The Social Organization

Do Enterprises Have the Patience to Develop Communities?

Communications, expectations, and business seem to move faster than ever these days. With the constant buzz of the Blackberry, a continuous stream of Tweets, and in incessant interruption of IMs our attention spans have dwindled even more. Our collective attention and patience is a dwindling resource. Yet, community dynamics still require a long-term view. Communities – and I don't mean flash mobs, groups of 10 people, or event attendees because those are not communities – take time to develop and flourish. Measuring communities based on quarterly earnings calendars is a bad way to go but most businesses are focused on short term performance. We are under such intense pressure to show results that we often abort efforts that play out over longer periods.

This is precisely why I think many companies will fail. The benefits of robust communities to a business are enormous and those tantalizing benefits will lead many companies to try to adopt a community strategy. How do we protect community efforts while they are in the maturation stage? How to we measure maturing communities in such a way that we don't set un-achievable expectations that then lead to executive disappointment? How do we keep executives interested and engaged while communities are maturing and not yet performing?

There are certainly ways to encourage faster community maturity. Creating aggressive content strategies and adoption campaigns certainly helps. Having a constituency that is already familiar with social media tools is also helpful. Regardless of adoption and tool use robust communities require community leaders (not just sponsors), rich interactions between members, and a collective sense of the community as a whole. Those subtle characteristics cannot be manufactured in any other way but to have the community develop those traits organically over time.

Communities are one of the hardest types of organizations to launch, develop, and sustain. Two years is a reasonable ramp period and growth comes in fits and starts – metrics have to change over time too. I suggest the following:

Phase 1 (0-12 months): New members, pageviews, ratings, comments

Phase 2 (12-24 months): UGC, posts/user, visits/user/month, % of active members

Phase 3 (24 months +): Activity of community leaders, initiatives/ideas generated, ROI/value measures

Do companies have the patience to wait 2+ years to see value…I'm not sure that most do – what do you think?

The New Era of Management by Committee

"Management by Committee" has a lousy image.  It connotes trying to herd cats - convincing one person, than another, than another - only to have to re-convince the first person later because they caucused with the other side while you were lobbying everyone else.  That process is time consuming, fraught with risk, and often hard to really get at what people want. In Washington D.C. where Congress is the best example of Management by Committee the process often turns into something more about power and politics than about solving the problem at hand. It has a lot of negative side affects - it is time consuming, concentrates power in the hands of a few by necessity, lends itself to bargaining, and is very opaque.  This is not how we want to manage our corporations - and it's probably not really how we want to manage government either but it is, or has been, the only way to democratically run government so we put up with it. 

Social software changes this paradigm:

• All conversations and buy-in from individuals can be transparent
• A much broader group can participate in the debate
• Polling can be done regularly and almost instantly
• Conversational persistence allows for asynchronous participation
• Low barrier to participation - some people can argue and write original commentary while others can organize supporting information and others can rate or comment - making participation in the conversation open to more voices and personalities

All of these qualities allow a broader group to participate in decision-making without making it exponentially more difficult.  The challenge is that it will change the equilibrium of who has power and who controls information.  Existing power structures are not likely to give in to the new model unless they feel passionately that ceding control in favor of including more voices is the right thing to do. And thus the challenge of deploying social software in organizations - regardless of how narrow the effort, it changes the balance of power which can be very exciting but also very unsettling.

Now if we could only show Congress how to more effectively include everyone in their debates....

Photo credit: Library of Congress via pingnews

Executive Blogs Don't Need to be Difficult

 When I meet with executives I often ask if they blog and the answer is often no - followed by a variety of reasons, some valid, some questionable. But one thing is often true: blogging can take a lot of time. Some executives get around this by having someone in their communications group write their blog posts.  Not really ideal and probably less than authentic.

Jeff Schick - IBM's VP of Social Computing - has come up with an ingenious solution. He blogs internally to his team but his posts are simply his daily schedule (most of it anyway) followed by a couple of lines about his impression of the meetings or the outcomes.  This gets him out of the endless cycle of "What am I going to write about today" and gives his team some interesting reading.

