Not all online communities for business succeed. In fact, many fail. The failure rate for online communities has been a popular research topic over the past few years and it is estimated that over 60% of online communities fail to thrive. Failure can mean a number of different things to the business. Some examples of failure include: the community is not well used by its members; it doesn't attract a critical mass of members or, worse, the *wrong* people join the community - people who are not at the right level or role for the membership to be valued by the company; or there are technical issues that prevent members from valuing the community offerings. Whatever your definition of failure is, if the business isn't happy with the outcome, you have a big problem. A failed community often does more damage to the brand reputation than no community at all.
But all is not lost. If you have an under-performing community there are steps you can take to remedy the situation and, in some cases, recover.
First - diagnose your problem well. Put ego and organizational politics aside and take a good hard look at what is not going as intended. Ask yourself and management what the vision for the community was at the onset. What did you/they hope the community would do for the company when it was started? Chances are you will find a wide variety of responses, many of which were unrealistic or unrealistic given the resources and effort dedicated to it. Too frequently, the business goals for an online community are not well defined at the get-go, so the online community never has a chance of meeting expectations because the expectations were not well articulated. If this is the case, back up the bus! Set time aside to work with key stakeholders to pinpoint the short-term, mid-term and long-term goals for the community. Then, assign clear measures of success.
Second - conduct an investigative needs analysis with members. Find out what is working and what is not working from their point of view. Don't ask about technical features and functions; instead focus squarely on identifying if the community meets their business needs. Does the community help them do their job better? What is the best part of the community? What is not meeting their expectations? If they could re-shape the community, what could it do for them professionally? These data can serve you well to refresh the site or to create more meaningful features or content. Taking member guidance into account can increase loyalty and use because the members will feel ownership over the ideas they generated that you put into action.
Third - Examine your current staffing and content creation processes. Is the online community an ad hoc venture saddled with high hopes or is the staffing adequate to support the business goals? You can't have a plan to be the go-to resource and have a part time millennial intern managing your site after he delivers coffee and mail. Resources and outcomes need to be aligned. This is a similar situation with content creation. You get what you give with community and if you are not creating valuable content on the site, not working with members to be content creators, not sharing thought leadership on the site then you will not benefitfrom the site.
Fourth - Ensure you have visit-triggers to get people to the site. If your audience is business people, chances are we have better things to do than to remember to visit your community. If your target audience is over forty, we are lucky to remember our own names some days, let alone recall to log in to your community! In order to increase awareness of the community and be able to make the most of the members you have, a regular newsletter that has links to the site can significantly increase use. Do you have a weekly newsletter that drives traffic to the site and exposes all the good things that are happening there? Do you do regular outreach to members and is that outreach customized to their interests or personalized? Don't forget there is more than email for this activity - the phone and paper mail still work too!
Fifth - Size matters. Many communities don't have a fighting chance to succeed because they never reach critical mass. If your community is under, say, 2000 members naturally there will not be a lot of activity on the site. Here is an opportunity to unleash the powers of marketing to create an effective member acquisition program. Size up your market of potential members and craft a compelling value proposition on why they should join. Engage WOM (word of mouth peer referral programs), and provide support for members when they first join. The level of personalized support will need to scale appropriately to the audience's level of seniority. Execs need more support as their expectations tend to be higher. Create a member acquisition program that scales over time, analyze it, and make changes in your approach based on the outcome. For example, you could run a survey and share the results in the newsletter or link to specific member questions with a call for participation.
Not all communities will be victorious in the long run. But, if you can provide a point of connection between your members - focusing on member-to-member collaboration in addition to member-to-company communication, have well defined business goals, features that serve the membership well, and a critical mass of engaged members, you have a powerful recipe for success.
Kids matter and the work that the Make-A-Wish Foundation does to help kids in need is out of this world. As a working mom and a social media practitioner, it is a joy to participate in the annual Age Of Conversation collaborative book. For the past three years, Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton gather scores of volunteer writers - notable people in social media and marketing - to write a brief section about the impact of social media on business and society. It is kind of like a blog carnival in book format and it offers an amazing snapshot of best thinking on social media.
