DSM Blog

Do you remember when Google aired this Super Bowl commercial in 2010? If not, refresh your memory…

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

It was inevitable that the internet would eventually intertwine with our cable viewing pleasure.  Forget those distasteful memories when Web TV was the next big thing.  No longer will laptops overheat our lower extremities while we watch our favorite episode of “Charles in Charge”.  Imagine watching a program and browsing the web at the same time on your 52” Sony flat screen.  Our television experience will never be the same thanks to the innovators at Google.  And the best thing about it…it will be from the comfort of your own living room.

Google has recently integrated its search functionality with our televisions.  They call the product Google TV and you can view the video here:  www.google.com/tv.  Never again will we aimlessly flip through channel after channel with a remote in hand.  We now type the program name we are looking for in a search bar and find it as quick as a standard search on any computer.  The product also has numerous downloadable apps, similar to the Android or iPhone, but directly downloadable to your TV set.  Browse the internet, watch YouTube videos or chat with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, the internet has found its way into Americas favorite pastime.   Gives home entertainment a whole new meaning to say the least.

Soon enough, everyone and everything will be connected.  Computers, mobile phones, televisions, health records, and other personal information will be easily and instantaneously accessible.  The information revolution is on its way at a rapid pace.  Better brace yourself.

Take a look at the Key note at Google I/O 2010 below:

Are Americans still reading publications and newspapers or has the online world replaced them?  No longer do we find ourselves sifting through the classifieds in search of a job, a car, a new home, or even a 1965 French carved piano.  The internet has made our searching more simplistic in helping us to find what we are looking for by typing in a keyword and clicking our mouse button.  Aggregators bring us news through the use of feeds and in real time!  We are no longer a day behind on breaking stories with the power of Twitter and Google at our finger tips.  Facebook has enabled us to share our thoughts, suggestions, and referrals openly and instantly with our friends and family.  Anyone know of a good Italian restaurant here in Knoxville, please let me know? Distribution is now in the masses through the interconnected galaxy of the internet.  If print still exists in the next 5 years, it will be because of the avid book reader seeking serenity sprawled up on their sofa with a glass of wine, paging through the latest top selling fictional novel.  Then again, Kindle is doing a nice job of capturing this market.  With internet access on our mobile devices, the joy of carrying a magazine to the bathroom to kill time is an act of the past.  With the present job market, would you rather page through ten city newspapers with band aids on your fingers from paper cuts, or hop on indeed.com and in 2 minutes find every job aggregated and perfectly sorted staring at you boldly on your computer screen?  The way we are reading, accumulating, deciphering, and sharing media has taken a 180 degree turn causing us to rethink and relearn the methods we have been taught.

So I say to you businesses…If you are looking at spending your advertising dollars utilizing the old school methods of print, the ones our grandparents were accustomed to, I would devise a new strategy.  From the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a changing.”

Most media professionals and website operators are unaware of a recent feature that Google has launched.  It is called Google Custom Search and some highlights are as follows:

• Include one or more websites, or specific web pages
• Host the search box and results on your own website
• Customize the look and feel of the results to match your site

This feature has numerous benefits to site operators who are looking at adding a customizable search feature on their main website.  It acts as a Google search which crawls through the content on your site and displays the search results in a Google type fashion – this can be customized to your sites coloring scheme, look and feel.  Thus, making it easy for your clients or employees to find specifics regarding your product line or services offered.  The cost is only $100 per year for the full enterprise search feature but does cap the amount of data/pages crawled.  Great feature for those who have large amounts of data or content that is relatively hard to find otherwise.

The Custom Search tool can also be used as a data crawler for specific sites you are looking at aggregating data from.  For example, say you wanted to build a site dedicated to crawling only the most relative and pertinent information around health care content – ie:  blogs, forums, community chat rooms, etc.  You can implement the Custom Search feature and choose which health care related sites you wish to be crawled.  As a result, only health care information and content would appear in the search results instead of scrolling through 25 pages on a typical search engine trying to find what you are looking for.  Most of us are looking for more quality results in a search query relating more to what information we are truly seeking.

Way to go Google!  Another great feature has been provided that helps the layman search more effectively.  I look forward to seeing how this new feature relates to more of a real-time search experience.

More information can be found on Google’s site here:  www.google.com/cse

Health care facilities no longer consider employee issues a “Human Resource” problem.  The workforce shortage is one of the most important issues facing all health care executives today.  With health care professionals being in such high demand, hospitals throughout the country feel the pain of not having enough staff to provide the best quality of care for their patients.

With advertising and recruiting fees costing tens of thousands of dollars each year, hospitals are looking for other outlets to help minimize these costs.  These days, recruitment firms take anywhere from 20%-25% of a candidate’s first year salary for placement.  To advertise in local newspapers or publications, costs can reach over $1,500 for a single weekend advertisement.  A new method needs to be derived.  One that guarantees a greater return on investment by marketing to quality and qualified individuals rather than quantity or a standard local market.

With ongoing budget crunches, layoffs and recruitment fund cuts, what will be the new health care recruitment vehicle?  Is it job boards, job aggregators, ATS systems, new retention strategies?  Something needs to be done and marketers can help.  If we put our heads together, driving a new median for health care recruitment can be created.  One that helps HR departments find what they are looking for without breaking their budgets.  Thus, significantly improving quality of care and making the health care industry more stable for the years ahead.

For those interested in data extraction and screen scraping, we found an excellent resource.  The company is Mozenda and their solution can be found here:  www.mozenda.com.  The price is very reasonable and the product is top of the line.  This is a very niche space that not many companies have ventured into.  The closest competitors out there, from a job scraping POV, is OptiJob and JobBoardMount.  Scraping data from the web can be a tricky and a very brittle process.  However, it appears that Mozenda is one that has their act together and from the video and tutorial they provide, it shows!

Take the video tour on their homepage and tell us what you think.