There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language.

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi- billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

Social learning is the lubricant of networked, collaborative work.

self-organized (social) groups for learning and working. If work is learning, and learning is the work, then shouldn’t the workplace be structured as a learning environment?

“One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.”

“Social Business” is not about technology, or about “corporate culture.” It is a socio-political historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating. A new perspective is changing how we think about society, politics, interpersonal relationships, science, government and business. New approaches are emerging. Learning and self-expression are exploding. Values are changing. Leadership is changing. The economy is changing. Change itself is changing — it is accelerating and becoming the norm.”

“Social Learning ” is not about technology, or about “corporate culture”. It is a socio-political historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating.”

Social learning has become the latest trending concept in the learning world.

the freedom to act and cooperate with others.

“One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.”

There are two key areas where this is happening and where it is having an impact on organisational learning.Extensive use of public social media sites like YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Blogger, Wordpress, Wikipedia, and so on, that support the creation, sharing and commenting of content, as well as the co-creation of content, means that workers are now using similar approaches in their organisations to co-create and share their own content within their own work teams.Extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc where individuals have built a personal network of trusted friends, means that they are using similar approaches to build networks of trusted colleagues (both internally and externally), as well as power team workspaces and internal communities of practice.

It is clear that a huge number of people who have been using social media for their personal use have now recognised their value for professional use, and are also using the very same tools to address their own organisational problems – mainly because enterprise systems just don’t provide them with the functionality they require to do so. Forrester estimated this was around 47% business users in early 2011 and was likely to rise to 60% by then end of the year.

The Interest Graph has been described as the “middle ground between Google and Facebook – between search, advertising, and the social graph”. Simply put, Google creates their version of the Interest Graph by mining my search queries and other data collected online, for example through Gmail or Google Maps.  It then offers advertisers a way to personalize their messages. One of the problems is the often high noise level in the data due to the lack of context (e.g. I might be looking up something for a friend rather than myself), which decreases relevancy. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz around social search as studies have shown that friend recommendations are much more powerful than traditional advertising in influencing consumer behavior and purchasing decisions.