There is little doubt that the emergence of Web 2.0 and social networking tools have radically changed the way organizations do business... so much so that terms such as "social business", "social enterprise", and "social workplace" - terms that had hardly existed a decade ago - are now widely accepted as commonplace phrases. Furthermore, it is apparent that these popular "buzz words" all have something in common: the word "social".

Unlike the days of old when working was simply a matter of getting your daily tasks done by yourself (or perhaps with the help of a friendly colleague or two), the new social workplace requires a level of interaction where daily conversations and activities are highly collaborative in nature and peer-to-peer oriented, and where knowledge is shared extensively without traditional time or geographic constraints. It is this new level of interaction, fostered by social tools, that have led many businesses to adopt new innovative approaches to business execution and strategies that impact the bottom line. And it is exactly this model of the social workplace, where tools and individuals mingle to create an integrated collaborative experience, that provides the immediate input and feedback that businesses need to compete locally and globally.

Unfortunately, with this new model of the social workplace, conversations happen in 140 characters, documents are collaboratively created, and content is archived and calculated - but very little experience and knowledge is actually shared. As a result, many executives have to deal with a series of looming questions:

• How can you continue to move fast, yet take the time to invest in growing your business?
• How can there be employee development when no one can stop long enough to teach or learn?
• And how can you identify the internal skills, intelligence, wisdom and expertise that your employees have and distribute it in a way that flows right into your business stream?

There is no one way to answer these questions, but many experts and organizations are now realizing that a new era in workplace learning has emerged - an era where knowledge sharing and collaboration are crucial, but needs to be nurtured and extended in ways that are conducive to how today's social workplace operates.

As Charles Jennings, a notable thought leader and consultant for learning and performance, notes in his blog post, Social & Workplace Learning Through the 70:20:10 Lens:

"Our awareness that more learning occurs outside courses and curricula than inside has added fuel to the fire of social learning...There has been a re-awakening of the understanding that context is vital for learning and, aligned with this, that performance in a formal training environment is not necessarily a good indicator of performance in a different environment, such as the workplace...These realisations are leading to greater focus on workplace learning - learning in the context of work. Learning and work are merging [emphasis in original]."

In other words, if your business has gone social, then your learning and knowledge sharing should go social too. Thus, a social workplace - one focused on sharing and collaboration - requires that social learning be at its core.

What Is Social Learning?

So what is social learning? Well, to state it simply, social learning is exactly what it sounds like—learning with and from others. It is learning that is organic, ubiquitous, and collaborative; it is the learning that arises from the ordinary peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions that happen every day; and it is the learning that we, as human beings, have been doing ever since we were born. Albert Bandura, a psychologist renowned for his Social Learning Theory, describes it as learning that occurs from observing and modeling the behaviors of those around us.

"Social learning requires that everyone in a company know that they are responsible for both teaching and learning."

We've all participated in some type of social learning in the workplace before. Whether it's drafting a sales email that outlines every step of closing the big deal or having lunch with a customer to understand how they are using your product in new and different ways, we have all experienced moments when we have gained valuable information and knowledge from our peers - knowledge that is directly useful and relevant to our jobs at the right time.

However, if social learning is not a new concept, then why is it generating so much buzz lately? What we really need to explore and define, then, is what Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner call the "new social learning" - learning that represents a "fundamental shift in how people work - leveraging how we have always worked, but now with new tools to accelerate and broaden individual and organizational reach."

As they define it:"The new social learning provides people at every level, in every nook of the organization, and every corner of the globe, a way to reclaim their natural capacity to learn non-stop." [1]

The important phrase to note here is, "to learn non-stop." In other words, social learning is not only about learning from others, but about continuously learning from others at the time of need to get the job done. This mentality is very different from the mindset that many of us are used to - officially "learning" or gaining knowledge during a teaching session, but then immediately storing that knowledge away afterwards in order to "get back to work." It is about time we redefine this traditional mindset.

What Does Social Learning Look Like in the Workplace?

