EVENT: The Social Media Strategies for HR Seminar

In two weeks I will be attending and participating in the Conference Board's 'Social Media Strategies for HR' seminar, along with many other fantastic Human Resources practitioners and leaders. If you are thinking that the 'Social Media in HR' angle is getting really played out and overdone, then you might be right, but you also might be in the tiny minority of HR professionals and leaders that actually have been working with social media, social networks, and proactively using these platforms to support their business and talent strategy.  I think, generally, that the opportunities and challenges that social media present to the typical HR organization are just beginning to be explored. Remember, unlike many of us in the social media bubble almost no real HR leaders spend their year attending seventeen conferences, fourteen tweet-ups, or diving into one of the myriad new HR-themed Twitter chats. Mostly they are too busy in their day jobs, and when they have time, they are trying to figure out how to better their function and their performance, and using social media can be one of those ways - if they could ever find some spare time to try and sort it out.

That is why a dedicated event like the Social Media Strategies Seminar for HR is so compelling to me.  In the early days of social media in the workplace, there were hours of trial-and-error while learning because there were no classes or conferences or case studies where you could learn how to use these platforms more effectively.  The benefit for today’s professionals getting into the space or for those who are using the platforms but want to take that use to the next level is that there are events where you can go and learn more in a day than many of us did in a month or a year.

If you or someone in your organization is wants to learn more about using social media platforms for HR and recruiting, you need to mark your calendars now for The Conference Board’s Social Media Strategies for HR Seminar.  Join me in New York City on April 17- 18, 2012 as we discuss and learn how to:

• Leverage social networks to benefit the entire organization
• Implement and manage social networks to spur innovation and knowledge sharing
• Use social media to increase employee engagement and bolster employer branding
• Manage the legal implications of social media in the workplace

I’ll be co-leading a session on how you can use social media to strengthen your employer brand and bolster employee engagement.  My co-presenter will be Trish McFarlane, Director of Human Resources for Perficient and co-founder of the HRevolution.

Use discount code SB1 to get $250 off the registration cost!  You can register for one day or both.  I hope you’ll join us, you won’t be disappointed.

Social Media and the Company: Which picture is worse?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show we will be re-visiting the topic of 'Social Media, The Company, and The Law', with special guest, Employment Law expert Eric Meyer.  It has been some time since we covered this ground on the show and tonight I am sure that Eric will do a great job getting us all back up to speed so to speak, with the ever-changing and fast-moving world that is the intersection and tension between social media, social networking, company objectives, employee rights, and the law.

It will be an interesting and fun show, and I do hope you can join us tonight at 8:00PM ET as we kick around the topic.

You can listen to the show tonight on the show page here, by calling in to the listener line - 646-378-1086, or via the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

This week, as luck would have it, another great set of 'possibly inappropriate examples of social media use by employees' popped up - from my favorite professional sports league no less, the NBA.

Submitted for your consideration are two Twitter status updates, both that originally contained a linked picture or 'Twitpic', and both from current NBA players, (though not from the same team).

Exhibit 'A' - New York Knicks forward J.R. Smith tweets a very NSFW picture of a female friend in a state of very little dress, with an accompanying joke commenting about an aspect of her physique, (note Smith has since deleted the original Tweet).

Exhibit 'B' -  New Orleans Hornets center Chris Kaman tweets a picture of himself holding up what appears to be a very lifeless cat along with some commentary along the lines of 'Look what we are going to do to the Bobcats tonight').

Both tweets were sent from the player's personal Twitter accounts, and not in conjunction with any official team or league activities. Just a couple of goofy NBA players messing around on Twitter in their free time. No doubts that Smith's and Kaman's updates and shared pictures could be described as (depending on your point of view), as inappropriate, crude, classless, vulgar, offensive, etc.  And depending on the NBA or the individual team's written policies and contracts perhaps these kinds of updates would put the players in some kind of 'official' trouble with the league brass.

But here is the interesting thing, and the tie back to tonight's HR Happy Hour Show on social and the company and the law - the league fined Smith $25,000 for his actions, and as of this writing, has not taken any action against Kaman.

And that's the tricky part with dealing with employee's personal use of social media as an organization. Sometimes you have to make the tough call deciding what is more offensive - a NSFW picture of a woman not really dressed, or a guy on the starting five swinging a dead cat.

Fun times...

BONUS CONTENT - My spot on the Oracle Apps Blog

Please indulge a quick spot of self-promotion - today I have a post up over on the Oracle Applications Blog with some thoughts around the impact of social media and social technologies in HR, and the great opportunity and potential for HR leaders to leverage these technologies inside the organizations.

The post is titled, Beyond Record Keeping: What Social Means for HCM, and I hope you will check it out and share your ideas and comments about Social HCM there. And while you are at it if you are interested in staying connected to what is happening in the Oracle Applications space, the world of HR Technology, (or just want another opportunity to internet-stalk me), drop the Oracle Apps Blog in your feed reader.

The Oracle Applications blog is meant to be a resource for the HR community and will feature guest posts from key executives, strategy leaders, and Fusion Applications customers. And I will be posting there from time to time as well.

