Our very own Andrea Duggan became a published author this week with the appearance of her blog post entitled “What employers can learn from the Jay Leno – Conan O’Brien succession plan!” Why did she become a published author? Well a lot of the credit goes to Twitter and our social networking initiatives around the 2010 HRPA Annual Conference in Toronto, Canada. Someone once called Twitter a serendipity engine because of the interesting people, connections and opportunities that come about through it when applied correctly. Such was the case in these circumstances. Through our #hrpa2010 Twitter campaign we began to connect and build a community of Twitters in and around the HRPA conference. Within two weeks we had hundreds of people sharing the #hrpa2010 hash tag and a real-time stream of 500 to 600 tweets a day. Through this stream a connection was made with Todd Humber (@HRReporter), Managing Editor at CHHR, who happened to connect with one of Andrea’s colleagues at Armor People Link. That colleague re-tweeted Andrea’s blog post on Conan & Jay which Todd picked up in his Tweet stream. Todd then followed Andrea and replied to her tweet. They exchanged emails, had a brief conversation on the phone and a blog star was born (a star in our eyes anyways). Why is this so interesting, well it’s interesting for two reasons: one, this never could have happened without Twitter (the serendipity engine works!) and two, this entire transaction took place in less than 90 minutes.

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Follow Geoff on Twitter @geoffclen
Follow Andrea on Twitter @andrea_duggan