The HR Blog Exchange

 

Many bloggers from time to time find themselves 'stuck', or lacking a source of inspiration for their blog, and get into a bit of a slump creating new content.

It happens to me quite often.

Most blogs have a particular angle, or Point of View, and sometimes after dozens or even hundreds of posts on your topic of choice you can easily find yourself at a loss for what to write next.  Hasn't it already been written, maybe even by you already?

Sometimes taking a fresh approach, examining a new subject, or mixing up your writing style a bit can help give you a shot of creativity and inspiration.

So in this spirit a few fellow HR Bloggers have decided to participate in a little 'blog exchange', a simple idea where two bloggers are paired up with each other, and each submits a 'guest post' to their Flickr - JasonDGreatpartner's blog, hopefully done in more of less the style and using the 'normal' subject matter of the host blog.

So each blogger gets a chance to stretch a bit, potentially writing about something new, and perhaps altering their style a bit, and hopefully most of all having some fun.

Getting to the point then, here are the bloggers that have agreed to participate in the blog exchange:

The Participants

Steve Boese - Steve Boese's HR Technology Blog - Twitter user name - sbjet

Lisa Rosendahl - HR Thoughts - Twitter user name - lisarosendahl

The HR Maven - HR Maven - Twitter user name - thehrmaven (The Maven really knows how to brand)

Trish McFarlane - hr ringleader's blog - Twitter user name - Trish_HR

designtwit -Fusion Frames- Twitter user name designtwit

Steve Urquhart  - Talent for the 21st Century - Twitter user name workforce101 and Talent421

Beth Carvin - Nobscot's Weblog - Twitter user name bncarvin

ImJustAGoyle - ImJustAGoyle - Twitter user name imjustagoyle

Margaret Murphy - MYFUTURE MYSELF - Twitter user name murphymargaret

Lois Melbourne - Aquire Blog - Twitter user name loismelbourne

The Pairings

Since the original thought was from one of my Tweets (lucky me), I was nominated to choose the pairings, so here goes:

HR Thoughts - Talent for the 21st Century

HR Maven - Nobscot's Weblog

Steve's Tech Blog - Fusion Frames

imjustagoyle- MYFUTURE MYSELF

Aquire Blog- the hr ringleader's blog

There were also a couple of folks who expressed interest in 'playing' but are not currently blogging, but would be interested in guest posting.

Ben Eubanks - Twitter user name beneubanks

I have a standing offer open to Ben to guest post on my blog, and I encourage other bloggers to consider opening up some 'guest' slots for new HR professionals and students.

For the actual writing and publishing of the posts, here are a few steps that I think make sense, feel free to ignore these completely if you disagree:

1. The 'pair' should contact each other via e-mail or Twitter DM to go over how they want the process to go and review any specific details that they care to discuss (length of post, timing, etc.)

2. Each blogger should spend some time reading their 'hosts' blog, looking at the content and style etc.

3. An agreement should be made for a target date to publish the guest posts

4. I think the 'pair' should try to publish on the same day, I think for the best impact and exposure that makes sense.

5. Once the posts are published, make sure to announce them on Twitter and use the hashtag #blogexchange in the Tweets, and the other participants in the #blogexchange should RT for further exposure.

I think that is it.  I am not 'in-charge' of this little project, I just agreed to help organize.  I don't plan on badgering anyone if the guest posts don't get done quickly. It is up to each blogger to make sure that the guest posts get written and published in a timely fashion.

Thanks everyone who agreed to participate, and let's have some fun!

A Picture in Search of a Post

Baby Geese In the Water
Originally uploaded by Felix Legion

I like pictures of baby geese swimming in line behind Mama Goose.

Maybe it is because I always enjoyed the work of the great psychological theorist Konrad Lorenz, who developed the concept of imprinting, and proved that baby geese would follow anything around if they were convinced what they were following was their Mama.

This is the point in the post where I should 'connect the dots' and link the image of the baby geese, trusting and obedient, and following Mama Goose to some grand pronouncement somewhat related to the theme of this blog, HR Technology.

I should make a point about people getting caught up in the latest trend in technology (Twitter, Social Recruiting, or bashing ERP), and implore them to analyze their own specific business challenges and capabilities before blindly following 'what the cool kids are doing'.

Actually bashing ERP is not really a 'trend', it's just something I like to do.

Or I could stretch the analogy to wax philosophic about Mama Goose as the leader, and the baby geese totally reliant on her to safely navigate the dangers and uncertainty of life as a goose, and exhort the managers and leaders who may read this to bear in mind their similar responsibilities to their organizations and employees.

Or I could just post a cool picture of a family of geese, peacefully swimming along, and leave it at that, in fact that is what I am going to do.

