The Social Organization

Community Velocity: A Metric for Measurement

I've been thinking a lot lately about how a community owner can measure how well they are doing - both against their own past performance and against others.  That requires one to track over time the things that are important indicators of community robustness but it also requires a way to normalize for different sizes of communities.  I also wanted to make sure the metric didn't require anything too esoteric or complicated since most community managers are still trying to figure out what the basic measurements mean for them and really complex metrics tend not to be understood and therefore, not used.

So here is my first stab at this - I've calculated this against the actuals of a few communities that are wildly different in size but would love to hear from others whether is works for them as well.

The inputs:

• Total members for a given month
• Total active members for a month
• Total posts (this can be a blog post, a wiki post, a discussion item, a link) for a month
• Total addressable market (how many members would you have if everyone was in the community - this will be a rough estimate)

The Community Velocity Metric:

• ((% of active members * # posts/per member/period) + total members ) / TAM

By including both active members and posts/per member/period you can account for everyone that participates but also your very active contributors since it is important that more people contribute but equally important that new content (no matter who contributes it) is flowing into the community.

By putting the total addressable market in the denominator and total current members in the numerator the metric normalizes across different size communities but it also gives the community increasing credit as it grows closer to the TAM. 

Results for me tended to start at 0.001 - 0.01 in the early stages of a community and reach the 0.3 - 0.4 area for very robust communities.

Thoughts?  What am I missing or calculating incorrectly?

Upcoming Events

I'm looking forward to two upcoming events, both of which I'll be participating in:

Enterprise 2.0 in June - I'm on the micro-blogging panel with Dennis Howlett, Basker Roy, Chris Brogan, and Laura Fitton on Thursday morning.  Should be a lot of fun and a great set of perspectives.

Gilbane SF - Always a good set up speakers and attendees.  I'll be on a panel, presenting, and running a workshop that will address building a social media roadmap.

Please let me know if you are attending either event - would love to catch up with as many people as possible.

Judgment and Lessons from Jury Duty

Like most American citizens, I was called to jury duty and I really enjoy the opportunity to participate in democracy.  I think it is amazing that as a society we have decided that a group of professional judges should not have the final voice on whether a suspect is guilty or innocent.  Instead we collectively trust a randomly selected group of individuals from all walks of life.  When you think about it, it is really amazing - we take the truckers, the school teachers, the convenience store employees, the naturalized citizens, the lawyers, the doctors, and the farmers and throw them in a room together to decide the fate of another individual.

The first thing we did at jury duty was listen to a senior state judge discuss our responsibilities and while I forget who the judge was, something she said struck me.  She explained that we use the system we do because we need average citizens to provide their judgment in how the law should be applied and that getting that judgment cannot be achieved any other way.

Human judgment.  What a concept. 

Then I think about how we've approach software for so many years. Algorithms...if we just have the right algorithms we can deliver the 'right' results.

But it turns out that, with information, we need judgment to make it 'living' information vs. data. We typically trust information based on our trust in the judgment of its source - whether an individual or an organization run by trusted individuals. And judgment is impossible to achieve without humans. And for years, we've accepted tools that don't incorporate the judgment of our peers, colleagues, and friends.  That is really what 'social' software is all about.

How to start out with enterprise social media

I find presenting to large audiences about enterprise social networking very difficult - there is such a wide range of understanding.  Invariably I get extreme reactions - one set of people for whom the presentation is thought provoking and one set for whom the information is not new.  But there has been a shift in the last six months, as Craig Roth points out.  I agree that we are ready to move on to hearing more statistics and stories about lessons learned as well as discussing how to get from A to Z.

Social media is fundamentally about creating better relationships. We don't lack tools and methods for developing relationships but social media increases the speed at which we can create close relationships and enables the development of relationships formed through other channels. Business - from resolving payment disputes to acquiring companies - require relationships. The better the relationships, the faster business activities can happen. 

Which gets me to how organizations should think about getting started in social media and it, perhaps obviously, goes back to organizational and functional strategy.  What relationships, from an organizational perspective, are mission critical?  What relationships are important but not core? Which relationships may be primarily transactional and could be interchanged?  If you are a holding company that does a lot of M&A, the mission critical relationship may be with investment bankers.  If you are a tier one automotive supplier the critical relationship is with the car manufacturer.  Consumer brands most important relationship is with their customers. Management consulting firms most critical relationship is with their employees. 

So where does a company get started?  Well, where a company wants to end up is clear - enabling those mission critical relationships and functions.  But, starting out it may be worth determining which users within the company are early adopters that can test out various tools and usage models - and those people may or may not be in the mission critical functions but they will help you learn how the tools can be effectively deployed in your organization.  During that pilot, bringing in some of the staff in mission critical areas is very important but those same functions are the ones in which you don't want to have an unsuccessful pilot. So - my advice:  Start with an eager group in a small way and get a pilot going.  Once active, bring in lead users from mission critical functions and get their feedback on the dynamics, tools, and content and how it may need to be different to support their function.  Use the early adopters to act as evangelists and mentors when you start rolling social media tools out in core strategic areas.

