Adventures in Social Media

Why I am Lucky to be a Member of The Community RoundTable

2011-05-15T17:50:00.006-04:00

A few months ago my employer arranged a membership for me in The Community Roundtable. I was already familiar with TheCR as thought-leaders in community management (see, for example, The 2011 State of Community Management), but it’s a premium service and I hadn’t gotten the budget for it, so I never had a seat at their table before.

What I expected when I joined the Community Roundtable is a place where community professionals gather and share ideas, but what I have found is far more than that. The key value for me is the leadership and service that Rachel Happe and Jim Storer provide. Community members may come and go, members' level of expertise and experience varies, and members' communities' relevance to my particular situation can be hit-or-miss. So, I may get great, actionable ideas from fellow community members, or I may find what they are sharing doesn’t really apply to me.

But the Community Roundtable’s leaders make all the difference. The Community Roundtable isn’t just a self-service community (although plenty of member-initiative is taking place). The leaders create programming for members at an impressive rate on a wide variety of community-related topics. Every week, it seems, there’s an offering I’m tempted to join. They bring in experts and thought-leaders for intimate presentations and discussions. These are rare opportunities to truly engage not only with the speaker, but because Rachel and Jim are skilled facilitators, there’s always a lively and thought-provoking discussion among the community members and the speaker, as well.

I’ve even learned that it’s not such a bad thing when I miss one of those sessions, because TheCR leaders write up an account of each session afterward. I rarely find it very engaging to sit through a recording of a presentation and discussion I have missed, but to have the key points highlighted and explained and the meaning extracted for me, so I can read and reference them when I am ready? Wow, that’s a great service!

In fact, I’d sum it up by saying valuable programming, content creation and curation by dedicated, experienced and professional community leaders is a key differentiator of The Community RoundTable. I can meet and network with community professionals many places these days, both in person and online, but TheCR provides the best service and leadership that I’ve encountered. That’s why I find The Community Roundtable to be a wonderful complement to my Community BackChannel membership that I’ve been writing about recently. If you’re committed to online community management and can join both, I highly recommend you do so.

Free Means Free... Yes, Really! #cmtybc

2011-05-05T09:50:00.008-04:00

So, let me make something perfectly, crystal clear about my last post, Join Us in the Community BackChannel. Membership in the Community BackChannel is free, now and forever. It's not a business, and our charter specifically states that it will not become a business (see paragraph 11).

There's nothing wrong with creating a business to support online community professionals. Heck, it could be a good business to be in, given the projected growth in community management roles! But that's not what we're about in the Community BackChannel. All of us who founded it have successful careers and we're not giving them up. We like our steady paychecks! :-) There's nothing wrong with startup businesses, either, but they aren't for everybody.

The Community BackChannel is strictly a labor of love. We've formed it because we truly want to be part of a community that exists solely to support the people who are advancing the profession of online community management and development. It seemed obvious that such individuals are the very best candidates in the world for creating a fantastic online community, because they "get community" and know what it takes to create a great one.

All we're trying to do with the Community BackChannel is realize that potential. We've formed the community and now we're ready to stay out of the way as the community itself takes form, finds its voice and direction, and emerges as a vital part of the online community eco-system.

So, no-fee means free. Non-profit means we are not in this to make money and won't ever be. And it means lots of opportunities for leadership roles in the Community BackChannel, because we are counting on our members to make the community successful. No fee also means no spoon-feeding and lots of self-service -- remember, we're not quitting our day jobs.

Now, I can see one place where people might get confused about our no-fee, non-profit declaration: our community is hosted within a community that is a business, The BrainYard Community. We all know there is no such thing as a free lunch, right? The BrainYard Community has agreed to host the Community BackChannel for free and respect our autonomy. The Community BackChannel is not owned by or controlled by The BrainYard, nor is any of the Community BackChannel's content in any way controlled by The BrainYard.

The Community BackChannel gets a full-featured online community site for free, but our members do have to create an account in The BrainYard Community in order to participate in the Community BackChannel. That's the no-free-lunch part. We'll see some ads in our community site and those pay the rent. Most of all, we'll bring active, engaged community professionals into The BrainYard Community because that's where we are hosted, and that's appealing to The BrainYard Community.

It's a win-win, as the Community BackChannel gets a great online home for no fee and The BrainYard gets a jump-start on building a big community of their own by having our members as part of it.

Hope that clears up any confusion. If not, or you have more questions, please let me know in the comments and I'll be happy to explain further.

If all of this appeals to you, please check us out at http://cmtybc.com and if you're as excited about this as we are, apply to join us. You can also follow us on Twitter at @cmtybc. I hope to see you on the journey!

Join Us in the Community BackChannel

2011-05-01T10:55:00.005-04:00

If you've ever been part of an active, healthy community online, you know what a valuable experience it can be. If you've ever led or managed an online community, you know what a challenging and rewarding experience that can be. What if there were an online community where anyone working in or interested in community management and development could find supportive peers, expert advice and a wide array of educational and professional resources? It seems natural, even obvious, that community management professionals should be able to form an exemplary community of their own.

And now we have: The Community BackChannel officially launched on May 1, 2011. The Community BackChannel is a community of peers focused on the management and development of online communities. It's a no-fee, non-profit private group founded by four community management professionals: Claire Flanagan, Ted Hopton, Megan Murray and Jamie Pappas. Our mission is

to advance the art and practice of community building by gathering active and engaged people together in a vibrant, trusting, no-sales-zone where we can learn from each other and from the experience of participating in a model community of our own.

If you're interested in joining our more than twenty charter members, then check out our full vision and mission, and see whether you qualify for membership. We'd love to hear from you! And you can hear from us on Twitter @cmtybc.

Hiring Community Manager in Shanghai, China

2011-03-28T11:11:00.003-04:00

We're hiring a Community Manager in Shanghai, China. It's a great opportunity, as UBM (United Business Media) is growing rapidly in China, and the new community manager will play an important role in helping us achieve our objectives there, through growing and developing our internal online comminity.

If you're interested or know anyone who might be, please see the job posting: http://bit.ly/chinacm

Although this is a blatantly commercial message, it's also a great indicator of the health of our online community, as we need to expand our management team to meet the demands of our business in China. And we know very well that without a community manager in place, it's unlikely our online community will be successful there.

Social Business Software as a Tool for Joe Employee

2011-03-16T09:53:00.003-04:00

To take Ted's previous post to the opposite end of things, I've been really encouraged by the number of people who are learning to use our platform as a way to get feedback on ideas before they implement.

My example is a new employee who has been with the company about 2 months now. She's been active since she got here, but it was mostly just "playing" initially. Today, she posted a discussion about a project she's working on. Then, she referenced that discussion post in her status update to drive additional traffic (which worked to bring me in). Within three hours, she's got feedback from three people across two other divisions of the company.

Before we had a social business solution, the only people she could have gotten information from would have been in her own division, or people outside of the company she might have networked with. And since the project she is working on is a new thing for her division, probably no one there had even as much experience as she did. So she would not have had any internal resources to draw from.

Contrast this with now, when she can quickly get feedback from others who have experience. People she doesn't even necessarily know exist. Not only that, but their experience is going to be diverse, and therefore really rich. To top things off, all of those people also get to benefit from reading and interacting with each others posts.

What a great way to facilitate learning interactions within an organization, and empower individuals to be more successful in their careers.

Social Business Software as Levers for the CEO

2011-02-25T16:04:00.011-05:00

I've found myself using this expression to describe our community several times recently: it's like a machine that our CEO can reach into and pull on levers to make things happen within our organization.

Of course, it's much more than *just* that, but I have enjoyed watching as our CEO becomes increasingly adept at "leveraging" this technology. A couple of examples...

The CEO wrote a blog post about our mobile strategy and plans, citing some successful examples. He linked to a group in our community that's all about mobile, and suggested that everyone working on mobile should list what their projects are, so we can coordinate across the enterprise, share ideas and best practices, and learn from each other.

Presto! A document was created in that mobile group and people added their initiatives to it. Someone else started listing contractors and platforms, along with impressions of and experience with them. Someone else started listing upcoming meetings with outside companies, and others chimed in and asked to join those meetings. Requests were made to see demos of some of these projects and questions were asked about re-using code. The document has grown into an invaluable resource for everyone across the company who is working on or thinking about anything mobile.

See what I mean? Reach in, pull the lever, and make things happen.

Another example I noticed recently was a comment the CEO made in a group in our community, in which he both praised the efforts reported there and lamented that we didn't have a comprehensive or coordinated effort across the entire company to make sure we were neither missing opportunities nor wasting resources on redundant efforts.

Within an hour another very senior executive commented there that this was, indeed, something we should look at. Poof! A document appeared in the group and people from all over began listing what they are doing in this area. The document has grown every day for the past week and suddenly the overall picture is becoming clear. With this view, we can assess how to most effectively move forward.

Once again, he reached into the machine -- our online community -- and pulled a lever, making things happen almost instantly, almost magically.

Now, how would this have been accomplished in the past? I suspect he would have had to contact his direct reports and explained what he wanted. They in turn would have contacted their direct reports and/or anyone they could think of working on these things and made a request to assemble information. These requests would have worked their way down the management ladder until they (hopefully, but far from certainly) reached the people who had the information. Hopefully the whisper-down-the-lane effect would not have distorted the request, and so the information would then begin getting fed back up the ladder, where it would eventually be fed in pieces back to the CEO, where his assistant would have the task of attempting to assemble it. And he would then have a static snapshot to look at with no ready or efficient way to ask questions, make comments, or act on it, besides repeating the down-the-ladder communication process.

Tell me our new way, using our online community in social business software, isn't much better than that.

I could cite other examples, but I think you get the idea. We've gone way beyond having the CEO simply posting in his blog. He's figuring out whole new ways to manage our global enterprise that were never possible before. I wonder what he will think of next...

Community Management Zen: Pebbles and the Ripple Effect

2011-02-09T11:57:00.004-05:00

My colleague, Tracy Maurer, just said something in an email that's inspired this short blog post. I wrote:

Sometimes it's one little positive experience that can turn a complainer into a fan of our online community :-)

Tracy replied:

And sometimes also turns their complainer friends into fans as well. Or at least take their complaining down a notch.

When you throw a tiny pebble into a pond it makes ripples that can carry out to the very edges. When you create one positive community experience for an individual, it can similarly have ripple effects that reach farther than you will ever know.

We're building community one person at a time, even one action at a time. It may seem futile at times, but keep the ripple effect in mind. Each little win spreads out in its own way. We're slowly creating waves of change.

Taking Jive Software to the Woodshed

2011-01-17T21:52:00.005-05:00

I'd like to clarify a public statement I made last week about taking Jive Software to the woodshed over their day-long outage last week. Here's how it came about.

Last Friday began badly for me. I checked my Blackberry while still in bed before 6am ET and found that our internal community hosted by Jive Software had been offline for at least an hour, and since there was no communication from Jive it appeared that they had not detected the problem.

Still in bed, I opened my iPad and entered a Priority 1 case with Jive support that voiced my displeasure: "Site down for more than an Hour - where is Jive?" Then while I waited for a response I hopped over to Facebook and resisted the urge to call Jive out publicly, as I had no facts about the situation. I simply posted as my Facebook status:

Ted Hopton does not like bad news when he first checks his Blackberry in the morning. #badstart

It did not occur to me that I was at that moment helping a friend and fellow Jive customer realize that the outage was widespread, as I assumed only my site was affected. You can read that story here: Managing Expectations – The value of Transparency

After half an hour of dealing with email and checking out the news online there was STILL no response from Jive. Feeling pretty testy, I posted a reply to my own P1 support case further expressing my frustration, pointing out that all I need is a short response assuring me that they are working on the issue. It's a very lonely feeling to have a major technology failure on your hands and not be able to rouse the support team responsible for fixing it.

Only after I escalated the issue through executive channels did I learn that Jive had a massive failure at their data center and we were not the only customers affected. That news changed everything, and Jive needed to get it out to all affected customers MUCH faster. I no longer needed to worry that my issue was not getting attention. I knew then that the issue was getting all the attention Jive could possibly give it.

In fact, despite the huge, terrible and inexcusable impact this outage had on me and everyone in my company, my emotions actually shifted somewhat on the spectrum from fury toward sympathy. My thoughts were more along the lines of, "Boy, they really screwed up! This is going to hurt." I felt sorry for them. And with good reason, as the outage lasted all day, giving Jive a big ol' black eye.

So when I ended up being interviewed by Information Week magazine (I was not selected randomly -- IW is part of my company, so the editors knew from my update emails to all employees that the problem was widespread), I was no longer mad at Jive. Disappointed would be a better word.

I'm not sure exactly what I actually said when the reporter called. Maybe I carelessly joked about taking Jive to the woodshed, but what I meant to say was that I WON'T have to take Jive to the woodshed over this incident because it has affected so many customers that Jive will take it extremely seriously and will take whatever steps needed to ensure it doesn't happen again.

For the record, it is my view that Jive completely dropped the ball several ways on Friday:

1) the failure of the failover system was inexcusable;

2) the failure to communicate quickly and proactively with all customers affected was unprofessional;

3) the failure to use social media to get in front of the public view of the situation was an opportunity that a vendor of social media software should not have missed.

Hardware failures can happen, so that's infuriating but understandable. Once Jive finally set up the Webex session for all customers to keep updated on what they were doing to resolve the issue, as well as to let us ask any questions we had in a common place where we could see all of the questions and answers, the information flow was effective and efficient. There was another minor glitch, in that I did not receive some email updates from Jive until Saturday and Sunday (I don't know why they were delayed).

But I also received phone calls from my Jive account manager and support team leader during the day to apologize and make sure I knew everything they were doing, and then again after the site was restored, to make sure I was satisfied that all was finally well.

I love Jive's technology. We're having tremendous success with it and reaping great benefits from using it. I hate it when it lets us down, as software is bound to do from time to time, especially cutting-edge software like Jive's. We have come to depend on Jive as a critical partner in running our business, so Friday was a bad day, but as long as it results in significant improvements then the memory of it will fade. I'm counting on Jive to learn and grow from this experience, so no woodshed's needed this time.

A Brief Checklist for Humble Community Management

2010-11-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

I recently re-assessed the way I was managing one of my communities and changed direction as a result. Since the community consisted of participants in my Community Development 101 - Internal course, I shared with them my thinking about a key part of community management:

change course when it makes sense to do so
admit your mistakes when you make them
recognize when the way you wanted things to work isn't working
listen to community members -- and think beyond what they are saying to what may be behind what they are saying
be creative in approaching situations and don't be afraid to try new ways of doing things
circle back to the top of this list and repeat...

Let's call it a Checklist for Humble Community Management.

Carrots or Sticks?

2010-11-16T15:46:00.004-05:00

It's a well-worn image: using a carrot or a stick to get people to do something. I know there is a ton of research on motivation and I'm not going to cite any of it. This is about my experience being a member of and manager of online communities.

Quite simply, are carrots and sticks equally effective in encouraging community members' participation and engagement?

My answer is simple and definitive: no, sticks rarely work well and carrots are the best way to go. Making people participate doesn't build community. Sure, requiring people to participate in particular exercises can be a good way to get them to try the technology out or get over their initial reluctance to contribute, but it's not a sustainable strategy. Healthy communities consist of members who want to be part of them.

It's a mistake to mandate quotas or activity levels for community members as a condition of membership. Think about it: one of the beautiful things about communities is the ability to participate when you want, how you want, when you have something to contribute. Ban the infrequent contributor and you've lost the opportunity to learn from her when she actually has something to say.

Is there a cost to having "lurking" members? (I hate that term, BTW, since the point of creating content is for people to benefit from it by consuming it.) No. Increasing the number of community members increases the odds that someone will have an insight or an answer at any given moment (remember how probability works from Statistics 101).

Encourage people to participate. Reward and praise them for participating. Most of all, continually explain the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) to them so they realize that contributing isn't some charitable act. It's part of what makes the community valuable for everyone in it, including themselves. For a great example of how to convey this message passionately, see my earlier post: My CEO Rocks. Admit It, You're Jealous!

Carrots rule, no question about it.

Increasing Community Engagement: 4.5 Comes Alive Music Video

2010-11-08T09:38:00.010-05:00

Added to my online community manager job description: music video producer. How did that happen?

