What Goes Around...

Woohoo – we get a free, bonus day this month. What to do with it? Surely we can think of a few fun, useful and interesting things to do together?

So I hereby declare 29th February 2012 as Leap Day. I’d like to make a few things happen in London on that day and I’d love some help.

Maybe some of you will join in, maybe you won’t.

Maybe some of you will suggest stuff we can do, maybe you won’t.

Maybe some of you will come along for the whole day, maybe just a part of it.

Increasingly I'm being asked about how to implement and manage a more social way of communicating. Sometimes within organisations, sometimes with customers, and when really lucky - sometimes with all stakeholders. I recently gave a talk for the CIPD on Social Media for HR, covering subjects like fear, authenticity, support and learning together. I've had some lovely feedback from the talk so I've written up the essence of it into a short report.

Here are a few headline thoughts:

We started the talk with a game, designed to help guests get to know one another and to start talking about social media and social tools. It was easy to play and great fun.

Then we acknowledged that social is here and isn't going away anytime soon. That doesn't mean you have to get involved, just be aware that many others are. Is it better to engage, or have people engage around you?

Hi – how are you? Did you have a good Christmas, a happy new year? I hope so. I’ve not been around to ask you these questions because of my determination to take a proper break from work. I haven’t written for well over two weeks and though putting the tools down felt odd at first, I soon relaxed into things. Until my Dad bought me a DeWalt drill for Christmas and that led me to toolish adventures of different kinds. More of that another day. Perhaps.

I went for a run with my wife Carole last Friday morning. She runs often and I’ve not done so since leaving school. When I was at school I was one of the saddos who volunteered to do cross country running. Yep – I did it by choice, I enjoyed the grinding muddy trudgery enormously.

 I was a participant and speaker at the CIPD Social Media in HR conference last week. My overall impression of the event was *thumbs up*. I met some interesting people, heard some interesting speakers and as a speaker, everything I needed to deliver to the best of my abilities was taken care of. It’s been said before and I’ll say it again – the CIPD events team are on the ball.

It’s interesting to see how the increasing use of Twitter in events is distilling things. Maybe my ‘pre-match’ nerves aided my inability to really concentrate, and I find a lot of what I’m recalling came as a result of an active Twitter stream. Here are just a few things that caught my eye and in some cases, puzzled me too.

 I and many others attended Neil Morrison's social media session at #cipd11. Loads of good stuff being shared and a healthy dash of British toilet humour thrown in for good measure. Here’s a summary of what I heard and learned. 

Numbers: Neil started showing us some huge numbers, in the hour to follow 5,000 blogs would be written, millions of tweets sent. These numbers show us that social media is not a passing trend.