Executive Leadership Programs and Social Media for SHPE • 03.28.09
Why have I got a blog post title with two seemingly unrelated terms? Very simple. The Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, or SHPE, has been innovating with new types of programs, like SHPE’s Executive Leadership Institute and other professional development programs as I outlined here in an earlier article. The problem is the word is not getting out to non-members.
SHPE members receive the newsletters and the updates. Latino Engineers who are NOT SHPE members make up a much larger number of Latino Engineers than actual SHPE members.
How do we bridge the gap?
Social Media.
One of my goals as President of SHPE is to build on the grassroots efforts of many SHPE members who have started blogs and Facebook groups, and to implement a concerted, integrated effort for SHPE to reach out to non-members to get the word out about what SHPE can offer to enhance their careers.
This graphic, put out by Forrester, explains very well how the corporate demographic that we need to go after is already actively involved in Social Media:
Our target demographic already uses social media extensively. Creators, or people who create blogs or Facebook groups, make up 43% of corporate America. Joiners, or people who join social networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook, make up 48%. A whopping 91% are spectators, meaning they read blogs!!!
I believe the time is ripe for SHPE to actively engage in a conversation via the various social media tools out there, whether Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and even our own social media applications as I mentioned earlier. This effort would enable us to reach out to Latino engineering professionals who are not members and inform them about these innovative leadership programs.
Why do this? Well the self-interested answer would be to gain new members. The correct answer is to empower the larger Hispanic community, and our particular niche, Hispanic engineers. As our vision states:
SHPE is the leading social-technical organization whose primary function is to enhance and achieve the potential of Hispanics in engineering, math and science.
Social Media is also a very powerful way to receive feedback from the community. The SHPE corporate website, a must-have, is a one-way conversation: the organization talking to the public. Social Media enables a two way conversation. It empowers independent thinking, as this blog, and other election blog represents. It can also be a place to air grievances, something which SHPE should not shy away from, but should embrace as we move forward and change to provide more value to Latino engineering professionals.
What do you think? How should SHPE get the word out to non-members about some of our valuable programs? Should we launch headlong into Social Media? I welcome your thoughts.
Manny Hernandez
