It’s been awhile since I’ve updated the Open Diversity blog, so I wanted to let you know what’s been going on behind the scenes around here. The short answer is this: we’re working on making the Open Diversity initiative more relevant and useful for D&I practitioners.
Our plan is to revisit more of the foundational issues related to social technologies. The primary reason for this is that we are finding that diversity and inclusion (D&I) professionals are using social media, but not much for professional-related matters.
As many of you know, social media (in its current form) has been around for several years but has only recently become more mainstream. What I’ve been finding, and have confirmed with some other D&I practitioners, is that while many D&I professionals have begun to use social media in their personal lives—to connect with family, friends, and the like—they have been slower to leverage social tools in ways that directly to D&I efforts. Some of this may stem from their organizational cultures (which may not encourage the use of social media), concerns about confidentiality of information, or uncertainty or unfamiliarity with social tools.
Our goal over the next several months is to spend more time discussing and educating diversity-related professionals about how they can leverage social media effectively in their D&I roles. We’ll focus on describing the tools and their capabilities, and hopefully we’ll be able to use some case studies to highlight how D&I professionals are currently using these tools.
To this we’ll add discussions of potential hurdles or barriers to adoption that practitioners may encounter, along with strategies for managing objections to the use of social tools in a human capital context. Hopefully, this will provide practitioners with at least some of the help they need in integrating social technologies into their current portfolio of responsibilities in a way that is beneficial to their departments and their companies overall.
We’re also going to highlight more news and events from the D&I/social media world because it can be challenging to find out what is actually happening in this space and we hope to be a resource in this area, as well.
If you have questions or would like to get more involved, email us at info [at] open-diversity [dot] com.
Happy 2011!
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