1. Strategy and tactics: There needs to be a clear vision for the development of the community. This vision needs to be translated to types of activities the members should be encouraged to engage with. You need to develop multiple scenarios because some activities catch on and others do not. If activities do not catch on one should be able to quickly shift into another scenario. It is important to take into account the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question from the participants perspective and to check if there are no barriers that get in the way of these activities.
2. Change management: To many organizations, achieving a state where people openly share, connect with each other, collaborate, and innovate requires a significant change in culture. Even though we believe that culture does not dictate our behavior, but it is the aggregation of our behaviour that defines culture; you need to actively promote the right behavior and deal with barriers such as fear, hierarchy, and knowledge as power. Senior management plays an important role by setting examples and endorsing exemplar behavior.
3. Reactive moderation: There are numerous standard tasks that need to be performed. Examples are: making sure people have a complete profile, contacting inactive members, managing login issues, dealing with unwanted behavior, etc.
4. Proactive moderation: This role is what we often refer to as ‘the magic’. You need to constantly scan the community for activity that, often with some orchestration, can help you realize your strategic vision. This role requires to ‘see through’ a standard question or idea and envisage its potential. Then try and identify and connect participants that can contribute. If the activity has significant potential, we often co-opt a senior manager to publicly endorse the initiative.
5. Relationships and stakeholder management: This role lies within the client organization. There needs to be a very well networked person to make the connections with relevant people within the organization or with senior management to find people to further activate initiatives selected through the proactive moderation.
6. Role models: You need commitment from senior management to behave as a role model. They should endorse behavior that is in line with the vision of the community, activate people to take ideas they post a step further, and ask the community questions or challenge them from time to time.
7. Content management: Communities are enriched by content. Interviews need to be sourced with members, senior management, industry experts or other interesting and engaging people. Content needs to be well planned and prepared in advance so it can be deployed at appropriate times, such as during lulls in platform activity.
8. Technical management: A plan needs to be in place to role out functionality related to the maturity of the community. Technical management works closely with the other community management roles to create a road-map of functionality. A close coordination with the scenarios is needed to match the functionality to the scenarios being played.
9. Project management: Moderating and activating a community typically requires performing a great number of tasks. These tasks are either dynamic or routine. Dynamic tasks are responses to what is happening in the community and routine tasks cover things such as contacting all people that have not completed their profile. Rigorous project management is a must to make sure all tasks are covered and completed. We have developed software tailored to managing communities and these tasks in particular.
10. Champions management: Your community will have members that are more active and set the right example. It is important to build relationships with such users over time and involve them in activating the community. The most important role these champions have, is being an antenna for ideas, problems, or solutions that are worth sharing. They then convince people to take their ideas, problems, or solutions to the community.

If you are interested in how this ties into our methodology and vision, you may also want to check out these earlier posts:

1. Successful implementation of communities part 1
2. Successful implementation of communities part 2
3. Successful implementation of communities part 3
4. Community management in innovative projects
5. Start hiring guy #3
6. Stop pitching social media to management

Related posts:

1. Successful implementation of communities 1
2. Successful implementation of communities 3
3. Successful implementation of communities 2

We like the term ‘Connected Business’ as it better describes what this technology does. It is set of tools to break down silos in large enterprises and have their employees connect to one another. Employees that are connected to one another have access to each other’s knowledge, skills, and experience. This connectedness then leads to more problems being solved in less time and more innovative ideas being tested and enriched in less time. On the back off these advantages enterprises can save  money because there is less need to purchase knowledge through consultants and commissioned research.

So you become more operationally excellent because of the improved problem solving, you become more competitive because you become more innovative, and you get all this at lower costs. Yes, it’s as simple as that.

Related posts:

1. Successful implementation of communities 2
2. Roles in managing internal communities
3. Women use social media more than men

Poetz and Schreir (2009) present “the first real world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm’s professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest.” Their findings are interesting:
1- Ideas created by professionals score significantly lower in terms of novelty than ideas created by users.
2- Professional ideas are attributed lower customer benefit compared to other ideas.
3- Ideas created by professionals tend to be easier to realize.

Kristensson, Gustafsson and Archer (2004, p. 11) provide the first laboratory-based insights that “professional developers elaborated with informational elements that were not as cognitively remote,“ whereas users seemed to have “access to informational elements that were further apart“. Users are thus able to come up with more novel solutions.

In short: If you want to come up with new and customer beneficial ideas it is good practice to involve diverse people with considerable distance to the company processes.

Get the paper.

Related posts:

1. Implementing Idea Management
2. Roles in managing internal communities
3. Forrester: Top 5 complaints about innovation management tools

Do you think you could pick the eventual winner of the X-factor out of 14,000 contestants upfront? Do you think an expert like Gordon, one of the Dutch jury members, can pick the winner upfront? And lastly, would you put money on his ability to pick the winner upfront? Personally, I wouldn’t bet much money on his ability to pick the right one out of the more than 14,000 candidates. The funny thing is, that a lot of companies take these low-chance-of-success-bets in regards to their innovation processes. The X-factor program however, has a very efficient innovation process.

