A presentation on how to start social learning communities given at Training 2012 in Atlanta Georgia by Karie Willyerd.

1. Fostering Social
Learning
Communities
Karie Willyerd
Vice President, Chief Learning Officer
SuccessFactors
© Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. 10/5/2011

2. Agenda
• 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?
2

3. The 2020 Workplace
The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract,
Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today
Available wherever books are sold
3

4. Three Forces Shaping the
Future of Work
BY 2020: global access to markets Globalization
and talent will reshape business
BY 2020: five generations will be Demographics
working side-by-side in organizations
BY 2020: social media will connect
employees, customers, and partners Social Web
for immediate communication
4

5. Size of the Generations in US Now
90m
5 generations
70m
BABY BOOMERS
MILLENNIALS
???
50m
GENERATION X
TRADITIONALISTS
30m
GEN 2020
10m
>1946 >1964 >1976 >1997 1997-?
5

6. Demographics
Demographics
2005 US
Generation 2020 0
Millennials 25%
Generation X 23%
Baby Boomers 45%
Traditionalists 8%
0% 20% 40% 60%

7. Demographics
Demographics
2010 US
Generation 2020 0
Millennials 36%
Generation X 22%
Baby Boomers 38%
Traditionalists 4%
0% 20% 40% 60%

8. Demographics
Demographics
2015 US
Generation 2020 1%
Millennials 45%
Generation X 21%
Baby Boomers 31%
Traditionalists 3%
0% 20% 40% 60%

9. Demographics
Demographics
2020 US
Generation 2020 7%
Millennials 50%
Generation X 20%
Baby Boomers 22%
Traditionalists 1%
0% 20% 40% 60%

10. What do
Millennials
around the
world want at
a job?
10

11. 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
Meister & Willyerd, Harvard Business Review, May 2010
11

12. 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
Meister & Willyerd, Harvard Business Review, May 2010
12

13. The #1 Way
Millennials
Want to Learn
is Informally:
Mentoring &
Coaching
13

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

15. Email Is So Yesterday!
15

16. 25 Billion Tweets
700 Million on
Facebook
70% Outside
US
16

17. 4 Billion YouTube Videos Watched …
A Day
On Average, 377 Videos Watched …
A Month
35 Hours of Video Uploaded …
A Minute
17

18. Now Is the
Time for
Social
Learning
18

19. 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.
19

20. 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
20

21. 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
21

22. Prior to launch
22

23. 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
23

24. 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
24

25. 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 collaboration
Your goals will define your community structure,
resources required, and metrics
25

26. 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
26

27. 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.
27

28. 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
28

29. 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
29

30. Launching social learning

31. 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
31

32. 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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33. 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!
33

34. 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
34

35. 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!
35

36. 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.
36

37. Scaling & Measuring Social
Learning

38. 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
38

39. 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 …. )
39

40. Is It Time to
Join the
Revolution?
40