Last Friday I presented at the ASTD New England Area 2011 Conference. ASTD is the American Society for Training and Development for my storage friends. The conference had an underlying theme of getting everyone comfortable and participating with social media. This was the brainchild of Jean Marrapodi. (Brilliant idea I must say!!)
All of the speakers have posted their presentations in the ASTDL20 Facebook Fan page, and follow-up blog posts have been posted there as well. My presentation is embedded below. My presentation was about how to deal with naysayers. There was a great discussion in the room – special thanks to Jim Storer of The Community Roundtable for all the great contributions!
Things have changed since I started giving this presentation – people are now coming to conferences with concrete objections they encounter when they propose social media initiatives. It’s obvious people are moving past fear of social media, and that they are starting to think about how to systematically, strategically implement social media applications to facilitate social learning in their orgs.
The thread of every presentation I attended was that learning professionals are in a position where we can help organizations tame the overwhelming amount of information being created in the digital era. It’s interesting, because as storage professionals we’re working on ways to help our customers deal with the sheer amount of data being created – the actual 1’s and 0’s. Learning professionals are best positioned to help organizations make sense of all the information contained in that data. Kinda cool to be at the intersection of those two disciplines.