Social Media

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:

  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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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.

Barriers

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.

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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.

People Doing Things Together

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.
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Start hiring and training Guy #3s

October 16, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

I was writing an article on bottom up innovation and I decided to discuss the definition of bottom up innovation in a social media group on LinkedIn. One of the participants came back with a tip to take a look at a blog post of Seth Godin about guy #3. Seth’s blog post gave me an interesting insight I would like to share with you.

The post is about a film someone sent him.

Seth writes: “My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement. Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob. We need more guy #3s.”

One of the key strenghts our company has, is that we can get bottom up innovation and internal corporate communities to work. It has always been a bit of a struggle to describe precisely what we do. We have always called what we do ‘supplying perceived critical mass.’ Perceived critical mass is needed when a (innovation) community is not large enough to look vibrant and without intervention would look dull and die. Until the community gains enough critical mass to be vibrant itself, a supporting team generates all sorts activity to stir things up. Some people find this description too abstract though. Reading Seth’s blog made me see a big void in innovation management and how we create value for our clients.

When most companies set-up innovation an important aspect of that is looking for entrepreneurs (guy #1). Not much attention is given to make sure that when guy #1 starts dancing there are people standing by to join in. Many companies have hiring policies and training to make people behave more entrepreneurial. I have never seen a company hire or train with the aim for people to be the initial supporters of intrapreneurs. When asked many companies will agree there is a big gap between the entrepreneurs running ahead and the the rest of the organization. You can have all the entrepreneurs, processes and tools you like, if you do not fill the gap, you’ll be completely dependent on the chance of a guy #3 jumping in. We fill this void by giving hands on support to entrepreneurs, activating employees to help out entrepreneurs, or coach entrepreneurs to find guy #3′s.

Wouldn’t it be great if we would structurally fill the gap. There are large groups of employees that would qualify for the role of guy #3. Traditional staff functions are generally very knowledgeable however, in many companies they take on the role of firing squad, telling the intrapreneur why his or her idea will not work. If these employees could be trained as Guy #3s this would be very beneficial. So the value for companies is not in training controllers to think like entrepreneurs. The trick is to train controllers to dance with entrepreneurial people.

In internal communities a similar problem exists. Usually community managers fully focus on finding people that will post content and stop there. If people are actually asking colleagues for input or help, unanswered questions are a detrimental warning: “Don’t ask your question here because you’ll be ignored by your colleagues and look stupid.”Also questions without initial response often remain without response. In the communities we support, we find guy #1s but also find guys #2 and 3 to respond quickly to guy #1. After guy #3, the community will take over.

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Women use social media more than men

October 8, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | No Comments

According to a post on Beatblogging.org women use social media more then men.

  • Flickr is 55 percent female.
  • Twitter is 57 percent female.
  • Facebook is 57 percent female.
  • Ning is 59 percent female.
  • MySpace is 64 percent female.

However, Youtube and LinkedIn are 50/50 and Digg is 64% men.

These figures tell us that to some extent women and men differ in the way they like to engage with social media. Although these figures could not prove this notion at all, I could argue that women like to share something and then discuss it, while men share without the need for the discussion (Digg).

That means that companies thinking about using social media to engage with their (potential) customers need to take these differences into account. No more one size fits all; they will need to specify their social media strategie to cater to the needs of both ‘the female’ and ‘the male’.

For open innovation this could also have implications. You would need to give women the opportunity to reflect on other peoples ideas and possibly enrich them, while men would possibly tend more toward just ‘digging’ good ideas.

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