A hat tip to Chris Ferdinandi for sharing his find.

Chris has a buddy, Ben Eubanks from Upstart HR, who tipped him off to this awesome, free ebook on HR Marketing and Social Media.

Chris posted it on Renegade HR to share with his readers and that's where I found it.

Written by Kevin Grossman and the HR Marketer team, it’s a great primer for anyone looking to get more involved in social media as an HR pro. It's amazing.

Download HR Marketing: A Conversation Starter

Enjoy, learn and share!

My daughter is nine years old. She owns her own domain, rocks her Google Rank and we track her online identity with Google Alerts.

She has a blog called Raising Tarah that she lets me share with her. Her page is the front page because she writes much more than I do. One of her posts inspired a highly respected leadership blogger Mary Jo Asmus to write Leadership Lessons From Children. 

She is working on her writing, "if you want your posts to be linked to, you have to write more details," sharing her space with guest authors, and is not afraid to share her feeling about others. She experiments with video, T-Rex Tango, and she shares her creative side via The Artist Within.

She knows that if one source says something she doesn't think is right she looks further. Just because something is in writing doesn't make it true and if you write something bad about someone you can hurt their feelings.

She is not online without our permission, she does not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account and is just beginning to e-mail. Her texting is limited to family members.

My daughter is interested and she is engaged.  Are you?

Cross posted on Raising Tarah

I attended a local SHRM chapter meeting Thursday to hear the latest on developing social media case law, progressive approaches businesses have taken with social media use. I expected to hear excitement and possibility. Instead, I heard fear and trepidation.

Perpetuating Fear

The social media = fear apple may not fall far from the HR tree. In his post, Fear and Social Media, Mark Stelzner shares comments that SHRM's 2010 Employment Law and Legislative Conference covered the use of social media to spy on employees, blocking of popular social media sites and the general risks to broad adoption. Bloggers Mike Vandervort and Joan Ginsberg rant about the same.

Disappointing to hear on a national level, this message was frustrating to listen to at a local level. The two attorneys at our chapter meeting discussed social media in a "sky is falling" kind of way. One was not aware of Twitter until she developed her presentation and the other was not engaged with any social media tools. It goes to credibility my friends and for me, there was little. (Note: I had to leave early so did not hear the entire presentation.)

As frustrating as the presentation was, it was just as disheartening to look around the room and see HR professionals appear to be taking this all in. Maybe some were, and maybe some weren't, but even one HR professional buying into the social media = fear discussion is too much.

It doesn't have to be this way

Change, perceived loss of power and lack of knowledge and understanding can equal fear but social media should not. HR professionals, you don't blindly accept opinions of others without first understanding something about it yourself first, do you? Don't start doing so with social media. 

Got attorneys? Getting advice? Take it under advisement. Attorneys mitigate risk and while I value that perspective greatly, I know it is only one perspective. Yes, even the obedient little rule follower in me questions and questions and questions. I've got to know the upper and lower ends of my risk scale to make an informed decision and know that the best attorneys are the ones who will engage in that conversation with me. I don't buy into fear.

Next Steps 

Above all, be the voice of reason. Ditch the chicken little attorneys, learn everything you can about social media, and make your own informed decisions. Be prepared to provide the leadership necessary to successfully address the social media questions facing your organization, and if the decision is to adopt, to implement the practices right for you and your organization. 

If you don't, someone else will. Then your sky really may fall.

Photo credit iStockPhoto

..... anymore.

A few weeks ago I embarked on a social media nip and tuck to frame up my social media efforts. My goals are to deepen and strengthen my connections, collaborate on a professional project and write beyond the blog

A work in progress, I am reevaluating how I am using the tools and checking out some new ones. Touching on the very basics, here is what I've done so far in no particular order other than the length of the bullet:

• Test drove out Nutshell Mail 
• Created my first Google doc
• Set aside time to write each morning
• Updated my contact form on the blog
• Reduced my RSS feeds to just over 100
• Set LinkedIn to weekly vs. daily updates 
• Unsubscribed from many retail mailing lists
• Test driving the Rypple sidebar feedback widget
• Deleted memberships in 2 online HR communities
• Routed some mail to a gmail account to check it out
• Decreased the email notifications from Facebook - a lot. 
• Reviewed current LinkedIn groups, added some and left others

Up next is setting aside time to actually read my Google Reader items and not scan them on the fly, reviewing professional email newsletter subscriptions with an eye on reduction, reviewing my Linked In profile, updating my blog roll, dusting off my Google Voice number and checking out Google calendar.

It's a start. It's part of the grand plan. And it's all good. 

How about you? Do you have basic strategies that work best for you? Tell me about them in the comments below or in the sidebar widget.

Photo credit iStock Photo

When I talk to people who are not active with social media, about social media, and we get past the lack of time issues, the first question I am asked is, "what should I use?" I say that I blog and use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. When asked if they work for me, I answered, "yes."

Then I read Framing Your Social Media Efforts by Chris Brogan. Chris writes for business marketing but he got me thinking about how I use social media as an individual. Not the nuts and bolts of logging in, updating, or posting regularly (or not) but looking at, as Chris says, how well I am "tying them all together. "

A Look In the Mirror

I am an experienced-based kind of girl. If I haven't done it, felt it, and learned from it, I can't talk about it. Table talk topics, Toastmasters impromptu speeches, and off the cuff comebacks are not me. I need time to process and I am so much better on the replay. So, while I love the lens Chris offers, I can't have this conversation with budding social media-ites without first taking a look at my own practices.

My social media use has developed over the past 12-15 months without a long term plan and I am convinced that the tools I am using and the way I am using them is not the right combination to get me to where I want to go. Now, as I am looking into the new year and making plans, it's time to put randomness aside and frame up my social media efforts.

My goals are to deepen and strengthen my connections, collaborate on a professional project and write beyond the blog. So, in addition to reevaluating how I am using the tools I am now, I am going to check out some new ones to see if they'd round out the mix.

A Work In Progress

It's a start. It's part of the grand plan. And it's all good. In the spirit of building connections, collaboration and writing, I'll update my progress here. How about you? Do you have strategies that work best for you? Tell me about them.