So...What's Next?!?

I was on TAG Radio

I did not know that it was posted already - here it is

Score one for SCORE

Today I had the opportunity to present to the Atlanta Chapter of SCORE (which happens to be chapter of the year).

Who is SCORE?

SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business" is a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth and success of small business nationwide. SCORE is a resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

The audience was phenomenal. One of the most enthusiastic, welcoming groups of people I have encountered. Basically it is a group of retired executives who give of their time to council small business owners. How amazing is that?!?

But not only that, these "retired executives" are full of life and well ahead of the game when it comes to technology.

The event was streamed live with the ability for those watching from home to chat with us during the presentation.

If you are a small business seeking some council, I definitely recommend connecting with a SCORE representative. I personally have already started a list of things I plan to seek their advice on.

This may be my favorite presentation yet!

I am sitting at a Starbucks in Margate, FL working on my workshop and keynote presentation that I will be giving today for the Human Resource Association of Broward County.

I am able to use some notes from past presentations, but for the most part I am have to create this from scratch. Most of my presentations are developed for PR and Marketing professionals. I do not think I have ever presented to HR professionals, although it is really the HR angle that I approach social media from.

For the workshop I am starting with the standard introduction of what social media is and how important it is to pay attention to. The one part that I know will generate some interesting conversations is the section about guidelines for current, past, and future employees.

In all the rooms I have sat in at conferences that past couple of years where we discussed these issues, I was usually the one who understood both sides because of my background as a recruiter and my studies for the certified personnel consultant certification. Today we get to really get into the nuts and bolts of the need for changing guidelines and I can't wait!

Some questions and issues I will be exploring are;
Current Employees
Does a Company have a right to limit what personal information an employee post about themselves?
Does it benefit or hurt an organization to have employees representing their companies online?
Should employees be blocked from social networking sites while on the job?

Past Employees
Reputation Management (monitoring the blogsphere)
Managing Disgruntled Employees (the need for an exit interview)

Evaluating Future Employee
The Pitfalls of Researching Social Networks
-Discrimination (Race, Health, Family Status)
Eliminating Your Best Candidate
-When you get to see who you are hiring today as opposed to 90 days from now
What would you think of the candidate that did not have ANY online presence?

Beyond that we will be exploring the various tools, sites and rules of engagement.

For tonight's keynote I will be presenting a new deck titled "Social Media - Threat or Opportunity?"
I will be discussing the changing demographics of the workforce and the expectations of the generations of today and tomorrow. I will then explore the challenges of managing reputations, intellectual property, and the shrinking talent pool as well as the opportunities for creating a visual path of social networks, tapping into the hidden talent in your organization, and keeping up with the market place. I am going to conclude with 8 ways HR professionals can lead the changes that are already happening in their world.

I will most likely post the notes from this session on the corporate blog this weekend.

What I Have Been Up To

As I had posted on Twitter, my house looks like I am back in college. I have so much going on that I have bought 12 spiral notebooks to track everything.

Notebook 1 -  Is for my personal coaching sessions - which are starting to find a groove. Tonight I listed opportunities for self improvement. The list is still growing. It is both humbling and hopeful. Nothing that I am listing is a surprise and in fact I could offer all kinds of hows and whys I have certain behavior habits. However the hopeful part is that with acknowledgment and willingness to work on improvement - life can only get better.

Notebook 2 - Business Finance - we are not thinking small with this company - never have. But now it is so important that I really wrap my hands around how to make this company financially healthy so that it can grow big and strong.

Notebooks 3 and 4 and 5 are our product offerings - we have listed out 11 unique offerings that can be offered ala carte or as part of a larger scope of work, not including consulting. I have defined each offering and written out the needs analysis and qualification stages for each offering, but now I am working on very specific project management steps for each project as well as roles and responsibilities for the team that would be involved.

Notebook 6 - Future offerings that we have identified

Notebook 7 - Community work such as Enterprise 2.0, AECF, and TAG's social network

Notebook 8 - Overall roles and responsibilities, policies and procedure, and overall guidelines for the company.

Notebook 9 - The 4 P's for Concept Hub and how we can improve in each area.

Notebooks 10 and 11 Notes for self improvement in areas such as sales, communications, and management/leadership.