Early in 2010, my colleagues Tracy Maurer and David Michael and I were on a conference call lamenting that more people don't sign up for our training sessions about our internal online community and we acknowledged that it's hard to make learning fun. Then a crazy idea came up: what if we could make our training into a funny video that people would *want* to watch and would, in fact, share with their friends and tell them, "you have to see this"?

Thus was born my foray into music video production. I don't do the heavy lifting -- that's done by the incredibly talented Christopher Harris, aka DJ $crilla, who happens to be one of our employees in Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote lyrics, recorded his performance of them, then wrote, directed, edited and starred in our first music video, which went viral within our company and increased awareness of, positive attitudes about and engagement with our internal online community.

That video even went public for a weekend, before our company lawyers made us take it down. That was my first lesson in the finer points of copyright infringement law, something that is more complicated than "parody is a protected use," it turns out.

Well, we try to learn from our mistakes. This time around we worked in partnership with our legal team and got the music, lyrics and entire video approved for public release. Chris even got more creative this time, coming up with a teaser "trailer" video like you see of coming attractions in the theaters. Note that this trailer was released just before Halloween and the name of our employee community is the UBM Wiki:

We "leaked" the new video last week by posting it in a group in our community where all the new features of our upgraded software are explained -- yes, those training materials we desperately want people to see (and we've learned to make them more appealing, too, as Tracy Maurer builds innovative Picasa slideshows in PowerPoint that resemble online children's books with lots of pictures and only a few words). The word started to spread...

Today we officially launched our upgraded site and put links to the video on our home page. And the video is also live on YouTube, where you are invited to watch it and see how we at UBM have fun while we get the job done: http://bit.ly/4pt5comesalive

Everyone in the cast and crew is a UBM employee, participating because it was fun and they want to help increase engagement in our community across the company -- and around the world. If you like it, spread the word!

Taking Global Connectedness for Granted

2010-10-26T12:56:00.004-04:00

I had a quick lesson last night in how much my perspective has changed over the past 2+ years since we launched our internal online community. I was preparing to deliver a presentation remotely (via conference call and slide share) about our online community for a company meeting in Shanghai and the only remarkable thing about it to me was the time zone differential. Here's what I posted on Facebook about it:

Ted Hopton is ready for his presentation (remotely) to the meeting in Shanghai tomorrow morning, which is, of course, tonight on the East coast.

The comments I got from friends about my status message were all wishing me luck on the presentation -- kind thoughts, to be sure, but not what I was expecting. It must have sounded like a big deal for me to be doing this

For me, it was not an unusual thing to be delivering a presentation from home to a group in Asia. It simply amused me that I was presenting tomorrow by speaking tonight. I just take it for granted that my company is connected all around the globe.

But a few years ago, it would indeed have been a very big deal, now that I think about it. Our community has in so many ways bridged distances that my mindset has changed. Of course I am connected with colleagues in Shanghai -- isn't everybody? :-)

Community Development 101 - Internal Week 1

2010-10-15T18:40:00.007-04:00

I'm leading a course for our employees called Community Development 101 - Internal, and we're just finishing the first week. It's going to run for six weeks, and I'll try to blog about it here at least once each week to share how things are going.

I've long felt I wanted to do more to teach people in our internal Jive SBS community about community management and development, but I never felt comfortable distilling such skills and knowledge into an hour or two of "training," let alone a PowerPoint deck. It just didn't feel right . . . antithetical, somehow, to the whole idea of communities.

Time, Assignments and Model Community

Finally it dawned on me that by making it more like a college seminar and stretching it out over weeks, including assignments or even projects, the potential for effective learning would be much greater. And when I realized that would also allow us to form, within the course participants, a community of our own in which we could model the kind of behavior I want them to learn, well, that was my eureka moment. This could really be an effective way to teach people to develop and manage their own online communities.

So, we are underway. I made the course open to any employee, no matter what their role or whether they have any community management responsibilities. If you're interested, you can join. I pitched it as a learning and development opportunity, making clear that it would be valuable for anyone working in our online community who wants to help make it a more effective and useful place.

Off to a Roaring Start

I expected 30, maybe 50 people to sign up, and at last count there were just over 100! Wow. And then I went away on a long weekend camping trip with no Internet connection, and when I got a signal back my Blackberry went crazy pinging in all the email notifications from our course community. In only a week, it has taken off so much that I had to teach people how to filter the course's email notifications to a folder instead of their inbox -- people were saying they would have to leave the course because they couldn't find their regular work emails among the flood.

Asynchronous Learning

We have employees all over the world, so there's no time of day that will work for everyone. And I don't see all that much value in gathering everyone together simultaneously to listen to me, anyway. I'm not their greatest source of knowledge: the community is. So I committed to posting a video "lecture" weekly as well as exercises for them to complete. I'm keeping the videos to about five minutes long (these people all have day jobs, after all) and I hope that with the exercises they'll only need to spend one or two hours a week on the course.

Learning by Doing

The exercises are designed to get them to learn by doing, as well as from each other. The first exercise was to respond to a discussion in our course's community and explain what they hoped to learn in the course. Since this is my first time offering it, their input is literally shaping the content I'm going to offer. This is another advantage of stretching the course out over time, as I can adjust the content to meet their needs. It's literally going to evolve, just as our communities do (subtle, eh?).

As they responded to that discussion thread, many people commented on what others had posted -- they were, in fact, exhibiting the behavior we want to encourage in communities. The next assignment was to read and then post a response to Andrew McAfee's blog post, Do's and Don'ts for Your Work's Social Platforms. This generated both routine "I agree" posts and quite insightful commentaries either challenging McAfee, qualifying his points or adding more that they felt he'd omitted. And then those posts sparked their own back-and-forth discussions.

The third exercise was to find a community within our site that they had not found before and tell us why they liked it. This proved to be a pleasant treasure hunt for many. My favorite response was from someone who found the Excel Tips and Tricks group: "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!"

In addition to the responses to exercises, people are taking initiative (and this is only the first week, don't forget) to start discussions about topics they want to learn about or to summarize in an organized way the ideas that have emerged in the long threaded discussions.

New Leaders Emerging

I quickly realized I was overwhelmed and wouldn't be able to respond as fully as I wished to such a large group alone, so I drafted my colleague, Tracy Maurer, to be the co-facilitator. But even the two of us are not enough, so I am delighted to see some of the more experienced people in the course stepping up and responding to their peers, too. They are modeling the behavior we want everyone in the course to learn.

We've Only Just Begun

This isn't an account of a successful initiative. It's a bulletin from the field while the initiative is underway. I'll try to keep them coming so you can follow our progress, and our inevitable setbacks, and so I can recall later what it was like at each step of the way.

I've just recorded the Week 2 video and will be posting it and the Week 2 exercise soon. I have to admit, recording my talking head on video is more uncomfortable than I expected. The first attempts I made were awful, with my eyes tracking back and forth while I tried to read my notes, or worse, random glances at the ceiling when I lost my train of thought. I'm not a pro. So, I acknowledged that upfront in the first video and moved on. These are not slick productions, but they are an attempt to connect personally with the people taking the course, since we can't be in the same room, face-to-face.

Here are the first two videos: the introductory one and then Week 1.

Community Development 101 - Internal: Week 0 Introduction from Ted Hopton on Vimeo.

Community Development 101 - Internal: Week 1 Diversity & Party Hosting from Ted Hopton on Vimeo.

My CEO Rocks. Admit It, You're Jealous!

2010-09-30T17:10:00.011-04:00

I wrote before about the perhaps unconventional model we used to roll out our internal online community (Guerrilla Social Media with CEO Artillery and Air Cover). Perhaps you doubted a CEO could so thoroughly "get it" when it comes to the value of Enterprise 2.0 technology? Doubt no more.

This video resulted from my request that my CEO say a few words on camera about the course on community development I'm offering for our employees. He absolutely knocked it out of the park!

Oh, and don't be confused by the name of our community: it's called "the wiki" even though it's much more (we run on Jive SBS).

For an outside perspective, see also The Chief Evangelist Officer – How does your CEO compare? (Susan Scrupski's my friend, but unlike me, she's not accountable to my CEO!)

Manifesto for Data-Driven Community Development, Part 1

2010-09-25T07:32:00.017-04:00

It's time to add more science to the "art" of community development.

We've been exchanging recipes for years now, hoping that what worked in your community will be successful in mine. We've played our hunches and hoped for success, even as we had trouble defining exactly what success is. Online community managers have been behaving like alchemists, desperately seeking ways to turn lead into gold.

It's not that we haven't had successes. Indeed, we have legendary community development alchemists among us who have, indeed, turned lead in their organizations into social business gold. Many followers have gratefully learned from this vanguard and in turn have made their own contributions to our collective knowledge. Our community of community development professionals is advancing and progressing impressively.

Learning from other successful community managers how they have developed their communities is an excellent way to discover how to make your own community successful. I do it and every other community developer I admire does it, too. The willingness of our peers to share their recipes for success is remarkable and inspiring -- it's one of the most rewarding aspects of being part of the Enterprise 2.0 movement.

But it's not a particularly efficient process. It's hit-or-miss, at best.

As the number of Enterprise 2.0 communities grows ever more rapidly, and more and more creative people try out innovative approaches to developing their online communities, the number of success stories about community development is growing ever larger. Add in the churn of positive ROI stories being spun by vendors, and we're well on our way to chaos.

We need ways to evaluate what community development approaches work best in our own communities. Just because something worked elsewhere doesn't mean it will work everywhere. We community managers need to add more science to the "art" of community development.

That's why I am issuing a call for community managers to join me in deploying and refining what I call data-driven community development. I threw down the gauntlet in a recent presentation at the Jive World conference in San Francisco, and I'll provide an updated version at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara this November. Are you ready to respond to the challenge?

This is just the first in a series of posts that I'm calling the Manifesto for Data-Driven Community Development. I'm going to explain how and why we can and should use actionable analytics to understand community member behavior, in particular by establishing Community Development Feedback Loops in our communities. I define the Community Development Feedback Loop as a data-driven process for monitoring, understanding and contributing to the development of communities and community members by measuring, analyzing and acting upon individual member behavior. More on all of this to come...

If you don't want to wait for the next installment in this manifesto, you can join the community I've set up to discuss and share ideas about these concepts. And you can find the link to the video of my presentation there, as well as download the slides and view my notes on them. So I invite you to join that community and help in developing this manifesto, as it's all about community. Come join me on the frontier!

Why Some Errors Are Good for Your Online Community

2010-08-27T08:11:00.007-04:00

I'm a former English teacher, so years of correcting papers has left me with an eagle eye for errors. I rarely use a spell-checker because I don't need it, and I do my very best to eliminate typos from whatever I write.

But I'm really liking the spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and typos I see in our online community's blogs. At first, I admit, it bothered me to see the CEO publish a blog post with several little errors in it. I wanted to edit it quickly and clean it up for him.

But, as with many other things when running an online community, I have found that staying relaxed and adopting a laissez-faire policy is paying off. Rather than see mistakes by executives as inexcusable failures, I now see them as friendly invitations to everyone else in the company to publish, too.

We don't have a tone of perfection and correctness in our community. We don't focus on appearance and format. The errors send the message that what counts is the quality of your thoughts: "If management's posts contain errors, I don't need to be perfect either -- I can just pitch in and share my ideas."

In a global organization such as ours, this is even more important, since the vast majority of our community's content is in English, even though that's not the native language for many of our employees. Fear of embarrassment about their imperfect English creates a barrier to participation, so it has been wonderful to read informative and insightful, if error-filled, blog posts by some of our executives in Asia, and see the enthusiastic response to them from employees both in Asia and elsewhere in the world.

It's a great message: What you have to say is what counts, not how perfect you are in saying in it, so don't hold back -- speak up!

The Unspeakable Truth: Cognitive Surplus in the Enterprise

2010-08-17T15:39:00.006-04:00

I just finished Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Of course, I read it looking for applications to the Enterprise 2.0 world.

Shirky makes the readily defensible claim that there are billions of hours of free time, or "cognitive surplus" in the world which people can choose to use as they will. Taking the simplistic case of working 8 hours a day, five days a week, and sleeping 8 hours a day, the math is simple: there are many unaccounted for hours which people can choose to use for constructive purposes, given suitable means, motive and opportunity.

But what about during the workday, where those of us working on Enterprise 2.0 are trying to make things happen? Dare we say that there is also a cognitive surplus in the office?

Well, I dare to say so: every enterprise that is a decent place to work in has a cognitive surplus, whether it wishes to admit it or not.

Human beings are not machines that can run non-stop for eight hours a day without stopping. There are certainly jobs where there is very little downtime (e.g., phone reps in a very efficient call center, for example), but knowledge workers in particular need and do take time to reflect, to plan, to research and to evaluate. They need to time to think.

It's simply not possible or practical to predict or regiment the amount of thinking time a knowledge worker needs in order to be effective. Every one of us simply does the best we can to be efficient and effective in discharging our responsibilities.

I believe there's gold in that thinking time. It's a cognitive surplus that can be tapped into by the enterprise if the right means, motive and opportunities are presented. It is exactly what those of us who have deployed Enterprise 2.0 technology have been observing for years.

It's not a bad thing to have a cognitive surplus, and you'll never get rid of that "organizational slack." It's just a shame to miss out on the amazing things your organization could be doing with it.

Sharing the love we've heard from our Jive community members

2010-07-23T18:19:00.002-04:00

Our company upgraded mid-June from 3.0.10 to 4.0.8. We made a pretty big splash of it, including creating a lot of user documentation, slideshows, and even a music video. And we used a Jive social group as a way to consolidate all the available information and to promote the heck out of what we were doing along with the WIFM (what's in it for me) for our community members.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive, well beyond our wildest dreams! My partner in crime, Ted Hopton, and I have both received several emails praising the new features. And one of them recently posted an update to her status stating just how much she loved the new weekly email digests:

Victoria Harres Akers is in love with the UBM Wiki Updates email.

By working with the Jive Analytics module, Ted has been able to document a 60% increase in activity since the upgrade. We were able to track some of it directly back to the weekly emails: people get them and check out items in the emails; or go add/remove people they are following; or update their status. We're not sure where the rest of the uptick is coming from exactly, but it is sure exciting!

Ted is tracking the activity to see if it falls back after the novelty wears off, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Ted will be posting again in September or October so we can let everyone know how the sustain goes.

Internal Communications: Our Online Community is THE Place for Big Announcements

2010-07-19T09:42:00.007-04:00

We successfully launched six simultaneous blog posts in our internal community this morning related to a re-organization. Every re-organization, now matter whether small or large, is of major importance for the people directly affected, so it was critical to get the communications right, and we wanted everyone to hear the news at the same time.

We're really maturing in our use of the internal community as the way we handle internal communications. Sure, emails are still sent to all employees when important announcements are made, but these frequently include links to the blog posts in the community, rather than the text of the full announcement. And today we not only coordinated the blog post publication times, but included links within the posts to each other, making it easy for people to connect the dots and see the different perspectives provided by each of the executives' announcements to their teams.

That's a lot of openness and transparency, and we've also set up a special area of the community as a forum for people to ask questions about, discuss and raise ideas related to the re-organization. We've long done such "town hall" meetings live and with audio and video -- now we are taking them into our online community, too.

We also opened up a previously restricted area of the community, after all the content there had been vetted as appropriate for all employees (or more moved to a restricted space, if needed). There are now two new areas devoted to cross-functional aspects of our business, as we push to be more nimble and smart about how we leverage the considerable expertise we have distributed in teams around the world.

TINSTAAFL and Facebook Entitlement Syndrome

2010-04-25T12:25:00.008-04:00

There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (TINSTAAFL)

I learned long ago that in the real world, there is no such thing as a free lunch. "Even if something appears to be free, there is always a cost to the person or to society as a whole even though that cost may be hidden or distributed." (Wikipedia)

So I find myself rather bemused at the outcry about Facebook's latest innovation, Instant Personalization, and the accompanying new option in Facebook's privacy settings. I have paid Facebook nothing for a service that I use daily (often many times each day). In return for my non-payment, I have received countless benefits, ranging from the simple pleasures of staying connected to friends (regardless of their geographical location) to moments that remind me of the "priceless" moments sentimentally highlighted in MasterCard advertisements. I haven't even sent Mark Zuckerburg a thank you note.

