Father Scott
You may not be aware of this, but change is not Maine’s middle name (I think it’s actually the Indian word for moose crap, but that may be wrong too). So you might be surprised to find that this whole Facebook/Twitter/blogging generation is just now making its way into my fine homeland.
Former newspaper staffmate and Facebook friend of the Padre Mindy Favreau has an interesting piece about how HR professionals are beginning to use these technologies.
In Maine, HR professionals are just starting to warm up to this new technology. David Pease, senior vice president of human resources at Androscoggin Bank in Lewiston, was recently elected director of the SHRM Maine State council, and has been pushing social media to the state’s HR professionals as a way to keep people connected. He created a discussion group on LinkedIn called Maine HR Council, and he has noticed an uptick in the number of people he sees linking up with him online; so far the group has attracted 68 people in less than two months. He also started a blog called MaineHR, and made his first and only post on Dec. 6. So far, no one has made any comments on it. “[Using social media is] beginning to become more prevalent,” he says. “But it’s slow going.”
As Mindy’s subjects note, it’s about finding value in these sites — being on them in and of itself does not make you useful in anyway. And perhaps this slow-going way has some merit. For instance, maybe if I spent less than six hours a day looking at my Reader and clicking on links in Facebook to see what my friends were writing, I’d get some work done. It’s a good thing 68,000 people didn’t get laid off today, or maybe I’d have something to worry about.
You wouldn’t Twitter either if you had this view
