Handbook of Community Management: A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice 9783110673739, 9783110673555

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Stan Garfield Handbook of Community Management

Knowledge Services

Edited by Guy St. Clair Editorial Board Michelle Dollinger, Manager, Knowledge Services Manager, Global Financial Advisory, Deloitte (USA) Sue Henczel, Author, Business Owner at Infase Training Pty. Ltd. (Australia) Lee Igel, Author, Clinical Associate Professor, Tisch Institute, Co-Director, Sports & Society, at New York University School of Professional Studies and Associate of the Division, Medical Ethics, for the New York University Langone Medical Center (USA) Barrie Levy, Knowledge Services Coordinator, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Architects and Associate Lecturer, Columbia University in the City of New York (USA) Anne Kershaw, Owner and Managing Director, Reasonable Discovery, LLC and and Lecturer, Columbia University in the City of New York (USA)

Stan Garfield

Handbook of Community Management A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice

ISBN 978-3-11-067355-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067373-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-067382-1 ISSN 2625-6126 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935457 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover Image: shuoshu / DigitalVision Vectors / gettyimages.com Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For my dear, late parents. My mother, Amy Louise Nusbaum Garfield (born June 13, 1922 and died May 5, 2013), was the first woman to serve in the prestigious role of Community Manager while attending Antioch College.

My father, Sol Louis Garfield (born January 8, 1918 and died August 14, 2004), was the co-editor, with Allen E. Bergin, of Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, a landmark textbook in clinical psychology.

Series editor’s foreword: About knowledge services A broader perspective for managing intellectual capital When Peter Drucker first introduced the concept of the knowledge worker, he did those destined to work with information, knowledge, and strategic learning a big favor. He said that these knowledge workers would be required to have a good deal of formal education. He also pointed out that they would have to be able to acquire and apply theoretical knowledge. “It was,” Drucker said, “a different approach to work and a different mind-set.” It was not a prediction. It was a statement. And while Drucker is famous for having said, “I never predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen,” it soon became clear that what he saw for knowledge workers was indeed a different approach to knowledge work. In the years following Drucker’s statement in Forbes Magazine (in March 10, 1997), many information, knowledge, and learning professionals came to understand that Drucker’s description was a rationale, a plan, for how they could deal with organizational knowledge. His reference to an approach and a mind-set became what we now refer to as knowledge services, the subject of this series. Regardless of the type of organization under discussion – whether it is a forprofit business, a non-profit furthering a particular social cause or a shared point of view, a not-for-profit organization, an academic institution, a government agency, or any other type of collective body that has come together to achieve an agreedupon goal or mission – the organization’s collective knowledge is its most fundamental asset. Often characterized as “what everyone in the organization knows,” this collective knowledge and the organization’s successful efforts in knowledge development, knowledge sharing, and knowledge utilization (often designated “KD/ KS/KU”) are essential to the realization of that organizational goal. Knowledge services is usually described as a methodology that streamlines the management of an organization’s knowledge by converging information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning into a single enterprisewide discipline. Its purpose is to ensure the highest levels of knowledge sharing within the organizations in which it is practiced, and being industry and workplace agnostic. Knowledge services brings important management and leadership value to knowledge strategists and knowledge leaders, as noted, in all organizations. The titles published in Knowledge Services are written to provide knowledge strategists with theoretical and practical advice for ensuring the level of excellence in knowledge sharing they are expected to provide. New and innovative approaches to the management of intellectual capital and – in particular – to the development of knowledge strategy development are offered. And since the purpose of knowledge services is to enable all organizations to engage in and practice high-level knowledge services, the discipline relates closely to organizational behavior, the study of human https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-202

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A broader perspective for managing intellectual capital

behavior in an organizational setting. As such, recommended knowledge services applications connect closely with the human/organization relationship. In addition to addressing a wide range of workplace environments, series titles also include works by authors writing about processes and practices relating to knowledge services. Others explore, as here, the growth and development of specific tools of value to knowledge services practitioners and knowledge strategists. Stan Garfield is one of the most respected world-renowned experts in the development of the communities-of-practice concept. He is particularly recognized as the founder, in 2005, of the SIKM Leaders Community, a global organization of knowledge management practitioners, open to anyone with a legitimate interest in the field. The goal of the community, as Stan puts it, is for participants to share experiences and insights for implementing knowledge management and, with the growth of knowledge services in recent years, for recognizing and applying the principles of knowledge services and knowledge strategy within knowledge-focused organizations. The SIKM Leaders Community meets online once each month, and with over 800 members, important topics are always under discussion. In addition to his work with SIKM Leaders, Garfield is a regular presenter at KMWorld, APQC, and other conferences, and he is a regular webinar presenter for Lucidea and multiple clients. As he demonstrates in Handbook of Community Management: A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice, his perspective about communities of practice is especially relevant throughout the management environment, especially since community management has become so important in knowledge management and knowledge services programs, in customer relations, in brand advocacy, and in social media strategy. The book is a practical guide, with specific advice on principles, techniques, and fundamental concepts of community management. As such, it can be used by a wide range of KM, knowledge services, and communities of practice professionals. It is destined to become the definitive handbook for all community management practitioners. A Technical Note: At the bottom of the first page of each chapter readers will find a URL, for ease in viewing the book electronically. When entered online, an electronic version of the chapter is available for qualified viewers. Guy St. Clair Series Editor

Preface Community management has become important in knowledge services programs, customer relations, brand advocacy, and social media strategy. The purpose of this book is to help knowledge services leaders launch and lead communities programs as part of their initiatives, to help community managers do their jobs successfully, and to provide a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of communities of practice. Knowledge services is an approach that streamlines managing an organization’s intellectual capital by converging information management, knowledge management, and strategic learning into a single enterprise-wide discipline. Knowledge strategists put the people affected by knowledge services and the knowledge strategy first. This people-focused approach to knowledge services focuses on the people and how they collaborate to share knowledge. Communities are fundamental to a knowledge services approach: they engage people to deliver value to the organization. Communities enable a wide variety of knowledge services activities, including gathering and disseminating content, asking and answering questions, solving problems, finding experts, transferring knowledge and learning about a subject. This book provides an in-depth tutorial on how to make communities work to really improve business performance. It covers principles and proven practices that ensure community success and longevity, provides tips and techniques for leading communities and communities programs that the reader can apply immediately, looks at different types of communities and the technologies that support them, and illustrates by sharing a number of real-world examples of communities in practice. Communities are groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another. According to Richard McDermott, healthy communities have a driving purpose, clear activities, a sense of accomplishment, and high management expectations. The heart of a community of practice includes peer-to-peer relationships, responsibility for stewarding a body of knowledge, membership which crosses boundaries, and room for dealing with whatever comes up. Communities connect people with related interests so that they can share with one another, innovate, reuse each other’s ideas, collaborate, and learn together. Starting a community is an excellent first step in launching a knowledge services initiative and can be used as a building block for more elaborate functionality. Communities enable knowledge to flow between people. Community members share new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions. The community can innovate through brainstorming, building on each other’s https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-203

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ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments. Reusing solutions is enabled through asking and answering questions, applying shared insights, and retrieving posted material. Members collaborate through threaded discussions, conversations, and interactions. And they learn from other members of the community; from invited guest speakers about successes, failures, case studies, and new trends; and through mentoring. One of the keys to the success for any community is effective community management. Community management is leading a community of practice so that it achieves its objectives, it remains active, its members benefit from participating in it, and its members adhere to its published code of conduct. This book is based on my experience in managing communities, leading communities programs, and leading knowledge services for over 20 years. It is a practical guide, and you can start applying its lessons immediately. It can be used by a wide range of knowledge services and communities of practice professionals. These include knowledge managers, knowledge management program leaders, knowledge services leaders, knowledge services evangelists, community managers, community evangelists, communities program managers, collaboration program managers, collaboration evangelists, Enterprise Social Network (ESN) administrators, social business leaders, social media strategists, brand specialists, and anyone providing instruction or advice to these people.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Guy St. Clair for his encouragement and for including this book in the Knowledge Services series for which he is the editor. Thanks to John Ryan and Jana Fritsche for doing a great job editing the book. I want to acknowledge those who worked with me on knowledge services and communities at Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard: Patti Anklam, Nancy Settle-Murphy, Max Bromley, Earle Craigie, John Tohline, Andrew Gent, Bruce Karney, Bernard Hennecker, Marcus Funke, Birgit Gobi, and Fred Bals. And at Deloitte: Lee Romero, Curtis Conley, Ray Sims, Adriaan Jooste, and John Hagel. I want to especially thank Lee Romero for his research, analysis, writing, presenting, and collaboration. I very much appreciate those quoted in this book: Richard McDermott, George Santayana, Lew Platt, Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Richard Millington, Arthur “Red” Motley, Mukund Mohan, Kai Riemer, Jan Finke, Dirk Hovorka, Arthur Shelley, Shawn Callahan, David Smith, Matt Moore, Lee Romero, Jakob Nielsen, Bradley Carron-Arthur, John Cunningham, Kathleen Griffiths, Nancy Dixon, Sue Hanley, Eric Ziegler, Bruce Karney, and Seth Godin. Thanks to Bruce Karney, Alice MacGillivray, Tony Moore, Fred Nickols, Chris Riemer, Lee Romero, Reed Stuedemann, and Luis Suarez for their comments and suggestions used in Chapter 2. Many thanks to those who have helped me launch and manage communities: Raj Datta, Sue Hanley Sanjay Swarup, Steve Wieneke, Karla Phlypo, Steve Kaukonen, Lee Romero, Susan Ostreicher, Linda Hummel, Kate Pugh, Patti Anklam, and John Hovell. And a final word of thanks to my family for their love and support: my wife, Barb Hayes; our children and their spouses, Roger and Cristi Garfield, Tracy and Matt Kahlscheuer, and Kathy Garfield; and my siblings and their spouses, Ann and David Olszewski, Joan Garfield and Michael Luxenberg, and David Garfield.

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Contents Series editor’s foreword: About knowledge services Preface

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Acknowledgements

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services Chapter 2 Ten principles for communities

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Chapter 3 Creating, building, and sustaining communities Chapter 4 Types of communities

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Chapter 5 Use cases for communities

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Chapter 6 The community creation process Chapter 7 Preventing redundant communities

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Chapter 8 The role of the communities program manager Chapter 9 The role of the community manager

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Chapter 10 Community goals, measurements, and incentives Chapter 11 The 90-9-1 rule of thumb for community participation

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Chapter 12 Culture and communities Chapter 13 Tools for communities

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Chapter 14 Examples of communities Chapter 15 20 Pitfalls to avoid

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Appendix: Resources for learning more about communities About the Author Index

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services Communities program managers need to be able to passionately describe the end-state vision for their communities program and its role in knowledge services. Community managers need to do the same for their communities. What does the program look like when it is working well? How does a successful community operate? Establish a vision for how communities should work, and relentlessly pursue making that vision a reality. An important part of articulating your vision is being able to explain the benefits of communities and knowledge services. You can use these visions and benefits as is, adapt them to your environment, or create entirely new ones that fit your circumstances. Whichever way you do it, be ready to deliver a concise pitch on a moment’s notice that powerfully conveys the reasons for implementing and sustaining a communities program as part of knowledge services.

A vision for communities Posting in communities is the preferred way to share information, ask and answer questions, and seek assistance. A single global platform is available, including a master community directory, standard sites for all communities, and a standard set of tools for discussions, communications, events, and other forms of collaboration. There is one (and only one) community directory for all people in the organization, and it lists all available communities. There is a user-friendly process for requesting and creating new communities. There is one (and only one) community for every subject of importance to the organization, its businesses, and its people, and each one of these communities has 100 or more members. This means that a single, global, cross-functional community is available for each major specialty, role, and focus area. Everyone belongs to at least one community, including the one most relevant to their work, and possibly other communities. All community members pay attention to the discussions and activities by setting email or other notifications for the community, checking regularly online, or through other effective methods. Whenever a community member sees a question or a request for a resource to which they can respond with assistance, they do so. All community managers actively monitor their communities to ensure that questions are answered, new threads and replies are regularly added, and that posted content is appropriate. Anyone needing help, an answer to question, content, an expert, or information on what the firm has done and can do can post in a community threaded discussion https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-001

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services

and receive a helpful reply within 24 hours, ensured by active monitoring of threaded discussions and follow-up by community managers. When other channels such as email are used to share, ask, or find, those who receive these messages redirect them to the most relevant communities. Each community offers a site, a calendar, frequent events, useful news and content, and active discussions. Everyone can interact with communities in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile client, desktop client, or web browser. When someone takes the time to share useful information, they receive positive responses in the form of likes, replies, and praise. People post in open, public communities whenever possible, and only use private Enterprise Social Network (ESN) groups or email distribution lists for truly private interactions. Leaders routinely post, reply, like, and praise in the community, and don’t just use it for formal communications or events.