Maybe it's because I work for a media company, or maybe I'm just cynical, or maybe my high school history teacher explained TINSTAAFL really well -- somehow I am not surprised or resentful that Facebook is trying to make money off the amazing service they have supplied for free to 400 million people around the world. I also don't feel outraged that Facebook is looking for ways to monetize the information I have supplied to them on their website.

I also completely understand and agree with Facebook's decision to make the new Instant Personalization feature opt-out instead of opt-in. That's probably because of my experience managing online communities. Opt-in sounds so nice and considerate and respectful. But in terms of establishing critical mass, it's a hopelessly ineffective and unrealistic approach. Getting a huge number of people to actively choose to do something -- especially something completely new and different -- is massively difficult. If Facebook made Instant Personalization opt-in then its chances of succeeding would be very slim.

Inertia rules. Facebook is using inertia to establish instant value with the Instant Personalization feature by enabling it by default. They are banking, literally, on people becoming impressed with the feature when they experience it. (Try it on this blog! Just make sure you are signed in to Facebook, first, then click the Like button in the right column.) That's a far wiser bet than trying to convince people to opt-in to something they have never experienced and that's so game-changing that it's hard to fully grasp how it will work and why we would like to use it.

Facebook Entitlement Syndrome

So I find myself recalling the mob scene in Young Frankenstein (which, of course, is a parody of the original mob with pitchforks in the Frankenstein movie) as I watch the rapid (and rabid) spread of Facebook status messages along the lines of this one:

"Something else from FB to you: there is a new privacy setting called 'Instant Personalization' that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to 'Allow.' Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck 'Allow.'" Copy and paste this in your FB status!

This is often accompanied by a derisive comment to the effect of, "how dare they!" or "we won't let them get away with this!" This is what I call the Facebook Entitlement Syndrome.

It's absolutely true that without "us" -- Facebook's 400 million users -- Facebook would be nothing. Literally. So Facebook must be careful not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by driving away hundreds of millions of the members of its community. But it's a false sense of entitlement, I think, to expect Facebook to philanthropically supply us with a sophisticated, innovative, culture-changing and constantly evolving software system without seeking creative and innovate ways to make money that will sustain the company and the site so many of us like to use. And what Facebook alone has that has the most value is the data that we have freely chosen to upload to their website.

No Coddling - We're Adults

I have reviewed my Facebook privacy settings. I am an adult and I accept responsibility for my decisions. I have restricted nearly everything I share on Facebook to viewing by my friends only. That means Facebook Instant Personalization is not going to expose to public view anything I have not already agreed to make public. I'm fine with that.

I choose to live a connected life online. In addition to Facebook, I have a blog, after all, and a LinkedIn profile and Twitter account (@Ted_Hopton), and I seek the social and professional benefits that virtual connections can provide. I can accept that companies spending millions of dollars to build, maintain, promote and improve those connecting services are seeking revenue in return for the services I enjoy for "free." I can tolerate targeted advertising messages based on the data I have chosen to upload to those sites, just as I tolerate advertisements on television programs I enjoy, in newspapers and magazines I like to read, on websites I visit, in grocery stores where I shop, in the mail and my email inbox, and so on.

I accept that there is no such thing as a free lunch, no such thing as a free Internet, and no such thing as a free Facebook. And I'm excited to see what's going to happen next. A year from now, I wonder if we'll all be routinely clicking on Facebook Like buttons all over the Internet and marveling at how useful it has become to share and rate information based on our own network of Facebook friends.

Online Community Engagement Up in 1Q 2010 = Critical Mass?

2010-04-06T15:33:00.011-04:00

The trends are clear so far in 2010: engagement in our internal online community is increasing. Total page views hit an all-time high in March on top of monthly increases in both January and February. The average number of people logging in each day has increased dramatically in 2010, hitting an all-time high, as well. The number of active members online each month is on an upward slope, also hitting an all-time peak in March. And the number of people creating content hit the second-highest level ever in March, too, at 28% of active members.

Great! So, the question I have is, what's the reason for these positive trends? Just as it's hard to precisely determine why attendance is up at an event, it's hard to have any certainty about the causes of increased wiki engagement. But I'm going to theorize about the drivers, just the same.

Critical Mass

The first factor is likely that our online community has achieved critical mass. Although the term "critical mass" is pretty widely understood, the definition from Wikipedia is still useful:

Critical mass is a sociodynamic term to describe the existence of sufficient momentum in a social system such that the momentum becomes self-sustaining and fuels further growth.

This is exactly what we seem to be seeing in 2010 with our online community. There is enough content in it, and enough people using it, that it has become useful to a significant number of people. As those people use it and add to it, the value increases and "fuels further growth." An empty wiki has nothing but potential value. While ours has tremendous additional potential yet to be realized, it has achieved sufficient value to develop self-sustaining momentum.

Discovery Factor

As more people discover value in the community, they use it more and spread the word to others, leading still more people to use it. Similarly, when people are in the community online they are discovering new ways to use it, and that leads to further engagement.

Familiarity Factor

Over time, more people are learning how to use the Jive SBS technology. As they become comfortable with the technology, perceived barriers to usage recede and willingness to engage increases. Training is obviously an important part of increasing familiarity with the technology.

Experience Factor

It's not always immediately obvious how to use such flexible and adaptable technology. As people gain experience using Jive SBS and see how it can be used, it becomes easier to think of more ways to use it, leading to increased usage overall. More experienced users are more likely to develop new uses.

Surrender to the Inevitable

Another factor may be that people who have been, or remain, reluctant about participating in our online community are realizing that it's time to get on board anyway. It launched about 18 months ago. It is used by every division in the company and our CEO made explicit to all of his direct reports that it "is not an optional." It contains over 26,000 documents, more than 5000 discussions containing nearly 20,000 messages, and nearly 4000 blog posts with more than 5000 comments on them. It's no longer a novel experiment. It's becoming an essential part of how we do business, and as that sinks in more people are engaging.

Absence of Alternatives

Many alternative sources of information have been shut down as essential information has been moved to the online community site. More and more communication takes place there. We are centralizing in a number of ways on Jive SBS as our information and communication platform, and this drives people to use it.

Improved Usability

While it's not a large factor or widespread across the enterprise (yet!), there have been improvements in the way areas use the wiki, which leads to greater usage. The division with the heaviest usage, for example, has invested significant resources in organizing and rationalizing the way they use the tool. They are deriving greater value from it as a result.

Cross-Company Communication and Collaboration

There's a growing level of activity in groups that cut across divisional and geographical boundaries. Sharing of ideas and information among people with common interests is fueling increased wiki usage, whether it's for a specific job function (e.g., Web Analytics) or related to strategic issues (e.g., Virtual Events). Far more of this should and will be taking place, but the green shoots of growth are already visible.

Increased Awareness from the User Survey

It's also possible that distributing the User Survey in December 2009 increased people's awareness of our online community, particularly the many ways it can be used and positive outcomes that are possible (since many examples were listed as part of the survey questions). About one-third of all employees completed the survey, and as many as 70% of some divisions' employees completed it. Although the primary objective of the survey was, obviously, to collect feedback from people, another outcome may have been to stimulate further community activity.

What Do You Think?

We'll keep pushing for greater engagement and monitoring the results. Ultimately, it's impossible to know how much each of these factors actually has contributed to the growth in engagement in 1Q 2010. Your guess may be as good as mine. Are these factors not as important as I'm suggesting? Are there other factors I've neglected to mention?

Content Curator

2009-11-16T12:09:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-13T13:33:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-13T07:26:00.007-05:00

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.

Hiring a System Administrator

2009-10-23T15:35:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I feel I whine too much in this blog about all the system administration tasks that eat up so much of my time, when my emphasis should truly be on community development. Turns out I had a case to be made, and it was good enough to get approval to hire a system administrator to take that load off my shoulders.

I'm very excited about having another dedicated resource working full-time on our community. I expect it to make a tremendous difference in what we'll be able to accomplish. It comes back to what I have been saying from the start: you have to invest in your communities if you truly want them to succeed. There is no such thing as a free lunch, nor a free functioning online community.

While we're most interested in hiring for this role from within, I think it would have been useful for me if I'd had model job postings to look at when I created this one, so I'll share the write up here. (Note: our Jive SBS instance is called the UBM Wiki and is commonly referred to as "the wiki.")

Jive SBS System Administrator

Job Role: Jive SBS System Administrator for United Business Media

Division: UBM head office

Reports to: UBM Wiki Community Manager

Location: Flexible, needs to be in a UBM office

To apply: Send your resume and cover letter to ted.hopton@ubm.com

Job Summary

The UBM Wiki is an evolving network of internal online communities that connects our people, enhances communication, and enables the development of a collaborative culture across UBM. Approximately 5000 employees in all parts of United Business Media (UBM) and the world use the UBM Wiki, and since it was launched in September 2008 they have created 18,000 documents, 4000 discussions and 1500 blog posts, plus tens of thousands of comments on all of those.

The UBM Wiki runs on Jive SBS, a rapidly evolving browser-based collaboration tool. Our system is hosted by Jive Software, the fast-growing market leader in social business software, and uses Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network).

The role of Wiki System Administrator is being created to provide the technical leadership and support needed to maintain and develop all aspects of the technology used for the UBM Wiki.

The role will require flexibility in working hours to accommodate a global organization, including but not limited to frequent interaction with the Wiki Community Manager (US Eastern time zone) and Jive Software personnel (US Pacific time zone).

Responsibilities

The Wiki System Administrator will be in charge of all technical aspects of the UBM Wiki, including the following major areas of responsibility:

Jive SBS Administration
System Maintenance

Our Jive SBS is hosted by Sungard for Jive Software. The system administrator is responsible for managing and maintaining aspects of the system that are within UBM control, to ensure:

maximum system availability and uptime
full utilization of system capabilities
all aspects of the administration console are configured managed appropriately
system processes are fully documented with appropriate controls

System Evolution

Lead the development of customizations to our Jive SBS instance to further meet the community's needs:

customizing the look and feel of our application
creating and modifying widgets to meet UBM-specific needs
assessing the need for customizations and prioritizing projects
managing the process of developing customizations (either in-house or contracted through Jive or other vendors)
recruiting and leading an in-house team of volunteer developers

Technical Lead
Jive Software: Tech Support, Hosting and Engineering

Primary technical point of contact for the UBM Wiki with Jive Software, responsible for:

bug tracking and resolution: file and follow through on bugs with Jive, tracking them until patched
system upgrades: assessing whether and when to upgrade, planning and communication, monitoring upgrades, and conducting and managing acceptance testing.
feature requests and improvements: identifying, prioritizing and working with Jive to influence the evolution of the software
speed enhancements: making the user experience throughout UBM satisfactory in terms of system response time; working with users and UBM IT to properly configure PCs and networks; working with Jive to achieve response time improvements
security issues: following up on, identifying and implementing security improvements, and working with Jive to influence the evolution of the software

Note: Jive headquarters is in Portland, OR and so meetings often need to be conducive to Pacific Time work hours.

Interface with UBM IT Departments

Coordinate and develop effective and cooperative partnerships with all of the IT Support teams throughout UBM:

point of contact for issues needing divisional IT support
developing processes within each department for appropriate wiki technical support
encourage teamwork and knowledge sharing to collectively provide a reliable user experience with the wiki throughout UBM

Manage Wiki Administrators

Lead and interface with wiki administrators across UBM:

communicate, educate and train
enforce compliance with wiki policies and processes
manage account set up for new teams and acquisitions

User Technical Support and Training

Help people use the UBM Wiki effectively and efficiently by:

responding to user technical inquiries and issues, offering guidance where needed
documenting how to do things in the wiki
conducting "how to" training sessions: in-person, on the web and recorded video training
reporting and tracking bugs, communicating with users about status and workarounds

The Wiki System Administrator will also be the primary back-up for the Wiki Community Manager and is expected to be an engaged and vital partner in furthering the development of UBM's online community in the wiki.

Knowledge Requirements

The successful candidate will ideally be an existing UBM employee, with an understanding of the range of UBM’s business activities, structure and culture and an ambition to progress their career further within UBM’s online businesses.

They will have general technical experience with websites (HTML, CSS) and working with web applications (database, network, apache, etc.), as well as a basic understanding of email and database systems. Ideally they will have had some exposure to or basic computer programming experience.

Current role and location matters less than a real interest in online collaboration applications, an appetite to learn and a commitment to delivering a UBM wiki that is not simply a technical platform but a tool to enable the development of a highly collaborative organization culture.

They will be energetic and excited about working with dynamic, cutting-edge collaborative technology. They will be an active user of wikis, blogs, social networking tools and other Web 2.0 technology in their professional as well as personal life. They probably have a budding reputation as a go-to technical person within their area of the business.

The individual will have excellent communication skills (written and spoken), proven experience helping others understand how to use systems, and will have successfully managed complex projects.

Some of the following experience would be helpful but is not essential:

database creation and administration
user interface design
software development management
information architecture

Going to Jive World 2009

2009-10-23T15:32:00.002-04:00

I'll be in San Francisco at the first annual Jive World conference next week. Looking forward to meeting fellow community managers and Jive customers to network and exchange ideas. Hope to have plenty to write about from and following the conference. If you're going to be there, let me know!

Jive SBS Self-Registration Pros and Cons

2009-09-16T12:03:00.010-04:00

This is going to be a rather technical post, which is fitting since I've spent pretty much the past month in nearly-full-time system administrator mode. It's not how I prefer to allocate my time, but there were things that just needed to be done.

During that time, I changed the process by which we create new user accounts for Jive SBS. For the first year, we manually created new user accounts (thousands of them). We didn't have a central directory across our company, so we couldn't use LDAP.

Now that we have used self-registration for a month, I'd like to consider the plusses and minuses of each approach. Spoiler alert: neither one is ideal.

What's Good About Manually Creating Accounts

Accounts get set up. You have a list of people who need accounts, a User Admin creates them, and they are done. This doesn't always happen with self-registration, as I'll explain below.
Usernames are consistent. Well, admins make mistakes, too, but in general your naming convention will be followed. There are a number of reasons this is important. First, we don't want goofy usernames like hellokitty or racy ones, either. Second, usernames in Jive SBS are case-sensitive, so we require them to be all lowercase. That is intended to cut down on confusion when people try to recall their username, and to avoid ridiculous scenarios where we could have two separate accounts such as TSmith and tsmith.
The User Admin adds the new user to whatever admin groups are needed to provide appropriate access levels.

What's Not Good About Manually Creating Accounts

Even though it only takes about a minute to create each account, that's a lot of minutes when you're creating thousands of accounts. It's a lot of admin work.
Because it's a lot of admin work, we spread it out by empowering many people as User Admins. That means a loss of oversight and control over the account creation process, and I don't like that.
Just because the account is created, it doesn't mean it's being used. We may have deluded ourselves in thinking that by creating all these accounts we now had that many people "in" the system. Activity reports suggest otherwise. Creating an account for someone doesn't necessarily engage them.
We only filled in the minimum profile fields. Even though we urged people to update their profiles with critical contact information, many did not (see the point above about usage).
There's no way to force people to agree to the site's terms and conditions when you create accounts for people. Since we didn't have our t&c ready when we launched, that didn't matter then. But it does now.

What's Good About Self-Registration

You can force people to accept the terms and conditions of using the site when they register. This alone is an important reason to consider this method.
You can force people to populate whatever profile fields you designate as required. This has resulted in much more complete profiles among our new users in the past month. I really like this.
It's less admin work. All I have to do is approve the pending registration. However, it's not all peaches and cream from an admin standpoint (see below).
The people who have new accounts have engaged. They have invested at least a few minutes of their time setting up their profile. I don't have stats on this, but I am guessing they will be more active in using the tool initially than those whose accounts were created for them.

