Remember the days everyone thought that social media was just a quick flash in the pan? For the majority of business leaders, those days are long gone. Social media has become more defined in the business world as a platform that can offer a distinct advantage. For HR professionals this presents a significant opportunity to leverage this powerful medium in many myriad ways such as recruitment, assessment, employee feedback and, most importantly, for trend analysis.
Drawing from this thought, SHRM India, a part of the world’s largest professional, not-for-profit Human Resource association, SHRM – The Society for Human Resource, took up the opportunity to identify key HR conversationalists and how they are shaping perceptions about the usage of social media in HR. This culminated in the recently released “Top 20 Indian HR Influencers on Social Media Report” which is a first-of-its-kind effort to identify and measure the Twitter influence of conversationalists in the HR space.
Coming up with a list of Top 20 is a path-defining innovation as it entails sorting through the HR noise to find voices that reflect engaging ideas and insights. For this study, SHRM India compiled a list of 50 Twitter influencers and then shortlisted 20 individuals on various parameters including the follower count, HR related tweets, retweets, and impressions. Data for this report was collected over a period of four months, starting in November 2011 through until the end of February 2012.
The report identifies the Top 20 HR influencers with “_Kavi," a familiar name in Indian HR twitterverse holding the top spot. Others in the top 20 included, Vineet Nayar, CEO of @HCL Technologies and author of Employees First, Customers Second, Gautam Ghosh, Lead - India Marketing @BraveNewTalent, Tanmay Vora, a Quality Management Professional, Yuyudin Digital marketing manager @EmployWise, Aadil Bandukwala, Social Media Advisor @ Dell, Abhijit Bhaduri, Chief Learning Officer @ Wipro and Shruti Tewari, who studied HR from the premier XLRI and works with Ernst & Young, Kolkata.
Rajiv Dingra, CEO of WATConsult, the social media agency that partnered with SHRM India to develop the methodology for this report said, “It is noteworthy that the top HR influencers are not from the HR fraternity alone but represent an assorted mix of CEOs, entrepreneurs, advisors, digital marketers, bloggers, coaching and quality professionals facing people management challenges.”
In a unique spin to gauge the influence of HR conversationalists on immediate audience, the SHRM India Influencer Score was also used for the first time. It factored in the relative standing of an influencer on the basis of followers and impressions, which were established as two key percentile ranks. The first score was obtained by averaging the two percentile ranks of each influencer. To determine the final SHRM India Influencer Score, this score coupled with the Tweetlevel score was averaged for each of the individual influencers. Within the context of the HR community, this metric not just reckons the size of the engaged audience but also outlines the topical impact of the content posted by HR influencers.
To conclude, G Ravindran, CEO and MD of SHRM India and member of the Global Leadership Team said, “Professionals must realize that social media is here to stay. It is important in today’s day and age to understand which social media tools and strategies can be leveraged at the workplace. We hope that this research report will act as a starting point for developing insights into online HR conversations and conversation starters.”