Be Polite - And Don't Tweet at the Conference

Day two at leadership is better. We have put sick Uncle SHRM to bed –he’ll be fine. The Friday morning vibe is much better. At the General session there was a lot of talk about diversity, life work balance and social media. Me I am happy to hear the talk of social media.

The morning panel included Eric Petersen, Lisa Horn and Curtis Midliff. The dialogue was great and the audience appeared well caffeinated and engaged. Eric managed to keep diversity on the front burner with interesting comments and information. Not to be outdone Lisa talked about work life balance and her other role in government relations. Then onto my man – who was tweeting while on stage.

Panelist Curtis Midkiff, Lisa Horn and Eric Petersen

Curtis asked for all of the people on twitter RIGHT NOW to raise their hand. My guess is that about 150 people raised their hand. There were supposed to be 800 attendees, so about 20% - not bad. Curtis talked about how to engage and involve chapters via social media. Curtis had some good dialogue and a number of how to question – which he addressed and will continue to do so. Perhaps the best moment of the Q. & A was this. Curtis wanted to address a question that had been posted out on twitter. The message was tweeted by John Jorgensen. Curtis called John out on the question and wanted to address it. John told Curtis that the question was actually from the person sitting next to him, who refuses to adopt any form of social. BAM- score one for the tweeters.

Social Media Perfect Storm

I have been looking for the best analogy for this post and I have been unable to come up with it, so I will go with an over-used trite and glib analogy. Watch out for the impending Social Media Perfect Storm. With the recently concluded SHRM Annual Conference, there is no doubt that all aspects of Social Media took at least two giant steps forward coming out of the conference, at least as it relates to those of us in Human Resources.

In another time, video taping an interview and distributing your video took a lot of equipment and expertise, just to get it done. Then it took even more resources to distribute or make it available to others. Today, you can shoot video on an iphone or with a flip cam (both around $200) and with internet access you can post it on youtube and with that you have the video imagery of your interview distributed to the world. This has been a huge change making video accessible for the masses, and easy to use.

Video was used on a grand scale at the SHRM 2010 Conference. In addition to video, there were many bloggers and tweeters who put out a large volume of excellent content during the conference. There was many other watershed moments as a result of the conference but suffice it to say, SM is now here to stay and will continue to grow like a giant snowball rolling down the mountainside.

Going forward from this point, how will SHRM, SHRM Chapters, State Councils and Human Resources communities build on the use of social media? The Illinois State Council of SHRM is going to do our part by elevating the presence of Social Media at this year's Illinois State Conference. As noted in Blog Post #1, we have a group of well-known bloggers and SHRM's own Social Media Guy all on our list of attendees. We have a committed State Council Director, Director Elect and Social Media Director who are all going to do the utmost to get our efforts to make the 2010 ISC Conference one to remember, not only as a great conference but for bringing social media to the event.

I will speculate that the HR community will see this continue. Coming up after Illinois, is the HR Florida Conference. There will be over 1200 attendees at HR Florida, in Orlando beginning on August 30. HR Florida already has a huge presence within the SM community. They were the first state council to have a social media director. Steven Harrison, with HR Florida, says 2010 will be the third year they have been using SM to promote HR Florida. Steve says they have even engaged conference attendees and exhibitors by running contest on twitter. HR Florida is on Curtis Midkiff's blogapolooza tour. I look for Steve and his Florida posse to really show us how it is done.

The blogapolooza tour continues, for SHRMsocmeguy in September starting on September 15 in Sandusky, OH. I know that there are many SM leaders and advocates in Ohio, so look for their State Council meeting to be another ground breaking event. Ohio currently has about 500 attendees signed up just about the same as Illinois.

And lookout in October, because on October 6 the Wisconsin State Council will host their annual convention and know at least one advocate of SM in WI, I am sure he will bring SM to the conference.

So watch and see how we do here in Illinois, and also see how SM becomes a part of the conferences in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin.

You can view an entire list of State Conferences for 2010 on SHRM’s website.