The book is broken into a number of sections:
At the coalface
Conversational branding
Influence
Getting to work
Corporate conversations
Measurement
In the boardroom
Pitching social media
Innovation and execution
Identities, friends and trusted strangers
This third book in the Age of Conversation series is crowdsourced, bringing together hundreds of authors from across the world. The diverse perspectives and innovative approaches reflects the global, changing nature of business today. All proceeds are donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and soon you can buy the book on the Age of Conversation website or Amazon.
Here is a list of the authors who have donated their time to participate...
What do Disney World and social media have in common? The answer to the question is social engineering. I recently gave a talk at LexisNexis about this topic and it was initially met with resistance... community and social media is all about collaboration and sharing, right? Right. But there are methods to achieving, designing, the experience for users to get what they need out of the engagement. Social engineering, though it sounds evil, can really serve your members well by providing them with the assistance to make the most out of their experience on your site.
There are two components to successful social media: there’s social design and technical design, both of which play an important role in establishing trust and creating vibrant online communities. From a technical perspective the community must be closely aligned to the needs and gratuitous features don’t always make for an engaging community. The features and the different technical offerings on the the goals of the group. So if a group needs to work on documents, there needs to be document-sharing capabilities; blogging, for example, and some of the newer, cooler features may not really be needed.
From a technical design perspective, trust can be established and displayed by matching the goals of
the community with the functional features that they offer. More importantly and often forgotten are the social
aspects of trust. Returning to the Disney World example; when you go to Disney World, there’s an awareness of what the needs of the constituents are before their needs become bothersome. They know exactly where to put the snack bars and rest rooms, and they let you know how long you’ll probably be waiting in line for your rides. That is a very important aspect of online community building as well, really to understand the psychographic and demographic profiles of the group that you’re building for.
You need to ask “Who are these people? What are their needs? How do they like to interact?” Break your constituencies into different groups of personas to predict some of their requirements, both informational and social. For example, “How much moderation do they need? How much handholding? Are they a self-sufficient group that can look up how to do things in a technical wiki? Or do they need more interpersonal interactions with the community builders?
Another driving need to to identify the business goals for the engagement activity and map then judiciously to the user experience. What are the rings of activities that you want the users to do on the community? Perhaps the first step is to log in and create a profile - then you design incentives around the fulfillment of that activity and track progress. Is is likely that you will create a goal of 60% (for example) login, and perhaps 40% profile submission. Next, perhaps, you will want the members to view a video on the site that discusses some company-centric new product offering. Well, the member will have a variety of choices about what they will do on the site - so you will want to create triggers - both social and technical- to guide the user to view the video. Again, assign goals for conversion to that activity and track the progress. It is critical to design engagement activities that benefit the members as well as the business. If you become too company-centric than the engagement crosses over into overt marketing and that is not the reason why your members are participating in the first place. Significant attrition will happen if you loose sight of the members' needs and goals. This is just a way to help focus the energies of engagement into a productive step-wise process. Enhancing your user experience should be your primary priority.
Here is an example:
Now, it is to be expected that not all community members will reach the center or core of the activities. With each ring of goals, the engagement deepens but the participation drops - and that is fine. It is the nature of the thing itself. But through this type of programmatic approach to socially engineering engagement, you can keep laser-focused on the goals. Community and social media engagement can often seem to be a daunting task - as it is big and never-ending. But this is a way to create micro-initiatives that help you move towards the center of success.
Two days of some of the most influential speakers in IT, and a room full of the top IT executives across the major verticals all talking about the impact of Cloud Computing on enterprise - that is what the Cognizant Community Conference has to offer. Cognizant is a large company that brings IT, business process and strategic consulting to organizations worldwide. They focus on IT outsourcing and BPO and have gathered together hundreds of their key clients to explore the thought leadership of cloud computing. I have the honor of attending and speaking at this event and have really enjoyed (continuing to) look at social media through the eyes of technology executives. (NB: While Cognizant is a client, this report back is motivated by excitement and appreciation of the thought leadership being shared here and there are no financial gains.)