With social learning, understanding an organization's learning culture is just as important as having the right tools and framework. Social learning requires that everyone in a company know that they are responsible for both teaching and learning. This may sound like a challenging prospect, but there are already several organizations out there that are already embracing this type of learning. Some good examples:

IBM

IBM is a frontrunner in the current social learning revolution, understanding early on that using social tools for business is simply not enough for growth, and that learning somehow also has to be involved. Over the past few years, the organization has seen a great shift in its learning culture as departments not only strived to deliver more education through a mixture of classroom and self-paced learning mediums, but also through cultivating a wide variety of online communities and specialist groups.

As noted by a CLO article, The Client Knows Best:

"Increasingly, IBM is leveraging social learning to meet this first element of learning strategy. Rather than develop centrally related content, experts throughout the company find, build, publish, share and comment on assets to enhance skills development and productivity. IBM has created tools such as online learning communities and socially generated tags on key knowledge assets to make relevant knowledge more searchable. It also has reduced search time and costs, accelerated onboarding and, recognizing that more than 40 percent of its workforce is global, enabled delivery of job-relevant information to networked mobile devices."

IBM is a great example of how a global company has managed to take advantage of its employees' diverse cultural backgrounds and knowledge base to create a truly collaborative space for innovation.

The Cheesecake Factory

Known for its gourmet cheesecakes and elegant restaurant ambience, the Cheesecake Factory is quickly becoming as famous for "serving up social media snippets for employee learning" as for its fine dishes. When Jeff Stepler, the Vice President of Organizational Engagement, realized the value of social learning strategies for enterprise growth, he quickly implemented what is now known as the Video Café”an informal learning portal that allows employees to film, upload, and watch short videos generated by their peers on a variety of different job-related topics, from how to greet customers to how to slice and serve cheesecake. Not only does this method significantly reduce the cost and time it takes to develop original content, but it encourages a continuous learning culture where employees can continue to learn tips and best practices from their peers - all through small multimedia snippets of information.

A list of additional examples of social learning in the workplace can also be found on founder Jane Hart's Center for Learning & Performance Technologies blog.

How Can I Implement Social Learning in My Own Organization?

So now that you have an idea of what social learning looks like in an enterprise, how can you capture "learnable" moments, make them repeatable, and then add them to your own social business stream? This is where technology can come into play. If social learning requires every employee to be responsible for company growth, knowledge sharing, training, and employee development, then everyone is a trainer and subject matter expert. Social workplaces must provide each person in an organization with the tools to create on-the-fly learning sessions - whether via videos, audio, or presentations - and allow them to place them organically in the business stream.

To go back to an earlier example, this means that the next time your star salesperson closes a big deal, s/he can take five minutes to sync audio over the presentation that was just used to close the deal, explain what the critical success points were, and embed that session into a wiki, intranet, email, Google doc, or enterprise social network. Nowadays, social business tools give your employees the extra on-demand opportunity to learn more, share information, and help grow your business.

Key Considerations To Social Learning Success

The key considerations to successful social learning in the workplace are simple:

1. Enable and empower everyone in your organization to teach and learn at opportune times.
2. Make learning collaborative and peer-to-peer, crossing department lines and organizational hierarchies.
3. Make learning on-demand and experience-based.
4. Combine learning with daily business tasks to create a more integrated learning and working experience.

As long as you take these considerations into account, you can keep your entire company learning and growing without having to spend an exuberant amount of time and resources to run formal training programs. Social learning embeds itself into the social workplace. By placing social learning at the core of your business culture, you can ensure that your employees will continue to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge at the same pace that your business innovates and grows.

[1] Bingham, Tony, and Marcia L. Conner. The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media. Alexandria, VA: ASTD, 2010. 5-6. Print.

Michael Rose is knoodle's general manager. He brings over 20 years of domestic and international management experience successfully leading, growing, and advising companies in the technology and services sectors. He was formerly the CEO and Director of Everyone.net, a market leader in providing Software as a Service (SaaS) messaging for small business and service provider customers worldwide. Previously, Michael co-founded SAVID LLC, a media and communications strategy consulting firm, was VP of corporate and business development and VP of International at video-on-demand pioneer DIVA Systems, and was General Manager at Fresh Western Foods. He is currently a tech partner at El Dorado Ventures and business advisor at Pacific Community Ventures.  Michael holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Republished with permission from CustomerThink.com, Copyright CustomerThink Corp.

