Community management

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How do you get people to share their knowledge?

April 14, 2010 by Jaap Linssen | 2 Comments

Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 18.27.00 Internal communities help people within an enterprise solve problems faster and more effectively. A vibrant community, which brings together people from across the organisation will also generate more innovation.

A key component of the community is the ability of people to access knowledge already available within the company. Knowledge can be found by searching the community platform for stored knowledge or to locate the people that posses, or have access to it. Having immediate access to such knowledge leads primarily to a reduction in the (re)search costs incurred (you don’t need to hire external expertise so often). In situations where access to the shared knowledge of a community is not available, time to research a subject increases dramatically along with costs. In the communities we manage we have seen savings of hundreds of business research and analysis hours on a single subject.

Such a system provides great benefits both for the organization and for the individuals. This should be reason enough for people to contribute to the community. In reality, however, it proves to be tremendously difficult to motivate people to help colleagues and lift these constraints on sharing knowledge. There are many reasons that govern this reluctance. Many aspects are psychological, such as fear of not being taken seriously or fear of losing the monopoly on that knowledge. Such psychological factors are complex to manage and take time and trust, to change for the better.

There is one factor that has great impact on improving access to knowledge, that can be managed quite easily. Instead of asking people to actually answer a question, you describe your ‘knowledge need’ and ask people that could help you to make themselves known. By doing this you start to build a ‘knowledge network’. These knowledge networks are very powerful in giving people access to knowledge. You can think of them like hyperlinks on the web pointing to relevant sources, only this time the links point to relevant people. Besides being a powerful way to unlock knowledge this method also helps lift the constraints on sharing I described earlier. People no longer have to be scared of losing their monopoly on knowledge as they remain the gatekeeper. Further, the time investment to indicate you have such knowledge is negligible. In our active communities we also see signs that it actually encourages people to share as it’s a way to profile themselves as an expert within the organisation.

At one of our clients an employee was asked to work on search engine optimization (SEO) for the website of a specific division. She posted a request for help on the internal community asking who had experience implementing SEO for a website. Five specialists replied that they had experience and would be happy to help out. Recounting her experience, she reflected that access to the knowledge of these people had saved her at least two months work and she had no need to hire external experts to get her going. Furthermore, in the future anyone with questions about SEO just has to search for the term and will have access to the knowledge in an instant.

So how do you create the environment in which this can happen? You need to shift the paradigm in peoples’ minds that you do not have to share the knowledge itself. We find that the best way of doing so is to set the example by sourcing two or three knowledge requests and asking a number of experts to make themselves known. Once a few strong cases are visible people catch on very quickly.

Case: ROI of Internal Communities

April 7, 2010 by Jaap Linssen | 2 Comments

This case describes a bottom up innovation initiative at a large Dutch insurance company. The case shows that bottom up innovation in large enterprises through the use of an internal community, results in lower costs and an improvement of the speed and quality of the first 2 stages of the Stage-gate process.

Bottom up innovation is the concept where ideas ‘bubble up’ from anywhere in the organisation. Employees lead the idea through the innovation process by utilising relations based upon knowledge, experience, and influence in their network and not so much by navigating company hierarchies.

It also suggests that, compared to the traditional way of innovating, it increases the innovation momentum within the organisation leading to more and better quality ideas and eventually a more innovative, collaborative culture within the organisation.

Download here: Bottom_up_innovation

Tagged bottom up innovation, Community management, costs, quality

Epic cycling tours and crowdsourcing

March 25, 2010 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 2.49.28 PM Through Springwise I ran into an initiative of Tour d’Afrique Ltd. a Toronto based company named for its flagship cycling tour that annually traverses the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. They have started to crowdsource cycling tours through an operation they call Dream Tours.

The text on their homepage: “Do you have a dream expedition on a bike that you would like to have others to join you on, help you get it off the ground and share the costs? Do you have a dream tour that you wish someone would help you implement it? DreamTours will revolutionize the way cycling tours around the world are created. You create your DreamTour and the community around the world makes it a reality.”

Crowdsourcing is hot, however getting it to work for you is not easy. I believe this initiative is aligned well to be successful. I’ll discuss a number of prerequisites for successful crowdsourcing and community management.

The community is passionate

These guys organise life experience cycle tours. They started with Cairo to Cape Town tour. A trip of 12.000 km in 120 days. They now have 5 of such epic journeys in their program. The people participating in such events have to be passionate. If you ask people with passion to come up with their dream, you’re bound to get interesting input. Currently there are 25 proposed tours.

The community is focussed but there is enough room for creativity

A very difficult aspect to deal with when you engage the crowd is to give them enough focus without destroying creativity. A mistake many companies make when asking the crowd for input is that they formulate the question/challenge broadly to get as many diverse ideas as possible. Such lack of focus is often detrimental for the quality of ideas. You get too many irrelevant ideas. The low quality will scare people away as they are not willing to invest energy into something of such poor quality. Furthermore, in such cases you also see the organisation itself lose interest and the initiative dies. So you need to apply focus. The level of focus correlates with the passion the community has for the subject. The more passion, the more you can apply focus. I believe Dream Tours has found the right balance. The only thing people are asked to do is plot a trip or in other words their dream. The planning and organisation is done by Dream Tours if the route gets enough buy in from the community.

