@Master Agree David and his team did a great job, well worth the long flight. Having tried pitching uncoferences to HR/Recruiters before it is tough sale as people are so use to traditional conferences. The talk of SM within the Enterprise would have been good.

@David Interesting I’m not sure we have moved beyond experimentation with social recruiting but do agree we must deliver results with everything.

@Laurie I like the idea of a real time wiki, I’m going to steal it for events downunder. It was fantastic to meet you as well.

@Brian Interesting comment that people came to learn about the buzz words. In Australia I would have completely agreed, maybe misguided, but I would have expected most people to have already understood all the buzz words.

I hope you eventually found some good coffee . If you ever come to Minneapolis, I can show you some good spots.

A few thoughts.

I wouldn’t say I held anything back exactly, but I definitely have other examples that could’ve been shared. I tried to keep my examples relevant to my best guess at the level of understanding in the crowd. If I knew in advance that the crowd was very savvy about social media/tech, then I could’ve bumped it up a bit.

Second, it would’ve been easy to put the crowd to sleep with a deeper dive into the merits of RSS and Yahoo Pipes. The great majority in the room however, glazed over at the mention of pipes, except you of course. Which tells me that you are at the leading edge of understanding the technology, regardless of the continent. Generally speaking the stuff I spoke about was fairly common knowledge in other industries outside of HR, probably 2-3 years ago, if not slightly more. Somehow, HR people in general tend to not pick up on this stuff as quick for a lot of reasons.

Third, as Master Burnett points out, and others, there could’ve been about a 100 other specific and useful topics that could’ve been covered relative to the overarching topic of social media. We’d just need more time and a different structure.

My job in getting Social Media buy in at Best Buy is easy, because they are very progressive and open, and the leadership largely participates on their own. So in my case the evangelism, and guidelines are already taken care of. Not so of course for the majority of companies with locked down legacy thinkers. <-oxymoron?

I’d most certainly have to agree that Shanon’s session was by far the most beneficial of the day, if only BH and the other agencies were doing more of that work. I was however very disappointed with the “listening” portion of the model as I have seen what they actually deliver clients and think a five year old could do better. The framework for reputation management is however quite valid, but limited in scope resource wise.

The most under discussed topic of the day was the notion of marshaling the enterprise to drive social media presence. While guidelines and policies were mentioned, they were never really discussed. No one talked about influencing internal SM users to drive content dissemination, no one discussed developing the business case to counter arguments against ee restriction, etc.

All in all, it was a great first event and I think David and his team deserve a great deal of thanks for pulling it off.

I definitely think that there is a huge difference between what the most bleeding edge members of the recruiting community are experimenting with and where everyone else is at. I would be surprised if any of the speakers dumbed down their ideas though!

I think that when the majority of these ideas seem less whiz-bang and mind-blowing, it’s a sign that we are beginning to move beyond the experimental stage of social recruiting (look at all the cool things I can do!!!) and into the less exciting but far more useful stage of how to use these tools to generate results.

I made a suggestion that a real-time wiki would have been fun to build. Have great typists in the room dedicated to catching the best from the discussions & presentations and funnel that into an online resource for the attendees, those at home, etc.

I think this became the issue of the day for a lot of people. Many have heard all the buzzwords and wanted to come to learn more. I think what would have been helpful is a 101 type session. Provide a little core knowledge so they could have gotten more from the day.