The Social Organization

Community Management is No Longer a Mystery

Communities have been around since the beginning of time and online communities sprung up very soon after the Internet was developed. Humans have a visceral need to seek out commonality and connect around shared interests - and it is so instinctive that most people cannot articulate how communities come together and thrive. Because of this community management - and prior to that community development - has been seen largely as an art, learned through experience.

One of my goals with The Community Roundtable was to observe and consolidate the practices of community management - and in doing so, make them more explicit and understood. After five years of learning together with our members, and documenting practices in hundreds of reports, we know what the core practices of successful communities are. This is not to say that good community mangers don’t also bring a magical element to the practice, enabling them to connect and orchestrate amazing experiences, but we do know from an operational perspective what kind of management elements are key to successful communities.

Our State of Community Management research this year showed us that of those communities that have the best management practices, 85% of them can measure their value. That suggests that taking a community approach is no longer a gamble and much closer to a sure thing.

Some of the markers of successful community management programs are:

• A multi-tiered advocacy program
• A community management playbook that documents how the organization engages with different constituent groups
• An owned community space and infrastructure
• Metrics that track not just activity but changes in member behavior

Now that our research has matured, we can assess the effectiveness of an organization’s community management system and are rolling out a Community Performance Benchmark. We think that by focusing on the performance of the system, it will enable organizations to produce reliable, scalable business results from a community.

This is the culmination of one of my primary goals when starting The Community Roundtable and I couldn’t be more excited to share it because I believe that a co-creation is the future of organizations - identifying shared goals and then building solutions together. Because of this, the future of all management is community management and it’s a critical strategic competency for organizations to develop.

Learn Community Management From Leading Practitioners

Each year at The Community Roundtable, we publish a report on what we have learned with our members during the previous year. Our members are leading community, social media, and social business practitioners at a wide range of organizations - from the very large to the small and agile. The report is a huge undertaking but we feel it is important to document and consolidate what the leading practitioners know so that we can help the market better understand the discipline of community management.

The State of Community Management 2011 is part research document, part reference document and it helps executives and practitioners:

• Understand the scope and complexity of the community management discipline
• Provide a training resource to new community managers
• Better plan for and support social business and community initiatives
• Improve the management of current social initiatives
• Find inspiration and new approaches to common challenges

This report could not have been developed without the perspectives of TheCR Network members, the insights from experts we have had as guests (follow them via our Twitter list), and the support of the report sponsors: Acquia, Enterprise 2.0, Farland Group, Igloo Software, Moxie Software, Rosetta, and Social Media Today. We have done our best to curate and assemble those perspectives, insights, and support in a way that provides you with a valuable resource. Please, in exchange, consider these individuals and organizations if they offer expertise or tools you need.

Click to view and download the report.

What SXSW Taught Me About Building A Serendipity Engine

I just got back from the annual festival of musicians, geeks, engineers, film makers and, increasingly, marketers.  It is a great stew of people. This is my second trip and I thought that my trip two years ago gave me a pretty good foundation for navigating the event this year. However, like all complex systems it adapts and changes. 

This year was roughly 40% bigger than two years ago. That's a lot of change. I found the serendipity engine that I was so in awe of two years ago was not running at optimal capacity for me this year. It led me to some interesting conclusions:

• Productive serendipity requires boundaries - bigger is not necessarily better
• Serendipity requires unscheduled time by a large percentage of participants
• Serendipity requires aggregation

There was a lot of serendipity at SXSW this year - I looked up from drinks at one point and Ze Frank was standing in front of me. I love his stuff and that was serendipity but not really the productive variety - I'm more of a fan girl than someone who is interested in collaborating. Maybe I should have said hi but I left him in peace and continued the conversation I was having. 

The people that I might more likely collaborate with were harder to find. With more people generally, those specific individuals made up a smaller percentage of the total population. Also because the conference was so large, panels and events were dispersed all over town with few consolidation points.  Lastly and because the industry is growing, people were busy and had packed schedules so there were fewer people with the time and flexibility to mill around.

The social business lessons of SXSW this year was that aggregating a network that is not too small but not too big, giving them a catalyst, and then giving them the free time to mingle are all critical elements to productive serendipity.

