Drawing Women into Social Media

I am a minority – at least in SHRM. I am a guy.  I did not get the official statistics from the mothership at Duke Street, as they were closed as I undertook to commit this post to hard drive.  The reason that this is important is this. This post is being written expressly to appeal to women (although men you are welcome to read on).

As we prepare for our annual conference we here at Illinois SHRM are working hard to make the event rich with Social Media.  But what is social media – really?  It is different things to different people.  It has many applications, uses, purposes and so on. Those of us in the HR space are seeing it as a recruiting tool, a way to change our Company’s image or culture, it is a way to message all of our employees in one fell swoop.  There is no shortage of ideas on how we can take Social Media and attempt to use it to our advantage.  However, my friends there are other things that people do with Social Media –as hard as that may be to believe.

Yesterday I saw this in an email from oldest son.  A fraternity brother of his just got engaged.  To share this wonderful announcement he used  social media to send out a Youtube video.  Take a look…

It took Joel let's say "a little while" to getting around to asking Holly to marry her.  So just another use of social media.

I wonder if anyone will get a proposal at ILSHRM11? If they do... we'll post it!

- Dave Ryan Director of Social Media ISC SHRM