I had a facinating discussion with 2 propects and Aaron Zizter about communities and “business processes”. Many of the conversations I have with businesses (mostly large to mid sized) is around HOW they want to build & grow their community. The important item to realize is that business process (and the automation of them) are the key for most corporations.

The reason is simple – it lets you “scale” and “repeat” the complex or simple tasks and makes for a more productive workforce.

So if you focus on the business processes that need to be fixed then it creates one (of many) starting point for you to then get the right users (community members) and finally the use of several applications and technology (wikis, blogs, etc.) you have the starting need for a community and what is goal might be. True?

Why is it that when it comes to communities many believe that some of these truisms dont hold true?

Here are some of my explanations:

1. Its too simple an approach. Given that there are over 1000+ consultants for SEO alone, and over 2500 buzz words around PPC, CPM, BLAH, etc. why should everything old still be valid?

2. Communities put the people first and everything else later. Granted they still have to do something together for the greater good, but if your center of gravity is the community member, then the nodal questions change.

Do you find yourself asking these questions?
What do users want to do in a community? When do users use the community? What can we do for users to leverage the community more?

As opposed to:
What can we do to improve our invoicing with our partners by leveraging communities?  When is the best time to release our product so that it causes minimal disruption to our users?

3. Business processes are boring. Lets face it. Not many people really want to do repetitive work and handle only by exception. Its little value-add and lot more bottom line focused. But communities are fun, time wasting to a certain extent (gasp).

Do you agree? Why do you think people forget the basics or throw it out of the door when they want to start building communities?

From Information week:
“At Procter & Gamble, the Enterprise 2.0 push is all about speed.
“Enabling effective collaboration is like adding a sixth gear to a race
car,” says CIO Filippo Passerini. The 140,000-employee company is
rolling out Microsoft SharePoint and Office Communicator as well as
Microsoft Windows Desktop Search company-wide, while adopting blogs and videoconferencing in critical niche roles, including a blog
to answer questions about the SharePoint rollout. P&G’s goal is to
make it easier for employees to connect to each other and to outsiders,
and the effort will be measured based on whether it helps get smart new
products to shelves faster. “In a world where competition gets tougher
every day, minutes really do count,” Passerini says.”

Review the opinions of Nic on the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. And also on his theory of adoption.

Good read.

Marc Canter is a legend by most people’s standards. He has contributed so much to the industry that few people dont know him or his work. He founded MacroMind – which later became MacroMedia. He is also credited with the first virus distributed in commercial software. He currently CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a 25+ person social network software and solution company with primary offices in Walnut Creek California.

Marc’s current company provides software, source code download, software as a service, hosted service and any possible other type of solution for creating social communities. Its not very expensive to get up and running since a couple of his enterprise customers have told him “You ought to charge us more for this”. Its starts at $2500 (perpetual license) to a MAX of $40,000 – nothing more to pay ever and YOU GET the source code.

Its important to provide options – and in Marc’s case for Broadband Mechanics, it makes a lot of sense. In case when you are expected to fulfill every option offered as if it were the only option – ensure you staff appropriately for it.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/rachel_ray2.jpg”>

Chris Carfi blogs at Social Customer Manifesto, which is another good resource of insight into communities and enterprise adoption. He has a very interesting link:

“Enterprise Web 2.0 Efforts: How To Get To Critical

Here is something that caught my eye:
“As such, growing an online community takes time and dedication; there’s no “just add water” silver bullet.”

I would agree in principle, but I cannot help but think before Rachel Ray came along there were hundreds of well intentioned cooks who suggested “Making everything from scratch” – How quaint?

Lets assume you have the dedication, but What if you dont have the time? Does that mean there’s no hope?

Here are some of the just add water tips that we have used to get a community up and running quicker.

1. Speed Dating: Making offline introductions to participants by “pre screening” interests of users so they can have a smaller clique to start with and feel part of the community quicker.

2. Its okay at times to bet on the one thing and have only one backup: For an internal community of sales reps whose eyes glazed everytime we said “Sales training” we completely advocated removal of a central event and replaced it with “all eggs in one basket” Breeze based 5 minute update sessions. Worked like a charm. Realize that some of these will work, some wont, but its worth a try.

3. Offer incentives (not things like money, or starbucks cards, etc.) that truly meet the underlying needs of the community. E.g. Appeal to their “leaving a legacy” like UOP or “no more boring 3 hour PowerPoints” for sales personnel.

What do you think? Where can you find that Rachel Ray in your company to help making good quality but without the start from scratch?

Here is an OPML file of all the bloggers on Online Communities, Social Media and Social Networks.

To use it: Click on the link above.
File -> Save As on your hard drive
Use your favorite RSS reader and Import the OPML file.

Some useful links to import:

1. Google Reader how to import OPML files

2. IE Feed Reader how to import OPML files

3. My Yahoo import OPML files

Enjoy!

