Miranda Man, Social Business Strategist: In our fourth and final post on navigating the social technology landscape, we will have a look at community platforms and social e-learning platforms.  This post summarises slides 53 – 66 of our social technology report (attached at the bottom of this post).  For reference, our previous posts were on:

• Social media analytics and listening tools
• Social media engagement and content creation tools
• Enterprise social platforms and enterprise activity stream platforms

What are community platforms and e-learning platforms?

Community platforms are used to build online communities and can be used both internally and externally, for employees and customers. Typical functionality include forums and user groups.

Social e-learning platforms include collaborative functionality such as blogs and shared spaces. These types of e-learning platform include authoring platforms (to create content) and learning management systems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why do we need to use community platforms and e-learning platforms?

Community platforms can enable you to develop online customer / employee communities.  This can help to build your online brand presence externally and harness the intelligence of your employees.  Social e-learning platforms can help to make the learning process more engaging for your employees – as with internal community platforms, you can foster a sharing and more effective approach to learning.

How can I use them?

Community platforms are often used to connect people  to experts and to build collective online communities of people with common interests and experiences.  They are great to connect peers – for example customer to customer and employee to employee – and are a good platform for your advocates to share knowledge and best practice.

E-learning platforms (in the social context) can be used to create engaging online assessments and for learners to share their experience with other learners.

How can I find out more?

To find out more about how you can use community and e-learning platforms and to learn how other companies have used them, read our report! We will also put these tools in context of a social business.

We would also like to hear your thoughts on community and e-learning platforms – please comment below or send us a tweet on @bloomworldwide.

If this whets your social technology appetite or you want to find out more about how BLOOM can help with identifying the right social tool for your company, please get in contact!