Today I did a quick scan through my RSS reader and the title of an older blogpost by Michael Idinopulos caught my attention: ‘The Grassroots Myth‘. Since we perform community management activities on a daily basis and develop social software for the enterprise, terms like “Grassroots” and “Bottom-up innovation” in blog titles attract me to read further. In his post Idinopulos goes against the notion that the most effective way to bring a new social software platform into an enterprise is through a bottom-up approach. He calls it the Grassroots Myth. I only partially agree with the blogpost and would therefore like to add a critical element: time.

The Grassroots Myth

The main reason behind the Grassroots Myth lies in the technology aspect. Besides a few success stories, it is generally really difficult to source a new technology, platform, tool or application via the grassroots approach. For a full explanation on the myth, definitely read the full blogpost. It’s well worth the read. However, I think that the proposed solution in the end is a little too simple. In the blogpost it is stated that “…the most effective way to empower Content Grassroots activity is to provide a single, unified, integrated technology. Then invite everyone in…” Specifically the last bit, I think, oversimplifies reality, because in practice it’s not a matter of “inviting everyone in”. When you just set up a platform and invite everybody in, there is a big chance that you get a load of people to log in, have a look around and never come back. There are a couple of crucial steps needed upfront to make people come back and really participate. Specifically in an innovation community this is the case. But before I’ll mention a couple of these crucial steps, I would like to add another dimension to the equation: time.

The road to community success
Personally, I think that the most interesting innovation communities are the ones where grassroots initiatives happen; “Content Grassroots” as Idinopulos calls it. However, it takes time to get there. From experience with clients we have learned that the best route to a successful enterprise community is the following:

First start with a challenge, which is a top-down initiative where you tap into the collective brainpower of a group of people. This can either be an idea challenge, a problem solving challenge or a knowledge challenge. The aim of an idea challenge is to capture ideas from a group of people and let them enrich and collaborate upon these ideas. A problem solving challenge is used to get solutions to a specific problem. The last challenge type can be utilised to capture knowledge and experience around a specific topic. Key is that the topic, for either type of challenge, is derived from a strategic innovation domain and the importance of the challenge is literally shown by senior management support and involvement. After the first challenge is launched, you can run a second one, and another one, etc. Since people are sharing knowledge, experience, ideas and interact with each other, a community forms. Over time the participants see the value of the collective brainpower and actual Content Grassroots activities start to take place.

Successfully starting an online community
Like I said before, it’s not simply a matter of setting up the technology and inviting everybody in. In different client projects we’ve learned that a couple of things are important when successfully starting challenges and growing towards an online community. These include:

• perform a social network analysis
• start with a pilot group
• organise offline events
• organise for visible senior management involvement
• use thematic challenges

Perform a social network analysis
Before you start to roll-out a social software platform, you should do an analysis who the linking pins are in your organisation. Because, in a network organisation the success of individuals and the team-success is not so much dependent on reporting structures, but on who you know. So definitely try to leverage the network of the linking pins in your organisation by attracting these people for your pilot group.

Launch with a pilot group
Before you invite everyone in, start with a pilot group. This group of people knows upfront that they will start on an (almost) empty platform and help kick-start the initiative. If you invite everyone in from the start, they will come to a platform with almost no content. No matter how nice your platform looks, it will most likely be the last time they’ve visited it, because the value needs to come from the content. So don’t invite the whole company in right at the start.

Organise offline events
After your social software platform has launched, it is generally a good idea to organise offline events, because at these offline meet-ups people get in contact with others on a different level than online. Simple things like mutual hobbies or interests can lay the basis for a first contact. Another benefit of offline meetings is trust, which is far more easy to generate offline than online. In the end, the barriers to react online upon each other are a lot lower afterwards and therefore offline events stimulate online interaction and activities after the event.

Organise for visible senior management involvement
At different enterprise communities we have seen that involvement from senior management is very important for the participation rate; a critical success factor of a community. When employees see and realise that senior management value their contributions in the online community it raises the level and quality of their participation.

Use thematic challenges
To maximize participation in a challenge it is essential that a significant amount of time, effort and thought is taken to ensure both the correct topic is defined and within this topic the correct generative question is created. By keeping the topic tightly focussed it is easier to be clear upfront about the anticipated outcomes and therefore the success factors of the challenge.

So I agree with Idinopulos that in large corporations a grassroots introduction of the technology is generally not the way forward. I think that the road to a successful community starts with a ‘top-down’ challenge. In the next step more challenges can be started to organically grow into a community where grassroots activities start to take place. The challenges are simply needed to supply the initial vibrancy on the platform. If the challenges prove to be valuable, participants will start to realise the potential of such a platform and start to utilise it for activities not scoped by challenges. The five activities I mentioned above are critical in this process. Have you experienced other activities that ensure a successful introduction of social enterprise software?