I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Haberman yesterday, and one of the big takeaways (other than a few really sweet quotes for later posts) was that HR people really need to be persuaded to see the advantages of social media.
So many of us see the benefits, but so few of us are making the effort to be active in this area.
After our conversation, I ran across this fantastic image on the DIYSEO blog that I just had to share. The blog post is a good one, and I encourage you to look over the information in the image below.
Is your organization using social media?
Ben, I know we’ve had some conversations about the benefits of social media in the past. We’re slowly working our way into it. In the last four months we (HRCP) have collected over 4,000 fans on Facebook! We use the page to provide PHR/SPHR test taking tips, promotions, and on occasion we post practice questions. We have now moved into LinkedIn and hope to get some discussions going. We recognize our blog needs some desperate attention and we haven’t ventured into Twitter yet. Though we still have room for improvement, we are seeing benefits from social media! Thanks for all the advice you have given us!
@ Terri That’s great to hear! I saw where you even polled your people to see if they wanted you to join Twitter, too. The only problem is you skewed that to FB folks who don’t much use Twitter anyway. ;-) Let me know if you ever decide to work on the blog, too. You guys are doing very well and actually making steps in the right direction! Keep it up.
@ Ben Finnish. Definitely Finnish. We’ve come so far from those days you mention. I remember my parents getting pitched for a $1500 website plus a monthly maintenance plan. Ugh. Now they think they can do just fine without a website, although I’ve pushed them and told ’em it’s much cheaper than they expect. Most people just don’t understand and don’t want to understand how it all works. Social media seems like a huge fad, but with the low entry barriers, I’m hoping people will pick it up and really see the benefits. And companies like yours are on the brink of that kind of thing. Once people realize that that “Internet thing” is catching on, maybe they’ll finally understand what we’ve been saying all along. :-)
Fear and trust – just a few problems I’ve seen from small businesses related to doing anything online. The words SEO, social media, and PPC are Japanese to them, or maybe Finnish. I think a lot of them got burned when everyone was pitching them to start their own website for a few grand, or selling them garbage link building services. I remember seeing companies sell listing services to major search engines for $999 bucks…and it was free to list all by yourself. I think they need/want proof of ROI to get rid of the fear of spending dollars on something they can’t track very well, or understand at all. It’s always hard to measure branding. It may be awhile before the technology is simple enough and affordable enough for them to really dive into the social media opportunities. And of course, there’s the time issue…it’ll be awhile.
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