Fostering Social Learning Communities

Karie WillyerdVice President, Chief Learning OfficerSuccessFactors

10/5/2011© Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.

Agenda

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• Why is now the time for social learning?• What is social learning? • What are social learning communities?• What should I do prior to launch?• How do I maintain and scale

communities?• How do I measure social learning?

The 2020 Workplace

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Available wherever books are sold

The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today

Three Forces Shaping the Future of Work

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Globalization

Demographics

BY 2020: global access to markets and talent will reshape business

BY 2020: five generations will be working side-by-side in organizations

BY 2020: social media will connect employees, customers, and partners for immediate communication

Social Web

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Size of the Generations in US Now

0% 20% 40% 60%

Baby Boomers

Generation X

Millennials

Generation 2020

Traditionalists

45%

0

8%

2005 USDemographicsDemographics

25%

23%

0% 20% 40% 60%

Baby Boomers

Generation X

Millennials

Generation 2020

Traditionalists

2010 US

0

4%

22%

38%

36%

DemographicsDemographics

0% 20% 40% 60%

Baby Boomers

Generation X

Millennials

Generation 2020

Traditionalists

2015 US

21%

1%

31%

45%

3%

DemographicsDemographics

0% 20% 40% 60%

Baby Boomers

Generation X

Millennials

Generation 2020

Traditionalists

2020 US

20%

22%

50%

1%

7%

DemographicsDemographics

What do Millennials around the world want at a job?

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Top 5 Things Millennials Want …

From a boss:

1. Will help me navigate my career path

2. Will give me straight feedback

3. Will mentor and coach me

4. Will sponsor me for formal development programs

5. Is comfortable with flexible schedules

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Meister & Willyerd, Harvard Business Review, May 2010

Top 5 Things Millennials Want …

To learn:

1. Technical skills in my area of expertise

2. Self management and personal productivity

3. Leadership

4. Industry or functional knowledge

5. Creativity and innovation strategies

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Meister & Willyerd, Harvard Business Review, May 2010

The #1 Way Millennials Want to Learn is Informally: Mentoring & Coaching

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Cisco’s Social Media Survey of Millennials

• 2/3 will ask about social media during job interview• 56% will not take a job from a company that bans social

media, or they will work around the ban• 1/3 prioritize social media access and mobility device

freedom over salary• 41% say their company marketed their social access

device and social media policy to recruit them• 68% believe corporate devices should be used for social

media and personal use• 50% would rather lose their wallet or purse than smart

phone• 70% believe being in an office is unnecessary

14http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns1120/index.html

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Email Is So Yesterday!

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25 Billion Tweets

700 Million on Facebook

70% Outside US

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4 Billion YouTube Videos Watched …A Day

On Average, 377 Videos Watched …

A Month

35 Hours of Video Uploaded …

A Minute

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Now Is the Time forSocial Learning

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What is Social Learning?

Social Learning is learning that happens by interacting with other people, able to be initiated by the learner, and enabled by digital technologies that provide both read and write capabilities.

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How is This Different Than a Website?

• The focus is on people providing content, not just content; you know who you’re getting your content from

• Communities are more interactive, thus require more effort on the company’s part – community managers

• The volume of content, and the currency of content, far exceeds nearly every website

• Barriers to posting and collaboration are reduced or eliminated

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What Powers Communities?Users, users, users!

• Essential to build user base as quickly as possible

Activity. Every time a user returns, there needs to be new, fresh, interesting content

Users interacting with users

Users interacting with company experts

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Prior to launch

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Readiness Check List

Future state solves a problem, such as:

• Getting information out quickly to the field

• Not enough budget to develop needed courses

• Connecting silos

• Dispersed workplace hard to train synchronously Training department willing to give up control Employee mix includes people comfortable with technology Policy in place for social media A few champions at senior levels Risk is managed; start with a pilot with a specific goal

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Guidelines & Policies

Social media guidelines must be easily findable

• http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php for sample guidelines

Set the tone; community managers essential to ensuring tone

Permissions

Content review

Community owner responsibilities

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Setting Goals – Some Examples• Provide an interactive area for employees and

dealers to learn more about the community and its products and solution• Drive engagement to solve issues• Encourage sharing of success stories• Create a collaboration space• Up-to-date news source

• Increase brand awareness

• Build brand loyalty and affiliation

• Encourage cross functional collaborationYour goals will define your community structure, resources required, and metrics

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Recruit and Train Community Managers

• The traditional roles of learning, such as facilitator or course author, do not prepare people to be online community managers

• Look for people who have a strong online presence already

• Send them to a social learning bootcamp or social marketing workshop

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The Role of a Community Manager• Foster a sense of community that encourages greater engagement

and investment from its members, and encourages word-of-mouth sharing for amplified impact on the community.

