The top story I read over the last couple of days  featured a  “Minority Report” type of social media monitoring for HR and IT recruitment by a  startup called Social Intelligence that data-mines  social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you or not. The article tries to answer the question – What happens when social networking analysis and predictive analytics are combined for HR goals? According to the post there’s no way around it: The Minority Report Pre-crime concept is coming to HR.

…When the software decides that you’re going to quit, steal company secrets, break the law, post something indecent on a social network or lie on your expense report, the supervising manager will be notified and action will be taken — before you make the predicted transgression.

Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube,LinkedIn, blogs, and “thousands of other sources,” the company develops a report on the “real you” — not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around.

… The company also offers a separate Social Intelligence Monitoring service to watch the personal activity of existing employees on an ongoing basis. The service is advertised as a way to enforce company social media policies, but given that criteria are company-defined, it’s not clear whether it’s possible to monitor personal activity.

The service provides real-time notification alerts, so presumably the moment your old college buddy tags an old photo of you naked, drunk and armed on Facebook, the boss gets a text message with a link.

Most of what I’ve mentioned so far is little different than what Radian6 provides if it’s set up properly for this set of tasks.   Interestingly, the article mentions another company I’ve written about recently called Recorded Future (small world), but I didn’t know they were partly owned by the CIA and Google.

A Cambridge, Mass., company called Recorded Future, which is funded by both Google and the CIA, claims to use its “temporal analytics engine” to predict future events and activities by companies and individual people.

The article makes a prediction about predictions ….

Recorded Future is only one of many new approaches to predictive analytics expected to emerge over the next year or two. The ability to crunch data to predict future outcomes will be used increasingly to estimate traffic jams, public unrest, and stock performance. But it will also be used to predict the behavior of employees.

And Google has figured out how to tell when someone is ready to quit Google.

Google revealed last year, for example, that it is developing a search algorithm that can accurately predict which of its employees are most likely to quit. It’s based on a predictive analysis of things like employee reviews and salary histories. They simply turn the software loose on personnel records, then the system spits out a list of the people who are probably going to resign soon. (I’m imagining the results laser-etched on colored wooden balls.)

My biggest concern, knowing the quality (of lack thereof) of Social Media Data, with so many issues around interpretation and judgment,  would be acting on it when the data could well be slanted or wrong.   Any thoughts?

Moving on to another subject, I’ll be in Boston for the next two days at Monitoring Social Media 10 Boston; should be an excellent event and I’m speaking at it.

Here’s the rest of my post: Texturant looks interesting and appears to replace the need for buzzers restaurants often have, and the concept can be extended to other businesses according to Read Write Web

ShareThis found a way to control what content gets social media shared using Facebook Connect and this can help regulated industries like Pharmaceutical companies who. As I wrote about last week, have a very short list of what they can say but a very long list of what they can’t.   For example ….

…pharmaceutical manufacturers for example now have complete control over the content advertised and can comply with FDA regulations to meet the fair balance to claims made in the description of the medicine.”

And this week Google released a web interface for it’s own URL shortener called Goo.Gl. I think if the Goo.Gl data is shared with Google Analytics, that would be great and encourage it’s more widespread use.

Also a  Burson-Marstellar study came out linking Americans to superficiality in regards to Social Media. Good points – but bloggers aren’t syndicated newspapers and the story isn’t a news clipping from Associated Press. But I think we have to be careful what yardstick we use because everything else is measured by it.