How far along is your business with really utilizing social networking and social learning tools? Do you feel like the only one trying to show the value it can bring to your organization?
Here is some information that may help you show everyone, once and for all, why you need at act fast and get ahead of the competition.
This January 2012 article from Debra Donston-Miller posted at The Brainyard cites that while organizations may be skittish about security and productivity, social media’s benefits are hard to discount. Her mantra – Be social–or be left behind.
I like that – ‘Be social or be left behind’.
The article cites some interesting ideas and ways for CEOs and other leaders in organizations to adopt and grow their use of social learning tools within the enterprise. However, as with any new computing shift, risk must be measured against reward, and tools for mitigating risk must be considered.
What risks may be preventing you from bringing more social and informal learning tools to your learning or training programs?
The full article from Debra discusses this issue in greater detail : http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/232301417/why-your-business-cant-ignore-social-networking
A couple high level points to take away from Debra’s article are:
- Gain customers by focusing on social networking, not just search
- Social learning has security issues, but there are tools available to stay safe.
- Internal social networking and learning tools are becoming more more accepted as tools for collaboration and knowledge management
But, what is the bottom-line value of social learning to a business? That is an important question to address to understand before you can move forward.
There is a blog post called Social Learning Value Explained which addresses the commentary from Rachel Happe, also from a post at The Brainyard, sharing some strategies to consider when explaining social learning tools to people in the workforce without drowning them in social speak or meaningless jargon. She offers some practical tips for those who need to internally “sell” the concept of social to their business counterparts.
| SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES AND PROCESSES FOR INTERNAL USE | ||
|---|---|---|
| Social Tool Use Case | Translation | Value |
| Blog for executives and subject matter experts | Be more productive, interact with a lot more people, and repeat yourself less. | Cuts duplicate effort, improves personal relationships, and provides faster action and reaction times. |
| Discussion board for project status updates | Reduce email clutter and time lost managing it; centralize information so it’s easy to find even after employees leave. | Saves up to 2 hours per day per person not having to manage project-related email, and increases knowledge capture and visibility. |
| Wiki for review cycles | Cut down on time wasted finding the current version of documents and editing the wrong versions. | Provides faster feedback and ensures you’re always contributing to the most current information. Cuts wasted effort. |
| Microblog for work updates among teams | Reduce or eliminate project status meetings while staying more aware of project status. | Saves up to four hours per person per week in time previously spent in meetings. |
| Internal social network that centralizes employee profiles and includes tags and expertise fields. | More easily find subject experts in your organization. | Reduces duplicate work, increases innovation, and cuts time spent looking for information. |
| Online chat tool that lets employees ask HR questions | Lets you easily locate policies, documents, and other HR info | Centralizes more of the HR team and reduces time spent looking for HR information. |
| SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES AND PROCESSES FOR EXTERNAL USE | ||
|---|---|---|
| Social Tool Use Case | Translation | Value |
| Customer support forums | Give customers a place where they can connect, create niche support documentation, and help each other | Decreases time to answers to questions, cuts number of support queries, and encourages innovative uses of products and services. |
| Drive word of mouth by sharing blogs, videos, podcasts, and other content on social networks | Educate the market about your product by encouraging people to share content with their connections. | Reduces cost of sales and customer churn because customer is educated before sale. |
| Engage influencers | Provide those most likely to drive positive results for your company with access and value. | Provides market credibility, positive market impression, and sales. |
| Co-innovate and crowdsource ideas | Solicit and vet ideas from and assess risks with a broader audience then you could in person. | Increases the percentage of successful new products and features, and reduces risks. |
| Use a community to extend the value of an event | Reach 10 times the number of attendees by enabling participants to share and discuss event content before and after. | Increases the relevance and audience for your event investment. |
Those are great charts. I hope they help.
What risks may be preventing you from bringing more social and informal learning tools to your learning or training programs?
Once you are ready to see more about how social learning can help your organization (big or small) reach your goals, fill out the form below and I will be happy to show you a live demo of the award-winning social learning management system, TOPYX.
‘Be social or be left behind’
John Hillsman
Business Development Manager
John.hillsman@interactyx.com
www.interactyx.com
