HOW TO: Build a Social Media Education Program for Your Company

From Mashable:

In the past few years, businesses have increasingly dedicated resources to creating social media strategies in hopes of boosting site traffic, sales and brand engagement.

Joining social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, companies have struggled to create unique user experiences and provide value for followers, while also meeting management expectations and program goals.

The biggest social media challenge for businesses in 2011 will be to rethink their social media strategies to make them sustainable and scalable. We spoke to representatives at Dell, Intel and Constant Contact to discuss how building social media training programs has helped their companies do just that. Read on for their top tips.

1. Choose the Decision-Making Team

Before getting started, it is important to recruit a core team to plan, execute and maintain the social media training program.

While the composition of the team may vary from organization to organization, it should include at least one social media strategist, tasked with managing the company’s overall social media strategy, which includes the social media education program.

The social media strategist then works with the existing corporate training group within the organization to pull in the appropriate resources. “Social media training shouldn’t be separated from existing corporate education,” Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang told Mashable, stressing that all on-boarding and ongoing training should be tightly integrated and housed in one location.

Steve Pratt, director of employee training and development at Constant Contact, agrees that integration is key. New hires at Constant Contact typically complete three weeks of on-boarding training to learn about the company’s history, culture and systems. During that time, new hires also receive an overview of social media. Employees can then take more social media courses as they are offered.

Beyond the strategist and training group, other key team members could come from the following areas within a company:

• Marketing: To keep company messaging consistent
• Legal: To review social media policies and guidelines
• Product: To integrate current company offerings into the training
• Web Development: To create an online portal for training assets

While some organizations will find all the human capital they need to develop a program internally, others will find it necessary to pull external experts to help put the pieces together. In either case, it could be helpful to assemble a board of social media advisors who have previously set up education programs — their tips and best practices could save your organization a lot of time.

2. Ask Questions and Set Goals

Once a team is formed, begin setting program goals by first understanding the organization’s needs. For starters, here a few questions that should be answered:

1. What is our overall social media strategy, and where does the education program fit within it?
2. Where does social media training fit within our current education offerings?
3. How can we make this program scalable globally and across business units?
4. Which employees and business units should we focus on training?
5. Will courses be mandatory for some or all employees, or will all courses be optional to everyone?
6. Will we offer in-person or online courses, or both? And who will teach them?
7. How will we develop the curriculum? And what skills do we want employees to hone?
8. What types of materials should we develop for the program?
9. Where will the training assets be housed?
10. How will we build a collaborative community among social media trainees?

After assessing the company’s needs from social media, you’ll have a better understanding of the goals for the program.

Intel’s social media strategist, Ekaterina Walter, told Mashable that some of the company’s original goals for its Digital IQ training program were to raise awareness for its social media guidelines, help employees understand social media, ease management concerns about the possible risks of social media, and increase employee participation in the medium through empowerment. Furthermore, the company focuses on training its 5,000 customer-facing marketing and sales representatives, who complete a set of mandatory courses and also choose a number of electives to suit their interests. But with 80,000 total employees, Intel offers all of its courses to anyone who wants to participate in social media on behalf of Intel — in fact, training is mandatory for those who do.

3. Benchmark Employees


A sample question from Constant Contact’s assessment quiz

Some organizations distinguish between social media fluency levels, while others don’t. Whether you plan to offer a variety of course levels or just one track for everyone, figure out where your employees stand. Benchmarking employees enables companies to develop relevant courses that fit their employees’ needs.

At Intel, employees take a Digital IQ quiz that places them at one of four levels: 100, 200, 300 or 400, just like university course tracks. For highly trained social media practitioners, Intel also offers 500 level courses. As new employees become interested in social media, they take the quiz and are placed at the appropriate level.

Another strategy is to use a company-wide survey to determine the program’s curriculum. Constant Contact sent out a one-time quiz to all employees to determine what courses needed to be offered. Pratt explained Constant Contact’s needs assessment strategy:

“We met with managers and leaders from across the organization and tried to understand the unique needs of their teams — the people in engineering and product strategy may have different needs than our front-line employees in sales and support. On an individual basis, we sent out an online survey, or quiz, to get a benchmark before we did any training to see what people know about social media tools.”

