Yesterday I posted a response to all the wonderful comments and contributions that you all made to my last post on “Why Companies Shouldn’t Build Online Communities“. As I plan to delve further into this idea of “Social Teams”, I thought I’d repost that reply as a post in its own right so as to make it easier for people to find and read – so here goes:
Dear All
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.
It seemed that many of you think 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 fashion to that of a 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) – to discuss this further!
Forget about Communities.Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Oh I know that communities are all the rage currently – companies are falling over themselves to create, build and own their very own communities: Communities of Employees, Communities of Customers, Communities of Interest Groups, Communities, Communities, Communities….
I find that many, maybe even most, companies approach social media, and other online community projects – with very little, if any, forethought on how value will be achieved as a result of jumping on this particular bandwagon.
Unlike in the movie “Field of Dreams” – you can build it – but “they” rarely come spontaneously – or if they do, they may well end up playing a jovial game of scrabble rather than a vintage MLB baseball game on the back lawn.
There’s a lot of nice words and feelings in that definition. “A social group”; “common heritage”; “interacting populations”; “shared identity”….The word conjures up a nice warm vision of a collection of friends and associates sitting around a fireside or, for the more cynical among you, images of suburban old age homes in Florida and Arizona maybe.
At the recent 
Twitter continues to be the fastest growing social media platform at the moment – but that growth seems to be primarily led by individuals with varying degrees of success and sustainability. By now I’m sure you all have several friends who have tried Twitter – some love it, others can’t see the point of it – which doesn’t tend to help its credibility as a business tool.
The truth of it is that it can be a very valuable tool in your business arsenal – BUT – unlike other social media tools, it delivers little value until you put a significant amount of effort into developing it. Now when I say “developing” – I don’t mean in the classic “programming lines of code” sense – but rather, in order to be useful to a business – you need a defined strategy, and a sustained input from your part before it begins to yield results back. What that input is, and how long it takes you to put in enough input to yield an output, really depends on which of the main strategies you decide to pursue – and as with most applications that work on the establishment of information flows – there are two main strategies: Push and Pull.
The Pull strategy for Twitter is simple. It revolves around an understanding that what Twitter can provide to you is an unrivalled personalized information source. Whatever niche information requirements you have – chances are, there are people out there posting tweets on it. Find them, follow them, and eventually your information feed begins to deliver a constant source of valuable data – be it important headlines, links to interesting articles, relevant quotes, allowing you to follow conferences remotely, etc etc – the more careful you are in selecting the people you follow – the more relevant that data feed becomes. In pure Pull strategies – you don’t care how many people follow you – it’s irrelevant and secondary to achieving a quality information flow to your desktop. For those of you considering this strategy – Don Smith has written an excellent 
The Push strategy is a little more complex – as what you’re trying to do is be read rather than necessarily do the reading. Maybe you’re a company with a product message to distribute, maybe you’re a consultant trying to build up your personal brand, maybe you’re a store with product specials to sell – whatever you are, the basic concept is that you have a message that you want people to see and read. Here, the name of the game is to amass followers – to get the largest possible following to actively subscribe to, and read, your feed. Whilst that sounds easy – it’s far from that – you have two big challenges ahead of you:
There’s another reason to provide valuable content, especially on Twitter – Twitter is a “viral community”. That is, it works on a viral process of message dissemination to the community at large. You post something of value, I see it, and I “Re-Tweet” it – meaning I pass it on to my own subscriber list with appropriate attribution to the original poster. I get kudos points from my community for passing on something valuable, and you get exposure to my subscriber list who may well decide to subscribe to your postings too (assuming you’ve followed the three steps above to create an interesting profile page!). There’s also exists a general concept of mutual following – You follow me because I post good info, and in return I’ll probably follow you too to see what your feed is like. Of course, if you then post a load of rubbish, I’ll probably end up deleting you from the list of people I follow – but that’s up to you to establish the value to me as a reader 🙂
This last week I had the pleasure to attend the World Innovation Forum held in NYC’s Nokia Theatre. Although the conference was well stocked with top class speakers, it wasn’t their content and inspiring speeches that really made the conference noteworthy to me – but rather the attendees – or more specifically, a sub section of the attendees and the conversations that were ongoing throughout the speeches. You see – what made this conference unique, at least to me, is that it was the first conference I’ve been to which has explicitly encouraged and exploited the work of social media mavens during the conference itself.
2) The Librarian – The librarian role would primarily be adding supporting material and/or other referenced material from the speaker. Maybe it would be a link to a video shown on screen, or a to a report referenced, or to a list of articles recently authored by the speaker – the end result was a steady flow of material enhancing the content being shared by the speaker that greatly added to the value of the speaker’s talk.
3) The Debater – Focusing more on comments, opinions, and shared viewpoints – the debater added unstructured and less formal contributions, essentially contributing a discussion flow that allowed people to openly support/refute arguments made by the speakers in real time as well as provide a more interactive community experience to the group.
Personally I can’t see why all conferences in the future shouldn’t be organized in a similar vein, and I have to take my hat off to HSM Americas, the conference organizer, for taking on such an innovative approach to an Innovation conference. Bearing in mind the buzz created by the invited bloggers to this event, it’s sure to increase interest in attendance next year, and thus benefit them in the long term. The whole effort was also sponsored by Pitney Bowes who definitely got some very positive buzz and attention out of the effort – so well done to them too for a very open minded and innovative approach to attention marketing.
@AndreaMeyer @YourBoot @HelenWalters @georgelevy @Jeffhurt @FHInnovation @dixitboy @innovate @chrisflanagan @ReneeCallahan @katiekonrath @stu @stevetodd @ssusman @bhc3 @twinnovator @ctcoco @pinnovation @PBConnect @wearewhatif @vidales @wrighth1 @hsmamericas @lindegaard @donpeppers @Pauldunay @dominicbasulto @LeftTheBox @Stu and of course, if you’re not already following me on @bpluskowski, shame on you :p
The Complete Innovator 