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?

Here in the US it is Dr. Martin Luther King day. It is one of our national holidays. To commemorate the day, people are encouraged to use it as a day of service, instead of a just another day off. This is because Dr. King was all about giving back, and building communities.

Today many people will recite or listen to Dr. King’s famous I have a dream speech, but that is not my favorite speech. My favorite speech is the one he gave the night before he died, it is sometimes called the mountaintop speech. He gave this speech to the striking sanitation workers in Memphis. He had come to the realization that the struggle was not just a struggle for people of color, but it was a struggle for all poor people. Dr King saw the need to connect everyone in the community, that the only way for individuals to overcome was to strengthen and support everyone in the community.

This background of civil rights is actually where I learned about community management. I went to Florida State University, which is in the deep south. I had the privilege of working under the direction of folks who participated in the civil rights movement. They helped me understand how connecting the Native students, the American Indian Movement, the local tribal leaders, and the faculty and staff was important to the overall community at FSU. They helped me understand how vital it is to connect all. And also what hard work it is to give of yourself to break down misunderstandings and prejudices that prevent people from making these connections on their own.

Connect all. We need to make sure everyone is along for the ride, because we need everything to make the changes stick.

I miss those days at FSU, where I could participate fully in the MLK Day activities. I will just have to be happy with reflecting about this here, and sharing my favorite speech with you all.

Martin Luther King, Jr: “Mountaintop” speech full length from Filip Goc on Vimeo.

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.

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.

This semester I’m taking a course named Multi-Media Design and Development. Our first assignment is due tomorrow, we had to do design a lesson using a free, online animation tool.

My lesson is on adding tags to community generated content. I think it is hilarious. For your enjoyment, I present “Community Alert: Solving the Case of Missing Information“.

I just finished my class meeting, and saw this posted by @courosa:

Pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in e-learning environments

I promised to write a summary of the responses I received to this post on blogging as reflective practice, so here it is (better late than never!).

Not only did I write about blogging as a mechanism for learning on this blog, I wrote about it on EMC’s internal social media site (EMC|ONE) as well. Here is a summary of the responses from both places:

• Blogging is used to interact with communities of special interests if none exist in your current network. Sometimes people were pleasantly surprised that blogging introduced them to peers they didn’t even know about until these people commented on their blog posts.
• Some people seemed to appreciate the benefits of the reflection they had to do to write a post more than the amount of comments a post received.
• Blogging helps show how online networks evolve and react to information.
• Blogging helps open up new ways to think about a topic.
• Blogging is much more than a “training tool”, it is a “career tool”. I think this is important – I framed the question in a strict instructional technology sense. But I was quickly called on that, and reminded that blogging really is a career tool – it’s probably one of those “knowledge worker skills” that people working with information should really become proficient.
• Many people (including myself) can’t blog about their day-to-day activities, but blogging has helped them learn more about the industry in which they work.
• Blogging helps open up new avenues for development. By reflecting and writing on different topics, as well as expanding your professional network, new ways to use your current skills start opening up.
• A couple of people reminded me of how things used to be done. People used to take the time to write journals, letters, and other written forms of correspondence. Sitting down to physically write these documents required people to slow down and really think about the ideas they were trying to convey in written format. Maybe blogs are a throw-back to those times.

So, I think we can definitely say that blogging can be used to learn. Blogging makes people slow down, think about their topics, and reflect on what they know (or what they think they know). Blogging helps to expand a personal or professional network.

I would think blogging can also be used as an instructional technology for an individual educational event such as a class, or even better a boot camp.

For myself, I’ll continue to blog for all of the reasons listed above. I’m learning so much about our industry, and also learning so much about education. My network has really expanded, I am bummed the economy is tanked because I can’t see me being able to travel to a conference to meet any of them in person. We’ll just have to keep building ties until things look up, or a conference rolls into Boston.

This semester I am taking a class called “Introduction to Instructional Design”. We are stepping through Dick, Carey & Carey’s textbook The Systematic Design of Instruction. The book examines the Dick and Carey model of instruction in detail. Here’s a diagram of that model (click the picture to see a larger version):

As with all models of instruction, the diagram shouldn’t be interpreted as a lock-step process. It is pretty fluid, you can go back and forth between steps as needed. The main points I take from the model is that you do constant analysis to ensure the instruction you develop is going to satisfy the instructional goal.

My degree program teaches instructional systems to people working in every sector: K-12 professionals, higher ed professionals, military folks and corporate professionals. Most of the corporate professionals develop training usually associated with HR, there aren’t many of us who do technical training. So while it’s good to have a map to ensure the effort and expense put develop training isn’t wasted, I have to wonder if this model is agile enough for a fast-moving technical education organization.

There are other instructional models that were developed specifically for technical instruction. Maybe I’ll write a post on that another day, it would be interesting to see if one has been developed to specifically fit in with Agile sprints and scrums.

We actually follow many of the steps in this model. One thing I (as a courseware developer) think we are missing is the learner and context evaluation. We use program managers to get that information to us from the managers of the students. Those managers deliver what they think the students should be able to do after consuming training, which is very important. It helps us set the correct performance objectives. But I have never been seen any learner or context analysis.

I can write courseware all day long, but if the students are starting from a different place than I thought they were, or if they can never get to training because they are too busy, does it matter how well the instruction is missing?

The biggest concern I have about the Dick & Carey model in a fast-moving technical area is that it takes alot of time to do the Analysis. The way we are learning this model, you have to be in the same room with learners to do the analysis and formative or summative evaluations. That would never fly with us, people at our company are just too busy. Not only that, but traveling all over the place do the analysis is too expensive. Besides, by the time we got back and compiled all the data, there would be a new version of software and we’d have to start all over again.

Why couldn’t I form a small community to pull all these steps together? The analysis would be there for all the stakeholders. The students could pop in and participate in guided discussions so that I have a real analysis of what it will take to get them to where their managers want them to be. We could pilot the materials in the community and get real-time feedback.

I think I know the drawbacks: people are still too busy to participate. People don’t trust online communities. Do we really need this extra step.

What do you all think? Does the Dick & Carey model move to slowly to be relevant for a fast-moving technical organization? Could it be modified and modeled in an online community? Do we really need to do so much analysis?

This week has been about networks in the CCK08 course. I haven’t posted or responded much to posts. My excuses:

• End of the quarter at work
• Group at school is non-technical, I’m practicing positive inter-dependence and helping them

But I have been reading, and thinking, and talking about the information flowing through the CCK08 network about networks. Valdis Krebs on networks was amazing, and brought me back to my undergrad years. His presentation reminded me that you can represent networks inthe following ways:

1. Hierarchical (e.g. org charts)
2. Hub and spoke (obvious informal networks)
3. Just connecting the dots that show us how the work really gets done (sound familiar to anyone at EMC?).

What I thought of almost instantly was the big E2.0/L2.0/Web 2.0 buzzword: Community. Everyone is racing to set up a “community”. What do people mean when they say that? Do they mean some of the things that Valdis is able to uncover with his network maps, for example:

• Expert Location – put the experts out there with your customers
• Communities of Practice – form learning communities with your customers
• Key Opinion Leaders – Put the key influencers out there with your customers

Do people even think this far when they are making the community — why do you want one? Because you were told to make one? If that is the only motivation, the community will die because there is not a network feeding it, breathing life into it.

The question remaining for me is: is a community a network? Or is the network the energizing force that powers a community?