A vision for knowledge services The vision for communities detailed above is realized. Everyone in the enterprise works out loud. They create spaces for observable work and narrate their work by posting in communities. People, process, and technology elements are in place to enable everyone to conveniently share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn. A single global platform is available, with access to community sites, websites, team sites, content repositories, and collaboration tools. Everyone can interact with the platform in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile client, desktop client, or web browser. Everyone can easily find, follow, be made aware of, and share what is going on in the Enterprise Social Network (ESN), activity stream, blogosphere, enterprise wiki, content repositories, threaded discussion, and other similar technologies. People are recognized, rewarded, and promoted if they share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest, and leaders set a good example by doing so themselves. What one part of the firm knows, the rest of the firm knows. Different parts of the firm routinely work together. Ideas are solicited and implemented. High levels of trust and transparency exist. Leadership engages with all levels of the firm’s members. People work out loud and interact with people they didn’t know before. Individuals learn effectively. Decisions are made quickly and effectively. It’s easy to find information and resources. Open communications are made frequently and widely. Redundant effort is avoided, and mistakes are not repeated. Scarce expertise is made widely available. Clients see how knowledge is used for their benefit, and sales and delivery are

Benefits of communities

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accelerated. Innovation and growth are stimulated. Morale is high, the firm’s reputation is strong, and the firm thrives.

Benefits of communities Communities provide benefits to their members and to the organization. They enable members to learn from other members; share new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions; reuse solutions through asking and answering questions, applying shared insights, and retrieving posted material; collaborate through conversations and interactions; and innovate through brainstorming, building on each other’s ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments. The organization benefits by having a reliable place where people with questions and problems can be directed to get answers and solutions, a searchable archive of the discussions, and a way for people to learn about their specialty and to develop in it. The broader the membership in a community, the greater the benefit to the organization. This is due to having the widest possible range of perspectives, the greatest possible number of people to answer questions and solve problems, and greater leverage of all knowledge shared. Providing a way for questions to be asked and answers to be supplied is a key function of communities. Members post questions such as “has anyone done this before?”, “does anyone know how to do this?”, and “where can I find this?”, and other members respond with answers, suggestions, and pointers to more information. Another use of communities is sharing insights, techniques, and innovations with community members. Posting a tip on how a problem was solved, a customer was helped, or a breakthrough was achieved allows many others to reuse that knowledge in other contexts. Additional benefits result from the lively exchange of ideas, regular community events, and content contributions from members. Communities expand the capabilities and improve the performance of their members. They can be used to analyze the knowledge-related sources of uneven performance across units performing similar tasks and work to bring everyone up to the highest standard. Communities can diagnose and address current and recurring business problems whose root causes span different organizations. They transcend organizational boundaries to knit the whole system together around core knowledge requirements. Communities link and coordinate unconnected activities and initiatives addressing a similar knowledge domain. They connect local pockets of expertise and isolated professionals. Cultivating communities in strategic areas is a practical way to manage knowledge as an asset, just as systematically as companies manage other critical assets.

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services

Communities are for cross-organizational interaction. They enable their members to share beyond their immediate teams and personal networks to reach everyone who might benefit from what they share. Communities can stimulate innovation, building on one another’s work to implement improvements. They encourage reuse, taking advantage of what has already been learned and accomplished. Collaboration is at the core of what communities do, helping members work together across boundaries for the common good. Communities are a good way to crowdsource, getting help and resources from people you don’t know. They enable learning together, allowing members to gain information they were not seeking but is valuable to know. Communities are the most effective and efficient way to share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest. Compared to using email to get answers and resources, communities are faster for receiving responses, yield more answers that are more varied and diverse, and have a much greater probability of success. Unlike email or other one-to-one or one-to-few messaging alternatives, you don’t have to know whom to ask for help. In fact, it’s likely that answers will come from people you don’t know and wouldn’t think to ask, but who are the optimal sources of expertise. Communities readily make possible Working Out Loud (WOL), a growing movement that encourages employees to narrate their work and broadcast what they’re doing so others can interact, respond, learn, and apply that knowledge to their own work. WOL combines observable work (creating spaces where others can engage with your content) with narrating your work (posting in social software). Leading by example and persuading others helps create an open culture of truth, transparency, and trust, provides feedback loops, and spans organizational boundaries.

Benefits of working out loud WOL in communities can trigger serendipitous connections through transparency. Here are reasons for Working Out Loud rather than privately, through email messages, or in closed groups: Multiple people may need to know what is going on, to read updates, and to reply. You don’t know who all of them are. With WOL, you can receive replies from all relevant people and see all people who replied, unlike forwarded email. Working Out Loud provides transparency in thinking, decisions, and processes. You can receive inputs and feedback from anyone willing to contribute. It allows you to vet ideas in public by allowing others to weigh in, which helps achieve consensus. By leading by example, you encourage others to also work out loud as well. WOL enables and exploits serendipity. You can meet up with people wherever you are, who otherwise won’t know you are going to be there. This allows you to exchange and support ideas with other people attending the same events and allows those

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unable to attend to also benefit. Participating in recurring online chats leads to gaining new colleagues. Others can benefit from seeing discussions. You can receive advice from unexpected sources and pointers to useful information based on the relevant experience of others. It also helps everyone to learn and develop. The act of WOL results in keeping a record of discussions. A single thread with all replies can be maintained in one place, open to all who have an interest. Everyone can easily refer back to the discussion through a public link. Those who work out loud can build their personal brands. They can maintain a journal of their thinking for a permanent record, reuse their thoughts for blog posts and book chapters, and enhance their reputation as thought leaders. Applying the principles of WOL avoids fragmentation of discussions into different email threads and different sets of people. There is no need to forward messages. It prevents having different people on different threads and out-of-sync replies. If you adopt WOL, you move from old ways of working to new and better ones. You model the open way of working, demonstrate trust, and help flatten out the hierarchy.

Benefits of knowledge services Enable better and faster decision-making. By delivering relevant information at the time of need through structure, search, subscription, syndication, and support, a knowledge services environment can provide the basis for making good decisions. Collaboration brings the power of large numbers, diverse opinions, and varied experience to bear when decisions need to be made. The reuse of knowledge in repositories allows decisions to be based on actual experience, large sample sizes, and practical lessons learned. Make it easy to find relevant information and resources. When faced with a need to respond to a customer, solve a problem, analyze trends, assess markets, benchmark against peers, understand competition, create new offerings, plan strategy, and to think critically, you typically look for information and resources to support these activities. If it is easy and fast to find what you need when you need it, you can perform all of these tasks efficiently. Reuse ideas, documents, and expertise. Once you have developed an effective process, you want to ensure that others use the process each time a similar requirement arises. If someone has written a document or created a presentation that addresses a recurring need, it should be used in all future similar situations. When members of your organization have figured out how to solve a common problem, know how to deliver a recurring service, or have invented a new product, you want that same solution, service, and product to be replicated as much as possible. Just as the recycling of materials is good for the environment, reuse is good for organizations because it minimizes rework, prevents problems, saves time, and accelerates progress.

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services

Avoid redundant effort. No one likes to spend time doing something over again. But they do so all the time for a variety of reasons. Avoiding duplication of effort saves time and money, keeps employee morale up, and streamlines work. By not spending time reinventing the wheel, you can have more time to invent something new. Prevent making the same mistakes twice. George Santayana said, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we will experience them over and over again. Knowledge services allows us to share lessons learned, not only about successes, but also about failures. In order to do so, we must have a culture of trust, openness, and rewarding willingness to talk about what we have done wrong. The potential benefits are enormous. If NASA learns why a space shuttle exploded, it can prevent recurrences and save lives. If FEMA learns what went wrong in responding to Hurricane Katrina, it can reduce the losses caused by future disasters. If engineers learn why highways and buildings collapsed during a previous earthquake, they can design new ones to better withstand future earthquakes. If you learn that your last bid or estimate was underestimated by 50%, you can make the next one more accurate and thus earn a healthy profit instead of incurring a large loss. Take advantage of existing expertise and experience. Teams benefit from the individual skills and knowledge of each member. The more complementary the expertise of the team members, the greater the power of the team. In large organizations, there are people with widely varying capabilities and backgrounds, and there should be a benefit from this. But as the number of people increases, it becomes more difficult for each individual to know about everyone else. So, even though there are people with knowledge who could help other people, they don’t know about each other. The late Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, is widely quoted as saying “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” Knowing what others know can be very helpful at a time of need, because you learn from their experience and apply it to your current requirements. Communicate important information widely and quickly. Almost everyone today is an information worker, either completely or partially. We all need information to do our jobs effectively, but we also suffer from information overload from an increasing variety of sources. How can we get information that is targeted, useful, and timely without drowning in a sea of email, having to visit hundreds of websites, or reading through tons of printed material? Knowledge services helps address this problem through personalized portals, targeted subscriptions, customized feeds, tagging, and enterprise search engines. Promote standard, repeatable processes and procedures. If these have been defined, they should always be followed. This allows employees to learn how things are done, leads to predictable, high-quality results, and enables large organizations to be consistent in how work is performed. By providing a process for creating, storing, communicating, and using standard processes and procedures, employees will be able to use them routinely.

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Provide methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples. These are the building blocks supporting repeatable processes and procedures. Using them consistently streamlines work, improves quality, and ensures compatibility across the organization. Make scarce expertise widely available. If there is a resource in great demand due to having a skill that is in short supply, knowledge services can help make that resource available to the entire organization. Ways of doing so include community threaded discussions, training events, ask the expert systems, recorded presentations, white papers, blogs, podcasts, and videos. Show customers how knowledge is used for their benefit. In competitive situations, it is important to be able to differentiate yourself from other firms. Demonstrating to potential and current customers that you have widespread expertise and have ways of bringing it to bear for their benefit can help convince them to start or continue doing business with you. Conversely, failure to do so could leave you vulnerable to competitors who can demonstrate their knowledge services capabilities and benefits. Accelerate delivery to customers. Speed of execution is another important differentiator among competitors. All other things being equal, the company that can deliver sooner will win. Knowledge sharing, reuse and innovation can significantly reduce the time to deliver a proposal, product, or service to a customer. And that translates into increased win rates, add-on business, and new customers. Enable the organization to leverage its size. As an organization grows, the increasing size is only a benefit if the knowledge of all employees can be used. Through the use of tools such as communities, expertise locators, and repositories, the full power of a large enterprise can be exploited. Make the organization’s best problem-solving experiences reusable. Consistently applying proven practices, also known as best practices or good practices, can significantly improve the results of any firm. For example, if a manufacturing plant in one part of the world has figured out how to prevent the need for product rework, and all other plants around the world adopt this practice, savings will flow directly to the bottom line. By establishing a process for defining, communicating, and replicating proven practices, an enterprise takes advantage of what it learns about solving problems. Stimulate innovation and growth. Most businesses want to increase their revenues, but it becomes increasingly difficult as industries mature and competition increases. Creating new knowledge through effective knowledge sharing, collaboration, and information delivery can stimulate innovation. If you achieve this and many of the other benefits enabled by knowledge services, you should be able to achieve growth.

Critical success factors A good vision should be easy to remember, told with passion, and convey a powerful story that the listener will relate to and be moved by. You will repeat it many times, so be ready to deliver it convincingly on a moment’s notice.

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Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services

The benefits of communities should be highly relevant to your organization. You should be able to use them as part of your vision, to identify objectives, and to define goals and measurements. The benefits of Working Out Loud should be part of your communities vision. And communities should be a part of the vision for every knowledge services program.

Chapter 2 Ten principles for communities 1 Communities should be independent of organization structure. They are based on what members want to interact on Some organizations try to align communities to the organization structure. They try to control communities from the top and assign topics, leaders, and membership based on business unit, function, geography, client, market offering, or initiative. Communities should be based on topics which use easily recognized terminology, not on organization structure. Communities should be organized around industrystandard, universal topics with which members can identify in their specialties and roles. Organizations are best served by providing informational sites based on organization structure or internal terminology. These sites are primarily to provide news and content for members of the organization. Communities are best served by providing collaborative capabilities, such as threaded discussions and meetings.

2 Communities are different from teams. They are based on topics, not on assignments Teams include workstreams, agile squads, operating units, task forces, committees, initiatives, and projects. Communities form around people who share a common specialty or interest. Teams share some characteristics, but they are not self-forming. Communities exist to help their members better do their jobs and to deepen their skills and expertise. Teams exist to get work done for the organization.

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Chapter 2 Ten principles for communities

Table 1 compares and contrasts communities and teams. Table 1: Comparison of Communities and Teams. Communities

Teams

Purpose

∙ Learning ∙ Problem-solving ∙ Innovation

∙ Mission accomplishment

Motivation

∙ Voluntary

∙ Assigned

Duration

∙ Ongoing

∙ Finite

Interaction

∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

∙ Sharing documents and files ∙ Using a shared calendar ∙ Attending regular conference calls and meetings ∙ Maintaining a list of team members ∙ Editing shared documents

Alignment

∙ Practice ∙ Interest

Asking and answering questions Sharing knowledge Reusing good ideas Solving problems for one another Brainstorming new ideas

∙ Responsibility

3 Communities are not sites, team spaces, blogs, or wikis. They are people who choose to interact Community sites are different from team sites, collaborative team spaces, organizational intranet sites, and standalone blogs and wikis. Community sites may use collaboration spaces, blogs, and wikis, but these tools are merely supporting the members, not defining them. Communities are not the same as social networks, readers of the same blog, or editors of the same wiki page. Such groups of connected people lack some of the fundamental requirements for communities (see Principle 10). Communities are made up of people and are supported by processes and technology. You can have a community with no technology at all, but most communities are well-served by using the SCENT tools – Site, Calendar, Events, News, Threads (see Principle 10).