Much fuss is made of class-size effects in schools, but I often get blank stares when I talk about the dangers of putting 10,000 people together in an online learning environment. This might be OK in an environment with no social interaction, but what about where we are trying to foster Social Learning?

Increasingly, the call is going out for some sort form of Social Learning to be a part of our online learning initiatives. Quite right, too. We’re well aware of evidence linking Social Context and long-term learning retention. We know how important Social Comparison is to our lives. We see theopportunities of the web 2.0 to create both a push and pull of knowledge throughout our organisations. But we’ve also got vast numbers of people to include in these processes if we are to make Social Learning a full part of our workplaces.

One of my chief concerns about the implementation of Social Learning within the enterprise is how we can ensure that the benefits of Social Learning scales to meet the thousands of employees that we might have as an audience. For me, there is a mix up between the power of Social Learning and the power of Crowdsourcing. The latter theory suggests that the more people we throw at a problem, the easier that problem is to solve. The former is more concerned with meaningful relationships which we build with other people and how they help to provide the context for our learning. Social Media is a tool which sits at the confluence of these two ideas; articulate your ideas using Social Media and they have the power to not only influence your close followers, but also the wider world.

Robin Dunbar theorised Dunbar’s number; a limit to the number of other people with whom one can maintain a relationship. The number is said to be 150, give or take a little. Dunbar based his findings not on observations of our daily lives but on an evolutionary perspective to account for the optimal number of relationships an individual should have in order to thrive.

Other studies, like those conducted by McCarty et al, have sought to estimate network size empirically. These methods have yielded higher numbers than Dunbar’s; a mean of 291 was found in the McCarty study. However, even these measurements have their flaws. Most notably, the McCarty study relied on people to estimate their own network size. People are generally poor at estimating various aspects of their own lives, so we must take this finding with a pinch of salt.

Facebook is rapidly becoming a better measure in my opinion; 130 would be the average number of ‘friend’ relationships a person has on the platform. It would be fair to say this number is conservative at the moment; not everyone is on Facebook and many people keep a separation of their friends, family and co-workers which means their complete network is not accounted for by the number. However, this number is also likely to be skewed by the number of “non-friend” friends we tend to have on Facebook; mostly old school acquaintances, who we might like to spy on for Social Comparison reasons, but wouldn’t otherwise count as friends.

Of course, the real answer here is that there is no single number to succinctly articulate how big a social network will be; the number will be slightly different according to our behaviours and situation. But, whatever that number is, it is probably in the low hundreds.

It is important to remember that we’ve already got a lot of relationships before we set foot in a Social Learning environment. Our capacity to make more meaningful relationships is going to be limited by the number of these relationships which already exist. In other words, we’ve probably only got a few slots left open. So when you are faced with a room of 10,000 people, where will you start focussing your effort in order to start building these few new meaningful relationships without wasting your time?

The answer is you probably won’t. Most people don’t. Less than 1 in 5000 visitors to Wikipedia actually makes an edit each month. I’ve built a community platform full of social features with over 3,000 registered members. No one contributes. If the room was vastly smaller, say 10 people, you could fairly easily meet each person and make an assessment as to whether a relationship is mutually convenient. When we run smaller classes of 15 or so people on the 3,000 member community platform the social interaction flows readily. But it is impossible to do this on a grander scale whilst fostering true relationships. Sure, people contribute to large news websites with comments, but that’s more about Glory than it is building relationships.

So, what can we do to address this issue? Certainly, just putting a social media type facility on your learning platform and expecting relationships to flourish isn’t going to work. I often say that there is nothing sadder than an empty forum and God knows I’ve seen enough of them in the various back alleys of company intranets and LMS’s to last a lifetime. The answer, for me, lies in breaking down the whole population into smaller parts on an autonomous basis. And I would model this answer on Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG’s), like World of Warcraft.

