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

No related posts.

• Not all smart people work in-house – need to tap into external knowledge
• External R&D can generate significant value to us
• Research does not need to originate from our internal work to be profitable for us
• A strong business model is more important than first to market
• Internal as well as external ideas are essential to win
• We can capitalise on our own Intellectual Property (IP) and we should buy others’ IP when needed

While the term was initially very much related to IP, it has evolved; A recent valuable resource of literature on open innovation has been composed by VINNOVA, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems. It has been made available on openinnovation.nl

In practice, there are many shapes in which Open Innovation can be manifested. So how about some examples?

• Co-branding, such as the smart car which started as a joint-venture of Daimler-Benz and Swatch, Nike+iPod by Nike and Apple, the Beertender by Heineken and Krupps, and the Senseo coffee maker by Douwe Egberts and Philips. Ironically, the latter example indicates that co-branding does not necessarily mean joint development.
• Working together with customers, suppliers, and other companies. Being located near one another, such as on the High tech Campus in Eindhoven, certainly helps
• Knowledge exchange with government, research institutions, universities, etc. A good example is autoindetoekomst.nl.
• (Lead) user innovation such as Philips’ initiative Leadusers.nl.
• Crowdsourcing such as the Goldcorp Challenge, t-shirt company Threadless, and the search for Steve Fossett, where 50,000 people scrutinised more than 300,000 squares of high resolution digital imagery trying to find his crashed plane. GMails M-Velope video is not only viral, but also made by actual GMail users. Many (online) communities depend mainly on User Generated Content.
• Mass customisation such as Brewtopia, My M&M’s, Edelwiser Ski Designer, and Lego Factory can also be seen as a form of open innovation.
• Another variation of open innovation is conducting ‘Idea Challenges’ such as “500 Wants you” by Fiat, Dell IdeaStorm, My Starbucks Idea, and the Cisco i-Prize. Essentially an Idea Challenge asks different sorts of contributors (clients, suppliers, end users) for their ideas.

There are many more initiatives. Do you have any good examples?

No related posts.

A recent online study conducted under 7000 Tripadvisor users also supports this increasing role in the planning and booking processes. This study found that 82,5 percent uses the Internet as their primary information source for booking a holiday. Furthermore, we see that web 2.0 like functionalities influence the selection process. 57,5 percent of the participants read online reviews to narrow down their choices and 75 percent of these people think that reviews highly influence their choices and give the most objective view (Gretzel, 2007).

But more is coming. The shift to travel 2.0 will offer new means of planning and booking a dream holiday.

Three main characteristics
In this article we will get into three main travel 2.0 characteristics and show some examples. Travel 2.0 centralizes sharing digital content in numerous ways and gives a user more control. Travel 2.0 has three main characteristics:

1. User generated content
2. Comparison services
3. Social Networks

User generated content
Sharing user generated content is not a new concept but combining user generated content to a conventional holiday booking website is. The user experiences more freedom of choice by receiving user-generated information and commercial information. An example of this crossover between travel 1.0 en 2.0 is a website called Holidaycheck.de. It is a conventional holiday booking website, however it also offers reviews, photo’s and video’s on holiday locations made by users. Now you can read how others experienced the accommodation and you can see their amateur pictures of it. Another website is Travelpedia which is a collection of information on countries, locations and hotels. Written and edited by travellers it gives you almost the same information as the lonely planet but then for free, although it is still in its infant state.

Comparison
Travel 2.0 tries to improve search ability by comparison services. Using mash up technology a holiday seeker is enabled to search multiple databases or websites instead of only one. The first examples are found on websites like Farecast and Kayak. They predict the best time to buy your airline ticket (not to confuse with the best flight). Airlines have dominated prices over the years; they in fact adjust prices regularly according to demand, time and season. With these new services we have some extra control on booking a cheaper flight. The wait is for a website that compares holidays across all suppliers, yet I haven’t been able to find one yet.

Social networking
Communities are the word on the web 2.0 buzz. While travelling we connect with fellow travellers, meeting people who like the same activities and we form groups. Travel is in fact an ideal industry for communities to be formed. Imagine connecting people with the same interests and hobbies. This would give you a great reference on where to go, what to see and maybe even find a travel companion. A good example is Gusto this is a social community website for travellers where you can organize, simplify and create and book your dream trip.

Another trend is emerging in the field of group travel, sites like Triphub create small communities; remember those skiing trips with a couple of friends and the hassle of chain like email on who will be present, when and where to go etc. Through mash up technology the formed group can plan, discuss their trip, send invites and let the participants communicate with each other. This website gives your group trip an early start and hopes to make the pre-holiday experience more fun. I expect to see more of these small social networks which will form the bases on pre-holiday experience, the holiday it self and the after experiences. Through mash up technologies the possibilities are endless. For instance one can think of many interesting future services, like proximity broadcasting, real time gps-tracking/recording and much more. A Holliday will become more digitalized than you think.

As you may have noticed travel 2.0 consists mostly of one or more of these three characteristics. To summarize the user gets a more central position, has the ability to create a dream trip and uses information from others and also contributes to this information. Currently we see primarily changes in the booking and selection processes, but that is just the beginning of this voyage.

Source:
Online Travel Reviews Study; Role & Impact of Online Travel Reviews, Dr Ulrike Gretzel, 2007.

Hotel marketing, 2007.

No related posts.