Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the HR Forum of the Information Technology Association of Canada. I was given the task of talking about social networking, how business uses social networks, and how they may be used in human resources. Since members of ITAC are in the technology industry, I also talked about online spaces and communities that IT staff may be involved in. My slides are below.

Also speaking were Dan Michaluk of the law firm Hicks Morley and Sheldon Silverman, Counsel at AMD. Dan spoke to the question of managing employee use of social media applications, especially how to manage risk. He has shared his slides on his blog All About Information. Sheldon rounded out the discussion by providing an interesting case study of internal social media policy.

Well, I’ve resisted blogging about this up until now, but the excitement has gotten the better of me. A short while ago Canadian marketer Dave Forde started putting together a list of most influential Canadian women in social media. I was nominated to the list (a fantastic honour!) and then Dave opened it up for voting. The vote is open until 11:59 pm ET December 31, 2008 (i.e. just before the stroke of midnight tomorrow night!).

I encourage you to head on over to Dave’s post to check out who else is in the running to be Canada’s next top social media diva! Lots of my friends and women I admire are there–it is quite a list. Vote for your favourite. And if you happen to want to vote for me, fantastic. It’s all in good fun, but I’m sure whoever wins is going to be bragging big time!

By the way, you do not have to be Canadian to vote. In fact, the further afield you are, the more widespread the influence is proven I suspect.

On a related note, after opening this up, Dave also initiated a contest for Canada’s most influential men in social media. You can vote on that one, too.

Cheers,
Connie

Photo credit:  image by Jeff Milner on Flickr, made available under Creative Commons.

As mentioned yesterday, last week I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop on recruiting for call centres using Facebook and social networking for the Contact Professionals Alliance as part of their Institute for Contact Professionals.  Thanks to everyone who participated last week!

I am sharing some of the key content here. We started the day off with a short updated version of a presentation I gave last May to the CPA with the formidable presentation duo Dara Renton and Rob Reid called Social Networking and Call Centres. This is the updated presentation:

Note in particular links to the delightful recruitment videos from Akoha and Freshbooks.

Other exciting “social networking” style sites we looked at:

• Ernst & Young on Facebook (Facebook registration may be required)
• McDonald’s Careers (USA)
• McDonald’s Canada Career Opportunities
• Harvey’s Standard is Lame
• Cara Restaurant’s CaraTown
• Staples’ Staplesville (see especially “Roll Reader”)
• State Farm: Your Style of Success

Some additional issues discussed in class:

• business use of Facebook allowed in the Terms of Use
• setting up Pages on Facebook
• privacy concerns related to sending Facebook invitations to contacts previously collected outside Facebook
• whether contacts can be gathered in Facebook and added to a contacts database
• ways to keep existing employees happy and turn them into evangelists for your company
• deciding which demographics of potential employees are most likely to respond to Facebook and other types of social networking tools

During the day participants worked through the content of the workbook I created for the course. It was my first time creating a full workbook, and I was quite pleased with how it turned out. We have made that workbook available under a Creative Commons licence (30 pages, PDF):

Graphic on cover courtesy of LuMaxArt.

Questions about the course can be directed to me at conniecrosby@gmail.com. Thanks to the wonderful Elizabeth Winters of the CPA for inviting me to develop this workshop.

Have you been using social networking tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts and others) for recruiting?  I welcome you to share your story here with us!

Cheers,
Connie Crosby

The second episode of the podcast Community Divas that I do with Eden Spodek is now live!

In this episode we continue our interview with Jay Moonah, Connie gives an update on recent problems with Twitter, and Eden asks how many social networking spaces is optimal for a community.  The interview with Jay is very interesting because he talks about research by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in the recent book Groundswell, how you can look at demographics to determine which social networking space to use to speak to a certain group of people.  He also talks about personal branding, how it is difficult to get out more than one message about yourself if you are known for one thing in particular (for him it has been music).

You can listen to this episode on your computer from the website communitydivas.com or download it from iTunes. We have also set up a Facebook page and a FriendFeed room for those who are so inclined. Or follow Community Divas on Twitter.