LINE conducts social media debate at British Airways Learning at Work Day
LINE Communications has used Twitter to facilitate a social media debate at a British Airways internal event celebrating Campaign for Learning’s Learning at Work Day
The event took place at BA’s Waterside head office where employees were encouraged to attend interactive seminars, learn new skills and had the chance to see what various learning suppliers had to offer. As a long term supplier to British Airways, LINE was on hand to see if BA employees felt social media could have a positive impact on their learning at work.
Participants were asked questions and then encouraged to document their responses on Twitter. As the afternoon unfolded, incoming tweets appeared on a TV screen in live word clouds revealing trends and themes. The more frequently a word was used, the larger its font size would appear on the screen.
Responses to the question, “Have you ever used social media to learn something?” were varied. One person tweeted, “I’ve never learnt anything from social media, just forums. Knowledge sharing could be useful”. Other responses were more positive: “Following interesting people or companies on Twitter/Facebook as well as using wiki's and forums can be very beneficial to learning.” The low cost and the ease of following industry experts to gain knowledge as well as the sharing aspects of social media resonated well with many of the day’s participants.
Knowledge sharing seemed to be the common theme when the employees tweeted their responses to the question: “How can social media have an impact on learning at BA?” The word cloud indicated keywords such as, ‘communication’, ‘relevant’, ‘sharing’, ‘information’ and ‘help’ which all point towards a positive way in which social media could be harnessed in the workplace. “Social media will drive the future of work in the next 5 years”, wrote one employee.
LINE’s Sales and Marketing Director, Steve Ash, says: “Informal learning has always been a hugely important part of the way people learn in the workplace. Introducing social media to support informal learning in a workplace context often causes issues at both the organisational and individual levels. The results we received from the BA event are very representative of the concerns and enthusiasms at both of these levels.”