Social Media: Best Practices in Training

Social networking is defined as the building of online communities based on common interests and activities. Some would debate that social networking is a leisure time, non-business activity for making friends or perhaps finding the love of your life. Our half day event at Babson College this month dispelled any misconceptions of Social Networking being primarily used as a consumer tool. Social Networking has moved into the commercial world, with many companies starting to actively promote employee involvement to raise awareness of their products or services as clearly demonstrated by our presenters.

Bill Cava CTO of ektron our first presenter gave us an overview of the progression from Web 1.0 static pages to Web 2.0 which included dynamic, collaborative and the conduit for social media business applications.

Bill talked about the network effect, it becomes better as it gets used, such as a community ratings system. The EBay marketplace is a good example of the collateral benefits of receiving and leaving feedback for both as a seller or buyer, it helps global sellers and buyers make better informed purchasing or selling decisions.

Adoption rates are increasing exponentially with twitter and face book, Twitter's users have jumped to an estimated 32.1 million from 1.6 million a year ago.

Dave Wilkins, Product Strategist from mZinga our second presenter started us off with traditional learning channel and how we process information i.e. kinetic, visual or auditory learners, now social networking can provide a user choice of passive vs. active dialog as a real time search tool.

Dave demonstrated some compelling examples of how companies today are using social networking.

P&G's contribution from its customer base, receive just over 50% of ideas generated from social networking. When they launch a new product, it has on average a 90% success rate. This is 3 times the traditional success rate for the consumer packaged goods industry. Social networking is a key driver for P&G’s product launch success.

Ford Motor is using social networking for its Microsoft Sync technology that uses Bluetooth connectivity, they use a social media messaging board to post and resolve issues with volunteer community users, in return, their Ford customers get technical support, effectively saving $800k to $1M annually in traditional call center support calls, assuming an average live phone support call is $8-12 and they receive over 1 million message views per year. The good news for Ford is the majority of their support for Microsoft Sync is peer to peer discussions which has an average cost of .25 cents per message.

Mark Bucceri’s, of Saba Systems our final presenter introduced some of the changes in the last 10 years with Web Based Training changing more to a collaborative approach of finding information with online repositories instead of structured online content. Instructor Led Training has been reduced considerably where before a typical training was 5 days , now it’s down to 2 or 3 days.

Some of the key drivers of social networking are Performance- how it’s measured, Learning- how it’s delivered and Collaboration-how the silo’s of traditional dissemination of information are now outside the company and more widely available inside a company using social networking applications. Mark explained the three models:

Blended learning with social networking has three models:

1. Embedded learning, examples include blogs
2. Surround learning, this is your foundation knowledge- before, learning was topic focused, now it is experiential with best practices
3. Community learning , live chat, discussion boards etc

The half day event was not only informative with our subject matter expert presenters, our sponsors brought expert level knowledge of cost effective ways of developing social networking to main stream business application to augment existing LMS or LCMS.

What is the future of social media or more specifically social networking? The possibilities are limitless with community users and as a business application from the case study examples above.

People will continue to share interests, ideas and Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Think about how your life will dramatically change in the next two to five years as social networking becomes are routine as phone calls were over 100 years ago.