A while back I wrote about organizational training going viral. What I meant was that telling employees that they have to complete a training is fine and effective but the engagement probably isn’t there because the employee is just checking off a box on their To Do list for the day. How can training engage employees? The instructional designers will knock themselves out trying to create an interactive, interesting, compelling training and this will go a long way in engaging the employee. Interest them and they often will reciprocate by active participation. But I want to know how do you get the learners actively looking for the training? How do you create a buzz so that they are recommending it to each other and the training is approached with an “oh good!” mentality? That creates an active engagement in the learning on both sides. That seems ideal in successfully transferring the knowledge.

Before I left my last organization I suggested that they release their next big product through employee social networking. I thought this would be a really fun way to reward employees (giving them first dibs to share with their family and friends) and I think the organization would be shocked how successfully this gets rolled out world-wide just through employee social networks. So this post really resonated with me for not only external product launches but internal product launches. When Google was rolling out Google Wave, they did it on an invitation-basis. People who were invited in were given five or six invitations they could send out and each of those people were given five or six invitations and so on. I didn’t even really understand what it was yet and I was dying to get invited in to see! What a fantastic way to create anticipation.

If a training isn’t required for certification or compliance reasons, if it was an “optional” but best-practices training, it would be a fantastic way to create buzz and gain an audience that may otherwise be kind of hard to bring into the training.

What would an internal campaign like this look like?