TotalPicture Radio Interview Transcript: Mark Willaman, Kevin Grossman, HRMarketer.com

Welcome to a Big Picture Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting.

I'm really happy to have on the show today Mark Willaman, who is the founder and CEO of HRMarketer.com, and Kevin Grossman, who is the chief marketplace evangelist of HRMarketer.com. We're going to be talking today about their 10th anniversary, about a new product they just launched out at HRTech in Las Vegas called SocialEars. Mark, let's start with you telling us about HRMarketer.com; what does your company do and what service does your software provide?

Mark: At HRMarketer our software has always been about information for marketing and PR professionals. At our core - and we haven't changed this in 10 years - we're about aggregating the right information for people to do their jobs effectively in marketing to HR decision makers. We go out and we access the most comprehensive list of conferences, trade shows and speaking opportunities, media outlets, journalists, award competitions, buyer guides, analysts... you name it, and we organize the information in a way that allows people to effectively use it.

I might add it's not just HR because over the years we've realized that other departments influence the purchasing of various HR products. So we also cover IT and finance and other key decision makers in the events that they go to, for example.

What the software does is that essentially we then overlay that information with tools to help our customer base effectively use that information. And in a nutshell, that's what real HRMarketer really is - it's aggregating the right information and then overlaying that with tools to help people effectively use it in their marketing and PR.

Peter: As you mentioned, you're celebrating your 10th anniversary. What are some of the most important trends you've seen in the B2B space over the past 10 years? Kevin?

Kevin: A couple of things that I've seen, Peter. In the 10 years, in particular, that I've been in the HR B2B space, there's the mass marketing mentality that we've really embraced for many years and it's all about the volume of numbers and the leads that you generate and getting folks to sign up for webinars has really kind of fallen to the wayside because those aren't really necessarily true leads; it's more about the conversation with the individual and not only the prospect, but the influencer as well in this space. I think a lot of the HR suppliers over the years have had a hard time kind of dismantling that, again, that mass marketing mentality with the rise of social that we're going to talk a little bit about in this interview as well. That's one of the things that I've seen.

It's more about that individual conversation and that being said, the way that software is deployed, not only in the HR space, but just in the greater B2B space with software as a service and cloud computing as a platform as well, IT and the CIOs of organizations aren't really the gatekeepers any more. They're still a partner in the process of buying and deploying software in their organizations but HR, in particular, for a lot of whether it's talent acquisition, talent management, lots of different kinds of HR-related software, they're really becoming more of the primary buyer and decision maker along with IT and finance and operations and vendors are struggling, I think, to have those conversations with HR. So that's a trend that I've seen that we're working with clients, as well, to help them better build the business in this case and have those conversations with HR.

Those are the trends that I've seen.

Mark: And Peter, if I may add to that; I think I can sum up the trends in one word - it's called the internet.

When we launched HRMarketer 10 years ago, most B2B decision makers got their HR news and information from a news portals and outside sources, such as analysts and trade journalists, who serve as gatekeepers.

Today, these same people mostly get their news from the internet and they consume it throughout the day - email, webinars, podcasts (like the one we're listening to now), blogs, social media sites... things we couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. It's a never ending loop where everyone functions essentially as a news source, and a few gatekeepers, as Kevin alluded to, control what news we see.

So I think the internet has forced all of us to completely rethink how we do business, including HRMarketer which is, as we'll speak about later, the primary motivation for our new platform. But that's the trend is the internet and social.

Peter: Let's talk a little bit about HRTech in Las Vegas. How was the conference this year? What were people talking about? Anything new and exciting out there?

Mark: It's the event to go to, it really is. It's just exceptional. We had a major product launch at the event, so I'm not a good person to ask how it went because I never left our booth; I think I gave close to 100 demos over two days of the new product that we were launching. I'm going to let Kevin actually talk about what was going on outside of our booth.

Kevin: The greater themes that I saw on the floor and had heard amongst the attendees themselves, which by the way, was fairly (I think) a record number according to Fred Kirst who does a lot of the event organization for a lot of the LRP events, including HRTech. Over 3000 paid attendees, not accounting the vendors, and there was 220+ vendors and exhibitors on the floor. Period.

