The Social Media Epiphany

Posted on 6. December 2009 by HumanRaceHorses

Today is an epiphanous day

Dudes, it is Sunday morning, and I just had an epiphany. I didn’t have it in church, and it didn’t involve the manifestation of a deity. That is unlikely to ever happen since I rarely go to church. My epiphany was the other kind of epiphany. You know – tie kind of epiphany where you have a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

It actually happened like this.

Living inside the HR on-line community

I am getting ready to get the hell out of Dodge City Tampa for a week, and will be going Internet/blackberry/google phone silent for the most part. Even though I want to be out of touch, I don’t like the blog to be down for a week. I know – the world would probably NOT come to an end, but you never know. I just like to be prepared, OK?

Therefore, I reached out into my generous friends within the HR community and asked a number of them to write stuff for me to post here while I am gone. Several agreed as mentioned in my post yesterday. Most asked what I wanted them to write about. Typically, I find it very interesting to let the guest post on what interests them at them moment, but having done this a couple of times, I have now learned that part of being a good host/editor is to help provide a theme. So having just finished the HR Carnival of Giving experiment, and having been “appointed” to the highly paid position of community manager for SHRM Connect by China Gorman, I decided to throw out “community” as the general theme for people to write about.

From Drop Box

Lots of community there – HR bloggers, twitter, recruiters, SHRM, even the still-developing SHRM Connect.

This fantastic community has been very helpful to me personally in a lot of ways recently – friends providing private support and encouragement during a really taxing period at work, the wonderful generosity shown by everyone in the HR Carnival of Giving which raised over $1,900.00 through blogs and Twitter alone, and the help with the blog by the guest I mentioned previously.

But wait, there is more to this epiphany!

Outside view of the HR community

I saw a tweet a couple of days ago sent to Steve Boese that complimented him on the great job he does with HR Happy Hour. The tweet was sent by @ControllerGirl aka Teresa Morris. Teresa has a posterous blog on which she posted something called “What am I doing here?”. You should go read the whole thing , it is worth two minutes of your time, but here is what caught my attention.

Man, HR knows how to represent on Twitter! You guys should really give yourselves more love. You can have a seat at my table anytime! There are some serious thought leaders out there who inspire me to raise my, albeit very limited, game. HR is only a small part of my job (most days), but the whole function in our company is pretty limited to executing what upper management wants done (our main focus is to “keep us legal” and we do) along with normal everyday things like handling payroll, medical leaves, open enrollment, workers comp, etc. I hope the HR tweeple don’t mind having me in their network or stalking the HR Happy Hour, because I’m really enjoying all the learning going on out there.

Remember, this is written by someone who is working primarily in a finance job with some HR duties added on. Teresa also mentions in the post that she got started with twitter and social media because she was looking for help from a community where she could develop herself., and that it was tough to do with the CPA/finance realm. They are there, but they are not using it for professional networking.

The second part of the epiphany comes from Chris Brogan, who posted the following thought today.

In our latest in the Overnight Success series, I bring up a point that Julien talks about in his recent speeches: that platform and community have to come first before success. People rarely find success while they’re still obscure. Their platform grows after their success, but most successful people have a platform from which to share ideas, and a community around which those ideas hold weight.

Put these two things together, and I realized that we are there. My epiphany for today is this:

HR Professionals who use social media are thought leaders

We are ahead of many other professions in our adoption of social media tools as business tools. Think about it. Beyond, marketing and public relations, what other professional group is doing more in the space right now? Where the supervisors, the quality control people, and yes, even the financial people? I am sure they are out there, but I don’t see much of them. Do you?

This signifies an opportunity for the HR profession. We have been building the community for a couple of years. We have a platform for success, the tools we have developed and that we can share with our organizations. We have a message to share.

People matter. These tools matter. What we do as organizations matter. We need to reach out to more people in HR. We need to reach out to other professions. We have the opportunity to mold and shape new things within our industry and organizations.

Use your community. Use your platform. Be successful!