What's Not Good About Self-Registration

Not everyone registers. We have a pretty large percentage of people so far who have been invited to register but they haven't done it, so they are not in the system. However, at least we have an accurate picture of who is not engaged. These people clearly are not.
Admin work has not gone away. In fact, there are a ton of headaches to deal with, and since for security reasons I've centralized the approval process with me, I am spending a ton of time dealing with lots of little things. I'll list the various issues here.
Employment verification - since people are submitting registrations instead of us working from an approved list of employees (ours is an internal community), the employment status of each applicant needs to be verified. When managers follow the proper process, this is pretty easy. But when they don't, it eats up my time and delays the process. (Note: email domain verification won't work for us, for a number of reasons.)
Permissions still need to be set up by an admin - I have to manually grant basic permissions to new accounts and their local admin has to give them any special permissions they need. Easy enough, but these steps take time and failing to do them causes problems.
People who have accounts apply for new ones. I wish I could magically make everyone read instructions and follow them. It says right on the login page what to do if you already have an account, but plenty of people still are going through the entire process of trying to create a new account (I guess this speaks to my point about engagement, earlier). So I have to check to see if they have an account and then email them with the directions they should have followed in the first place. Plus, I have to alter their registration form so the email address they used doesn't get locked in the database as "taken." Quite an annoying waste of time, and before we had the "create an account" link people couldn't get mixed up this way. Need a dummy-proof solution to this...
People are lazy and don't follow instructions and I end up editing their profiles before I approve them. I may have to give up on this, but I hate seeing it look unprofessional.Some don't capitalize anything in their profile, or they mispell things or enter information in the wrong place. Amazingly, some select the wrong division from the dropdown box (they don't know where they work). And my favorite is putting "Miss" or "Mr." in the Title field instead of their job title.
There's a bug that I discovered (and reported, but I don't know when it'll be fixed) which breaks the approval process if you change the username before approving the account. Some people don't follow the username naming instructions ("use your email address in all lowercase letters"). This forces me to leave inappropriate usernames as they are and simply approve the account. The only way around it is to approve the account, then edit the username, and then send an email to the user trying to explain what to do (when they've already gotten the automated email with the other username). I could reject the application and tell people to start over, but we have enough trouble getting people to register, so I am loathe to do that.
In Jive SBS, User Admins have permission to create accounts, disable accounts and edit user profiles -- and they can approve pending accounts. That's created a ton of extra work for me, as we have dozens of User Admins solely because they need to be able to promptly disable accounts of people who leave the company. But at least a couple of dozen times they have approved pending accounts inappropriately, and the clean up work I've had to do on the back-end is considerable and very time-consuming. It also makes us look like idiots to the person applying for an account, as they get an email saying they are approved but they don't have any permissions, and then they get an "oops" email saying we messed up.

So, Which Is the Best Approach for Creating New User Accounts?

I don't think one approach is clearly better than the other. That's why I spelled out all the pros and cons of each method. Choose for yourself which method you think meets your needs best.

Of course, we're still new at the self-registration process and it's possible (I hope!) that over time we'll figure out solutions to the problems we've encountered with it. If anyone has any suggestions in that area, I'd love to hear them!

What We're Struggling with in Our Online Community

2009-08-10T21:02:00.008-04:00

I tend to focus on the positive, being an optimist. Most of my posts in this blog reflect that. But I'm preparing for a presentation about our online community, and I want it to cover both our successes and our struggles -- and that leaves me "struggling" to decide which of our struggles are worth sharing. It's also forcing me to decide what's "dirty laundry" that shouldn't be aired in public. So, while I want to be open, talking about what's not gone so well with our social media software deployment isn't as easy as telling our success stories.

Resistance

Our biggest struggle can be described as resistance. As in every organization, we have some people who resist change in their technology, their processes and their routines. Any organizational initiative encounters all of these. But saying that there is resistance doesn't really help us understand why, or how to overcome it.

Fear

There's a good bit of fear underlying some of the resistance, and fear can be tough to dispel, since it's not necessarily a rational response. But many fears are, indeed, grounded in solid experiences and so merit a thoughtful response.

What are some people afraid of? I think we can group the fears into several categories:

theft, espionage, betrayal -- the tool will make us vulnerable
legal liability -- people will use the tool in ways that expose us to legal penalties
inaccuracy, errors, misleading information -- it will become a garbage heap
chaos, disorder, sloppiness -- it will be inefficient and ineffective
wasted time, idle chatter, not serious -- it will be a distraction
making mistakes, being shown up, looking foolish -- it will expose people unflatteringly

Well, now that I have listed all of those out, that's a pretty scary list of fears! And there probably are more...

Lack of Resources and Time

One of the toughest struggles I face is the difficulty of getting people to commit resources and time when they are already stretched thin. It's a tough economy out there and we're running lean and mean like everyone these days. It takes time to learn to use new technology, more time to master advanced features and even more to really get the most out of it. And time is not something people have a lot of during their workday anymore.

It also takes resources to support this technology and develop online communities. Although we've found a clear correlation between having an effective community manager and getting real value from the system, we still have areas which have not committed sufficient resources to this role. That's holding back our overall adoption rate and the community's effectiveness for the enterprise. It's a tough challenge.

Misunderstanding and Misinformation

Another battle we're fighting is misunderstanding. Some people assume they know what social media is about, and that it has little to offer them. Some have "heard" one thing or another, assumed that was true, and have written off the significance of what we're trying to do as a result. But many others just don't have any idea what the full potential of this technology is, and lacking any experience with it or context to place it in, have simply tuned it out as yet another confusing computer system that may go away if they ignore it long enough.

Skepticism

I'm a skeptic, so I can relate to this sentiment. It's over-hyped. It's a fad. What's the catch? This too shall pass. It's not proven. And so on.

Just Don't Like It

Let's make one more catch-all category, even broader than resistance. It's not a very actionable category -- hard to know how to address people in this group -- but there are some people who simply don't like using the technology. It's not productive to call them names (Luddites!), and it's a real challenge to win them over, but they are out there. Some don't like aspects of the particular technology we've chosen (it's too slow, too confusing, it doesn't do this or that, etc.), but some wouldn't like any technology we selected for this purpose. I think it's fair and reasonable to say that social media technology simply is not for everyone.

All right, that's a longer and more comprehensive list of our struggles than I've ever come up with before. It's not as much fun to talk about the obstacles we're facing, but it's a necessary step in overcoming them. Time to get to work on addressing each of these!

Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.

2009-07-24T14:08:00.008-04:00

We've chosen a tagline and logo for our internal online community. It has been a year since we began our pilot and will be a year in September since our official "soft" launch. And I think that means it's time for a communications effort to help us get to the next level, and we'll use our logo and tagline to get the message(s) across.

I wish I had a great metaphorical reason for choosing the logo, but really we just liked it best of all the entries submitted by our community members. I expect over time we'll endow it with all sorts of meaning and so retroactively explain the imagery. Wouldn't be the first time that happened.

The tagline (Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.) sums up what our social media software is for, and what we expect our community to do with it. Let's look at each point in turn.

Connect

We're seeing people connect in our community across geographical borders and divisional boundaries. Suddenly it doesn't matter so much where your desk is or which part of the company you work in. It has become simple to reach out to people you've never met (and perhaps never will).

You find them in all sorts of ways, too. Some are prolific or profound or funny bloggers. Some ask provocative questions that set off dynamic discussion threads, and others offer insightful and informed responses. Some publish documents that you find valuable. Others are members of groups that you have joined, whether on work topics (e.g., SEO) or not (e.g., Gardeners).

Still more are there to be found with a bit of effort through searching or filtering on topics that interest you, locations you're interested in, or offices you're visiting. Finding peers who perform the same role you do in other parts of the company has become practically effortless.

One's network of connections within the company is an important part of any knowledge worker's effectiveness. Knowing who to turn to can be just as valuable in solving problems as your own accumulated topical knowledge. The better connected our employees are, the more effective our organization becomes.

Connecting: it's the first fundamental factor in our online community's success.

Communicate

Can we all agree with the truisms about communication in organizations? Communication is important, there is rarely enough of it and getting people to pay attention to it is a challenge. Our social media software is just one communication tool for our organization to use, but it offers some powerful channels for improving the way we communicate.

The fundamental difference we're seeing is a change from one-way communication (top-down) to not only two-way (people responding to the writer), but to open discussions among many people, including follow up by the writer. Our managers have always communicated, but never before have their written communications invited response as they do now. People comment on the CEO's blog, triggering further comments and entire discussions about the topic of the blog (or the comment itself).

In order to engage like this, you have to pay attention, and when you see that others are engaged there's more incentive for you to engage, or at least pay attention, too. Communications become less about silently reading an email from the boss and deciding where to file it (or whether to delete it), and more about an invitation to think and join a lively conversation. Human beings are all about conversation, and it's making our communications more effective.

Of course, there are many other ways people are communicating within our community, and I am sure new ways will continue to evolve. We have people blogging about what interests them, and people who read and follow them based on the merit of their ideas and writing, not the author's job title. People are speaking up and sharing what they are thinking. It's satisfying to have a voice and be heard, and it's good policy for the organization to hear so many more of the ideas and opinions that otherwise might not have been shared. We are all the smarter for listening to each other.

Collaborate

Collaboration is the one-word answer I give when asked what our social media software is for and why we have rolled it out across the enterprise. Trying to quantify all the positive effects from "collaboration" is like trying to do the same for "learning." The possibilities are endless. The sheer multiplicity of potential from thousands of employees interacting one-on-one, in small groups and one-to-many can't easily be assessed by any tools or predictions.

But the value is real. We're seeing it already, and I believe far more collaboration is taking place than I can see. After all, who thinks to comment upon the fact that they just had a productive conversation with someone they met through the online community? Who bothers to point out that they just found the answer to an important question by searching and finding a document posted by someone in another part of the world?

In fact, I'll posit the Collaboration Iceberg Rule (as in, the tip of the iceberg): For every example of collaboration that comes to the community manager's attention, nine other examples go unreported. Of course, it's not exactly nine (really it's 9.27, but I know you won't believe I have calculated it that precisely) -- but you get the point.

Collaboration saves the company money. Collaboration leads to more revenue. Collaboration leads to new business opportunities, innovation and competitive advantage. When you think about it, collaboration is the reason that companies exist: companies are designed as ways for individuals to work together to accomplish the organization's objectives. Our online community is helping us work together better.

The Sunflower

I'll close by suggesting some associations we can make from the sunflower image on the logo. It's alive. It's growing. It's healthy, as indicated by the bright colors of the flower. It's vibrant. It contains the seeds of further growth. It responds to light, an image of openness. It requires nurturing, as well as weeding and occasional pruning. It develops strong roots that hold it steady in the face of adverse weather.

All of this applies metaphorically to our online community. And we've only just begun to plant the seeds. But we're already blooming and reaching higher. And just like a magnificent sunflower does, that brings a smile to my face.

Great Discussion on Social Media ROI and Metrics

2009-06-14T12:14:00.007-04:00

This will be a first for me: I'm recommending the comments on a blog post more highly than the post itself. I just came across a promising blog that I plan to return to frequently, The Brandbuilder Blog by Olivier Blanchard. After reading just a few posts I was struck by this one about measuring the ROI for social media: Impossible? Think Again.

The blog post itself, and the embedded video, are essentially a teaser for future posts and a book. Olivier promises that measuring the ROI of social media is, in fact possible, as well as fairly simple. But neither the post nor the video reveals how.

But the comments delve into a number of tactical and strategic examples, in which questions, ideas and suggested solutions are debated by Olivier and his equally capable readers/commenters. I learned far more from the comments, so don't miss them. In fact, by following a link to another blog written by one of the commenters, I've found another promising site which I plan to explore further: Metrics Man. I can already recommend the latest post, The Difference Between Value and ROI.

And I suggested you bookmark The BrandBuilder Blog or add it to your RSS Reader, as I did, if you're interested in social media metrics. Really good stuff there!

Jive SBS Training Course Is Now FREE!

2009-06-12T12:35:00.007-04:00

I'm really loving this move by Jive Software: they just made their online training course for Jive Social Business Software (SBS) free for the first time. Like so many organizations today, we're cutting costs everywhere we can, so paying extra for this kind of training was never going to happen with us. And that put the burden of developing training materials on me!

No surprise that I haven't found time to develop a nice training package around Jive SBS's nifty new features, even though we have already upgraded. Making the Jive SBS training free is a huge win for us, as it has saved me days or weeks of development work and it means more members of our community will learn how to better use the system.

Thanks, Jive!!! Now we just need to get everybody to take the course...

UPDATE:
Thanks for your comments, Claire and Rick. I'm also going to share the links you sent me, Claire, since people who find this blog post likely would find them valuable, too.

Finding people and Content--> http://www.vimeo.com/1620741
Finding People via Filtering --> http://www.vimeo.com/1304560
Connecting--> http://www.vimeo.com/1555432
Organizing Yourself -->http://www.vimeo.com/1622605
Collaborating--> http://www.vimeo.com/1621749
Sharing Files--> http://www.vimeo.com/1516195

Tackling Technology vs. Community Building

2009-06-09T07:45:00.005-04:00

As a community manager, my mission is to build and develop our online community. Yet I am also the system administrator, and at times technology issues consume more of my time than I'd like. The past month has been an especially tough one for our technology.

Change is the enemy of stability when it comes to technology, I am learning. Last month we started preparing for two major changes: upgrading from Jive Clearspace 2.5 to Jive SBS 3.0 and also implementing Akamai's Content Delivery Network (CDN). In the middle of all of this, we suddenly experienced a major loss of system functionality (no one in our largest division could download file attachments from the system).

It took more than a week to resolve the file download issue, and it got worse before it got better. Meanwhile, our upgrade date rapidly approached and we kept our commitment to get that done. Now we are doing our best to thoroughly test the Akamai integration -- which promises to finally resolve our long-standing complaints about slow system response time outside of the US -- and hope to be ready to cutover the entire site by Friday.

The trade-off for all of this focus on the technology is clear: our community has been neglected. I'm looking at usage statistics for April and May and see downward dips after months of upward movement. We've taken our eye off the ball (community development) so it's not surprising that growth and progress have stalled. Still, it's frustrating and discouraging.

The plan now is to maintain a stable technology situation for as long as possible once we get through this push. We'll likely wait until November to upgrade to Jive SBS 3.5 (it's due out in September), both so we can avoid inevitable early-release bugs and so we can extend our focus on community development for a five-month stretch.

There are so many steps we are ready to take with our community. We have raced ahead for nine months now. We've lost a bit of momentum over the past two months, but lulls are to be expected, especially after the new-ness of the technology wears off. I'm hoping we are just catching our breath, so to speak, and with the new features of Jive SBS 3.0 plus the speed enhancements from Akamai's CDN we'll start a new push toward the next levels of community maturity.

That's my mission. Now, if we can just get the technology issues wrapped up so I can get to it!

Facebook: It's The Little Things that Count

2009-05-19T06:37:00.004-04:00

I resisted Facebook for years. What a waste of time, who cares, why should I bother, a bunch of trivial non-news -- I had lots of reasons.

Now I find myself logging on daily, even more than once a day sometimes. I update my status and check the status of my Facebook friends (not all of whom are "actual" friends, of course). I even comment on the status of others, look at photo albums and give a thumbs up now and then, and once in a while take one of the stupid quizzes.

So I'm asking myself now, why the shift? What has changed my mind, or at least my behavior?

Well, it wasn't really a conscious decision, so here are the reasons that I can think of off the top of my head right now:

A number of my Facebook friends are clever and interesting -- reading their status updates is amusing and informative. Good content draws repeat readership.
It's making me feel more connected to people I rarely or never see in person: people from my distant past (high school classmates, long-ago neighbors), work colleagues in far-flung offices, people I've met once or twice socially and those I've only "met" online in some way. Facebook friends aren't *real* friends, but being part of a virtual conversation with them on Facebook is a form of social interaction that I enjoy.
As a full-time telecommuter/home office worker, I miss out on the routine office chatter with all the day-to-day chit chat about colleagues' kids, weekend adventures, the ups and downs of single and married life, and career successes and setbacks. Facebook status updates fill that gap shallowly, true, but broadly. I'm current on many more people's status than I would be via in-person contact alone, even though only on a surface level.
People like to talk about themselves, and I am no exception. I find it mildly satisfying to share simple thoughts, observations or insights by updating my Facebook status. And when someone comments upon it or gives it a thumbs up, I like seeing that someone is listening. There's a connection that has been made or strengthened, even if only so slightly.
I am constantly seeking out and learning about news and ideas, and I like to share what I have found. I use FriendFeed as well as Facebook's own system to post links to articles and occasional videos. I used to do this in my personal blog, but I don't find time for that much anymore. It's much faster and simpler to share the link and make a very brief comment -- plus, it's going to be seen by a much wider audience than it would be on my personal blog. It's fun to spread the word about things that interest me, and I like it when people comment upon or even debate my views.
Just about everyone seems to be on Facebook. Resistance is futile. It has become a commonly accepted way to acknowledge and continue even casual acquaintance-ships. Why be anti-social?

