The Social Organization

Mzinga's Product Team is Growing...Looking for a Few Fun People

Know anyone with a lot of energy and talent who wants to join Mzinga's product team and help keep the boat afloat?  And, yes, it means that special person would get to work with people like me (@rhappe), @dwilkinsnh, @DJDiva5, @jstorerj, @astrout, and @Alexa - aren't you excited already? 

But, wait...there's more!

Looking for:  an individual with energy, enthusiasm, a strong work ethic, sense of humor, analytic skills, creativity, maturity, competitive spirit & social skills

To: design product interfaces and workflows, brainstorm, herd cats, wrangle tigers, and be a product champion

Who knows something about: Software, design, social media, and business

And can: design user interfaces and workflows, diagram information flows, design graphical elements, communicate clearly and compellingly, negotiate, and write product specs

OR

Can: Understand user needs and their environments, diagram information flows, translate workflows into logical product specs, communicate clearly and compellingly, and negotiate with some degree of finesse

Extra credit for being passionate and a tad quirky... because we are too!

Interested? Drop a note here, find us on Twitter...get us interested and we may just ask for your resume!

Can Communities Focus?

After years of working in various size companies, one thing that I am struck by how immensely difficult it is to maintain focus.  It is very difficult to keep two people on the same page, let alone hundreds or thousands of people.  To combat this, companies organize themselves into a decision-making and responsibility hierarchy.  One thing I wonder is that in a community environment, where there is even less ability to directly motivate members, is it even more difficult to maintain focus?  And if it is, how does a corporate entity who wants to incorporate communities gain traction in any one direction?

I go back and forth on this answer...and I think this is one of the most difficult issues to grapple with as a profit-driven entity.  And it is why structured content will not go away - and neither will organizational process and structure (sorry to the social media activists who may believe that you really don't need formal information structures). Because businesses need to have decision-making and investment categories, they will necessarily need structure around information and content. Add to that financial and regulatory constraints and businesses will never get away from a top down structure.  The question is - how do you incorporate user generated information into that structure...and how do you allow individuals to add structure to content as appropriate rather than forcing it on them?  User-generated conversations are immensely empowering and motivating because individuals can participate in topics about which they are passionate. The productivity and value gains generated from that type of activity are huge but to take advantage of them, they must be transitioned into the corporate structure that can take advantage of the opportunities.

I do think some communities can focus - if the values of the community are strongly felt by each member. In that case, only people who are like-minded opt in to begin with and that is certainly a model that some companies can emulate but in my experience, most companies do not espouse and act on a strong articulated value set in a way that is conducive to enabling focus and a community-based structure. There are a few Craigslist, Zappos, W.L. Gore

What do you think?  Will there be more community-based companies? Is structured content important? How important is it to link structured content to unstructured content?

Picture by: pietroizzo

Looking for Excellent Communication Skills...

What does that mean?  Throughout my career I've had an issue in that I've been highly valued by my work colleagues but I don't feel like I really know anything more (and sometimes a lot less) than they do about a domain of knowledge.  Over the years it has slowly become apparent that what I can contribute that is really valuable, and more difficult to find than really recognized, is that I have excellent communication skills.  Almost every job description has 'excellent communication skills' listed as a needed qualification and yet....it is really not at all clear what differentiates good communication skills from excellent communication skills.

So, here is my attempt to try and articulate what that means.  Good communication skills - what I would consider the basics needed to be a good employee - are the following:

• Ability to put together a sentence with a decent grammatical structure.
• Ability to verbally describe something such that it does not leave others confused.
• Ability to have a friendly conversation and be engaged with the other person (rather than staring at the floor, the ceiling, etc.)
• Ability to structure a document (argument) in an understandable, easy to absorb way.

What makes great communications skills?

• Passion and enthusiasm for the topic
• Genuine interest in other people and understanding them
• Sensitivity to understand the emotional subtext of a conversation
• Ability to help others clarify and structure their perspective in a way that results in an actionable conclusion
• Ability to parse apart actionable issues from interaction-related issues and re-focus the conversation on the actionable issues.
• Ability to make others feel positive about an interaction (this often involves humor)
• Understanding of how to provide a face-saving/ego-saving ways for another to exit an argument so that when you change someone's mind, they feel like they contributed to the final outcome too
• Ability to structure arguments (and therefore documents, presentations, and conversations) in logical, succinct, simple ways
• Ability to simplify and use analogs to help people understand complex issues or arguments
• Ability to synthesize information from a variety of sources to draw conclusions regarding how to address issues based on context, logic, emotion, and power dynamics

There are probably more factors... these skills overlap with leadership skills but I wish people would stop asking for 'excellent communication skills' because that, ironically, doesn't mean anything.

P.S. Is it ironic that I have good communication skills and crappy spelling?  Readers think so - thanks to some kind editors who corrected an error.

Crowdsourcing to Get a Great Strategy Sketch

Mzinga's CEO, Rick Faulk, gave the Mzinga team an interesting challenge recently.  He asked everyone in the company to draw the Mzinga strategy on the back of a napkin and announced some good rewards for the best.  To inspire us, Rick pointed us to the book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures which is a great read about clarifying arguements with relatively simple drawings. Examples of other companies going through this exercise can be found at Fast Company.

While this contest is fun and gets everyone to really think about what we are trying to do and articulate it in a way everyone can understand it, it also addresses a significant tactical problem. Firstly, too much experience with Powerpoint can lead to some complicated slideware. Working with a smaller group of us, this is the result:

Now, don't get me worng, I think this is a great slide that is pretty comprehensive...but it really doesn't have much of an emotional connection - and doesn't make me feel why this is important. And one thing that I think is really important is that Mzinga is structured in a way and invests in ways that are geared to make our customers as successful as possible. The above Powerpoint doesn't really convey that passion or focus.

So... being a good crowdsourcing enthusiast, I shot out a note to my Twitter pals (can I submit the best of the sketches that my social network does?!?!?) about the contest and in quick order, Tom Humbarger took the bait.  And without the benefit of the slide above, he came up with a brilliant submission:

This blew me away because it incorporated so much of what Mzinga tries to get across - and how we go about supporting that vision.

So, Tom has raised the level of play....now I need to go figure out how to improve on that.  Want to play too? You can either post your version on a blog and add the link to the comments below or send it to me at rachel at mzinga.com

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!