Social Media has to stop being seen as an exclusive Marketing/Branding Channel. The synergies with the rest of Corporate Core Processes are too major to be disregarded.
The following diagram describes our view on the role that Social Media will play in corporations in the future and HR in particular. Each corporate process will have a social media extension in order to add a channel of communication with the corporate community of stakeholders.
Holistic social media strategy
Social Recruiting has to be (and will definitely be) embedded in a holistic Social Media plan and strategy. There are significant synergies between your target social media customer audience and prospects/candidates to incorporate into your organization.
HR leaders should not ask themselves if they should use Social Media. Today they should be asking: What channels should I use: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, other social networks? Should I be involved and ask to be included and contribute to the corporate Social Media strategy? Benefits of being part of the leadership social media team are obvious if corporations can capitalize on the investment on branding.
In companies were they just realized that Linkedin is a great way to hire, and in a different department the management has just bought on the idea of using Social Media for marketing there is a major step forward in order to understand that combined social media efforts can be much more powerful.
Today we are frequently hearing expressions of system-implemented processes such as C2C (Customer to Cash), P2P (procurement to pay) and many others in worlds that are much more sophisticated than HR. Even though it will take some time for HR leaders to buy the idea, we will soon start hearing about processes such as: Googler2Employee, Employee2Alumni and Employee2Candidate.