There are probably more reasons, but that's enough for now. It seems to come down to the little things that have sucked me into the Facebook universe. But all those little things do add up.

In the end, Facebook is one of the largest and most well-known social media sites, so lessons learned there should be considered for our own online communities. My Facebook lesson for today is that it's the little things that count.

Accentuating the positive

2009-05-17T17:43:00.003-04:00

Online communities and marriages have one big thing in common: They take work to be successful.

Actually, I think they also need positive attitudes to remain successful. I don't know about you, but I have those days when I look at our online community and get a bit discouraged. The reasons? You name it -- not enough time, not enough help, limits to the software, user complaints, etc.

I'm a huge fan (and user) of Ubuntu, probably the world's most popular flavor of desktop Linux. I'm also a huge fan of Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, and what he has done to make the Ubuntu community such a big part of Ubuntu's continued success. (Jono has a must-read new book coming out this summer called The Art of Community, and he's releasing the content for free under a Creative Commons license.) Here's how he answered an interview question about the Ubuntu community culture and why it works:

I am a firm believer that positive culture is largely driven by positive personalities. Communities are vessels of dependent relationships: we have thought leaders for the entire project, sub-communities with their own thought leaders, people who follow those leaders and people who listen to those followers. At each step in the chain we need to encourage positive participation both in the cogs of the machine, but also in the personality and outlook of the those who drive those cogs. It has been an explicit desire of mine in the Ubuntu community to not only ensure that the machine is simple to interact with, but to encourage people to bring their positivity, excitement and enthusiasm to the machine so the community feels like a fun and inspiring environment to be part of.

It takes what Jono calls lots of "care and feeding" to make this happen. In online communities, as in the rest of life, success doesn't come without sweat.

As Ted mentioned, our wiki -- our online community -- has reached critical mass, and the next step will be working hard not to rest on our laurels, but to think harder and more creatively than ever to make our wiki community "a fun and inspiring environment to be part of." What additional value can we deliver?

I'm looking forward to the creative challenge and opportunity. Are you part of the Ubuntu community or another online community at work or in your spare time? What challenges is your community facing now, and how will you overcome them? Please comment to share your thoughts.

Internal Social Media Sites Are Ant Farms

2009-05-13T12:51:00.006-04:00

I live on a horse farm, and at lunchtime I walked down the hill to get the mail. When I opened the mailbox I found that ants had decided it seemed like a good home.

I'm not keen on ant-covered mail, nor having them crawl onto me while I carry the mail back to the house, so I pondered what to do about them. I removed my mail and left the door open, idly watching them while I considered my options. And as I watched, the ants became alarmed and started picking up eggs and moving them. Since the mailbox was no longer closed and dark, it must have triggered a reaction to look for another place.

Suddenly the ants' activity looked really familiar, and I recalled the ant farm I had as a kid, with the glass walls so you could see how endlessly busy the ants were.

And then I made the connection: no one was telling the ants what to do, yet their separate activities were nonetheless self-coordinating and effective... just like what happens in our internal online community. This may not seem like a compliment (although I would argue it is), but internal communities are actually like ant farms.

The insect world is full of examples of amazing collective intelligence that we superior, intellectual humans struggle to understand and explain. With our social media software, we're helping organizations become as smart as ants are. In our internal online community, our employees are self-organizing, responding individually and rapidly to the stimuli that affects them, efficiently coordinating with others as needed, and busily going about getting the "farm's" business done.

In some ways it really is as simple as that.

Social media isn't everything

2009-05-11T12:27:00.004-04:00

At work I wear several hats, but I’m generally known as either the “wiki guy,” the “social media guy,” or the “community guy.” Mom just calls me Matthew.

I spend quite a bit of time using newer forms of social media, which I define as everything from Twitter to wikis to online customer communities. Yes, I check Twitter and Web 2.0 blog feeds on my iPhone every day. I even contribute to this blog (sometimes). I’m always thinking about how we can use social media in better ways to better serve our customers. It’s really a labor of love.

But I have a confession to make: Even I have to choose my battles. Some weeks I spend a lot of time on Twitter or our wiki, but other weeks my various other duties limit my tweeting. It’s all about priorities – what’s hot at the moment.

Given the state of the economy, many organizations today are hopping from project to project like a barefoot beachcomber walking across broken shells. They need to identify and press those projects – sometimes on a daily or weekly basis – that will bring in much-needed revenue. Sometimes that means there’s less time for Twitter because more client calls or new marketing materials are much more vital at the moment.

As I like to say, any method you use to reach out to customers and prospects is, in a very real sense, an exercise in social media. Sure, you might be talking on the phone or doing videoconferences with customers instead of spending time on Facebook. But you know what? You’re probably doing the right thing under the circumstances. The other stuff can wait.

There has to be a balance. We shouldn’t neglect the newer forms of social media or walk away from our current investments in new media, but sometimes we have to be realistic and focus on the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Of course that low-hanging fruit could be leads generated by social media, but it might also be meeting with current customers for lunch and restating how your company can help them. Sometimes lunch trumps LinkedIn.

So don’t feel guilty about not using a particular form of social media today, at this moment, just because the cool kids seem to be on it 24/7. Feel guilty if you’re not showing value to your customers and giving them a reason to continue to do business with you. Just do what you need to do for your customers in today's shaky economy, and you’ll live to tweet another day.

How We -- and Online Community Members -- Decide

2009-05-06T10:19:00.008-04:00

I just finished a terrific book last night: How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. It's one of those books that I believe everyone in marketing, sales and management must read. It's darned relevant for one's personal life, too, in fact. Maybe it's a stretch to include in a social media blog, but social media is all about people and how they interact with each other, and I'll argue that communities are massive pools of individual and collective decisions.

Doesn't living your life really mean making an endless series of decisions? Lehrer draws heavily upon the latest in neuroscience research and behavioral economics (see, Predictably Irrational, another great book), as well as fascinating interviews and case studies ranging from Tom Brady's decision-making process in the Super Bowl to airplane pilots coping with mechanical failure. This isn't a dry science textbook. It's compelling reading, with the hard science explained smoothly and clearly.

I want to share the principles of good-decision-making from How We Decide's final chapter.

"SIMPLE PROBLEMS REQUIRE REASON"

One of the drawbacks of emotions is that they contain a few obsolete instincts that are no longer suited for modern life. This is why we are all so vulnerable to loss aversion, slot machines, and credit cards. The only way to defend against such innate flaws is to exercise reason...

Nutshell: for easy decisions, rely on reasoning, not emotion. For complex problems, listen to your emotions more, since the brain's reasoning capacity gets overloaded and reason alone leads to poor decisions. (Lots of explanation and examples of these concepts in the book, of course.)

"NOVEL PROBLEMS ALSO REQUIRE REASON"

Before you entrust a mystery to the emotional brain, before deciding to let your instincts make a big bet in poker or fire a missile at a suspicious radar blip, ask yourself a question: How does your past experience help solve this particular problem?

Nutshell: Mysteries are problems that reason alone can't solve, but reason is a vital checkpoint to avoid the errors that emotional decision-making can be prone to.

"EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY"

There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses.... Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know.

Nutshell: When you feel absolutely certain about a decision, watch out -- certainty produces poor decisions more often than not.

"YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU KNOW"

The emotional brain is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. Its massive computational power -- its ability to process millions of bits of data in parallel -- ensures that you can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. Mysteries are broken down into practical feelings. The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events.

Nutshell: Trust your emotions -- they are telling you the outcome of your brain's sub-conscious processing of the situation (but, see above, use reason to fact-check).

"THINK ABOUT THINKING"

Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the thought process it requires.... The best way to make sure you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the arguments inside your head.

Nutshell: Since there's no simple, reliable way to make decisions, the best approach is to hone your awareness of all you are thinking and feeling -- take it all into account and beware of lightly dismissing those feelings or thoughts that don't immediately fit.

It's a lot to think about. My mind is still buzzing with all of the implications, and I expect it will be for some time. As I make decisions about our online community, I'll be watching myself to see how and why I'm thinking. I *think* that sounds like a good plan...

Getting social like it's 1899

2009-05-04T14:10:00.002-04:00

(Add usual disclaimers about being busy here. This will also be posted on EverythingChannel.com later today.)

No, that's not a typo. I would never have written 1899, though, unless I'd had the chance to listen to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's keynote address, "Delivering Happiness," at this year's SXSW Interactive conference. Do yourself a favor and listen -- you'll be pummeled by common sense (even his slides are interesting).

If you've been paying attention to Web 2.0 over the past few years, you know all about Zappos. They're the "shoe guys" who are wiping the floor with their competitors, moving over $1 billion in merchandise in 2008. And they're selling a lot more than shoes these days (they're evolving just like Amazon did). They have big plans to make the Zappos brand synonymous with superior customer service, whatever they happen to sell.

Back to 1899. According to Hsieh, what's Zappos' top customer service tool? What social media option gives them the most mojo for their brand? Here are your options:

A) Twitter

b) Facebook

c) blogs

d) the telephone

If you guessed a), b) or c), you're wrong. Sure, Zappos does use new social media methods to connect with customers, but Hsieh insists that d) the telephone is far and away the most effective. He considers every customer call a customer service opportunity, and he believes that customer service opportunities are synonymous with marketing and branding opportunities.

His reasoning? Hsieh points out that a customer service telephone call is initiatied by the customer, so you have a captive, focused audience. They want to talk to you about their experiences with your company -- whether good or bad. It's therefore your best opportunity, in that 5 or 10 minutes, to make sure they leave with a positive impression of your brand and want to shop with you in the future. Compare that to a direct mail piece that often ends up unread, or an email newsletter caught in a spam filter.

Hsieh is clear that such customer service calls aren't intended for hard sells or even upsells, but to show the customer that Zappos puts a priority on putting the customer first. Not surprisingly, word-of-mouth advertising has played a key part in Zappos' growth. Oh, and Zappos gets a lot of business from repeat customers -- those same customers who tend to shop more often and spend more money than one-off customers.

The telephone is taking something of a backseat to new forms of social media these days, but it might be time for you to make "old school" new again. Why not pick up the phone more often and talk to your customers? When's the last time they heard your voice?

After all, social media wasn't invented this decade -- and it was never intended to make your company anti-social.

Is Your Community Manager Your Admin, too?

2009-05-01T14:09:00.003-04:00

We're running lean and mean in our online community. Our community managers do double-duty. Not only do they have responsibility for developing their online communities, but they serve as admins, too.

It's really not difficult to do the admin tasks needed in our social media software (or social business software, as Jive calls it). But I'm starting to wonder if there's wisdom in dividing to conquer.

The skills and traits of a successful community manager don't necessarily map over to those of an ideal administrator. Would we be better off splitting up these roles?

How do you do it in your community?

Welcome, Jamie!

2009-05-01T12:31:00.005-04:00

We've got another author here now, I'm happy to say. Jamie Heckler is another one of our local community managers, and she's responsible for the largest, most active member community we have. They are pushing the edge for us, always challenging our assumptions and leading us to come up with better and better approaches to building and developing our community.

Jamie guides them with a gentle hand -- except when the iron fist is needed -- and has developed many wiki champions in her division. It's all led to a vibrant and engaged online community.

They've got an interesting, evolving story to tell, and I look forward to Jamie's sharing it with you as the chapters unfold.

Community Leadership Summit

2009-04-29T12:24:00.004-04:00

Coincidences are funny. I always wonder if they are influenced on a subliminal level. For example, I had an idea a week ago to have a community management summit within our company, and yesterday I happened to see that there's a Community Leadership Summit scheduled for July 18-19, 2009 in San Jose.

It's new, and it's an unconference. So, there's no schedule of speakers (though some will be scheduled) and it's also free. That last bit helps when getting travel approval!

What's appealing and exciting about it is the opportunity to dialogue and network with peers and experts alike. So much of what we know about online community management is still evolving. I feel practitioners -- those directly involved with managing and leading online communities -- have as much, if not more, to share than those who have anointed themselves as social media experts. Give me practical experience and lessons learned, please!

And let me build a network of fellow community managers I can tap into with questions, ideas and problems I want help with -- that's ongoing value. A conference (excuse me, unconference) like this offers a rich pool of peers to draw upon.

And since it's an unconference, if I've got a topic that resonates with others it may end up on the program. That's a degree of customization and targeted scheduling that's hard to beat.

Yes, I'm going to be there. Anyone want to join me?

Speaking of Lists, Here's a Great Social Media List

2009-04-29T12:05:00.005-04:00

I mentioned lists in relation to SEO in a recent post, and today I ran across a rich resource for learning about social media -- it's another list, naturally: Social Media Case Studies SUPERLIST- 22 Extensive Lists of Organizations Using Social Media (UPDATED)

I haven't checked out the places it links to (they are lists about specific social media topics), but I instantly realized the power of having such resources at hand. Take a look when you get a chance.

Customers Search for Answers, Not Your Community

2009-04-28T00:04:00.011-04:00

After writing my last post, Which Comes First, SEO or an Active Community?, I found myself in the car for a few hours delivering a snapping turtle to my daughter in college (if you really want to know, ask me why). So I had plenty of time to think, and what kept coming to mind was the title of the next blog post I wanted to write: Customers Search for Answers, Not Your Communities.

So, I'm going to follow up on the SEO and communities topic a bit further.

Maybe the world is changing and the way people search will change -- I can't predict that. But I believe the way people search now is to find information, and they aren't idly searching: they have questions that they want answered.

Really, how many people do you think go to Google with the thought, "I want to find a community to join today!" or "I hope there's a community centered around this topic!" I don't think so. OK, the social media consultants and bloggers might do this, and really lonely people with too much time on their hands...

But most people use search engines to find answers, not to look for communities. So if you're trying to grow and develop your customer community, you need content that answers the key questions prospective members of your community are likely to have -- and you need to get that content to rank highly in search engine results so that people will find it.

There's an interesting, rather polemical debate about content vs. community on the Search Engine Guide website (see, Content is Dead. Community is King Now). But I think it's rather a case of splitting hairs and failing to define content reasonably. Content is not just what the community manager or website owner creates -- it's that plus what members of the community create. In my view, it's the quality of the content that counts more than who created it. Again, people are searching for answers, and good answers are valuable in and of themselves.

I'm more in tune with Jennifer Laycock's post, Can't Get the (Great) Content Without the Community. Take a look for a nice explanation about the the symbiotic relationship between content and community. In fact, I'll refer you to her post instead of explaining that in detail, for that's one of the key points I wanted to make.

You shouldn't choose between content and community. That's a false dichotomy. Rather, recognize that to build your community you need people to find it, and for you to be found you need valuable content that both answers key questions for people and has been optimized so search engines will display it prominently. High-quality, high ranking content is essential to growing a successful online community.

Which Comes First, SEO or an Active Community?

2009-04-27T17:23:00.014-04:00

I'm posing this question -- Which Comes First, SEO or an Active Community? -- because I'm not sure the importance of SEO (search-engine optimization) is always considered when it comes to planning new online communities . It is sort of a "chicken or the egg" question, but I've come to the conclusion that when you think about building an active customer community, you need to think about search-engine optimization.

Here's why: you need big numbers to have an active community and SEO is a key part of delivering them.

We've all seen the 90-9-1 statistic, and whether you accept it literally or not, it's obvious that only a fraction of your community members will be active creators of content. It's what we see in the real (not online) world, after all, where in any given group the vast majority will listen and observe while a motivated few take initiative and lead the way.

So, if you want discussions in your community to be lively and timely, if you want content to be fresh and not grow stale, you need a lot of people who are willing to be active. To get a large number of them, you need a large community.

There are lots of ways to populate your community, but for sustainable growth the search engines are your best friend. When content from your community shows up high in searches for terms and phrases that represent problems and solutions important to potential members of your community, you'll have created a set of signs leading new members in your door. And not just any members -- these are self-selected, interested and motivated members.

I call that organic growth -- it's all natural. If you have thought things through well, then your community exists to serve a specific population for a specific purpose. Make sure the content that's in your community has value and meaning for your members, and also consider how to optimize that content for search engines.