Now I am no stranger to the world of the CIO, having run two amazing online communities for CIOs: first Cambridge Technology Partners CIN (boy were we ahead of our time there as the community launched in 1995 and grew to almost 10K CIOs of F1000 companies) and ComputerWorld Executive Suite. With these communities, as an adviser to IT strategy, we grappled with many pressing topics, such as the impact of the web on business - formerly known as "web-centric application development". Those were wild times as the IT executive faced a host of challenges figuring out how to leverage new tools for business benefits and, not dissimilar from now, also needed to make sense of the applications and ensure they connected to business needs. That was child's play, however, compared with their challenges and opportunities due to cloud computing.
A gathering of industry thought-leaders such as Frank D'Souza, CEO, Cognizant, Nicholas Carr, Andrew McAfee, and Juan Enriquez have all discussed frameworks for understanding Cloud Computing in the spirit of innovation. This is critical because the cloud is the underpinning and architecture of social media. A new framework for understanding is mandated as the world wide web has become the world wide computer.
Some of the key takeaways from the talks:
Cloud computing offers greater efficiencies for business
Cloud computing is able to offer enterprise greater efficiencies and collaboration around people and the content they offer. Some speakers asserted that the cloud can provide a risk reduction as business are now able to align their technology consumption with their technology needs and, in fast, shatter former models of time to market. By working through the cloud businesses can democratize technology and serve as a powerful enabler to all - staff, partners and clients alike. In many ways, cloud technology is an unstoppable revolution because it advances the performance of the business.
The cloud is a pure disruptive technology
The sheer disruptive force of the cloud upon business is not to be overlooked, however. In the past, successful business innovation could largely be shaped by skilled and controlled processes. "If you want to control the outcome, control the process" remarked Andrew McAfee. However, he continued, with social computing, we need to stop trying to impose structured work flow and get new flavors of order.
Social can not be controlled as we can not reign in the universe of social. Controlling social media is akin to boiling the ocean - exhausting and futile at the same time. But its disruptive nature can be shaped to the advantage of business if and when (as it is just a matter of time) they are able to map the right processes to making sense of structured and unstructured social data to help the business succeed. Social computing produces volumes of valuable data for the enterprise - we just need to find the right methods for data mining and social CRM best practice. We need to go to the customers, wherever they are.
Social computing can fundamentally change enterprise relationships with clients, partners and staff
The advice heard time and time again was let the good of social shine through and inform the bottom line through better customer care, product development, QA processes, and to help define business innovation needs. Simply put, social brings to organizations a new way of doing business but there is a heavy organizational change required to make sense of the information gathered and the content shared through the social web. The structure of knowledge is no longer predefined as it was in the past through knowledge management systems (or "knowledge coffins"). As my fellow panelist, Joe Vito, CTO of Dunn and Bradstreet so eloquently said during our session on the impact of social on the Information and Media Industry "Cloud computing will soon be our only option to cope with the growth of digital info."
The role of the new breed of search called "broadcast search" was also examined in depth. "Broadcast search" was defined as communicating your ignorance in order to find what you need, like asking a question of your followers. Social computing combined with the power of information broadcast yields a greater depth of information and access to experts around the globe as people put out their questions and assistive responses on the web. The new search, when social principles are applied, enables a growing body of work to emerge which taps into the wisdom of everybody. This has huge ramifications on how we find and share information and can fundamentally change the way we make decisions.
The cloud is changing the IT leadership role
Along with high hopes for the change that social computing brings to enterprise, the cloud also places a great responsibility on the CIO. She is being called to the executive table to drive and inform the business innovation brought about through social computing. We are early in this transformational journey and social computing is still in its infancy. Business and IT need to form strong alliances and alignment to support the bottom line as delivered through the social web. Be it within the internal cloud (or new order KM systems), customer facing and the social CRM that drives the business' ability to understand and interpret customer needs, there are many technology and business decisions to be made. IT executives need to help shape the culture of their organizations to ensure the right (and right number) of tools are invested in, ensure that the organizations' ability to use the tools is well understood, and perhaps most importantly, help drive the bus when social innovation is embraced by the business lines through the best practice adoption of the right tools at the right time within the enterprise.