4 Community leadership and membership should be voluntary. You can suggest that people join but should not force them to Community managers need to volunteer, not be assigned. Members need to join voluntarily, not be assigned without their permission. People want to exercise their

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own discretion on which communities to join, whether or not to join, and when to join. They will resent being subscribed by someone else and will resist attempts to make them do something they did not choose to do. The passion of the leaders and members for the topic of the community is what sustains it. When people are told to lead or join a community and they lack the desire to do so, the community is unlikely to hold events, conduct stimulating discussions, or maintain interest of the members. To entice members to join communities, the leaders should make membership appealing. Create communities for which potential members want to be included in discussions, meetings, and other interactions – make it so they don’t want to miss out on what is going on. Leaders need to meet the SHAPE expectations and members need to perform the SPACE activities (see Principle 10). Both are more likely to happen if voluntarily agreed to.

5 Communities should span boundaries. They should cross functions, organizations, and geographic locations Communities should generally be open to any person aligned with the defined purpose of the community. By transcending organizational structures and boundaries, communities take advantage of diverse experiences, perspectives, and talents. Those who wish to start a community frequently assert that it is just for one business unit, location, language, or role. For example, a product-focused community that is just for technical people, not sales or marketing people. There may be discussions which are of greater interest to the technical people, but there are also customer problems which the salespeople may encounter which may be solved by the technical people. Or there may be technical discussions which can help the marketing people become more knowledgeable. Another example is a community which is set up in one country and wants to limit membership to that country. This would deny the possibility of people from other countries learning from or contributing to the community. In general, keeping out people who could benefit from membership and offering help to those already in the community hurts both groups. When I launched the SIKM Leaders Community in 2005, it was intended for knowledge management (KM) leaders at consulting and systems integration firms, hence the title of SIKM. It soon became apparent that there was nothing being discussed that could not be of benefit to any KM practitioner, and so the scope was broadened to include anyone who is part of a knowledge management initiative. The benefits of being more inclusive have been many, including a wider range of presenters on the monthly calls, participants in the online discussions, experiences, and perspectives.

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6 Minimize redundancy in communities. Before creating a new one, check if an existing community already addresses the topic Some people believe that all social media should be offered on a self-serve basis and that anyone should be able to create a new community of practice. Unlike team sites, collaborative team spaces, blogs, wikis, and other social media, the creation of new communities should be reviewed by a coordinating group. Reviewing requests for new communities has multiple benefits. Redundant communities can be prevented. A central directory of communities can be maintained, helping potential members find the right ones to join. By keeping the number of communities to a reasonable minimum, a long and confusing list for users to choose from is avoided. Silos which isolate people who could benefit from being connected are avoided. Critical mass is achieved, helping to ensure that each community succeeds and takes advantage of scale (see Principle 7). When I took over the HP KM program, there was a very long and bewildering list of communities, most of which were inactive. Potential members could not easily determine which communities were alive and which were dead, and as a result, didn’t join any. By deleting the dead ones, creating a streamlined list, and reviewing requests for new ones, the communities program completely turned around and took off. Most requests for new communities that address a topic already covered by an existing one should be responded to by suggesting that the requester become a comanager of the existing one. This harnesses the requester’s enthusiasm, injects new energy into the existing community, and prevents the fragmentation of members into isolated silos. See Chapter 7 for more on preventing redundant communities.

7 Communities need a critical mass of members. Take steps to build membership A community usually needs at least 100 members, with 200 being a better target. Why should there be at least 100 people? In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, etc. If a community has only 10 members, that means that only one person will be doing most of the activity. In a community of 100, you can expect around 10 people to be very active, and that is probably the minimum number for success. As the community grows in size, it becomes more likely that experts belong, that questions will be answered, and that a variety of topics will be discussed. The greater the number of members in a community, the greater the potential benefit. A community benefits from a broad range of perspectives. If it has only a small number of like-minded members, it is unlikely that innovative ideas, lively debates, and breakthrough thinking will result.

8 Communities should start with as broad a scope as is reasonable

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The rule of thumb is that 10% of the members will participate at all, and only 1% will regularly be active in discussions and presentations. In small communities, 1% can be rounded to zero. If only a handful of people speak up, that will not usually sustain momentum. The larger the membership, the more likely that any question posed to the community will be answered. By including as much of the available expertise as possible in the community, its ability to respond increases accordingly. Increasing the size of a community yields more potential speakers at community events and conference calls. It results in greater leverage, since for the same effort, more people realize the benefits. And it helps more people to become comfortable in the community model, which can lead them to join other communities, recruit new members, and launch related communities of interest. See Chapter 11 for more on the 90-9-1 rule of thumb for community participation.

8 Communities should start with as broad a scope as is reasonable. Separate communities can be spun off if warranted Try to avoid parochialism. Local organizations tend to think of creating local communities and sharing within them but are reluctant to expand to a global community. Encourage communities to be broader and to include other countries, other parts of the organization, customers, partners, and former employees. This may be hard to sell, even though wider membership will probably make the communities more successful by supplying more answers to questions, additional perspectives, and more varied experience. Here are rules of thumb to follow. Initially, the broadest possible approach to a new community should be supported and narrowing either by geography or function should be discouraged. Local chapters can be created as subsets of larger communities. Start with the broadest feasible topics and narrow down as needed. Spin off narrower sub-topics only when a high volume of discussion or communication makes it necessary. Suggest that overlapping communities with similar topics be combined, either directly or with one as a subset of the other. Challenge those with a niche topic to prove that it warrants its own community. Start as part of a broader community, play an active role in leading discussions and events, and prove a high level of interest. If the volume of activity becomes high, spin off a separate community. If the volume of activity does not become high, remain in the community until it does.

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9 Communities need to be actively nurtured. Community managers need to create, build, and sustain communities The first thing to do is to decide what topic you wish to address in a community. Pick a compelling topic that will be of interest to many people in your organization. The potential members must be passionate about the subject for collaboration, and it must be relevant to their work. You need a committed leader for the community. Volunteer to be the community manager or identify someone else with the right attributes. The community manager should know the subject, have energy for stimulating collaboration, have sufficient time to devote to leadership, and then regularly spend time meeting the SHAPE goals – Schedule, Host, Answer, Post, Expand (see Principle 10). Keep the community active. Implement and manage the SCENT tools – Site, Calendar, Events, News, Threads (see Principle 10). Perform the SHAPE tasks – Schedule, Host, Answer, Post, Expand (see Principle 10). Regularly suggest to those with questions or interest in your topic that they join the community and use its tools. See Chapter 3 for more on creating, building, and sustaining communities.

10 Communities can be created, led, and supported using TARGET: Types, Activities, Requirements, Goals, Expectations, Tools 1.

Types can be used for describing communities, creating a community directory, and helping users readily navigate to the communities which interest them. 2. Activities should be used to explain to community members what it means to be a member of a community and how they should participate. 3. Requirements should be used to decide if a community should be created and if it is likely to succeed. 4. Goals should be set for communities and progress against those goals should be measured and reported. 5. Expectations should be set for community managers to define their role and to ensure that communities are nurtured. 6. Tools should support member interaction. Types can be used for describing communities, creating a community directory, and helping users readily navigate to the communities which interest them. There are five categories that can be used to describe and organize communities: TRAIL – Topic, Role, Audience, Industry, Location: 1. Topic (e.g., Enterprise Applications, Cloud Computing) 2. Role (e.g., Project Management, Software Development)

10 Communities can be created, led, and supported using TARGET

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3. Audience (e.g., Recruits, Women) 4. Industry (e.g., Manufacturing, Telecommunications) or Client (e.g., European Union, US Federal Government) 5. Location (e.g., US, UK) See Chapter 4 for more on community types. Activities should be used to explain to community members what it means to be a member of a community and how they should participate. There are five ways community members should participate: SPACE – Subscribe, Post, Attend, Contribute, Engage: 1. Subscribe: Get email, mobile alerts, or desktop notifications and regularly read the threaded discussions. 2. Post: Start a new thread or reply in a threaded discussion. 3. Attend: Participate in community events. 4. Contribute: Submit content to the community newsletter, blog, wiki, or site. 5. Engage: Ask a question, make a comment, or give a presentation. See Chapter 5 for more on community use cases. Requirements should be used to decide if a community should be created and if it is likely to succeed. There are five elements that communities need: SMILE – Subject, Members, Interaction, Leaders, Enthusiasm: 1. Subject: A specialty to learn and/or collaborate about 2. Members: People interested in the subject 3. Interaction: Meetings, calls, and discussions 4. Leaders: People passionate about the subject who are dedicated to creating, building, and sustaining a community 5. Enthusiasm: Motivation to engage and spend time collaborating and/or learning about the subject See Chapter 6 for more on the community creation process. Goals should be set for communities and progress against those goals should be measured and reported. Unhealthy communities should either be nurtured back to health or retired. There are five ways to measure the success of a communities program: PATCH – Participation, Anecdotes, Tools, Coverage, Health: 1. Participation: percentage of target population which is a member of at least one community 2. Anecdotes: percentage of communities displaying the following on their sites: a. Testimonials by community members on the value of participation b. Stories about the usefulness of the community c. Posts thanking other members for their help

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3. Tools: percentage of communities having all five key tools (see below) 4. Coverage: percentage of desired topics covered by at least one community 5. Health: percentage of communities meeting these criteria: a. At least one post to a threaded discussions per week b. At least one newsletter or blog post per month c. At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter d. At least 100 members e. At least 10 members participating in each event See Chapter 10 for more on community goals and measurements. Expectations should be set for community managers to define their role and to ensure that communities are nurtured. There are five tasks for community managers: SHAPE – Schedule, Host, Answer, Post, Expand: 1. Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events, 2. Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings. 3. Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate. 4. Post: Share information which is useful to the members by posting to the community site, threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter. 5. Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts. See Chapter 9 for more on the role of community managers. Tools should support member interaction. There are five key tools for communities: SCENT – Site, Calendar, Events, News, Threads: 1. Site: home page for reaching new members and sharing information with current ones 2. Calendar: of community events for promoting interaction 3. Events: meetings, conference calls, webinars for interacting personally 4. News: newsletter or blog for ongoing communications and publicity 5. Threads: threaded discussions for interacting virtually See Chapter 13 for more on community tools.

Critical success factors The principles defined in this chapter are critical success factors for communities. They should be reflected in your communities program and applied by all community managers. Refer to them as you launch, build, and sustain your program.

Chapter 3 Creating, building, and sustaining communities Let’s start with the fundamentals. There are five keys to success for a community of practice: 1. A compelling topic: The members and potential members must identify with the topic, be passionate about it, and it must be relevant to their work. 2. A critical mass of members: You usually need at least 100 members, with 200 being a better target. 3. A committed leader: A community manager chooses to spend time leading the community. 4. Regular events: Conference calls, webinars, or in-person meetings are scheduled and held regularly. 5. Active online discussions: Regular posts are made, multiple replies are received, and no questions are left unanswered in the threaded discussions.

Carefully choose the community’s topic Make sure a new community will have all of the SMILE attributes: Subject: A specialty to learn and/or collaborate about; Members: A critical mass of people interested in the subject; Interaction: Meetings, calls, and discussions; Leaders: People passionate about the subject who are dedicated to creating, building, and sustaining a community; and Enthusiasm: Motivation to engage and spend time collaborating and/or learning about the subject. Avoid creating a new community for a topic that is already covered by an existing one. Don’t narrow the scope of the community’s topic by geography or function (e.g., sales, marketing, engineering). Join the existing community instead. If appropriate, create a local chapter as a subset of an existing community.

Select a community manager You need committed leaders for communities. Community managers should know the subject in depth, have energy for stimulating collaboration among the members, and be able to devote sufficient time to leadership activities. These activities include regularly spending time increasing membership, lining up speakers, hosting calls and meetings, asking and answering questions, and posting information that is useful to the members.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-003

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Chapter 3 Creating, building, and sustaining communities

Publicize the community Once your community is established, publicize its existence to help recruit new members. This is an ongoing requirement, because new people will join the organization and need to be informed for the first time, and other people need repeated communications for your message to reach them and to sink in. Ask the leaders of relevant organizations to send a one-time message to all of their people. Ask well-connected people to forward your announcement memo to their distribution lists, social networks, and communities. Send a one-time broadcast message to the entire population containing your target audience. Make sure your message is brief, compelling, and visually appealing. Include a link to the community site and instructions for becoming a new member. Look for all existing distribution lists of people interested in your community’s topic. Use these lists to invite people to join your community. Look for related communities, calls, and sites you can use to promote your community. Ask permission to do so, and then post, present, or send a brief invitation. Speak at a meeting or on a conference call to solicit new members. Use your Enterprise Social Network (ESN) to inform possible members about your community. Post to make them aware of the community and how to join. Use social networking tools and social media to inform possible members about your community. Search personal profiles for people with relevant interests and/or expertise and invite them to join. Write and submit articles to existing newsletters that reach your target audience. Provide a concise description of the community, including its purpose, benefits, events, and tools. Supply an easy-to-use link to follow for more information and to join the community. Solicit success stories of how the community has helped its members and the organization to achieve their goals. Publicize these stories within the community and through articles in various publications and websites. Ensure that your community is included in your organization’s master community directory. Request that a link to your community site be added on all relevant websites. Examples include the intranet home page for your organization, other community sites, related links pages, and other intranet pages related to the community’s topic. The provided link should go to a page that quickly grabs potential members’ interest, shows them the available resources, succinctly describes the benefits, and makes it easy to join the community. Offer an incentive to join the community. For example, a member will be chosen at random to receive a book about the community’s topic. Or the one hundredth member will receive the latest smartphone. Or everyone who joins receives a complimentary subscription to a relevant industry periodical. You can also recognize existing community members who recruit the most members.

