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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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. “

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The discussion did not hold very much substance. There was a discussion whether the name enterprise 2.0 was relevant or not, which to me is a completely irrelevant discussion. But the two sides (Davenport: contra enterprise 2.0, McAfee: pro enterprise 2.0) are a classic example of the hurdles you have to take when implementing enterprise 2.0 tools in your organisation. Davenport represents the traditional thinking (web 1.0) and McAfee represents the next web (web 2.0). According to Davenport it is a hype, technology has been around for decades and enterprise 2.0 is the wrong name. He agrees with the success of web 2.0 but does not seem to understand the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. He sees the tools that are clustered under the name enterprise 2.0 as tools that have to fight against Sharepoint and others. I do not think this has to be the case, since you can also use enterprise 2.0 tools like a wiki to function as an addition to the tools you already have. It does not always have to replace these systems. Because of the ease of use it is an addition.

Accepting tools from the enterprise 2.0 era is more a cultural issue than a technology acceptance issue. But you do need to have the right tools to facilitate this cultural change! The one depends on the other. Davenport says that they could have achieved the same effect years ago with tools like Sharepoint or Lotus Notes, but why did this never happen? Because these tools did not have the ease of use that the current web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 do have. According to Davenport the possibilities of web 2.0 have been around for about a decade. I think that only the theory of web 2.0 that has been around for a while, but the actual technology and actual working tools have not. This because usability is one of the key factors of the success of web 2.0.

After an hour of discussion I did not learn anything new, but the discussion subject is very current. I think anyone who is trying to implement a web 2.0 tool in their enterprise has encountered the issues Tom Davenport mentioned in this discussion.

To listen to the mp3 of the discussion, click here

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Adding a new note is fairly easy. Just click “New note” and start editing the content. Of course a WYSIWYG editor is used for the editing. The editor has all the features you need to create rich articles.It is easy to embed media and to perform a spellcheck. This is all very basic, but it works very well. Next you can attach documents to the note including version management. To structure the notes you created it is possible to add “slashtags”. When for example you add the slashtag “/Home” and the note will be placed in the category Home. To share the note with other users in your bliki you click on share and select other users in your bliki or you can invite a new user. When you choose to publish the note select the publish to intranet or publish to the web.

The layout of the pages in Cyn.in look very good. Especially below the notes a very comprehensive overview of actions is displayed. The actions include details of the note, posting a comment, editing the note, adding slashtags, sharing the note, publishing the note, and an overview of the previous versions of the note.

I think that the strength of Cyn.in is that it is very simple to switch the notes between the different spaces. This can be perfect for project groups. These groups have information that will be perfect to share in this bliki. The information that a poject group has can be divided into the same spaces Cyn.in uses: personal, shared, intranet and web spaces. A user can work on their personal information and keep this information private. When this user has to perform a task with a collegue they can share their information. To communicate information within your company about your project you can publish the information on the intranet space. When you want to communicate information to the outside world you can publish the information on the web space. The reader will see this posting as a blog. This is perfect. You don’t need different systems to perform all these actions.

The costs range from 30 dollars per user per month for small groups to 20 dollars per user per month for 500+ users. I think this pricing model is good for project groups, but too expensive for large groups.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• nice dashboard
• all actions are easy to perform
• switch notes between spaces
• RSS feeds of different sources
• fileupload with versioning

Cons:

• I miss a good overview of all notes in the dashboard
• Expensive for large amounts of users
• no real tagging, only slashtags

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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.

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