It was a huge show being in Vegas. Some of the trends that came out, there wasn't necessarily anything new - and this is kind of the buzz from both the attendees and the analyst community, as well as this new community that is called social voices that we're going to talk about - it's kind of like in between we're not journalists, we're not analysts, we're influencers in the space, the HR bloggers, practitioners, vendors... anyway, social and mobile are still the buzz, the talk of the town, except now... so it wasn't really new per se, but it's also about how it's integrating into the software much better than it ever has before. There was some new iPad apps being shown at the show, people fluent in Workday and some others were unveiling their mobile apps and social being, again, baked into the software in some capacity from the top management suites to ripples of the world and others that were at the show.

That was still the talk - again, not new, but it's more mainstream now and I think getting better integrated into the products that were showing.

So those are kind of the bigger trends that I saw and heard on the floor at HRTech.

Peter: So this was sort of like the iPhone 4S launch, right?

Kevin: Yeah, it was actually. You're right. That's a really good analogy. It was. It's cool, but it wasn't the next big thing yet. I think people are trying to catch up to - even though for those of us that still have the 3GS.

Peter: Let's talk about this new product that you launched out at HRTech - SocialEars. What is it and what do you hope to achieve with it?

Mark: I can answer that. We talk about trends and what we struggle with at HRMarketer over the last year or so is what to do about these individuals that are not journalists, per se, they're not analysts, they're sometimes HR vendors, they're consultants, they're HR practitioners - these people that have tremendous influence online with respect to the human resource and B2B marketplace but again, they're not journalists, per se, and they're not analysts. We know it's very important for individuals who are selling HR products and services to engage with this audience and yet, it's not that easy to find them and keep up with what they're saying.

We launched a database called Social Voices, which essentially includes these people that have tremendous online influence and really drive the conversations with respect to HR. Again, they can be consultants; they can be HR practitioners, people in finance, vendor voices as well.

SocialEars is an algorithm that we built that essentially sits on top of all of our information databases. Whenever we add people to our database, whether they're a press contact, an analyst, or now a social voice, we collect their social networking information. Are they on Facebook, are they on LinkedIn, do they tweet, do they blog.

We then aggregate using SocialEars all their conversations, and it allows us to build individual tag clouds so people can see what respected people are actually talking about online, or we can build tag clouds across our entire database to see what topics are trending.

For example, if rewards and recognition were trending over the last 3 or 6 months, whatever timeframe you identify, then you could click through that tag and actually see the people that are participating and are driving the conversation about rewards and recognition online. And again, they'll be press contacts, they could be media outlets that are covering in their articles, they could be people who are tweeting about it, HR practitioners who are blogging... it's essentially an algorithm that is tracking all the online conversations amongst journalists, media outlets, analysts and other social voices and then reporting on what's trending and what's not.

The value to it - there's quite a bit of value to it but primarily, we think it has tremendous media relations value and marketing intelligence value to help vendors better understand who the people are that are actually talking about the topics that are important to them to allow them, Peter, to begin more intelligent engaging conversations as opposed to yesterday's way of doing things, where you just blanket release your news and hope that somebody bites and takes interest.

Peter: Is this product released at this point?

Mark: We debuted the product for the first time to allow people to see it and play around a little at the HR Technology event. Since then, we are entering control data as we're saying to give a few of our customers of HRMarketer access to it.

We're doing that for obvious reasons to make sure that it's working the way we hope it is and so far it is, thankfully. Then we'll begin to roll it out to more customers. What we're going to be doing is slowly rolling it out to all of our clients throughout the fourth quarter and then the debut for everybody that wants to have access to it will be January 1.

It is launched, Peter and it's in control beta just as it will be throughout the fourth quarter with a formal anyone can have it beginning of the year.

Peter: Is this a web app? Are you going to be doing apps for mobile devices with this? How will people access this?

Mark: The answer is yes, yes. All of our software's SaaS and this is no different. The natural progression of this is obviously to have it available in various formats for mobile devices which we don't have right now. It certainly is functionable on a pad but we do plan in first quarter to have an actual app for this.