But most importantly: those driving the social media efforts - from the project managers to the executives - should be blogging, Twittering, and participating in public social networks to explore for themselves how it works. Like most enterprise initiatives it won't work without public and regular support from the top and with social media, that will require a degree of time and energy.

[photo by teliko82]

Helping Earthquake Survivors in China

I have a very close family friend (she's like an aunt to me) that was born in Chengdu and still has family there. I asked her about local relief efforts that I could donate to and here is part of an email she forwarded from a relative: The purpose for this message is to inform you that the massive relief efforts have been lunched by the Chinese American community in the U. S. for the disaster relief. I am involved very much in this effort. We need your support and help in any ways. For all of you, please keep the victims in your prayers. For those of you who would like to make a contribution, you may make your donation payable to:

1. Support for Sichuan (SFS):
address: 3030 S. Emeral Ave., Chicago, IL 60616 or

2. Chengdu Municipal Foreign Affairs Office. This is my prior employer in China, their information is as follow: Bank Name : China Construction Bank, Sichuan Branch, Chengdu No.1 Sub-branch
Swift Code: PCBCCNBJSCX
Account Name: Chengdu Municipal Foreign Affairs Office
Account No.:5100 1416 1400 5088 3516

Thank you!

Bring me my Wubby, I'm feeling Mooky

No idea what that means?  Most of my good friends would.  Why?  My friends and I make stuff up.  Say 'mooky' out loud and it might become clear to you what it means...you know....when you start getting motion sick, in a boat or a really large American car and maybe you've had too much to eat and the motion has that perfectly sickening wave length that creates a slow oozing motion.  That's mooky. 

What does that have to do with *anything*?!? 

Language creates lock-in.  Language distinguishes people who are 'in' from people who are 'out' - communities in particular create linguistic habits that maintain community history and cohesion.  Linguistic habits are formed but they can't really be created without the help of many community members.  It is also why individuals who can 'translate' between multiple communities are some of the more important people in large organizations - the product managers, the customer service reps, the sales people...and the other catalysts that don't explicitly need to be.

When you create customer or employee networks a measure of success will be when there are unique expressions that having meaning only to a specific community.  It is great to encourage and support some of that but think about how it affects its position in regard to the rest of the organization and how it might affect new members. If you are looking to create a small passionate community to co-develop products having a high degree of unique language will drive cohesion, trust, and attachment.  If you are creating a community for prospects you will want to encourage more translations and less unique terms so that the community discussion (and associated meaning) is transparent to new members.

Community 2.0 Recap

Just got back from Las Vegas and the Community 2.0 conference.  It was one of my favorite types of conferences - big enough to get exposed to new people and ideas but small enough to get to know people, have great conversations, and not get totally overwhelmed.

I had a few agendas; One - to meet some people in person that I had gotten to know either in Twitterville or the Blogosphere. Two - to recruit some people who were willing to give me their community ramp stats so that I can build a model that can be used to simulate community growth based on the effort, content, etc. that is injected...but I need real data to make sure my model has the right assumptions in it.  Three - I wanted to hear more stories from companies who were in the middle of the storm.  On all fronts - I got more than I expected out of the event.

I got to meet Shel Israel who told some wonderful stories about his global neighbourhoods work with SAP. I met Jake McKee who told the Lego Mindstorm story from his perspective as the community manager. I had a great chat with Sean O'Driscoll who is having a lot of fun helping companies figure out their own community strategies.  I had a very interesting dinner with Greg Schneider and John Kembel from HiveLive - John has a product design/IDEO background and great perspective on the space. Got to have a great conversation over lunch with Dan Neely from Networked Insights.  Last night, Mike Walsh from Leverage Software, Dawn Lacallade from Dell, and Rawn Shah from IBM had a great dinner and discussion. In between all of that I talked to some community managers from WebEx, United Airlines, Zappos, Kawanis Club, RSA Conference, SAP, GlobalSpec, Wells Fargo, Verisgn, and Reed Elsevier.

Highlights for me:

• The people that are in this space right now are incredibly interesting, passionate, and fun.  Many people commented that they hope this aspect doesn't change as the market grows.
• While there is a lot of chatter, like my recent forecast confirmed, enterprise communities are happening in all kinds of organizations to address a number of different challenges.
• Perhaps the most revealing moment of the conference was when two different Microsoft people stood up, one to say how community focused his group was while another to say how not community focused her group was but how much she wanted to get there.
• Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh gave a keynote about community and values as Zappos and how that is their brand and they use it to guide all of their decisions.  For me, the vision that he is executing on is part of the reason I am so passionate about this space.  I don't believe we need to compromise and resign ourselves to corporations who treat their employees and customers like widgets with the excuse of expense or distraction.  Tony is showing that you can do the right thing (and some would call it the obvious thing) and build an incredibly successful business doing it.
• Listening to Tony Hsieh and Shel Israel reinforced something I have been thinking for a while which is that storytelling is the most effective way to transfer knowledge - regardless of the topic or context.  Stats, theories, and details are important backup but it is the stories that people remember and it is stories that inspire. 

