Cloud-y But Clear Skies Ahead in the HR Marketplace

Nope, this isn’t a weather forecast. Nor is it an economic prediction about the human resource marketplace. And it’s not even about cloud computing – although the technology I’m going to discuss does reside in the “cloud” and combines social data analytics and cloud computing.
I’m talking about SocialEars, HRmarketer.com’s new social data analytics product that analyzes the online “social” activity in the human resource marketplace and identifies the trending topics and the key “influencers” driving those discussions.
SocialEars was quietly introduced at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas last month (the perfect event to roll out such technology). These were a few Tweets from a sampling of people who saw the #SocialEars demo:
  • The company that impressed me most was HRmarketer.com with their new product feature “socialears”.
  • Forget Elvis! The real must see show this past week was #SocialEars at the HRMarketer’s booth!! Very Impressive!
  • New #socialears tool is HOT. Very cool.
  • Impressive stuff with #SocialEars!
  • @socialears is cool!
  • #socialears is awesome!
  • Dear HR PR folks, please please check out @hrmarketer’s #socialears. Great stuff! – #socialears is Remarkable!
  • #socialears is awesome!
  • #SocialEars is brilliant!
SocialEars is currently in controlled BETA with HRmarketer.com software customers and will be introduced to all HRmarketer.com software customers by year-end.
So what exactly is SocialEars?
I wanted to dedicate a blog post to the question because a lot of people are talking about SocialEars and wondering what it is and how it may help them.
SocialEars sits on top of HRmarketer.com’s vast information database that include thousands of media outlets, journalists, analysts and other thought leaders (we call these people Social Voices) in the HR and IT marketplace.
From this base of highly targeted data, the proprietary algorithm that powers SocialEars filters out the noise and analyzes the news stories, blog posts, Tweets and other socially “shared” articles.
Notice how I said, “filters out the noise”.
That’s kind of sort of super important (and really difficult) because anyone who spends any amount of time on social channels, for business purposes, knows just how much irrelevant information is flowing around and the difficulty in sorting through it to locate the good stuff – or at least the stuff you care about.
People are drowning in information.

As an example, in just three months SocialEars has analyzed hundreds of thousands of online social data and even after filtering through the irrelvent content (nothing to do with HR), removing duplicate content and “gaming” tweets (a bunch of the same tweets pointing to the same article using different URLs) we have a database of nearly 500,000 tweets and a quarter of a million unique articles. Again, this is just three months!
But SocialEars helps make things clear.
SocialEars then generates tag “clouds” of trending topics – like the sample image you see below. You can view tag clouds by the week, month, etc. When you click on a trending topic, you can view a list of key influencers on the respective subject and link directly to their online content relating to the topic.

You can also do open ended searches on any topic of interest to you to get similar data described above. You can also search individual people’s “social” content (e.g., a journalist, analyst or social voice) and view tag clouds of what they frequently talk about online (which may even surprise them:-)
You can also view the most widely used twitter hashtags in the marketplace and who’s using them.
So how are companies using this data?
When we first introduced SocialEars, the primary benefit we spoke about was laser focused media relations and PR. In other words, actually sending your news to people who care! So if you have some news about Total Rewards you would be able to locate the people who have actually written about the topic recently, like the sample image below reveals.

But when our customers started using SocialEars, we learned of many other practical uses:
  1. Identifying trending subjects and using this information to pick the topics of thought leadership content (blog posts, webinars, white papers, etc.). And then knowing who to share the content with.
  2. Source experts on various topics for news stories, and thought leadership content.
  3. Find speakers for conferences and webinars.
  4. Competitive intelligence.
  5. Market research, finding statistics, etc. etc.
  6. Curiosity and fun – OK, not a business argument for using SocialEars but it is really cool to see who in the HR marketplace is talking about what and how often online!
I’m sure as more companies start using SocialEars we’ll learn about even more practical uses of the technology.
And as the social “noise” continues to grow, I’m sure the demand for products and tools that help companies filter it, analyze it, and effectively use it will grow.
Like SocialEars.
If you are interested in learning more about SocialEars please contact HRmarketer.
Post by HRmarketer Founder and CEO Mark Willaman. Join Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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