Jon Ingham trawls the net to provide his round-up of the great and the good of HR thought and opinion, so you don’t have to. This month, he reviews the use of social media at the CIPD Conference.
For the last eight months, I’ve been providing an irregular HR blogosphere bulletin to HR Zone. The idea of this has been to provide you with some of the best ideas, news and reviews from ‘the HR blogosphere’ meaning that you don’t need to trawl the net yourself (whilst encouraging you do to so).
Some of these updates, including the first of these bulletins, have focused on social media itself, ie blogs about blogging, etc. For example, in October, I provided a collection of posts about ‘the Social Business’, stressing the importance of HR’s use of social media in this. And back in July, I wrote about the extensive activity on social media around the SHRM annual conference in New Orleans
I also wondered about how much use the CIPD would make of social media at its annual conference this year (in fact, I first suggested that this conference should make use of social media to engage more people two years ago). So it was great to see the CIPD giving quite a prominent role to bloggers and tweeters this year.
Blogging
In part, this was about all the blogging that was taking place, including in particular on:
- My own Strategic HCM
- Mike Morrison’s Annual CIPD Conference blog
- HRzone.
Also see HRman (from Ukraine) and Graeme Martin’s HR and People Management blog. And you’ll also find some interesting observations on Graham Salisbury’s HR Case Studies blog.
I was particularly interested to participate in some live blogging, firstly at Personnel Today, covering Next Generation HR and then on my own site for A New Leadership Paradigm.
Tweeting
But the raised profile was also largely due to Twitter, and all the tweeting going on. HR Zone even provided an update of all of this on its home page. See for example this Twitter stream from Nick Baylis’ session on happiness.
We also had, and tweeted and blogged on, the UK’s first ever HR tweet-up (Twitter meet-up).
In the presentations
In addition, our use of social media at the conference sometimes became the focus of the sessions themselves. Emmanuel Gobillot talked about my blogging and tweeting three times, and in the final keynote, Shaa Wasmund mentioned my live blogging too. Then Vicky Wright concluded the conference by noting that this was the first time the conference had reached beyond the walls of the conference centre through everybody’s tweets.
But probably more important than any of this, however, was the fact that social media was also on the speakers’ agendas. I’ve posted on the speakers’ references to the social aspects of organisations, and the use of social media to support these aspects on my Social Advantage blog.
Implications
So what’s the implication of all this? I think it means that there’s an increasing opportunity for HR professionals to make use of social media themselves. You could do worse than starting with Nick Shackleton-Jones’ quiz, and going from there.
In the meantime, I’ll be talking to HRzone about how I may be able to help its members maximise their benefits from this new opportunity. Do add your comments to this article if you’ve got some ideas on this.
Jon Ingham is executive consultant at Strategic Dynamics. He specialises in helping HR teams to become more strategic and to increase their impact, including through the use of social media. He has two blogs, Strategic HCM – which has recently been voted as one of the top global blogs focusing on talent management – and Social Advantage, as well as a podcast show (Talking HR). You can also follow him on Twitter: @joningham.
