Not long ago, there was a story in the media about a woman whose mother was suffering a debilitating condition for which there was limited information and help in the UK. Her persistent trawling of the internet yielded information from those in other countries with similar experiences, as well as medical expertise and a drug which prolonged the elderly lady’s life. Similarly, an oil company – Exxon – had for 20 years been dogged by the problem of separating frozen oil from water during exploration, but by reaching out over the internet, that problem was solved by a chemist from Illinois who worked in the concrete business. These, and doubtless many other vexing dilemmas have been overcome in recent years due to the remarkable interconnectedness of the worldwide web.

In less than a handful of years, the internet has been the unwitting facilitator of an unprecedented exercise in collaboration. Moreover, the explosion of social networking tools has taken it further, creating a proliferation of discrete communities of interest, driven by their need for information and propelled by their own momentum. The consequence is being felt throughout the world as consumers benefit from the mass empowerment of individuals.

In the US today, patients and care givers are empowering themselves in record numbers when it comes to managing their own health; more than 80 million adults use social media for health-related issues, creating or using content on health blogs, message boards, chat rooms, health communities and patient testimonials. Perhaps not surprisingly, the internet surpassed physicians as the most popular health resource for the first time in 2009.

This is all reflected in the exponential growth of social media; Facebook, though only six years old, is the world’s most popular social site, growing by 105% last year while its ‘micro-blogging’ younger cousin, Twitter, grew by more than 900% in 2009.

All of a sudden, social networking has become less social and a lot more commercial.

Over the last two years, most large companies – and many smaller ones – have developed their own social media policies aimed at leveraging social networking principles to drive businesses. At first, many of these were aimed simply at regulating the amount of time employees spend on Facebook rather than on doing their jobs – or banning it altogether. Meanwhile, when no-one was really looking, social media began to transform the world of work.

Throughout the mainstream media and in the marketplace, business managers keep hearing examples of how social media has provided an effective and low cost means of sharing information with clients and the industry, how it can drive brand awareness, conduct recruitment, exercise damage control, win new clients, increase sales – even become an alternative to their above-the-line marketing costs, so what’s not to like?

As a result, more companies are developing more comprehensive policies – it’s estimated that 75% of Fortune 1000 companies in the US will launch social networking campaigns over the next year. And in a world of global interconnectedness, the UK will surely follow.  Which is all very well but if the business community overlooks social media’s potential to revolutionise staff learning, it could be missing out on its most important trick.

In a recent UK survey conducted by SkillSoft from among a sample of 3,000 learning professionals, an overwhelming 91% believed that social networking principles can be even more useful in a professional environment than a personal one. It also emerged that 84% were already using e-learning at work, suggesting that the concept is already entrenched in the majority of larger workplaces. Taken further, 83% agreed that collaborative online communication, such as that achieved through the social networking principles, have the power to create unprecedented knowledge bases that can empower individuals, entire industries and even society as a whole. Powerful stuff.

Some call it ‘crowd sourcing’; using the power of people-generated knowledge and opinion to arrive at a uniquely powerful set of data. Procter & Gamble do it to canvas the opinions of dog owners about what they want from their petfood provider; Mini did it to help refine its marketing plans prior to introducing a new model; the publisher, Harper Collins even did it by providing readers throughout the world with access to raw manuscripts in a kind of collaborative editing process that resulted in them publishing a best seller.

Collaboration is the key to releasing this new people power. With half of all internet users around the world using social networking, people are now, for the first time, getting – and trusting – information from their peer group, including colleagues and associates, much more freely than from distant ‘experts’ as in the past. Which is why collaborative learning among colleagues in the workplace is starting to become part of our corporate learning future.

The corporate world can now do it by providing their own employees with a vehicle for collaborative learning and unlock their organisation’s inner genius.

E-learning, while providing a remarkably effective, low cost and extremely fast means of delivering staff learning – hence its widespread use throughout the corporate world – the bolting-on of the collaborative element is where magic happens.

By introducing a collaborative module as part of an organisation’s staff learning resources, it's possible to extend the value of trusted, expert information by surrounding it with the knowledge and expertise of its employees. Unlike standalone social networking applications that lack business focus, a tailored collaborative module – like Skillsoft’s InGenious – can build on existing e-learning content to foster serious contributions to the organisation’s knowledge base.

A social learning platform layer like this lets businesses securely empower their employees to find, create and share knowledge assets with their colleagues in a way they’re already doing in their personal lives. It may sound like these tools are about technology but what they’re really about it is human behaviour and how to leverage it for the corporate good.

Building a social-networking style user community in the workplace of a large organisation effectively connects thousands of employees in a forum where they can talk and support one another, solve problems, share ideas, archive solutions and build a whole interconnected culture.

Although research is alerting some – and confirming to others – what they already suspected was happening with social media trends and learning in the workplace, their effect on encouraging collaborative learning in the commercial world has yet to be felt. But given the speed of growth in social media, you can bet that it’s changing already.