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Try all these tactics and keep track of the ones that yield the best results. Periodically repeat each one. Here are ten potential communications vehicles for community publicity, with examples of each:

Figure 1: Website: My personal Google Site.

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Figure 2: Collaborative team space: HP KM Leads Team Space.

Figure 3: Community portal: APQC Knowledge Base.

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Figure 4: Wiki: SIKM Boston PBworks wiki (Boston Local Chapter of the SIKM Leaders Community).

Figure 5: Threaded discussions: KM4Dev Community DGroups discussion (KM for Development).

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Figure 6: Regular conference call: SIKM Leaders Community monthly call.

Figure 7: Blog: My personal Quora blog.

Publicize the community

Figure 8: Newsletter: The Gurteen Knowledge Community’s monthly newsletter.

Figure 9: Submit articles to publications: RealKM Magazine.

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Figure 10: Request that links to your site be added to a community directory: HP Community Directory.

Build community membership The community will need a critical mass of members. You usually need at least 100 members, with 200 being a better target. A community benefits from a broad range of perspectives. If it has only a small number of like-minded members, it is unlikely that innovative ideas, lively debates, and breakthrough thinking will result. Only 10% or fewer of the members will usually be active in discussions and presentations. In small communities, only a handful of people will speak up, and that will not usually sustain momentum. The larger the membership, the more likely that any question posed to the community will be answered. By including as much of the available expertise as possible in the community, its ability to respond increases accordingly. Increasing the size of a community yields more potential speakers at community events and conference calls. It results in greater leverage, because for the same effort, more people realize the benefits. And it helps more people to become comfortable in the community model, which can lead them to join other communities, recruit new members, and launch related communities. To build membership, try to take advantage of existing networks. Is there an existing team that could become the core of a new community? For example, is there a team whose mission aligns with the topic for the new community, or whose members practice the community’s specialty? If so, these can become the initial members.

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Is there an existing distribution list of people interested in the topic? If so, use that list to invite people to join your community. Send a message explaining the benefits of the community and how to join. After new members join, be sure that some useful posts are made to demonstrate the value of the community. Skills inventories and expertise locators can be mined to find potential members. Look for people who have declared a specialty, expertise, or an interest in the topic, and invite them to join the community and subscribe to its threaded discussions. If you are conducting user surveys about other aspects of a knowledge services initiative, you can include questions about topics of interest and communities that users would like to join. Use the results of such surveys to invite members to join associated communities. Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be used to identify people who are linked but who may not be part of a formal community. These people can be invited join the community. Regularly suggest to those with questions or interest in your topic that they join your community. Attract members by word of mouth. Create communities for which potential members want to be included in discussions, meetings, and other interactions. Make it so they don’t want to miss out on what is going on. After new members join the community, you should periodically ask them to help recruit others. Potential members can be invited to attend events to see if they would like to join, check out the threaded discussions, or review community content for possible use.

Keep the community active Many communities fail because after the initial effort to create them wanes, there is limited effort devoted to sustaining activity. Help the community thrive by regularly using a variety of interventions.

Schedule and host events Hold a regular conference call with a scheduled speaker. The purpose is to stay connected, share progress, reuse good ideas, and collaborate on common needs. The community can decide on the desired frequency, but it should be often enough to keep the event in the minds of the members. Speakers can be from within or outside the community. Member speakers can share their experiences and insights. External speakers can be thought leaders, members of other organizations with diverse perspectives, or experts on topics of interest.

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Speakers can give presentations, lead discussions, or demonstrate concepts. Topics can include proven practices, success stories, lessons learned from failure, emerging concepts, controversial ideas, tips, techniques, insights, and methods. In addition to presentations, calls can be used for a member to request feedback on a presentation, document, website, idea, program, or problem. Members should be encouraged to lead discussions on any topic of interest, or provide updates on a project, program, initiative, or organization. You can also host themed calls, where multiple speakers discuss the same subject. Make it easy for people to attend the calls, and minimize time wasted due to technology challenges. Record the calls and post the recordings so that they are available to those unable to attend, and for future reference. Post agendas ahead of time using an events calendar and meeting agenda pages in team spaces. Upload presentations in advance so no one needs to ask about this during the call. Send reminder messages a week before and the day before the call. Prime the pump prior to the call by asking others to ask questions or share their thoughts. Hold periodic events such as face-to-face meetings and training sessions. Meeting in person at least occasionally is essential to building trust. Members who have met, socialized, and learned about each other’s personal interests will have a much easier time collaborating thereafter. Spending more time together than is available on recurring conference calls allows for deeper learning to occur.

Post and reply in the threaded discussions Post at least once a week to the community’s threaded discussions. Include a summary of a community event, a useful link, or a thought-provoking topic to stimulate discussion. By doing this, you will keep the community in the minds of the members. To those browsing the community tools to see if they wish to join, frequent posts serve as an indicator of community health. And some members will typically respond to your posts and useful discussions will ensue. Lay the foundation for effective use of threaded discussions. Enable posting and replying by email or mobile devices. Seed the discussions with example posts. Recruit other key community members to also post and reply. Set clear expectations for the community’s threaded discussions. Members should subscribe by email, mobile alerts, or other regularly visible notifications. If a member posts a question, make sure that it gets a response within 24 hours. If your community has a regular call, leverage the threaded discussions as a means of continuing the conversation, or providing resources covered on the call. Set a calendar reminder to post every week. Post a summary of a community event, a useful link (save these in a list and share one each week), or a thoughtprovoking topic to stimulate discussion.

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Look for relevant discussions that are taking place in email exchanges, in public distribution lists, in other collaboration channels or communities, or outside of your organization. Then redirect those discussions to your threaded discussions, copy or link to the key points, or summarize the highlights. By drawing these external discussions into your community, you will provide useful insights, demonstrate the value of membership, and possibly attract new members. If you receive questions via email or instant messaging that the entire community can benefit from, ask the requester to post in the threaded discussions and reply there. Regularly suggest to those with questions or interest in your topic that they join your community and use its tools. These people may surface in multiple ways. They may send you a question or call you with a problem. Or they might contact a knowledge help desk looking for help. Or someone who knows of your expertise in the topic may refer someone else to you, either by forwarding an email message or by providing your name and phone number. However the question or interest is identified, it represents an excellent opportunity to make the initiator aware of the community and use the community to respond. This builds credibility, adds new members, and creates value for the organization. Only 10% or fewer of the members will usually be active in discussions and presentations. The other 90% are often referred to as lurkers. Lurking is okay, because it allows those members who are new, inexperienced, or shy to learn from the more active members. Lurkers play an important role in communities as the beneficiaries of much of what is being discussed by others. They can benefit from seeing how others solved problems, listening to speakers, and reading posted materials. So, while active members are essential to a community’s success, so are silent ones. Send out a regular newsletter to stay in communication with members. Remind members about upcoming calls and summarize recent calls. Link to key information, reusing content already contributed to the community. Call attention to recent threaded discussions, blog posts of interest, and recently-edited wiki pages.

Sustain the community After a community has been created and developed, it must be nurtured carefully so that it doesn’t stagnate or die. Here are some practical tips for how to sustain communities: Don’t let a few members dominate. Encourage lurkers when they surface with an occasional post. Invite a variety of members to speak during calls and meetings. Publicize contributions from all members.

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Avoid parochialism. Local organizations tend to think of creating local communities and sharing within them but are reluctant to expand to a global community. Encourage communities to be broader and to include other countries, other parts of the organization, customers, partners, and former employees. This may be hard to sell, even though wider membership will probably make the communities more successful by supplying more answers to questions, additional perspectives, and more varied experience. Meet in person, either in a periodic community meeting, or as part of another meeting or training session. Colleagues who see each other regularly are more likely to ask one another for help and to trust each other enough to share documents and other content. Someone who works in the cube next to another person will be likely to visit that colleague to ask for help, to bounce ideas off them, or to ask if they have a document that they can use. They are much less likely to post to a threaded discussion or to contact someone they don’t know personally. Faceto-face meetings help overcome this challenge by introducing members to one another. Aim for a wide variety of speakers, topics, and activities. In community events, don’t always have a presentation. Sometimes schedule a field trip, a discussion, or a social event. Invite outside speakers who hold the attention of the audience. Introduce new topics into threaded discussions. Inject humor and levity to keep things fun. Add an ask-the-expert process for the community. A specific way to use threaded discussions effectively is to ensure posted questions are answered. This is a service level agreement associated with threaded discussions guaranteeing that if you post a question, you will get a response within 24 hours. That response could be the answer to your question (the preferred result), or it could be that the community is working on it and they’ll get back to you later with the answer. Or in some cases, it might be that the community doesn’t think it can answer that question. But at least you’ll get an answer within a specified time and you’ll know whether you need to seek a different avenue. Use existing threaded discussions to reach experts within communities who can reply to questions. This is a typical use of threaded discussions anyway, so adding this capability is simple. To do so, ask the community manager to designate at least two members who are assigned as experts to monitor the threaded discussions. The community manager is usually one of these experts. At least one expert should be on duty every workday. Users can be told to expect an email response within 24 hours with one of the following: the answer to their question, the status of the expert’s search for the answer and when to expect it, or a statement that the answer is unlikely to be provided, but may come from other members. If you use this method, you may not need to implement a separate expertise locator tool.

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Finally, some communities need to be allowed to die. If a community has failed to build its membership, no longer has active members, or no longer has a viable purpose, the right thing to do is to retire it. Move on to another topic of greater current relevance that can attract new members who are passionate about it.

Require community participation Although participation in any individual community should be voluntary, it’s reasonable to ask employees to choose at least one to join and monitor. The power of communities is when all of the people with interest, experience, and expertise in a given topic are all members of the same community. As part of the individual knowledge services goals defined for employees, you may wish to include one to require everyone to belong to at least one community. A very simple way for a knowledge services program to succeed is if all employees join and are active in at least one community. Here is what you can communicate to those who are given this goal to let them know exactly what is expected: One of the performance goals for all employees is to be an active member of at least one community of practice. To get started, visit the community directory website to find the community or communities that match your job. If you have a particular specialty, join the community for that specialty. If you have both a specialty and a role, for example, a storage sales rep, you may wish to join both the storage community and the sales rep community. If you have multiple roles, then join multiple communities. And if you have other topics of interest, join those communities as well. When you subscribe to the community’s threaded discussions, you’ll be in touch with other people in the same specialty so you can start finding out more about things that are of interest to you and the role that you play. And you’ll also have a place where you can ask questions, share your insights, and collaborate with your peers. Being an active community member means not just subscribing to the threaded discussions, which is easy to do, but also regularly thinking about things that you’ve learned that you think others could benefit from knowing, and then taking a moment to post to that community and share that insight. This could take just a few minutes because it’s as easy as creating a simple email message, writing a few comments, and hitting send. By doing this, your peers will benefit from what you shared. Your comments will get entered into the archives, so others who come later to the community can read and benefit from them. By collaborating with your colleagues, you will learn more about your specialty, be able to resolve problems, and earn respect for your expertise.

Include a link to the community directory and to additional documentation. Then send the message to the target audience and post it to the knowledge services program’s website.

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Provide community tools To enable the community to collaborate, offer one or more tools for members to use. People make up the community, and tools support collaboration among the members. See Chapter 13 for details on all community tools. Threaded discussions are the fundamental tool for communities. It’s also valuable to use newsletters, blogs, and wikis. Newsletters should be one page in length and published and distributed every month. They are used to stay in communication with members and remind them about the monthly calls and latest discussion and content. Include links to key information, reusing content already produced, e.g., recent discussion threads, blog posts of interest, and recently edited wiki pages. Blogs provide a chronological archive for the newsletters so they can be readily found and retrieved. They can also be used for announcements, recurring communications, and other articles that are best accessed in lists and archives. Wikis enable collaborative editing. They are good for creating meeting agendas, position papers, and self-maintained lists of resources.

Tell members how they should participate Getting people to join communities is important, but you also need to let them know how to participate once they join. There are two useful acronyms to help you explain this and to help members remember what to do. SPACE: •  Subscribe: Set and monitor notifications via email, mobile alerts, or desktop notifications and regularly read the threaded discussions; •  Post: Start a new thread or reply in the threaded discussions; •  Attend: Participate in community events; •  Contribute: Submit content to the community newsletter, blog, wiki, or site; •  Engage: Ask a question, make a comment, give a presentation, or lead a discussion. SAFARIS: Share, Ask, Find, Answer, Recognize, Inform, Suggest See Chapter 5 for more on community use cases.

