Yesterday I was fortunate to be asked to present ‘How to Apply Social Media for Human Resources’ at my firm with several of my colleagues. While we have offered several sessions previously on how specific sites work, we had not taken the next step of demonstrating ways to use the sites in our day-to-day work.
Topics covered were:
- RSS– Why having a reader is a time saving method of finding news specifically tailored to the HR areas you want to know more about.
- Twitter– That it is not just about saying what you are doing at a given moment. It’s about building community, *meeting* other HR professionals, sharing your ideas on human resources, asking other HR pros how they handle issues, learning best practices, posting jobs, finding candidates. The list goes on and on.
- Blogs– How to use it initially as a method to put your ideas down in black and white. How blogging can then move to the next step of interacting with readers through comments, finding new HR blogs you love, and ultimately meeting these bloggers via phone or in person.
- Facebook– Going beyond just a personal use of Facebook. Creating event and fan pages for specific work events. Also can be used to find and research candidates in the hiring process.
- Linkedin– Why it is an excellent tool for recruiters and how they can perform very specific searches for candidates.
My plan was to direct participants to my blog roll as a start so they can get some great HR and recruiting blogs in their readers. This morning, I see that Steve Boese has given us an excellent post on how to share blog bundles using your reader. I’d like to direct everyone to that post becuase he did a great job of listing the steps and making it a very easy process.
Is your company encouraging HR to use social media yet? If not, think of ways to show how it can save time and add value to the day-to-day HR activities.
5 Comments
Very nice overview Trish, and thanks for linking to my post on feed bundles, funny I wrote about that today. It is a useful way to introduce new users to Reader and RSS in general. A company could also use the ‘bundle’ method to aggregate feeds from all company sources, or all competitors, or the overall market or industry they operate in, there are tome of applications.
Thanks Trish. I have bee gradually adding people to follow on Twitter, and you pointed me to Steve’s blog about an hour ahead of when I would have gotten there through my reader. What a great way to add the people you are most likely to want to follow.
We are having a lunch n learn on this same topic later this week. I am looking forward to sharing and learning more there. We have a couple of people who read blogs, and most of my team is on Facebook – in fact we sort of keep track of each others’ travel that way.
It is good to see people promoting Social Media tools in order to help HR Professionals in their day to day work. I know Steve has been doing and is still doing a really good job promoting those. I am used to forward interesting blogs, whitepapers (often found on Twitter), etc that I have found interesting to my team mates. But they often do not allocate that much time to read them. Time seems to be quite an issue. This is quite a pity knowing how much there is to learn from others thought. It would be good to learn how you show them how it can save time and add value to the day-to-day HR activities. Thanks Trish.