I’m heading off to Manchester later for the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition. Condensed to two days this year there promises to be much rich content with a wide range of speakers and contributors. We’ll be opening with a keynote on ‘Creating the Best Workplace on Earth‘ and closing with ‘Leadership and the New Principles of Influence‘. The latter session will be delivered by Daniel Pink – after live tweeting, and blogging about, his two presentations at HRTechEurope I’m in danger of becoming a fanboy!

For this event the CIPD have put together a blog squad of more than 20 of your favourite HR bloggers and tweeters, and between us we will endeavour to capture the essence of what’s being said, and which exhibitors have an interesting story to tell.

For some of the squad it will be their first live tweeting/blogging experience – I’m looking forward to reading what they have to say – and with such a cross section of people there will inevitably be a range of styles and viewpoints.

I noticed during my visits to HRTechConference and HRTechEurope a greater embedding of bloggers in to the event conversation as they become important conduits of the various messages. Everyone has their own style – I tend to live tweet a lot of what’s being said as an aide memoire to help me blog about it later. I don’t often give my perspective on it until my post event review – I see my role as someone who is taking the content to people who aren’t able to attend, drawing in a much wider audience than usual, and then reviewing afterwards. A bit like a sports journalist commenting on the live action and the writing an opinion piece later.

Others in the blog squad are likely to do it differently, giving a view or perspective on what’s being said. Only by following the hashtag #CIPD13, rather than individual tweeters, can you get the full picture.

For those of you following from afar there are three channels to follow:

The event hashtag on Twitter – #CIPD13

The individual blog squad members, their tweets and blogs – this list from Steve Bridger will help

The CIPD Tumblr – curated by Doug Shaw

It’s been noticeable during events over the last year or two, particularly those around recruitment and HR, that the twitter hashtag thread often draws in comments from those not in attendance. This is a good thing as it broadens the conversations, and also offers a useful way to spot examples of those two growing live event phenomena – the Social Snark and the Hashtag Heckler.

Social Snark

They aren’t in attendance, usually because they are too busy – but not so busy they aren’t following the twitter chat for 140 character updates that they find less than insightful or (cardinal sin) something they’ve said before. They are usually dismissive of the quality of the content believing that the conversation hasn’t moved on and hence justifying their decision not to go.

Hashtag Heckler

They can’t shoot down the message so take it out on the messenger. They’re different from the snarks in that they want a debate, usually to publicly call out the speaker, so start disagreeing with the live tweeter. Again there is usually a link to something that the heckler has blogged previously. This type is not to be confused with the Hashtag Hijacker who basically uses any popular conversation thread to promote themselves irrespective of whether they have anything to contribute.

Enjoy the conversation and if the buzzword bingo gets too much you can always go snark and heckler hunting 😉

Here are a few posts I’ve written from previous CIPD conferences:

Unlocking the Potential of Our Future Workforce
The Elephant in The Room for Tomorrow’s Workforce
Blogging and Learning at #CIPD11
Trust is The Word