Set goals, measure progress, and provide incentives Community program managers should set goals for community managers, who in turn should set goals for their communities. Here is an example of a set of goals for an active community:

Provide useful content

• • • • •

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 At least one threaded discussion post, reply, and new thread per week  At least one newsletter or blog post per month  At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter  At least 100 members and increasing over time  At least 10 members participating in each event

Incentives, including recognition, rewards, and gamification, can be used to help achieve the goals. See Chapter 10 for more on community goals, measurements, and incentives.

Provide useful content Review and refresh community content on a regular basis. Communicate any additions and changes in the newsletter. Solicit content contributions from your membership. You don’t have to produce all of the content yourself. Let members know specifically what is needed and recognize contributors publicly in the newsletter. Ask members for content submissions to the community newsletter, blog, wiki, site, and threaded discussions.

Solicit, find, and publicize success stories One type of content that should be a priority is the success story. These can be obtained in one of three ways. Solicit stories directly from community members, including testimonials on the value of participation and stories about the usefulness of the community. If you have an incentive system, request success story content as part of giving out points for desired behaviors. Monitor community threaded discussions for testimonials on how the community helped a member in a time of need and for posts thanking other members for their help. Then publicize the stories you collect in the community newsletter, blog, and wiki. When capturing success stories, ask the following questions: •  What challenges did you face? •  What community resources did you use? •  How did you use these resources to address these challenges? •  What was the outcome? •  What benefits did you realize from using the resources? (time saved, costs avoided, incremental revenue, problems avoided, increased customer satisfaction, accelerated delivery, innovation, process improvement, etc.)

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Chapter 3 Creating, building, and sustaining communities

 What benefits did you and your organization derive?  Did anyone else benefit as well (e.g., other community members)?  What alternatives (instead of using the community resources) did you consider?  Which alternatives did you try?  If you did not use the community resources, how do you think the outcome would have been different?

Create a separate Enterprise Social Network (ESN) group, list, document, or wiki page called Community Wins. Share threads that are examples of success there, including the highlights of the original query and the subsequent acknowledgement. When someone asks about the value of communities, the proof is right there, in the words of the actual members. At one company where I worked, we had many hundreds of examples collected, and every time I saw a new one, I added it immediately. The typical sequence was: >Can anyone help me? >(Help is provided.) >Thanks a lot! That was just what I needed. Here is an example: >Any tips and insights on knowledge retention? >Thank you very much. The information is very helpful! You can point leaders to the group, list, document, or wiki page, or you can extract examples from it to share in a presentation. It serves as a curated collection, and you can add text to highlight the success when adding new items. An example of collecting success stories is how Slack uses a dedicated Twitter account, @SlackLoveTweets for this purpose.

Critical success factors Here are ten actions community managers should take: 1. Carefully choose the community’s topic. 2. Publicize the community widely. 3. Take steps to increase membership, both initially and on an ongoing basis. 4. Post and reply in the threaded discussions to prime the pump and set the example. 5. Publish and distribute a monthly community newsletter. 6. Schedule and host community events. 7. Provide useful content.

Critical success factors

8. Tell community members how they should participate. 9. Set goals and measure progress for the community. 10. Solicit, find, and publicize success stories about the community.

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Chapter 4 Types of communities At their core, most communities are similar, not different. However, there are times when it is helpful to classify them. When you list communities in a directory, it makes it easier for users to find ones to join by tagging each community with one or more category types. If you group communities by type, you can better understand the landscape and how communities are being used in the organization. And you can suggest different approaches for each type of community to improve their effectiveness. Two types that have traditionally been described are Communities of Interest (CoIs) and Communities of Practice (CoPs). Communities of Interest are for topics that don’t require a lot of formal structure, but need threaded discussions for collaboration and knowledge sharing, typically not work-related. COIs are groups of people who want to learn about a particular topic, or who are passionate about one. They make no commitment to deliver something together. The motivation is to stay current on the topic and to be able to ask and answer questions about it. An example is all people who have an interest in photography. Communities of Practice have a rich and formal set of activities, governance, and structure, and are based on common roles or specialties, typically work-related. CoPs have members with a particular work role or expertise. These communities are focused on developing expertise, skills, and proficiency in the specialty. The motivation is to master the discipline, learn about the specialty, and solve problems together. An example of a role-based community is project management, and an example of an expertisebased community is Microsoft SharePoint. Etienne Wenger-Trayner defined three CoP characteristics that are crucial: The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care about their standing with each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-004

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Chapter 4 Types of communities

The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest – people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. (Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner wenger-trayner.com/introductionto-communities-of-practice) Richard Millington defines five different types of communities: 1. Interest: Communities of people who share the same interest or passion. 2. Action: Communities of people trying to bring about change. 3. Place: Communities of people brought together by geographic boundaries. 4. Practice: Communities of people in the same profession or who undertake the same activities. 5. Circumstance: Communities of people brought together by external events/ situations. (Different Types of Communities by Richard Millington feverbee.com/differenttypes-of-communities) Other types I have seen include communities of: •  Action: People who collaborate to act on a specific set of priorities. •  Circumstance: People who find themselves facing similar situations. •  Concern: People who share a common concern and wish to address it. •  Inquiry: People who want to find out more about a specific matter. •  Intent: People who intend to develop something together. •  Passion: People who are passionate about the same topic. •  Position: People who hold the same position and wish to interact. •  Place: People who live, visit, or care about the same location. •  Purpose: People who share a common mission. Applying the frequently used concept of N Cs of Topic X, I once defined five types of communities: 1. Content-driven: Publish content on a community site. 2. Communicative: Publish content and push updates through a distribution list. 3. Collaborative: Publish content, push updates, and share files in a collaborative team space. 4. Conversational: Publish content, push updates, share files, and have threaded discussions. 5. Comprehensive: Publish content, push updates, share files, have discussions, and use social business tools such as blogs and wikis.

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These had no long-term value but were helpful in sorting out a large number of different uses of the word “community.”

Community types Types can be used for describing communities, creating a community directory, and helping users readily navigate to the communities which interest them. There are five categories that can be used to describe and organize communities: TRAIL – Topic, Role, Audience, Industry, Location. Topic: A specific subject that members practice, have experience in, or have a strong interest in. Topic-based communities are the most common and should be the default type. Examples include cloud computing, security, compensation, change management, and supply chain. Role: A specialty that members perform, have experience in, and identify with. A role-based community focuses on performing the role well, not on subdividing a topic-based community by specialty. Examples include project manager, software developer, auditor, instructor, and leader, Audience: A personal attribute that members have in common. An audience-based community is concerned with things that are unique to that personal attribute, not on subdividing a topic-based community by demographic. Examples include recruits, new hires, women, LGBTQ, and people of color. Industry: A standard grouping of businesses into industries and sectors, or a specific client firm. Industry-based communities are about general industry trends, not on subdividing a topic-based community by industry. Examples include financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, European Union, and U.S. Federal Government. Location: A community focused on a shared geography. A location-based community focuses on geography-specific issues and events, not on subdividing a topic-based community by location. Examples include U.S., Midwest, Germany, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Enterprise social network group types Enterprise Social Network (ESN) groups are often used to support communities. There are additional types of ESN groups beyond community types. Workplace by Facebook classifies groups into these categories: Teams & Projects: Share and discuss updates with your team or project. This group type has an automatically synced chat attached to it, and is closed by default. T&P

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groups have a group member limit of 250 people. There are no group moderators in this group type, only group admins. Automated group membership isn’t allowed. Open Discussions: Give feedback on projects, products or other initiatives. Announcements: Share company events, updates to policies or other company wide announcements. Announcement groups have notifications switched on for all users, regardless of member count. Social & More: Get to know your coworkers in groups for sports, hobbies or other social activities. Buy & Sell: List items for sale, mark items as sold and search for items to buy. Buy & Sell groups can only be created by Workplace Admins. Multi-Company Groups: Allow people from multiple organizations to collaborate. MCGs can be secret or closed. You can invite people from other companies to multi-company groups. (facebook.com/help/work/1653941198177032) There are eight categories that can be used to describe and organize ESN groups: COLLECTS – Community of Practice, Organization, Location, Language, Event, Community of Interest, Team, Support. Community of Practice: Work-related communities, open to anyone who specializes in or who wants to learn more about the subject. CoPs tend to be larger and public, based on a topic, role, or industry from the TRAIL types listed above. An example is social media for all people interested in the topic. Organization: Mostly top-down communications targeted at everyone in a formal organization. They enable few-to-many communication. Organizational groups are mostly public but may serve as a cordoned-off area for people who work together (without outsiders) to make people comfortable. They tend to be larger, including everyone who works in an organization. An example is human resources for all employees who work in that function. Location: Used for people in a specific location or to provide information specific to a location. They tend to be public, which allows visitors to a location to access relevant information about it. Examples include Chicago Office, Canada, and Europe/Middle East/Africa. Language: Used for discussions in a specific language. This could be a local chapter of a global community, set up specifically for local language conversation. Language-based groups may be public or private, and large or small. Examples include Portuguese speakers in Brazil and Portugal, French speakers in Canada, and Spanish Speakers in the US.

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Event: Used for sharing information related to a specific event. They may be public or private, and large or small. Generic examples include new hires who started on a specific date, tributes to late colleagues, photos from a community service day, and posts before/ during/ after a meeting. Specific examples include August 1, 2015 New Hires, Tribute to Edward Ross, Company Impact Day, and Annual Worldwide Meeting. Community of Interest: Non-work-related communities, open to anyone who is interested. They tend to be larger and public. Examples include running, photography, music, and cooking. Team: Used for collaboration within a project team, work unit, task force, or committee. They are limited to those people who are assigned to the team, and are usually small and private, for trusted colleagues only. Examples include Project Cleanup, Finance Team, Merger Task Force, and Holiday Party Committee. Support: Used to get help or make requests to a specific set of people. They enable many-to-few communications and tend to be public. Support-based groups provide archives, deliver transparency, and replace or augment other channels such as email, phone, instant messaging, or text. Generic examples include call centers, help desks, specialized support, and transaction entry. Specific examples include Knowledge Brokers, IT Help Desk, Business Research Center, and Book Orders. Some communities or ESN groups have multiple types, all of which can be applied as tags in a directory. This allows filtering and searching on all relevant attributes, with some communities or ESN groups appearing in multiple views and search results. For ESN groups that are Communities of Interest or Communities of Practice, both the COLLECTS and TRAIL types can be applied. Here are examples of applying multiple tags: an ESN group for SAP in banking receives the ESN group type Community of Practice and the community types Topic and Industry. A community for new hires in Mexico gets tagged with two community types, Audience and Location. An ESN Group for French-speaking football fans gets two ESN group types, Community of Interest and Language, and one community type, Topic.

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Chapter 4 Types of communities

Here is an example of how community types can be used in a community directory: Table 2: Community Directory. Community

Practice or Interest

Community Types

Community Purpose

Artificial Intelligence

Practice

∙ Topic

Deepen expertise in artificial intelligence.

Management

Practice

∙ Role

Share experiences to improve as managers.

New Hires in Detroit

Practice

∙ Audience ∙ Location

Answer questions for recent hires in the Detroit office and keep them connected.

Semiconductor Industry

Practice

∙ Industry

Share insights on doing business in the semiconductor industry.

Midwest Knowledge Management

Practice

∙ Toipc ∙ Location

Meet in person each month to discuss knowledge management.

Folk Music

Interest

∙ Topic

Discuss folk music, share favorite artists and songs, and meet at concerts.

Picnic Coordinators

Interest

∙ Role

Share ideas for coordinating local employee picnics.

African American Leadership Group

Interest

∙ Audience

Meet regularly for discussions, advocacy, and camaraderie.

Montreal Female Hockey Goalies

Interest

∙ Role ∙ Audience ∙ Location

Connect with other female hockey goalies in Montreal to meet up, swap gear, and compare notes.

Austin Food and Music Lovers

Interest

∙ Topic ∙ Location

Share advice on where to eat, what shows to see, favorite foods and performers; go to restaurants and concerts together.

Critical success factors Differentiating the types of communities is not of critical importance but defining community types can be useful in three ways: Description: To help people understand the purpose of a community, whether they should join it, and what to expect if they do join. Directory: To allow sorting, filtering, and searching by type in a master directory of all communities. Navigation: To help users readily find communities that are relevant to their work, interests, and personal attributes.

Chapter 5 Use cases for communities It’s not enough to simply ask people to join a community or start using an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Promotional messages that encourage people to connect, communicate, and collaborate with others are not likely to persuade many to do so. What is often missing from such requests and messages are answers to such questions as: why should I join a community? What’s in it for me? What are the advantages of communities over other alternatives? What are community members supposed to do once they join? Communities program managers and community managers should define compelling use cases. Instead of talking about driving adoption or rolling out a new tool, talk about the advantages of using the tool over existing alternatives. Here is a fundamental use case for communities. Before sending an email, a group chat message, an instant message, or a text message to share information, ask a question, or seek resources, ask “Can I post this in a community instead?” If at all possible, do so. This will allow everyone who might be interested in the information, or who could respond to questions and requests, to be made aware. It benefits the person who posts by receiving multiple, prompt replies. It benefits the people seeing the post by informing them of valuable information and enabling them to provide help. And it benefits the organization by maximizing the dissemination of useful information and reducing the time to receive assistance. There are several knowledge services methodologies that can be effectively enabled by communities. Here are five examples of community use cases based on such methods: Appreciative Inquiry is the co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives life to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges. It is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned. Peer Assist is used to learn from the experiences of others before embarking on an activity or project. It brings together a group of peers to elicit feedback on a problem, project, or activity, and to draw lessons from the participants’ knowledge and experience. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-005

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Chapter 5 Use cases for communities

Most Significant Change is the collection of significant change stories emanating from the field level, and the systematic selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of designated stakeholders or community members. Once changes have been captured, people sit down together, read the stories aloud, and have in-depth discussions about the value of these reported changes. Ritual Dissent is a workshop method designed to test and enhance proposals, stories, or ideas by subjecting them to dissent (challenge) or assent (positive alternatives). It is a forced listening technique, not a dialogue or discourse. There are three acronyms that can be used to communicate and remember the use cases for communities: SIRCL, SAFARIS, and COLLABORATION.

