Archives for community building

Content cost and creation – and how it relates to community building

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 17th 2012     

During a meeting at the Dell Storage Forum in London Hans De Leenheer, one our invited bloggers, told me something to this effect:

You are Miss Social Media. You have to make it so we are able to keep connecting. You have to make it so we can grow this community. That is your job!

My first reaction was – hey wait I can’t single-handedly build a vibrant community. I may be able to architect an environment where people can connect. I may be able to find influencers who want to connect and create a community, and I may be able to create a space online where that can happen. But I rely on those influencers to invite other members to the community, and to create relevant content that can serve as the glue that binds individuals together in a common interest and communion (see this post for more on the technical definition of community).

Why will people join a community?

People initially come to a community to fill a need for information. If it is a business-based community, the business can create some of the content that will fill the information needs of their customers. But the danger in only relying on content created by the business is that the information tends to get stale very quickly. The information offered to the community will probably be subject to the same internal processes as press releases and website content. The content will be what the business wants to project, what it wants its customers to know and believe.

Many times, content created by community members is much more current. Community members aren’t bound by corporate policy on communication.They can say it how they see it.They may be fans of the products the business creates, but they can also call out all the warts and blemishes of the products. If the community is positive, community members will offer solutions to problems they encounter. This is the type of content that people look for when they are trying to fill an information need.

If the community is being managed well, the business will interact with the content created by the community. This forces the business to create current, up-to-date content. The kind of content that fills the information needs of their customers. The kind of content that moves people from visiting because they are interested in information about the company’s products to developing an attachment to the individuals creating the content about the products (employees and other customers). It is this kind of content that facilitates the creation of community.

The cost of content

Yesterday I saw Marcia Connor tweet this from the IBM Connect conference:

There is a real cost to storing content (after all, I do work for Dell Storage!). But I think the idea behind this tweet goes even deeper than the financial cost of storing the data. For me this brings up so many questions….

Is there a way to architect things so content is always fluid? There is only so much that can be done from a technical architectural standpoint to make the data – the 1′s and 0′s fluid. How do you make the content fluid? What organizational barriers (dams?) prevent content from being in motion? How can we architect communities so that the content flows and everyone is able to extract the value from that content?

Things I’ll be pondering….but would love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

category: community building
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Beer: the essential ingredient for successful community building

Posted by  on Thursday, October 6th 2011     

I don’t know if it was Bitnorth, spending the last couple of nights communing in Barcelona with other members of the internal Dell Storage community, or the tweets coming from my friend Ed Saipetch at Monktoberfest, but I have finally decided to write this post.

Beer |  [ wine | $someOtherBeverage ] is an essential ingredient for successfully building communities.

This may seem like a radical statement, but hear me out. A few months ago, I wrote a post about the definition of a community. In that post, I outlined the sociological requirements to call a group a community:

  1. Place: Territorial or place community can be seen as where people have something in common
  2. Interest: In interest or ‘elective’ communities people share a common characteristic other than place
  3. Communion: a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea

Those elements happen after people open up, bond, and create their places, interests, and communions that make them a community. I’m saying communal drinking is one of the catalysts to get people to open up so that the place, interest, and communion can be firmly established. According to the Social Issues Research Group, in most cultures drinking is social. Their research showed that across cultures some things remained the same:

In all cultures, the drinking-place is a special environment, a separate social world with its own customs and values

A great example of this are the #storagebeers and #vbeers events that are usually held during enterprise storage and virtualization conferences. There are rules around organizing an event: only customers can organize an event. Vendors can come along, and can pay, but it can’t be a vendor-organized event.

The events are usually live-cast via tweets, solidifying the community with rituals and vocabulary that identify members who are part of the “club”. Most of the time, people have “met” each other on Twitter, or have been reading blogs of people who promise to attend. Maybe they feel a little silly about coming to an event to meet total strangers, but coming to a pub to share a beer after work is a commonly accepted social ritual. It breaks down the barriers of entry into the boisterous storage community.

By the way when and where is #vbeers for #VMworld in Copenhagen??

