My learning experience at Impact99 HR Summit 2012
By: Lydia Liao, MBA Candidate
Engagement Through Social Media
The Impact99 HR Summit, in conjunction with the MIS course in my MBA program at the Beedie School of Business, has helped me understand how I can better use social media to promote an organization’s own personal brand, as well as my own brand image. I learned how to promote myself to my future employers, what questions to consider before launching onto a specific social media platform, and what ideas I need to keep in mind when using these powerful tools.
One of the learning pod sessions at the Summit, Five Pillars of Successful Engagement Strategy, focused on engagement through social media. The session discussed a range of tactics, from listening to those you follow, to discussing, meeting and connecting with your followers, either face to face over coffee, or virtually over Skype. Building, expanding and deepening these relationships has great potential, such as the possibility of helping you land your dream job, or increasing incentives to manage a problem when a mistake occurs.
The final keynote speech, Leading change in a technological workplace, focused on the tools required to bring social media to the workplace. Since there are still many people who are resistant to this, it is important to be flexible. Tools which can help you deal with such a scenario include using coaching questions, such as “what would it look like if we did X”, or “if we did Y, what would we create?”
Both of the keynote speakers at the Summit discussed how HR professionals can bring social media initiatives to their CEOs by utilizing language that a CEO would use. One theory suggested using statistics to illustrate how the social media initiatives proposed would translate into savings on both money and time, and what results would be achieved through implementation of these initiatives.
Cheryl Cran, President of Synthesis at Work Inc., and keynote speaker at the Impact99 HR Summit, discussing how HR professionals can bring social media initiatives to CEOs.
Ultimately, the Summit demonstrated why social media is here to stay, and that we must learn to be flexible and adapt to its presence, as well as use it in alignment with our business strategies. In the end, if you do not have a social media presence to promote your own company’s brand image and values, you risk allowing others to say it on your behalf and lose the advantage of being able to control what is being said about you.
Part 1: Social Media takeaways at the Impact99 HR Summit 2012
Part 2: Utilizing social media to instil a sense of trust in your business
Part 3: Engagement through social media