Enterprise 2.0 Archives

What Online Communities Will Expose in 2010

January 4, 2010 By Rachel Happe

There is a lot of chatter in social media and online community circles about how social initiatives lead to increased transparency – and some of that is definitely true. Customers and the public can find out a lot more about what others think about a company’s products and service than ever before. However, I don’t think it will miraculously make companies share their planing and decision-making processes with the world because those processes are quite messy and not always fair or well-articulated. In fact, it’s not ideal to share much of that information out of context because it only serves to confuse so it’s entirely appropriate that not everything is shared in real-time.

There is, however, one thing that online initiatives expose reliably once they gain momentum: business and operational inconsistencies. I’ve spoken with a number of companies who have a hard time identifying where they should start with social media or what their goals should be. To me, this is often an indication that corporate or departmental strategies and goals are not well clarified and articulated because they should be the drivers of any social media or community initiative. Unclear strategies and goals are not social media problems. But business issues will be exacerbated by and exposed using social media. That can be a good thing – it can force the organization to grapple with the bigger strategic or operational issues – but if it’s not recognized for what it is, social media initiatives can give businesses some surprises they were not expecting in the form of confusion over who ‘owns’ the relationships, who has the ‘right’ to say certain things, and internal rivalries between functional groups – not to mention confused customers or employees.

Social media execution is often in a bit of a bubble – either handled by a small number of individuals internally or outsourced to a marketing agency. The market is starting to see how this is an insufficient model because of the business and operational issues it brings up but far too often, social initiatives are not given allocated senior business oversight. Without a senior champion – who has the time and resources to actually solve strategic and operational issues – social media will increasingly become a venue for frustration for many people within the organization and burn-out on the part of social media practitioners who spend their time seeing issues but who have no avenue to solve the underlying business problems they expose.

My bet is that 2010 will bring a lot more executive attention to social media and online community. The companies that will excel at social initiatives will be those that recognize how linked it is to their core strategies – and be willing to spend the time, money, and resources to ensure ‘social’ is not an isolated activity but a core strategic competency. It’s not an easy or cheap task and because of that, it will start to separate the market between those who see social as a driver for differentiation and competitiveness and those that dabble because they think they ‘should’. A side effect of this will be that those practitioners who now have some experience will change organizations and roles as demand for their experience increases and they better understand which companies are serious and which are dabbling. If you are a practitioner, it’s a good time to assess how realistic and serious your organization is, whether there is progress to be made or whether you are being asked to be a band-aid for business ills that are far beyond the scope of ‘social’ without the means to address them. It’s also a good time to read some basic business strategy books by Michael Porter or Clayton Christensen or newer additions like Linked and Information Rules. As with most operational disciplines, success is much more predicated on a realistic assessment of your organization, its limitations and its opportunities than on idealistic plans. January is a good time to ask:

What do you want to get out of this year?
What does your organization want you do to this year?
What is realistic to expect for this year?
If the above answers don’t line up, what’s possible and acceptable to change so that they do?

Conversations with Community Managers – Stewart Mader

October 22, 2009 By Jim Storer

Rachel sat down with Stewart Mader (blog/Twitter), the author of Wikipatterns and a recognized expert on technology adoption, to talk about the concept of social software pilots.

Initially, Michael Idinopulos wrote a post called “Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot” which sparked quite a conversation in the blogosphere. In this Quick Chat, Rachel and Stewart explore how internal workflows are evolving, the changing definition of “content ownership” and why companies should consider removing the term “pilot” from their social software and community initiatives.

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Thoughts on the Emerging Discipline of Community Management

October 1, 2009 By Rachel Happe

Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett – both well known and respected enterprise IT voices and ZDNet bloggers – have recently highlighted community management as an important piece of corporate evolution. Dion’s piece, Community Management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts, brings up a number of great points:

The critical nature of the role itself
The tension between managing what a community wants and what the sponsoring business wants
The fact that community management is a ‘Jack of All Trades’ position
A recognition that if community management resources exist, they are often overwhelmed

I, for one, am glad to see the E2.0 conversation and the conversation around community management start to converge. For too long, the discussion of online community management has been mostly focused on customer communities and E2.0 has been largely focused on the tool sets. What we’ve found is that after implementation, the tools are not the primary focus for community managers who are concerned with driving activity, connection, conversation, and conversion. The focus shifts to attracting and engaging the members, building programming and content, measuring & reporting, evangelizing, negotiating with the community and with internal management, and a lot of other tactical details that have little to do with the technical architecture of the solution (although that does have significant impact on how and how easy it is to engage).

Dennis moves the conversation on to the people piece of the equation in “The burnout risks for E2.0 community managers” and adds some important considerations which strike me an complementary, not contradictory, to Dion’s post. He identifies the following hurdles:

Cultural change management
The importance of leadership
Creating community management roles that are feasible for a single individual
The power dynamics between internal and external influencers and associated issues
Managing and accounting for the altruistic nature of community participation

Dennis’ perspective is more nuanced and having spoken to him about this post, it’s clear to me that he is talking about more sophisticated community management challenges than most organizations have achieved yet but marries well with what we see evolving as companies mature their community initiatives (see my presentation on this: The Powers & Perils of Online Communities). In large part, Dennis is right in that our large organizations are learning about how to navigate control and power dynamics at every step of the community management process. Giving up control and ceding it to un-affiliated third parties has some enormous benefits but also significant risks to the current status quo. One of the hardest things for large organizations to do is to change. One of the benefits of communities is that they force change so that companies can adapt – critical in today’s world but really, really hard in reality because of vested infrastructure, customers, revenue streams, and the people who manage them.

We are really just beginning to understand the maturity paths for companies that wish to use communities for business leverage. It’s both an exciting and uncertain time. That is often coupled with community management organizations that aren’t necessarily seen as strategic but who are starting to dramatically change how business is done for their companies. That mis-match is making it very stressful for the community managers themselves because they hear daily what customers/employees/partners want but don’t often have the strategic leverage to change the organization.

Those of us passionate about community management see a better way to do business, at a fundamental level, but have a long way to go in terms of exploring what that means from a tactical perspective. We must help organizations by providing roadmaps and guideposts regarding how to evolve in ways that are not completely disruptive to current operations. We’ve published the Community Maturity Model in hopes it will help organizations think about this community evolution and we hope we can be part of pushing that conversation forward.