The number of CEO’s joining social media platforms is on the rise. However, a new study indicates that many are still unconvinced. While there is no question that an online presence has it’s benefits–such as engaging customers and employees–not all are convinced that it will increase their bottom line or benefit their brand.

As Forbes.com reports:

For every aspirational leadership rationale for signing up ─ to present an authentic face, get closer to customers, engage employees ─ there are pragmatic reasons still keeping the majority away.

Some simply don’t see the cost-benefit of the personal commitment. Others turn away due to the risk of well-documented personal attacks, disclosure issues or media scrutiny from off-the-cuff commentary.

For the full article, click here.

Andrew begins a recent blog post by stressing the inefficient ways employees of the federal government experience training and education, and by suggesting three forces that will shape the future of learning for federal government. These include:

1. Informal learning is the new normal (i.e. Google searches, YouTube videos, LinkedIn / Quora / GovLoop question and answer).
2. The real experts are in cubicles, not classrooms (meaning that we learn less from people who stand in front of us in a classroom and more from our colleagues online and in-person).
3. Social networks are the perfect, perpetual classroom (you don’t need to wait for the next training – you can learn right here, right now).

Social Learning Boot Camp Modeled Social Learning

With that background as context, Andrew participated in the Social Learning Boot Camp hosted by    Future Workplace at Georgetown University. First Andrew shared how the Boot Camp was not just another conference, but really an executive education session which successfully modeled a new way of learning, one that is social, collaborative and mobile.

Here is what Andrew had to say about his experience at the Social Learning Boot Camp:

• Participants were encouraged to engage in pre-work that got them to interact with one another and primed them for in-person engagement
• Pre-work was incentivized through gaming and that online interaction was incorporated into the in-person session.
• Each participant received an iPad and was taught how to use it throughout the session.
• Participants broke into teams and used the iPad in a hands-on, real-time activity where they created a sample learning video to explain a concept or challenge – in under an hour!

In addition to these practical elements of the training, participants heard from practitioners who shared case studies about enterprise-level learning through internal social networks and gaming. I’d like to give a special shout-out to the Defense Acquisition University, who presented on their cutting-edge gaming endeavors.

Key Learning Points from the Boot Camp

Some other gems I heard in conversations and presentations throughout the day:

• “We are canceling more instructor-led, classroom-based courses than we are putting on due to tightened budgets and restricted travel.”
• Employers are increasingly expecting their potential hires to demonstrate social media literacy (or training them in that subject)…and applicants are increasingly expecting an open, social environment that welcomes online engagement as part of work flow.
• The top 3 barriers to adoption of social learning in an organization are: a culture that’s not ready for it, confusion about its value, and lack of training on its use.
• It is not fear of technology, but fear of transparency that inhibit social learning.
• Culture change happens when an organization identifies the committed leaders, communicates the benefits, and creates social media literacy training programs
• Social media / learning policy should explain the value, not just the do’s and don’ts (see socialmediagovernance.com for examples)

Why the Real-Time Video Project Was Successful

The videos created by participants were great examples of how quick, easy and effective it can be to prepare video for the purpose of training as they were:

• Created in real-time for just-in-time learning
• Authentic because it wasn’t over-edited
• Involved focused, fast production (vs. a long, drawn-out process)
• Fostered collaborative, social work to get it done
• “…not just a tech thing” as most of the production process was a dialogue about challenges (45 minutes) that culminated in a tech-enabled product (5 minutes)

One of the groups even used an app called Magisto to add music and some editing – all in just a few minutes – to take their video to the next level.

The next Social Learning Boot Camp is scheduled for:

March 7-8th, 2013

Georgetown University

Washington DC

Learn more and register here:
Social Learning Boot Camp

The infographic below, entitled “How Do We Spend Our Live Online,” was created with data from comScore, Pew Internet, The Digital Life and Nielsen.  Some interesting top line data points include:

We spend a typical hour in the following way:

• 22% on social networking sites
• 21% on searching for information
• 20% on reading content
• 19% on emails
• 13% on multi media sites
• 5% on online shopping

Social networking activities win a clear lion’s share of people’s attention, with this set of data suggesting that Facebook captures an average of more than 465 minutes of people’s time each month.

Highest growing trends of online usage:

• 27% Location based services
• 27% Time shift TV
• 19% Internet Banking

Least growing trends of online usage include:

• 12% User created videos
• 12% Live internet videos
• 12% Professionally created videos

So here are three of my surprises after viewing the Infographic:

• With growth of internal social networks in companies, more employees will be encouraged and see value in creating user-generated videos. Is this really on the downward shift?
• Forrester predicts the social enterprise software industry will become a $6.4 billion market by 2016. What happens to email? How long will it be taking up almost 20% of our typical hour during the day? Will this go down to 5% and how fast? If you listen to what companies like Jive, Moxie say, the death of email is right around the corner.
• The Global online population is exploding with 30% of world’s population. If Chinese users spend five hours a week shopping online, what does this mean for emerging markets in Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia, will they follow suit?