I'm no SEO expert, and this post isn't about *how* to optimize your community's content for search engines (there are plenty of SEO experts out there, but I'll point to one of my favorites, where I have learned a lot: Jill Whalen's High Rankings website).

I'm simply telling you to make SEO for your community content part of your plan right from the start. I'm happy to share a few tips I've learned over the years, however.

When you respond to a question or create content, think about the kinds of terms that someone would search on if they were interested in this. Sprinkle those terms in the content naturally a few times (don't overdo it!). Instead of using common speaking or writing references (e.g., "that," "this, "it") all the time, ignore your school teacher's advice and be a bit redundant. Notice how many times I have used "search engine optimization" instead of only SEO.
Recognize that search engines are literal, and there may be other ways to phrase or describe the main topics you are writing about. For example, "search engine optimization" and "SEO" refer to the same thing, so I am using both in this post. Think about the exact words people would likely enter in a search box.
Make the title of content engaging to people and search engines, both. Obviously you want a key search term right in the title if you can do so. The search engines will compare the title with the content and look for it to match up. But there's also the human factor to consider. When your content does show up in the search engines, you want a compelling title to increase the chances that people will click through to it. So, think again like a potential member of your community who has a need, question or problem: what would get them to take a look at your content?
Build your content in small, targeted chunks. I learned the power of this quite by accident. In managing a Q&A site, our content was naturally built around very specific topics. When we split out each topic as its own webpage (the way blogs do), our search results and traffic grew tremendously. Search engines want to provide specific answers to specific questions, so short and sweet works for them. The more targeted, the better.
Use consistent terms and phrases throughout your community site. So, if your community is about social media, that term should appear in just about everything on your site (again, don't overdo it and don't force it, but look for opportunities). All that short targeted content will get aggregated by the search engines and they'll conclude that your site really is a rich resource for those terms.
Use tags. These are freebies, folks. You get to set a list of the key terms people should use to find your content.
Link to other content and sources when it makes sense to do so. First of all, look for opportunities to link to your own content. Those internal links not only help your readers navigate quickly and easily, but they show the search engines the connections between your content, too. But link outside your site, as well. The more connected your community is to other expert resources, the more helpful you are to your readers -- and, again, search engines look for these connections. Last point on links -- they can lead to links back to your site, which is even more valuable.
Name drop and praise generously. It's a great way to get people to create links to your site. People and organizations like to link to places where good things have been said about them. And don't just drop the link into your content -- reach out to the person/place you've complimented and make sure they know about it. You can either email them or, much more Web 2.0, you can leave a comment on their site with another compliment and include the link to your site where you praise them. That creates an incoming link to your site -- a really good SEO thing -- and if you've chosen a well-trafficked site to praise (hint, hint), then that little link could really pay off over time.
Make it easy for people to share your content. There are all kinds of tools now, including the ShareThis button you see at the bottom of this post. You want word of mouth, so make it really simple and painless for people to talk about you and recommend your site.
Consider creating lists. I don't know why, but lists seem to be popular with both readers and search engines alike. Have you noticed that this is a list?
Last tip: be honest and do right by your community and searchers alike. Don't bait and switch with a catchy headline for content that doesn't deliver on that topic. Don't pound search terms into people in your content and turn them away by making your material annoying to read. The best SEO advice I ever got was to do what's best for your readers -- the SEO results will generally follow if you keep that in mind.

What do you think? And do you have any SEO tips you recommend for customer communities?

Chris Brogan on Confidence

2009-04-27T12:00:00.003-04:00

There's a great blog by Chris Brogan on community and social media that Matt pointed me to, and I just want to take a moment to recommend the post I read there today: Confidence and The Next Move

It's not strictly on social media, but your social media network is one of the key elements he talks about for building your confidence and preparing for the next move, so I thought it was worthy of a mention here. And while you're there, check out the rest of Chris' thoughts and ideas on social media -- or just add the feed to your RSS Reader, as I did.

List of Online Community Managers Inside the Enterprise

2009-04-24T13:00:00.005-04:00

I just ran across a terrific resource related to online community management. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Jobs and Professionals It's in an invaluable, insightful blog, Web Strategy, by Jeremiah Owyang, who I would certainly cite as a thought-leader in social media. He also happens to work for Forrester Research, but this is his independent blog, not Forrester's.

Jeremiah started his list in 2008 and asked people to leave a comment if they wanted to be included in it. He also spelled out the specific requirements for being included in the list, thus adding value to it, since he vets all the submissions -- nice! I immediately wanted to sign up, since I'm a community manager.

But, sadly, I don't qualify :-(

Jeremiah's list is for external-facing community managers, and in his selection criteria he makes it clear that those of us serving internal communities won't be included. But, he made this offer:

If you do not meet the requirements to meet this list, you can create your own, and I’ll prominently link to it.

OK, Jeremiah, I accept your offer. I'm creating my own list, borrowing heavily from the excellent model you've created, and this list is for internal community managers only (since you've already got a great list for the external community managers).

So, to get included in this list, leave a comment on this post and make sure you follow and meet all of these requirements (lifted in part from Jeremiah's).

Requirements:

This is your current job even if you have a variation on the title –you are not a consultant. It's okay if you wear other hats, as well, but one of your official roles is responsibility for managing an online community within your organization.
Provide verifiable references: your title, organization, industry and a link to your blog/profile/linkedin that indicates your role and title, and/or perhaps a post that announced your title or intentions.

The Reason for this List
Community managers know better than most people the value of social networking. This list is intended to serve as a resource to help connect managers of internal online communities (i.e., staff/employees within an organization) with each other. It's also intended to become an exhibit of the large number and wide variety of organizations that are using social media software internally and recognizing the value of cultivating online communities within the enterprise.

Ongoing List of Online Enterprise Community Managers
Bill Chamberlin, HorizonWatch Community Manager, IBM
Ted Hopton, Wiki Community Manager, United Business Media

Now, don't leave me hanging here! Comment below to get added to the list, or send this along to someone you know who should be on it.

Debian, Ubuntu and wiki symbiosis

2009-04-23T13:27:00.005-04:00

As any hardcore IT geek knows, the Debian community has been around for over a decade, and it produces a well-respected Linux distribution by the same name. This is a distinctly non-commercial enterprise for the Debian community.

Another enormously popular Linux distribution is Ubuntu (they have a new 9.04 release out today, as a matter of fact) -- I happily run it on all my home computers. Ubuntu's chief financial backer (and erstwhile space tourist), Mark Shuttleworth, was in fact a Debian developer for many years before he started Ubuntu earlier this decade.

What Ubuntu does is use large bits of Debian -- which they're free to do under the GPL -- and add some polish (plus a few bug fixes!) to produce a distribution better suited for the average computer user. Both distros have their place, and after a somewhat turbulent relationship between the two, they've been working much better together in recent years.

I'm starting to think that our internal wiki and our customer-facing communities are developing a positive Debian/Ubuntu-type of relationship. Our internal wiki is a place to experiment, try new things, get feedback, etc. Our customer-facing communities are opting for a slightly more conservative approach, for obvious business reasons!

Both internal and external wikis have their role to play, and I fully expect that they'll develop an extraordinarily symbiotic relationship over the coming months and years.

Have you had a similar experience with your company's wiki ecosystem?

Oprah and social media going mainstream

2009-04-20T10:34:00.004-04:00

Last week there was quite an uproar from the Digerati about -- gasp -- Oprah using Twitter.

You could almost hear the anguished cries: "Wasn't it bad enough when Ashton Kutcher and those Hollywood types began using Twitter? And now Oprah Nation too? Man, this totally sucks."

This reminds me a little of the response when open source software (Linux, in particular) went all "corporate" a few years ago. But what's the result been? Linux on laptops and netbooks, more rapid enterprise adoption of open source software, more paid Linux developers, etc. Is that such a bad thing?

Twitter and other social media tools like Facebook are becoming more mainstream, and that's okay with me. It means that more time and treasure will be poured into making these services fulfill their promise as presence-enabling business tools. Why? Because the audience will be there. And so will their credit cards.

Sure, there will be some, um, missteps as businesses stumble and bumble their way onto these social platforms (picture "Woz" on Dancing with the Stars). But there will also be some exciting things.

I, for one, am cautiously optimistic that better, more exciting social media days are ahead. What do you think?

Wiki Attitude: Getting Things Done

2009-04-15T17:42:00.004-04:00

A colleague remarked today that he really likes working in our social business software (aka, wiki) because "we get things done." I liked that. It sums up a lot about social media overall.

Everyone in the wiki can just do it, as Nike so aptly puts it (side note: Nike has a terrific social media site). You don't have to ask permission, fill out a form, navigate red tape or in any way delay getting something done. The tool is flexible and powerful, and most of all, so easy to use that it is empowering. You really can get things done quickly and easily in it.

But this isn't just about a contrast with bureaucratic work processes. It's about the energy and potential that's released when *everyone* has the power to just do things. There's no time like the present, is there? How many useful ideas have never been implemented because it simply would have taken too long or too much trouble to try them?

I saw a great phrase the other day about social business software: it allows us to fail faster. When you have everyone trying things, without all the usual constraints created to avoid failure, you certainly will get more failed efforts. We have countless user-created groups in our online community, for example, that are languishing. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but for one reason or another, there's little or nothing happening in them now.

But that's okay. Social media is messy, not tidy. We also have terrific, active, innovative groups that have developed into true communities. Maybe we could have selected the winner groups in advance and shot down the loser groups before they started, but I truly doubt it. And I hate to imagine the evaluation process we would have to go through, or how long it would take and how much valuable energy it would consume (think opportunity cost).

So we have some quick failures in the mix -- maybe lots of them -- and we learn from that. We have some home runs, too, and we learn from them. Failing faster means eliminating things that don't work with less investment in them, and that frees us up to keep seeking things that do work. Since crystal balls have never worked very well, trying ideas out quickly is a pretty good strategy.

It all boils down to getting things done, and that's one of the most exciting things we're doing with our social media solution. It's the wiki attitude!

Social Media and Technology Dependence

2009-04-13T16:05:00.003-04:00

I'm a telecommuter. Maybe that's one reason I got so interested in social media. And I depend on technology for 95% of my interaction with my colleagues in the workplace.

That also means that when my connective technology fails, I am suddenly isolated and unproductive. I'm not hooked up to any medical monitoring devices, but I suspect my blood pressure rises and primitive areas of my brain start firing. In other words, I get angry and frustrated.

So as I sat here for 90 minutes this afternoon, waiting for technology to work properly again, I found myself thinking about how dependent I am on so much technology, and how so many of us, particularly through social media, are becoming more and more so. Yet we know technology can, and at least occasionally will, fail.

But I don't see myself turning back. We're on this road. But this afternoon I kept thinking how nice it would be to be working in my garden, instead, doing something simple and literally down-to-earth. It has a real nostalgic appeal...

Welcome, Rob!

2009-04-10T15:07:00.002-04:00

We've persuaded another one of our capable and insightful community managers to join us in telling tales of our adventures in social media. Hailing from South Africa but living and working in the UK, Rob Enslin brings a new global perspective to this blog.

Looking forward to your posts, Rob!

Calling for Champions

2009-04-10T15:01:00.003-04:00

Thought I'd share here a post I wrote for our internal community (note that we use the name "wiki" for our Jive Clearspace installation, which is really a full-featured social media application that includes a wiki):

Calling for Champions

No matter what your title or role is, you could be a champion. All it takes is passion and determination! So, if there's something you're passionate about, put the wiki to work and channel your passion into it.

What Does a Champion Do?

Champions step forward and take the lead in addressing an issue or acting on an opportunity with the objective of enacting change or implementing improvements. Champions get people to think about and address issues. Champions facilitate discussions -- online and/or in real-time. Champions organize all of the ideas about their issues and seek consensus. Most of all, champions are results-oriented and push for action, rather than settle for endless or circular discussions.

How Do I Become a Champion?

Anyone can become a champion simply by taking action. You can start a discussion in the wiki, post a document, write a blog post or form a group. Or you can approach your local wiki community manager or me, to express your interest and learn more about how to champion it.

Do I Need Management Approval?

No official management approval is required to become a champion in the wiki for something you are passionate about, but keeping your manager apprised is a good idea. For one thing, becoming a champion means taking initiative, and that's a desirable quality you want your boss to know about you. But, there's no pay or official job title for champions -- just opportunities for fame and glory -- so, you must make sure your activities as a champion don't in any way interfere with your "real job" here.

The Wiki Needs Champions

I'm currently seeking champions for a number of issues related to the wiki itself:

Tagging and tag groups
Organization in the wiki of spaces for shared services teams not aligned with one UBM division
Blogging best practices
Organizing content in the wiki so it's easy to find
Prioritizing our ideas for improvements to the wiki's software

And I am sure I will think of many more, but that's enough to get started.

So, who wants to be a champion? Let me know -- or just start championing your idea here in the wiki... no permission needed! And if you're interested in advancing the wiki itself, join the group for Wiki Leaders to stay in touch with what is happening and the issues that need work.

Critical Success Factor 5: Ownership

2009-04-10T11:45:00.003-04:00

I like writing occasional blog posts about the critical success factors in our social media implementation rather than sitting down and trying to come up with a definitive list all at once. The fact is, our online community is still evolving -- and I hope it always will be -- so our critical success factors will continue to evolve, as well. Right now, of course, we're largely in the discovery phase. The critical success factors are emerging and we just have to be observant so we notice them.

Critical success factor number 5 (simply in the order I'm uncovering them, not in importance) is ownership. I almost called it local ownership, but decided it's broader than that.

Ownership means taking responsibility. Our most successful communities have one or more owners who take responsibility for the appearance, organization, quality of content and level of interaction in their communities. In a small community, that's not a lot of work at all, but it makes all the difference. You see it immediately when you come to the community's overview page and find a welcoming message along with helpful directions and links. There are index and directory pages to help people navigate. And in discussions, the owner is helpful and encouraging.

My role is to oversee the entire community, but it's the individuals taking ownership in each little corner of our online world who are making it vibrant and sparkling with energy.

The other aspect of ownership that's been critical to our success is structural. We've assigned a space in our community to each division and given them control over it. I don't know about your company, but ours is full of competitive people, and they're proud of their divisions and so want their space to be and look the best. I use this strategically, of course!

And it's working. I highly doubt that we'd have the level of engagement that we do if I'd designed every division's spaces for them. Instead they were given, literally, a blank slate filled only with potential. I spent my energy in getting them excited and educated about that potential, guided them as they learned and experimented, but always stood behind them and let them pick their own paths.

And that trickles down, it turns out. As the individuals in charge of each divisions' space create sub-spaces or communities, they hand off responsibility and expectations to local owners. And when those people create new communities, they do the same thing, and so on and so on. It's a classic example of a virtuous cycle of behavior.

So, we've definitely found ownership to be a critical success factor in our online community. I recommend developing ways to encourage and enable ownership within any social media community -- it's the way to make it grow into something great.

The cash value of social media

2009-04-10T11:19:00.004-04:00

The great American philosopher William James coined the term cash value to describe the worth of an idea to an individual. Now BusinessWeek is reporting on research from MIT Sloan and IBM about what social connections are worth. This work is trying to assess the cash value of an idea -- social media -- to organizations and to individuals. (Their working paper is here.)

Some tidbits:

Among the group studied, several thousand consultants at IBM, those with strong links to a manager produced an average of $588 of revenue per month over the norm.

...leading tech companies, including IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO), are hiring economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map and classify new types of friendships—and put a value on them.

Researchers at IBM Research and MIT's Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue. To unearth that and other data, they used mathematical formulas to analyze the e-mail traffic, address books, and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year. (Their identities were shielded from researchers, who viewed them only as encrypted numbers, known as hash codes.) They compared the communication patterns with performance, as measured by billable hours.

There's so much more in this report. I encourage you to read it. If IBM and MIT are teaming up on a research project like this, my bet is that they're on to something.

How could your company profit -- really profit -- from these insights?

If a tree falls in the forest ...

2009-04-09T08:16:00.002-04:00

The philosophical question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" came to mind this morning. Not because I am in a philosophical mood -- far from it -- but because of the "silence" we've been experiencing since last week.