There is a Google Calendar icon on the right. We are trying to put together all the events (public and vendor specific) about Online communities in ONE place, so people can view and get involved as they see fit. This includes:

1. Seminar’s, conferences, Camps, Unconferences, etc.
2. Vendor specific webinar’s, seminars and events
3. Noteworthy dates for release of new research.

We would very much appreciate you helping make this a great resources. If you know of an event that is related to communities that is NOT listed here, please drop me an email

Thanks.

Giovanni pointed us to Rusty Weston’s My Global Career blog.
“My Global Career features reader–generated content by a burgeoning community of global workers, hiring managers and recruiters among others.”

“My Global Career 500 – a ranking and directory of the world’s
largest employers; tools such as World Business Holidays; unique
assessment tests such as Global Ready?;”

Very nice listing of top employers globally or as one would call it MNC’s – Multi National Corporations. The emphasis is on upper case M as in BIG.

Increasingly smaller companies and organizations (like ours for example) are the new mNC – emphasis on the lower case m. We are small (less than 100 people), but have employees (not just temporary hires) in US, India, Ukraine and Canada.

Most of the communities that businesses that we run are 65% dominated
by US users, and some in India are obviously dominated by people from
India.  So what have we learned from global communities:

1. Moderation cannot be done in a non-local way. E.g: We had a US semiconductor company with moderators in India. After seeing no “moderation” for 3 days we asked the moderator “What’s going on?”. Apparently one of the users posted offensive content that bothered the moderator, but it really was a colloquial usage of an american slang.

2. Use timezone differences to your advantage: Personalize your content enough for local test, but cater to global issues that plague all users.

3. Accept global survey results with a grain of salt. Survey questions dont always translate well in local languages even if your answers are of the multi-choice type. We found it better to localize survey questions to get a better feel for localization within an international community.

News.com reports that at the American Association of Advertisers’ annual media conference and trade show, the key message was “let consumers brand your product”.

“Building relationships through brands is the future of marketing, Jim
Stengel, global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, said in a
keynote session. The company, whose brands range from Gillette and
Crest to Downy and CoverGirl, is sponsoring Web sites for customers as
a way to increase brand loyalty and attract new customers, he said.
“We’re working to co-create rich experiences that tap into the desire
for self-expression,” Stengel said.

For example, P&G worked with Yahoo to create the Capessa online community site aimed at women. Yahoo also created the Pontiac Underground site for fans of the General Motors brand.”

Sean ODriscoll is the Michael Jordan, Lance Amstrong and Tiger Woods all combined in one for online technical communities. He has been working on community for approximately 4 years with a particular focus on engaging the active enthusiasts and leaders that fuel the value of communties. He has been at Microsoft, where he is the General Manager of Community Support and MVP (Most Valuable Professional). This MVP group is about 3500 people who are actively helping their communities learn more about technology and leveraging Microsoft products more effectively. They are independent from Microsoft, and leaders in their own right with their sole mission to help others be successful with technology.  They are not evangalists for Microsoft, but more the leaders at how to use and leverage their technology.

The one question I had for Sean was “What is the ONE thing you have learned that you would like to share with community practitioners, managers and designers?”

“Start with a focus on the active enthusiasts or leaders of the community and build it around them. These are the top 1% of folks who are going to make the core of your community and are the most vocal participants”.

The answer seems very obvious at the superficial level, so I dug deeper to understand his perspective.

1. Leverage active participation tracking: Currently they use the most simple tools to monitor who are the most helpful MVP in NNTP (Network News) and use Netscan. Since their MVP are people that help on other communities besides Microsoft, they have to watch, monitor several communities hosted outside Microsoft to ensure they find out who is helping the users. These people get nominated to be the MVP’s for the year.

2. Provide incentives to the active participants: Each year (similar to the Oscars), these MVP are identified, awarded and feted by Microsoft. Since they help the community which indirectly benefits Microsoft, they are all invited to fly into Redmond for a summit, they meet with their peers, product experts from Microsoft and also meet with Bill Gates. They do get incentives along the way. E.g. At the Vista launch last month many of them got the first views at the product.

3. Grow and nurture your active MVP’s: Since most MVP help the community out of their own interests, helping the benefits Microsoft. They are actively courted by Microsoft and given training, documentation etc. This helps them be more effective at their activities.

4. Request active feedback from your participants: The conversation is bi-directional with lots of MVP’s providing their perspectives which sometimes are not always aligned with Microsoft’s but they end up learning from each other and still help the larger audience of non MVP’s.

5. Build the community around your active participants as opposed to making the participants come to the community. Support your participants ways to organize instead of building a community specifically around your own needs to control the message and medium. What this implies is that if your company makes a product and there are independent communities that have sprung up outside of your direct influence, it still makes a lot of sense to support & help those extended communities.