Assessing Organizational Readiness for Communities

All the hype as well as the overwhelming focus on using social media for outbound marketing can distract companies from really understanding how communities fit into their business processes and operations - and the considerations organizations need to account for before they decide to employ a community strategy.

Here at Mzinga, we have a couple of different assessment frameworks.  The first is a framework for understanding culture and communication styles - this is really to understand how 'WE' a company is at the individual level.  We have a second model too - a WE Corporate Assessment framework that lays out six operational components that will determine where on organizational maturity scale a company is.  the six components are:

• Strategy
• Corporate Structure & Operations
• Culture
• Community Membership
• Tools
• Content

This is not a judgement but rather a way to make sure that your community efforts are operationally aligned so that they will be as successful as possible given where you want to be on the spectrum.  In reality most companies are more ahead in some areas than others but that mis-alignment can hamper success.  For example, if your vision is to use community to reduce support costs and improve customer satisfaction and culturally everyone is supportive but you haven't budgeted anything for content development or moderation...you may end up with a pretty sparse community.

Something to think about as you consider either deploying or re-engergizing your community efforts.  Using communities can bring great rewards but they are not free or cheap to deploy and sustain.  For more information about what it means to be WE, see: http://www.wearesmarter.org

Feel free to use the graphic above but please credit Mzinga!

Comments

[Linda Sherman]

I followed you here from your comment on Tom Humbarger's crowd sourcing post. I am community manager for the soon to be launched singularcity.com (successful single adults in LA to accompany glossy Singular magazine). Are you on Twitter?
@lindasherman

[Samuel]

Hi Rachel, I read and reread this post, printed out the diagram in larger format to understand what your saying. This framework looks really interesting, but I don't get all of it. Could you describe what you mean by 'strategy', 'content', etc in more detail. The short description how to use it, is not descriptive enough for me.

[Hans Henrik Heming]

Hi Rachel

Great post :-)

The WE is an important brick in our understanding here in Wemind - my company - og how we uncover organizations REAL potential.

All the best
Hans