Content Curator

Just want to share this post: Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future ?

Here's the essence of this much-needed role:

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.

That's what I feel I should spend more of my time doing in our internal online community. I'm not sure we'll ever get to the point where it's a full-time paid position, but not long ago we would have had trouble imagining online Community Manager could be a full-time paid position. And there is certainly a rapidly-growing demand for the burgeoning online content to become easier to sift through and process.

Guerrilla Social Media with CEO Artillery and Air Cover

Our Model: Guerrilla Social Media with CEO Artillery and Air Cover
I'm part of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group of peers who are wrestling with Enterprise 2.0 in our companies, and the Council has just released a research report: A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise. It's full of valuable advice based on real-world experience by companies achieving success with social media inside the enterprise.

But as I read through the report, I couldn't help be struck by how different our company's path to adoption seems to have been. I don't actually think there is any one right way to successfully establish an online community within an organization. That should be pretty obvious. But I do wonder if our company's path hasn't, perhaps, been especially atypical. Here's how I'd sum up our approach.

CEO Sponsorship = Artillery and Air Cover
A key factor -- perhaps *the* key factor -- is that our CEO pushed for this project pretty much from the start. So we haven't had to justify what we are doing as much as other organizations have. We've faced skepticism, to be sure, but not from the man at the top.

Our CEO is practically our Chief Evangelist, not only talking up our online community, but leading by example as an active participant. While he hasn't mandated using the technology, he's directly suggested to many that it would make sense for them to do so... and when the CEO makes a suggestion, people tend to look for reasons to comply, rather than defy.

He's providing air cover in a sense, but he doesn't just do flyovers. He also brings the big guns to bear, using his position and influence to support our efforts.

Skunkworks
Beyond the CEO sponsorship that gave us clearance and funding, our project feels more like a skunkworks experiment than the quite formal process described in the Council's report. Unlike many other companies, we didn't have a formal cross-functional team. We don't have a formal charter. We just got busy making things happen.

There were only three of us orchestrating the entire effort at the start, and together we devised the plan and strategy for making the technology and the community happen. We pushed as much responsibility as we could outward and downward, but all of the central decision-making effectively remained in our little team. After six months we were down to two people: me as the full-time community manager and my boss, providing much-needed support, insight and guidance. Sometimes it feels like we're doing it with smoke and mirrors!

Volunteers
Although we established a central Advisory Board and local Steering Committees in each division, those attempts at formal structure are not the reason our community has grown and taken on a life of its own. What has made it work is all of the enthusiastic volunteers who have carried the message far and wide throughout the company. Their enthusiasm and energy has spread, person-to-person.

It feels a bit like those Our Gang/Little Rascals movies where someone says, "Hey, I've got an idea! Let's put on a play!" and then all the kids go to the barn and happily pitch in just because it's so much fun to produce something together. I don't think we're ready for the curtain to go up, yet... we're still building the sets and trying to learn our lines.

Guerrilla Social Media
Day by day, department by department, person by person, we're gradually infiltrating the enterprise. This is not a Napoleonic campaign with a master battle plan. In many ways we're a guerrilla army of loosely affiliated compatriots using whatever tactics we can come up with to fight all the little battles we face along the way. It's a long, slow battle in many ways and some days we win and some days we lose.

Is This a "Model"?
I don't think this is necessarily a model others should try to follow. I share it more to reassure others out there who may find that their approach doesn't look like anyone else's. Read the Council's report and learn as much as you can from what others have done, and take all the pieces that look like they will work for you, but in the end you have to develop a model that fits your organization. And that might look as different as ours does.

That's okay. Our model's functioning pretty darn well, all things considered. I hope yours does, too.

Emergence and Enterprise 2.0

I just finished reading Andrew McAfee's newly published book, Enterprise 2.0 (he's the one who coined the term in 2006). It's a rich resource and there's much I want to say about it, but I'll start with a post about a key word that is central to understanding Enterprise 2.0 -- emergence.

I smiled when I saw McAfee had used ant colonies as an example to illustrate emergence:

Ant colonies are similar to the Web in that they appear highly structured even though no central authority is in charge. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 66)

I came to the same conclusion myself back in May: Internal Social Media Sites Are Ant Farms. The scientists who study ants have made impressive contributions to our understanding of not only insect behavior, but online communities, as well.

Emergence does not mean "emerging" as in something that's new, young or not yet mature. Rather, McAfee uses the term emergence as it is defined in complexity science:

Emergence is the appearance of global structure as the result of local interactions. It doesn't happen in most systems; what's necessary is a set of mechanisms to do critical things such as connecting the system's elements and providing feedback among them. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 66)

The term McAfee has coined for the technology systems that make Enterprise 2.0 possible is emergent social software platforms (ESSPs). As he explains,

Emergent means that the software is freeform and contains mechanisms like links and tags to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 69)

I'll close this post by noting the key point at the end of that sentence: "over time." We've had our online community up and running for over a year now and we're still struggling with structure and "findability." While I'm not going to stop looking for ways to better manage both of those challenges, McAfee's given me some reassurance that patience is part of the solution, as well. It's going to take time for the (scientific) magic of emergence to be realized.