Improving Your Game with Social Media

Social media is all around us- it has become part of our lives and we use it almost every minute of every day.  From checking your Facebook account to your Twitter feed to your Linked In networks, we are using social media for many personal and professional reasons.  However, many of us use social media in HR for recruiting passive candidates and networking with colleagues, to creating learning platforms that allow employees to connect with each other from anywhere at any time.

Using social media to advance business is highly important in today’s tech savvy environment.  There is a need to deliver information 24/7 using a variety of platforms to access as many people as possible.  It’s not just about checking our friend’s status updates and what they’ve had for breakfast.  Today, employees want real-time access to benefit and payroll information from their mobile devices.  Prospective candidates are following your company on Twitter to follow job postings and determine if your culture is the right fit for them.  And let’s not forget advertisers.  Before they spend their money, advertisers want to know if they’ll get the most “bang for their buck” and reach the most consumers possible.

Social media is a necessity in driving business.  But, have you thought about how it can benefit your learning environment within your organization?  Using social media, we can incorporate knowledge networks in training and development to help employees connect, interact, and prompt discussion that becomes a supplement to basic course training.  It allows employees to teach each other and further drives innovation and creativity.  Social media in the work place promotes collaboration across an organization.

For example, at my former company, I was responsible for leading a series of management courses for a group of new managers, stretched across several states in the north east.  Not only did we have a structured course discussion, but through the use of social media, there were numerous chat groups, crowd sourcing opportunities and question/answer sessions that supplemented the course learning and provided a more cohesive, collaborative group that benefited from each other.  This also helped employees build their personal brand and expand their network.  They became known as a “go-to” person in their area of expertise.

Social media can be a “game changer” for you.  It all depends on how you use it.  Make it work for you.  You may not be able to shoot a 3 pointer and take your team to the Final Four, but you can definitely score points in creativity, knowledge sharing, and new ideas that generate revenue.  It’s a powerful tool that can open doors around the world and provide you and your employees the opportunity to build your personal brand while driving the business forward.

I want to know what you think!  Share your ideas with me! Has social media been a “game changer” for you or your company?  Let me know!  You can tweet me @CorporateHRGirl or email me at rf248@georgetown.edu and I’ll share your ideas in the next post.