Learn and Lead: customers

Two keywords of social media are "Social" and "Media".

Social media is about being social. It is about connecting with your communities: customers, employees, partners, investors, service providers. It is about conversations and collaboration between these communities. You are not social if you are not having a dialog. Remember, monologues were never considered social.

Social media is also about using media to be social. In the very near past (and even today), conventional channels of media were more unidirectional and slow for two way communication. Communities are now conversing using the new media in form of various social network site. People are blogging and commenting everywhere. Use these multitude of media to connect with them and start a conversation.

Devices these days have made media ubiquitous and your communities are having conversations everywhere and at all times. You need to be available 24x7 to connect with the communities.

I recently was responding to journalist questions about the elearning industry. While most answers could be found in innumerable industry reports, there were two that caught my attention. I would be interested in hearing more about these.

Do you see demand for e-learning from any particular sectors in the economy?

As a vendor organization, we have seen elearning clients grow in almost all sectors. Technology has been an all time favorite and demand for technology training has been consistent across the years. Other sectors are banking and finance, retail, engineering, and education, not in any particular order. In terms of areas of training, sales training, compliance training, application training, new hire training, and online education stand out more amongst a plethora of training areas.

What I am interested in hearing about is whether there are any particular sectors or areas in which elearning is growing faster than others? Any sectors/areas that are experiencing a slowdown? Is there a report that highlights sector/area wise trends in elearning? What are you seeing as trends?

Are companies happy with the quality of e-learning contractors?

Now this one was quite interesting. What are you experiencing, as a customer and as a vendor organization?

As a customer, are you generally happy with the services provided by independent contractors and vendor organizations? What qualities do you like to see in your vendor? What kind of vendor provides you with the service levels that you find satisfactory? What are the common mistakes and pitfalls for vendors when they work with you? What do you think vendors should do to make outsourcing successful for you?

As a vendor, what are you experiencing? What are customers looking for? Are they hard to please or are you able to satisfy them with ease? What are the common mistakes and pitfalls for customers when they work with you? What do you think customers should do to make outsourcing successful?

It would be interesting to see responses.