Here's a warning, boys and girls: make sure your email server team whitelists your wiki or social media software's sending address. Sometime late last week, our company's email servers concluded that the volume of emails being sent per minute from our wiki to our company email domain constituted a spam attack. So it blocked all further messages.

That's right -- usage on our system has become so fast and furious that it looks like a spammer! I'm actually delighted by that news, now that I have calmed down (I was not a happy camper when I realized thousands of emails had been refused delivery).

Now there's an odd sensation this morning as messages pop in one after another while the backlogged email queue clears. There are little comments here, questions there, and all of them actually were posted days ago. But no one heard them then. Like the tree falling in the forest, they made not a sound, since no one was there to hear them.

Now we're there in the forest again and the trees are falling right and left -- it's very noisy, and I like it!

Letting your wiki wander

2009-04-07T13:58:00.007-04:00

(First, kudos to Ted for keeping this blog alive. Unfortunately, I've been pulled away on a number of projects and haven't been able to give this blog the attention it deserves. I'll try to do better, but keep me honest.)

Wikis are like a box of Legos -- you can build a lot of different things with the same basic components.

I love the serendipitous nature of the wiki. It's like a giant vat of clay, ready to be molded into all sorts of interesting things. And you never know what's going to be made. Wikis are great for the right half of the brain.

The problem is that a wiki is just software. It exists within a human (business) context, and sometimes management can squelch new uses of a wiki. It's vital that the wiki be allowed to evolve, and it takes a lot of guts sometimes to let employees experiment. (Ted has been a master of strategic restraint on this score!)

Ah, there's that word: Experiment. For some it's a dirty word -- after all, they know what the wiki is for, and how dare anyone mess with their perfect vision? But the truth is that wikis have an exciting, unpredictable quality that's unavoidable -- indeed we should welcome it because it attracts creative thinkers.

I know this to be true because that's what's happening with our wiki. Not to embarrass him, but if Ted had managed our corporate wiki by imposing a set of predetermined ideas about how it should be used, the adoption rate across our company would be just a fraction of what it is.

As you plot out your company's wiki strategy, be sure to leave room for the unexpected. Let the creative create. Try this next time: Instead of reacting to new ideas with a clenched fist, first ask the person what he or she had in mind -- you might be pleasantly surprised. Heck, you might even develop a whole new revenue stream.

For some inspiration on taking your wiki in exciting new directions, check out blogs like Future Changes -- and this one, of course.

The State of Our Social Media Cultural Evolution: 7-Months In

2009-04-07T10:52:00.006-04:00

We deployed Jive Clearspace 2.5 in September 2008, so it's been seven months now and I want to look at what the results have been. I've written several other posts today that address this, too, but I'll try to share some statistical results here. I know all too well how hard it is to find useful statistics about social media, so bear with me as we are still very new at this part.

We've gone from a few dozen testers in the summer of 2008 to more than 4500 user accounts. We estimate close to 30% access the wiki (that's our name for it, and I know it drives Jive crazy, since it's far more than a wiki, but wiki really is faster to say and type!) every day. About 3% are creating content daily (and not the same 3% all the time).

We have over a thousand communities already. There are a couple of thousand discussions containing about 10,000 messages. We have nearly 10,000 documents that have been created or uploaded. Although the number of blog posts seems puny by comparison -- a couple of hundred -- we have a couple of thousand comments on them, meaning we're averaging more than four comments per blog post, which seems to me a very healthy level of interaction and engagement.

Our monthly page views have climbed above 300,000 and for the first six months were growing 50% every month. We'll have to see whether this trend is slowing or will resume.

In summary, we've reached and surpassed critical mass. The wiki is here. It is not going away. The exciting questions now are along the lines of, "just how far can we go in realizing new value from this?" New answers -- and more questions -- are popping up every day. We are, indeed, undergoing a social media cultural evolution.

What Do We Use Our Social Media Software For, Anyway?

2009-04-07T10:17:00.005-04:00

So, we have social media software and that makes us cool and progressive :-) But what are we actually using it for?

That's a big question that I am trying to answer, myself. You see, when you have more than 4500 people using a system, it's hard to know what they all are doing. So, I'm trying to get them to tell me (see my post on Wiki Win of the Week) -- and most important, tell each other.

Here's a brief, somewhat random list of some of the ways we're using our social business software:

Replacing endless email threads with discussions online that are available to all, not just those on the "cc" list. No need to file an entire long email thread and hope you can find it later, since it's online. Nice that the discussion flows down, too, instead of forcing you to scroll up and down as an email thread does, to catch up or review it.
Thought-provoking discussions started in one division that spread to include input and ideas -- and more questions -- from people in other divisions, areas, functions and countries.
Blogging by executives to communicate important ideas or toss out thoughts on their minds. These blog posts inspire comments that form discussions among people at all levels, including people who would never be bold enough to email the exec directly.
Blogging by individuals on topics they care about. Some fascinating ideas are emerging from people who never would have had a voice, so to speak, otherwise.
Cutting down on emailing large files back and forth. We upload them, instead, and it's easy for people to find them and makes sure they always grab the latest, current version.
Posting policies, procedures, etc. online. It's like a self-administered intranet, with no need for a webmaster or knowledge of HTML.
Project management among teams producing conferences, building websites and doing any other kind of work where collaboration, task tracking and a shared calendar is helpful.
Building bonds among employees through social groups of shared interest. We encourage this non-work usage (preferably out of work or on breaks) and have groups on everything from gardening to video gaming.
Coordination and collaboration among management teams in private groups where they can share ideas and keep each other informed even if they are located in different offices or traveling.
Skunkworks projects where people can explore and collaborate on potentially valuable ideas that are not yet ready for prime time.
Connecting with experts and resources in different locations and divisions. For example, finding a vendor in another country (and saving tens of thousands of dollars as a result). Also, we have groups formed by individuals on topics such as SEO, for example, that now have hundreds of staff (most of whom have never met and would not have known of each other otherwise) exchanging best practices, comparing vendors, asking and answering questions and even offering training sessions for each other -- all without any management involvement. Pure initiative!
Increase awareness throughout the enterprise of all the different offerings our businesses have, including products and services that can add value or save money if used internally or in partnership for clients.
Coordinating talent and expertise from different divisions to bid on new business. The software facilitates and enables this very effectively across time zones and geography.

I could go on. But that should give a pretty good impression of how we're using social media internally. And we're only seven months in! I'm excited about the many possibilities that we haven't even discovered, yet.

How Does Our Social Media Software Work?

2009-04-07T10:06:00.002-04:00

Another question I was asked is "how does it work?" I don't think this means to rate it, but if so then the answer is "very well." We're running Jive Clearspace 2.5.x and we're very happy with it. Of course, there are things we don't like and the inevitable bugs that come with complex software, but no system is perfect, is it?

But if the question is, "how" does it work, then that's a little harder to explain. It's easier to show than to tell, but I'll take a shot at it.

Jive Clearspace is an integrated set of tools and capabilities, all delivered through the Internet in a browser. It includes:

Discussion threads / forums
Blogs for individuals and communities
A full-featured wiki with a rich-text editor
Profiles for users, viewable in a directory format as well as an organization chart view
Project management features (somewhat limited, but fine for many, many projects)
User-created groups that allow and empower anyone to form a community easily
RSS feeds and email notifications to keep people informed
Widgets that let you customize many pages with slick sets of features
Powerful and handy search capabilities
Tagging and tag clouds, for developing a folksonomy and visually drilling down on topics

Anyone can learn more by going to the Jive website, but that's what I would highlight. The key is that all of this is in one system that is really very easy to use. You can find all of these features in separate tools and piece this functionality together. But the benefits of an integrated, simple system are immense.

Why Did We Deploy Social Media Software in our Enterprise?

2009-04-07T09:44:00.005-04:00

I was asked this question recently ("why did you deploy social media software in your enterprise?") and thought I would respond in this blog. It's a question many people are facing as they consider whether to implement social business software.

I can't say I was present at creation, so to speak, but I think I can piece together what led us to where we are today (about seven months into our deployment of Jive Clearspace). In one word, we saw potential.

This is not proven technology. The benefits of deploying social business software are not widely acknowledged and accepted (although this is changing rapidly, I believe). We had individuals in our organization who saw potential, took initiative, and made a case for trying this.

But what did we expect would happen? I think that's really what the question is.

We expected at least the following (and we hoped for much more):

Communication among and within our many divisions would improve. Email would in some ways be replaced with more effective means of communicating (e.g., discussion threads, blogs, posting files in a centrally accessible location).
Collaboration would be enabled in new and exciting ways, again, both among and within our many divisions.
Significant financial benefits would result from sharing what our smart and experienced people are doing in silos all over the world with the rest of the enterprise, so we can leverage what works and learn from what doesn't.
Most ambitiously, I think we expected to develop a more cohesive company culture. We've grown so much through acquisitions that we have a global patchwork of cultures more than one enterprise-wide culture. Without diminishing those independent cultures, we wanted to develop a sense of community that's enterprise-wide.

But I have to come back to the word "potential," again. The most compelling case for deploying social media software was the allure of unknown benefits, and the sense that there were opportunities that we just don't want to miss. And so we leaped, and so far we're soaring along nicely!

Critical Success Factor 4: Training

2009-04-01T22:01:00.000-04:00

The importance of critical success factor number four, training, hit me right between the eyes this morning. Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of your face until it smacks you!

We were having our monthly enterprise-wide wiki advisory board meeting, and as each division presented their updates on their progress and challenges, I kept hearing about training that had been done and was being planned.

We're well beyond basic demos of how to use the software in most of our divisions. What's underway all over the company is advanced training, and that's very exciting. It also reinforces the importance that training has had and continues to have upon our success.

The social media software we use, Jive Clearspace (now renamed Jive SBS or Social Business Software), is easy to use. But training is still important. Training saves newbies time by teaching them tricks and tips as well as how why to use the tool. And the "why" is the most important. Without it, "how" has no purpose.

The advanced training we're doing covers some software features, but it's even more conceptually based. We're moving from how and why to proficiency and expertise and standardized practices. For example, staff in a division are taught where to look for the information they most need, as well as the finer points of creating content for others (effective titles for documents, descriptive and consistent tags, even SEO tips so it will be easy to find in the search results). Different teams are evolving their own strategies for using the wiki, and training is an essential part of their success.

It's true we rely to a very large degree on individuals to take initiative -- and they do -- but you can go a long way toward empowering those individuals through effective, strategic and creative training. It's certainly a critical success factor in our social media cultural evolution.

NEW! Wiki-Mind Interface Breakthrough

2009-04-01T09:30:00.005-04:00

We've just upgraded to an exciting new feature today, April 1, 2009, and it changed everything. This Mind Interface plugin enables us to post content directly to our wiki without using a computer, keyboard or even a mobile device. There are a few bugs, but the tremendous benefits outweigh the risks.

Here's how it works, and you can try it right now!

Concentrate on the place in the wiki where you wish to create new content. Sit in a quiet place and visualize the location for 10 seconds. (Warning: if your focus wanders, the entire process will fail!)
Next, visualize the kind of content you are creating. You must focus your mind on one of the following: blog, new discussion, document, comment or discussion response. (Sorry, poll creation and responses are not enabled, yet.)
Next, think of the title of your new content, preceded in your mind by the keyword, "title." Picture any punctuation marks, if needed, as well.
Now, speaking clearly and slowly, say out loud the words that will make up the content of your new item in the wiki. Since this is only an early version of the Mind Interface plugin, you do have to say the words aloud, but engineers are working on a silent-enabled version.
Finally, click your heels together three times and say "Publish, publish, publish" loudly and clearly!

That's it! You've just published your content directly in the wiki via the new Mind Interface. Be sure to tell your colleagues about this tremendous breakthrough, too -- this changes everything!

Critical Success Factor 3: Simple Software

2009-03-30T10:46:00.004-04:00

I always liked the story about how a goldfish doesn't know it's in a bowl because the way it experiences the world is the only way it ever has. I find myself thinking of that whenever something jolts me out of commonplace acceptance of the way things are -- "oh, right, just because it always has been this way doesn't mean it always will be."

This brings me to critical success factor #3 for deploying a successful social business software solution within an organization: simple software. We've been running Jive Clearspace 2.5.x since our proof of concept trial in August 2008. But as an organization we had experience with a few other social media platforms, so we're actually wiser than the goldfish.

And what we learned from trying other platforms was that if the software's not simple to use, not many people will use it consistently. They may give it a try when it's new, but over time the hassle factor wears them down. We really like how simple Jive Clearspace is to use and I'm certain that's a key factor in the success that we have had in developing our communities.

However, Jive Clearspace isn't perfect, of course -- and that's what reinforces my belief that simplicity is a critical success factor. Where there is too much friction -- when the way you have to use the software isn't easy -- we see people resisting using it. For example, we have many email addicts and it's not been easy to persuade them that using the wiki is as simple as firing off an email (especially from their BlackBerry). We can talk about and demonstrate the benefits of having their discussions in the wiki instead of trapped in separate inboxes -- and they get it -- but if they still have to take some extra steps, if it's not as simple as email, then people will tend to stick with what's simplest.

So, choose your software platform carefully. Look for lots of great features, of course (by simple to use I don't mean stripped down). But really look hard at ease-of-use factors, and be sure you test with ordinary, typical users over some time so you can learn what they think -- and observe what they do. It's another critical success factor for your internal online community.

The wiki meme

2009-03-30T10:32:00.003-04:00

The famed biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe an idea that was passed along in minds much in the same way that genes are passed along in bodies. As our wiki project has continued, I think the wiki meme is spreading.

Let me explain. Our wiki spans the length and width of a very large corporation. Employees are getting into the habit of working across departments, groups, etc. What matters isn’t where someone works, but what they can contribute to the discussion. Speaking personally, I really like to discuss ideas with individuals across the company, and the wiki makes that possible like no other tool. It’s Web 2.0 in the wild.

Someone once said the businessman has no country, and I’m starting to think that the wiki-empowered employee has no division. Our wiki is fostering a less parochial, more cosmopolitan view of our company in the minds of its employees. This, in short, is the wiki meme.

Most of our employees aren’t there yet. They’re still asking about how to upload documents and whether it makes sense to start a blog. But I predict that the wiki meme will disrupt, in an increasingly fundamental sense, how our company does business. Once employees get used to working across divisions, it’s hard, if not impossible, to put the genie back in the bottle.

As I like to say, simple ways of doing business always triumph over complex ways of doing business – eventually. Let me rephrase that: Companies that will survive the upheaval of Web 2.0 will have to be more agile. They need the wiki meme to spread to all corners of the enterprise.

How’s your company doing? Is the wiki meme spreading throughout your office?

When Social Media Goes B-to-B

2009-03-27T14:34:00.004-04:00

A team of analysts over at Forrester Research recently produced “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers," a really thought-provoking report on the use of social media by IT decision-makers in the b-to-b world (as opposed to the b-to-c world, where the focus has traditionally been). The headline on Josh Bernoff’s blog is enough to attract anyone’s attention: New research: B2B buyers have very high social participation.

Consider this from the related PowerPoint presentation (just register and log in to get it):

In the current economy, social media offer new ways to reach and engage hidden B2B technology buyers.

Hidden buyers? In other words, there’s an untapped market here, if only companies don’t mess it up. Overall, these buyers are more engaged in social media than the average consumer — for work and for play.

Another section from Bernoff’s post:

91% of these technology decision-makers were Spectators — the highest number I’ve ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. Note that 69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.

Only 5% are non-participants (Inactives).

55% of these decision-makers were in social networks (Joiners) — despite as mature business people and not college students, you’d think they’d be participating a lot less.

43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.) and 58% are Critics, reacting to content they see in social formats. Again the numbers are very high compared to other groups we’ve surveyed, and again the level of participation for business purposes is also very high.

While Bernoff notes that word of mouth was still the number one influence on buying decisions, he expects that as social media becomes more commonplace, the online ecosystem will become more influential:

Note that buyers use social technology but don’t rate it highly in terms of its influence on their buying decisions. This, despite the fact that [they] count on peers’ opinions to make decisions. I think this reflects that people haven’t gotten used to this sort of information as a key input in buying decisions. This will change, especially as better applications come on line.

Another great insight:

Buyer use of social media — across all types of social media — is highest at the outset of an IT project and lowest during the final phrase Forrester dubs “Review the payback or business results of completed IT projects.”