That said, I managed to have some fantastic conversations, catch up with old friends, meet new people, and attend some great gatherings - it is no surprise that David Armano and Aaron Strout throw some of the best parties around. Thanks to all of you that made SXSW another great event.

 

Photo by Amancay Maahs

Your Cultural Fingerprint - Van Gogh or Kindergarten Art?

I was speaking with Anne McCrossan of Visceral Business last week about socializing business processes and the cultural change management required to bring a more innovative, humane, and personal way of doing business to life. We were talking about the difficulties in articulating culture that can be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in changing culture. If you cannot describe or articulate what does exist, how can you hope to change it?

Anne mentioned that this challenge of articulating culture was similar to that of art in that you might know a Van Gogh when you see one but it can be hard to describe what it is about a painting that tells you it is a Van Gogh. This idea resonated deeply with me as I've found one of the best ways to help people understand their culture is through art and imagery. Art historians spend years understanding the nuances of artistic expression. However, even amateurs that have seen a number of Van Gogh's pieces can quickly get beyond the 'colorful' adjective and understand that it is the quantity and passion in the brushstroke, the thin black outline of objects inspired by Japanese print making, and the pixelated use of color that identifies Van Gogh's work. Understanding and articulating that allows us to copy it and as we copy it we see more differentiating details.

When we are learning to identify these differences in artistic expression, it is helpful to start with the more pronounced artists - like Van Gogh, Seurat, De Koonig, Pollock and those whose work is very distinct. Once you master those, you can move on to subtler differences found in Eakins, Copley, Degas, Homer, Cassatt and a host of others. The more you can describe and differentiate, the better you can define how one might approach a new painting to achieve a particular outcome. This is almost exactly the same process one needs to go through to understand and change organizational culture.

The question for organizations is this: Can you describe your culture in some detail and do you understand how various dimensions of your culture are affecting business outcomes? Have you purposefully created your culture to support specific outcomes or have you let it evolve as an unstructured group art project where the collection of contributions make no sense as a whole? Do you have a consistent cultural fingerprint that gives everyone who interacts with your organization a consistent expectation?

In a highly connected and inter-networked world, having a consistent fingerprint (many might call this 'brand' but I have always felt like brands have been largely disembodied heads, created by external agencies to be pushed out to the public when they often do not relate to the employees that make up the organization at all... but that is a different post) is critical because it means that there is less confusion, fewer clarifications, and more speed with which things can happen. While kindergarten art projects are charming I'm betting it is not the impression you want to leave with your marketplace - why leave culture to chance either?

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Cross posted from The Community Roundtable blog. If you're interested in learning how your peers in social media and community are facing the challenge of articulating (and changing) their corporate culture, you might be interested in joining TheCR Network. Tell us a little about yourself.

Survey: Assessing Social & Community Maturity

Over the past year at The Community Roundtable, we've been talking with our clients and members about the Community Maturity Model which lays out a high level framework to help organize how to approach either a discrete social initiative or general social business enablement across an enterprise. When we created the framework we did so at a very high level because we felt that there were not enough generally accepted best practices to built it out further at that time. That is changing and as we work with a variety of business we are starting to see commonalities in how these efforts are approached and what artifacts point to various stages of maturity.

While we have some ideas of what social maturity looks like, we would like to have a wider sampling so that we can take the pulse of the market and assess trends across different type of organizations. We will be analyzing and reporting on these results in our annual report, The State of Community Management that will be made available for free. Please help us by filling out our survey and/or sharing the link to it (http://bit.ly/SOCMSurvey) with your network. Thank you!

Social Media ROI - Seeing the Forest for the Trees

There has been a lot of discussion about social media ROI lately - everyone is pushing very hard to figure out how it can be used to make money or reduce costs. Fundamentally we need to start any investment initiative with the goal of making more or spending less so the ROI conversation is very important. However, as an analyst I often had to chuckle because we hear very little from the companies making a lot of money (with high margins) off of social media and online communitities - companies like The Knot, Match.com, and UTest. Why? Those who have figured out the puzzle have no particular need to share their secrets and in most of the examples I know of they are market disruptors, not established brands.

