Social Communities – The Hidden Jewel of Social Media

Whilst everyone is getting slap happy about Twitter the one trend we’ve noticed that we believe is far more significant is the growth of social communities. A number of vendors have made significant technical advances such that I think the focus for many companies (large and small) going into the second half of this year and 2010 will be around building a sticky social community.

Social communities represent the coordinated use of many social technologies – blogs, wiki’s, forums, social networks, multi-media, ranking/voting tools etc. There are many examples of Communities already in existence. We actively participate in a number of communities both professionally and personally.

Communities can take many forms – from the low cost option of Ning through to the emerging leaders – companies like Awareness Networks, Mzinga, Igloo Software, and HiveLive.

Communities are nothing new.

True, in fact, for the past 6 years I’ve been a member of Australia’s oldest business community – The Executive Connection (TEC). TEC is an affiliate of Vistage International.

With more than 14,500 members, Vistage International is the world’s foremost chief executive leadership organization

Membership of TEC introduces you to a community of like minded senior executives – this is an important point that we’ll come back to as we start to develop some community strategies for TEC in the coming months.

The question is whether TEC can make the transition from a traditional community to a social community – one that is deliberate, capitalises on TEC’s inherent trust among members, reflects TEC’s premium reputation and senior executive member base, and one that delivers long term value.

TEC has a unique opportunity ahead of them. They have a premium service that has at its core business leaders who are striving to build better companies whilst maintaining a thirst for knowledge and personal growth.

What Does This All Mean?

In my opinion, Social Communities represent the Holy Grail of social media – and will be the critical, mandatory component of any business seeking to go down the road of Enterprise 2.0. But whilst they are the Holy Grail, they also represent the toughest challenge. A company like TEC can’t simply decide to ‘do’ community. It requires strategy, resources, planning, investment, and most of all – commitment.

In the coming months we’ll compile a resource pool of articles and content that has been shared with us. We’ve found these resources to be invaluable in helping us understand communities as well as working with our customers to scope, understand, and plan for future social community initiatives.

Social Learning – Changing the Learning Paradigm

As we researched the social media space and started putting together our strategy plans this idea of social learning kept coming up. The idea first came to my attention back in October 2008 at the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference in Chicago. Daniel Perry of Aramark spoke about how they create internal communities so that new hires can share information, reinforce their learning’s, and provide mutual support.

This sounded really interesting – a sales organisation utilising social media tools and strategies to provide a platform for greater collaboration and knowledge capture – but the idea of social learning hadn’t gelled. In fact it wasn’t until one of my TEC group members (known as Vistage in the US) raised a point about the problems they were having in capturing informal knowledge from the field that I connected the dots. At the same time as this I read a couple of blog posts by David Wilkins from Mzinga and I realised just how important social learning has become.

In simple terms, social learning is about using social media technologies to close the gap that exists between the training/learning the enterprise provides and the informal learning that is always happening within the enterprise. I thought what Aramark was doing was very cool and I often mentioned this example to people as a good example of using social media tools to reinforce key learning and knowledge.

That was until I read David’s post about the future of training. The key thing with this post is the Cross and Jarche model of social learning (see diagram)

Jay Cross and Harold Jarche map the future of learning in the enterprise

Jay and Harold describe a pyramid where emergent practices come from the workers, established practices and processes come from management, and workers actively collaborate with each other as part of the normal work experience.

I realised then that Aramark had only part of the solution. Aramark were using the technology to make sure training was sticky, that sales reps stuck to the pitch and that the field sales managers didn’t start debunking the training with “real world observations”. For Aramark, the real advantage would come if they embraced learning from the field and formalised this into their enterprise. So rather than suppressing “real world observations and variations” they would encourage this and formalise this into their enterprise memory (and therefore their training).

Given most learning and collaboration happens away from where training is delivered, capturing this informal learning is the real challenge for the enterprise. But it doesn’t stop there. Like most social media initiatives, changing the cultural attitude around learning will be challenging also. A great place to start for organisations wanting to start down this road is to implement enterprise wiki solutions like Confluence from Atlassian (Disclosure: we’re an Atlassian partner for the Confluence product). Confluence (as a hosted Wiki) can be live in minutes and allows collaboration to start occurring. I’d still recommend getting a strategy in place and getting wide buy-in, but starting with something is still the most important first step.

The outcome of reading David’s stuff is we’re putting more research effort into understanding what this means and how it fits into an overall social media strategy. When you think about the idea of opening up your enterprise information and allowing the community to take it, use it, and add value, we mustn’t forget that the community is in fact a series of intersecting communities as David noted in a later post.

A very useful image from David Wilkins of Mzinga

As I noted to my TEC colleague – harnessing this knowledge and learning represents real strategic advantage. So whilst we talk about the fantastic marketing, PR, and sales benefits to flow from social media, we must also keep our eye on the positive impacts this can have on how the enterprise learns and grows.

Livescribe – Applying the lessons of Tim Martin

As a TEC member, I’ve had the privilege of hosting Tim Martin from 2 Sticks Digital Marketing as a speaker at my TEC group earlier this year. Tim gives an engaging, yet simple presentation where he talks about all things digital marketing.

Here at Smartpen, we’ve taken all of Tim’s advice and applied them to the launch of our Smartpen website. As we prepare for the official launch of the site we were really pleased to see our efforts pay off with the site achieving the top organic listing on the Google search term “Livescribe Smartpen”.

Smartpen achieves #1 ranking in organic Google results

You can contact Tim at 2 Sticks (03) 9018 5672. He’s got some really interesting stuff on his blog. I recommend Tim to anyone looking to get their heads around the Web 2.0 world.

Here’s some of Tim’s work from YouTube