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I have never heard of this myself! It would certainly be an 'eye opener' and I would like to know more it, either from you or if you have or know of a website that might go over the methods of adding chlorine and/or why one should do so.
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I'm sure there are a ton of google hits that'll pop up under shock chlorination.
The actual procedure is fairly simple. Take the top off the well, pour in chlorine, liquid, tablet or a combination. Circulate the water by running a garden hose back to the well until you get a strong chlrine smell coming out of the water from the hose. I also try to move the hose around to wash down all the inside walls above the water level at the same time, then I spray down the well cap and sometimes the general area of the well itself.
Then I go to the house and run water through evry place I can get water to run until I smell chlorine strongly. Sinks, toilets, washer/dryer hookups,, ice makers, dishwashers, outside spikets, etc. It takes a little longer to get the hot water side done since the tank has to fill first and replace all the water stored in it.
Once all this is accomplished let everything sit for 24-48 hours. Vacation time or a weekend getaway is a good time. If you can't leave flushing a toilet occasionally shouldn't extract enough of the chlorinated water from a well to hurt anything.
On my parents house they have a ground water heat pump so the procedure also involved chlorinating the discharge well, running the heat on high long enough to flush chlorine through those lines then shutting the heat off during the time period so the heat pump wouldn't extract all the chlorine from the well prematurely.
As for the why part, it's to kill off anything that could be contaminating the water supply including coliforms and e choli. They usually don't do the e choli test unless you flunk the total coliform test since e chloi is a type of coliform bacteria. I believe you've probably noticed the deaths and sicknesses from e choli all over the news recently from the spinach episode where one farm was watering with contaminated water to the Taco Bell thing a couple weeks ago. In additon, when servicing wells and house hold water lines the plumbers hands are very rarely sterile. Many plumbers still drag your pump and pipes out onto the ground by hand where they lay in contact with whatever's on the ground including, leaves, mud, grass squirrel droppings, dog poo and who knows what else. I finally got my father to drop $4,000 on a motorized reel unit we now use to assemble and drop pumps and pipes into wells as well as for winding them up when extracting so as to avoid having to lay wet pipes on the ground. Saves my back and arms a lot of work also. In the old days I've had 600' runs of pipe and wire disappear around corners and crossing neighbors yards trying to find some distance to stretch them out and tape them together.
