The Complete Innovator

So a few months ago I put up a post on this website about a concept I’d formulated whilst listening to some of the fine speakers at the annual World Business Forum last year. That post, entitled “Why companies shouldn’t build online communities” proposed that the entire mentality with which most companies approach collaboration and communities primed them for failure straight away.

In the next post “Continuing the Conversation: For Companies, Build Teams, Not Communities” I continued to explain my rationale : namely that by looking at these virtual groups as “teams” instead of  “communities” you moved away from treating these groups as unreachable, undefinable, and unmanageable groups – and instead could begin to add the essential elements of teamworking and value driving that would make these groups both more sustainable and more valuable from the corporate perspective.

In the latest of the series, I went ahead and defined what I since began calling “Social Teams” – namely as “a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the “game they’re playing” (ie the team’s purpose); know in which goal they’re trying to score in (ie have a shared understanding of what ‘a win’ looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim.“. I went on to detail the roles that people played in a Social Team, and some of the basic ways in which it could be used to drive value for an organization.

The “Social Teams” post has gone on to be one of the most popular things I’ve written, and has drawn the interest and curiosity of many in the social media and collaboration worlds. This Wednesday I’ll have the honor of leading the very first live conversation on “Social Teams’ with one of the virtual teams I actively belong to:  #smchat.

I’d like to extend the invitation to attend this session to all of you – it’s easy and free of charge – and hope that you’ll enjoy the typically very productive, energetic and lively discussion and debate for which #Smchat is known for.

If you’ve never attended one of these type of debates on twitter – the process is simple: At the prescribed time (#smchat meets every Wednesday at 1 PM EST (-5 Hrs GMT) ) – go onto the twitter application of choice (Twitter Search and Tweetchat seem to be favourites), and do a search for posts with “#smchat” in them. By making sure that all posts have that string of letters in their contributions, participants are able to have a mass live discussion on the preset topic.  If you have any questions on how to participate, feel free to contact me and I’ll try and help as best I can.

As this is the first time I’ve formally spoken about Social Teams, rather than writing out a list of topics and questions to guide the conversation – I’d like to invite you to use the Comments section below to write down specific questions that you’d like to see addressed, and I’ll make sure to tee up as many of them as possible in the hour time slot we have allocated!

I’m looking forward to speaking with you all!