Social media such as twitter, facebook, blogs and wikis are THE topic of the day. Also for internal communication purposes because they offer wonderful opportunities to enlarge the loyalty and commitment of employees. On the other hand they also bring reputation risks because of transparency. Therefore the theme of this years congress holds the duality treat or threat. You will get an overview of the possibilities and risks of social media, the impact they have on the role of the IC Manager and of course lots of practical experiences and cases.

Chairman is Internal Communications goeroe and author of the book: ‘Twitteren in your company’: Huib Koeleman. There will be speakers from: Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, Achmea, Microsoft, Politie Brabant Zuid-Oost, Getronics, Hogeschool Arnhem & Nijmegen, Vodafone, Gemeente Amsterdam, TNT Post and Ministerie van Defensie.

Next to the Congress there are Masterclasses on April 14 (Social Media for dialogue and commitment), April 15 (Online Reputation Management) and June 1 (How to help business managers communicating effectively).

For further information: www.corner-stone.nl

Related posts:

1. Women use social media more than men
2. Social media count
3. Mobile Communications For Social And Environmental Benefits.

PRESS RELEASE
2 March 2010

Vodafone Group rolls out IdeaNet™ software in Europe

The international telecommunications company Vodafone Group plc and the Dutch innovation stimulator Innovation Factory have agreed on a contract for the use of the IdeaNet™ software. IdeaNet™ is an idea management system, developed by Innovation Factory, that helps companies manage ideas, information and expertise to promote innovation.

Chris Brown, Head of Innovation Vodafone UK: “Innovation is a great part of the success of Vodafone. The IdeaNet™ software helps us to take full advantage of the knowledge of our employees worldwide and furthermore creates a transparent, innovative and involved culture in all Vodafone countries. We have chosen the software of Innovation Factory because of the great User Interface and the expertise of the company in creating an innovative culture. Our staff in the UK did not need any training to work with the system.”

The IdeaNet™ software has been operative at Vodafone UK since July 2009 and was recently introduced at Vodafone Spain. In 2010 Vodafone will roll out the software in other countries.

Professor Han Gerrits, founder and CEO of Innovation Factory: “All our tools are built to actually help organisations innovate and to ensure innovation is embedded into the organisation. The knowledge and creativity of employees are too often left underutilised. Their involvement will lead to great new ideas as well as cost savings and will facilitate a change in the corporate culture for the better. We have had great success with our IdeaNet™ software at Vodafone UK and are very proud that we have been given the chance to implement the software for Vodafone Group in Europe.”

For further information:
Innovation Factory
Coebergh Communications & PR
Reinier Hillen
reinier@coebergh.nl

Vodafone Group Plc
Media RelationsTel: +44 (0) 1635 664444
+31 (0) 20 470 87 87

About Innovation Factory
Innovation Factory is a Dutch based software and consulting firm founded by professor Han Gerrits (VU University Amsterdam), specialised in innovation strategy and technology. Since 2005 Innovation Factory helps companies with the collection, management and implementation of new ideas. By means of consulting, training and the development of special software Innovation Factory supports organisations to become successful innovators. Innovation Factory changes mindsets, wins hearts and minds of employees and clients, and acts as partner in innovation projects of companies as TNT Post, Achmea and UPC. www.innovationfactory.eu

About Vodafone
Vodafone is the world’s leading international mobile communications group with approximately 323 million proportionate customers as at 30 September 2009. Vodafone currently has equity interests in 31 countries across five continents and around 40 partner networks worldwide. For more information. www.vodafone.com

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Clear question
First of all, the logo design contest was initiated on Crowdspring.com with a preset running time of two weeks. To start a contest, Crowdspring has a submission form to describe your briefing. Their template takes you through a number of steps: You need to supply background information, what you need, who your target audience is, what kind of designs you like, and things you absolutely do or don’t want to have in your design. Before we started we observed that good briefings at other contests resulted in higher quality contributions so we took our time to write a good briefing.

Good feedback
It is vital to give supportive feedback to the people that contribute to your challenge. This feedback results in a higher quantity and quality of new submissions. This stems from the fact that people enrich each other’s designs based upon your feedback. Imagine one specific designer submits a design at Crowdspring and gets feedback from you that a specific element is really cool but another element definitely needs to be changed. If this happens a couple of times with different designs, new entrants will be better directed towards the type of design that you like. So in the end, people build upon each other’s submissions to come to higher quality submissions. In the end we received 197 design submissions of which the quality kept improving during the process.

