Social Media is a huge subject at the moment. More and more social networking sites pop up weekly along with new and improved ways to communicate with your “friends” by tweeting, microblogging or by simply posting on their wall for all to see.  And its not only in the personal world. Social Media has crept its way into the business world too, proving to be a hugely plausible marketing tool, ferrying companies; including Percepta, right into 21st Century technology.

Last year, I had my first real taste of genuinely how far and wide Social Media really is.  I was sat in a coffee shop with my sister, who was a bit distracted by something on her iPhone. I asked her what she was waiting for….. Did you know that University lecturers no longer call or even email to cancel classes, they tweet their instructions @ their students? No, nor did I. In fact the majority of her contact with University, aside from actual lectures, was through Social Media of some sort, whether it be essay titles and deadlines posted on the University E-room board or Lecture podcasts posted onto their RRS feed site.

It got us thinking. If there are social media tools that are useful for business operations, and if Education functions are already using social media in one form or another then surely there must be tools that would work for Learning and Development functions too. Right?

After a few clicks and a Google search or two it became clear that from the simple for example social bookmarking sites, like Delicious – where you can set up group favorites pages so that everyone has access and links to the correct and same information, to the more involved i.e. social networking sites, like Facebook - used in a way for people to share best practice, there are a multitude of ways to use social media to reach your audience on an entirely different level.

And the best thing about all of these sites? By and large they are FREE! Access to course authoring tools (Udutu), social communities, blogging, file sharing, video sharing, RSS feeds, is just a click away. There is an absolute wealth of tools that until recently I had truly never heard of. Social Media where have you been all my life?

In all seriousness though, social media has been on the periphery of business and more specifically Learning and Development for a while now:

“We are moving towards a knowledge-era model of education with large scale social networks involving complex communities and individual identity construction” Wenger 2004

Not only is it a fun and exciting new way to do blended learning, but it is an absolute necessity. For the “Net Gen” or Millennial Generation social media is their bread and butter. Chuck a folder with induction information in front of them, cue dramatic sigh and vacant stare, however sit them in front of a computer, with a blog of live experiences, a Wiki page for warranty and a Podcast on the very same induction material and you have found the key to switching them on.

So for the team in Learning and Development the door has been opened to a whole new world of tools to reach our delegates and we have already begun our exploration into how we can make this work for us.

What does the future hold? Who knows, maybe the next training session you attend will be held over your iPhone, or the next product update will be found on Facebook. One thing’s for sure, paper is a thing of the past and iPads are the future.