The Importance of Education for Social Business Success

Education (formerly known as training) is an important piece to any internal Social Business adoption strategy.  I say “formerly known as training” for a couple of reasons.  One is that is the word "training" conjures up negative images of people sitting through hours of classroom sessions.  The second reason is that training has received a bad rap in the social business world. 

 

There's a philosophy that a good social business solution should be so intuitive, like it is in the consumer world, that training isn’t necessary.  I don’t completely agree with that philosophy.  First of all, consumer social media tools aren't as intuitive as people who have been using them for a while think they are.  I consider myself savvy but when I first started using Twitter I had to actively search out what RT, FF and hashtags were.  (As you can see in my very first tweet here, I hadn't figured those things out yet.)

 

 

 

 

Secondly, there's a large percentage of the user base in every one of the F500 companies I've worked with over the last 6 years that has never used any of the consumer Web 2.0 tools.  That means many of the concepts behind communities, microblogging, activity streams, ideation, etc., are completely new to them.  That segment of your audience needs to learn the concepts before they can figure out an intuitive interface.

 

More important beyond the concepts and clicks is the WHY.  If I work in sales WHY would I care to change the way I work to start using this new collaboration platform?  If I work in R&D how does it benefit me to start following another researcher in my organization that I’ve never met before?  Sell me before you tell me.  If you don’t get buy-in from your end-users before you show them a few things about where to click they will never use your system (except for your early-adopters).

 

I’ve found four main types of education to be important:

1. At the launch of your new platform.  It's a no-brainer to promote your new platform and educate people on what they can do with it and why they should care.  (I'm not talking about long, intensive classroom training sessions.  These can be voluntary townhalls, short videos, webinars, hand-outs, staffed tables in the cafeteria - whatever channels work best for your organization.)
2. 1x1 hands-on-sessions for executives.  Enable your executives to lead by example.  Admit it or not some of them may be intimidated by the new tools or may not understand the benefits of the new platform.  And they don't have time to figure it out on their own.  The more leaders with whom you can spend just 30 minutes, the more quickly they can start engaging and seeing business value. 
3. On-boarding.  As you bring new employees into the organization don’t forget to educate them about this great resource you are providing to them.  I prefer to have the hiring manager take the employee on a quick tour of the platform from that job role's perspective.  If the hiring managers can't fit this in then getting a script into the onboarding team's hands is important.  Either way getting a tour of the social platform incorporated into the onboarding process gets the new employees onboarded into the company culture and accessing company resources much more quickly than otherwise.
4. Ongoing as you iterate.  Both the beauty and a sometime challenge of a social business platform is you are never completely done with implementation.   You will regularly be adding to and refining your social business platform based on new capabilities, business needs, and employee feedback.  As you iterate, educate your users on what’s available to them and how they might make use of it.  HOW to use it might be obvious but WHY they should use it might not be.

 

Lastly, this isn’t a formal education initiative and so I’m not including it in my list of three, but make it easy for employees to share their successes.  Let them educate each other about new ways they’ve found to use the platform to save time, find info, innovate, etc.  Peers trust peers (look at Yelp) and so they may be more likely to try something recommended by a peer rather than by their managers or IT.

A little education about what’s in it for them can go a long way to driving adoption of Social Business within your organization.

 

Which educational methods have you found to be most successful in your social business initiatives?

 

 

P.S.  And since I'm talking about Education and not Training - I didn't list out important items like ongoing training for Community Managers, Help Desk, etc., that take a more formal, deeper functional dive, which I still categorize as Training.  I'm splitting hairs, I know. :)