Drinking-places tend to be socially integrative, egalitarian environments

I can think of a couple of examples of that demonstrate how organized tweet-ups can be environments that neutralize power and title. Chuck Hollis was at the very first #cxiparty and he visited with all of the storage twitterati who were in attendance. Certainly not expected behavior for a high profile industry executive.

At the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando, all of the Dell Storage executives were present sharing stories and with customers, partners and employees of all levels. Michael Dell himself showed up and visited with everyone as well. Not everyone had an alcoholic beverage, but that didn’t matter. It was an egalitarian environment that transcended title or choice of beverage. Listen for yourself, you can actually hear the community coming together on this Infosmack podcast.

The primary function of drinking-places is the facilitation of social bonding

Social bonding leads to communion (a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea). If you share beers with another person, you don’t start off talking about business. You talk about sports, your family, the weather, sometimes politics. Heck you may even talk about beer. You start identifying things you have in common with the person with whom you are drinking beer.

I believe in a world where we work with people who live far from us, we don’t have lots of time or many opportunities to make real bonds that lead to communion and create community. Having a beer together, finding out how similar you are to a team mate on the other side of the world, helps you remember to reach out to them more often, to be more inclusive so that a broader point of view is included in the projects you share.

For marketers, sharing beers with the broader community is critical to success. You will disagree with a competitor at some point in the future, that is a given. I’ve found that having a personal connections makes these conflicts more productive. If you can share a beer with your partners and customers, really get to know them and build community, they are going to be more receptive when you want them to listen to a message you have for them. Actually having beers together builds community, so when you market you get beyond messaging to having a conversation.

What do you think? Are you part of any communities where the small world ties are made stronger by communing at your local watering hole? What do you think about the idea of beer being a critical component to community building?

category: community building
tags: ,

Dell Storage Forum and the emergence of a new community

Posted by  on Tuesday, June 21st 2011     

A goal we had for the Dell Storage Forum was to bring together all users of Dell Storage – whether they use PowerVault, EqualLogic, or Compellent, into one Dell Storage community. For me, one of the biggest take-aways from the  Forum was the emergence of a visible, coherent community.

Community Definition

One sociological definition of community1 holds that the following things are required to call a group of people a community:

  1. Place: Territorial or place community can be seen as where people have something in common
  2. Interest: In interest or ‘elective’ communities people share a common characteristic other than place
  3. Communion: a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea

Here’s why I think we can see a Dell Storage community now:

    1. Place: There are many places online where the community gathers: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, the Dell Tech Center, etc. Individuals who knew each other from these “places” were able to meet in real life in Orlando for the Dell Storage Forum.
    2. Interest: Folk who elect to become part of this community are interested in challenges people have managing information, and how Dell Storage products can be used to help overcome those challenges. People in the community include Dell employees and executives, customers, partners and analysts. They also are people who have varied technical backgrounds – from engineers to salespeople to implementers to marketeers.

      I love this image from the DSF tweetup. You see bloggers, influencers, partners, and execs in the shot. Members from all different areas of the storage community landscape, coming together at one event to talk about community issues.
      Dell Storage Forum 2011 Tweet Up

    3. Communion: I think after #dellsf11 there is an attachment to Dell Fluid Data architecture
      The Virtual Era is Fluid - Dell Storage Forum 2011 #DellSF11

    Where do we go now?

    And now we come to the question and answer section of this blog post. ;)

    I know what I’m hoping to see – the emergence of real community of practices (CoPs). Here’s Etienne Wegner’s definition of communities of practice 2 :

    Groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

    How do we start connecting people to create these C0Ps within our storage community? Do some of these already CoPs exist? How do we strengthen them, so we are all interacting regularly to help each other master all of the elements that are required to manage information?

    And what should  we do when our CoPs have conflicts? Communities are not idyllic – there are boundaries that are constantly evolving. Especially in technical communities full of highly motivated, passionate, creative, intelligent people. Bonds that seem immutable can shift and change. How do we use this sort of passionate conflict to strengthen community bonds?

