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5 ways Communities best Networks

We’ve noticed among some organisations amove to host their “communities” on socialnetworks like Linkedin and Facebook. In

some cases this may be misguided, especially if you

are seeking to become a social business. Don’t getus wrong, there are some very successful groupson those networks and perhaps surprisingly Face-book hosts a multitude of active business groups.The successful groups deliver mutual value – theyserve the purpose for which they are created. Howdo we match purpose to platform and where tocreate communities? In many cases, an internalcommunityremains the better choice to serve spe-cic business and cultural change objectives.

Purpose

In serving the purpose for which they are created,we need to have defned that purpose, right? Wecan see that many Facebook groups are relativelysmall, and do have a common set of connected in-terests, so it’s not just about network size. Here thepurpose might be to have a low maintenance wayto keep in contact and share information.

On the other hand for other purposes network size itself is very important, and large numbers create avaluable asset. Here Twitter might be used for quickfeedback, or event promotion, and Facebook mightbe used to more intimately connect with people viaa personal Facebook page, business page and privategroups. For brands like Coke, the community is notabout deep levels of engagement, but rather abouthighly branded, mostly one-way communicationwith small doses of customer interaction/feedback.

However if the purpose is to achieve some sharedbusiness goals, and share fate and motivation, and

to seed and promote the transformation to a socialbusiness, then hosting your community on a publicsocial network probably isn’t the right solution. Sure,Facebook has some great uses. You can build an

audience pretty quickly. The issue is not to avoidFacebook / Linkedin etc. The issue is not to build acommunity on it for the wrong purpose. These arewonderful outposts for internal communities, butare not the vehicles for all communities.

In general subscribers in your social network aresubscribing to your streams of information toconsume your thought-leadership, expertise, ormarketing offers. In your community, which canbe more private, the conversations are more candid

and you can leverage employee, customer and par-tner input to improve the organisation (the socialenterprise), the customer experience and satisfac-tion with your products and services. This applieseven in specialised internal communities such asTalent Communities because those communities ex-pect to be able to connect widely and openly andeasily across the organisation – which means thatthe organisation has to be able to support this kindof interaction – culturally and technically.

In summary, to answer the question of what plat-form to use, you have to rst dene community andwhat that means to you, your organization, and yourgoals (and especially your social enterprise goals).

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5 ways Communities best Networks

Internal communities shape social business

Here are 5 reasons why internal communities oftenbest networks:

1. Communities are focused on a commongoal or objective – not just a relationship ormarketing;

2. Communities allow true collaboration – n-ding, rening, storing, sharing information;

3. Communities can be linked to workow,help streamline processes, and provide ope-rational advantages;

4. Communities can be private – for exampleaccording to corporate identity and accessregimes; and,

5. Communities can be tools for culturalchange and social enterprise enablement.

If you’ve ever searched for something you once sawash by in a Linkedin Group then you know that it’shard to fnd, and then you need to le-tag-book-mark it yourself in order to nd it next time. Same

for Facebook. Adding to that information, rening,and building on it, takes more than just scanningthrough the comment thread.

If you’d then like to share that information withinyour organisation, and manage and monitor thatsharing, and develop actions and outcomes, thenyou’re not going to nd the external social networksvery helpful. If your goals and purpose embrace

these needs, then you need to have an internal com-munity.

The crux of this is that communities which are lin-ked to business objectives, which link to existingsystems and workows, have a much better chanceof not only surviving but thriving. Increased dis-coverability also makes for much better employeeor community interaction, as information is notscattered and lost. To support that need, the plat-form may need to provide features such as privacy/

permissions, document collaboration, le-sharing,tagging, following/subscribing, federated identitymanagement, database integration etc. which arenot available from groups on social networks.

Internal community fundamental to

organisational transformation

Reasons #1 and #2 are strong reasons, but the killerreason is #5.

If your ambition is to break down barriers, to be-come more transparent, to engage with your stake-holders in a more open and collaborative way andthings that really matter to the future of your orga-nisation as a social enterprise, then:

•  You have a massive challenge ahead of you,as you undoubtedly know; and,

•  You need an internal community, becauseyou won’t achieve this with “a LinkedinGroup”.

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5 ways Communities best Networks

The journey to becoming more social, in order to beable to build social into your business and businessgoals, is a tough one. In isolated cases it may havestarted and succeeded through an evangelist in PR or Marketing, but in the vast majority of cases theywould have given up. An internal community faci-litates this journey.

That this is true is validated by the likes of EMC

(EMC Does Social Media From The Inside Out via@adamcohen), and IBM, Cisco, or CSC with theirC3 Community, to name a few successful stories.

If you have no purpose then it doesn’t

matter

Let’s be brutal about this. If you’re thinking “well,communities are just something we need to do forour members/customers/partners” then go aheadand use social network host. After all, anything will

do for this activity since it has no particular purposeexcept to be seen to be doing something.

But if you’re thinking “there’s a dynamic here thatwe all need to get to grips with, I don’t understandit, but I think that it could have a big impact on howwe do business and how our employees relate to eachother ” then you need kick off with internal commu-nity – within the framework of some business goalsand expectations of what a social enterprise entails.

If you’re looking for more ideas on business benetsread this slide from Rachel Happe at the recent IBM Connect 2012 conference, she outlines eciency andvalue benets of a business community (via Luis Suarez).

The Community Manager is not the Social

Media Manager

Once you appreciate the power of internal commu-nities for this purpose, you may then ponder the roleof the community manager – and understand that

this community manager is different from a social media manager. Both require content generationand content management, real-time response to ad-dress positive and negative feedback, building andcultivating relationships, identifying and nurturinginuencers and evangelists and crowdsourcing in-telligence about the brand or services among otherthings. But the rules and dynamics of engagementare different as Rachel Happe explains so well.

The social media manager, for a start, is engagingthrough different tools and with a differentpurpose. Often the external network is focused onthe most viewed content and most active membersand highlighting the most popular things. Whereasthe community manager, using a different set of to-ols, might want to bring to life content with the leastfeedback or members with the least participation.

Communities are about maximising engagement

and relationships to encourage learning and withit, behavior change, all focused on business out-comes. This has to be supported by a communitymanagerrole, if not a job. The former tasks are not social media, and therefore the role is certainlynot a social media manager. Most importantly, thecommunity manager has to be totally attuned tothe organisational change issues and the cross-organisational nature of a community as a routeto social business transformation.

While the biggest challenge is people, the actualplatform – the technology – does matter. Softwareallowing employees to easily produce, collect, struc-ture, analyze and publish data is key to wider adop-tion. You will easily nd pockets of users willingto participate in “social experiments”; but to rallyEVERY employee you will have to include businessapplications and processes in your internal social platform.

Social connectivity is also important, but the bestsocial intranet is not the one providing the most

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social features, but the one which ties the mostbusiness processes and data to employee’s socialbehaviour. It is a long path to become a social en-terprise, including the social integration of infor-mation, knowledge, data, applications, processesand communities, but this should be your ultimategoal to fully leverage your internal communities.

Conclusion

To achieve social business transformation you haveto have an internal Community (social intranet), forother purposes whether you use a community ora network depends on your goals, choose wisely.

 How do you dene community versus network?   How do you see communities playing a role in thesuccessful transformation to a social enterprise?  What frameworks and methodologies, in your ex-

 perience, best guide this process?  

What is the role of community manager versus socialmedia manager? 

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson 

Tweet to @igo2

See also our Slideshare presentation Company “Ow-ned” Social Networks 

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