Notebook 12 -  Family Activities - now that summer is coming up, there is a lot more to keep up with and the kids are so different now that it is hard to keep up with the goals and needs of them both as well as overall family activities.

Besides ALL of that I am working on a number of proposals, and ongoing client projects.

I am also still speaking quite a bit, though I have not been promoting those engagements as much. I recently spoke for the GA Department of HR and the Mac User Group. This week I am speaking for the National Volunteer Health Association as well as leading a discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 workshop. On April 9 I will be in South FL  running a workshop during the day and am the keynote dinner speaker for the Broward County Human Resource Association. I am speaking at Flourishing Forum on April 17, I believe I am slotted to speak at the North Fulton Chamber of Commerce on April 29 and I am teaching a class for the GA Center for Nonprofits on May 14th.

Alright - I am exhausted - going to bed now....but I leave you with a quote - because I know you have been missing them...and look it's a sports quote too!

If you are bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things - you don't have enough goals.

Lou Holtz - The only coach in NCAA history to ever lead six different colllege teams to postseason bowl games, and a man who also won a national championship and "coach of the year" honors

Down the path of accelerated change

I spoke at UGA again tonight - this time for the student chapter of International Association of Business Communicators. As I was walking to the Student Learning Center with one of the students she made the comment about how we all grew up on Word.

Now, I am not old, never do I feel old, but I had to pause at that moment and remind her that I did not grow up on Word. In fact when I started college in 1990 I had to write my papers on a typewriter which did have spell check, but unfortunately also had a correction ribbon of which I could not find where to buy the replacement. So every time I heard, beep beep, I would have to stop, backspace, get the whiteout and dab a little on the paper, blow on it and then start typing.

Actually come to think of it, this may be the root cause of all the typos I am cursed with today. As a defense mechanism, perhaps I stopped paying attention to the beep beep and the errors....

Windows did not come out until 1995 - at which time had I stayed on course I would have graduated college by then. Fortunately I did not stay on course and actually returned for my last two years of college in 1996 when in my first marketing class my professor started by writing email addresses and websites on the board. By 1998 I was questioning that same professor as to why there was not an course offered in Internet marketing and he encouraged me to write my own directed individual study.

Fast forward 10 years and I am standing in front of about 20-30 students explaining how the Internet has evolved and what that means to the business world. At the end of the presentation the students expressed to me that they felt like they were behind and needed to catch up.

We started talking more about acceleration referring to  8 tracks to albums, to CDs to mp3s - I mean we live it, but do most people stop to really reflect on how fast our lives and the way we do things change?

I started thinking about this more on the drive home - how there are so many people who are comfortable communicating and doing business the same old way that they will not change until they are made to feel uncomfortable. That might have worked in the past, but with the pace of acceleration, perhaps we will skip over the uncomfortable phase and into the irrelevant stage.

Perhaps that gets a little over dramatic. But honestly I am not sure. People adopt to new things really quick. Second Life and blogging was "weird' a little over a year ago to the exact same people who now claim to be experts in it!

So to break this down a bit...people can collaborate without time or geographic restraints to share ideas and create new tools that disrupt the status quo (Wikinomics), the barrier to entry in the marketplace is pretty low - especially since the cost to create and distribute is so low now (The Long Tail), Adoption through the Peer to Peer network accelerates at an ever increasing speed (Spider and the Starfish / Tipping Point) and people change their habits leaving others who have not adapted wondering what happened.

I really do not think I am being overly dramatic. I think we are seeing the most accelerated  changes and disruptions to our culture than we have ever experienced in the history of mankind. Even those with their head in the sand can't ignore these earth shaking vibrations.

"Next one may wonder what has to happen to an inactive object in rest-motion to      cause it to become active? Acceleration is the answer. If an accelerative force         (Newton's LAW I) is impressed upon the object, the object will immediately experience a change in its speed, direction, rate of rotation, or as many as all three at once. An      accelerating object is an active object. An object in rest-motion is an inactive object. Therefore, rest-motion is the opposite of acceleration which, conversely, is the opposite of rest-motion." (Article II: The Equality of Rest and Uniform Motion, paragraph 11)