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Why great companies aren’t so great online

Lizzie O'Leary Apr 18, 2014
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Why great companies aren’t so great online

Lizzie O'Leary Apr 18, 2014
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Lists like, “Best Places To Work,” or “Top 10 Coolest Companies,” usually focus on salaries, or perks like stock options, wellness programs, or a great cafeteria.

But even those details sometimes don’t tell you what the culture is like inside a company and what employees lives are like. 

Jason Seiden, CEO of Ajax Workforce Marketing, looked at the LinkedIn profiles of 250 people who worked at celebrated companies, and found that 80 percent of them had nothing to say about the places they worked.

“I’ve been watching this trend on social media, where employees are out there, they’re looking each other up, they’re engaging online the same way we would engage at a bar, you know ‘Hey, what’s real? What’s going on?’ And what I didn’t see is, I didn’t see companies adapting to that. I saw them using the same old broadcast channels to get their message out. So that disconnect is what i wanted to explore,” Seiden says.

“Once upon a time, if a company wanted to speak to the world, they would have to buy advertising,” Seiden says.T”hey would have to have a press release get picked up by journalists and carried out through a broadcast medium. Now, because of social media, we all broadcast.”

Read Jason Seiden’s thoughts on why employees are silent about their companies on LinkedIn

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