Jon Ingham trawls the net to provide his round-up of the great and the good of HR thought and opinion found on the web, so you don’t have to. This week, he reviews the increased use of social media tools discussed at SHRM’s 2009 annual conference.
Web 2.0 and social networking tools are being increasingly well used by HR practitioners working in recruitment, and to a lesser extent, in learning and development. This trend is also being felt on the conference circuit, see for example the high level of tweeting (posts on Twitter) taking place at last week’s social media in recruitment conference. However, it still doesn’t yet feel like something that’s mainstream for many generalists.
The first sign that this may be about to change was recently provided at the SHRM annual conference in New Orleans, where a very high level of blogging and tweeting suggested that US-based HR practitioners at least have substantially increased their involvement in social media over the last year.
Following the conversation
As well as the official conference blog, a dozen bloggers and many more tweeters kept SHRM members and others around the world informed about the presentations and other happenings. See, for example:
- April Dowling at Pseudo HR
- John Hollon at Workforce’s The Business of Management
- Kari Quaas at Cool Works
- Libby Sartain at Brand for Talent
- Mark Stelzner at Infexion Point
- Michael Long, The Red Recruiter
- Michael VanDervort at Human Race Horses
- Sharyln Lauby, The HR Bartender
- SmartBlog on Workforce
- (and sorry to those I’ve missed!)
HR bloggers: Who are these people and why should I care?
Also, four bloggers participated in a session discussing HR blogging with SHRM’s COO, China Gorman:
- Jessica Lee, editor at Fistful of Talent who emphasises the need to be involved in the community and paying attention to new and emerging technologies in order for HR to gain credibility
- Kris Dunn of The HR Capitalist who notes that the social media buzz within HR may still just be limited to about 100 people out of 7,000 conference attendees and 250 thousand SHRM members
- Lance Haun, Your HR Guy who stresses that bloggers are not journalists
- Laurie Ruettiman, (Punk Rock HR) who observes how networking is changing, with convention attendance being replaced by flash mobs and cheaper ‘unconference’ formats
In addition, there were a lot of tweets throughout the conference, particularly during an HR tweet-up.
Resources
You can see videos of an HR bloggers session at SHRM’s conference blog site and of various interviews at Jennifer McClure, the Cincy Recruiter’s Vimeo site. And you can hear audio podcast interviews with SHRM conference speakers at Peter Clayton’s Total Picture Radio. You’ll also find a good review of the conference featuring many of the bloggers listed above at HR Technologist Steve Boese and Shauna Moerke, The HR Minion’s HR Happy Hour podcast.
Conclusions
I didn’t attend the conference myself, but I still found following proceedings using social media useful. And I’m sure those who did attend and either blogged or tweeted, or listened to this traffic, found that social media added to their experience of the event.
In fact, I think there’s a growing need to ensure that the growing popularity of social media doesn’t exclude people who aren’t using these tools – you can see more of this in a recent post on my own blog.
So what are the lessons from all of this? One is about the opportunity to add value to traditional events through the use of web 2.0 and social networking technologies – and is something that applies to in-company as well as sector-based events. Just imagine if your own annual conference got this much attention within your own company!
And of course, this attention is something that can be generated and sustained throughout the whole year as well. Social media may raise issues over security, productivity and potential legal problems, but it provides a great opportunity to raise engagement and productivity as well.
Addendum
As well as the above links, also check out the most recent two HR carnivals at Inflexion Point and Effortless HR. And you’ll also find a very good list of HR blogs at Fistful of Talent’s fourth round of talent management blog power rankings (my own blog comes in at #13 out of 130 HR-focused blogs).
Jon 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 and Competitive Society), and a podcast show (Talking HR). You can also follow him on Twitter @joningham
One Response
Employees need to be careful on social media sites …
An HR practitioner using social networking tools to ‘add value’ is one thing. However, employees themselves must approach social sites with some care because their view of what is acceptable may not accord with those of their employer.
Here is an interesting article
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/10/more-companies-firing-people-over-social-media-misuse
Like all things social media exposure is a balance and in the right hands a very powerful medium – but employees need to weigh the content of their messages against their employers perception of placing the business at risk by un-guarded comments.
James Chrimes
MD
SureBooks Online Accounting & Human Resources
http://www.surebooks.co.uk