The latest addition to UK Recruiter's team of roving reports is Mervyn Dinnen and on 20th January he is attending the SMART conference on our behalf. Here is his pre conference pre amble! .
On January 20th I’ll be going along to Incisive Media’s SMART 2011 conference. Entitled ‘Social Media for Business – The Risks vs The Opportunities’ this should be an enlightening and richly rewarding event featuring knowledgeable speakers sharing best practice and giving attendees the opportunity to discover how to best utilise social media for growing business.
The day will be structured to give maximum opportunity to share, learn and network, through a mixture of keynote and panel sessions, case studies and smaller workshops. I’m particularly looking forward to the breakout sessions, 30 minute concurrent groups covering Talent Management, Business Strategy and Tools & Techniques. For me, one of the differentiators with this conference, and something that I am keen to find out more about, are around the risks as well as the opportunities. Brand hijacking and legal compliance will be two key areas as well as a case study on what happens when social media strategy goes wrong.
Some great keynote speakers are lined up, and for me one of the highlights could well be the Social Media Sofa, a session featuring representatives from YouTube, Google and Mashable talking about how their channels can add value to businesses, and how they are using social media to increase revenue.
The breakout sessions contain something for everyone. I’m keen to hear Steve Fogarty from Adidas Group talk about implementing social media into recruitment strategy, Jeremy Fawcett from Yahoo talk about protecting you online brand, as well as the workshop on content creation with Peter Abraham of Econsultancy.com.
The final keynote panel includes Gurtaj Sandhu, Digital Director of The Times, and Mark Squires, Director of Social media at Nokia. Their insight on both staying current and anticipated future trends should ensure that the conference ends on an uplifting note.
You can find more out about Mervyn on his superb blog. If you are going along why not drop him a note and maybe meet for a coffee.
