Focus Magazine - Fall 2011 - 17

CUTTING EDGE Lance Dublin

Social Learning in Action:

Beyond the Hype

I
The time is right to look
to the expanded use of social media technologies

n this challenging business climate, across all industries the training organization is certainly under pressure to do whatever it can to help the sales force win more business. And, with budgets tight, new and more cost-e ective solutions that don't require more training, more time away from customers, more travel, more trainers, more programs and, most likely, more money are required. Given this situation, the time is right to look to the expanded use of social media technologies to leverage social learning in sales organizations to produce real business results. Social learning can help a sales organization to be more e ective in three ways: 1. Break down silos and knowledge vacuums; 2. Tap into the 80 percent of the knowledge stored in people’s heads as well as the 20 percent on their laptops; 3. Connect and capitalize on the intellectual and creative content. And, there are o -the-shelf technologies including, but by no means limited to, Windows Small Business Server, Sharepoint, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Delicious, Wikipedia and MySpace. As an example, using these tools, a minimal budget and a multifunctional team drawn from both the sales and training organizations, one large multinational company was able to design, develop and launch its own internal sales social business network in just four months. is network serves not only as the means to build professional relationships and share success stories and strategies in support of sales e orts, but also as a valuable online source for nding and exchanging pertinent sales information and docu-

ments, wherever and whenever they are needed. e four key elements of this – and any - network that make a social learning solution e ective are: 1. e people – the community members; 2. 3. 4. e technology – the tools that share and exchange information; e content – company and user-generated knowledge;

e partnership – leveraging the social learning facilitation skills of the training organization and subject matter expertise of the sales organization. In just the rst four months, the results were signi cant for this company. ere were more than 2,002 users participating in more than 124 online communities. ese users visited the network more than 17,519 times and made 213,239 page views, averaging 146 visits per day. And, in two years this healthy and active network has become fully integrated into the life of the sales organization. ere are more communities (50% increase), more discussions (61% increase with a 74% increase in views and 62% increase in replies), more documents (65% increase with a 16% increase in views with an average of 11 views each) and more videos (63% increase with an average of 28 views each). I am not privy to the sales results from this company and I’m sure many would argue there is not a 1:1 correlation between using the network for social learning and the increase in sales. But when the president and chief operating o cer of the company says, “[this network] has the potential to change the way we do business,” you know you must be doing something right. I

Lance Dublin is CEO and chief solution architect of Dublin Consulting. Email Lance at lance@dublinconsulting.net.

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Focus Magazine - Fall 2011

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