• Moderate online conversations and events to make sure the posted topics are relevant and positive

• Become a key contributor to the posts, blogs and tweets of the community

• Increase community awareness of the tool, products and services• Welcome new members• Engage and motivate the community’s most active online

influencers and advocates to ensure that their input is acknowledged

• Provide community feedback to internal teams for the consideration of future programs.

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Picking a Platform – Features List

• Authoring – including screen capture and webcam; bundling of objects

• Sharing – communities with forums, comments, rating, tagging

• Security – to the object level• Findability – advanced search methods to ensure

knowledge can be easily found• Metrics – essential to training functions• All from your browser, no downloads• Mobile• Signals – alerts to community members of new content

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Recruit People & Content

• Ensure community is pre-seeded with new content• One idea: Ask every person in the community to load

a recent presentation, paper or policy that they believe represents some of their best work.

• Recruit people in advance of launch to add content

Launching social learning

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Marketing Must Be Social!• Email blast X 3 (minimum)• Include links to community in emails and marketing• Live events (may be virtual) to learn more about the community• Recruit bloggers pre-launch• Expert week

• Be sure to send note to experts and their managers thanking for participation• “Spooky” week. Similar to Halloween TV programming, experts commit to

posting on pre-determined themes• Staff a booth in common spaces, such as the cafeteria to demo the

community• Run an annual social learning community ACE contest. (Award for

Community Excellence) This awards a person, not necessarily a piece of content.

• Have community manager contact members who have not visited site for two months

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Provide Incentives

• Implement a social equity feature• Best content of the month; provide reward such as

community polo shirt; ongoing for at least a year• Tag! You’re It! Run a contest for a month. Provide a

reward to the person who tags the most content.• Featured content. Put some cache around content

specially selected for featured content. Have community manager send note to person and manager.

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Keeping Content Current

• Automatically triggered reviews• Rewards for people who flag old content• Community owners who inspire the addition

of new content

• Besides – most people don’t go past the second page of search!

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Keep It Interesting & Stimulating

• Goal is to make people feel they are out-of-touch if they don’t participate in community regularly

• News feeds

• Daily digests

• “Fun” content; unleash your experts’ creativity

• Planned events to allow nearly synchronous interaction

• Rotating special programming/topics

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Make It Easy to Use

• Ensure policies don’t make collaboration and posting onerous

• Encourage tagging to make content findable

• Keep content short; unpack long presentations and eLearning courses into a series

• Use a bundling feature when multiple documents need to go together, such as a tech spec and a tutorial

• No training required!

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Making Content & Experts Findable Is Key

• Both finding and authoring content need to take as little time as possible

• Tagging essential

• Eliminate review cycles on authoring; every step of review will dramatically reduce contributions

• Feedback needs to be provided quickly. There’s nothing more frustrating than taking the time to write a thoughtful question and then not getting any responses.

Scaling & Measuring Social Learning

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Now That You’ve Piloted, What’s Next?

• Pull is better than push• Align business needs to ensure successful

execution of enterprise-wide launch• Continue deconstructing existing training

materials and make available in nuggets• Get creative on viral marketing; look to your

marketing department for ideas on how they are going social with customers

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Establishing Metrics – Some Ideas

• Determine which metrics best align with business goals

• Cost savings: amount of content contributed by people outside of normal job duties; valuation of that content if created formally (# of pages or # of hours of content X formal creation $ rate)

• Time savings; reduction in questions to experts

• Engagement; turnover in targeted audience

• Member-to-member interactions (measures community maturity)

• Survey members to determine satisfaction; provide open-ended question for qualitative metrics (e.g., The SLC helps me in my job because …. )

Is It Time to Join the Revolution?

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