The other reason I shake my head is that the ROI discussion doesn't include the discussion of time frame often enough and that is where the real challenge for companies lie.  In most business use cases that social tools are applied to, the revenue or cost impact is not returned directly. Instead social initiatives require constant investment for a period of time before the returns accumulate.  When they do they can grow quite quickly but if the organization does not understand the investment period required, they can easily cause themselves to fail by being too anxious for the returns to manifest. And this aspect of social media is really, really hard for large organizations to manage, particularly in the marketing and customer support functions. In large part, the business processes, infrastructure, and resources of marketing and support are not set up to support initiatives that have off-set returns. To get around that hurdle, outsourcing seems to be a good choice but that often means a time-bound project where both companies and their vendors push for returns in a relatively short period of time which can result in a long-term negative impact on building a community of advocates.

ROI is important but if the dynamics of social initiatives and how they produce results are not well understood it is quite easy to force failure before you give projects the space and time they need to succeed.

As an analyst who is now running my own business I have been fascinated by how large the marketing ROI really is when social media tools are used effectively but it has also reinforced the fact that the returns are slow to ramp at first and accelerate over time. Judging the results too early would have definitely made the investment look like a failure. 

Selling Community: Getting Stakeholders to the 'Aha' Moment

Whenever we make investments in organizations, we need a business plan that makes financial sense. With social and community initiatives, that is required but often not sufficient. Why? Communities take a long time to gestate and mature before they start to realize their potential - certainly more than a quarter which is how a lot of large organizations are managed these days. Corporations tend to understand long payoff periods for new products but not for changes to business processes so unless expectations are set well in advance, social initiatives which mostly involve process change, can often be judged a failure before they have the chance to succeed. Because of the long investment period required, business sponsors need to have both the business plan and some faith that when mature, the initiatives will pay off. Getting stakeholders to viscerally understand how social processes and tools impact speed and productivity - both for themselves and for the organization - is critical to developing the faith they need to remain supportive throughout a long initial investment period. This understanding is most often created through a series of 'Aha' moments when people grasp for themselves the power of online social environments. Aha moments will happen organically for people who are participating in online networks and communities but it may take a while. I believe there are also ways to orchestrate these moments for people that will get them there faster, if they are inclined and able to understand them. For social business owners, it's critical to understand how this can be achieved for various stakeholders. While the best social leaders do this intuitively, we are only just beginning to see the tactic articulated. I'm planning a session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in November where we challenge a panel of experienced community managers to articulate how they have orchestrated Aha moments for others. In the meantime, I would love to start this conversation and crowdsource your approaches. For me, my Aha moments came fast and furiously when I started using Twitter in 2007. Because of its ease of use and large network, Aha moments seemed to happen faster on Twitter. Here are some of the revelations I had during that time:

• How I was welcomed to the network had a huge impact. Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout) was the person that finally convinced me to join after a few months of hearing less than interesting uses for it ("my mother loves it" etc.). Aaron is a great host and once he convinced me to join, he took it upon himself to make sure I was introduced around. This was critical to finding some immediate value and feeling positive about the experience.
• Getting the attention of influencers through content they found interesting is important. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) was generous in promoting my work and that gave me early exposure to an audience I never would have had otherwise.
• I knew quite a few people that were social thought leaders but until I saw them all chatting with each other, I did not know that they all knew each other. Knowing that made me appreciate just how influential they each were and it was a good way to assess others' influence.
• When watching the network of influential people on Twitter, I could easily spot others that I didn't know that were also in the sub-network (back when Twitter allowed you to see who your friends were chatting with). I 'met' a large number of people this way, all of whom were important to understanding what was happening in the market.
• Knowing most of the thought leaders in the market completely changed the conference experience. At Enterprise 2.0 in the spring of 2008, I met a ton of Twitter connections in person. Instead of standing around at a big industry event looking for people to chat with or walking up blindly to individuals and chatting only to find we had nothing in common, it felt more like a college reunion. This picture of me, Chris Brogon, Loren Feldman, Laura Fitton, and Dennis Howlett taken by Stephen Collins still makes me smile. It was my first time meeting Dennis, Loren, & Stephen and we immediately connected. That conference experience blew my mind because it was such a change from a decade of conference going experience.
• Live tweeting events created much more value around conference content by extending its reach to more people and experiences. I got more out of conferences but I also met many new people because of my (and their) live tweeting.