In a lot of companies, two or three ideas are selected out of all the ideas that exist within the company. The other ideas do not get a chance of growing or showcasing progress. The ‘innovation’ budget is divided among these two or three ideas and these ideas are developed until launch. If you would be able to pick the two or three right ideas at the start, you would be one of the worlds best predictors and you could make a lot of money at the bookies with that gift. But personally I don’t believe that anybody is that good. Apparently, The makers of X-factor don’t trust Gordon to be that good either. They have set up a process to select the winning idea/singer.

Would you put your money on this contestant, in Britain’s got talent
(the English version of X-factor), after only seeing her?

Innovation process at the X-factor
The 14,000 candidates go through a first screening phase in which a large portion falls off. But also quite a large number of contestants progress from this first phase and they start a continual process of training and showcasing progress. Each time the best ones are selected to progress to the next round. This process goes on until the best candidates reach the finals and in the last episode the ultimate winner is chosen. In the final steps of the process, public voting by text-messages is introduced next to the judgement of the jury.

Organise innovation the X-factor way
The process described above reflects the way an innovation process at a company should be as well. At the first stage of the innovation funnel, very liberal selection criteria should be in place. In that way you will not dispose a ‘rough diamond’ idea, which does not look like a good idea at the beginning, but might potentially evolve into a killer idea. In the next steps, the continuous learning process of evolving the ideas throughout the innovation funnel ensures that ideas will develop to their full potential. The lessons learned from ideas that do not make it along the process, fuel the further development of ideas that are still in the process. The public voting done at the X-factor show translates to asking your customers for input on the ideas in development. If companies organise innovation in the X-factor way, they will become more efficient in their innovation process.

Related posts:

1. Venture capitalists understand innovation principles
2. Innovate the Google way
3. Innovation in the Music Industry

The size is an important factor in the ongoing community survival simply because this is related to the total number of postings and viewers (Koh et al., 2007). Consequently, it seems important to attract many community members, because more members generate more discussion. Especially in the start-up development period high activity in a community is important in order to lead to a successful community. Moreover, a large community entails a greater diversity in opinions and ideas and also creates a larger knowledge base. Building a large community seems to be beneficial, however, members seem to have difficulty gathering valuable information when a community is very large (McLure-Wasko & Faraj, 2000). Small communities build an intimacy that leads to fuller disclosure and richer insights.  The optimal size of a virtual community regarding effective communication is rather difficult to estimate and seems to be related to the needs and the effort involved, to perceived rewards, as well as the community’s role in the wider social network of the individual (Yeoman et al., 2003). A blogpost by Jeffrey Henning argues that the optimal community size is highly dependent on the purposes attached to the community. To ensure an ongoing community survival and encourage members to continue to interact, the optimal community size should be maintained. This means that new members should be attracted and current members will be leaving constantly.

A CoP normally is constructed of a core group of members that supply social and intellectual leadership and the other group of peripheral members (lurkers). In general it is considered that only 1 percent of members are active in posting and blogging. The critical mass is achieved when this active contributor base in a community is large enough to both satisfy the needs of the contributors as well as those of the lurkers (Tedjamulia et al., 2005). Too little contributors cause an inactive community and too many will lead to chaos and disorganized content if there is no effective organization and technological tools. A proper method for creating a successful critical mass is by checking whether a particular member is an active participant, a lurker or even inactive. The community manager should filter its members in order to create a more active community. The number of members needed for an active community might be lower when a few very active users produce enough content and results. These top-contributors are able to constitute the critical mass, activate and encourage lurkers and attract new members.

Community leaders should attempt to attract community builders to affect others to engage in the community. Moreover, through word-of-mouth communication or advertisements, leaders can accelerate network effects to achieve a perception of critical mass. In general, a large member-base is assumed to be beneficial, because this increases the amount of knowledge and its diversity available and can increase the competitive advantage of a company (Voelpel et al., 2008). Very large communities are usually structured into subgroups in order to encourage active participation (Wenger et al., 2002). In short, long-term participation depends on a sufficient base of content and interaction and on the community’s ability to organize the searching for information properly (Tedjamulia et al., 2005).
Literature:

• Koh, J., Kim, Y.G., Butler, B. & Bock, G.W. (2007). ‘Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities’. Communications of the ACM; Vol. 50; No. 2; pp. 69-73
• McLure-Wasko, M. & Faraj, S. (2000). ‘‘It is what one does’: why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice’. Journal of Strategic Information Systems; Vol.  9; No. 2-3; pp. 155 – 173
• Tedjamulia, S.J.J., Dean, D.L., Olsen, D.R. & Albrecht, C.C. (2005). ‘Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory’. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences; pp. 1-10
• Voelpel, S.C., Eckhoff, R.A. & Förster, J. (2008). ‘David against Goliath? Group size and bystander effects in virtual knowledge sharing’. Human Relations; Vol. 61; No. 2; pp. 271-295
• Wenger, E., McDermott, R. & Snyder, W.M. (2002). ‘Cultivating Communities of Practice: A guide to managing knowledge’. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

Related posts:

1. Community management in innovation projects
2. Incentives to activate community members
3. Expectation management in Enterprise 2.0

The survey focuses both on using Web 2.0 as external-facing tools as well as internal-facing tools. As an Innovation Consultant working on Enterprise 2.0 projects my interest points toward the internal-facing use of the tools.

