I attended the Social Recruiting Summit in NYC this past Monday.  No, I’m not a recruiter but the company I work for is in the recruiting business and we were sponsoring the Summit.  As with everything related to social media, there were people there who were new to it and others who have been doing it for a while.  But what I took away from the event was a couple of things:

1) Using social media for marketing or for recruiting (or anything else for that matter) is a process of trial and error. Yes, there are best practices out there but a lot of this entails trying something to see if it works and modifying appropriately.

2) The people who seem to be the best at it are the ones who jumped right in yet realize they still have a lot to learn.

3) People are clamoring for information regarding how to use social media, what to measure, how often to update the various sites, etc.  And, again, because it’s basically trial and error, there are no clear-cut “directions” to give people.  Regarding metrics, John Sumser, one of the speakers at the Summit, said it best:  “We don’t know what we’re measuring, and what we measure now will change”.

In my mind it comes down to this: those people who don’t see things as only black-and-white, but who see shades of gray and are interested in all the variations, will be the most successful when it comes to using social media.   One has to be willing to experiment a bit, to be wrong occassionally, to learn from their mistakes and to try different approaches because this is a work in progress.  At the end of the day it’s all about establishing relationships and communicating with the people you are trying to reach.