Scout the community for input
You should scout through the profiles of the community members to find people you think can make a good contribution. We did this soon after we started our design challenge. We went through other design challenges and looked for designs that we liked and sent messages to the designers to tell them we liked their previous designs and asked them to participate in our challenge. Our eventual winner was someone we found in this way.

Diversity boosts creativity
Another great aspect of a community like Crowdspring is the fact that it’s members come from all over the world and have different backgrounds. Sure, they all do something with design, but compared to one specific design agency it’s a very diverse group. The resulting creative contributions are absolutely amazing. We selected the following design from a Japanese designer named Kiona:

Self-regulation within the community
At a certain point in the contest, one Crowdspring member even sent us a message that he found a similarity in one of the design submissions. He noticed that one of the submissions in our contest was a slightly altered copy of a submission from a different designer at a previous project. Obviously, copying is a complete no-go in a design process. So the community even helps to keep the contest ‘clean’. This is something that is hardly do-able without those extra hundreds pairs of eyes.

Idea management
In general, when you ask a community a question you leverage the principle: nobody is as smart as everybody. Specifically when you involve a diverse group. But when an organisation sets up idea management one should realise that resources should be made available to coordinate the process. In a previous blogpost “Implementing Idea Management” we concluded that implementing effective idea management is about asking the right people the right questions. A significant amount of time should be spent getting the questions right. While supplying feedback to idea generators can improve the quality of a specific idea and motivates them to keep submitting ideas that constantly increase in quality. This feedback and motivation is part of community management, a crucial element within idea management.

An idea challenge normally runs for a specific amount of time (compared to open ended idea management) and is focussed around a specific subject.

Crowd-sourced design process in the context of idea management
Because of our experience at Innovation Factory with idea challenges we could see the potential upfront to leverage a community like Crowdspring where the diverse background of its members contributes to a very creative logo. I find it really interesting to see that the above mentioned crowd-sourced design process has a lot of similarities with an idea challenge:

1. Clear question. It is very important to state a well thought out briefing as this gives direction. At an idea challenge the way you formulate your question is identically crucial. Also a set timing of two weeks helps the “sense of urgency” of contributors to submit a design quickly rather than postponing it. Idea challenges also run best for a set time.
2. Good feedback. From our experience with idea challenges we know that it is absolutely vital to give constructive and fast feedback. As a result you get more and higher quality contributions.
3. Scout the community for input. Part of the community management activities we perform at idea challenges consists of looking through member profiles to see if their experience and knowledge matches a specific idea. We then contact those people to ask if they can contribute to the idea. This proactive moderation activity was exactly what we did at the Crowdspring design contest as well by searching for designers that we thought could make a good contribution.
4. Diversity boosts creativity. In general diversity helps to boost creativity. In that respect internet tools help to lower the barrier significantly to attract a broad public. This holds both for idea management software but also for the Crowdspring website.
5. Self-regulation within the community. The self-regulation we saw at the logo design process, also happens in another form at idea challenges. People place corrective comments on ‘bad’ ideas and the community also acts as a first filter on which ideas are good and which are not. This is done by letting people vote ideas up or down and the commenting.

In the end it means that you definitely need to make time available to coordinate the whole process. It takes a lot of time to support the community in the right way, but you will probably be positively surprised by the good results you will get with open innovation.

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1. I-Prize: open innovation at Cisco
2. Social Strategy Talk II
3. Open Innovation

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

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1. The Internet became big after HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he needed another way to present his research.
2. The Camelbak was invented by a paramedic that found it too dangerous to reach for his drinking bottle while on his racing bike. He came up with the idea to sow an I.V. Bag into the back of his shirt.This evolved into a Camelbak.
3. The sports bra was invented in 1970 by a Victoria Woodrow who just started jogging and was severely annoyed by here bouncing breasts.
4. White-out liquid (Tipp-ex) was invented in the 1940’s by a secretary called Bette Nesmith Graham to fix her typing mistakes. She initially named the product “Mistake Out”

Of course there are other categories of innovation without the inventors having a problem. The most interesting being dreams and accidents. We would not have airplanes if nobody had dreamt of flying. If Sir Alexander Fleming had not accidentally left out one of the glass culture dishes in his lab, we would not have penicillin.

If you know of any interesting innovations from people solving their personal problem, feel free to add them in the comments section.

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1. Lead users, Geeks, and Freaks
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Two weeks ago I attended a masterclass on co-creation by Frank Piller. An important part of the day concerned lead user innovation. Piller made a distinction between what 95% of the people call lead users and ‘real lead users’. During the masterclass it didn’t take hold of me, but as time progressed it kept echoing in my head. I’ll share a few thoughts on it with you.