Designing online communities for business is a subtle blend of creating the right business model, a clear understanding and service of member needs and a usable interface that enables professionals to focus on engagement. Too often, however, the design of professional communities draw inspiration from consumer communities and try to mirror the user experience they experience on non-work based social applications. Frequently, there are far too many bells and whistles - gratuitous features - built into the design of B2B communities that can get in the way of successful use of the community of practice. While sexy widgets are neat playthings for users who are browsing communities for social or fun reasons, in a workplace setting, they just serve as distractions to getting the job done, the information shared or found, or the connection accomplished to solve a business problem.One of the main reasons why online communities for business often fail to provide a meaningful user experience is a lack of understanding about best practice design for professionals.
With this in mind, I have invited my colleague, Tania Schlatter, to be a guest blogger and share her thoughts on building online communities for business from a design perspective. Tania is co-founder of Nimble Partners, and an award-winning designer who focuses on human-centered websites and applications.
Now onto Tania's thoughts about context and guidelines to keep in mind when creating user interface requirements, selecting a designer or firm, and overseeing the design and production of an online community for professionals...
What’s unique about designing for a professional community?
Professional online communities don’t need slick features and interfaces to be vibrant and successful. In fact, online communities such as Usenet were at the heart of the birth of the Internet in 1980 and were successful in plain text – before there were graphical web browsers. Usenet newsgroups were lists of topics discussed by reading messages and responding to them in text. Even now, there are active online professional communities that use only text-based mailing lists for interaction, but they are dwindling as the number of graphical tools increases and the cost of developing with them goes down. Yet the essential ingredient remains the same today as it was in 1980 – passionate contributors – which has nothing to do with technical platforms, interface widgets and their design.
The proliferation of low-cost tools has created the expectation that a “best in class” community will usually employ the latest technology. How do you navigate this gap between what’s needed and what’s expected?
What is are the first strategic steps in the design process?
Before you make decisions about features and visual design, you need to know who is interested in your community and what their preferred tools and methods of communication are.
For example, executives we talked to in supply chain management were interested in being able to contact peers with whom they share an academic research partner, but they do not want to do so in real-time. How do we know this? When designing a partner-only site for sponsors of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, we talked with executives and asked them to select the most interesting content and features from a list of possibilities. We also asked what kind of information and interactions they wanted, and how they expected to use the site. Before talking with the execs, the client was considering a chat feature. Afterwards, we realized that partners were much more interested in robust search features, a discussion section and summaries of research. Had we pinned the site interaction on chat, it would have failed.
The key to taking advantage of the tools available today is to base the community’s feature set on user behavior and how the tools fit their objectives. Learning about your community members in the planning stage allows you to make informed decisions throughout the design, development and management of the site. It helps ensure that the look and feel and features you offer match what users need and want.
Interviews
When planning the community, it is essential to get input from representative users. There are a number of ways to do this quickly and inexpensively, although they may require a fair amount of management to identify participants and schedule interview sessions.
Identify 8-12 potential community members with whom your team has a rapport. Ideally, meet with them one-on-one briefly in person or schedule a 15-minute call. Find out what social media tools they are currently using for business, when and why they use them, what their pressing concerns are, and if/how those needs are being met. This number of interviews will provide a good range of input while still being manageable. If you have a community with a diverse set of user types, such as a community for lawyers that covers many specialties, you may need to interview 3-4 representatives of each major group.
Document what you know
Document the business perspective: identify and articulate the organization’s goals for the community. What will make it successful? Are there metrics?