    I’ve been connecting with the internal Dell folks who work on Dell object storage, and I’ll start blogging about that technology very soon. I’m happy to bring this internal CoP external for anyone who is interested in joining in that conversation.

    What ideas do you have?

    References
    1. Smith, M. A. (2002). community – a review of the theory. the encyclopedia of informal education. Retrieved June 21, 2011, from http://www.infed.org/community/community.htm ↩
    2. Wegner, E. (n.d.). Communities of practice. Etienne Wegner. Retrieved June 21, 2011, from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ ↩
    category: community building
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    Insiders, Outsiders, and Visitors – and what this means for community

    Posted by  on Wednesday, September 1st 2010     

    I’ve been managing the EMC Proven Professional Community and the outlying social media ecosystem we’ve created for the community for a little over six months now. Maybe in another post I’ll talk more about what we are calling the social media “ecosystem”, but today I want to talk a little about our community.

    I’m so lucky to be managing this community, because the “community” already exists. Everyone who is an EMC Proven Professional holds an EMC Proven Professional certification. The profile of someone who would hold this certification is someone who is very technical, very experienced, this person is probably running the IT systems power your credit card data, your hospital, your bank, your university, your business. They are smart, driven, and what most folks would consider to be hard core geeks. These folks already have a community – I was lucky enough to be able to be one of the people building an online community to make things easier for the community to interact online.

    One other thing – I hold EMC Proven Professional certifications. I’ve worked in data center situations supporting SANs and 3 tier web applications. I’m a geek. In other words, I’m an insider.

    What is an insider

    From a sociological, ethnocentric viewpoint, an insider is someone who belongs to a group. To be an insider you must be fluent in the group’s language, customs, culture, rituals, and history. Because of your fluency with these things, you are accepted as an insider to the group.

    What is an outsider?

    An outsider is someone who is not fluent with all of those things. When I listen to the frustration of my #lrnchat (education) friends about IT, it is obvious to me that they are outsiders to the IT world. And IT are outsiders to the learning world – the business they support.

    What is a visitor?

    A visitor is middle ground. They know enough to know that they are not an insider. But they may have business to conduct with a community so being a complete outsider is not really an option. So they learn enough of the language and the culture to order a beer and hang out in a bar. They are ok with not pretending to be an insider, and the insiders accept them because of this.

    What does this mean for community?

    In my case, I straddle the technical community that I am a member of with the education community. I think EMC does it right – the people developing education are all members of the technical community that makes up our audience. That’s right – the people who write EMC instruction are SMEs (scandalous I know!!)

    But now because I’m working more and more with marketing people because of the social media work I do, I’m finding myself teaching my new team mates how to become visitors to our technical world. Techies, just for the record – marketers are worried that they sound like marketers for you (at least the good ones worry!).

    After my visit to Montreal this weekend I have a new appreciation for how they feel. I had to get gas – and I USED to be fluent in French (long long ago…). I was so nervous and felt so stupid trying to speak French. I know I sounded ridiculous – and probably like a Southern hick. I was grateful when I was in Tim Horton’s that the teen behind the counter started speaking English.

    I was a total outsider. I knew it. But I tried to speak the language – and that opened the door for me to step up to visitor status. And this is the point for communities:

    • Number one – know your audience. Know the community you serve – research their language, their customs, their rituals.
    • Number two – try to speak their language. Don’t pretend to be an insider though, that is the easiest way to be branded an outsider. Respect the language and culture. Acknowledge the fact that you may never be an insider. That way the community will ask you for the rest of your order in your native language.

    Never be an outsider – try to get to visitor status. Insiders, help new people that try to learn become fluent enough in your language and cultures to communicate – its the only way to open your community to new ideas. And people trying to become visitors – realize no one wants to be preached to, work hard to be something other than an outsider.

    Lots of ways I’m thinking of branching this conversation…..the activist in my has lots of stories to tell.

    category: community building
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    A community to support customers must be more than customer support

    Posted by  on Tuesday, July 20th 2010     

    I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time. I’m noticing that many businesses will set up a community for their customers, but the community never makes it any further than the customer support stage.

