-trust exemption."

Great!

Our unscientific measure of the human capital industry's health looks at the aggregate number of advertising placements across the major HR trade publications and our subjective analysis of other "activity" within the sector including new investment money flowing into the space, IPOs, M&As, closures, etc. We then benchmark against the previous month to come up with a 5 point rating system of Excellent / Great / Good / Average / Poor. Again, we caution readers that our rating is a subjective analysis and may not be a true reflection of the industry's health.

April showed a slight improvement over February so we increased our rating from Good to Great. Click here to review a summary of earnings announcements for the most recent quarter for major publicly traded HR firms in April.

This month's "Huh?" goes to SAP and Oracle. On April 14th, 2005, the chief executive of SAP told a German business magazine he'd be open to a merger with rival Oracle if company head Larry Ellison were to raise the idea. "I would listen to him," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche, published April 14th. In a statement issued later that same day, the Walldorf- based company said Kagermann's remarks had been taken out-of-context and dismissed the notion of joining forces with its fierce rival. "SAP is not in merger talks with Oracle, and there is absolutely no substance to this situation other than media speculation," the company said. Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne declined to comment.

Deciding to hire a SEO firm can be a daunting task. The time and the investment - are they worth it? Factors such as what you sell, how you sell/distribute it, who you are targeting, your competition, and the purpose and the complexity of your website(s), will determine what you should spend on SEO and whether you need to hire an SEO firm. But whether you hire a firm or not, here are some things you can do immediately to improve your SEO:

1. Avoid dynamic pages, URL's that contain a question mark (?), frames, complex image maps, Javascript navigation and (sorry creative types) flash-only welcome pages. Most search engine crawlers cannot read these. If you want to use graphic links, make sure the graphics have ALT text descriptions that includes a keyword phrase that relates to the image (IMG SRC="logo.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="about hr marketer blog").

2. Insert a top and/or bottom navigation row that has text hyperlinks to all key locations on your site. This is a must if you currently have an image map navigation sidebar.

3. Create a "site map" page that includes text links to all key locations on your site.

Before proceeding to the next seven tips, first identify your targeted keywords (i.e., key search terms). These are the words or phrases people use to locate your services when they do a search on a search engine (i.e., "payroll services"). Don't assume you know what these are. Understanding what these keywords are is so important that we recommend you invest some money in market research to poll your customers and prospects on what keywords they use (d) to locate your category of service. When you identify some keywords, you can use services like http://wordtracker.com to find out how often people search for them, and how many competing sites use those keywords.

4. Update your Title Tags. Place your targeted keywords (at least two keywords) or keyword phrase (50 - 80 characters) in the HTML Title Tag on every page of your site. Each page will have a different title that pertains to the content on that respective page.

5. Update your METAs. While some major search engines may not pay attention to the META Description and META Keywords tags, some still use them so you may as well have them. Your META Description tag should contain 200-250 characters that describe the content of a respective page (again, use your targeted keywords). Your META Keywords tag will reinforce the target keywords on a respective page.

6. Update the copy on all your pages to include your keywords and keyword phrases (especially those used in the respective pages title). Place targeted keywords near the top of the page (first few paragraphs).

7. Develop internal page linking. Throughout your site, create keyword rich hyperlinks to other pages on your site. For example, in the descriptive copy on your "About Us" page, you may have the phrase "payroll services for small business" link to the product description page for that respective service.

8. Secure reciprocal links with other top sites. Go to a major search engine and type in keywords that you hope will bring up your site once it is optimized and check out the top ten or so results. Consider getting some of these sites to link to your site. The more sites that link to your site, the better your site will be ranked - especially if those links are from the most popular sites in your keyword category. Obviously competitors will not link to your site but you may find a few sites that will (i.e., maybe a directory site).

9. Information pages are vital! Content, content, content! The more relevant, interesting, and useful content you place within your site, the more popular your site will be and the better it will be found and ranked. So, start a blog, place your eNewsletter archives on your site, and place case studies, white papers and press releases on your site. Create a page of interesting tips and information to help educate buyers about your type of services, etc. And for each of these information pages, follow the same rules described above with META's, titles, internal page linking, etc.

10. Identify the free online buyer guides or product directories within your segment and submit your company.

Keep in mind that once you optimize your website, the major search engine "crawlers" should find your website and rank it higher than it would have been without optimization. However, it can't hurt to manually submit your website(s) to the major search.

Mark Willaman, president of HRmarketer.com, along with other HR experts, was interviewed for a recent MarketingSherpa.com article entitled How to Market to HR Professionals: Top 10 Dos & Don'ts + 4 Pain Points.

These marketing experts provide valuable tips on what works and what doesn't when selling to human resource professionals. The article also helps you understand the day-to-day responsibilities of HR professionals who are playing an increasingly important role in a company's business success.

As HR continues to become a strategic business unit of organizations, the number of suppliers selling to HR increases, making it more important than ever for you to understand the challenges of HR and how to effectively sell to them.

Ascentis is a leader in the HRMS space with their flagship product - HROffice - that provides small and midsized companies with automated, integrated, and electronic HR and benefits management.

While spending a fraction of the cost of a retainer- based PR service, Ascentis has achieved significant national visibility with their target audience by implementing a series of fundamental and highly effective marketing and PR campaigns via HRmarketer.com.

"I immediately saw the benefits and capabilities of HRmarketer and approved the purchase of the service," says Hayes. "They are constantly adding new features and functionalities and truly care about their customers' needs. Recently they announced a new feature HRintelligence that tracks editorial and advertising placements in the major industry trade publications for all HR service providers. This service is fantastic and helps us monitor our competitors and track our own editorial and advertising placements. HRmarketer is always one step ahead of its competition."

In addition to using HRmarketer's popular press release distribution service that distributes releases directly to the largest and most up-to-date list of HR and workforce journalists, Ascentis uses HRmarketer's Internet wire service called Direct2Net. Direct2Net allows Ascentis to dramatically increase the exposure of their press releases by submitting them to hundreds of major search engines and news portals like Google, Google News, Yahoo, Yahoo! News, MSN, and AltaVista. Direct2Net releases also support imbedded keyword links and are converted to RSS which dramatically increases the visibility of press releases. Ascentis recently received over 140,000 views on one single press release using HRmarketer's Direct2Net service!

"HRmarketer was impressive when we bought it and it continues to become even more and more powerful," says Hayes. "We credit their service with the national presence we now have."