(Oct 29, 2008) If you haven’t had a chance, tune into the ERE conference. The page at ere.net is featuring live material from this week’s conference. With an emphasis on outreach and interaction, things are shifting at ERE. David Manaster continues to set a high standard for the relevancy of national conferences.

The first panel featured Gerry Crispin, Mark Mehler, Joel Cheesman, Shally Steckerl and an extremely insightful woman from Yahoo (Carmen Hudson.) It was a reprise (though en extremely interactive one) of the technology panel that has been a part of every trade show since the early 1990s. Really smart people who know about relatively obscure things coaching the audience to invest now.

I wonder if anyone can give me the name of a company that lost a competitive advantage by being slow to develop a corporate website? Why would the current (Web 2.0) wave be any different. The only urgency I can see is the urgency to enrich the consultants focused on the utilization of new technology.

Invest in the technology now or you will be a corporate laggard. Really?

An audience member asked how to get the rest of the organization blogging and twittering. “It’s al well and good that we’re recruiting this way,” she said, “but it isn’t worth a hill of beans if the hiring managers and trench level supervisors are not doing it.”

I wonder when it became the recruiter’s job to lead the organization into new technology usage. Isn’t the job to staff the existing organization? Aren’t other people supposed to be moving the technology ball forward? Are Recruiters really supposed to spend their time at the cutting edge?

Of

The real problem is that technology should follow strategy, not lead it.