The organizational perils of live blogging

Illinois SHRM leaders pushing the envelope

I am getting ready to start day two of the Illinois SHRM State Conference and Exposition.   The organization was kind enough to invite me to attend as part of their initial blogging team.  You can check out some of the presentation slide decks here if you like.   The leadership here have done a great job putting together a very nice program, especially since they were forced to relocate their entire program to a new venue in only three months,  after finding out that the original location of the conference had been double booked, and Illinois SHRM was the group on the loosing end.  Nice job all around by John Jorgenson and his team.

One of the  new things on the agenda here at #ILSHRM are the efforts of the state leadership to provide more information and exposure to social media.   They have a social media director for the state chapter in Dave Ryan.   They brought in Curtis Midkiff, the social media director for SHRM National.   They sponsored the blog team that I am a part of, and they had at least two concurrent session on social media.  This is all part of an effort to raise the knowledge level of their members by providing information and exposure to various facets of social media.

Role of a conference social media/ blog team

There are a number of reasons to have a blogging team or social media squad on-site at a conference.  These can include:

1. extending the conference experience to those unable to attend.
2. providing an opportunity to interact with professionals using social media on a regular basis
3. publicizing the event and its content before, during and after the event
4. a sort of celebrity entertainment factor
5. education and exposure

There was a major collision of all these yesterday here at the conference.  I’m not going to rehash the entire dialogue from yesterday afternoon, but it elicited a flurry of discussion and some criticism on twitter about the tone of some of the tweets coming out of a social media session  yesterday afternoon.   You can check it out for yourself in the Twub link for #ILSHRM, and make your own assessment.

There are some lessons to be learned from this event, including these:

• The organization sponsoring a social media squad takes some risk, including the possibility of generating controversy from time to time.
• The members of the social media team have a purpose, which primarily is the education of conference attendees and the external audience of twitter followers and blog readers.
• The level and quality of presentations on social media, and all topics at a conference is going to vary.  It is appropriate to comment on this, but the tone should generally be professional.
• A certain amount of levity and criticism, even “snarkyness” is to be expected from time to time. It is a part of the entertainment factor of this whole deal.

Here’s the bottom line.  The Illinois SHRM Conference had a great first day at their 2010 show, and while they may have had a couple of rough spots, they got their money’s worth out of day one at the conference, including some great exposure for their leadership efforts on the HR/Social Media space.  I’m getting ready to head down for the start of day 2!

Will you join me?

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Tagged as: Blog, Business, Dave Ryan, Education, Human Resources, Illinois, Social Media, Society for Human Resource Management