Lots of professionals use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to network and connect with others personally and professionally. The downward spiraling economy has resulted in thousands of lost jobs. Participation on these sites has skyrocketed as a result.

Reaching beyond your direct network
“I think we have only just scratched the surface of using social networking for job hunting,” says Matt Hicks, a spokesperson for Facebook. “People are now going beyond their direct network and reaching that next layer of people that may have interest in getting a job with your company, but may be hard to reach through traditional media.

Job loss numbers are climbing
Many more people are out of a job now than this time last year, so obviously more people are looking. The plummeting stock market is what started the first wave of layoffs, leaving 533,000 people jobless during the month of November. The Department of Labor Statistics tell us that since December 2007, 2.7 million Americans have lost their jobs.

Get connected
In these troubled economic times, it’s more important than ever for people to stay connected with their personal and professional networks. Hicks explains, “It’s harder to find jobs and times are tough. People naturally want to stay in touch not only to find the next job, but even to get advice.”

Mainstream and broad-based radio station formats perform better than smaller niche-based formats in metered ratings is largely determined by the main metric used to describe the audiences: the relationship between “cume” and Time Spent Listening (TSL).

Just about every station in PPM markets will experience a significant cume increase because the meter will clearly show that people are listening to twice as many stations than are being recorded in the diary.

Conversely, the meter reports a dramatic TSL because the meter shows that people are listening to more stations, but for shorter amounts of time.

Making the switch
As a matter of fact, the TSL declines are so dramatic that Average Quarter Hour Persons (AQH), the relationship between the cume and TSL, shows lower results across the board with the PPM.

“We used to see people write down 50 hours of listening to one station,” said Charlie Sislen, President of Research Director, Inc. “Stations that were running on their great Time Spent Listening in a diary-based world have to adjust their format for more than big-cume stations.”

Keeping the listeners happy
PM forces many broadcasters to rethink their business model to meet the challenges of the new methodology.

Sislen says, “Stations can’t rely on an emotional relationship with listeners. Personalities have to be tight and concise. If they start to ramble, people turn them off and the meter picks that up. ”

There’s a real connect (as opposed to a disconnect) that needs to take place between the stations and their listeners. “High TSL radio stations need to be more conscious of what’s going on-air than they were before. They have to make sure they’re not blowing off listeners,” added Sislen.