So, here it is, some geese following their mom, a picture in search of a post.

HR Tech Central - Update

A few weeks ago I agreed to participtate in the launch of HR Tech Central, a site designed to collect, organize, and promote content from many excellent HR and HR Technology Bloggers.

By all accounts, the site has been extremely well-received, and hopefully will continue to grow as an intersting and valuable resource for HR and HR Technology.

If you have not had a chance, I encourage you to stop by and check out the great content from the likes of John Sumser, Michael Specht, Talented Apps, Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors, and even little old me.

The below list is a sampling of some of the great content that ran on the site in the month of March 2009:

Hot List - March 1, 2009 to March 31, 2009

Top Posts

The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Workplace policies for Social Media- Michael Specht, March 18, 2009
2. Five Things HR Can Do- JohnSumser.com, March 13, 2009
3. Time to offshore the law- Phil Fersht, March 2, 2009
4. How do you navigate barriers?- Talented Apps, March 25, 2009
5. The Twitter Revolution II- JohnSumser.com, March 25, 2009
6. Bad news bears. Or other unlikely misfits.- Talented Apps, March 23, 2009
7. Special deal for blog readers- Michael Specht, March 16, 2009
8. A Collaboration Experiment- Steve Boese HR Technology, March 6, 2009
9. Resources for the other 77%- Steve Boese HR Technology, March 12, 2009
10. Performance Review, what’s in it for me?- Talented Apps, March 18, 2009
11. Here Comes The Train- JohnSumser.com, March 11, 2009
12. 4 Questions With... HR Minion- JPIE, March 10, 2009
13. Where should outsourcing vendors invest their marketing dollars in this climate?- Phil Fersht, March 5, 2009
14. Talent Management March Madness!- Inflexion Advisors, March 4, 2009
15. 4 Questions With... Jennifer McClure- JPIE, March 4, 2009

So there you go, lots of awesome content, all nicely organized and categorized.  Thanks for checking out HR Tech Central and for stopping by.

HR Tech Central

 

I am excited to be participating in and helping to announce the launch of HR Tech Central

I was contacted a few weeks ago by Tony Karrer from TechEmpower about participating in the site, and when I heard the idea, I was happy to have my blog's feed included.

This site collects and helps to organize the best content from blogs, news sources and other web sites all about HR Technology.

The goal is to create a place where it's easy to find current and highly relevant content. And perhaps to help folks discover bloggers and resources that they never knew about.  HR Tech Central tags content by 'Concept' and 'Vendor', so readers can easily view and subscribe to particular focus areas of interest.

You will find lots of great information here, many bloggers that I really admire and respect are represented, like John Sumser, Michael Specht, Mark Bennett from Talented Apps, and Mark Stelzner to name a few.

Hopefully, HR Tech Central will be a useful resource for HR pros and my HR Tech students alike.

Thanks to Tony for putting this together, and for including me in the launch.

Happy 100!

So I've hit the 100 post mark on the blog since I moved it over to Squarespace and figured a 'retrospective' post was in order.

Flickr - Chocolate Geek

Quite a few times in the short life of this little blog, a post that I spent many hours researching and writing and was really proud of fell completely flat, got very few hits and 0 comments.  Conversely, a few posts that I was not particularly proud of, garnered (relatively) high traffic and lively comments.

And once in a while, a post that I knew would be popular turned out to be just that, and for a minute or two I let myself think I was starting to figure this whole blogging thing out.

So, in keeping with a good 'retrospective', here are the most popular posts out of the first 100:

Your First 100 HR Twitter Follows - my list of 100 interesting, informative, and fun HR-related folks on Twitter

An Introduction to Twitter for the HR Student - my first attempt at the HR Twitter 'list'

Empty your cup - this was a recent post about my approach to teaching, and was helped greatly by being my 'featured' post for my short stay in the Fistful of Talent March Madness blog contest.

And here are the posts that I personally liked the most, but for one reason or another (probably because they were not about Twitter) did not rise up in popularity

Your HR Director should Blog - My fruitless attempts to find 'public' corporate blogs written by Directors or VP's of HR

Technology and the University - thoughts on what the future of college teaching/learning may be - more open, collaborative, and fluid

Cast of Characters - a post on differentiating yourself in the workplace.  This is probably my all-time favorite post because I used one of my son's drawings to help illustrate the point. It was also the post I submitted the first time I was included in a Carnival of HR collection.

Finally, I want to say thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read, comment, re-tweet, and otherwise help and support me and this blog.  I have learned much, met dozens of fantastic people, and have really enjoyed working on this little project.

I am not sure what direction I am going to take for the next 100 posts, but I hope that whatever happens, I am providing value to the HR community and to my past, current, and future students.

Cheers!