SIRCL • • • • •

 Share  Innovate  Reuse  Collaborate  Learn

Figure 11: SIRCL: Knowledge services use cases.

SIRCL

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Communities are a fundamental component of knowledge services. They enable members to: Share new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions. There are many ways to share in a community. Members post tips, tricks, and techniques in the threaded discussions. They post links to blogs, articles, sites, videos, podcasts, and other content. Content is contributed to the community site, blog, and wiki. Members present on conference calls and at meetings and write summaries of such events. And they conduct training for the community. Innovate through brainstorming, building on each other’s ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments. Communities are excellent sources of innovation due to the wide range of backgrounds of the members. Posing an innovation challenge to a community is a great way to get all of the minds working together to solve what appears to be an intractable problem, or to create new ways of doing things. This can be a regular topic for threaded discussions and community events. It can also be relayed from company executives or industry leaders to get the community’s creative juices flowing. Special innovation jams can be held to facilitate the process. Reuse solutions through asking and answering questions, applying shared insights, and retrieving posted material. A sales knowledge nugget attributed to Arthur “Red” Motley is that nothing happens until somebody sells something. Reusing this concept, knowledge services won’t happen until somebody reuses something. Communities provide a convenient way for members to reuse the good ideas and proven approaches of other members. These can come from threaded discussions, presentations, shared documents, and other content published in the community. Collaborate through threaded discussions, conversations, and interactions. Collaboration means working together, and communities of practice do this as their core activity. Members interacting online, on calls, at meetings, and individually is a basic use case for communities. They come together across organizational boundaries to solve problems, develop new concepts, and advance the field in which they practice. Jointly conversing, presenting, writing, and creating are fundamental community behaviors. Learn from other members of the community, from invited guest speakers, and through mentoring. Community members regularly learn about successes, failures, case studies, industry trends, and new ideas. They do so through following the threaded discussions, attending community events, reading published documents, and viewing shared videos. They also learn in the process of helping others through formulating answers, creating presentations, and writing new content. Deepening expertise in the community’s topic is one of the main reasons people choose to join and participate in communities. The depth and breadth of the community’s experience and expertise provides its essential value.

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Chapter 5 Use cases for communities

SAFARIS • • • • • • •

 Share  Ask  Find  Answer  Recognize  Inform  Suggest

Figure 12: SAFARIS: Community use cases.

Communities are the very best way to: Share information: Post text, links, and attachments that can be useful to other members. “Here are my latest thoughts on how to reduce waste in our manufacturing plants.” “Here is a link to the latest Forrester report.” “Here is my presentation on social networking.”

Ask questions: Post queries to start discussions, solve problems, and receive help. “What do you think about the new international standard?” “Has anyone encountered this problem before? How was it solved?” “How do you compute return on assets?”

SAFARIS

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Find resources: Locate experts, documents, and tools. “I’m looking for a specialist in retirement benefits to help win a bid in Calgary.” “Does anyone know of a good presentation on managing remote teams?” “What tools exist for converting PDF files to Word documents?”

Answer questions and requests: Respond to queries, supply requested resources, and offer solutions to problems. “Here is my answer to your question on how to apply for a grant.” “Here is a link to the document you are looking for.” “I solved that problem before and will be glad to assist you.”

Recognize colleagues: Thank, praise, and acknowledge other community members for their contributions. “Thanks to Sybil Fawlty for helping solve a problem that had been vexing us for months.” “Kudos to Doug Dinsdale for going above and beyond what was expected to pitch in today with the customer visit to our facility.” “I want to recognize the planning team’s hard work that helped make the symposium such a success.”

Inform about activities: Work out loud and let people know about your current and future projects an where you will be. “I’m working on a new wellness initiative.” “I will be in the Philadelphia office today. Does anyone wish to meet?” “Here is our team’s latest progress report.”

Suggest ideas: Offer recommended improvements, spark brainstorming, and stimulate innovation. “Local office TV screens should display the global ESN conversation stream.” “I think we can reduce costs by consolidating three offices. What other ways can we save money?” “I have an idea for a new flux capacitor. Here is a diagram showing how it would work.”

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Chapter 5 Use cases for communities

COLLABORATION • • • • • • • • • • • • •

 Communicate  Obtain  Locate  Learn  Assist  Build  Offer  Resolve  Ask  Transfer  Innovate  Onboard  Network

Figure 13: COLLABORATION use cases.

Communities facilitate effective collaboration. Members can use communities to: Communicate: Inform the organization about your activities, plans, and progress. Interact with colleagues. Solicit input, feedback, and advice. Relax, refresh, relieve tension, and laugh.

COLLABORATION

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“I will be the project manager for an engagement with a large pharmaceutical company.” “Here is the statement of work for the project plan.” “I’m looking for feedback on the plan.” Schedule a group dinner at an upcoming conference.

Obtain: Gain assistance from others. Find out what others are doing. Retrieve information. Receive answers to questions. “I can use some help in setting up the meeting room for our monthly meeting.” “How are all of you dealing with the upcoming software migration?” Reuse a proposal from the community document library. “Here is a link to a presentation you can use.”

Locate: Find subject matter experts. Find documents, credentials, references, sites, official methods, lessons learned, and proven practices. Find needed resources. “I’m looking for a network security specialist to join a new project.” “Does anyone have a tool I can use for social network analysis?” Look in the community threaded discussion archives to find a relevant solution.

Learn: Master a subject. Deepen expertise in a specialty. Keep current on the latest news in a topic. Participate in a community training event. Attend a community call featuring a presentation on a topic of interest. Read the community newsletter for the most recent updates.

Assist: Respond to a request. Respond to a client request for information, proposal, or support. Submit a proposal to a customer. Deliver a product, project, service, or client engagement. Provide advice, guidance, and thought leadership. “The attached document provides the answer to your question.” Offer to get on a call with a client to help solve a problem. Develop a proposal for a customer based on content provided by the community. Deliver a service as part of a team including other community members. “Based on my experience, I suggest that you follow the steps outlined in the document linked to here.”

Build: Develop and deliver thought leadership in the form of advice, writing, presentations, audio recordings, or videos. Write a document or a presentation. Record a podcast or a video. Create and deliver a product or service. Publish a white paper on a new methodology you helped the community develop. “I am sharing the tweet transcript of my notes from last week’s conference.” “Here is the recording of today’s community call.” Collaborate with other community members to create a new product.

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Offer: Answer questions. Provide points of view, proven practices, lessons learned, examples, or official methods. Get staffed on a project or client engagement. Lead an effort. Praise, recognize, and thank colleagues. “I experienced that same bug and discovered this workaround.” “My view is slightly different, based on my time working in South America.” “I am a user experience designer and am available to join a project immediately.” Serve as project manager for a community initiative. “I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the discussion. Your insights were most valuable in helping me decide what to do next.”

Resolve: Identify issues. Solve problems. Fix something that is broken. Work with other community members to create a list of important issues. Provide a peer assist to solve a problem faced by a community member. “We fixed the bug that prevented search from returning recent results.”

Ask: Pose questions. Request advice. Submit a query or request. “What is the best way to record a podcast?” “How have you been able to convince senior leaders to provide funding?” “I need help in migrating to a new platform.”

Transfer: Transmit knowledge. Share links, insights, lessons learned, tips, tricks, and techniques. Contribute reusable content. Submit documents. Lead a training session for the community. “I am posting a link to an article I recently published.” “I will present the new methodology on this month’s community call.” “The project artifacts are now available in the community repository.”

Innovate: Develop new and better ways of serving clients. Solicit ideas. Manage the innovation process. Improve existing products, services, processes, and tools. Invent new products, services, processes, and tools. Work with other community members to improve the help desk call handling process. “What features should be part of the new platform?” Conduct an innovation challenge using threaded discussions, community calls, and the community wiki. “Please review the list of suggestions and vote on the top three.” Participate in a task force chartered to developing a new product to replace an old one.

Onboard: Induct new hires or team members into the organization. Get oriented as a new hire or team member. Orient new clients. Use the community to offer help to people who have just joined the organization. Attend a community event where experiences are shared with new team members. “Please sign up to help present at next month’s new customer orientation session.”

Critical success factors

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Network: Connect to others with similar interests. Work together as part of a team. Connect multiple organizations to deliver services as one. Invite a community member whose posts have been helpful to meet up for a chat. “I am looking for volunteers to work on the annual community meeting.” Pull together members from different practices, functions, and regions to deliver services.

Critical success factors Use cases must be highly relevant to the target audience. Potential community members should recognize the use cases and understand how their application provides value. Use cases must show how using communities instead of other approaches is much more efficient and effective. The advantage over existing methods must be significant. Use cases must be intuitive and make sense to those you are attempting to persuade to join and participate in communities. You need to speak their language and get them to nod in recognition when you explain how to use communities.

Chapter 6 The community creation process Launching a new community is not as simple as just creating a website or ESN group. Considerable thought, planning, and hard work are needed before officially turning on the lights. There are important roles for community sponsors, communities program managers, community managers, community champions, and community members in creating a new community. Community sponsors are senior leaders with budget authority who either request a new community or ask a community manager to do so. Sponsorship includes allocating funding, resources, and leadership time and attention to help make the community successful. Community sponsors provide oversight to community managers. Communities program managers are responsible for all communities in an organization. They review all requests for new communities and either approve them, redirect them to an existing community, or suggest better alternatives. Community managers provide the communities program manager with answers to questions about the community they are requesting. If approved, they take on full responsibility for planning, launching, building, and sustaining the community. Community champions help the community manager with leadership tasks. They help recruit members, develop sites, publish content, stimulate discussions and activities, answer questions, give presentations, and fill in for the community manager when necessary. Their existence helps justify the creation of a new community, and they play active roles in creating and launching it. Community members are the core of any community. They need to exist in sufficient numbers to create a critical mass, and with sufficient enthusiasm to maintain a thriving community.

Perform due diligence When starting a new community, the first thing to do is to decide what topic you wish to address. Pick a compelling topic that will be of interest to many people in your organization. The potential members must be passionate about the subject for collaboration, and it must be relevant to their work. Before creating a new community, check to see if there is an existing community already focused on the proposed topic or on a related one. If nothing similar already exists, then you can proceed to create a new one. If communities already exist in your organization, then answer the following questions:

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Chapter 6 The community creation process

•  Is your topic already covered as part of another community? If so, offer to help the community manager of that community. Help can include increasing membership, booking speakers, leading calls and meetings, responding to questions, and sharing useful information. •  Is there an existing community focused on a related topic? If so, approach its community manager about expanding it to include your topic. This helps achieve critical mass, broadens the appeal of the community, and provides the same type of help as mentioned in the previous paragraph. •  Is there an old community that is inactive but could be resurrected or migrated to form the new community? If so, ask if you can take over as community manager, or harvest the membership list to start the new one. Reusing existing membership lists, community tools, and knowledge content can save time in starting a new community. When starting a new community, here are five key questions to answer: 1. Is there an existing community that covers the topic or a related one? If so, offer to become a co-manager of that community rather than creating a new one. Add a tab, section, or link to a sub-page on that community’s site (e.g., sub-topic, local chapter). Share collaboration tools such as an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) group. 2. Is the topic defined using widely understood terminology? Try to use industrystandard, conventional terms. Avoid esoteric or company-specific nomenclature. Start with as broad a topic as is reasonable. 3. Are people likely to want to join in sufficient numbers to achieve critical mass (100 or more)? They should identify with the community’s topic and view themselves as specializing in it. They should be deeply interested in it, view it as relevant to their work, and want to deepen their understanding of it. And they must be willing to spend time learning and collaborating about it. 4. Are you willing to spend the time it takes to manage a community by performing the SHAPE activities? Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events; Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings; Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate; Post: Share information useful to the members by posting to the threaded discussions, blog, and newsletter; Expand: Attract new members and content contributions. 5. Are you willing to measure the community by the ACME health indicators? Activity: at least one post to the community threaded discussions per week, posts by more than two different people, no questions left unanswered after 24 hours; Content: at least one document, newsletter, announcement, or blog post added to the community site per month, and content is reviewed to ensure that it is appropriate, current, and accurate; Membership: at least 100 members after the first three months, with growth in membership every quarter thereafter; Events: at least

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one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting every quarter, listed in the community events calendar, held as planned, with at least 10 people participating in each event. If the answers to questions 2, 3, and 4, are “yes,” check your company’s community directory to see if a community already exists that is focused on your desired topic, or on a related topic. If so, volunteer to help with that community. If not, request a new community and prepare to regularly perform the SHAPE activities listed in question 4. Measure your community every month using the ACME metrics in question 5. If any of these metrics is not achieved, take the necessary actions to improve. If these actions still don’t result in a healthy community, then retire the community.

