Building a reputation and trust in a connected culture can be difficult, how are you building a network of individuals who are dynamic, reliable, and participatory?
Are you leveraging healthy relationships from your PLN for growth?
How would you create a PLN prior to engaging a social media campaign on a topic of your choice?

A strong PLN with reputation and trust is essential for helping to create better learning. In an interconnected culture, building reputation and trust can be difficult. Someone may ask, how do we build a dynamic, reliable and participatory personal network before launching social media activities on the topics we choose?


Woods (2013) believes that spending time chatting with the people in your life will help you to easily establish your personal learning network (PLN). Talking with others is a simple way to get insight from others. In addition, use technology to expand and strengthen your PLNs. Participate in online chat and message boards, and communicate with people in the same industry on Twitter. Follow the industry experts you like. Get to know some interesting viewpoints. Start conversations with your peers and establish connections with other Twitter users. Join the learning and development (L&D) tweet chat, which will help you look at the problem from different angles. You can also take advantage of the conference back-channels to see various perspectives from all over the world. Establishing contacts with people from different industries can also help you see things in different sights. These activities can be useful when building your learning and development PLNs.


Therefore, it is necessary to establish a dynamic, reliable, and participatory personal learning network before starting social media campaign on the topic you choose. Firstly, increasing the participation of social media can help you build a dynamic interpersonal network. Follow some professional industry experts you like. Make high quality comments under the similar industry experts who you follow and attract a group of like-minded friends, who might agree with your viewpoints and comments or retweets your comments. Check the insightful comments under the posts or articles of relevant experts, and comment below his comments to increase the connection with people who has the same viewpoints. Retweet the insightful posts or articles, with your opinions attached. In short, actively participate in social media interactions, contribute your highly relevant opinions and comments, which will help you to expand your social contacts in related industries in this process. Increasing engagement on social media is of great importance for building a dynamic, reliable, and participatory personal learning network.


In addition, increasing contacts with relevant people will help you build a reliable personal learning network. Build a thematic learning community on one of social media you want to engage a campaign, such as Twitter. Members can be the friends you made on Twitter. Establish trust with others and use your PLNs to help or answer questions about relevant topics and contents in this thematic learning community or in L&D community. By cooperating with others to solve problems or answering their questions, you can build deep contact and trust with them. Building deep contact with other individuals can consolidate your personal learning network and make it dynamic, reliable, and participatory.


Furthermore, actively sharing useful industry-related or topic-related resources on the social media. Sharing resources can also help you find some like-minded partners in the same industry, who can jointly lead social media campaigns on the following topics and expand your personal network teams. As more and more similar industry peers join in, they can provide with various insightful ideas, which can enrich this social media activity and increase its reliability.


In conclusion, you can take advantage of the healthy relationship in your PLN to promote the growth of your PLN by actively participating in related industry or theme social networking activities, increasing connections and trust with other peers and expanding your personal learning network teams. Use social media to expand and strengthen your PLNs. Establishing a dynamic, reliable and participatory PLN plays a vital role in engaging in a social media campaign in the future.

Reference
Woods, B. (2013). “Building your own PLN: seeking new insights and ideas? Expand your personal learning network.” T+D, vol. 67, no. 11, Nov. 2013, pp. 70+. Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A348998538/ITBC?u=uvictoria&sid=summon&xid=1010abdf.