Develop user scenarios. User scenarios are stories about who will come to the site and why, told from the user perspective. They should be composites of what you learned from the interviews and should define the most common examples of what people will be looking for and sharing, and the situation of use. You can create these with your own team or with the help of a community builder or user experience designer. Developing scenarios is a good test of concepts – if your scenarios feel forced, the team will know there may not yet be compelling reasons for people to use the community.
Visual design
Your community’s overall look and feel should generally be simple, straightforward and convey aspects of the parent brand to keep the focus on interaction and content. But “simple” doesn't mean “undesigned“ – every element, intentional or not, will communicate.
At a minimum, the design of the community should include:
logo or unique typographic treatment for the name of the community (Identity)
color palette
graphic style for navigation
typographic treatment of all text including heads
Home page and profile page templates for INmobile.org invitation-only community for executives in the wireless industry.
Does the community need to look like the corporate web site?
Unless you’re creating a stand-alone community unconnected to a business or organization, the design of the community should relate to the parent organization’s logo, typography, and other brand elements. Chances are that community members are aware of the connection to a parent brand or sponsor, and that this is a key reason they’re drawn to the community. A familiar look will help people feel comfortable and confident that the community possesses the same high-quality characteristics of the parent brand or organization.
Communities often have a growing body of content. How should the content be structured? Even blogs and communities need a solid information architecture. In an online community, this may take the form of categories for features and discussion forums, as well as tags that help users narrow in on the content that most interests them. Search is an essential and expected feature, and ideally provides more than just keyword-based results, such as results organized by type – article, discussion topic, video, etc.
To develop the information structure, list and prioritize features and content based on what you’ve learned, and have the designer or developer create a prototype or wireframe sketches. These are great tools for usability testing, and will allow the team to explore options for the best ways to engage your community members.
Wireframe sketch for a home page for partner executives of MIT’s CTL Program
What are the most important features to have in the community?
Remember the success of text-only communities? Include only the essential features that you know will allow people to find information, share it and exchange ideas in a way that fits their situation and the parent organization’s goals.
For example, features that show activity are likely to encourage participation, like a crowded restaurant: “everyone’s here – it must be good.” Other features are a less certain win. Josh Porter, a designer who specializes in community UIs, recommends the use of ranking contributors (“reputation points”). In his experience, successful communities hold participants accountable for their contributions, and the possibility of recognition encourages “good” behavior and discourages “bad” behavior. In my experience, like real-time chat, a feature like this is never an automatic “must have” – it can make or break a community, and should be implemented only if it fits the culture of your community and facilitates sharing.
After the community has been designed, what needs to happen to maintain it?
The key to maintaining your site’s design is consistency: using the color palette, type styles and page templates when adding content or making any changes. These elements are a rulebook for ensuring your community continues to look neat and professional. Make sure your designer provides a style guide or other document explaining how to keep the site looking great, and that the developer is willing and available to make changes if and when needed.
The demand to build online communities has been accelerated by the fashion of social media. Consequently the roots and best practices of moderation are often overlooked due to the pressures to perform. However, online community building requires skill -a cultivated skill - in order to create a productive and safe environment for information exchange. Online communities can be of great value to organizations seeking to foster relationship building, increase customer intimacy, and to better understand the needs of their members (and therefore have the ability to translate those needs into service offerings or products).
We believe that the act of building communities for business is a strategic initiative that can fuel the lifeblood of an organization. The information gathered through the give-and-take of dialogue can be leveraged to benefit both the customer and the company by serving to inform and change the ways the company does business; Perhaps there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with a product ... through the community, the organization can learn about it before it becomes persistent, and perhaps issue an product upgrade. Maybe there is a new hot issue brewing within an industry... the community is likely to identify it quickly - which leaves the company in a position to respond. There are some of the ways that well moderated conversations can make a competitive difference.
Online communities are of greatest value to a company when they are managed internally as the customer relationships are much too important, especially in the B2B realm, to leave to an outside agency. But, in order to be successful, the act of supporting interactive areas needs to be conducted wisely. In our training workshops where we teach community management skills within companies who manage social sites, we often leave behind a summary of readings so that the community facilitators can continue to have resources at hand when questions arise.
