The Social Organization

Lead from the Back

 I recently read Time Magazine's article about Nelson Mandela and his 8 Lessons of Leadership. One in particular stood out for me - Lead from the Back. In communities, this is really the only effective way to lead because participation is voluntary...if you start telling people what to do, they will simply leave. But leading from the back requires a skill set that is very different than what we often think of as leadership - i.e. strong decision-making combined with a strong personality that leads a charge and delegates tasks from the center.

Leading from the back requires the leader to be much quieter, more measured, and to a large degree introspective and patient.  The one thing both types of leaderships styles require is that there is a strong vision of where one wants to end up.  Leading from the front requires the leader to lay out the steps from A to Z and delegate in order to accomplish each step in the right order.  Leadership from behind requires the leader to firmly understand and communicate Z (the end goal) but let the community around them figure out the interim steps to get there.  This has some enormous benefits in that the community takes personal ownership and responsibility for how they get to the goal...and that makes the goal more sustainable in the end - even if the leader departs the scene.  The downside of the model is that the process of getting to the goal may go through a meandering path that has a number of false starts and, because of that, will take longer. Along the way, the leader has to highlight and encourage what is working and facilitate people away from initiatives that are not productive or downright destructive to the end goal.  The leader also had to encourage other leaders that operate in a similar fashion so that each initiative also has a strong vision but distributed ownership and responsibility.

For Nelson Mandela, using this approach has enabled South Africa to peacefully change an entire government and smoothly transition to leadership beyond Mandela himself.  For your organization, there might not be so much riding on how you lead but if you are looking to truly build a sustainable and self-regulating organization that is not dependent on one individual (I know...not in the best interest of most highly paid CEOs...that is how they have justified their outsized pay for so long), I would argue that leading from the back is the only way to do that.

And, after all...cows can't be lead from the front without rings through their noses...why would we expect people to do their best that way either?

Red's - A Community Built Business

I've been on vacation and, frankly, not doing a whole lot of thinking about social media or community.  However, I did eat a lot of lobster and got the experience of going to Red's Eats in Wiscasset, Maine.  It's been ranked by many as the best lobster roll in Maine and after having eaten there I have no evidence to disagree with that assessment...with tail meat spilling over a warm, perfectly toasted roll and all.

But Red's did get me thinking.  It's a family run business and it is housed in little more than a shack on a busy street corner.  We stood in line for over an hour in blazing heat and sun along with many others, some of whom were from as far away as Texas. It is only open part of the year and only from noon on. They do have some friend clams, hot dogs, and other assorted things (the onion rings were great) but really, people go for one thing: the lobster roll.  From what I know, they do no advertising.

So here you have a highly inconvenient restaurant that is hard to find out about (and out of the way), serves a severely limited number of things, and has little ambiance. Yet, it is busier than any other business in town certainly and probably busier than many restaurants in cities like Portland. How do they do it? They focus on doing one thing extremely well, they invested in it for years, and the wider Maine community takes care of the rest. 

So if you are thinking of taking advantage of existing communities to help drive your business...learn from Red's.

1. start by providing the best product/service in your market
2. invest in it for the long run
3. deliver it with a smile

Sounds easy, right? 

Social Media is not Community

I'm finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.  Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content...which is *not* community. For example, ABC allowing people to comment on specific news stories with comments and ratings is not a community. Rating and ranking books on Amazon does not create a community.  I am not suggesting that these things do not have value - they do and it is immense and important - but it is not the same as enabling communities.

Communities have the following characteristics:
- They are continuous, not temporal - this is not to say that people don't drop in and out but there is a core membership that interacts together over a long period of time.
- Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community).
- Communities take on various conversations and activities, led by different members over time - it is not one conversation but many.
- People within communities get to know each other and interact regularly without centralized facilitation and not necessarily in the context of what the community is discussing as a whole.
- Community leaders emerge over time as they continue to take proactive roles in the community and rally other members to their causes. These leaders are community members and they self-select because of their interests - not because they are told to do so...although they can be encouraged to do so.

There are two opportunities for enterprises then. 1 - to use social media to enable conversations and get a better idea of how constituents respond to specific content, initiatives, goals.  This is much easier both to understand and implement. 2 - to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.  Communities have enormous strategic benefits to companies but require considerable investment (in resources, time, and tools) and are difficult to implement because they have a significant impact on business processes.

Right now the market seems to get social media but we still have a long way to go in helping companies understand the value, requirements, and needs of communities.

Mind the Gap: Turning Vision into Reality

Although social media and enterprise social networking is more commonly understood than it was even a year ago, there still exists an enormous gap between where the leading thinkers are and what large organizations can actually achieve in the short term.  This frustrates both the visionaries and those charged with actually implementing social media solutions in the enterprise. 

What's the solution?  Better understanding on both sides.  Going back to business fundamentals; You don't get something for nothing.  Communities that add value to business relationships take the time and effort that any good relationship takes - but multiplied geometrically. 

Visionaries often get frustrated at the pace of change but could be sobered by doing the hard work of building a sustainable, robust community. Those on the ground who often get drawn into all the operational hurdles could very well borrow some of the energy and passion of the visionaries.  It's difficult to walk both lines and maybe it means having two types of community managers - the tactical and the passionate.

Those of us in the industry also need to provide better frameworks, tactical examples, guidelines, templates, and tools that help leverage both the vision and the tactical needs of community building. This is starting to happen as more and more companies tell their stories and connect with each other online.  Here's to all of us who need to continue to really listen to each other so we can help narrow the gap.

Photo by: Grumbler %-|

Leaving IDC...Joining Mzinga

While it has been in the works for a bit, leaving IDC was difficult.  I am leaving behind some incredibly smart and interesting colleagues (and good friends) in IDC's Digital Marketplace team (Sue Feldman, Danielle Levitas, Karsten Weide, and Caroline Dangson).  I've also been fortunate enough to have covered the emerging market of enterprise social media which brought together my background as a management consultant, product manager, marketer, and a builder of an early online social network with the experience of watching my parents - both congregational ministers - expertly facilitate very challenging communities over decades. While at IDC I've gotten to meet more interesting people than I could mention here and see a huge array of technology and corporate innovation.  It has been a wonderful experience.

Alas, because of my operational experience, I am too antsy to remain on the sidelines as an analyst. I want to dig in a little more, work with companies to get their social media efforts off the ground successfully, and help develop hardened best practices and measurement guidelines.  As an analyst I can report on trends but I can't really understand the ins and outs what companies struggle with on a day to day basis.

Mzinga is one of the most interesting companies emerging in the social media market and there are some things that make them a particularly good fit for me:

• The Mzinga executive team (Rick, Barry, Karen, Dan, Aaron, and others) and I share a similar vision about how social media will transform business operations.
• The aforementioned team - and everyone else that I've met there - is wicked smarht (as we say in Boston), down to earth, and generally great individuals.  This is more difficult to come by in companies than might be imagined.
• Mzinga has the vision, resources, customers, employees, and executives to be *the* enterprise social media vendor.  No one can predict what will happen in the market but I'm excited to join a team that I believe has a shot at going big.
• Mzinga is giving me the opportunity to help start a strategic consulting group - one of the things I have seen as lacking across the market in a major way.  Individuals like Jake McKee and Sean O'Driscoll are doing valiant jobs in this regard but as individual consultants.  I think that having services ranging from implementation to community moderation to strategic services in this market is key to helping customers succeed and another smart move by Mzinga.

So - I am looking forward to the Thursday BBQs in Burlington and helping companies better understand how to approach social media, social networking, and developing communities.  And I'm really looking forward to working with the gang at Mzinga!