Here is the How We Spend Our Time Online Infographic.
Share your surprises with me here on the blog.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE) — Future Workplace will present its Social Learning Boot Camp, an exclusive, two-day event that provides senior executives in corporate learning, human resources and talent management the tools to design and launch collaborative learning platforms. The boot camp is March 19 and 20, 2012, at the IESE Business School (165 West 57th Street) in New York City.

“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation”“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation,” said Jeanne Meister, Future Workplace partner and co-author of the best-selling book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (HarperCollins, 2010). “This is our fourth Social Learning Boot Camp, which attracts chief learning and talent officers and their teams. As we head toward 2020, we will see more organizations using social media to attract, retain and develop their employees, as well as to collaborate with their customers and suppliers.”

Talent development and training is evolving from the classroom-based model to a more-collaborative one that leverages a range of social media tools. During the Social Learning Boot Camp, participants gain a deeper understanding of best practices, benefits and barriers in designing and implementing social learning in their organizations. Participants receive an iPad 2 and use this during the boot camp to experience the power of social learning, tweet insights and questions to #slbootcamp during presentations, as well as develop a business case for social learning in their organization.

The boot camp features the following sessions, among several others:

• Learn how Cerner Corporation created UCern, a collaborative platform to connect all members of the Cerner network (employees and customers) to better innovate and quickly adopt new ideas throughout the enterprise.
• Examine how companies such as AT&T, AXA Equitable, Marsh and Jarden Consumer Solutions are re-imagining corporate learning to be social, collaborative and peer driven.
• Explore why corporate learning needs to adapt to the digital needs and expectations of Millennials (born between 1977 and 1997).

Meister and the Future Workplace team will offer continual recaps and debriefs to help participants build a plan they can take away from the boot camp to implement in their own organizations.

Partner companies who are working with Future Workplace to produce the Social Learning Boot Camp include Jive, GP, Kaplan University, DeVry University’s Keller Center for Corporate Learning, Ashford University and Badgeville. In addition, IESE Business School will share original research on the use of iPads in executive education programs.

For more information about the boot camp and to view the full agenda, visit www.sociallearningbootcamp.com.

About Future Workplace
Future Workplace is an executive-development company that works with human resources executives in Fortune 1,000 organizations to provide continuing education, peer networks and leadership development. Future Workplace runs the 2020 Workplace Network, an ecosystem of innovative chief learning officers, chief talent officers, and directors of global human resources who are rethinking, reinventing, and re-imagining the role of human resources, corporate learning and talent management to drive business results. For more about Future Workplace or the 2020 Workplace Network, visit www.futureworkplace.com.

About IESE Business School
IESE is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world by publications, such as The Economist and the Financial Times. In 2007, IESE became the first European business school to establish a permanent presence in the United States. Its state-of-the-art New York Center, located in Midtown Manhattan, offers diverse programs for executives. For more about IESE, visit iese.edu.

Contacts
Amy Briskin, 212-794-6644
amy@futureworkplace.com
www.sociallearningbootcamp.com

Tablets On the Rise!

In The 2020 Workplace book, we predicted a rise in corporate apps as employees request business apps as a way to increase their productivity at work. With more than 500,000 apps in iTunes, Gartner’s new research points to apps being used across the enterprise.

As of November 2011, according to a recent press release by Gartner Inc., sales of media tablets in 2011 increased 261% to 63.6 million units and it is predicted that by 2016 more than 900 million tablets will be in the hands of users.

Executives and leaders are bringing tablets into the workplace — and in many cases are preferring them to the traditional PCs for client-facing meetings, distributing marketing materials, configuration tools and more.

According to Gartner, the top 10 business applications for tablets include:

1. Sales: Automation systems for customer collateral, sales presentations, and ordering systems.
2. Business Data: Intelligence, analytical and performance applications with management dashboards.
3. Email: Containerised email to separate corporate messaging environments from personal email.
4. Collaboration Tools: Applications for meetings and events.
5. Files and Utilities: Sharing and document distribution.
6. Business Processes: General corporate/government enterprise applications for CRM, ERP, SCM and messaging.
7. Healthcare: Medical support systems for doctors, nurses, and physical therapists.
8. Virtualization: Hosted virtual desktop agents to provide secure remote operations of traditional desktop applications and environments.
9. Social Networking: Applications with intelligent business insight.
10. Documentation: Board books for secure document and report distribution.

Are You Ready?
This leads us to three questions for you:

1. What are your company’s top 10 business applications for media tablets?
2. What are the top 10 apps for HR?
3. What processes have changed because of the surge of popularity of media tablets in the workplace?

Share below what your organization is doing to adapt tablets and apps in the workplace and we will write a follow-up  post on this.

Also, if you want to explore how organizations are redefining learning using a mix of internal corporate social networks and media tablets, be sure to check out our upcoming Social Learning Boot Camp, March 19-20, at IESE Business School in New York. The boot camp will highlight various corporate uses of the iPad 2, as well as examine the benefits and barriers for using mobile devices and corporate social networks for learning. Case studies from several companies will be shared. Plus, participants get an iPad 2! Learn more …