social learning
… as the community starts to engage, look for your nodes and amplifi ers; the early adopters and people with high reputation – people who are followed and infl uential.
Encourage users to carry out the mechanical actions required (posting,
registering, joining) but focus on the activity, not the task. Make it low risk – joining groups about personal interests is a good, non-threatening use of social tools in the workplace. In practice - Get people together. You can create a group, start a blog post, ask a question or share an idea about anything in social learning tools – so if tackling a complex work problem seems too intimidating a place to start, maybe look for an easier start point – next social outing for your team? Everyone likes a party...
2. Find your amplifi ers And as the community starts to engage, look for your nodes and amplifi ers; the early adopters and people with high reputation – people who are followed and infl uential. Engage with them, and encourage them to harness team leaders and project managers to drive higher adoption in more business-oriented contexts. Users will soon see the benefi ts in effi ciently sharing ideas, collaborating and
breaking down the information siloes. View your own role as facilitating them in building their community, not your role to build it. Socially connected people with high reputation will build engagement far faster than you (unless you are that person!). You can thank and reward amplifi ers with kudos in other social networks and
contexts, for example recommendations and endorsements on LinkedIn. Leaders who already have authority make for great social learning models.
Focus on senior leaders and encourage them to step forward, join communities, share their insights. If your CEO is open and authentic, it sets the social learning tone for the whole business.
In practice - make it easy for amplifi ers. At the start, you may need to bring the horse to water, and help them with blogging or starting to share. If your infl uencers and amplifi ers are not natural writers, then interview them and write some copy for them. Better ghostwritten than not written at all.
3. Reach out to the quiet ones As the community starts to engage, reach out to the quiet people. Most people are lurking and consuming, not contributing. So speak to them, in person if you
can. Find out what they’re thinking about the community, and what, if anything is holding them back from being more of a contributor. Don’t assume it’s a matter of attitude or technology. Assume they have valid reasons: fi nd out what they are. Then see how you can facilitate them to be successful. How can you support them in being more effective: not how can they adapt to your system. At the formation stage of the community, it’s all about engagement: how can we support it, how do we generate it. So reach out, talk to people and avoid falling into the trap of thinking it’s about content or willingness. Generally people are disengaged for good reasons. Give them better reasons to engage and support them as they learn.
4. Narrate – share the stories It’s often valuable to have a formal voice, even in social systems. Not the voice that issues edicts and warnings, but the voice that provides commentary. As you see communities forming, growing, developing, narrate this. Tell stories about the communities. Pick out individuals who are contributing effectively, who are offering support, who are making a difference. Again, reward them with recognition and social authority. Share stories of success. You can use your narrative voice to set challenges: competitions, awards and opportunities. You can use it to ask questions about what support the community wants.
Don’t use it for transactional discussions: use it to add value and share success. Use it to recognise and reward, to challenge and support.
In practice - Do the round up. In social learning tools, you create a blog post that is a weekly or monthly round-up post of the most shared content or most valuable content within the community this week. You could create a podcast to add an actual voice to this. Celebrate and single out great contributions and success stories.
5. Be clear on ownership It’s important, in each community and space, to understand who owns the conversation: inappropriate intervention or moderation will kill engagement. Clarity about ownership is vital. You can vary ownership between fully formal and progressively more social spaces. For example, if you have a group for ‘Marketing’, you may have that as a formal space, an organisational space that sits behind a physical team. It’s a place you can share news, can direct activity and conversation. But if you have a group for ‘Innovation’, you may want more freeform and creative engagement, so it’s important to moderate it and engage in it in different ways. Organisational, formal engagement must be varied by group. If you engage in the same way in every space, you will make all spaces formal and, therefore, less well engaged. But if you just stand back, you will neglect your role in Forming and Guiding. It’s a balance. You don’t want a classroom, or the Wild West, but always be clear and transparent about ownership.
Pro Tip: HR needs to share by example
“I personally think too few HR leaders are embracing social learning. Many are simply not active on social media and not seeing the potential of social learning. How can we expect HR leaders to be guiding and leading their organisations on the “new world” of human capital management, when they are not embarrassing and are not actively participating in this ‘new world’.” Con Sotidis @Learnkotch
e.learning age june 2015
As you see communities forming, growing, developing, narrate this. Tell stories about the communities. Pick out individuals who are contributing effectively, who are offering support, who are making a difference.
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