Last week, I had the honor of sitting on a panel discussion on the use of social media (I and others use this interchangeably with “social networking”) in the training space. Thanks to Paul & Sherry for getting me there! The panel was made up of 5 smart people and then, well, me and was put on by 2 “societies” of TAG (Technology Association of Georgia) which were the Workplace Learning Society and the Enterprise 2.0 Society.
There were some great ideas and resources shared. Here is a quick rundown from my notes:

Coca-Cola USA takes social networking seriously enough to have developed a SN certification course for employees who will be sponsoring these resources internally. Sheri Simon of CC-USA was on the panel and I would like to find out more about what this course covers.

IBM has published their social media guidelines – http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html – and many use this as a model.

Some are using Yammer, including some groups at Turner that I was unaware of. The comparison was made:
o Twitter answers “What am I doing?”
o Yammer answers “What am I working on?”
Selah Abrams of Turner was on the panel and was great on this stuff, showing us some screen shots of what the Turner production groups are doing with the technology.

Some were using social networking in the classroom:
o Allows learners to post questions in real time
o (This was pretty significant in the ensuing discussion) It equalizes the voices of introverts and extroverts

Sharepoint is picking up a lot of 3rd party partners who supply social add-ins.

You can’t push this technology out like you would the new accounting system. It is primarily a learning application and as such, the role of the training professional is to create or identify incentives for people to use it.

All agreed that ROI remains an important metric, but is difficult to measure with social media. I suggested a "currency exchange" either to provide cost benefit analysis on the front end or to measure ROI on the rear end (so to speak). The currency of social media is conversations completed and decisions made. Demonstrating how those were facilitated within a social framework compared to how slowly the same decisions would have been derived in the world of phone calls, vis-a-vis, and one to one e-mail can make a good case for this technology.

Hopefully some of that makes sense and resonates.

Come get me, Mother. I'm through.