While those were some of my early Aha moments, I am still having them. Read my previous post on tacit knowledge and communities' critical role in its development into explicit knowledge (which is what I'm attempting to do here - move what I understand tacitly about Aha moments into more explicit examples that can develop into tactics for orchestrating these moments for others). All of these experiences let me really understand how fast and productive social environments could be. Now, I try and encourage these experiences for others. Here are some of the things I do:

• Welcome and make connections for others
• Encourage people to comment on other blogs and blog themselves
• Encourage people to share some of their personal lives in social environments because it makes it much easier for others to engage in conversation, which is a critical first step to having more substantive conversations
• Point out online conversations that I know are interesting to the individual
• Do simple searches on social networks (LinkedIn, Slideshare, Twitter, etc) for topics of interest to the individual and show them how easy it is to find and connect with others who share their interests.
• Show people examples of how others are doing something small well (i.e. x person tweets really well, watch them)

How do you help others get to Aha moments?

[This is cross-posted at The Community Roundtable blog]

Social Media's Pull: People Want Comfort More Than Food

We don't often like to compare ourselves to children or monkeys but the truth is that we're not that different.  As adults, we often hide our needs, desires, and disappointments but when looking to understand the behavior of adults, it is useful to watch children and animals because they have no artifice masking their instincts.  One of the most powerful and heartbreaking experiments ever done was by Harry Harlow on how baby monkeys form attachments and how important comfort was to their existence.  The video below shows that baby monkeys will take comfort over food - in effect starving themselves in order to feel OK.

I can hardly watch the video but the point is that animals and people (we're not biologically all that different after all) will choose something comforting over a more obvious need like food.  To me, this gets at the heart of why the social interactions facilitated by social media and social software can make such a big difference to the individuals that interact with organizations.  Individuals will flock to organizations that offer comfort (personalized attention) even if the 'food' - i.e. salary, product cost, partnering costs - does not make economic sense for the individual. 

For organizations, this has a couple of implications:

• Resources and time spent on effective personalized experiences with employees and customers will see the returns in the form of higher margins, lower operating costs, and increased retention rates.
• The recent conversation about applying business process and integrating 'social' into existing processes should be very carefully pursued.  If the social element becomes just as standardized as current processes, it won't have much impact.  The business processes themselves must become more flexible and adaptable to individuals which is now possible because social software reduces the cost to support that flexibility.

The issue many of us have is responding to requests to quantify how much comfort is enough. In essence, we are being asked to put a dollar amount on feelings. If you have any suggestions on how to do that, I'm all ears. In the absence of being able to do that, each organization will need to experiment (which, I'm sorry to say, will cost some money) and turn the dial up and down until they find what balance of 'comfort' and 'food' works best for them given their unique market and the unique constraints of their organization.

Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Managing social environments is often compared to other organic or natural evolutionary systems because they are complex, emergent, and the daily details are unpredictable even if the outcomes are not.  One of the things that I hear from experienced community and social media managers is that they have well developed judgment regarding when to get involved in a discussion and when to step back and wait. Sue John of British Expats talks about Knowing When to Step Back, Claire Flanagan of CSC talks about 'Return on Ignoring', and I've mentioned it before in my post Wait for it...Emergence Happens.

Why is this waiting so important?  Because it creates the space for creativity and community leadership to emerge and reminds me of a recent post by Peter Bregman on Why I Returned My iPad - important things happen when you leave space for them.  You lose a lot in the process of being 'efficient' and often things that require complex processes require a lot of time to develop. 

For many of us - raised professionally in the age of Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, and the Theory of Constraints - stepping back, sitting around, and just waiting is extremely difficult.  How the heck do you justify that to your boss? Um, "I'm waiting for the results to emerge you see..."

But sometimes, monumental things happen that reinforce why waiting is important.  I recently welcomed a new baby to the world and wow, I had to wait....and ignore a lot of things that could be interpreted as problematic and/or not worth the pay off...and then accept that she did not arrive the way I would have preferred. And while doctors give you what seems to be a very definitive due date, it is up to the baby to decide when it is fully ready to enter the world. All the milestones leading up to that event can't tell you much about when, exactly, to expect it - only that it will happen.  The outcome is predictable - you will get an amazing little person - but the details of how you will get to that point are quite a bit murkier and you really just need to wait and see. The better you wait, the less stress-inducing hormones you will produce and share and the more likely that both you and the baby will be calm and happy.  Now that I've survived the waiting for her arrival, it's on to more incremental care and feeding - and waiting - knowing that one day it leads to a healthy and happy toddler/child/adolescent/adult but in the short term hard to predict when and how she will reach each milestone along the way.  Understanding that those small surprise successes are most of the joy and pay-off is as important in managing social initiatives as they are in parenting. 