It is encouraging to see that the Enterprise 2.0 projects we are working on are getting more widely accepted and appreciated.

For example I have been working on several internal wiki projects, during all of these projects the idea of an external-facing wiki came up. I think that addressing the external community is far more effective when using blogs, social networks or communities, just as the figures in the report show and the following statement also underlines this: “However, only 33 percent of respondents expect to employ wikis on an external-facing community, believing that wikis are of greater benefit to employees than consumers.”

For another client we created and managed a platform to increase innovation within the company. This platform is aimed for the most innovative employees in the company to share their knowledge, improve internal communication, and to connect with each other. The following quote from the report underlines our efforts:

“Organizations working on project with the use of these Web 2.0 technologies will increase knowledge-sharing and employee collaboration (82 percent), improve internal communications (78 percent) and help employees find and help each other (59 percent). Ideally, these applications will improve horizontal and vertical cooperation, provide a convenient platform for knowledge sharing, facilitate closer collaboration between employees, nurture teambuilding and create loyalty to their organization. “

Related posts:

1. Using Enterprise 2.0 tools ‘in-the-flow’
2. Why Wiki’s Do Work
3. Davenport vs McAfee about Enterprise 2.0

In the first place, Enterprise 2.0 is gaining traction in more companies; the initial small pilot projects have grown into serious applications that do change the way organisations are working and business is done. As a result companies plan to spend more on Enterprise 2.0 in the next year.

Secondly, the focus is less on technology and more on application of technology. The survey reveals that the technologies of P2P and web services have decreased in usage and that applications like blogs and wikis have grown. That’s a good sign showing that users are in charge of Enterprise 2.0, which is an imperative for successful introduction and use of Enterprise 2.0. In our experience, organisations where users drive Enterprise 2.0 are far more successful than organisations where IT is in control of Enterprise 2.0.

Third interesting point is that organisations are saying that the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 asks for and leads to other ways of organizing and collaboration. It’s not the technology, but it’s the change in the way people work that delivers value of Enterprise 2.0.

That’s also why application of Enterprise 2.0 tools can help organisations to become more innovative. The collaborative, grassroots way of communication of Enterprise 2.0 can be used as an important stepping-stone toward a more open culture, which is a prerequisite for an innovative company.

Related posts:

1. Davenport vs McAfee about Enterprise 2.0
2. Using Enterprise 2.0 tools ‘in-the-flow’
3. Twitter for the Enterprise

E20portal can be of great help when convincing a corporation to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools using the industry reports, success case stories and the blogs of experts.

Related posts:

1. Davenport vs McAfee about Enterprise 2.0
2. Enterprise 2.0 Repository
3. Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008

I often hear Twitter users complain about the amount of non-interesting tweets passing by. In a previous blogpost McAfee suggested to introduce norms and policies to filter out the ‘noise’. A lot of people responded that such a strict company policy would actually cripple the tool. Furthermore, it appears that Enterprise 2.0 tools are used differently than their Web 2.0 counterparts. People are aware of the fact that their colleagues will read their contributions. So less ‘noise’ is to be expected anyway. I personally like the suggestion McAfee has made in his most recent blogpost to allow categorization of tweets by preface characters. By writing predefined characters at the beginning of a tweet, messages can automatically be categorized. All the uncategorized tweets will simply end up in one general stream and the categorized tweets will be shown in their respective tweet stream. I think this would be a good addition to our internal twitter.

Related posts:

1. Davenport vs McAfee about Enterprise 2.0
2. Enterprise 2.0 Repository
3. The business opportunities of Twitter

Today I read this blogpost that tries to find an answer to the question: “When should blogging be mandatory and when should it be voluntary?” Their conclusion was that it is better to not make blogging compulsory, especially when driven by the knowledge management angle. They do state however, that in project management situations or certain process-related activities mandating blogs could work well.

In the same blogpost the author links to an opposing opinion about advantages of making blogging mandatory. In that blogpost the suggestion is made to make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. I personally do agree with her point that it is important to get the everyday knowledge out that usually resides in the back of people’s brains and are never needed by the firm until they are on vacation or out sick. However, I think that this type of information is better suited for an internal wiki, because certain aspects can change over time. The wiki articles can be updated with these little changes, so all updated information is stored at one place. On the other hand, there are strong advantages of making it compulsory for employees to write down this knowledge. First of all, employees become better at writing, and secondly they develop their skills to make information digestable and relevant for others.

What do you think? Should writing blogposts be made mandatory or voluntary?

Related posts:

1. Why Wiki’s Do Work
2. Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008
3. Four business solution areas for wikis