    My Verizon example

    I bought an HTC Incredible phone from Verizon. I’ve had Verizon service for years and years, and I like them. I like that the Incredible is built on an open OS, so that I can write an application for it (in my copious free time, of course).

    Since the OS is built by Google, all of the Google tools you normally use are built in. People are writing all sorts of neat applications – I have a pedometer, a wedding countdown app, an app that tells you the stars and constellations you are looking at in the night sky, apps that tell you where your twitter friends are in relation to you, an app that prevents me from butt dialing my friends, and many others.

    Sometimes the applications don’t play nice with the internal memory. There is a tool that shows you how much memory is being used, but it doesn’t report that information accurately. Once you start running low on memory, applications start to break. Like texting – and I need to be able to text.

    I googled around and confirmed my suspicions: the memory reporting tool isn’t providing accurate information. So I called Verizon, and talked to a really nice guy. Had me do the stock – pull the battery from the phone – move. I kept asking him how to tell what is really using up all the memory. He said there was no way. He said the best way was to wipe the OS and do a fresh install.

    Here’s where customer service and a community to support customers should be different.

    On the one hand you have me. I’m pretty good with operating systems, although truthfully I’ve never played around much with a phone OS. Mostly because the wireless carriers lock that down so you can’t play around with it. But from what I researched, and from my technical experience, I knew although wiping the OS would only solve the immediate problem — it would come back. I wanted to troubleshoot the phone.

    On the other hand you have the Verizon CSR. He gets paid based on how fast he can get people off the phone, and how many people he can help a day. He’s not going to take up half his shift to troubleshoot an open OS issue. He actually told me this (in a really nice way though). So from a customer support point of view he identified a problem, identified a solution, and pleasantly tried to help me.

    Of course I said no thanks. I went on to find a solution – Advanced App Killer – that gives me the ability to kill any running apps on the phone, thus freeing up some space. I didn’t need the answer that got me out of the queue, I needed some help understanding the deeper issue and developing a strategy to deal with the root cause of the problem. I needed community support, not customer support

    Lessons learned

    If you have a community set up for one of your audiences, fight the urge to answer their questions as if you have a customer support queue to clear. While you were building the community, hopefully you were

    • Finding the target community members
    • Messaging to the prospective members about the types of content and interactions that would be available in your community
    • Listening to what your members were saying

    Now that folks have decided to join you, the next steps may be to foster an atmosphere of trust where members are learning from your official program team, but also from each other. If you can get that trust rolling then you can promote engagement and build affinity between the community members and with your program. Hopefully this will lead to a dynamic learning environment.

    Building a dynamic learning environment in a community

    All of this work has to happen with a background appreciation for the small world you are trying to bring together in your community. Is the content (and the way it is presented)  in the community relevant to the information needs of the members? Verizon didn’t care that I was an advanced user with different information needs, they just wanted to fix the high level problem and get me off the phone.

    I’m not saying to ignore the problems and questions, there needs to be a mechanism to answer every question. What I’m saying is in a community you have to dig deeper. Don’t just answer the question using a paraphrased version of a script your customer service team would use. Why not leave the question sitting there for a few hours, see if another community member has some insight? Observe the conversation between two natives of the same small world, perhaps you’ll see the real question that didn’t get asked.

    Pause and think about the information needs of the member who is looking for help. Why is the member asking for help? What is the underlying information need? If you can ensure that the information need is completely met, that member will feel a very strong affinity to the community.

    Even if the community managers do not belong to the same small worlds as the community members (perhaps marketing runs a community for highly technical individuals), having the community managers adopting  communication rules that make sense to your target audience will help build affinity. If members have access to the vocabulary of their own small world, they will have the words they need to initiate a search for information.

    Doing customer support online is easy. Answer the question, clear the queue. Community support is hard. Identify the question, speak the same language, dig deeper for the real information need, provide relevant content and answers, build engagement and affinity. There are no short-cuts, and its easy to fall into the trap of just clearing the queue. But taking the slow, arduous route to real community support will get you to the place where you are reaping the real benefits of social media.

    category: community building
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