One of the things that I love the most in my work as a community manager at The Community Roundtable is watching our members 'get it' and understand how social methods can be applied to their specific environments and processes. In most cases, 'getting it' is a process not a discrete event and comes from multiple interactions with peers, experts, guides, and new tools. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to account for the investment required to get those complex outcomes within the constraints of modern management and accounting structures.  Protecting that development and evolutionary time is critical.  It's worth thinking about when considering goals, budgets, and available resources. 

A Plea to Professional Communicators - Don't Be Microphones

 Social media - as a business conversation - has been around now for a number of years. It's not new anymore, at least conceptually.  There are still a lot of operational details to figure out in terms of how it integrates with an organization's current processes, structures, and resources but unless you've been under a rock, you've been hearing a lot about it for a while. You may be tired of it.

If you are a professional communications person and by that I mean you are in a role explicitly responsible for ensuring communications happens (that could mean you are in PR, marketing, customer support, project management, executive management, HR, etc.) you would be crazy by now not to be at least experimenting and educating yourself on how social tools and methods are changing the fundamentals of your job.

One issue that I've noticed that is a risk if you are a communications professional, is these new 'social' methods will expose your communication style pretty quickly and, frankly, for many that communication style is not particularly effective. It may be time to take a good hard look at how well you communicate in general (forget Twitter, etc).

Let me explain.  Over the last few years I have interacted with a large range of communications professionals who are exploring this new social landscape (kudos to them). However, many immediately expose the fact that they could care less about who they are speaking with because they are on a mission to educate themselves and then figure out how to get their message out. While their focus may be admirable their efficacy in making an impact is very low.  They use others for their own needs without offering anything in exchange. I've personally had a few experiences of spending hours of my time with groups and not even receiving the most basic 'thank you' in return. This leaves me feeling used and thinking they are extremely rude and don't understand the basics of good conversation - i.e. asking the other person questions, giving others recognition and thanks in exchange for something they need. The sources of these poor communication skills have been downright shocking to me.  For those of you who know me, you know I love a good conversation, I love to help people, and I love seeing new technology so I'll talk to just about anyone but I don't really love being talked at or spending a lot of time only to feel like it went unrecognized. And it's a pretty good way of ensuring I won't come back to the table later.

The other interesting thing that I've noticed about many people who are professed 'communicators' is that they have very little ability to pick up on others' cues whether that consists of arm crossing, staring at the ceiling, or shifting their body weight in physical interactions or their completely dead silence from the other end of the phone, IM chat, or Twitter conversation. It is actually fascinating to me because part of the hallmark of a great communicator is an intuitive understanding of the reaction they are getting and the ability to adjust their own technique to that. This is admittedly a hard skill to learn in a classroom and it requires a level of self-awareness that takes time to attain but it is absolutely critical if you want to be an effective communicator.  The irony is that for the last few decades, communications degrees can be earned without really being a good communicator, leaving people looking like great communications professionals on paper who don't have the skills necessary to be effective.

So here is my plea. Please consider the following when trying to influence someone:

• If you ask for someone's time or attention, say thank you.
• Before you start speaking about what you do, ask others what they are interested in.
• Tailor your conversation to the other person's interests.
• Pause occasionally to check in and get reaction... if they don't have much, they are likely not that engaged... so ask again what they find most interesting about the topic and adjust.
• Ask the other person about their business/goals.
• Don't ask for more than is reasonable to get for free. If you use someone's deep expertise, pay them for it either in exposure, money, or referrals.

And yes, some of these lessons we should have learned in kindergarten.  Thanking people takes time. Build that in to your schedule. And yes - all of us occasionally get pressed for time, forget, etc. There have been times that I forget my manners too so we are all responsible for giving each other the occasional hall pass but generally, try to care about the people you ask to do something and try to give something back to them in exchange. While it's the right thing to do... it's also the only way to really be influential.