WoW has millions of players entering into its world every day. Players choose a realm to play within when they enter the game. Each realm is an individual copy of the game, perhaps characterised by being run in a different language (French realms instead of English, for example). Within each realm is a series of playable areas that take the form of continents; these can be explored autonomously and alone, with players taking on challenges that exist within them as they go. However, many of the more complex challenges that exist within each realm require a team effort to complete. This is where things get interesting. Small groups of players, banded together autonomously as “Guilds”, get together to take on the bigger challenges.

Of course, you don’t want to get together to take on a challenge and find some other group already in the dungeon (how often does that happen at work), so each challenge has the ability to provide a unique instance of itself for your group. This instance is a copy of the same challenge others can take, but only your group has access to it. This way many groups can take on the same challenge at the same time. Each person within the Guild needs to be engaged in order to tackle the challenge; there is rarely room for freeloaders as the challenges are often limited in terms of the number of players who can be in the group. Everyone contributes.

Guilds are often fairly tight-knit groups. Some of the more serious ones go on to meet each in real-life and many Guild participants would readily accept that some of their relationship slots are occupied by those which they play games online with. In addition, there has emerged a huge community of Guilds talking with each other; sometimes on friendly terms, sometimes more competitively. But the ability to showcase skill and discuss tactics with other Guilds is one of the biggest drivers of online communities outside of the actual game environment.

I believe this model can help to overcome the scalability issues that Social Learning often faces. Asking people to make an impact on the world as a whole is difficult, but it’s easy to be influential within your group. Hiding in the big wide world is easy, but it is difficult within a smaller group. Making meaningful relationships with everyone in your organisation is beyond the realm of possibility, but you can select a few people from which to learn within a smaller group.

In short, the answer lies in breaking down the enormous mass of your workforce into smaller groups, working together to improve both themselves and the organisation. The limitation in this approach is in the crowdsourcing approach to problem solving. If people work in groups separate from each other, how can we mitigate the silo effect and make sure we capture all of the learning on a collective basis?

Well, firstly I would suggest that silo effects can be countered by simple measures to ensure the groups are diverse in nature; only a certain number of people per department in each group for instance. Secondly, I wouldn’t stop any one being members of different groups for different topics, allowing insights to spread virally between groups. And thirdly, I would look to the groups to curate the best content to be pooled into a single, enterprise-wide access area. Instead of trying to aggregate everyone together on every topic, have groups nominate their best insights to be part of the company’s best insights and use a voting system within the realm to showcase the very best content.

There’s a lot more work to be done in this area and at the moment I’m looking to talk to those who have implemented social learning initiatives within their organisations to research deeper on what the ‘ideal number’ might be. Please do get in touch through the comments if you are interested in taking this further. But for now, let me suggest 5 lessons from WoW to help your Social Learning initiatives scale massively:

• Break down online social interactions into smaller realms and instances for groups.
• Make sure everyone in a group needs to contribute in order for the group to succeed.
• Create areas for groups to interact with other groups.
• Don’t allow groups to match up identically with organisational structure – diversify!
• Curate the best bits of each group to deliver real insight back to the rest of the organisation.

People on the front lines, doing nitty-gritty manual work, can teach us plenty about real collaboration.

Two men walk into a bar... Even if they both wear muddy work boots and heavy jeans, you'd think one of them might use a smart phone to alert someone to his location. Perhaps he checked in on Foursquare or Twitter, too. You can picture it happened, can't you? It happens every day.

Then why, jokes aside, is there so little attention paid to social media use between people outside the knowledge-worker ranks? I live in rural America where "doing" jobs outnumber "thinking" jobs by a wide margin. Warehouse work is big. So is manufacturing and farming. And yet almost everyone has a smart phone, connecting with friends, family, and co-workers whenever they can. We had a fire on our land, and the volunteer firefighters took breaks to cool down and check in. They sat on the ground or leaned against brush trucks, typing with rugged thumbs, asking questions of people back at the station or to see if a daughter's 4H meeting was rescheduled.

