I’m finishing off our presentation for the eLearning Guild’s Instructional Design Symposium. One thing I’m doing is explaining what EMC does, since I’m presenting to ID folks and not technical folks. Thankfully Polly Pearson (fellow EMC blogger) got some slides to me that are turning out to be very helpful!

As I’m adding the slides in, I can’t help but think about the Analysis part of ID. We write training for a very wide range of audiences. My team usually seperates this into three big audiences:

• Internal
• Partners
• Customers

We usually break those big audiences down by role: support folks, implementers, pre-sales, etc. But when I think about *how* the products we’re producing training for are used, we really have a diverse audience. Our products are used by pharma companies, banks, financial services companies, hospitals and other healthcare, and government agencies just to name a few. How in the world can we do analysis for customers if our products are all about storing, optimizing, managing, and securing information? Its pretty daunting.

How can we make our training relevant to each of these audiences? Right now I think we depend heavily on our instructors for that. They are CTT+ certified, and they know how to poll the class to see what everyone is looking to get from the training. I’m still wondering if that’s enough.

I starting thinking about this because I came across an interesting pharma blog. I used to work for a pharma company, its where I learned all about change control and compliance (nothing like having to fill out 6 change control documents to replace an ailing server…). The blog is called The Pharma Marketing Blog. The author, John Mack, gives an insider view of how tricky social media is for the pharma industry. He talks about FDA influence into what can and cannot be tweeted, and how Adverse Events are keeping the pharma industry from embracing social media.

Lots of stuff you may not have considered if you’re a “social media expert”.

It really is all about your audience….