Social Media, Monitoring and the HR Professional

In the social media bedroom, there are far too many HR professionals still hiding out in the bathroom. HR professionals, it's time to get out, face the social world around you and above all, be the change.

That was <generally> the message delivered in a series of mini presentations for 50 Shades of Social at HR Florida last week. I had the pleasure of joining Mike Vandervort and panel members Amanda Hite, Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane, Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen in sharing social media tools, tips and perspective.

I prepared my slides and when I went to upload and saw they wanted us to use the HR Florida template, compliant rule follower that I can be, I ditched my original slides, changed my format and posted away.

Here are my original slides . . . .

. . . .  and my message on social media monitoring. Whoa HR pros, don't you dare interpret monitoring as policing social media use. Think of monitoring as listening to social media chatter about you and your organization.

There are many tools that monitor social media chatter and while they vary in their approach and methodology, they are the same in that they go to social medial sites you specify, grab content you want, arrange it and deliver it to you. Here are 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools courtesy of Social Brite.

If you were asked to present 3 slides, 3 minutes on a social media tip or tool for HR professionals, what would you share?

Social Media Tools Are Not The Boss Of Me

..... 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
  • 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. 

Photo credit iStock Photo