The Social Organization

Thinking about Deaths, Endings, & Beginnings

My husband is in the news business - in New England - which means we were up early this morning on news that Senator Kennedy had passed. Interestingly he passed away late last night, on the anniversary of the death of my father from the same type of cancer.  Both were great men - Sen. Kennedy nationally and my father on a local level - and also flawed men (like us all - some just hide it better than others). It's a sad day. Whether you like his politics or not, Senator Kennedy cared deeply about ensuring everyone in our society had access and opportunity and spent his life dedicated to making our society a better place.

I've given a lot of thought to the process of dying over the years mostly thanks to the way my father handled his own mortality. While he underwent treatment, when it was clear that he had an aggressive form of cancer, he accepted that gracefully and spent the limited time he did have on the business of life and relationships, not on fighting.  He died gently and with dignity at home. Even in that final stage, he taught me about how to end things - and that sometimes we need to accept the end so that it is dignified and allows for those left behind to move on securely, if sadly.   After his death, I also realized some other things:

• By knowing him, we could continue to know him and 'be' with him - I still wonder what he would think about some things but in many situations, I'm pretty sure I know and that knowledge can still make me smile or cause me frustration. Ending something doesn't mean it has to leave you.
• My father lives on through the lives of people he knew.  He continues to have influence over how many people think and act - and with that, his life's work continues.
• The end of his day-to-day influence, which was strong, has given me the space and opportunity to become my own person. Part of that means that I've made choices that he may not have made for me, but are good choices for me - and I may not have made while he was alive because I did not want to face his disappointment or disagreement.
• The vacuum of his death in his community forced people to re-assess what they valued and whether they would step up and fill part of that vacuum. It empowered others.

How does all of this relate to our organizations and how we work together?  Well, I don't think we are particularly good at dealing with the death of a person, an initiative, or an entire organization.  More often than not, we resist the dying and force extreme measures so that we can hold on for just a little longer. The reaction to the suggestion that everyone should have end of life counseling being called 'death panels' is just one of many examples of this.  In our organizations, the problem is even greater. It is really hard to kill a dying business model, an initiative/product to which a few senior people are highly committed but is clearly not working, or indeed to say goodbye to staff that just are not a good fit. The suggestion that we end something is pretty horrifying to many people.

The problem is, we ignore the whole concept of ending things often because we feel it reflects our own failure, but everything ends whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. And because we don't often plan for the end, they are often highly disruptive, prolonged, and aching.  It takes a lot of courage to put an end to things but often the pay-off is huge - it can save time, money, churn, dissonance, confusion, prolonged anxiety - and it allows for the celebration of the thing that is ending, before it has withered to a shell of its former self and people have forgotten its benefits.

I'm going to spend part of my day today thinking about things that I'm doing that may need to end. It will give me the time and space for more productive and interesting things to take their place. It may be sad and it may be hard - but it's critical to evolution.

Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto

The power of communities is so tantalizing - the idea that a large group of people will all work with you to help make your products better, help other customers, and advocate to all of their friends is too intriguing to pass up. There are enough case studies to show that it is, indeed, possible to do this. A vast number of companies are now looking at some form of community to help with their business and I think that is great. If a company is selling a product and service that does not have some passionate fans, I wonder why they are still in business. However, in the quest to build communities there are a lot of pitfalls.  I shared a number at Social Media Breakfast 15 - The Power & Peril of Online Communities and my slides are here.

I want to cover one peril in particular that I'm seeing more often. People are eager to ramp up their communities quickly. This is completely understandable - large companies cannot even put a dent in their marketing with a 100-person community. They are looking for the promise of community which is a geometric growth and ROI curve that is achieved by some very successful communities and networks, looking something like:

In their effort to get there they front load awareness and recruitment into the community and are successful at getting a lot of early views.  A small percent of those who do this strike gold and everyone starts authoring, friending, and discussing things. That typically happens in smaller market niches where participants know a lot of other people already and there is pent up demand for a discussion outlet or a great deal of isolation. Most companies who try this fast scale model end up with curves looking more like this:

Why? Because when everyone comes to the community, no one knows each other and there is no one to introduce them, show them the ropes, and make them feel comfortable - at least not enough other people to help all the new people at the same time. That leads to a very passive experience that can feel like browsing a website. So people don't come back unless they are looking for specific information that is there. The real risk is that once dis-interested, it is even harder to get someone to come back for a second look.

This is where I get to risotto. Risotto is a rich creamy dish that very few people make at home. Why? Because it requires 30 minutes of dedicated time and attention - you can't do much else while you make it. It seems like it shouldn't be that different from other rice - throw it and some water or chicken stock into a pan and let the heat do the work. But risotto doesn't work that way. The short grain rice cannot absorb a lot of water all at once. You have to add a little at a time, wait until it absorbs and add a little more. Once you've done that for a while, you can start adding more and more water with each cycle but only after you have started small.

It's very much like community. A small community can only absorb a small number of new members at a time. Once it is bigger and there are more people that can welcome and absorb new members in a way that acclimates them, recruitment can ramp up. However, if you overwhelm an emergent community you are very likely to have the activity of the community stall out and it will be much harder to get it going again.

The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Starting The Community Roundtable has been a great way to understand better the day to day issues of community managers in a wide array of organizations. There are a few things that come up somewhat regularly:

• Community managers are under pressure to justify what they do to peers and bosses that don't really see or understand what tasks make up their day.
• Some community managers are dealing with the challenge of inspiring participants to author only to see them become unmotivated when they don't receive any comments or activity on their content.
• Almost all the community managers we talk to struggle with ways to maintain or increase engagement.

One thing that more experienced community managers know - and will typically be learned over time by anyone in the role - is that the visible activity of a community is only a very small part of the overall activity of a community. There are a huge number of things that happen in the background, between two individuals, or behind a wall. While over time, this background activity is done by many in the community it typically falls heavily on the community manager during the development and growth phases and include all of the following tasks:

• Back-channeling: Encouraging participants privately to post, comment, and participate.
• Event planning and orchestration: Ensuring that events are successful by getting commitment from the influencers within the community that will bring along everyone else and make for a successful event.
• Posting event documentation and recaps to extend the value of the event and include more members.
• Sending community activity and content to members that have a specific interest in the topic to ensure the members with something of value to add see it.
• Drafting content, discussions, and ideas so that it is easy for members to contribute or share.
• Creating or re-publishing content into different modalities - text, pictures, audio, & video.
• Building relationships with key members of the community to maintain an 'ear to the ground' of what is really going on.
• Intercepting or interceding with members who are acting inappropriately.
• Evangelizing within the sponsoring organization to generate more involvement and/or gain support.
• Gathering and reporting on activity and results.
• Helping to translate and negotiate between organizational and community needs.
• Monitoring discussions and content.
• Brainstorming on activity, content, and ideas that keep community members interested.
• Working with colleagues to build programming that is valuable to them and the community members.

I'm sure there are quite a few more activities that I'm forgetting (please feel free to add any I missed) but the point is this: If you are just looking at public community activity, you are likely seeing a very small percentage of what is actually going on.

This dynamic is critical to keep in mind when thinking about resources and investment needed to manage a community. What may look like a 'part-time' responsibility likely requires much more than that if you want to successfully drive member engagement and growth.  Once a community is more mature and community leaders emerge and take over some of these tasks, the percentage of a community manager's job likely shifts to less back-channeling and evangelism to more time spent working with community leaders and programming. What you see in a successful online community is really only the tip of the iceberg. 

How do you think about, prioritize, and articulate your 'hidden' work?

[this is cross-posted to www.community-roundtable.com]