It’s a bitter cold December evening and you’ve been called in for the night shift to help monitor for customer issues. A few months ago your company added in a social media component to your organization. There was a week long training course and instruction on the social media side of things, which up to this point had generally meant having another window opened up on your computer screen. Half-way through the night you read a tweet that you know needs to be escalated and responded to by  someone. Now who is that someone? You think back to the first meeting you had 3 months ago, after the chocolate chip muffin before the pizza was the part where they talked about who should respond. It’s 3 a.m. and all you can remember is chocolate and pepperoni.

Probably one of the biggest fears of anyone who’s out to train their internal team on how to use social media both for work and personal experience, is making sure they retain everything you teach them. All the best training in the world will mean nothing if you haven’t built out a place for your internal teams to refer back to that valuable information. Just like asking questions is a necessity, so is having a place to store the answers. By providing your team with self serve options to reference the material they’ve learned, you’ll be ensuring that there’s always a knowledge base for them to turn to.

How do you build this information?
Start from Day 1 of your training and make sure you are recording all the information that you provide to employees. Also make sure you are recording all the questions they ask and the answer you give them. Here’s a few suggestions for formats:

Written: Nothing is more simple than writing out all the information you have gone over.

Slide Decks: For those that are a little more graphically inclined, building out slide decks is a great way to document the information in a user friendly visual format.

Audio/Video: We’ve had enough Youtube celebrities lately to know that creating an audio/video file is pretty straight forward. Sing a Social Media Saturday song and you’ll be all set.

Where do I keep all this?
Almost as important as creating the information for your training course, is finding a place to store it that is accessible to everyone.

Content Management Systems (CMS): These programs can host all of your information and let you decide who sees what and when. Give this post from Social Media Examinar about How to Create your own social networking community a read and see if they are what you are looking for.
Community Platforms: These platforms can help to build out an internal community of information. Use them to store your internal training documentation and even have employees grow their knowledge base by asking/responding to each other’s questions. Give Forrester’s Community platform report a read and decide from there.
Shared Documents: If you’re not ready to go the full system route, try using your own special sauce mix of document hosting services. Most have free and paid options and you can limit security settings so your documents aren’t public. Examples include but aren’t limited to: Google Docs, Scribd, Slideshare.

How to stay up to date?
Information is ever changing and we’re sure your internal training will continue to evolve over time, so it’s important to make sure you’re communicating this new information to everyone. Why not try a couple of these methods:

Quarterly On Site Meetings: Working online via email and phone is great and cost effective, but sometimes nothing helps to keep communication lines open and training fresh in everyone’s minds than a good ole’ fashioned day of meetings. If you can, schedule some face to face time on a quarterly basis to keep everyone in the loop.

Monthly Webinars: Internal webinars are a great way to do a quick 1 hour refresher and update on any of your social media policy changes. Compare web conferencing software and find one that works for you.

Weekly Email Updates: We all have email, we all use it everyday. While another email in our inboxes doesn’t sound inviting, keeping it short and to the point with just the important changes like “Don’t discuss product X online” can help to de-mystify the week to week.

Daily Instant Message/Email Questions: Keep the communication lines up by having a variety of ways to communicate. During your initial training make sure to identify who people should contact AND how! Try different messaging clients like Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo or Skype to keep things rolling through out the day.

No matter how you choose to store, share and update your training information, the important thing is just doing it so that your employees continually know where to go and don’t get caught dreaming of chocolate and pepperoni at 3 a.m.

What formats are you planning on using for your training documentation? Where do you store your internal training information? Will you be having quarterly/monthly/weekly training updates?

Tags: Community, Social Media, Training