Mentoring with Social Media

While we traditionally think of mentoring as a long-term relationship where a mentor guides a protègè's career through face-to-face meetings, Special Project Mentoring helps to guide a protègè in relatively shorter time spans.

In addition, Special Project Mentoring can also be accomplished through the use of social media. Just as Social Learning can take place through Social Media, the face-to-face environment of traditional mentoring can also be replaced with more versatile media, such as blogs, microblogs (e.g., Twitter & Yammer), Virtual Meeting Places, (e.g., Adobe Connect & Elluminate), and social sites (e.g. Facebook & MySpace). Thus the use of these tools and applications allow mentoring to take place over greater distances and in different time periods.

Activities to Promote Social Learning Mentoring

Microblogs

Social media microblogging tools, such as Twitter & Yammer, have the potential to become a new informal communication medium, especially for collaborative work within organizations (Zhao & Rosson, 2009). They also allow mentors and protègès to connect (collaborate) informally and send short messages that can be requests for help, answers, tips, etc. Thus they may be used as a just-in-time performance support tool.

During formal training sessions, the learners should use one of these tools to connect with each other, the instructors, and anyone else that is involved or has an interest in the tasks being taught. This will allow the learners to not only receive mentoring from experienced and knowledgeable sources, but also give them the opportunity to help mentor others once they have gained a level of proficiency.

Blogs

Blogs make nice additions to microblogging tools as it allows the mentor to write longer and more in-depth articles that can be read by a number of his or her protègès. The protègès and mentor can also make longer comments on the blog, in addition to using the microblogging tool for shorter and more informal comments.

Virtual Meeting Place

Virtual Meeting places probably come the closest to replicating traditional mentoring as it allows both the mentor and protègè to hold their discussions in a virtual face-to-face meeting style no matter how far they may be separated.

Social Sites

Social sites allow the mentors and protègès to keep in touch. In addition persons looking for mentors can scan potential mentors' social sites to see if they might be a good match for them.

Mentoring Resources

Next Step

Return to the Leadership Training and Development Outline

Reference

Zhao, D. & Rosson, M. B. (2009). "'How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work'". ACM GROUP2009 Conference.