The social media phenomenon, with people learning from one another across space and time, isn't somehow roped off for the desk-jockey crowd. Is the lack of attention because doers are too busy doing to be interviewed by the press? Are those at desks social media snobs? Where are the case studies, the best practices, and the reports showing working-class employers that they have a big opportunity too? Social media has jumped the shark, the chasm, and the job site. It's time to consider what this means. People on the front lines, doing nitty-gritty manual work, allowing the rest of us to keep clean, can teach us plenty about real collaboration. They are working together, often side-by-side, day in and day out. Here are some examples of out-of-the-office practices.

Show, Don't Tell.

TELUS, the Vancouver, Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, has issued handheld flipcams and mobile computers to several technicians in the field. From atop a telephone pole or in a cable trench, workers can capture the view of their surroundings and upload video to an internal social network, asking for colleagues' help with difficult situations as if they were nearby. These workers need quick information nuggets, accessible from their trucks while on site with customers, to learn quickly as they change routers, set up home phone systems, and perform custom installations they may never have done before. By equipping people with a media mindset and a culture of collaboration, the 35,000 people employed by TELUS around the world share responsibility for educating one another and giving each person an opportunity to seek focused assistance from their peers. "The opportunity to connect people doing manual work is equal to, if not greater, than those already sitting together," says Dan Pontefract, director of learning & collaboration at TELUS.

Dig Down Deep.

As one of North America's largest producers of lime, Graymont operates facilities on sites that have been in operation for 200 years. To "transcend the continent" and get far-flung employees working together as if they were just around the corner from one another, the company created myGraymont, a collaborative environment for every employee (usingThoughtfarmer technology)--especially those who come to work in steel-toed boots and only occasionally sit at a computer. "But the big value comes when a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he's done that saves the company $10,000 (or $20,000); or when an informal discussion group is established amongst maintenance workers or kiln operators across borders and geography," says Ron Ogilvy who directs IT at Graymont. Just using myGraymont to interact more personally with distant colleagues can also be an end in itself. "If it helps create a new relationship, the value of that relationship will be the payback."

Hold on Tight.

Disaster Operations Volunteer Escapees (DOVE) are people who live on the road to help the Red Cross in times of disaster. Louise Horner and her husband Sean Welsh are retired computer experts who have sought out a life outdoors, often in the rain. They were recently in Greensboro, NC, ready to deal with any damage caused by hurricane Earl. They spent twelve weeks living in their RV in Baton Rouge after hurricane Katrina. While some DOVEs put down sandbags, rebuild houses, or clean up the muck, the team Louise and Sean volunteer with is responsible for ordering the technical equipment, setting up computers, cell phones and technology needed from start to finish during a disaster. Increasingly that technology has included social media. It's used to monitor the social and mobile Web, listening for people reaching out any way they can after being trapped within their vehicles or homes. It's used to alert people in neighboring areas to pack up. It's used to save lives. Wendy Harman also publishes a blog specifically for people on the scene, giving the public a real role in disaster response and providing better situation awareness."

John Seely Brown, visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and former chief scientist at Xerox, and Douglas Thomas, who teaches at USC's Annenberg School for Communication , say, "This kind of learning is radically different from what we traditionally think of as learning: the accumulation of facts or acquisition of knowledge. They involve the experience of acting together to overcome obstacles, managing skills, talents, and relationships, and they create contexts in which social awareness, reflection, and joint coordinated action become an essential part of the experience, providing the basis for a networked imagination."

No matter the color (or fabric) of your shirt, the type of dirt under your nails, or where you breathe the air--each of these organizations sees clear payback. Hyper connectedness can enable dramatic improvements in outcomes as social media encourages people to learn from one another everyday. Easier access to information and tools makes people more productive, and less frustrated, and also reduces the management burden for putting good practices into action.

Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia), partner with Altimeter Group, focuses on enterprise collaboration and learning. She writes for Fast Company. Her new book is The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media.

I've written a few postings recently (notably Social Learning doesn't mean what you think it does) where I have tried to show how the fundamental changes in how businesses are operating, require a fundamental change in how the L&D function needs to view workplace learning. I suggested this means a move from a "Command and Control" approach to an "Encourage and Engage" approach to Workplace Learning.