Piller stated that when most people say ‘lead user’ they are actually talking about very early adopters; geeks and freaks. The people that have the latest gadgets and tools are sometimes referred to as lead users. Understandable, because you could say they lead the masses into the adoption of the product. Very often some of these people also write reviews about their latest gadgets and become a subject matter expert (a leader). But they are not lead users.

Another group of people that are also often (wrongly) defined as lead users, are heavy users. It is true that they know your product inside out and they can probably help you improve the usability of your product, but they will not be very effective in finding novel innovations for you.

Lead users, according to Piller, have had a very big problem and have (partly) solved it. If you are able to find people that have (solved) big problems in you domain you can learn how you can design products that solve real problems for people. Furthermore, you can invite these lead users to come and join you to think about innovating your products. Since they have solved one or more problems in your domain before, they are bound to be creative problem solvers.

Here are two examples from the domain of hospital hygiene:
- A veterinarian with exceptional low percentages of infections after his surgery on (not very hygienic) animals.
- A surgeon from a poor hospital in Africa that has achieved exceptionally low infection rates.

So if you are looking to innovate, find yourself people with big problems, find people who have solved their problems, and maybe add some dreamers to the formula.

If you are looking to tweak your product, find heavy users and geeks and freaks.

Related posts:

1. Many innovations come from Lead Users
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During the third exercise you check the activities against 8 barriers that can hinder the community performing these activities. If the activities or the people involved in these activities are hindered by any of the barriers described below, it is best to find other activities that are less hindered. There are ways to deal with these barriers, but I will discuss these in a later post.

Freedom and time

In many cases engaging in online collaboration or knowledge sharing does not tie directly to peoples day to day work. This becomes more the case as the work people do is more standardized. The moment someone helps solve a colleagues problem in another part of the business, this will take up time without direct benefits to the helpers business. Of course on a larger scale this does add value to the company as a whole. However, we see many cases where management does not want to allow people time to engage in such activities because the results do not add directly to their bottom line. If people aren’t given enough freedom and time to engage you will be dependent on those that will engage in their own time. Ask yourself if that group is large enough to make your community vibrant.

Transparency

The use of enterprise 2.0 technology within your company will increase transparency in your organization. It will be more transparent who is competent in certain areas and who contributes. It will also be more transparent how decisions are made. There are many people within organizations that believe transparency will not benefit them. The resistance stems from the fact that people think they will be held accountable for certain actions or colleagues will think less of their competences than before. Because this barrier is so personal and threatening to people, you can expect them to put up a big fight against transparency.

Knowledge is power

There are people that hold their position because they have valuable knowledge. These people are often afraid to share because they believe it will make them obsolete. This barrier is also a fear barrier and hence very powerful.

Fear of stupidity or fear of being ignored

There is nothing worse than looking stupid or being ignored where everyone can see. This barrier has most impact in the initial stages of a community. If a community is not very vibrant yet, the barrier to engage with the community is larger than in situations with a lot of vibrancy. Have a close look at the people that are to engage in the activity to make sure the percentage of fearful people is not too large.

Negative marking of people

In many communities there is a small group of very active people. Especially in the early phases of a community you need to manage their activities a little bit. In the early stages the community often still has to prove its usefulness to the company. Skeptics and threatened people will be looking for ways to damage the initiative. An easy way to do so is to target enthusiastic people. In almost all communities I’ve seen, very active people are marked as “having nothing better to do.” Be prepared for this and subtly protect these people from themselves and the skeptics.

Confidentiality

The fact that confidential information could leak easier when using a community with so many people involved, is a valid concern but also an important weapon of the more skeptical people. It is the most heard reason for people not to engage.

Competition

Map out other community initiatives within the company and analyze if your community, when successful, will threaten them. Also talk to IT to establish if the platform you are likely to chose does not conflict with their plans. If so, plan to deal with it. There is nothing more deadly for a community than a change in technical platform for any reason other than an improvement for the community.

Management participation

As with everything you want to achieve within an enterprise, if management does not endorse the initiative, forget it.

If you are starting a community it is best to start the community with activities least hindered by the barriers described above. As the community becomes more vibrant and gains more trust you can start initiatives that have more barriers to overcome.

Of course there are strategies to deal with the barriers described here. I’ll write about these in the near future.

Related posts:

1. Successful implementation of communities 2
2. Successful implementation of communities 1
3. Roles in managing internal communities

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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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2. Roles in managing internal communities
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