better late than never but I found the encapsulation of Losers quite poignant. I find a lot of people worried they will miss the big idea idea if they don’t reach out to their community to capture anything and everything. So in almost blind panic engage with everyone on everything.

I recently received an update from an on-line community I’m part of. From some 80,000 + ideas they have taken 50 forwards. Of course what I heard was 50 made it but what happened to the 79,950 or so others? Are there that many losers out there? Or is that because the company doesn’t know what it wants so it’s willing to sift through everything it doesn’t want to get to the 50 things it needs? Or is this a PR exercise and as the advert says “Windows 7 was my idea”? For me its a scatter gun – no idea what I’m aiming at but if I fire enough shots off I’m bound to hit something I want. What is the real value in this – honestly? For most, I think its PR that they have a community so when they are around the CxO golf course they can bling with who has the most twitter followers and blog posts!

Enjoy,

Matt

PS love your community….
PPS I still have no bling

Many, many thanks for your responses – they’re both very welcome and very appreciated. I wanted to take some time to reply to some of the concerns that were expressed in the comments.

Many of you seemed to think that I was advocating that companies should no longer value the input of large groups of people. Far from it – the main point in the post was to point out that as a structure for large groups of people, the community concept is a flawed one – at least from a corporate perspective. It’s simplistic, unstructured, and lacking in motivation and purpose to name but a few flaws.

That’s not to say that value can’t be created in a community setting – it’s just very hard to do so because you’re relying on value being created through serendipitous interactions between community members. It’s not unlike advocating participating in the lottery as your prime way of getting rich – sure, it’s possible that you could hit the jackpot if you take part, but only a fool would rely on that as their sole chance at fame and fortune.

Likewise, whilst there is definitely a place for serendipity in an organization (more on that in a future post) – it would be a foolish management team that would rely on its occurrence to generate value for the company. My argument instead is that the team framework is a much more robust and reliable one when it comes to generating value for a company. In fact, in the few cases where looser community based initiatives have created value, I’ve found it’s usually because they began to adopt the characteristics and roles of a Social Team – namely things like purpose, direction, shared goals, diversity in skill sets and specialized roles, etc.

You could also make a good argument based on semantics – ie, that a Social Team is merely a type of Community; however, I think it would be equally valid to say that a community is simply a dysfunctional Social Team.

I think it’s also important to point out I focus on strategies and processes specifically to drive corporate value. Whilst I believe the Social Team concept still holds and still works in more social groups, the concept of what constitutes value and the expectation of it being created in those groups is very different to that of a large enterprise investing in this area.

Companies invest real money as well as intellectual capital into creating and participating in these networks, and as such, need to see a reasonable return, ideally on the bottom line to justify investing in these initiatives.

Having said that, my core belief is still that people function and perform better with a degree of organization when compared to loose collectives. In addition, the visualization aid that thinking of these groups in a similar method to that of an amateur sports team gives us to analyze and improve the quality of that interaction is invaluable.

I’ll go deeper into the Social Team concept in future posts, but in the meantime – please do keep your comments coming, or contact me directly via e-mail or twitter (@bpluskowski) –do discuss this further!

Best Regards to all ,
Boris

However, somewhere the message has been mixed-up about relevance of on-line community with actual value derived from a community (online or offline).

I don’t want to ‘speak’ about the medium (online/offline) here as much is available on the net, however I’d like to argue that a community is an important element of not only business, but society as a whole (within which a business functions).

Companies that encourage communities, implicitly have the opportunity to gather good practices that evolve organically from each contributing member. If a company would require a team (say a project team or selling team), then it would assign objectives, metrics and deadlines, with a leader/s in charge to deliver. That would be a team.

A community on the other hand is a group of individuals with a common idea/culture/working who come together to share issues, best practices, ideas etc. with or without a clear objective in mind.

A good example is group of scientists at the Royal Society meeting over tea to discuss physics, medicine, mathematics, astronomy etc. Each scientist may come from a different branch of research, but is bond together perhaps by the thought of knowing and sharing, perhaps by the desire to contribute to the betterment of society or perhaps by the desire to advance science.

Place this in a context of an organisation, and you get innovation. I attended a virtual-conf by APQC last week where a deck on how graphics can tell a better story was presented. A case study of Shell was presented where Shell fosters a community of internal -team, all staff and externa- academics, enterprenuers, vendors etc. people. This has been going on since 12 years, and has been successful!

I see no reason why a value can’t be attributed to these followers. Survey them, ask them about their habits, cross reference them with your database (if that’s possible) and give them a value. The likelihood is they’re actually quite valuable. They’re engaged with your brand, they agreed to sign up. You didn’t interrupt them or drag them kicking and screaming.

I also think the western fetish of winners and losers is detrimental to some of what is needed to achieve some benefits of communities such as social learning.

I think you’ve wrapped a good point in the wrong issue.

Businesses don’t properly understand the benefits of online communities, nor how to achieve them.

But this doesn’t mean online communities don’t offer benefits. It certainly doesn’t mean that online communities are a bad idea.

When you connect customers together, you become the ticket to their friendship group. They keep buying the product to be part of the club. People keep going to the same bar to meet the friends they have made there. It’s the same thing.

You also can get amazing insights and feedback from them. You can cut your advertising costs and reach people through your community. Better, you can use your community members to spread the word, recruit new members and directly increase sales. Online communities add an extra element to customer service, you don’t need to phone up the company if the community can answer the question.

Creating an online community also forces the company to be more social and open. It can fundamentally change how an organization approaches it’s public for the better.

Online teams with fixed goals are great too. But people don’t work for free. They work because it’s fun to do and gives them the recognition of others they consider peers. This is what online communities offer.

Only then Good knowledge and not SPAM would get generated in these online communities.