Notes from the session:

Interest behind this topic: so much discussion around communities is very tactical – what tools to use, community building 101. But what are the strategic uses of communities? How can companies use communities as a strategic tool, or leverage the feedback and learning from communities into product development and company strategy. And, how are companies leveraging their employees / internal communities to give input into strategy?

What companies are using collaboration / community tools internally? One company Plum has an internal tool for setting up groups on any and all topics: by department, by team, by interest, etc. Can share discussion and photos. Makes it much easier to meet people, get to know people, and start discussions on different topics.

AOL example: going through a big change, AOL people including AOL university people created online materials and online training courses to discuss all the changes and why they were happening. The training was followed up by online community tools and community manager who helped people use the information they had heard. Helped an organization of 8,000 successfully navigate the change. Used IM, used discussion groups/boards, etc.
There are various organizations/companies that help corporations to set up internal communities.

The technology is just a tool. But you have to get the participation and behaviors – you have to use the tool to tie into existing issues and processes. Otherwise people will use their existing old tools/behaviors (email etc.).

How to get people to use the new community tools – how do you change behavior? Company has to choose to drive activity / content in the community environment – give people a reason to go to the community environment. Some companies are moving away from distribution lists: due to email overload, email not being a good tool for capturing all knowledge / feedback across the org. Email is not a good tool for building a knowledge base – versus a community environment where all conversations are captured and searchable.

Many companies already have an intranet site – and now are also putting community tools out there. So is the intranet dead? What information/uses should move over to the community tools? Intranet is more static, harder to update; community environments are more fluid, easier to update, anyone can contribute.

One attendee’s company moved all their intranet data over onto SharePoint.

Various examples are given – there’s a lot of ad-hoc, grassroots tools being implemented out there – some take off, others don’t.

There’s often self-selection by the employees – some will participate in a new or a particular tool, depending on their friends, their own interest in new technology, their boss’ directives, etc. So the communication flow gets complex – people are getting exposed to different information because they’re using different tools. To what extent is this an issue that needs to be addressed/mandated by company management, versus letting employee users do what they want?

How can we use social media to drive better business decisions? For example: traditional business meetings can give more weight to the opinions of higher-ranking roles, and good input from lower-level ranks can get ignored.

One example: during a company meeting, have an online open discussion thread / stream so that everybody could ask questions or make comments during the meeting. In this case, everybody was anonymous (including the execs) in order to encourage issues to come out in the open. It made it safe for people to challenge and raise questions.

In most cases, you don’t want people to be anonymous – you want people to own their issues/own their voice (and this cuts down on bad online behavior too). But there are situations where anonymity can be used to surface issues that otherwise people would be afraid to raise. This is similar to the old “write your issue on the card and we’ll read the cards in front of the group and the CEO will answer.”

Pros and cons of anonymous. Cons: anonymity can allow people to behave much more negatively; you want people to own their comments. (Also note that there’s a difference between total anonymity and persona – an ongoing persona is a legitimate identity.) Pros to anonymity: in some times/places you want people to feel completely safe to give their feedback and ideas. Identity “informs” or “contaminates” the communication/content – sometimes you don’t want to be forming judgments about content based on your knowledge or assumptions of the speaker.

Ease of use of the tool can make a difference – lower the barrier of entry for people to participate. Tools like Yammer make it super easy to participate.
Some collaborative work can still be done in person best. Sometimes people fall in love with the online networking tools – but they’re just tools – they shouldn’t be used for their own sake.

Sometimes these tools are being used to solve problems that wouldn’t exist if people would just go talk to another person directly.
“Shiny object” syndrome – falling in love with the new and shiny.

Sometimes the tool gives people a way to do something they already want to do – where people want to socialize, want to collaborate, and these tools give people a way to do that.

Sometimes a leader will say “we don’t want to collaborate too much, because it’ll make the process go too slow.”

What are various approaches to getting people’s input: you have to be clear about what’s going on, and let people know what to expect, so people don’t misunderstand and aren’t disappointed.

Wisdom of Crowds says there are certain types of problems that benefit from large-scale aggregated input into the decisions.
Giving people a way to give input helps people buy into the decisions.

The executive hierarchical decision making model is a different model from the collaborative community group decision model. So what are any blended models between these two end points?

Related issue: how to get input heard from all employees / people. Getting a fair hearing is a key issue in many organizations – but that’s a different thing than a fully community-driven decision model.

Product cycles and product development is happening faster and faster. The old hierarchical model where all decisions have to filter up to the top – is creating a bottleneck and slowing things down. Are there ways companies can use collaboration tools to increase the speed of decision-making?
Using communities to ask people to give input – new ideas, etc. Like Dell’s Ideastorm, etc. – give people a way to submit new ideas and then aggregate input around core priority ideas.

How to use community input to define the problem (not propose solutions)? How does an organization figure out what the core problem is? Have to figure that out before you try to solve it. A problem can be experienced and seen differently by different people and levels in the organization.

Do you have to actually ask what the product problems are? Or if there’s an active community – can you just monitor and listen to that community, to figure out where the problems are? Use tools to analyze an ongoing conversation. Depends on the demographics of that community vs the overall customer group or target customer group.

Are there any community monitoring / content analysis tools that are using NLP? (nobody knew)

These technologies can open up conversations between groups and people who weren’t easily able to talk to each other before. This can be very powerful and empowering – and, it can also cause new challenges.

What is the company strategy – how can online community be a part of that strategy? How can it help the company achieve the strategy?

It’s easier for smaller companies to have these kinds of conversations across levels etc. Very large companies struggle with the issue of scale -- what kind of conversation can the CEO at a very big company have with the front-line employees of a company? Does a CEO blog help or not?

Is social media / online community a tool – or, is it a whole paradigm shift about how we structure our organizations and run our society?

With customers and with employees – the importance of employee engagement – getting employees to participate in their organization in meaningful ways (to the employee and to the employer).

There’s a sea change going on – and people in business today have different experiences with this – different generations. Many people in leadership positions aren’t familiar with online community and don’t know how to interact with it.

Two steps: 1) leader gets an intellectual understanding and commitment that s/he needs to change their decision processes etc. to include community realities; 2) leaders knowing specific actions to take to include community input/issues in the existing processes and decision making.

(notes by Mary Walker -- www.anthrogoggles.com)

Notes: Alexa Bruce (not official note taker)

• How tackle self selection process?
• Need to model interaction behavior to indicate where you can find info
• How use social media world to drive decisions that can't happen in more traditional ways
• allow people to raise issues cloaked
• enable community manager to ask questions on behalf of others
• Anonymous
• social responsibility for voice
• persona has identity
• Research shows that we judge content based on where it is coming from
• Decide what type of decision is going to be made?
• collaborative vs. hierarchical vs. mixed
• What matters
• make decisions fast - need decisions to be made at action level
• get ideas - ask the masses for feedback
• shape problem - transparency; honesty
• natural language programming to understand what is being talked about in other spaces
• voice of customer - need to talk to user and need to talk to the user - Linda Sharp