The Value of Social Media to Learning

Last week I was speaking at the World of Learning Debate ‘To what extent does social media have a place in learning?’ Clive Shepherd and I were defending social media (as if it needed defending) and Robin Hoyle was questioning the value of social media.

Some weeks prior to the event I had asked whether there would be much of a debate: ‘who would argue against the value of social media?’ I asked. Robin, apparently. So, the night before the debate I googled Robin – and was somewhat surprised to discover that he has a blog. Not only that, his most recent post was an attack on the kind of ‘evangelist’ who would ask whether or not anyone would seriously question the value of social media. Presumably the irony had escaped Robin, so I opened the debate by saying that I had read Robin’s blog, thought it was good, but definitely hadn’t learned anything from it.

But the debate wasn’t quite as lively as I would have hoped – and that’s what I really wanted to talk about:

Like it or not, I think it’s self-evident that social media can and is being used for learning. Sure, you can waste time with social media – you can waste time on the internet, but no-one would seriously argue that the internet isn’t a useful tool for learning.

Robin’s opening argument was against the ‘social’ component of ‘social media’. He put it bluntly ‘we go to work to work, not to socialise’. I have two concerns with this: firstly, we know that the vast majority of learning that takes place in organisations is informal and that much of this is social in nature. Workplaces are by their very nature social environments – the principal reason why people go to work is relationships with colleagues (not money, according to a recent HRDM survey). The social environment is to organisations what water is to fish. I recall a telecoms company that, having installed GPS locators in its field-based engineers’ vehicles, found they were all getting together for breakfast. They put a stop to this and the first-time-fix rates dropped significantly. Social is how we learn, how we work.

The second problem is that I think the attack relies on an outdated model of work. ‘Social media is a threat’ so the argument goes ‘because it distracts people from their work’. How do you know people are working? If your answer to that question is basically ‘because they are in their seat from 9 – 5’ then you were probably missing what was really going on all along. The correct answer is that you know they are working because they get the job done – how they get it done should concern us less than our ability to define and monitor performance.

Social media is not the issue; but how people use it, and we should adapt and communicate the relevant policies clearly. Clive made the point that many of our concerns about social media could equally be said of the mobile phone: people might be calling their friends, they might be sharing company information outside the firewall etc, etc. The fact that people do sometimes do these sorts of things does not make social networking an intrinsically bad thing: if I am spending work time blogging about my weekend, then maybe that’s bad. But what if I blog about work during the weekend? What if I have a large network and blog about my enthusiasm for the projects I am working on – will I be paid for any resulting sales? Have I improved the reputation of the business? If all our employees use social media do we suddenly have a vast, voluntary sales and customer service department? Certainly there is an issue of ‘employee engagement’ going on here. And how about organisations using social media to find out how their employees actually feel about the company, or what is really going wrong with the business? Isn’t that better than a once-yearly ‘employee engagement’ survey or the ‘undercover boss’ approach? As one delegate pointed out, ‘if the MOD can overcome obstacles to using social media, then we ought to be able to’.

But there is a difference between arguments which focus on social media’s inevitability and actually persuading people of the business value. I suggested two approaches we might take in the debate: we could look at case studies where organisations have successfully applied social media to learning (I was thinking of our work and BT’s Dare2Share, amongst others), or I could simply say ‘It works for me’.

It does work for me. Twitter is my no.1 learning tool these days. Not only do I learn a lot more, I am a better learner: sitting in a lecture thinking ‘what key messages would I want to pass on?’ or ‘How could I summarise this in 140 characters?’ helps greatly in processing the information. As Clive pointed out, the discipline of blogging is an excellent piece of self-development. To someone who imagines that Twitter is all about trivia, it can be hard to explain the merits. But I put the argument like this: imagine a supplier approached you with a fantastic new service. They explain that they have persuaded some of the most respected figures in your industry – visionaries, practitioners, researchers and consultants – to provide a constant daily feed of the projects they are working on, things that work, research they are doing or have found, new ideas they are exploring so that you have the latest and best information at your fingertips. How much would you pay for a service like that? How about nothing? My point is this: whatever you may feel about ‘social media’, try it out – sign up for twitter, follow someone whose views you respect, and decide for yourself if it has value. I think this is probably the best way to begin to explore the benefits of social media – but if you are reading this I am no doubt preaching to the converted.

Robin’s second argument was that social media was primarily a referencing tool rather than a learning tool. I am not going to spend any time on this, as I think it’s just semantics – learning is clearly much more than formal learning, and referencing is at the core of how we learn and perform today.

Having said all this I began to feel that Robin had been put in a difficult position: the ‘value of social media’ question is something of a straw man. The more interesting question – and I suspect the question Robin really wanted to debate – is 'can learning & development can realise the value of social media?' I think this is much less clear.

I began to feel so concerned that people might take our defense of social media as an unqualified endorsement, that at one point I actually found myself saying ‘if you implement social media within your organisation, it will almost certainly fail’. And I think this is true: there are some successful projects, but outside of the glossy presentations many of my colleagues will admit that it hasn’t worked as well as they hoped. In essence, I think this is mainly because companies think ‘we’ll introduce a social network to do x, and encourage people to use it’ rather than ‘let’s look at how our staff and customers are using social media, and then consider roles we can play’. In short, as Scott Stratten has pointed out in relation to marketing – social media approaches fail because organisations begin by assuming it is something they can somehow control. What happens is some well-intentioned person creates a wiki or blog site and says ‘come on everybody, post your stuff here’. And people think ‘why should I? I already post my stuff to facebook/twitter/blogger.’

Social media is in this regard a lot like elearning – many organisations simply introduce it on a ‘build it and they will come’ basis without thinking very carefully about the audience, the application and the implementation itself. The case studies where social media have worked well typically involve a very specific problem with measurable outcomes (such as first-time fix), the right target audience, and a cast-iron system for ensuring that staff use it.

I have often been asked how we will evaluate the success of social media. I have two answers to this – firstly, do we evaluate email? Social media is happening around us, what we are evaluating is our success as learning professionals. Secondly, evaluation may not be easy, but it will be easier than evaluating training. Most social media applications (marketing, brand awareness, customer service) are aimed directly at performance areas that are already carefully tracked. It’s a bit ridiculous of L&D to ask ‘how do we evaluate this?’ when for the most part they have yet to answer the same question for classroom training.  Don’t transfer the problems with have with justifying formal learning to social media. We won’t be doing Kirkpatrick.

In conclusion, it is not so much that I am an evangelist, but an optimist: I feel that learning and development are at a crossroads: We either embrace new technologies and try to make them work for the betterment of the learning organisation  - however tough that may be (and it is tough, it’s tough to make elearning work, and it’s tough to make social learning work). Or we retreat, we say we do formal training, classrooms – maybe the occasional online course. Compliance mainly. Personally I wouldn’t want to see learning & development take even more of a back seat.