Social Media and Learning

Over the past year, a lot has been written about the growth of social media and why you just can’t ignore it when planning your communications and marketing strategies. But what about social media and learning? How does it fit into the plans for the training department? What impact will it have on your training program? Which web 2.0 tools are relevant for your target audience? At its most basic level, social media is a change in how people discover, read, learn, and share news, information and content. It's a mix of sociology and technology, tranforming how we communicate: from one to many into many to many. So how can you as a trainer tap into the power of social media to successfully support and drive your training programs?

Social media has the ability to extend learning beyond the classroom or standalone e-learning module. Using tools like blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking to name but a few, employees can start to connect and collaborate with each other in a wider circle.

So how do you begin? Forrester Research have come up with a simple methodology to get your creative juices flowing as you try and figure out how social media fits into your business plans. Its called POST. People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology.

The CLO website has done a great job of aligning POST to the world of training.

P is People. Don't start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. Are they mostly spectators or active creators of content? What are the demographics of your employee population, and what are the demographics of your new hires? Many companies have older demographics for current employees, but almost 100 percent of new hires are in the Net Generation, meaning they are in their early 20s and have been active users of social networking during their college years.

O is objectives. Think about your business objectives in wanting to use social media for learning. Do you want to use these tools to attract new hires? Are you interested in using social media tools to keep Net Gens engaged on the job? Are you experiencing higher turnover among Net Gens?

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you have achieved your business objective. In other words, do you want to increase the percentage of Net Gens who are interested in your organization? Do you want to lower turnover among Net Gens or do you want to build a robust online community of your best associates? Imagine the endpoint, and that will help you with how to begin on your journey.

T is Technology: Are you interested in creating an online community, a wiki, a blog or several hundred blogs held together by a common theme? How does this match up with your organization’s policy guidelines for using these tools? Has any group within your organization had success using any of these tools? If the answer to the last question is yes, reach out to this group and use them to build your business case for using social media for learning.