Although in my earlier posting I pointed out some of the features of these two approaches, in this posting I first want to summarize the two approaches again. This time I am going to refer to the first approach as Traditional Workplace Learning and the second as New Workplace Learning.

Although these two approaches are clearly quite different, what I am hearing is that some are advising (and others are believing) that it is enough for L&D departments to simply add "social" onto their traditional approach to learning - as follows:

This is clearly perpetuating the old model of training.

Jane Hart is the Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT), one of the world's most visited learning sites on the Web. She is an independent consultant, writer and public speaker. Jane is also a Principal of the Internet Time Alliance (ITA), a think tank of leading learning and business performance practitioners that help organizations exploit emerging practices in work smarter. The ITA has connections to thousands of different organisations within its different networks, so is able to share the practices of many forward thinking organisations. Jane has been blogging for many years, she writes articles for international magazines; and is also an established author. Her most recent publication is the Social Learning Handbook and she is now working on a follow-up book: The Non-Training Approach to Workplace Learning.

In Tony’s previous post, “Tearing Down Cubicle Walls – The Rise of Social Learning In Business”, he mentioned some of the business issues driving the adoption of social learning, namely the need for speed and collaboration. In that post, he also touched on the fact that learners (employees) want to engage with their peers at their time of need, no matter where those colleagues are physically located. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and dig a little deeper into some of the practical considerations for adopting social learning in your organization:

#1. Culture

Before you embark upon any social learning initiative make sure you have a solid understanding of your organization's culture and how it supports collaboration. Most corporate 'portal' initiatives usually launch with a bang! - meaning everyone logs in to check out the new site and then it quickly turns into a virtual ghost town. This is often a reflection of the all too common "what's in it for me?" corporate culture. For social learning to be successful, you need to really understand and perhaps change how you motivate and recognize the organizational contributions made by your employees. For some excellent reading on the subject of highly effective teams, check out Keith Ferrazzi's "Who's Got Your Back", Stephen Covey's "The Speed of Trust" and Patrick Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team". Also, take a look at this great article by Marcia Conner and Steve LeBlanc on how culture and technology provides the foundation for social learning to thrive.

#2. Governance

Otherwise known as "who gets to do what?", governance is the model that you put in place which ultimately dictates who gets to publish, review and rate or comment on content. The traditional governance approach in corporate training is that a relatively small group of people define and create learning content, usually with the help of one or two SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). The broader learner audience consumes this content, usually based upon compliance needs and job role requirements. For social learning to be effective, you need to figure out how to fit informal, peer-based learning into your model and to recognize that on a micro-level, SMEs exist throughout your organization. Susan may bring into the organization a skill or best-practice that is highly developed but may not be core to their existing job role. Long term employees often have invaluable tips garnered from years of experience serving in various roles and departments in the company. The beauty of social learning is that it creates a level playing field, where everyone has the opportunity to contribute a unique perspective or nugget of wisdom. When designing your social learning governance model, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. There are clear reasons why governance exists around your formal learning processes. These do not necessarily change with the introduction of social learning. You are simply adding a layer to the model. 

#3. Keep it Simple

When choosing a social learning platform, appeal to the lowest common denominator. In other words, keep it simple. The tools/platforms that you choose should be fast enough, and easy enough to use that people will embrace the technology and start using it. Creating content, uploading content, sharing content, making it searchable, adding assessments and comments, viewing reports and bundling content together should all be easy to do.
 

If you've planned this properly, you may choose to have everyone established as "content creators" and commentators, but only certain individuals able to create and edit assessments and review reports. You may choose to incent and reward participation in the social learning platform. For your 'keener' types, perhaps the creation of a monthly learning nugget could be a formal metric on their SMART employee objectives. You could reward frequent contributors with a gift card or other incentive. Your culture and corporate policy will dictate what you can and can't do with incentives but you may need to consider something like this to drive early adoption and continued participation.
 

There may be more considerations for effectively implementing social learning in an organization. What are your thoughts or additional considerations that you have found to be crucial to building a social learning enterprise?