I like this approach for two reasons: One - what a great tacit training tool.  Ambitious employees who want to move up have a great way of seeing what an executive really does all day and of understanding what they might want to start paying attention to within the company.  Two - large teams often rarely see their executives and have no idea what they are doing until they show up, ask some questions, and go away again. That can lead to a lot of speculation and even resentment if employees feel like they can't get the attention they need to solve problems.  Jeff admitted that since he started publishing his schedule publicly he actually now gets sympathy from many people on his team.  That sympathy helps a lot when you've got to turn around and ask the team to do something hard.

Simple. Brilliant. Easy.  I like it.

Flickr image by Arthaey

Twitter's Transformative Effect on Conferences

I've gone to a lot of enterprise/technology conferences in the last 15 years - and even developed and managed a few. It has always been a somewhat numbing series of presentations, demos, meetings and new faces. If I was really well organized, I had a series of specific meetings lined up but...let's be honest, I was rarely that organized.

With Twitter things have changed a lot - from enabling spontaneous organization (is that possible?!?) to allowing me to participate in presentations without disrupting them.  Here are various examples of how I've seen Twitter transform events:

• Creating demand for a particular event - when people raise their hands and tell each other that they will be at an event, it attracts more people
• Sharing events with a broader audience through hashtags like #C20 and #E20 and photo streams like this one from David Terrar (great conversationalist BTW - even when jet-lagged!)
• Spontaneously planning events like @stevemann did with the Enterprise 2.0 Mayhem dinner which brought together big software company execs, bloggers, interested observers, PR, and consultants all of whom are interested in enterprise social media - great fun and very interesting.
• Finding people at big events 'hey - I'm near the Starbucks, where are you?'
• Audience participation - while I'm not in favor of trash talking during presentations - Twitter allows me to add my perspective to what is being presented and that keeps me more engaged than just sitting and listening - even if no one reads it.
• Meeting 'old' Twitter friends in person and meeting new people in person and continuing the relationship on Twitter

How else have you used Twitter to enhance your event experience?

SAP Video on BPX Community

Not quite as exciting as seeing Coke and Mentos exploding but good video profiling members of SAP's PBX community.  For highly skilled knowledge workers that are often somewhat isolated in their own organizations, like many business process professionals are, it is critical to be able to reach out and collaborate with others who have similar issues.  And it servers multiple purposes, making its value pretty effective:

• It allows individuals to grow and develop - and possibly find their next gig
• It allows companies to 'learn' in a way they cannot in their own echo chamber
• It gives services firms a platform to demonstrate their knowledge

It's not Whack-A-Mole

Good business people are problem solvers.  We like to identify an issue, figure out how to it could be better addressed, and fix it quickly so we can move on to the next problem.  Communities come up with plenty of problems, issues, and concerns and there is not time in life to address all of them.  This leads to a couple of things:

- Good business people understand the river of issues that a community could come up with and know that they can't address them all so they would prefer not to open up the floodgates at all.

- The first instinct of many business people is to address and try to fix all the problems that flow in from communities - kind of like Whack-A-Mole - leading to exhaustion on the part of those employees who do try to fix every problem and some very unreal expectations on the part of members of the community.

The result is analogous to using a hammer on a pin - it doesn't work and it breaks things in the process.

What to do then?  You already have a community if you are in business (whether or not you've provided a space for them to congregate online) so forget ignoring the problem. But businesses are used to having the cost of raising an issue as their filtering mechanism...which isn't necessarily good because as a business you then address the issues of your loudest customers, not necessarily your best. So better to get it all out there in the open and vet everything.

However, don't treat a community the same way you do a bug list. Good community facilitation is all about being a bit Zen in regards to flare ups on the part of the community.  Most community flare ups, if left alone, will burn out. Some will simmer. Some will spark a fire.  The art is understanding which issues are core to the business (i.e. the case of the Dell batteries catching on fire in 2006), which are tangential, and which represent big opportunities that shouldn't be ignored.

Communities have a cadence that is quite different than most business activities.  They meander, morph, and change in unexpected ways.  Those managing communities will have more influence on them if they spend most of their time participating and only occasionally stepping in to mediate an issue. And yes, it is OK to not step in a solve every issue - and in fact, do so at the peril of community members becoming passive and expecting problems to be solved for them.

The biggest question is: Do businesses have the patience and personality to let communities meander?  For most it will require a big cultural shift.  But remember, it is not Whack-A-Mole.

photo by: blurradial