3 Principles Learning Professionals Should Steal From Advertisers

One of the simplest concepts in any marketing or advertising strategy are the 3 M's: Market, Message, Media.

When you are trying to communicate to another person, or group of people -- whether it's in a corporate training situation or in advertising -- consider these three key elements to get your point across.

1. Market: You need to know to whom you are speaking.  Who are they? What are their interests? What is their background? What are their problems you can solve? Learn as much about them as possible before you even begin to develop your training workshop. You don't want to get 80% of the way through development and realize you've missed the key needs of your learners.

2. Message: Carefully crafting your message around the needs and wants of your market is key. Be sure to incorporate proven instructional design principles like our S.O.L.I.D. process (Simple Online Learning Instructional Design) to ensure your message is clear and consumable. Oh, and be sure to cut out any unnecessary information so that you can keep it short yet effective.

3. Media: Depending on where your audience lives and how they like to work will determine the mechanisms you use to communicate to them. Evaluate whether or not self-paced learning, virtual classrooms or face-to-face ILT is the way to go. If you have scheduling constraints with your learners you may want to consider self-paced training. If you have distance issues or budget issues, virtual classrooms are proven to be just as effective as face-to-face.

You may bemoan the effects of advertising on your community, but there is a simple fact you need to consider: it works! So, if you don't think this simple advertising principle is true, just look for advertising in places/magazines/web sites you frequent. See if they have accurately determined the 3 M's to target you!

To learn: Just add water.

We live in a compressed world.  Everything around us seems so tightly wound or packed so tightly that it's hard to see how it can make a difference. Is there anything in that tightly packed wrapper? Perhaps you've seen your kids delight when they place a "magic capsule" in water and it expands into a sponge animal or dinosaur.

In a very real sense, this is one way learning is being delivered. Consider Twitter for instance. 140 characters. What can you do with that? (By the way this paragraph was 140 characters!)

But you can do so much!  Consider the following tweets from our Twitter feed @learningexplosn:

You have got to see this amazing new App & band that Inspires Healthy Living http://ow.ly/7ju6V

2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report via @smexaminerhttp://ow.ly/7h1hW

iPads and Beyond: Top 10 Business Applications for Tablets. Free #Gartner webinar http://gtnr.it/ua6OLC

Each were well under 140 characters. But for those of you new to Twitter, you may just now be realizing that the power of the tweets is found in the shortened URL at the end.  Today, it was exciting to see a woman's eyes open up to how powerful Twitter can be when she learned this simple fact.  All of a sudden, the 140 characters became a quick summary, or a headline, while the real learning was where the tweet took her.

So the next time you think learning has become too compressed just jump onto Twitter for a few minutes, add a little digital water, and expand your brain.

Please, let's recycle (knowledge).

Google has essentially become a recycling bin for our memories. If you need to learn something, you search for things that someone else has discovered, processed and shared.

Knowledge not recycled into the common knowledge base is lost forever. What a shame to lose so many learning fragments! You may know something that nobody else knows and there are so many places to share your information.  Facebook, YouTube, even Urban Spoon (if you know of a great -- or not so great -- restaurant).

Listening to Betsey Sparrow from Columbia University who was speaking at Learning 2011, she describes it as "Transactive Memory". Simply, we use our friends, family and the Internet to help us remember things that we forget.

Although some may say that Google is ruining your memory, we look at it as a vast recycling center of trillions of pieces of knowledge that you couldn't possible remember anyway.

Change just ONE thing to free yourself from your phone

Like Pavlov's dog, many of us have been conditioned to reach for our pocket or purse whenever we hear a chime. Some people like myself also suffer from a condition that is commonly called, "phantom vibration syndrome"(Read this a great article on the syndrome by fast Company)--Which means you reach for your phone, because you think it is ringing or vibrating, only to find it isn't there.

Yes, I hate to admit it, but I am one of those people who cannot go an hour without pulling out my phone to do something...whether it's checking email, checking in to a location app, updating my social media status, or surfing the web. I even tried going a day without having my phone with me. I felt like a smoker who is trying to go cold turkey. It was really hard.

Then I realized that if I CHANGED JUST ONE THING, one setting, my phone dependency decreased substantially. That one thing was to turn off most of my notifications. You know, the chimes and bells that would go off every time I received an email, or text, or reminder, or...whatever. Because, whenever one of those chimes would go off I would react to them, no matter how unimportant they were. So, by turning off all the unimportant reminders, and only leaving on the important ones, I found I became less of a slave. Phones nowadays are "smart" enough that in most cases you can even select who, what, and when to receive reminders from. If you haven't already, take a few minutes to figure these features out on your phone. This short activity will save you from a lot of distractions and time wasting activities.

Go on, give it a try. Take back your life. You'll be surprised at how liberating this one practice can be. 

Kill your inner zombie; Embrace your inner mutant

Inside each of us are two diametrically opposed creatures trying to escape: a Zombie Learner and a Mutant Learner.

Zombie Learners are half-alive, passively learning and unaware of all of the knowledge available to them. They don't explore the incredible universe of learning tools and knowledge available to them.

Mutant Learners are rapidly adapting, evolving and changing to effectively harness today's Learning Explosion. They are actively looking for new information and contributing their knowledge to the rest of the world, helping other people learn as well.

To survive in today's ever-changing world of learning you need to kill your inner zombie and embrace your inner mutant.

Join us for this free webinar and we'll help you learn how.

Age Defying Webinars

While speaking to a group of online learning professionals we recalled a story of an older female facilitator who told us that webinars have extended her career. Because people can't see how old she is, they don't have any predetermined stereotypes against her.

At that moment a fairly young woman raised her hand and said the exact same thing--in reverse! While doing webinars, nobody can see how young she is, which builds her credibility within her organization.

So, webinars can make an excellent wrinkle cream -- adding them or erasing them. It's your choice.

If you learned it the hard way...

How many times have you heard someone say, "That was a really tough experience! I guess I learned it the hard way."

We can guarantee you've said it at least once in your life. Maybe it was said after a complicated project was completed. After a difficult conversation with your boss. After a thorny relationship had ended.

You might say that the most important thing is that you learned something. However, we believe you should go one step further: You need to share that new knowledge with others.

Sharing your experiences allows other people to learn. It's also how you fortify your knowledge. Life is like a great learning laboratory filled with beakers and vials of ongoing experiments to test your knowledge and to improve your acumen.

Sometimes your experiments produce incredible new results (hooray!). Sometimes they end in a fiery blaze (hooray!). In either case, you've learned something new and that is how you grow. But it's up to you to help others by sharing your results.

We're reminded of the story of Elizabeth Smart and her father, Ed. Elizabeth was kidnapped at age 14 while sleeping in her home and over the following nine months her father kept looking for her. He organized searches. He worked with detectives. He learned everything he could about her disappearance.

Elizabeth was eventually found and the story ended happily. Additionally, Ed continues to share his knowledge with other parents of kidnapped children. He could have retracted into his former life, never speaking of this experience again. Rather, he has become a major national spokesperson for child protection, sharing the knowledge he gained during this terrible ordeal.

So after your next hard experience (troubleshooting your home theater, interviewing for a job, battling illness or disease, etc.) don't keep the lessons learned to yourself. If you learned it the hard way... share it!