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

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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.

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The key value gain for enterprises that engage with social platforms is that employees are enabled to solve more problems, improve their practice and test or enrich new ideas.  All without raising the costs of doing so.

The knowledge and experience of thousands of colleagues can be easily accessed through a social platform. If you have an idea or a problem you can search the community for shared knowledge or discussions on that topic or find experienced colleagues by searching profiles or discussions they participated in.

Many enlightened enterprises have recognized these benefits, however most struggle to create and maintain vibrant communities on social platforms.

I recently wrote a post on the importance of addressing the “what’s in it for me?” question for potential users of an online community. If potential participants do not clearly see what they can get out of participation, they will not engage. We regularly run workshops with participants to identify how collaboration would add value for them, with who they would collaborate, and on what subject collaboration and sharing would add value.

If you have answered the “What’s in it for me?” question. There is another factor that has great influence on the potential success of an internal enterprise community. It  is related to the fact that enterprise 2.0 technology, or social media, help overcome a number of important barriers.

Firstly, space and time. If you have people in several different locations it is difficult and costly to bring everyone together to collaborate. It also makes it difficult for employees on different continents to know what their colleagues are up to. By having rich personal profiles, listing your projects, and having technology for online collaboration, you can lower the barrier of space and time significantly.

A second barrier has to do with the fact that, without tools, people are only capable of effectively networking with about 150 people. This phenomenon is often referred to as Dunbars’ threshold. Online networked communities can help overcome Dunbars’ threshold by what is called ‘loose ties’. An on-line community with loose ties and search capability can let you access a multitude of other peoples skills and experience, beyond the scope of your physical network of 150.

Imagine you have a problem or an idea; you can enter a community and do a very focussed search on profiles within the community, quickly identifying relevant people to talk to. You can also ask the community an open question and the people with the relevant knowledge will reply. Finally, and Linked-In is a good example of this, you can have loose connections with a large number of people. The platform then updates you periodically of all the activities of the people in your network.

For the third barrier we go back to Dunbars’ threshold. It is the reason why small companies are able to have successful collaboration and large enterprises struggle. W.L. Gore is an example of a company that is very collaborative and innovative. To maintain this level of collaboration they cut up any business unit that grows over 150 people.

The traditional answer of most governments and enterprises to this issue has been hierarchies. With hierarchies Dunbars’ problem can also be solved. When it comes to collaboration and innovation hierarchies also have a number of significant downsides. The main reason hierarchies hold back collaboration is that communication needs to travel great distances, up and down the ranks, to reach it’s destination. Add to that the fact that there is a lot of internal competition, power play,  politics and there is a big barrier to surmount if collaboration (and innovation) is to occur. Communities can help get around this barrier because the participants interact directly without having to work through the hierarchies. We call this the democracy of participation.

When companies plan to start a community, the barriers are often overlooked. Having defined the “What’s in it for me?” question and created a list of things people will do together on the platform, you need to test all of them to see if they actually lower one or more barriers. The more barriers are lowered, the better your chance of creating a vibrant community.

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Just to name a few things: sharing documents, sharing links, wiki’s, sharing photo’s, setting goals for yourself and others, etc, etc. Integration with Google Calender,  Salesforce, Webex, Twitter, Tripit, Google Docs, Google Reader, etc etc. Yes, very impressive.

However, after an hour we stopped using Cubetree because it just generates too many updates. We tested with 3 people and were just completely overwhelmed by the updates. We imagined what would happen if 15 more colleagues would partake and shivered. For now we are going back to using Yammer for our internal communication, and wiki’s and Google Docs for collaboration. If Cubetree solves this issue, we’ll give it another go and potentially implement it at clients.

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