While those are the highlights there were also many other wonderful presentations and I caught up with many friends - well worth the long flight and dry desert air (I swear I don't ever remember being so dehydrated) More post-conference content is posted at the Community 2.0 Blog

Modeling the Hockey Stick

Social media nirvana usually includes some kind of expectation around getting to a 'hockey stick' adoption curve.  For online services in general it is immensely hard to predict if and when that curve will happen.  But communities are slightly different - especially enterprise communities. Here's why:

- There is a known addressable audience
- It is easier to gauge where there are passionate, engaged individuals
- There is strong existing affinities - even if unevenly distributed
- The topic and scope of discussion is more obvious

Which leads to the question - are there standard models for growth (i.e. slow, moderate, aggressive) given how much content and marketing is injected into the community over time?  I think that there are....I'm just not sure exactly how to build them yet.

Some factors that I believe affect community velocity:

• Size of the total potential user audience
• Jump starting connections by analyzing email and IM transactions and, based on that, recommending 'friends' to new users
• Jump starting profile pages by pulling directory, location, and reporting/team structures from existing enterprise information
• Allowing individuals to customize their profile with their pictures, links to external accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Upcoming, etc.), and other media
• Profiling users for contributing content - Social Media Today does this very well. Replicate this offline or in other venues as well
• Providing online recognition for volume or quality of entries (who doesn't want to be a grand puba?)
• Providing a few compelling ways to  'converse' initially rather than overwhelming users with too much functionality
• Seeding plenty of content so people always get something new
• Provide some structured ways to participate with specific fields/questions so to make people comfortable with expectations - i.e. an idea form with specific questions.
• Email alerts
• Marketing and awareness campaigns
• Make it fun - be tongue and cheek, include some games, ask odd profile questions...

What do you think affects the velocity of community ramp? 

Collaborating? Communing? Conversing? Twittering?

What the heck is it that we do with social media?  In my mind there are a number of things that apply:

- Talking
- Conversing
- Publishing
- Collaborating
- Planning
- Exchanging
- Referencing
- Promoting
- Befriending

I started thinking about collaboration because a colleague - who I had recently shared a story about why Twitter was so powerful - came up to me later and was quite insistent that social media is simply a continuation of where 'Collaborative' technologies leave off.  On one hand I agree - they often are used to further the same goals: link people, disseminate information faster, encourage collaboration (little c).  On the other hand, there are some significant gaps and differences between email and team rooms and social media.

I asked my Twitter friends how collaborating and social media were different and here's what I got in response:

mukund   @rhappe they r all buzzwords :)
TalentSynch   @rhappe Collaboration can happen without social networking/computing but don't think GOOD social networking can thrive w/out collaboration
SamLawrence   @rhappe People think email is collaborating. Social software connotes an open-dialog-driven collaboration.
SamLawrence   @rhappe It's more than nomenclature as you know. :)
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - to me, it feels like collaboration is more of an internal company 'thing' and...
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - ...and that social computing is more of an external, outside the firewall phenomena...they are moving together, but not yet...         
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - maybe I feel collaboration is an internal feature as that is one of the value props that we use at iRise, but it's sharing of work 
jstorerj   @rhappe imho, social computing is just one type of collaboration, limited by the fact that it's confined to occur with a "computing" context
jstorerj   @rhappe agree that collaboration occurs across many different constituencies & existing mental models dictate types of collab that work
stoweboyd   @rhappe I disagree about collaboration as umbrella: it's so rooted in 90s thinking that its best to consider social tools as a new paradigm
vanhoosear   @rhappe on your earlier question, I see collaboration as a subset of social computing
rsims   @rhappe different things. Collaboration doesn't even require a computer and e.g. Twitter is social computing but not collaboration
mibdepot   @rhappe I started saying that social computing must be a subset of Collaboration then wondered which came first the chicken or the egg

It is clearly not very clear what the relationship is between collaboration and social computing.  As buzzwords, Collaboration has connotations that are quite a bit more structured than what people typically mean when they use social media or social computing lingo.  As a word collaboration is simply working with someone else on an initiative...which can be quite small and discrete...and offline. And Social media can simply connote a tool used for dialog/conversation - without collaboration happening at all.

One of the things that I think differentiates the two most dramatically is this: you cannot create a team workspace if a) you don't have a team and b) you don't have an agenda/goal. So much of work is about having an idea (not a project or a goal), discussing its feasibility, prioritizing, and figuring out who should be on the team or how to execute it.  Often you want to pull in people within the organization that you don't actually know personally.  And these ideas can be customer requests, new product ideas, new approaches to a problem, new ways to present your product or service, new people your company should know, and on and on - they touch every department and team in the company.  Where do those conversations happen?  It has to be on an open network that everyone has access to...with information filtering tools to help individuals find relevant conversations, content, and people.

Once ideas become more than a glimmer and have an interested group of people, a goal, and some initial feasibility...well then they can use - either inside the social network or not - a team workspace.

I think I'm with @TalentSynch on this one - collaboration can certainly happen without social media but good enterprise social media efforts cannot thrive without collaboration.

What do you think?