Here are some articles that we believe can be most helpful to both novice and expert community managers alike...
Building Professional Peer Communities: An Interview with Vanessa DiMauro
by Matthew D. Lees
This interview provides a good historical overview of online Communities of Practice. It also discusses some concrete areas of online community building, such as establishing trust, member relations, and active moderation.
Calming Threads of Conflict in Online Forums
by Nancy White
This summary of a list conversation discusses useful strategies for a moderator who is dealing with challenging postings in their online community.
Communities of practice: a brief introduction
by Etienne Wenger
An introductory article to Communities of Practice, it includes a list of nine activities through which communities can develop their practice, including problem solving, seeking experiences and mapping knowledge.
Guidelines for Managing Virtual Discussion Groups
by CARE Academy
This two page handout identifies four categories of online communities, key moderator roles and commitments, and sample evaluative measures.
How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations
by Lisa Kimball and Howard Rheingold
This article discusses ten ways that an online social network brings value to a corporation, with a description of moderator strategies to achieve each goal.
Top Tips for Moderators of Online Discussion Groups
by William Spitzer, Kelly Wedding, and Vanessa DiMauro
Adapted from a moderating book published by TERC – a pioneer in online professional development – this article shares moderating strategies, including asking questions to encourage participation, composing thoughtful responses, and promoting reflective dialogues.
Why communities of practice succeed and why they fail
by Gilbert Probst and Stefano Borzillo
Published in European Management Journal, this academic article identifies ten reasons that Communities of Practice succeed and five reasons why they fail. Moderator techniques are described along with a corporate example for each.
There is also some good stuff to be found on the download section of the Leader Networks site
Please add to this list to help grow a useful body of work for all of us community builders!
A thought leadership storm happened recently in the Social Media Today LinkedIn group. My colleague, Jack Greene, asked a seemingly simple question in the discussion forum - "Can social media co-exist with traditional marketing?" Jack was curious about what peers thought about the matter so he posted his ideas for people to respond. And what happened next was a veritable flood of controversy, emotions, and productive idea exchange. More than 200 people responded within the span of a few weeks and the conversation is still going on! Clearly, Jack's single question opened Pandora's box.
The cascade of opinions regarding whether social media can co-exist with traditional marketing fell into the following three categories: (a) those favoring traditional marketing, (b) those supporting an integrated approach and (c) those who believe solely in social media practices. What I found amazing is the passion with which people responded. Camps formed: business people, executives, social media leaders and consumers all shared their opinions, concerns and excitement about the role social media can play within the marketing domain.
Jack tapped into more than the question du jour; he pointed to the elephant in the (conference) room. The question is really whether social media is its own domain. Is it a practice, a strategy, a discrete operation or is it a tool, tactic or strategy within Marketing? This taps into a host of questions:
Staffing - Should marketing folks be the executors of social media or should it have its own dedicated skill set?
Budget - Who owns social media within the organization?
Measurement - Can social media measurements be isolated or does it need to occur within a larger context of ROI? and,
Organizational structure - Is social media stand-alone or should it be integrated into the larger value chain in order to be meaningful?
The discussion never comes to complete resolution of these questions, and in fact, it surfaces even more questions than it answers. Perhaps, today, there are no clear answers. But the art of knowing the right questions to ask is often more important than the actual answers themselves.
Jack Greene invoked an idea storm from around the world with a simple question - and clearly one that needed to be asked. He has created a great report that summarizes the discussion and its main findings. You can download it here. Click on Resources at the bottom of the page to access the report (in full disclosure I helped him with it) and let's keep the discussion going inside organizations for the answers lie within the questions. Lets keep the discussion going... what do you think?
What do you get when a VP of Influencer Relations from SAP, the founder of Silicon-Valley Watcher and former Financial Times Journalist and a Social Media strategist come together? The answer is lively discussions and debate about the impact of social media upon business. Don Bulmer, Tom Foremski and I have recently formed a lyceum of sorts and meet regularly to discuss this very topic. In addition to thoroughly engaging and timely discussion, we are also forming a framework for understanding social media in a business context. We believe that social strategy is and needs to become about more than just marketing, and will be woven into the very fabric of the enterprise as a strategic platform.
