I believe that the ultimate value of social media revolves around a central idea: communities. Groups of like-minded people sharing information and collaborating in unstructured ways. For me, that's the mother lode, the jackpot, the singular goal.
When we talk about our social media initiatives, I've brainwashed everyone to talk in terms of communities: community identification, formation, growth, development, management, leverage, etc.
And we're starting to see some proposals for some pretty big and hairy communities start to form.
It's Really What We Wanted
As people imagine their ultimate social media platform, they tend to imagine broad, vigorous communities of people sharing information, discussing, collaborating, helping each other, and so on.
Getting to that point -- well, that's another discussion.
We've had our behind-the-firewall platform up since Sept 07. Last time I checked, we're getting close to 2000 users, and we've got maybe 40 or so communities that are active or semi-active.
But they're all small -- small number of participants, rather limited topics, and so on.
We knew we'd eventually want larger communities, but we weren't sure we knew enough to guide them through formative stages to ultimate success. And we've seen more than our fair share of smaller communities start, falter, and ultimately fail.
It's one thing when that happens in front of a small group of your co-workers. It's quite something else when that happens in front of THOUSANDS of your co-workers. And still another thing if you pull the same stunt in front of customers or partners.
It's a matter of concern for me. We pull a big goose-egg, and we'll take two big steps backwards.
Case #1 -- EMC's Presales Community
I don't know how many presales people we've got at EMC, maybe several thousand. They span multiple geographies, and are further subdivided into focus areas and roles. EMC has a very broad technology portfolio, so there's a fair amount of diversity inherent.
These people are also proficient at using online resources -- there's already a dozen or more places they can go for information, but -- surprise -- no place they can go to discuss things, other than the inevitable email blasts.
Their leadership wants to build an online community. They've never done anything similar before.
It's a bit scary.
Case #2 -- EMC's Partner Community
EMC's strategy is to do more and more with partners. Not only do we have many more partners than before, we're having much broader discussions with them on all sorts of topics: from technology to business to strategy to competition.
We've been approached by the partner marketing organization that wants to set up a community for EMC's partners. Sure, it's a powerful idea, but I can see some pretty scary failure modes.
One ugly scenario is the "dead board" -- a nice place to have a discussion, but no one is talking. Another one is the "ugly crowd" scenario -- someone instigates an insurrection about something or other than EMC has done, or hasn't done.
And, of course, anything that we put out there won't be entirely secure, will it?
It's even more scary.
But We're Going To Wade In Anyway ...
We're getting exactly what we wanted. We wanted EMC to consider SM as a business tool. That's exactly what's happening.
And I think we need to be willing to go out and make a few mistakes if need be.
I'll let you know what we find out along the way ...
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