The Changing Landscape of HR Marketing and PR

Things have changed.

In marketing and PR, that is.

If you are managing your marketing and PR the same way you did five years ago, you are doing it wrong.

Two statistics to help make the point:

• Online ad revenue in 2010 will surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. Less ads = less editorial copy = less traditional media placement opportunities!
• Total Worldwide Internet Users in 2010 = 1.97 billion. And 41% said they get most of their news online.

For a lot of examples why things are different, see our new Infographic, The Changing Landscape of HR Marketing and PR.

I'll summarize in three steps what HR vendors need to be doing with respect to their marketing and "media relations":

1. You need to be online.

2. You need to regularly produce engaging content on all your social networks.

3. You need to identify and pique the interest of the online ”influencers” and “content curators” - and distribute your “news” to these groups.

Sounds obvious, right?

But how many of you are still blasting your news releases over your favorite wire service and sending your news releases as a bulk email to the same list of journalists?

This former is important (but not enough). The later is wrong.

In other words, the "list" of people you are sharing your news with should be based on who is presently participating in and driving the online conversations about the topics your news relates to. And this list of thought leaders changes daily - that's the value of HRmarketer.com and SocialEars, software to help you sort through the noise, identify trends and the key influencers driving these trends and engaging these thought leaders so you can start to stand-out and build your visibility in both traditional and new media. These products give you an instant list of the thought leaders relevant to your news (and their recent "conversations" that relate to the topic(s).

To learn more register for our December 8th webinar with Lance Haun, contributing editor of ERE and TLNT.com, and Elrond Lawrence, vice president of media relations for HRmarketer.com. Lance and Elrond will host this interactive webinar on understanding today's media relations and social PR.

Elrond and Lance will discuss:

- How media relations has evolved in the age of SOCIAL MEDIA

- How to target the right "journalists" (e.g., influencers)

- How to get your news noticed.

In other words, how to do PR the right way, today.

Other topics will include:

- Writing a good introduction for your press release

- The importance of personalizing your news or story pitch

- What makes for a newsworthy topic

- What not to send a journalist

Fact is, a lot of people influence HR today: traditional journalists and analysts, HR vendors, consultants, HR professionals, etc., etc. And not all of them work in the HR marketplace. Many are in IT, finance and other departments that influence HR decision makers. Their level of influence fluctuates, and so do the topics they influence. And they do their influencing on a lot of channels: traditional print media, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

So register for the webinar today and find out how to do media relations the right way in today's social landscape.

What do talent communities mean to you?

It's a bigger question than you'd think. The one about what "community" means to others as it relates to your social recruiting and social marketing efforts.

I told you to put a sandbox in your roundabout so "they" will come for community and each other, not necessarily for you, at first anyway. They being your "leads," the ones you want interested in your employment and corporate brands (which again should be pretty much aligned if you're serious about attracting the best talent and buyers since sometimes they're interchangeable). Plus, we've tackled it more than once or twice via the #TChat shows.

But is that realistic? I mean, most companies I've spoken to of late are only to the point of talent/lead pools, not communities, and they're quite content with what they're doing. Meaning there's sourcing and sharing but limited collaborative nurturing.

Well, at the upcoming TalentNet Live event (#TNL) in Chicago on December 5, 2011, at the JSTN headquarters, my HRevolution co-presenters and me are going to revisit our NPR Talent Community session.

But I'm going to start even early than that, at least the night before at the #TNL Tweetup event co-sponsored by HRmarketer.com and Talent Technology Corporation.

We'll be running a joint Twitter competition during the Tweetup. Attendees (including practitioners and vendors) will be encouraged to tweet their response with the #TNL hashtag to this question:

What do talent communities mean to you?

We'll then review and award the top 3 responses with a $100 gift certificate to their choice of either iTunes or Amazon. The next day I'll announce the winning tweets during our "Talent Community" session.

It's all about putting our ears to the collective community wall and listening to what you all have to say.

You know what else is like putting your ears to the collective community wall? It's when you use SocialEars, HRmarketer's social monitoring and analysis tool, to search for topics like "talent communities" and you get a whole bunch of smart journalist, analyst and online influencer folk who are all talking about the topic in articles, blogs and tweets as well as a myriad of other HR B2B topics (see below).

What, you didn't think I'd leave without plugging SocialEars, did you?

C'mon. I made it work. Kinda.

We look forward to seeing some of you in Chicago next week!

 

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.

While we're not the CIA or an HR B2B mood ring, yet

You should be proud. Really. You're actually using Twitter to monitor industry chatter about your particular part of the HR B2B space, as well as your company.

You're even jumping into conversations without selling from the get-go. And not just on Twitter, Twitter streams and Twitter chats -- you're also in LinkedIn groups, on Facebook, Focus and maybe others.

You're reading relevant blogs (like this one), sharing content, starting conversations and joining online communities. You and your company are finally embracing social media as a valuable marketing channel.

Right on.

Did you know that social media has been the driving force of social change around the world?

And did you know about how social media has helped reveal the whereabouts and actions of Mexico's dangerous drug cartels?

Crazy cool indeed.

Even more eye-opening -- the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of a nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency's Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as "vengeful librarians," are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.

Vengeful librarians gleaning insights into the collective moods of groups abroad.

Wow. And you just starting using Twitter.

Let's bring it closer to home, though. Now that you're floating in and around the social noise you're realizing that it's just, well, too noisy.

SocialEars helps you hear the right voices. While we're not the CIA or an HR B2B mood ring -- yet -- SocialEars is our new social data analytics service that analyzes the tweets, blogs, and online conversations and news stories for thousands of HR and B2B journalists, analysts and other "social" voices (new online influencers database) to identify trending topics and the people driving those discussions. It's a pretty amazing marketing and media relations research tool.

Learn more this Thursday, November 17, from 2-2:30 pm ET (11-11:30 am PT).

Oh, and you can share this across your social networks, too. That would be great.

Because otherwise we know where you live.

(Just kidding. Only some of you.)