We are actively exploring the idea that every company is a media company. Initially, I had a negative, knee-jerk reaction that this didn’t concept sound right. How can every company be a media company? Why would every company need or want to be a media company? When this idea was first introduced by Tom Foremski, my mind quickly went to a mis-interpretation of the concept.. every company is a media company meaning that each should be mini-publisher, every organization now needing to be burdened with complex publishing cycles. I recoiled from the thesis... Everyone knows that enterprise success is predicated on competitive advantage, best products and services, excellent customer service, and right pricing. Being a media company is the last thing strategic executives need to have on their minds to excel in today’s global economy!
But the more we talked about this concept – the better I understood and the more I agreed. The reality is that every company today and into the future faces a new reality: the need for speed and relevance in the market. Competition is stiff in most industries and due to the recession, we face a “new normal” of doing more with less budget, fewer staff, and a reduction in experimental or innovation projects that are geared towards discovery. Plainly spoken, companies need to “get it right” to survive. I have written extensively in my blog about the Engagement Cycle; the basic tenant is that the more a company engages with clients and prospects, the more likely they are to gain awareness, insight, and ideas into the market’s needs. Through the sheer act of engaging with the very constituents they hope to attract they can begin to strengthen relationships that are at the very core of the buyer decision-making process. This belief was reinforced through the research that Don and I did called The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks (under our research fellowships with SNCR) where we found that decision makers are increasingly relying on social media driven peer networks to make buying decisions. In fact, in-person and social media driven relationships are almost equally as trustworthy, according to the survey participants.
Re-enter the idea that every company is a media company…. Media, and specifically social media, is the wellspring for relationships. It is the source of information, collaboration and dialogue with the market that can, and will, inform enterprise about the needs of their buyers and influencers.
When media is used strategically and effectively, many of the answers to these burning questions can become clearer and help shape competitive strategies for success. On the flip side, people are already talking about notable companies, brands and products. The dialogue already exists, outside the control of the enterprise throughout online and offline channels – in email, phone conversations, industry gatherings, Twitter, blogs, online peer networks and groups The buzz – both positive and negative- happens with or without intervention but unlike in the past – before social media – enterprises now have an opportunity and, in fact, a standing invitation to participate. And, they also have an opportunity to share the leading thinking in the market. Most successful companies got to their levels of achievement, in part, due to their deep understanding of their industry and its nuances. Thought leadership is the new relationship conduit. Through the effective use of thought leadership platforms, made so agile on social media, companies can “be the media” by sharing and showcasing content and ideas of value. They can participate and in some instances lead and shape the dialogue, not as an overt marketing channel, but through earnest efforts to educate and inform about the issues and topics relevant to their segment.
As Don so eloquently summarized in a recent blog post on the topic “The way that people (consumers, employees, partners and influencers) are using social technologies to inform, shape and share their opinions has quickly become a priority for business leaders to understand and appreciate as they (re)define their corporate strategies and operational business plans. Many companies are actively looking to incorporate ‘social strategy’ and social thinking into the core of their innovation process (research and development), service and support operations, sales and partner programs, and of course employee engagement efforts.”
So, through this lens of urgency and strategic value, Tom Foremski, Don Bulmer and I have begun to capture key concepts, best practice and look forward to the future where all competitive organizations are weaving social strategy across the value chain. We are soon to launch a new blog together to explore the ideas with you and are also creating a framework for putting the ideas into the business content to help companies in their charters.
Coming full circle to the platitude that every company is a media company, I believe the answer is yes! Through the act of creating, leading and engaging, companies take a more participatory role in shaping their future.
Social media's embrace by business is now commonplace. But it is with unbridled joy that I am now able to tell you about an online community that is dedicated to connecting crime fighters nationally! Yes, you heard me correctly, there is an online community for Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement to share tips, information, crime fighting resources and connect with each other to advance the ability to catch a criminal.
