Guidelines For Creating A Community

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but I think most people studying SM from a business perspective realize it's mostly about creating communities of shared interests that can collaborate as a team.

These teams can be internal to a company (self-contained to a small group, or spanning multiple organizations), external, or -- ideally -- a mixture of both.

I'm finding myself having to explain community concepts to more people here at EMC, and I thought I'd write down some thoughts in this blog.

The Big Picture

The power of social media tools is their ability to create communities: groups of like-minded people with shared interests who want to share information and experiences, and work towards a common goal.

For EMC (or any other company) to be successful at social media (and community creation) we need to give some thought as to what goes into creating a successful community.  They don't "just happen."

What It's Not

It's not a content portal.

Many people have expressed a need to share content with others across the company.  That's understandable, but that's not social media.

EMC has many tools at its disposal to share published content with different audiences: PowerLink, eRooms, email, etc.  If all you want to do is share documents with people, we'd suggest you take a look at the other tools that are available for that purpose.

Another flavor of this is providing an organizational structure to existing content.  Maybe there's stuff scattered around different places; you'd like to get it all nice and neat and organized in a single place.

Fine, but unless there's some sort of community and collaboration around the content (suggestions for improving it, reactions, etc.) it's not social media and it's not a collaborative community.  It's just a web page.

In particular, we really want to avoid simply copying stuff from one place to another, and putting a nice page in front of it.  It's OK to link to other authoritative sources (e.g. PowerLink, eRooms), but it's not OK to simpy make another copy of an authoritative document.

It's not a (particularly good) workflow or management tool.

Some people have expressed the need to get status reports, monitor progress against plan, make sure that actions are getting done, and in general solve a program or project management problem.

The platform could be used for this purpose, but it won't be good at that.  Informal projects and initiatives that have a high degree of collaboration and discussion would be good candidates, tightly managed projects probably not so.

It's not a messaging or communication tool.

We've got email for that.  If you want to send a message to everyone, use that tool.  If you'd like to start a discussion and have people participate, well, that's what our new platform is for.

What It Is

The platform allows people from across EMC to informally collaborate: share thoughts, participate in discussions, add experiences, contribute to activities, etc. 

We use the term "community" to refer to these loose agglomerations of people who have a common interest.

The idea is that it should be easy to find out what's going on, join a discussion and contribute to an initiative -- without having to go to lots of meetings and conference calls.

Thinking About Communities

When we look at successful business-oriented social media communities, we always tend to find the same sorts of things.  Give these ideas some thoughts as you think about your envisioned community.

• What are the "shared interests" of your community?
  
  It might be a specific product, or market, or project.  Keep it narrow at first -- the tendency at the outset is to try and eat an elephant -- don't do it!
  
  You should be able to write a short paragraph that clearly identifies the interests of your specific community.  Ideally, you could write a second paragraph as to what it's NOT.
   
  A small group of very passionate people makes for a better community than a large number who have merely a passing interest in the topic.
   
• Who will be your "authoritative voices" for your community?
  
  It's pretty much like a party -- you need some interesting people to talk to at the beginning.  Later, other people will join in to the discussion, but at the outset, you need these voices as an incentive to come to the party and check things out.
   
  Great content is nice, but it's no substitute for one or more authoritative voices that can speak passionately and intelligently to the common interests of your community.
   
  Trying to start a community without these shining lights is very much like that awkward part of a party where people have started to arrive, but the party really hasn't started yet.
     
• Who will be your "community manager"?
  
  Going back to a party analogy, who will be your host?  Who will keep the discussion on track?  Be responsive to the needs of the community and the needs of the business?
  
  I have yet to find a successful business-oriented social media community that didn't have one or more community managers at its heart.
  
  And make no mistake, this can be a LOT of work, especially at the outset.  We are aware of several communities that grew so fast that the community manager couldn't keep up with the community.  And the community fell apart as a result.
   
• Who will build and develop your community?
   
  Hate to say it, but there's a lot of work up front.  There's prepopulating the community space with content and thinking.  There's getting people to come on in, check things out and to hopefully participate. 
   
  I have now built a few of these, and it takes me several weeks to set up a nice space where people want to come, hang out, and contribute.  And you can't order them to do it, can you?
   
• How will you market to "lurkers"?
   
  "Lurkers" are a term for people who come over to check you out, and don't want to join.  Every community seems to start growing when "lurkers" become "participants". 
   
  How do you frame content and discussion so people feel a need to comment and contribute?  How to do you manage the tone so it's a friendly place where everyone wants to hang out?

There are lots of other topics as well: rewarding people, discouraging malcontent behavior, merging communities into larger entities, and so on. 

But this should be enough to get you started.

Not All Communities Thrive ...

I think that people who approach this topic have to be mentally prepared to fail, e.g. you put all this work into something, and it doesn't pan out.  As long as we're learning lessons along the way, this is not inherently a bad thing.

And I'm sure we'll be back with more thinking around "building a community".

Comments

[Jason Mundy]

Chuck,

This is extremely helpful. We have a need in the TS Field (and Anne Rath can speak more to that) to better share ideas, content/ docs, experiences and critical information - the latest competitive buzz - what's killing us or making us succeed, etc. Because the field is so disperse and many people never have a chance to meet and come together physically there is a huge need to facilitate these things in some other form. I see this need also in the CS field community and in education services. Much of what is needed can be and should be solved by existing tools such as eRoom, email, Powerlink as you indicate. I do believe there is significant value that could be realized if we can get our highly skilled and experienced remote folks to collaborate and exchange ideas more easily and regularly. There are so many silos and vacuums in the field and we have seen redundant solutions to the same problems time and time again. I think SM could really help our services field but it will take some work and commitment.

Thanks, Jason