4. Set the Curriculum and Refresh Often


A screenshot from Constant Contact’s introductory e-course on social media marketing

The curriculum of a social media education program depends on the goal-planning and benchmarking that take place early on in the development process, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

At Constant Contact, users take a 20-minute e-learning course prior to attending in-person courses. The e-learning course covers the basics of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and is meant to “give people a baseline of knowledge before they come into class,” explained Pratt. A sample screen of the course is pictured above. After taking the e-learning course, users attend instructor-led classes that last 90 minutes to two hours and include “demonstrations of some of the key tools and functionalities, hands-on activities where people get a chance to practice with the help of a facilitator, and customer case studies,” said Pratt.

Liz Bullock, who leads Dell’s Social Media and Communities (SMaC) University, explained Dell’s social media education program. “In the first class that we offer, we roll up our social media policy into five principles — that way, it’s very easy for employees to understand it and quickly grasp what they need to do, the rules, and the best items for engaging with customers,” said Bullock. After employees complete that course, they move onto strategy-based courses that focus on how to use specific social media platforms. In those classes, Dell subject matter experts share their best practices and tips for engaging with users on each platform; classes are highly scenario-based with lots of actual case studies that enable employees to think through how they would act in certain situations.

A screenshot of Intel’s Digital IQ training portal home screen

Intel’s program begins with an introductory course on why social media is important for the company and at large, and then spans a broad range of level-specific topics in more than 60 online courses. Depending on an employee’s level as determined by the Digital IQ quiz, they are assigned two to eight mandatory courses. Above and beyond those courses, they can choose electives that pertain to their interests. Walter noted that people often complete many more courses than are assigned to them out of pure enthusiasm to improve. To date, Intel has trained nearly 2,000 Social Media Practitioners (SMPs) and nearly 20,000 Digital IQ courses have been completed in total.

Social media platforms and best practices change daily — remember to update materials as functionalities and community standards evolve.

5. House Training Materials Centrally

Based on the curriculum, the next step is to create training materials that add value to the courses. Materials could include e-learning courses, PowerPoint presentations, handouts, quizzes, case studies, white papers, videos, transcripts, newsletters, playbooks and other supplemental resources.

All training materials should be housed in one central location — in most cases, housing them on the company intranet is a great option. If employees are active on internal blogs and communities, a social media blog or community page is a great resource. For example, Intel fosters an internal “Social Media at Intel” community, in which employees can find all social media training resources and the latest social media news.

Likewise, Dell stores all of its social media training documents on its intranet and uses Salesforce’s collaboration tool, Chatter, to facilitate conversation in a “group” of employees who have taken the training. Employees visit the group to post social media stories, ask questions of the SMaC team and give feedback about the training.

6. Get the Word Out


Christopher Barger, head of social media at General Motors and unconference panelist, examines the crowd-sourced agenda board at Dell’s SMaC Unconference in Austin

Creating an education program is just the start — getting employees excited about and enrolled in social media training is the next step. Use the usual outlets, including e-mail announcements, quarterly updates and flyers for starters, to get the word out, but also consider other non-traditional options.

Dell is big on having unconferences to kick off regional social media efforts. Since founding its SMaC University program in July 2010, Dell has kicked off three unconferences in Austin, London and Xiamen, China, and has trained more than 5,000 employees through the university. For its unconferences, Dell invites outside experts to join its employees, who set the agenda at the start of the event, based on what they want to discuss and learn about social media.

Conclusion

Creating a social media education program involves many people with varying skills, a solid strategy and a lot of buy-in. While we didn’t discuss it in detail above, all of our sources agreed that one of the most important steps to getting started is to have all the necessary approvals from above. Focus on scalability, sustainability and attainable goals, and your training program should be well on its way.

If you’ve already begun building a social media education program at your company, let us know what tips you’d add on to this list in the comments below.