Sep 19, 2014 | Blog

Building and Retaining an Engaged Mobile Learning Audience

Develop Your Workforce

Enterprise learning & development is undergoing a profound and rapid evolution from classroom and other location based venues to mobile enabled learning solutions and practices. Another way to describe this transformation is that learning and development is moving from a push (classroom) to a pull (self-directed, self-selected elearning) medium. For a pull mobile learning medium to be successful the learning and development content has to be informative, relevant, and most of all entertaining and engaging. The emergence of a new mobile learning model that is based on characteristics of a successful radio talk show does just that by offering compelling content that hits those marks of what makes for a successful pull mobile learning medium. One of the ways a talk show does that is by a focus on understanding its audience along with their needs, interests, and likes.

 

As Bob Dylan says, “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Technology keeps changing at a dizzying pace with the Apple Watch being the latest example of the trend towards wearable mobile and personal technology. As such, you don’t need to be a weatherman to see that mobile enabled learning will continue to play an ever larger role in enterprise learning and development so getting it right is critical. That being the case, let’s look at some of the other factors that make a radio talk show a great model for creating and selecting compelling audio/video content and building an engaged employee audience?

 

How Your Audience’s Expectations Have Changed. Your Audience Expects…

There is an ongoing and revolutionary change underway in your learners/audience’s expectations of how, when and where they learn.

 

  • Content On-Demand: Your audience expects to be able to access the content they want on-demand, anytime, anyplace whether at work or at home.
  • Engage Me: Your content had better grab your audience’s attention and engage them within the first 10 to 60 seconds or they’ll move on to other more engaging content.
  • Performance Support: Just-Enough Information Just-In Time: Your audience needs just enough information, bite-sized chunks, to solve current work challenges rather than being put into a training class. For example, they may need to know how to deliver bad news to a boss, not everything from A to Z about managing up.
  • No Time for Training: Your audience can’t afford an entire day nor a week to go away for training. For that matter neither can you.
  • Authenticity: Whatever your audience members do for development they want it to be real and meaningful in a similar way of the growing consciousness around corporate responsibility

Looking at the Bigger Picture: Getting that compelling mobile audio and video content right is important not just in and of itself, but also is important as a critical step on the way to the larger goal of building a true learning organization of the future where learning happens autonomously through peer-to-peer social learning. Great talk show mobile content leads to engaging your employee audience, which in turn leads to liking, favoriting, and sharing of content, and in my book that is the very definition of a learning organization.