Peter: Talk to us about the rise of social and its place in business software today and maybe project out to the future a little bit.

Mark: I'm going to let Kevin answer this one. Kevin is much more educated about social as far as day to day since he is one of the top influences in this space. Kevin, what are your thoughts on that and I can add something when you're done.

Kevin: Thanks Mark and Peter. I think that what I always find fascinating about the rise of just social networking, social media is that this whole aspect of getting to know one another now online isn't really anything new. I mean it's just kind of natural human behavior, the fact that for decades we were going to various fundraising events and we go to our kids' soccer games and we end up mingling and meeting others. Then there are other networking events and on the golf course.

Then with the rise of the internet, we had the online Yahoo user groups for people that - these communities that began develop online but just another way again to get to know you and what's happened I think is that we really want to get to know each other again I think. Again with the way that a lot of products both hardware and software are sold today that are very consumer oriented.

When you talk about mobile for example, I mean the push of the consumer taking their devices to work into the enterprise when IT was like, "No, no, you can't. There are security issues. We can't let you use it." and we're just saying "Forget it. We're still going to bring them in." so we brought our Smartphones to work. We brought our tablets to work, Apple being the prominent player there. That began to kind of change the way that IT focused on how we do our work today.

Finally the enterprise is still playing catch up right now in that regard. You even got Oracle and SAP finally now launching their own full public products SaaS driven HCM suites that they're finally really releasing to the wild and pushing it for the longest time being very much the vanguard of the enterprise software company.

I think the "us"; this democratization mash up world that we live in now has really driven and fueled that need to get to know one another. I think that the businesses that are really embracing that and not only including that aspect in their software that they're selling to other businesses and just internally from an HR perspective, embracing it more. Allowing internal networks to talk amongst themselves to be able to know at any given time what individual is doing at a team in the UK and what skills emphasis they may have and if they leave, how do I fill that. Just this map which kind of goes back to the granular point of analytics which is another trend I didn't mention earlier when you asked.

Social, mobile and analytics are extremely hot right now and the fact of the matter is today in organizations, we can pool information from disparate systems, put them in a data mark, run some magic secret sauce, like we do with our SocialEars product as well, and we can analyze and we can see so much from different vistas and vantage points and visualizations of what our workforce is today, what it looks like. From a marketing perspective, what our SocialEars product will do with looking at what the influence or space looks like, who's saying what and what's trending what and what's timely today in the HR B2B space.

It's an exciting time again and I think that we're going to continue to see that into the future where it's just going to be pretty much standard. There's going to be some kind of social technology built into most of the HR B2B software products that are released. Mobile will be more than just an App wrap thing. They'll be very, very focused on what it means to me for me to use my mobile device as a marketer, as an HR professional, as an operations, in the field, in the manufacturing, on the floor. We're going to see that continue the global, the connectivity, the collaborations are going to continue to grow.

Peter: I was at a Salesforce.com conference earlier this year and I was amazed at the number of people who had iPads at this conference. It was certainly everyone on the stage did and how people are now using this tablet device as a sales tool, as a marketing tool and as a way of what you were just talking about, just tracking all the information at real time that's going on within an organization. It's amazing.

Kevin: It is amazing, yeah and we're only going to see more of that for sure.

Peter: Mark, something that you said earlier about how social is really becoming the news channel. I learned that Steve Jobs died on Twitter, which I think has become the breaking news channel and sort of replacing traditional media in the sense that if you want to know about what's happening right now, you go on Twitter, right?

Kevin: Right.

Mark: Yeah, you're absolutely right. You can spend another hour talking about that but Peter, there's just this blending of information and how we get information. I just landed in San Jose Airport minutes after it was announced and the first person that announced it was a stranger behind me who had just turned on his iPhone and alerted all of us around him to the news.

Not to go back to SocialEars but again, there's so much information coming from so many different directions as we share our news on Facebook. We twit about it. We go on to LinkedIn and do an update and from so many sources that I think tools are going to be in demand and many of which on the analytics side at HRTech were being shown to help people make sense of all this information, to sort through the noise like our SocialEars product does. More importantly to help people as there's more and more information going around to filter through it, to make sense and analyze it and I think I see that as something that will continue to trend.