You’ll be seeing some new names and some names that you probably already know. The goal is to provide you with the information you need to get the most out of Oracle Applications today and identify new opportunities for your business in the future.

Thanks for the indulgence - tomorrow we will back to our regularly scheduled hijinks here on the blog.

Information Imbalance and Roach Motels

Last week this piece on TechCrunch about social CRM startup Nimble, caught my attention, as interest in business systems that can more effecitively connect with and leverage the social graphs of customers, prospects, and employees is certainly a hot topic for many organizations today. Nimble attempts to re-think traditional CRM systems, which have primarily functioned more as data stores and repositories of information rather than truly dynamic systems of engagement and added value by connecting contact, company, and deal information with external social networks, (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+), as well as internal and enterprise sources. Dead End

The trouble with traditional CRM, and likely other slices of the enterprise technology stack, is that there often seems to be an imbalance, or at least a perceived one, in the information flow to and from these systems in the minds of those that the systems are ostensibly trying to serve. If you think about it, administrators, managers, and employees can pretty easily get the sense that they have to spend too much time feeding these beasts, without getting that much in return. A telling quote in the TechCrunch piece from Nimble's founder Jon Ferrara sums this feeling up well:

“CRM tools are not about communications,” he says. “It is a management tool, a way for managers to keep a hand around the neck of managers. CRM doesn’t tell you anything, you have to tell it everything.”

The quote is very instructive, and kind of reminds me of the old 'Roach Motel' line - 'roaches go in, but they don't come out.' Substitute roaches for data, and you are pretty much there.

Contrast that concept of an information imbalance with some recent ideas about the value derived from participation in social networks, where it has been posited that the average user or consumer of social information gets way more value out than they have to put back in. Some of that positive information imbalance on social networks like Facebook and Twitter can be attributed to the 'power users', the ones that feed the platforms with copious updates, tagged photos, 'likes', and re-tweets. While sometimes kind of annoying, they do have the effect of generating significant interaction, content, and perceived value for these networks. Ultimately, most network participants feel like they are getting more value from their participation than they have to contribute.

The net-net of this for folks that have to design, deploy, and convince sometimes less than excited users to actual engage with enterprise systems that perhaps they don't really feel that excited about? Think long and hard about how to tip the imbalance scales more in the direction of the everyday user. Think about ways the systems can tell the users something they might not already know, and present that information to them in way that is easily consumable. Recruit a few more 'over-sharers', I mean, 'power users' that understand the problems that the everyday users need to solve, and can help you architect your solutions so that they don't seem so needy.

There are lots of reasons why Facebook and the other social networks have proven to be so successful and popular, but the idea of 'I get out more that I put in' is probably the most important, and the one to think about as most of us try to create that same value and power inside our organizations. 

WEBINAR : Social Recruiting MacGyver-Style

MacGyver is probably the coolest TV-hero ever.  He is cooler than you could ever dream of being even if you only dreamed of being MacGyver.

He could make a cannon from a old microscope, turn a bedframe into a catapult, and do just about anything else with s Swiss Army knife and some duct tape.

Smart, agile, resourceful - and able to rock a mullet as good as anyone before or since. Possessor of many of the qualities of my friends from Fistful of Talent, Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett.

Why the clumsy transition from the legendary MacGyver to KD and Sackett, who are also legendary, but for slightly different reasons?

Because next Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:00PM ET, Kris and Timmy, (and possibly Pete Thornton), are presenting a Fistful of Talent Webinar titled - Social Recruiting MacGyver Style! (How to Recruit via Facebook).

Here's what you need to know:

Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn are teaming up to present the next Fistful of Talent Webinar: Social Recruiting MacGyver Style! No Money, a Paperclip and Facebook – all a Real HR Pro Needs to Recruit. (Sponsored by the good people at  Branchout)

Join KD and Tim on February 2, 2012 for this one-hour webinar and they’ll hit you with the following Facebook-centric items: 

• Where is social recruiting heading, and why do you need to care as the HR rep of your organization?
• How a 1-2 person shop can compete in social recruiting (with no money, a paper clip and Facebook…)      
• How to use rarely understood tools like Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pay-Per-Click Ads to drive Facebook candidates to your open positions
• How to use Facebook search features to locate candidates on Facebook and contact them without looking like a stalker

Register today and the fine folks at Fistful of Talent will send you a special FOT toolkit – “How to Find and Contact Candidates on Facebook without Looking Like a Stalker”, once the webinar is complete.

Everyone knows that whatever the future holds for recruiting, that Facebook, the largest social network with it's soon to have one billion profiles, is almost certainly going to play a part in most organizations talent strategies. I've written about the subject here as well, and on the webcast KD and Tim, (along with the experts from BranchOut), will help to prepare you for what could very well be the next frontier in the talent game.

I encourage anyone in the recruiting and talent space to sign up for the webcast. The FOT gang guarantees your 100% satisfaction, 60% of the time.

And we can also have fun live tweeting and making fun of Tim.