Twitter is just one of the new social media tools available to the training and development (T&D) community. Many people I know wonder how to use Twitter to enhance their social learning programs. In this blog we will take a look at this new platform for communication and discuss one example of how you may be able to incorporate this technology into your social learning programs.
First, let’s address what Twitter is not. Twitter is not a game. There are no missions or challenges to be won or prizes to be claimed. Also, Twitter is not only for teenagers or kids. As a matter of fact only 11% of Twitter’s users are between 12 and 17 years old as reported by The New York Times. This may be because Twitter was originally created as a platform for people to stay in touch with acquaintances and not to support long or in-depth conversations. Teenagers who feel that their friends are the center of their world don’t seem to care much for the short message format.
So what is Twitter? Take a look at this short video for a “Plain English” introduction on how to use Twitter (via Lee LaFever).
As you saw in the video, users are restricted to 140 characters to make their point. These messages, or tweets, are added to the user’s profile and sent out to other people that have opted into receiving the user’s updates. In other words, the people receiving the tweet have chosen to follow the user. Within these 140 characters users can ask questions, post feedback, highlight news stories, link to items on the internet, etc.
- Twitter stream for the #learning hashtag.
Let’s put this into a real world example. At the last minute, the President of your company has asked you to provide an hour long presentation to a large group of employees. The purpose of the presentation is to “train” them on a new piece of software that your company will begin using next week. While you have little to no time to perform a needs assessment, you know that knowledge of this software program varies greatly among your audience. Would you believe that this is a great situation to use Twitter? It sure is. If you choose to employ the hashtag technique you will be able to get real time feedback on questions or concerns the audience has, leverage the pool of experience provided by employees familiar with the software, and perhaps highlight those individuals as mentors to help with the transition. By using the hashtag you will be able to engage every learner in your audience and make them part of the conversation. So let’s take a look at how you do this.
- If you don’t have one, open a Twitter account. Accounts are free and can be created at www.twitter.com. Even if you have one you may want to open one for specifically for this presentation.
- Determine the hashtag you will use for your presentation. You want to make it as short as possible so people can include it on every single tweet, but you also want to make it unique so people outside of your audience don’t accidentally use it. For example you may want to use your company name such as #ABCcompany or #ABC. To check and see if these hashtags are already in use visit http://hashtag.org and search for your ideal hashtag. If you look up the example of #ABC you will see that it is already taken, however #ABCcompany is not. You can not register a hashtag, so it is best to start using it right away. This will discourage some one else from starting to use it before your presentation.
- Share your plan with the intended audience before the presentation. Ask those that are registered with Twitter to bring their cell phones (equipped with a Twitter application) or laptops to the presentation. Also, let them know that they can log on to Twitter and get the conversation going now by using the hashtag that you have developed. This way they can start asking questions and reveal any major concerns you may want to cover in the presentation. While this isn’t a scientific needs assessment, it will certainly get you a great deal of information that will be helpful in your preparation.
- Stream the Twitter feed live during your presentation. Engage your audience by asking them to tweet in their questions and comments during your presentation. In addition, to keep those that aren’t tweeting engaged, project the Twitter stream on a screen behind you. If an audience member makes a good comment ask them to elaborate. This will help people identify possible mentors. Also, you can save any posted questions until the end or cover them during the presentation. If you only have access to one computer or projector, my suggestion is to have somebody else run the computer and take down key questions and comments from the Twitter stream. This will help the flow of your presentation.
- Invite your audience to continue to use the hashtag after the presentation. Asking your audience to continue to use the hashtag after the presentation has a number of positive outcomes. First, and foremost, in this example it gives the employees somewhere to go to with additional questions about the new software. They now have a way to tap into the collected experience of their colleagues. Second, by monitoring the conversation online executives will have an understanding of how well the new software conversion is going. Since each post is a maximum of 140 characters they will be able to get a feel for the state of the transition quickly. Finally, the Twitter stream is a great place for the T&D department to go to qualitative data when doing a formal needs assessment for future training on this software.
As you can see, you can use Twitter as a free and simple way to engage your learners and keep track of how they are doing. I challenge you to try this method the next time you give a presentation. For now, the best thing to do is start with step one from above: open your own Twitter account and start exploring the functionality for yourself!
Best,
P.S. Remember, if you found this post to be helpful, others might too! Feel free to forward the link for this post to others that might need this information.
