I gave a talk on social media this morning for Vestnorsk personalforum, an organisation for Human Resources professionals. Although I’ve not blogged much since Benjamin was born (he’s three months old and giggles!) I’ve been reading and thinking and I really enjoyed putting some new slides together. I tried to record my voice during the presentation to make a “slidecast”, but the synchronisation of audio and slides isn’t working right now and my voice is missing so many gestures that I probably should have rerecorded the whole thing specifically for a web audience. Maybe next time.

Right after me, Anders ÿvre-Johnsen spoke about Adecco Norway’s ambitious uses of social media. Anders is the manager of Adecco Norway, and is clearly very savvy about social media. Their most obvious success so far was a social media campaign for a freshly developed iPhone app they made (a job search app since they’re a temp agency) – they made a simple YouTube video of the manager demoing the app and got 100 employees to talk about the app in their various social networks – Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on. The push worked brilliantly, and the app was in the top 25 downloaded apps in Norway for a few weeks – not a bad achievement at all. Interesting, they were able to compare this success to a more traditional ad campaign during the winter olympics. In this campaign, no social media was leveraged but they ran traditional and extremely expensive full page newspaper ads – and for a lot more money, they got far fewer downloads of their app.

Here’s my slides and audio. Next time I’m definitely going to start more forcefully – there’s some shocking umming and ahing at the beginning there, but it gets steadier after a minute or two. I’m actually not quite sure that I like audio with the slides – what do you think?