Social Media Training and Conferencing

Social media isn't Dell's only internal course offering. The company has other training programs such as for the 3,000 or so staffers on various global marketing teams, and others who need to understand corporate compliance issues.

Nevertheless, they have had 4,000 people take at least eight hours of classes in social media since the program began 18 months ago, and they still have plenty of demand for them. Dell has about 100,000 employees around the world.

Richard Binhammer, the head of communications outreach for Dell's Social Media and Community team, is excited about all this interest. "We built the programs around what our employees were anxious to understand the terms and roles and responsibilities and how that related to our business. In retrospect, we should have done a business management course for our leaders and executives. We should have offered that at the beginning, rather than as something we added later."

"We also do a training ambassador program, where we have people who are trained by us initially who then go out to the regions and conduct their own classes," said Social Media & Community Director Brown. These ambassadors also have translated the original English class content into ten other languages, including German and Mandarin. "We found that for some audiences, having classes in English and sitting for a full day of training was just too much."

And the class schedule and topics aren't set in isolation of what the employees want. Each year Dell conducts an "unconference" where attendees set the agenda and lead the sessions and the discussions. "Two years ago, there was some trepidation about the whole unconference thing," says Brown. "At the first one, we had 200 employees and now we do it every June." Dell has held similar unconferences in China, London and India to kick off their training sessions and set local agendas. They also did an unconference last month at the South By Southwest conference for their small business customers. (You can see a photo of the agenda that I took when I was at their offices below.)

"It is very un-corporate, but extremely effective," says Brown. Each unconference ends up producing a book of proceedings that is widely distributed. "Hot topics surface that you didn't think about and we can better understand what the company's priorities are from the ground up," said Binhammer.

All this training and conferencing is great at figuring out what people need to know and how to disseminate knowledge most effectively. "It really is social media writ large," said Binhammer. "We bring together participants that span across all organizations within the company and we get to see the various people work together on specific topics. It is very effective at connecting like-minded folks, finding pain points, and as a way to embed this effort across the entire fabric of the company."

"We were astounded with the groundswell of employees using social media and their initial uptake. We had no idea of the level of demand was going to be so high, and the feedback we get is phenomenal," said Binhammer.