Getting Social, Getting Seen

Who knew when I first got online in... maybe 1993? and text-chatted for the first time with a distant friend using a text-based chat program called ytalk that I was starting to engage in the now trendy trend of Social Networking? I keep reminding myself of my office-mate's impression at the time.

"Dave! Check this out! I'm actually talking to a friend – in NEW YORK! Look! I'm typing, and she sees what I'm typing, and then I can see what she types!"

Dave nodded sagely. "I heard about another way to do that, where you punch in a series of digits and can then actually talk to the other person via voice."

"REALLY!?"

He grinned and pointed to the telephone. Groan! Gotta love tech-savvy luddites for keeping gear-giddiness in check.

MOO was next, with the announcement of the grand opening of schMOOze University for teachers and non-native speaking students of English. I started forming my long-standing hypothesis that human interaction was the best thing about the internet, and a key factor in any attempt at online learning.

In the past couple years, online human interaction seems to have finally come into its own as the web melded with the Internet, as apps got easier to use, and as more and more older people got online. My mom's got a facebook account, for goodness sake, and chats with us via gtalk using her webcam.

Social networking – used to be geeks and academics, now it's everyone.

So I'm finding it strange to have been at least a little bit of a pioneer in using the Internet for communication (as opposed to the old "information superhighway" idea of its main purpose being information retrieval) – and now feeling like a bit of a noob trying to figure out how to use it correctly for marketing. I've been using it forever to collaborate on projects, to co-author articles, to provide language learners with opportunities to interact in English, to communicate and share with my friends, but I'm feeling like a bit of a latecomer in trying to use it for marketing.

But we're diving right in, head-first, with both feet, or something like that. Micheal's up to his eyeballs in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), pimping every page in our websites (www.GCPLearning.com and www.GCPWorld.com) to help the spiders and bots find us and push us to the top of the list for people searching for what we sell. Meanwhile, I'm working in character – trying to maximize our human participation on the web by tweeting at www.Twitter.com/GCPLearning, poking and updating our status on the GCPLearning facebook page, becoming more active on LinkedIn, and lurking (for now!) on 4LearningExecs. Stay tuned!

Training in Transition

I talk to trainers, training coordinators, and HR personnel every day, all facing different training issues depending on their industry, their worker population, and the maturity of their learning organization. But they all say the same thing:

"Our training program is in transition."

Of course it is! I don't know why I had to hear it so many times before I noticed the pattern that exemplifies that obvious fact of corporate life: nothing is more constant than change, and the only training that is NOT in transition is training in a stagnant company.

("Training in Transition" sounds like a good session title for a presentation at ASTD or eLearning Guild... I wonder if it's taken yet! I should trademark it; Google only spots 900 instances of it, but I hear it every day.)

Anyway... I'm not brilliant, but I have my moments. When I do things right, when I hit the nail on the head, it's only because my business methodology is to instinctively do the right, brilliant thing, and only later figure out that evidence (of which I was oblivious) supported my approach all along. The positive side of this personal phenomenon is that I get to enjoy plenty of satisfying epiphanies, the sort where I smack my forehead and exclaim in amazement, "Damn, I'm smart!!"

So the smart thing this summer was this: collaborating with my partners, we dramatically expanded the options for acquiring our training content. The starting point of this revolutionary evolution was this – our "finished product" is great; we made our courses so that in their integrated player, they'll run in SCORM/AICC-compatible learning management systems, directly from the web or intranet, stand-alone on learners' PCs, or as auto-launching CD-ROMs. Very cool stuff; we're proud of what we created. And we've been optionally including uncompiled (editable) source files for some time. But it turns out that even with those flexible options, our clever clients are using our courseware in other ways we hadn't thought of, most notably as the focal point of instructor-led classroom training.

The big "ah-ha" was that behind the 91 courses in our library, there is a repository of some 50,000+ files. Not just the uncompiled Flash files. I'm talking about the digital photos (both the final course graphics and the extra shots). Storyboards. Assessments. Digital audio files (again, both final narration as well as the random "Please go on to the next screen" and "Correct!" and "Sorry, try again" bits and pieces that make up navigation and feedback. If our clients are using our finished courses as stand-up training aids, wouldn't the files behind them be just as useful? Why the heck is all that usable instructional content gathering digital dust, sitting idly in archives on our servers?

We tossed that idea at a couple crucial clients, and they were stunned. Shocked that we were willing to provide those files, and shocked that no one had done that before. "No-brainer," one said. Of COURSE all those digital assets would be useful to trainers and in-house training developers! At the minimum, they'll have the dressiest PowerPoints in the whole company. More enterprising developers will have new "custom" courses ready in a fraction of the normal development time, using our course materials as a foundation to build their own courses "from scratch." This is HUGE.

When another prospective client had no need for our finished courses but wanted to purchase storyboards only, we knew our thinking was moving in the right direction, and we formalized the idea. In press-release-ese (the way our marketing department states it), "Our eight Multimedia Curriculum Libraries are each available in three distinct editions - Developer's Edition, Business Edition, and Ultimate Edition - to put exactly the training materials you need – no more, no less – at your fingertips." There's more info at the site of a recent promotion I probably shouldn't be linking to here in my blog, but whatever... can't see the harm in pointing to it.

You can't outsource this

Early on in my particular outsourcing history, we were pretty careful about letting clients know about our offshore partnerships. It was actually sort of our dirty little secret, and besides, what if our clients bypassed us and went straight offshore to get their work done? Where would we be then??

One time a client realized after the fact that much of the work on the elearning course he'd hired us to create was developed by members of my offshore team, in India. He was a little incensed, and wondered why he was paying me instead of going right to the source and paying an Indian firm less to do the development for him.

What he failed to realize was how thoroughly I earned the money that he paid me to manage his outsourced project for him. He didn't know that behind the scenes, I'd had to schedule meetings around a 11.5 hour timezone difference, perform quality control on "final" products, and communicate constantly with folks whose native language is not mine and whose English is not my English.

That client is still my happy client, but things have changed. There's more recognition of two facts:

1. Offshore outsourcing is not evil; it's necessary and part of the evolution of the global economy.
2. Offshore outsourcing is not easy; it's fraught with peril and requires expense, attention, and more human resources here at home to accomplish successfully.

Our outsourcing is no longer secret; it's a selling point. It's a valuable and marketable expertise. It's what we do now.

It's a blog!

Commerce is heavy on the streets of Varca City. Teeming with life, smelling of fish, diesel exhaust, a million spices and a billion people, Varca is a microcosm of something or something else entirely.

Diving into the indoor market, we eased gingerly past the drying meats in the sausage-maker's stall. "Hey Robbo," we quipped. "There's your sandwich, ripening nicely!" Rob wondered to himself, "Did I really eat meat like that, or was it all a bad dream?"

Oh, you ate it, Rob. But the kindly ministrations of multiple and multi-hued bottles Kingfisher Ale and a shot of Jura before bed each night set his innards right, and indeed, all of us remained healthy despite pushing our luck repeatedly.