Elearning - June/July 2008 - (Page 32) today’swatercooler ture or more speed.” Some cost-conscious CEOs might question the actual impact of social networking on the company’s bottom line. But an important component of its definition is “designed to build organizational value,” which places at least as much value on corporate interests as employee interests. “A lot of people are looking for hard, fast numbers on savings or benefits with these tools,” Brainard continues. “The reality is that we’re seeing business benefits, but some are very subtle. Look at how email reshaped the boundaries between the home office and the work office. Nobody predicted that. What about the social dynamics that are hard to quantify, but are significant game-changers? These technologies promise to change how we do things over the long term.” Companies that offer a wide variety of social networking tools also stand a pretty good chance to recruit the best employees in the marketplace, according to Bruce Schechter, committee chair of the Intel Alumni Network, which uses a platform called Big Tent to keep in touch with other former co-workers. “We’ve talked to several longstanding corporate alumni groups,” says Schechter, “and they have strong relationships with the corporations from which they all come, and conversations tend to be oriented around recruiting topics. It makes a lot of sense. There’s something uniquely interesting about what we’re doing. I really generate useful business information out of what I’m getting from the Intel Alumni Network. It’s a whole new realm.” WHAT ARE THEY? Corporate social networks are collections of online groups of employees and other corporate constituents who interact through their individual profiles. These portable profiles collect and blend information from among all associated corporate networks. The networks are secure and private, open only to members identified by the enterprise. The connections create knowledge capital that becomes attached to members’ profiles and are visible to other network members. Actually, the term “social networking” refers to the technology itself — a technology with an infrastructure that supports and gives life to online communications and collaboration. Corporate social network members share knowledge in realtime, in effect creating a living corporate knowledge map. “With the resource challenges brought on by economic tough times, training professionals are discovering that social networking tools have become the most costeffective means of enabling their organizations to continue providing the training and knowledge transfer that team members require to perform their jobs at the highest levels,” observes Altus Learning Systems CEO Ted Cocheu. According to Brandon Hall Research, social networking applies to five types of technologies: >> Communication (instant messaging, e-mail, SMS [short message service], etc.) >> Experience-sharing (blogs, photo albums, shared-link libraries such as del.icio.us, etc.) >> Discovery of old and new contacts (Classmates.com, online personals such as Match.com, social networking sites such as Facebook, etc.) >> Relationship management (Orkut, Friendster, etc.) >> Gaming (online versions of traditional games such as chess and checkers, team-based or free-for-all games, etc.) Notes SocialText’s Brainard: “The software — we call it ‘social software’ — includes a number of technologies: blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and even traditional tools like e-mail and instant messaging that allow people to come together, to form groups and collaborate on projects, and to share knowledge. “All these tools provide great opportunities for companies to save huge amounts of time and energy. Companies can reduce e-mail by 70 percent with wikis, for instance, and accelerate project times by 30 to 40 percent.” WHAT CAN THEY DO? “There’s a big educational component to learning from each other,” observes Fatwire’s Gupta. “We’re seeing tremendous interest from enterprises for using tools like wikis to share knowledge across a team. There may be a lead person who is conducting training or providing guidance, but then the team members themselves start sharing their experiences and knowledge using wikis. The moderator/instructor can correct misconceptions but, in general, allow the group to learn from itself. Harnessing collective intelligence through the knowledge base and expertise of people is where I see the whole evolution of e-learning.” Some companies envision social networking as a way to bring down support 32 June/July 2008 Elearning!
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.