Using Forrester’s P-O-S-T (People-Objectives-Strategy-Technology) approach, marketers can make sure their marketing campaign “does” social media in the right way. And based on how b-to-b buyers act, we can make sure to have have all the rungs on Forrester’s Social Technographics ladder (Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators) covered in our campaigns.

At the end of the day, as Forrester’s research shows, any successful social media marketing stategy begins by understanding the social behavior of buyers. What do you really know about what influences your current and potential customers to make a buying decision? And how can social media help tip the scales in your favor?

Critical Success Factor 2: Support from the Top

2009-03-25T14:25:00.003-04:00

This is the second in a series of posts about what it takes to successfully deploy a social media software solution inside an organization.

It took a while for this one to reach my consciousness. I guess that's because it's been there from the start and has never wavered. But the more I look into it, the more I realize how important it has been to us that our CEO has been our project's sponsor and advocate.

He's really set the tone in so many ways:

Subtly, by forwarding emails to me and copying the sender when they've sent him something that should be posted in the wiki rather than sent around by email.
Vocally, by mentioning the wiki in nearly every one of his enterprise-wide communications
By example: from the start of our implementation he's been in the tool frequently, blogging, responding to discussions and commenting on documents
With his direct reports: he's had me speak to his executive team several times, demoing the software, explaining our objectives in using it and regularly reporting our progress with it -- including reports that break out how each division is progressing, so each exec can see how s/he ranks compared to their peers.
Financially, by signing off on the expenditures for our implementation.
Leadership: setting expectations, creating accountability and providing direction as needed.

So, critical success factor #2 may not be a surprise, either, but it's real. I'm not saying you can't succeed without it. But your chances of success are much greater if you have strong support for your social business software initiative from the top. The effect on the organization is significant and invaluable.

Critical Success Factor 1: Strong Community Manager

2009-03-25T14:06:00.004-04:00

I am trying to distill all that we have been learning about successfully implementing a social media solution in our organization (or as Jive has aptly named it, social business software). I'm going to write a series of blog posts about the critical success factors I have identified -- not necessarily in order of importance.

The first critical success factor, and the earliest one I identified, is to have a strong community manager. Sure, as the community manager I am biased, so take that into account as you read this. But I'm not looking in the mirror, I'm looking at the dozen local community managers we have throughout our enterprise (at least one in each division).

As I reported on our rollout and engagement progress each month, it became clear that some divisions were moving more quickly than others to gain adoption and derive value from the tool. Why was this? The strongest correlation I could find was with the local community manager.

This sounds so obvious: a strong community manager is critical to the success of your social business software implementation. But it's worth stating boldly. If you're serious about building a community, you'd better select and invest in someone well-suited to the role who has the skills, abilities, passion and bandwidth needed.

It's that simple. The single best predictor of your community's success is your choice of community manager.

Jive Support: Grade A

2009-03-24T09:30:00.004-04:00

I spent many years in the call center and customer support industry, so I know as well as anybody that support professionals rarely get noticed except when they make a big mistake. When they do their job well, everything runs smoothly and we tend not to notice when that becomes normal and expected. We don't notice oxygen, either, except when it's missing and we can't breathe.

Well, we've been running Jive's Clearspace for about six months now and I just noticed I have 600 posts in the Jive Support area since then. I'm not an easy customer, either. I'm pretty demanding and I get cranky when things don't meet my expectations. I call 'em like I see 'em and I expect the support professionals I deal with to be just that: professional.

I'm happy to report that Jive's support team is excellent. Grade A. Responsive. Knowledgeable. Helpful. They get results and do it quickly. They take ownership for resolving an issue, they respond to follow up questions and extend themselves to resolve not only the original issue but any related (even tangentially) issues. And they do it all in a personable, friendly way, too.

Of course, I haven't really noticed this much because I have come to expect it. It's my normal experience with Jive Support now, and we don't tend to remark on normalcy. But in this case we should, because Jive's Support team is everything a software support area should be: so good you come to take them for granted.

Thanks, guys at Jive! Keep up the great work!

Getting Excited About Jive SBS 3.0

2009-03-18T14:20:00.003-04:00

We're running Jive Clearspace 2.5.x and have been since September 2008. This week Jive released version 3.0, along with a name change: Jive Social Business Software 3.0 (as far as functionality is concerned, it's the next major release of Clearspace -- more on the marketing and positioning in a future post).

I've had a couple of demos with Jive now of SBS 3.0 and I must say I like what I see. Social bookmarking is something I really wanted, so put a checkmark next to that on my wishlist. Not only are individuals going to have a simple, built-in way to save their favorite locations, but teams will, too. The power of sharing bookmarks -- even external ones -- throughout the enterprise is very exciting. It's a social media tool that's proven to be powerful and I expect we'll find real value in it.

I'm most excited about the improved reporting, though. As a community manager, I have been seeking data, actionable data, to understand what's working, what's not, who's participating and how, and who's not. Clearspace 2.5 provides an array or reports, and we've deployed Omniture for web stats, too, but little of the data is what I could truly call actionable. We need it to be more granular, more flexible and more widely available.

I just got a peek at the new Analytics module for Jive SBS 3.0 and as a numbers geek, I'm drooling. Can't wait to get my hands on all that data and connect my old pal Excel to the data warehouse. Just from the examples Jive provided I can see it's got "actionable" written all over it, as well as flexibility in spades. Can't tell, yet, how easy it is to make is widely available, but have my fingers crossed for that, too.

One of my objectives for 2009 is to develop a custom set of actionable data reports. With the Analytics module and the data warehouse that's part of it, it looks like Jive has given me a huge boost toward accomplishing that objective. I still need to get under the hood and test it out, so I'll report what I find when I do that, but from the documentation I have seen so far, this is going to really be useful.

Beware of Pornographic Images

2009-03-11T11:05:00.002-04:00

Did I get your attention? I hope so! We had our first case of pornography in our wiki today. This was not in the least bit questionable or borderline -- there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that it was pornographic.

So, how did it appear? Well, it turned out we were the victim of a bait and switch of sorts. An employee pasted in a link to an image on the Internet instead of uploading the image to the wiki. Because that method relies on a live link to an image outside of the wiki, when that image is changed by its owner, the image that appears inside the wiki changes, too, instantly. We went from displaying an innocent image to a pornographic image sometime overnight.

What are the lessons to be learned here?

Avoid linking to images as a method of displaying them. You are at the mercy of the image's owner when you use a link to display images.
All externally-linked images currently in the wiki should be identified and replaced by uploaded images.
We need to educate everyone about this risk and how to avoid it.
Overview pages for groups, spaces and projects in Jive Clearspace are especially high risks because the Formatted Text widget that people usually employ to display images on those pages only accepts a URL as the way to display an image.

There is a tedious -- but now mandatory -- workaround to use uploaded images in the Formatted Text widget in Clearspace instead of links to images outside of the wiki.

Save the image to your computer
Upload it as an attachment somewhere in Clearspace. We've created some Image Container pages for this purpose, so people can use those or create their own.
After you have published the page with your image attached, right-click on the link to your image attachment and select Copy Image Location.
Now go to your overview page, click on Customize, wait 5 years for it to open, edit your Formatted Text widget, click on the camera icon to insert the image, and paste the link you copied.
Save the changes to the widget and publish the page.

Please spread the word! Now, I'm going to follow my own advice and audit all the images on the wiki's main page to ensure they comply with this policy.

MFS Career Day

2009-03-03T20:38:00.003-05:00

I'm looking forward to speaking to students at Moorestown Friends School, my alma mater, about careers in online community management. Rather than put together PowerPoint slides for my presentation, I created a Ning network and will use to illustrate what a community manager does, and then to allow the students to follow up afterwards. Should be fun!

Web 2.0 Empowers People, Especially Angry People

2009-03-02T13:26:00.002-05:00

Our focus in this blog is really on internal deployments of Web 2.0 or social media technology (aka, Enterprise 2.0), but we do digress to comment on the broader aspects at times. This is one of those times, but I'll keep it brief and simply refer you to a post on my personal blog, if you're interested:

PlentyOfFish.com Sucks at Customer Service

You see, just as social media enables people to share, collaborate and communicate to benefit the enterprise, it also empowers angry people by giving them a platform to complain, loudly, when organizations treat them badly. I'm the "super empowered angry customer" (thanks, Keith Dawson) this time, but I also use the case to illustrate larger lessons about customer service.

If you're interested take a look. If you're looking for a dating website, now you know one to stay away from.

Wiki Win of the Week

2009-02-28T17:52:00.003-05:00

Both Matt and I have been way too busy to keep up in here, sorry to say. And I'm embarrassed to see that I haven't posted in here since last year! So I'm going to take the approach of one small step at a time to get blogging here again. Some of my posts may be quite short for a while, but I hope they'll be worthwhile just the same.

I want to share something fun and successful we just started doing. I added a place on our wiki's main page called, "Wiki Win of the Week." The idea is to highlight ways that people are using Clearspace to help them at work. Not only do those people get a public "attaboy" for the whole company to see -- including the CEO, who truly follows what's going on in there closely -- but we propagate and publicize those good ideas throughout the enterprise. That's a two-fer!

The "wins" can be small or large or in between. Here's an example:

Posted a question on the Live Events group to get a recommendation for a general contractor for an exhibition in the UK. Within 48 hours I had three replies, all recommending the same company. We contacted the vendor and within a week of posting the original question, we had a more competitive offer on the table. Exact savings to be determined, but in the range of US$20,000. Access to other event professionals within UBM has resulted in better negotiating power with vendors and faster access to recommendations.

I love it when the wins include dollar savings! Still working on how to answer the inevitable ROI questions, but tracking all the wiki wins across the company is a start.

How one old dog learned a new trick

2009-01-22T09:56:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you just walk into a special situation that brings the human face of an IT project into bold relief. That happened to me yesterday. When I walked over to a colleague's desk to ask about something completely unrelated to the wiki, I noticed something interesting.

On her PC she had an open wiki text editor with some text typed in it. But she was working on something else. Since she's never posted anything on the wiki, I was intrigued.

"Ready to post something?" I asked her.

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Why not?"

She just looked at me for a few seconds.

"Don't worry about posting something. All ideas are welcome."

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Just go for it. With thousands of people on the wiki, you never know where your idea might go."

She thought for another second, turned to her computer, and hit Send.

"Good for you," I said.

She was visibly relieved. Less than 5 minutes later, she had her first reply -- from her manager, no less. He thought her idea had legs. Without the wiki, I wonder if it would ever have seen the light of day.

Score one for the wiki. Score two for the power of human relationships.

Teaching an old wiki new tricks

2009-01-13T13:11:00.003-05:00

Last week I did a wiki training session that included one of the senior managers in our company. As I walked him and the others through the options for doing work on the wiki, he asked me if we could use the wiki to do customer focus groups. Yes, customer focus groups.

Now, our wiki is primarily intended as a resource for internal use only, but when Ted and I considered this proposal, we found a way to make it happen using a 'sandboxed' instance of the wiki. In the end, we hope that this customer-facing wiki will not only save time by avoiding countless conference calls with clients, but that it will become a place where we can educate thought leaders in the industry about all of our other social media activities. And that's just for starters.

This is exciting stuff, and it goes to show that the old saying is true: You can teach an old wiki new tricks. Or something like that.

Have your wiki users surprised you with unexpected uses for your corporate wiki? Please share your story.

Going with the flow

2009-01-09T15:36:00.006-05:00

One of the worst things anyone rolling out such a large-scale project such as our internal wiki can try to do is micromanage. It's also deadly to be on any sort of ego trip -- if you think about it, the amount of new ideas generated by wiki users is directly proportional to the passion you convey to your colleagues about wiki possibilities. You can hardly plant seeds of inspiration and not expect them to grow.

Even though it's still early days, I've been thrilled at the amazing ways in which our colleagues have twisted, turned and pounded the wiki into submission to meet their specific needs. I see myself, in my role as a wiki community manager, as a facilitator, sounding board, encourager, etc. My job, as I see it, is to coax the wiki creativity out of my colleagues and set them loose. This results in a wiki that's more innovative, more democratic and frankly more fun. Oh, and which has more go-to-market ideas.

So the wiki ROI flow looks like this:

Training about the wiki --> Excitement about possibilities --> Facilitation of ideas to execution --> End result

Has this been your experience too?

My wiki wishes for 2009

2009-01-05T09:45:00.004-05:00

Welcome to 2009. Never one to buck a trend (*cough*), I'd like to follow the example of countless other bloggers and share my wishes for 2009 -- my wiki wishes, that is. So here goes:

1. Get everyone at the company using the wiki on a regular basis.

2. Getting a clearer understanding of how the wiki is actually being used.

3. Getting a clearer understanding of why folks aren't using the wiki for [fill in the blank]. Along with #2, this will help us see how the wiki will fit within our evolving social media ecosystem.

4. Using the wiki to manage more projects across the company.

5. Enabling others within the company to take greater ownership over different parts of the wiki.

6. To point #3, finding ways to make the wiki more user friendly/less scary. This will involve training, for sure, but we also need to find ways to build "bridges" (technical and even psychological/procedural) between the wiki and how people interact now. In other words, how can we make it more "natural" for folks to use the wiki?

7. Findings ways to quantify the monetary benefits of using the wiki and ways to use the wiki to pull together for management stats related to sales. This would seem to be an important thing given the current economic climate.

I should probably list more goals list here, but that's a start. What are your wiki wishes for 2009? Come on. Don't be shy.

Going with the flow

2008-12-22T10:35:00.004-05:00

This morning I was irritated to discover that my preteen daughter had borrowed my car keys last night to open the trunk, and then proceeded to lose said keys in a large mountain of snow where she was sledding. By the time I realized the keys were missing, a lot more snow had been added to the snow mountain, and any chance of finding the keys was gone until the spring thaw. I had to call a locksmith: $200 and several hours later, I had new keys. No chance of heading into the office, so I had to work from home.

It look some time for me to calm down, and I began to see that working from home wasn't so bad. I just needed to be a little more flexible in my thinking.

Social media is all about flexibility, an understanding that the landscape now won't be what it will be in 6-12 months. As a "disruptive" technology, social media is constantly challenging all of us with new ways to connect, to build brands and to develop communities where sharing and transparency rule. We're all going to lose our keys a few times as we try to figure it all out -- and that's okay.

Focusing on your goals

2008-12-15T10:09:00.006-05:00

When I do wiki training, I compare the wiki to Times Square in New York City. There's a whole heck of a lot going on, and it's really scary, quite frankly, for new users. There's a discussion over here, a blog post over here, and on and on. Lots of little tidbits of content in your face.

I think of this when I hear that about 8 million adults in the U.S. have ADHD. As we think about wiki design (and redesign), how can widgets or gadgets give these users -- really all users -- exposure to the bits of the wiki they need to accomplish a specific task, while not blitzing them with the 'Time Square' treatment whenever the log in? Sometimes going off on a wiki tangent is a good thing, but a lot of times it isn't, especially during the work week.

I wonder if some new business desktop widgets coming on the market might help modulate the flow of information hitting users' eyeballs?

What's your experience been? How can we help wiki users stay on task?

Deep users wanted

2008-12-10T15:54:00.005-05:00

I think Ted's absolutely right that our wiki is reaching critical mass. I see it in the lists of folks who register for training, in the folks who email me from a far-flung corner of the company telling me they want wiki access. I see (and hear) it especially poignantly in the emails and coffee machine conversations with those who, like little kids, proudly announce to me that they just made their first wiki post. Then there's my new title around the office: Wiki Man.

You get the picture.

Amazingly, I've encountered remarkably little resistance to the wiki. Sure, some folks have told me it will take time to learn, and they have questions on the best way to use it, but I can count on one hand those who've said the wiki will just be...wait for it...more work. Maybe it's because I tend to work with the Web 2.0 generation, but I think there's more to it than that.

Less than a quarter of our registered wiki users are regular wiki users, and we need that percentage to grow. We need more deep users to create a groundswell of sharing and transparency that leaps out of cyberspace and into our workspaces to make them more conducive to the kind of cross-department and cross-company exchange and collaboration that will separate the Losers from the Winners in the business world of the 21st century. Sharing is just good business.

We're not there yet, and there's lots of work left to do, but the progress is encouraging.