Someone once said "you peel off layers of the onion ... until you cry".
Well, it's not that grim, but we're now into the meat of the real challenge that lays in front of us -- creating important new skills and behaviors that bring the potential of social media as a business tool to fruition.
So, The Story So Far
We want to get better at social media. About three weeks ago, we put in a behind-the-firewall platform (Clearspace) and started to invite people to join discussions, blog, and -- hopefully -- develop powerful, interactive communities around passionate topics.
I am firm in my belief, especially after this experience, that the platform and the tools should be transparent, or nearly so. This is all about people's behaviors, skills and roles. The purpose of the technology is to support people.
To a large extent, this has become true. The way we've implemented, and the platform we chose (Clearspace) has met this important objective.
We launched virally -- we knew people who'd be interested in this, and we made sure we had plenty of self-help documentation, and a few people who could help out, but it's turning out to be not enough.
They came. They saw. They started to use.
And now we're in to the meat of the problem.
The Good News
We're seeing new blogs pop up, sometimes a few per day. Now, we all know that the first blog post is the easiest (or the hardest?) but the arrival rate guarantees that we'll end up with some valuable voices.
And everybody is commenting on everything. It's a bit noisy, but there's some good discussions going on.
The problem is now with communities.
How Do We Develop Community Developers?
We have about 20 communities under construction. Only one has emerged as a viable, vibrant community. The signal to noise ratio is not acceptable, in my humble opinion.
The person who approached building the community did it totally different than everyone else. He gave careful thought to his initial community members. He prepopulated his community with great content. He encouraged targeted people to come, participate, post, contribute, discuss, etc.
Now, I wouldn't say his community is best on an absolute scale across all potential communities, but it's the most promising start in a field of more substantial challenges.
For me, the trick will be to develop community developers. And, because I want scale quickly, I can't do this function all by myself.
So, because I have a fair amount of exec authority, I'm recruiting two people to work on this part-time. They are skilled and mature individuals who have worked at our company a long time, and do all sorts of interesting cross-functional projects.
My rough idea comes in four phases;
First, they're kind of new to this whole social media thing, so they're going to need some time to explore, poke around, ask questions, etc. They're going to have to go through the whole thing with a new frame of reference just like I did.
Second, they're going to have to assemble a list of known "best practices" around designing and building a community. I have a lot of that in my head, but they're going to have to pull it out of me and other people, and then validate that with our prototypical community developers.
Third, they're going to have to coach an audience of about 20-50 community developers at any one time. Now, they're going to have to learn how to do this without setting up lots of face-to-face meetings, lengthy phone calls, etc. Sure, their will be some need for this, but I'd like to see the majority of the activity done using the social media platform itself.
Fourth, since they're going to be engaged with a wide swatch of communities, I'm going to need them to report back on progress, business impact, newfound knowledge and insights, and all the rest.
McGyver At Work
Now, my first thought was to hire someone to do this, and I still might do that in addition to this. But that's a pretty big career move for a senior individual who has no exposure to this stuff.
Asking someone to do this on a project basis gets them going in the right direction without having to make a big career decision.
I also like the idea of having two people team up -- they'll each bring new perspectives to the problem, and hopefully encourage each other, as well as complementing each others' skill sets.
So, we all get together to lay this out tomorrow. We'll see how it goes, and I'll let you know.
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