The Social Organization

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!

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