While the LexisNexis Law Enforcement Community for Accurint users is a extremely gated community (a fortress in fact) that is available only to badged officials who have already been pre-screened users of the Accurint Law Enforcement tool, I can share information about this site as we tackled a number of challenging issues in its social design such as confidentiality, engaging nontraditional social media users, and designing for professionals with little time. (Accurint is an online search tool to help Law Enforcement find critical data about criminals. This tool makes the crime fighting software we see on the cop TV shows look like child's play!) The community launched this week and all I can say is "Criminals, beware! The world is a safer place now due to social media."
The LexisNexis Law Enforcement Community was created to connect the power of the collected wisdom of national Law Enforcement - to allow those men and women in blue who are dedicated to keeping us safe - to share information with each other. In the past, Law Enforcement typically collaborated with their local peers and experts. But oftentimes, cross-jurisdictional information is critical to catch a criminal as bad guys do know how to travel. (As an aside, I learned through this project an interesting fact: that crime waves typically move west to east.) Often, a gang will send a gang member to a new city to set up a post, recruit new gang members and start to establish their territory.
In the past, when a Law Enforcement group first saw a crime wave, for example suspicious potential gang activity, it could take weeks or months to identify the gang operations and identify them with predictability. Now, through this new community, Law Enforcement is able to share information about key activities and tap into the wisdom of experts. They can share, for example, photos of gang identifiers and tattoos and even participate in a dedicated group for gang management. One of the more unique aspects of this community is that the exchanges need to be limited to discussions of best practice and past experiences as Law Enforcement can never share information about a current or open crime online. As all exchanges are subject to discovery, they refrain from message posting about anything related to a current case. (This applies to other fields as well. Medical professionals can discuss general facts about a patient in hopes of best treatment. Marketing professionals share strategy and operations ideas, and the list goes on.) This is unlike almost any other professional network where the nature of the collaboration is typically about the here-and-now. But, as the past does tend to dictate the future, lessons learned and expert experiences can make all the difference when brainstorming and trying to close a case.
This is one of many powerful examples of how the community is working to make the world a better place. There is a place for all types of crime fighting resources on the Law Enforcement Community: sexual predator information, policing tactics, information about new technology, investigation best practice, Amber Alert support information. All are being share virtually. As a result, our Law Enforcement superheroes are now constantly connected and collaborating as one giant force.
Law Enforcement using social networking? While that may seem unlikely, this community was shaped directly in response to the needs of Law Enforcement as something that could be deeply useful to them as long as it was clearly secure and only accessible by validated law enforcement professionals. Therefore, this community can be found only through Accurint. The challenges we faced when defining this online community were numerous. First, we needed to create a customized experience that would benefit Law Enforcement collaboration while maintaining the ability for undercover agents to use the system, with our knowledge so we can serve their needs, while remaining, well, under cover. Second, much of the law enforcement peer exchange is so highly confidential that it needs to happen in-person or by protected phone lines. However, officials needed the ability to contact each other and arrange confidential settings for information exchange so we included a secure instant message system so they can make connection arrangements. Third, we needed the ability for members to be able to clearly identify experienced experts so the membership profile information was highly adapted to be able to display demarcations of experiences such as length of service, awards and other indications of trust. And fourth, we needed to design the site in a way that would accommodate their fast information access needs to include significant ease of use. The site, now in its early beta period, has been very well received largely due to the attention that was paid to servicing their unique needs.
It is with great honor that I, with my team at Leader Networks have been able to guide the strategy and operations for this site for our client LexisNexis Government Services. I know I sleep more safely at night now that this community exists. While chances are you are not a law enforcement professional, please help spread the word so that cops, FBI etc. learn, join and benefit from it!
The media tsunami and Old Spice videos...
-
By Tom Foremski At the beginning of 2010 I resisted making predictions but I
couldn't help myself and wrote 2010 Prediction: The Media Tsunami Is
Coming......