Process steps Answer the five questions above. If the answer to question 1 is “yes,” or any of the answers to questions 2–5 are “no,” don’t create a new community. If the answer to question 1 is “no,” and the answers to questions 2–5 are all “yes,” proceed. Identify the community sponsor, community manager, community champions, and the approximate number of potential community members. Confirm that the sponsor approves the creation of the community and the estimated effort and costs required to launch and sustain it. Verify that the community manager and community champions understand and accept their responsibilities. Submit a formal request for a new community using your organization’s official process. This might involve filling in an online form and submitting it, sending an email to the communities program manager, or opening a service desk ticket. If not approved, don’t create a new community. If approved, proceed as follows. Accept a request for a community kickoff call with the communities program manager, or a member of the communities program team. Schedule such a call if one is not initiated by the communities program team. Sign up for all relevant training, including site creation, tool usage, content management, and community management. Complete the training, including inperson, remote, and on-demand courses. Perform an assessment of existing content that is relevant to the community. Identify the initial content to provide on the community site and start collecting it. Begin community site development by designing a prototype site. Solicit feedback from potential members, and revise the design based on the best suggestions. Implement the revised design, continue to solicit suggested changes, and iterate to new and improved versions.

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Publish a variety of useful content to the community site. This can include reusable documents, presentations, and proposals. It can also include videos, training materials, and learning resources of all kinds. Post to the community’s threaded discussions to prime the pump. Ask a few questions and ask each of the community champions to answer one or more of them. Start a few discussions and ask the community champions to reply to each one. Share a few documents and links and ask the community champions to do the same. These posts will serve as examples for new members when they join and will also prove that the community provides value to its members. Set up a community events calendar and add entries to it. Schedule the initial community call or meeting. Line up topics and speakers for this and subsequent events. Write the community announcement. Be short and to the point, stressing the community’s purpose, benefits of joining, and planned activities. Request a launch review from the communities program team. Use this opportunity to have your site, content, and announcement reviewed and approved. If improvements are suggested, make every effort to incorporate them. Upon a successful launch review, request that the community be added to the community directory. If there are other pages and sites that should also link to it, request a link from each one. Launch the community. This may involve switching from private to public access to the site, moving from a development site to a production site, or changing the security permissions on the site to allow everyone to view and post on the site. Publish and distribute the community announcement. Post it on the community site, to the threaded discussions, and the first community newsletter. Request that links to the announcement be added to other relevant sites and newsletters. Post a link to it in a few other relevant threaded discussions but avoid spamming the world. Make sure that you are set up to receive monthly metrics reports. These may be provided to you by the communities program team each month. If not, learn how to create these for yourself. Conduct a membership drive. Ask the community champions to recruit additional members. Start a contest for the initial members to see how many additional members they can recruit. Recognize everyone who recruits even one new member. Give a prize (a book about the community’s topic is a good choice) to the member who recruits the most members. Add content (documents, recordings, videos, files or links) from members, presenters, other repositories, and outside sources (with permission). Stimulate collaboration in the community by posting questions such as: •  What answers are you seeking? •  What do you need help with? •  What resources are looking for? •  Are you seeking a new assignment?

Process steps

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 Who has helped you that you would like to recognize?  What was your last project?  What are you working on now?  What would you like to work on next?  What is something that worked well for you?  What have you learned that you would do differently the next time?

Start community discussions by posting questions such as: •  What would you like to see the community do over the next year? •  What have you seen other communities do that you would like us to do? •  Which books, training, and other resources do you recommend to other community members? •  Which speakers do you suggest we schedule for future community calls? •  Should we meet in person? If so, what should we be sure to do during the meeting? •  What are the top three challenges and top three opportunities for our community’s topic? •  What have you learned recently that you would like to share? Are you willing to present this on a future community call? •  What are your top three tips for other community members? •  What questions do you have for the community sponsor, community manager, and community champions? •  What would like to know more about? Review metrics each month. Is membership steadily growing? Are new posts and replies being made to the threaded discussions? How often? By how many different members? Are questions being answered quickly? Is content be contributed? Take corrective action for any problems that surface. Host the initial community event. During the call or in-person meeting, allow members to introduce themselves and say a bit about their backgrounds and interests. Provide details on what is being planned for the community. Request feedback and suggestions. Have a presentation, discussion, or peer assist. Solicit success stories about the community. How has it helped members? What have they learned? What have they been able to do more quickly, efficiently, and effectively than by using other methods? Who in the community has been helpful in what they share and how they respond? Recognize active members by acknowledging their contributions. Those who post, reply, contribute content, present, lead meetings, manage the site, recruit members, and publicize the community should be publicly thanked and praised for doing so. Continue devoting time and energy to the community after it is launched. Some people think that the project to create a new community ends when it is launched.

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In fact, that is just the beginning of an ongoing project. Building and sustaining must continue for as long as the community is active. Here is a Ten-Step Checklist for Starting Your Community by Mukund Mohan (bit.ly/2Hxc0FI) 1. Figure out what you want to give to your members. The next question is what you or your company wants from the community. The order is very important to create member-centric communities. 2. Understand why you want to have a community. Is it to give members a voice? Or is it to help them share among each other? 3. Form a core team. Preferably a cross-functional team of community champions. 4. Do a quick survey of your members. Understand what they want out of it. 5. Put a good marketing plan in place for how you plan to make your community aware that you are around. It should include simple promotion materials, the benefits of joining, and what they will get out of it. 6. Identify your influencers. The first few that will really help you get started. How are you going to help them get others to get onboard? 7. Learn about the technology. You don’t need to know how it works, but more how you can apply it to help your members. 8. Clearly identify your resource plan. Who is spending time to answer questions, who will help with management, and who is going to help market? 9. Put together a simple business justification. You are probably going to have to sell it to management. Use simple, not complicated metrics. 10. Get it going. Most communities start small and then grow.

Community charter A community charter is a document that defines the scope, objectives, and participants in a community. It explains the community’s purpose and benefits, identifies preliminary roles and responsibilities, and provides strategies and measurements to support community success. Identifying the objectives for a community before creating it is always a good idea. Writing a community charter makes those objectives explicit and adds other important information. Having to commit these details to writing helps those launching the community to think through important concepts and make key decisions before the community goes live. Working with the community sponsor, community manager, and a facilitator, the community champions and potential initial members should create a community charter. Doing this in a facilitated workshop will help community members come together quickly, focused on a finite, common task. The charter can be discussed, modified, agreed to, and posted on the community site.

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Here is a template that can be used or adapted to create a community charter: Community Name (Identify the name of the Community, e.g., Project Management Community of Practice.) Community Audience (Identify the types of members the community is targeting or is trying to attract, e.g., project managers, program managers, and project administrators.) Community Purpose (Identify the intent of the community, e.g., the community is focused on documenting, sharing, and transferring project management lessons learned and proven practices.) Type of Community (Identify the community type from Chapter 4, e.g., role-specific community of practice.) Community Objectives (Identify the short-term and long-term goals for the community, e.g., short-term: hold monthly lessons learned sharing sessions; long-term: routinely reuse proven practices on all new projects.) Community Roles (Identify by name the individuals who are filling key roles.) •  Community Sponsor: •  Community Manager: •  Community Champions: Critical Business Issues (Identify the challenges the community will address.) Tools and Activities (Identify the tools and activities that will be used to support the community, e.g., Site, Calendar, Events, News, Threads) Measures of Success (List measures of success, e.g., Activity, Content, Membership, Events.)

Critical success factors When creating a new community, these are the most important factors: •  The new community fills an unmet need and is not redundant with any existing community. •  The community’s topic uses industry-standard, conventional terms and is as broad as is reasonable. •  People are likely to want to join in sufficient numbers to achieve critical mass. •  There is at least one person willing to spend the time it takes to manage the community. •  The community manager is willing to measure the community using standard health indicators and take corrective action as needed to keep the community healthy.

Chapter 7 Preventing redundant communities Principle 6 in Chapter 2 is “Minimize redundancy in communities. Before creating a new one, check if an existing community already addresses the topic.” Should an enterprise take steps to avoid having multiple communities or Enterprise Social Network (ESN) groups for the same topic? This is an important question, with no consensus on the right answer. This chapter will take the position that controlling community creation is in the best interests of the enterprise, its people, and its community managers. Shouldn’t anyone who wants to start a community or ESN group be able to do so? Some people believe that all social business tools should be offered on a self-serve basis and that anyone should be able to create a new community of practice or ESN group. Unlike team sites, collaborative team spaces, blogs, wikis, and other social media, the creation of new communities and groups should be reviewed by a coordinating group, if this is possible. Reviewing requests for new communities has multiple benefits. Redundant communities can be prevented. A central directory of communities can be maintained, helping potential members find the right ones to join. By keeping the number of communities to a reasonable minimum, a long and confusing list from which to choose is avoided. Silos that isolate people who could benefit from being connected are avoided. Critical mass is achieved, helping to ensure that each community succeeds and takes advantage of scale. When I took over one knowledge services program, there was a very long and bewildering list of communities, most of which were inactive. Potential members could not easily determine which communities were alive and which were dead, and as a result, they didn’t join any. By deleting the dead ones, creating a streamlined list, and reviewing requests for new ones, the communities program completely turned around and took off. Most requests for new communities that address a topic already covered by an existing one should be responded to by suggesting that the requester become a comanager of the existing one. This harnesses the requester’s enthusiasm, injects new energy into the existing community, and prevents the fragmentation of members into isolated silos.

Survival of the fittest Why not just let a thousand flowers bloom, and rely on the survival of the fittest to sort out which communities or ESN groups should be retained? Is controlling community creation too limiting and authoritarian? The existence of multiple communities https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-007

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on the same topic presents challenges. For members, they have to choose which ones to join and for which ones to set email notifications. For people wanting to post, they have to choose in which communities to post, and possibly have to cross-post multiple times to reach their intended audiences. And the people who can answer a question or benefit from seeing shared information may not belong to the community in which it is posted. Consolidating similar communities yields multiple benefits. It makes it easier for users to find the right community to join and in which to participate. Communities can better achieve critical mass of members and posts. Fragmentation and duplication of posts can be avoided. The effort of being a community manager and moderating discussions can be shared. And it increases the likelihood of questions receiving timely replies. Consider these questions about redundant communities: •  If someone posts in one of the overlapping communities, will it reach everyone who might benefit? The most likely answer is no, it will not. •  If someone asks a question in one of the communities, will it receive timely and diverse answers? It’s possible that it will not. •  Are the members of each community seeing all the conversations relevant to the community’s topic? It’s likely that they will miss some that are posted to communities to which they don’t belong. •  Are posts having to be cross posted in multiple communities, thus increasing the noise level? If so, this will likely annoy most of the members of each community. •  Would there be any harm in having discussions take place in a single community with more members? Generally, the answer is that there is no harm in this. If a community’s activity grows too large, a community can be split up into logical subsets to bring the volume back to acceptable levels. An ESN I managed once had a dozen different groups all focused on different aspects of social media. None of these groups had more than 100 members, and none were successful. After combining them into a single group for social media, the combined group became more active than any of the original groups, and steadily grew in membership to over 3,600 members. It was then easy to figure out which group focused on social media, so people regularly joined the group and posted in it. Before, they might have looked at all the competing groups, thrown up their hands, and given up without joining any of them or posting at all.

Good intentions Won’t controlling community creation stifle enthusiasm and creativity? If potential new community managers are turned down on creating new communities, might this turn them off altogether? Often, the initial enthusiasm for a new community does not

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last once it has been created. Communities are often started with the best of intentions, high hopes, and great expectations, only to founder almost immediately. Here are some typical scenarios I have seen: •  A new community is requested, but once it is approved, it is never launched. No time is available to do the actual work of creating it. •  A new community is launched, but then there is no activity. No one is available to do the ongoing work of community management. •  A new ESN group is created. No posts are ever made in it. •  A new ESN group is created. There is an initial post, sometimes replied to with enthusiasm (“Great to see this new group!” “Way to go!” “You rock!”). Then there are no more posts. •  A new community is launched. There is activity for a short time. Then it becomes inactive. Community management takes more than initial enthusiasm. It takes ongoing commitment, discipline, and dedication. This effort is often lacking, resulting in communities being abandoned like ghost towns.

