Engagement is a hot topic. For those of you who have heard me speak, you know I think not all engagement is created equal and there is far too little focus put on the purpose behind the engagement. You can have high engagement and very little value - look no further than the comments on a general news site. The other common problem is you have no engagement at all, which happens far too frequently inside organizations where people feel like the only outcome of sticking their head up is becoming a good target.
What's interesting is that in most cases we diagnose the issue as a tactical one - we aren't providing good enough tools or spaces for people to engage in a constructive way.
The more sophisticated organizations realize that tools alone won't solve the problem and have started investing in the operational systems that include community management roles and training to ensure that when people engage they get real value from it. This is where I spend a lot of my time - helping companies understand how to build systems of engagement. But it's not a complete solution either.
Ultimately, to sustain engagement, the business model needs to generate more value for each of its stakeholder groups than they contribute. People need to feel like investing and contributing to the ecosystem will return disproportionate rewards to them. If it does, they will return to engage again and again and again.
The implications to business models are quite radical, however, and in a way most organizations cannot accept given their current leadership. This type of business model requires the organizations themselves to recognize revenue and value only after it has ensured each stakeholder group has gotten more value than it has contributed. Typically, organizations work to recognize as much value as possible, as soon as possible; when is the last time you heard a sales executive say 'We don't get paid until our customers feel like they have won'? This mentality leaves stakeholders feeling combative, not collaborative - whether they are customers or employees - and that does not lead to organic and frequent engagement because those stakeholders don't see the organization's success and their success as the same thing.
However, those organizations that do have the patience to be generative - making their stakeholders success a key part of their own business model - tend to reap far more in the end because every one of their stakeholder groups has a vested interest in their success. To me, that is a #winning strategy.
If you would like to see more about how I think about engagement, below is one of my recent presentations:
The Community Landscape in 2016
It's an exciting time for TheCR team - as we end the year we are welcoming two new team members, soon to be three, one of whom is a VP of Sales. That takes us from 7 employees to 10 - a pretty big leap for a small organization. For many reasons, this signals that both TheCR and the community industry is growing up. I watched my five-year-old head off to elementary school this fall and it feels like we’re on the precipice of a similar milestone with TheCR.
At TheCR and more broadly, we are no longer figuring things out or incubating ideas. We know how to run communities effectively and the market is ready to get things done. Here are some of my observations about what we can expect.
The Community Landscape in 2016
We know from our research that 70% of community budgets are approved by VP- or C-level executives. The community opportunity is now strategic, rather than a tactical mechanism of execution. That visibility is awesome - but I also believe the window to act upon it is limited. Community program owners have to reward that strategic interest with new revenue, effectiveness or innovation. If community programs cannot demonstrate value in terms the business cares about, executive attention will wander.
The time to scale community programs is here and it’s a huge opportunity for those of us in the space.
However, as communities go mainstream and more dollars are allocated to community initiatives, more players get involved. There is chum in the water and sharks big and small want a piece of it. The community market is attracting a lot of different players with solutions and services to sell. That’s a good thing - many of these players have a lot to offer and organizations will need them to scale. However, many of them don’t really understand the space - and that is a risk.
This happens in every market - it’s not unique to the community industry - and it can be a treacherous time. The CRM market went through a bumpy growth path as organizations and the vendors that served them made mis-steps, fought for attention and figured out what worked. The better the choices organizations make the more the community market will thrive. If organizations fumble about without clear direction and thoughtful approaches, achieving some hits but a lot of misses, the community market will suffer.
How fast will the community market develop? That will depend on a few things. Whether:
CIOs and their teams develop a sophisticated understanding of what software, infrastructure and integrations are needed to really succeed. (Hint: having a social stream is not sufficient. If social does not integrate with other communication, collaboration, content management, analytics, CRM and HR systems it will limit its potential value). The value of community architects is growing as this sophistication grows - people who can design the ecosystem in ways that maximizes value and minimizes confusion for individuals as they navigate it.
At The Community Roundtable, we obviously have a self-interest in seeing the market succeed because we help our members and clients address some of these issues. However, I also have a personal passion in seeing this approach succeed.
By evolving our organizations to adaptive networks, individuals have a great degree of choice in how they work and with whom. Communities provide individuals with both support and challenges, in a way that enables their potential. This is my passion - to help individuals define work on their terms, in a way that fulfills them and makes them happy. A networked approach to organizations is the way to deliver on that potential.
Here’s to an exciting 2016!