I've been meeting a lot of HR directors and heads of HR, yet, while many of them are business savvy HR professionals working in large organisations that have a suite of impressive brands behind them, I'm constantly amazed that the majority do not know the first thing about social networking and its associationed terminology; web 2.0, blogging, corporate intranets, let alone have guidelines on internet / social networking policies. 

HR Capitalist writes in his posting More on not stinking as an HR pro:

"If I had a million dollars? I'd subsidize the effort to get every HR manager, director and VP subscribed to blogs...It's still shocking how many in our profession don't know what a blog is. Low uptake on technology is part of the perception problem."

Why does HR seem to be slow on the uptake of social networking technologies? Granted, there are some great examples of HR professionals riding the social networking wave; using it as a new way of attracting talent and to promote the organisation's employer brand through the likes of Facebook and Second Life, but get this, knowing how to work the net to connect your staff, reach out to your customers and market your employer brand in a way that is unimaginable to you, could allow you to make your commercial mark far beyond the highest expectations of your board. 

 Race ahead to outmanouevre those HR cynics and then snigger at your opponents!

In a moment, I'm going to present you with a snippet from a new book called 'groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies', I've already put up a post on this book, but I can't get enough of it. This book will give you the tools to stretch your imagination and allow you to earn yourself a reputation as a well respected innovative, entreprenuerial guru.

I'm currently reading Chapter 4. 'strategies for tapping the groundswell' and can't stop getting it out of my bag and throwing the book in the face of an unsuspecting HR professional who is still wrestling with the ideas I posed that as their first basic steps, they could set up a forum or blog as part of, get this, their internal comms or external comms strategy or even......both.

Wow, what a frightening prospect! So, here's my challenge to you, read as much as you can on the subject.

Ok, to get you started, I've pulled out an extract from the covers of Groundswell. Read out loud at lightening speed with lots of exaggerated emphasis on all the wording - which is basically what I've been doing to startled looking faces as I really want to hammer it to HR that you must get involved and be a participant in order to gain competitive advantage. 
Who says that HR cannot be commercially driven?

Extract from the covers of Groundswell:
a groundswell is rising. are you ready?

"RIGHT NOW, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon - the groundswell - that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat.

You can see it as an opportunity.

In Groundswell, two top analysts from Forrester Research show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. With twenty-five vivid cases from around the world - from health care to retail to consumer goods to business services - Li and Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenue, saving money, and energising their own customers.

Whether you're in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there's targeted advice here for you, backed up with real-world ROI to prove if it works.

Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies. You'll see jhow the marketers of Procter & Gamble proved that subtle marketing within a community was four times as effective as television, how Best Buy taps into the intelligence of over a thousand of its employees with its own social network, how Dell has transformed itself by embracing customer insights in nearly every department, and how a South African winery boosted its sales tenfold by tapping into the power of bloggers, YouTube, Facebook, and every other tool in the social technology arsenal.

You can't afford to ignore this trend."