The days when only the media and market analysts drove public opinions are long gone. Social media has opened up the world of influence to anybody with an audience on platforms such as blogs, Twitter, and/or Facebook. To keep track of these influencers, hot industry discussions, and what anyone might be saying about you or your competitors, you need a social media monitoring application. Determining which one is not easy, as there’s an endless list of social media monitoring tools available. For recruiting professionals, you may want to take a look at SocialEars, a social media monitoring tool tailored just for the recruiting B2B space, explained Kevin W. Grossman (@KevinWGrossman), Chief Strategy Officer for HRmarketer.com, makers of SocialEars. At ERE’s Recruiting Innovation Summit (#RIS11) in Mountain View, California, Grossman told one success story of how SocialEars helped a client discover an MSNBC journalist who had written about his client’s space. They used that knowledge to reach out to the reporter, and create a relationship which finally resulted in an article and video for the client’s company. Grossman also said that if you’re writing about recruiting on your blog, “employment branding” and “recruiting technology” are two of the hottest trending topics in B2B recruiting. Building relationships is key to recruiting, but doing it efficiently can be difficult. Tuning in to your social space can improve your effectiveness not just in identifying industry influencers - it can also help with curating content, finding guest speakers for an event or webinar, or guiding trending topics in industry blog posts.