Social Media and Training

I’m a big advocate (and regular user) of what is commonly called “social media” – tools that enable people to publish, connect, and interact on-line. Inevitably, social media is evolving into strategies for marketing, PR, and training – although very slowly for our highly-regulated pharma industry.

Next month, I’ll be attending a conference exploring the use of Digital Media in pharma (Princeton, NJ, Oct 14-16).

This week, I saw a press release by a company that is moving in the inevitable direction of joining social media tools to a Learning Management System in a new platform they’re calling LearnSocial. We’ll see more stuff like this in coming months.

There’s also been a bit of noise about the 3-D platform called Second Life. SL has some cool factor, but I’m skeptical about its utility for training (in its current level of evolution). I do see one place where a Second Life application could be very useful, however – an orientation tool for pharma sales new hires. Think about how cool it would be to have a virtual world for new hires to explore during Home Study, where they could be oriented to the company and its culture, while “meeting” trainers and other new hires on-line before coming in for residency training. This would be a great way to spice up on-boarding!