What’s in it for me?

One of the key aspects in having a lively community is answering the “What’s in it for me?” question for the people you would like to contribute. If it isn’t clear how people can benefit from contributing, they will not. The benefit can be as straight forward as prize money or more intangible like feeling good about yourself. “What’s in it for me?” also correlates with the passion of the community; talking about something you love is very satisfying to most people. Not sufficiently addressing this subject is the number one reason for failing communities.

In this case, the answer to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question is very clear. You get to plan and share your dream journey. If your journey is selected and enough people sign in, you have the option to ride for free or share this prize with the others as a group discount.

How can the Dream Tours community improve?

A powerful way to improve the quality of ideas generated by the community or spin of new ideas is what we call ‘enrichment’. Others enrich ideas that were posted previously. In our practice we usually witness that the true brakethrough comes from insights other people add to the ideas. For Dream Tours, I imagined that people would go crazy enriching the tours proposed by others. Enrichments such as special sites to visit, special mountains to climb, etc. There is no real enrichment activity on Dream Tours. I would suggest Dream Tours to start inviting their members to enrich each others tours. And why stop there? Why don’t they also put their own tours in the community for others to be enriched?

Tagged Community management, crowdsourcing, idea challenge, idea management

Open Innovation at Crowdspring

December 23, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman | 1 Comment

In a true entrepreneurial spirit, quite a number of employees at Innovation Factory have their own side projects which they work on in the weekends and evenings. For one of those projects, Green at Work (in which I participate), a logo needed to be designed. It was done through Crowdspring, a crowd-sourcing platform. Even the seemingly simple process of having a logo designed by a crowd has many aspects of open innovation to it. I would like to share the experience with you and place it in the context of idea management.

Crowdspring

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:

Green_at_Work

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Tagged Community, Community management, idea challenge, idea management

Roles in managing internal communities

December 21, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

As our Community management practice is growing rapidly, we’ve spend some time at the end of the year to further professionalize our approach. One of the things we did was to describe the different roles and activities we see in managing internal communities. In moderating and activating communities we distinguish between 10 types of roles:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:

Tagged Collaborate, Community, Community management, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Social Media, social network, social networking, social platform, Strategy, user generated content, web 2.0

Successful implementation of communities 3

November 23, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

In two previous posts I described exercises that will improve the chances of success for your community. During the first exercise you describe in great detail what activities people will engage in and think about barriers the way it adds value to them. In the second exercise you check for what activities the community software tools actually lower barriers to collaboration.

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.

Tagged comm, Community, Community management, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, social networking

Stop pitching Social Media to management

November 18, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 2 Comments

Social media are HOT! However, the term does not catch on with management. Some say it’s because management is not modern enough. Maybe that is true. However, I recently heard a manager say: “Social? I’m running a business here. Let them socialize at home.” It’s a very understandable reaction. The question is if managers react to the results of well implemented 2.0 technology or to the fact that the word social insinuates that people engage in non work related activities. I believe it has a lot to do with the latter. So let’s stop calling it ‘social’ and tell them what’s in it for them.

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.

Tagged Collaborate, Community, Community management, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, social networking, social platform

Successful implementation of communities 2

November 16, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 2 Comments

This post describes one of three key exercises you need to perform to improve your chances of having a vibrant (enterprise) community.

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.

Tagged Collaborate, Community, Community management, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, social network, social networking, social platform

Successful implementation of communities 1

October 20, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

Communities, by definition, need to be valuable to all its participants. Enterprises in many cases only deal with the ‘What’s in it for me’ question from their own perspective. They often fail to truly address this question from the participants perspective.

If it isn’t clear to an employee how he or she will benefit from collaborating with others on an internal community, most will simply not engage. Add to that the fear of asking a ‘stupid question’, not giving the ‘right answer’, or being ignored when asking a question and internal communities often quickly grind to a halt.

We use a simple slogan when we help enterprises set up communities: ‘People Doing Things Together.’ When setting up a community, you need to go into a great level of detail defining this and make sure they valuable. The definitions can be generalizations or actual examples. The more focused, the easier it will be to show potential users ‘what’s in it for them’ and get them engaged.

Some examples:

Product managers ask for available market research for a new concept they have.
Marketeers test a new proposition amongst peers.
R&D tests the market potential of a new application with marketing and sales colleagues all over the world.
Controllers share and discuss their annual budgeting spreadsheets to get best practices for next years budgeting rounds.
HR searches the community for a person suitable for a certain role based on expertise and experience shown in peoples’ community activities.
A product manager wants to make a manufacturing investment but his market will not give him sufficient revenue to justify the investment. He asks product managers in other markets for their potential revenue. Their combined markets may justify the investment.
An insurance product manager in Belgium asks his colleagues in The Netherlands if they have implemented a specific coverage in their insurance, and if they have how it was done and what the result was.
Before testing his new campaign in an expensive survey, a marketeer tests the campaign, at no costs, in his own organization.

Tagged Collaborate, Community, Community management, Culture, Innovation, soc, socia, Social, Social Media, social network, social networking

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