Kevin: One more quick note about that is that there's this long running joke of everything you read on the World Wide Interweb is correct and real. We know that's not true but I think to Mark's point about really there's going to be this demand of different types of software and filtering tools so that I can really focus in on more of what's credible and timely as opposed to a lot of the garbage that's out there in the internet.

You do just a straight Google search and Google's been amazing with their search algorithm but you're going to get a lot of stuff. You're going to get a lot of that floatsam and jetsam that's in the middle of the Pacific that gets dumped everyday and we're going to need more of these types of tools. Not just ours, there are a lot of great different filtering tools that are out there in order for us to make more sense of this credible timely information that's flying around again, that's really democratized the world and will continue to do so.

Peter: I have one more question for you guys. I know that along with SocialEars that you are working on a new platform for HRMarketer.com. When is that going to launch and can you give us sort of a sneak preview of what's new.

Mark: The new platform is actually launching the last week of October and I mentioned some of the changes earlier in our discussion, Peter, about how people get their news and how they want it and social. Our new platform introduces new databases like our Social Voices database whereas before we had the press contacts and analysts now will have social voices.

We have an entirely enhanced UI, much easier to get at the information that you're looking for. We've integrated with social sites like Twitter, so once you assign your sight to your Twitter ID, your company's Twitter ID, you can easily follow and see who you're following across our entire day to day's. There's enhanced news distribution services, Peter, and syndication deals we've done to ensure the broadest visibility in the HR and B2B space with your news distribution. Ways to add which media to your news releases, video, images, etc. and interface with Google Analytics. I think the theme would really be social that we've kind of incorporated throughout our entire site and that will be coming in just a couple more weeks.

Peter: Great. One last question and this really is my last question! Are there any projections that you have for 2012 especially relating to the B2B marketplace and SaaS that you'd like to share with us?

Mark: I'm not good in predictions. If you want to press me hard, I just think it's the continuing of social. Years ago in the `90's I remember being in this industry and people would ask, "Do you have a web based application? Can my employees access your services online?" It was a big deal for those who could in 1995 and `96. Now that's like a ridiculous question. Of course you do, everybody does. Last year the question was "Can people access your services on mobile?" or "Is it socially...?" or does it incorporate social.

Next year you're after I don't even think people are going to even ask those questions anymore. It's going to be expected so I think in the HR marketplace as it relates to technology. I think we're going to see not a subset of social vendors over here and those that aren't. It's just going to be everybody's doing something in that space.

Kevin: What I'll add to that is and again, I'm no soothsayer but trends that I see that are going to continue to grow are two primary ones that come to mind. One is that a lot of suppliers and companies that sell the B2B space, we're going to see a lot more broader and partner networks... everybody's got an API that integrates with one another and so what used to be more traditional head on competitors are now going to be partnering more. It doesn't mean they're still not going to be competitors. There's going to be a lot more of that kind of cross integration between platforms, services, products.

There are a lot of really exciting niche tech companies that are coming out, some that will make it, some that won't but partnering I think is going to continue to grow next year as well as if companies want - particularly if it relates to the HR B2B space and the deployment of cloud computing platforms and just SaaS software and selling directly to HR literally along with the other partners that again make those decisions, they're going to need to be able to speak on like granular level and make the business case in that level. That's something that the companies that are going to get it are the ones that are going to grab tons of market share next year.

One company that I'll say that has been doing that as one of the bigger kids on the street is Workday. "They do a really, really good job of talking to HR" and companies that can model that, they're the ones that are going to succeed this next year.

Peter: Those are some great insights. Well it was great talking to you, guys. Best of luck with the launch of your new products and we'll certainly be staying in touch.

We've been speaking with Mark Willaman, founder and CEO of HRMarketer.com and Kevin Grossman, chief marketplace evangelist at HRMarketer.com. Kevin's blog is Marcom HRsay and you can find him at Twitter at Kevin Grossman and Kevin hosts a weekly Tweet-up Wednesdays at 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern with the hash tag TChat.

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This Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.