Does size matter? I have heard from some people that conversations are more likely to take place in smaller communities. This argument is that people are more willing to hold discussions in small groups of people they know and trust, and are afraid of posting in larger communities with members they don’t know. In my experience, most small communities struggle to become active, or to remain active. See Chapter 11 for a quantitative analysis to support this observation. If there is only one large community per topic, won’t there be a lot of spamming the community with posts of interest only to a small subset of the members? This assumption is that not everyone is interested in subtopics that arise in communities. It is actually more likely that spam will result from having too many similar communities, not from having just one. I have seen people doggedly copy the same post over and over to every similar community, which is viewed as spam by those who belong to more than one of these. If there had been only one community for the topic, then the post would have been posted only once. If most posts in a small community are shared from other communities, or things that should have been posted in a larger community, then use the larger community instead, and delete the smaller one. The problem with most communities is not too much activity. It is a lack of activity. Few, if any, communities suffer from having too many posts. Most suffer from the opposite: too few posts. Even the most active communities usually have no more than a few posts a day. It’s easy for any community member to quickly scan all such posts, either online or in email notifications, to see if they are of interest. If not, they

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can quickly be ignored or deleted. Hashtags can be used to differentiate posts within a community to make it easier to find, follow, and ignore specific topics. It’s hard to tell in advance which posts will be of interest to which community members. As long as they have some interest in the broad subject covered by the community, there is little harm in them seeing posts over the full range of relevant subjects. If a community does end up having too many posts on one niche subject, it is easy to spin off a separate community for that subject. One question that arises is how many communities should an enterprise have? The best answer is exactly one for each topic of importance to the organization and to its people. Enterprises should have smaller numbers of communities, each with larger numbers of members. A single, large community for each important topic, used for collaborating across all organizations and geographies, is more effective than having lots of separate small communities for each possible subset of the topic. There are several reasons for this. Reaching critical mass (hundreds, possibly thousands, of members) for any community is the best way to keep it active and continue to attract more members. Online communities work best when they cross geographic and organizational boundaries to facilitate virtual, asynchronous collaboration. Keeping things simple is best for both those managing the communities and those joining. If there is just one community to join, that makes it easier for leaders to recommend it, and for potential members to figure out which group to join and in which to post. Once a community achieves critical mass, it tends to keep getting bigger. This is because there is only one main community for the topic, so it is easy to decide which one to join. When prospective members see that there are already lots of members and posts, they figure that the community is worth joining and will be valuable to them. Large communities tend to have active managers making sure that questions are answered, useful content is shared, and discussions taking place elsewhere get redirected into the community. This leads to a virtuous circle of new members who receive value from joining and in turn tell others, who then join as well. Some types of communities are unlikely to succeed due to being too granular. Here are a few examples. Annual events: Instead of having a separate community for each year and location, a single community for all posts for all years and from all locations would allow broader sharing, greater likelihood of questions being answered, and increased value for all members. Affinity groups such as alumni groups: With a few exceptions, most alumni groups for specific colleges and universities will have few members and posts. If instead of having multiple communities, there was a single one for all alumni program participants, they could all share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest more effectively. And they could create separate hashtags for each school if people want to follow just those posts, e.g., #StateUniversity for posts directed at State University alums.

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Niche topics: These are unlikely to ever have much activity, and they all run the risk of having someone post a question, receive no answer, and decide as a result that communities don’t work. But if they had posted their question in a large, active community, they would most likely have had a much more positive experience.

Sub-communities and local chapters Sometimes people ask about setting up sub-communities rather than creating entirely new communities. To accommodate sub-categories within a community, members can add hashtags to differentiate their posts. For example, within a knowledge services group, hashtags such as #Communities, #Taxonomy, and #Collaboration can be used. Or to designate geographic subsets of a global community, members can use #CityA, #CountryB, #RegionC, etc. when posting in the global community about a topic of local interest. For those who are only interested in seeing such posts, they can elect to follow that hashtag. Narrowing topics by geography or other organizational restrictions should be discouraged. Local chapters can be created as subsets of larger communities. Local chapters work best when they meet in person, perform local actions, or participate in physical activities. Geography-based communities that meet locally, and online communities that collaborate virtually, complement each other nicely. An example of two communities that complement each other are the SIKM Leaders Community (global, online discussions and monthly conference calls) and the SIKM Boston Community (local, monthly in-person meetings). The global community does not meet in person, and the local community does not have online virtual discussions. People can join both and not have to participate in multiple threaded discussions. Online geographic communities can be useful to enable a country or city to have discussions about that geography and its local activities and events, possibly in a local language. Keys to success for geographic communities are having the right level of granularity (to achieve critical mass), campaigns to increase membership, sticking to discussions specific to that geography (and not better discussed in other communities), and active and regular local leadership participation. Local chapters can work if they are focused on meeting in person. Don’t create separate online spaces for them. Instead, encourage them to post about their local events in the larger community’s threaded discussions or Enterprise Social Network (ESN) group, adding hashtags unique to each local chapter. Here are key points to keep in mind for local chapters: •  They are mainly for in-person meetings, not for online discussions. Consider providing a local place to gather to participate in the larger community calls.

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•  They can be used for local language discussions. For other discussions (not in local language), use the main community threaded discussions or ESN group, with a unique hashtag for posts about local chapter activities. •  Other members outside of the local geography can still see what local chapters are doing and emulate those activities in their locations. And when traveling, members can join local activities when in other locations. •  A separate online community for each local chapter would likely result in no critical mass and low activity for each one. Having a single online community avoids creating one more that members need to join and pay attention to. •  Keeping all discussions in one online community helps achieve critical mass and regular activity, keeping it healthy and sustainable. Whatever members share locally could be of interest elsewhere, so it’s better to share in one community, not in multiple ones.

Reducing redundancy Preventing and eliminating redundant communities can be difficult. To keep only one community for each subject, require that communities must be reviewed and approved before being created, and then enforce the rule that there is only one community per important topic. Regularly review existing communities to ensure that they are still at the right level of focus (not too broad, not too narrow), are still active, and have managers who are regularly leading them. Merge ESN groups that overlap. Anyone should be able to request a community. You may want to require an executive sponsor with a clearly defined business purpose for any business-related community. For non-business-related communities (communities of interest), anyone should be able to request one. Communities may be rejected due to the inappropriateness of the topic, overlap with an existing group, or narrowness of the topic. Before approving a new community, require that this question be answered by the requester: is there an existing community that covers the topic or a related one? People will ask about allowing communities for topics that are similar, but not exactly the same, as existing ones. Before creating a new community, search for an existing one that covers, or could cover, the desired subject. Look in community directories and ESN group lists. Type your proposed community name into the enterprise search box, search, and look at the search results for communities or ESN groups. If one exists with a similar name or description, join that group and offer to become a co-manager instead of creating a new one. If the subject is not quite right, suggest that the group be renamed or redefined to include the desired subject. Sometimes you will already have existing communities and ESN groups that overlap and cover similar subject matter. This may be due to taking over as communities program manager or managing an ESN platform that allows anyone to create a new ESN group. If you find yourself in this situation, the following steps can be taken:

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•  Review existing communities and groups looking for overlap. Then contact the community managers to suggest combining them. •  If you find inactive groups or groups with no current admin, take steps to make them active, assign a new admin, or delete if no longer needed. •  If you can’t control new group creation in your ESN, review all new groups as they are created or in a weekly new group report. Then contact the creators to suggest ones that can be deleted. •  Regularly search for key topics and see what groups have been created or renamed so that combinations can be suggested. •  Regularly promote this message to all community managers and group admins: if someone else approaches you about becoming a co-manager for your community, renaming it or redefining it, or deleting it, give it serious consideration. Talk to them, and others with similar communities, about the options. And then make a decision that supports open, global, cross-functional sharing and collaboration. If you decide to govern ESN groups, here are suggestions for how to use regular reviews and ESN analytics to do so. Ask those who are thinking of creating a new group, “Are you willing to regularly monitor the group, and to have it measured by the following health indicators?” 1. Not redundant with other groups 2. At least one post to the group per week 3. Posts by more than two different people 4. No questions left unanswered after 24 hours 5. At least 100 members after the first three months, with growth in membership every quarter thereafter If they agree, then they can proceed to create a new group. If not, they should work with an existing group, possibly as an additional group admin. If you can control group creation, then you can prevent redundant groups before they are created. If not, then you should suggest the following governance processes: Post a policy that states that groups that are redundant with other existing groups, are poorly described, or have no activity may be deleted by the network admins. For example: •  If you create a public group for a subject that is already covered by, or is a subset of, an existing group, the new group may be deleted. •  Start with an initial post defining the group’s objectives and target audience. If you don’t post to the new group within one week of creating it, it may be deleted. •  If a group will include confidential or sensitive discussions, it should be private. If you create a public group for this purpose, it may be changed to private. Each week, review all groups created during the past week. Look for those groups with: 1. A subject which is already covered by, or is a subset of, an existing group

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No posts within one week of creation No description A description which does not help explain the group’s purpose Inappropriate privacy (should be public, not private, or vice versa)

Whether or not you are able to control group creation, you should regularly review existing groups to ensure they are effective. Here are group success factors: 1. 100 or more members (200 is even better – see Chapter 11) 2. Membership continues to increase over time 3. At least one new post per week 4. Posts are made by more than two different people 5. No questions are left unanswered 24 hours after posting 6. No redundant groups on the same or a similar subject exist Each month, review all existing groups to find those for which: 1. There is no admin 2. There has been no post in the last month 3. The only posts are made to give the appearance of activity 4. There is no description 5. There have been no posts 6. There has been only one poster 7. There are fewer than two members 8. The name of the group is very similar to another group 9. The privacy is inappropriate (should be public, not private, or vice versa) 10. There are questions which have not been answered within 24 hours For each subject of importance, periodically review all groups having that term (or a variation of it) in the name or description. If there are groups that appear to be redundant, contact the admins of those groups. You can send a message like this one: TO: Admins of Groups on You have each created or are the admin of a group with “” in the name or description. Here is the list, including group name and number of members for each group:

The existence of multiple groups presents challenges: 1. For members, they must choose which group(s) to join and for which ones to set email notifications. 2. For people wanting to post, they must choose which group(s) to post to, and possibly need to cross-post multiple times to reach their intended audiences. 3. For community managers, they must choose which group to align to their community.

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If we can consolidate, rename, and/or better describe some of these groups, we can: 1. Make it easier for users to find the right group to join and participate in 2. Achieve critical mass of members and posts 3. Avoid fragmentation and duplication of posts 4. Share the effort of being a group admin 5. Increase the likelihood of questions receiving timely replies If you are willing to consolidate your group with one of the others, delete it, rename it, or change its description, please reply to indicate this. You can use a unique topic to tag posts in another group so that your members can follow that topic and view only those posts, if they prefer. If you believe that your group should continue unchanged, please review the data for your group including how many different members have posted so far. Consider these questions: 1. If someone posts in my group, will it reach everyone who might benefit? 2. If someone asks a question in my group, will it receive timely and diverse answers? 3. Are the members of my group seeing all of the conversations relevant to my group’s topic? 4. Are members other than you or the other group admins posting to your group? 5. Would there be any harm in having your group’s discussions take place in a group with more members? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” please reconsider.

Critical success factors Here are the actions communities program managers should take to prevent redundant communities. Review requests for all new communities. Only approve ones that are not redundant or too narrow in scope. Facilitate adding community managers to existing communities in lieu of creating new communities. If necessary, convene discussions between current and new community managers. If you can’t control creation of new ESN groups, regularly review the new ones. Intervene as needed to remove redundant groups. If redundant communities exist, take steps to combine them. Facilitate discussions and help migrate content. Promote the use of local chapters instead of separate communities. Facilitate the creation of new local chapters and help integrate them with existing communities.

Chapter 8 The role of the communities program manager You need to have at least one manager to lead a communities program. This manager is needed to raise awareness, align community actions with business priorities, promote a culture of asking and sharing in communities, engage senior leadership, manage the community infrastructure, and support all community managers and community members. A manager should be assigned to lead the community efforts of an entire organization, or any group within an organization. A dedicated leader is important for the success of the program. This could be the leader of the knowledge services program, the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) administrator, a social business leader, a collaboration leader, a learning and development manager, or any similar role. Titles for this role include Knowledge Services Leader, Knowledge Services Evangelist, Community Evangelist, Communities Program Manager, Collaboration Program Manager, or Collaboration Evangelist. Some organizations may try to have communities of practice without having a dedicated leader for the program. They ask someone with other duties to take this on in addition, or they assume that communities can succeed without a program manager. This is a mistake. You need at least one person whose primary duties include leading the communities program. For smaller programs, this can be the overall leader of knowledge services. For larger programs, this should be the main responsibility of a single person. This person might have additional knowledge services or collaboration-related duties, but they should be able to focus much of their time on nurturing communities and the ESN. Communities program managers should regularly share their vision for how communities can enable effective sharing, innovation, reuse, collaboration, and learning. They should help demonstrate how communities work better for sharing, asking, finding, answering, recognizing, informing, and suggesting than alternatives such as email, repositories, or directories. And they should actively lead and participate in communities to stay in touch with what works, what doesn’t work, and how people, processes, and technology enable successful communities. The role of the communities program manager includes a wide variety of responsibilities: •  Evangelize: Promote the effective use of communities, ESNs, and collaboration across organizational boundaries. Establish collaboration use cases, differentiate available tools, and recruit new community managers, champions, and members. •  Provide program and project management: Lead formal programs for communities, ESNs, and collaboration. Manage projects for communities, ESNs, and collaboration.

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•  Lead by example: Regularly post, reply, like, praise, and share in communities and ESNs. Lead specific communities and ESN groups. •  Educate: Develop, maintain, and deliver training on communities, ESNs, and collaboration. Regularly post tips on communities, ESNs, and collaboration. •  Communicate: Publish and maintain documentation, websites, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Maintain community lists and the master community directory. •  Implement: Define, document, implement, and manage processes for creating new communities and ESN groups. Respond to requests, help implement new communities and ESN groups, and help communities and ESN groups merge or split as required. •  Support: Work with IT and vendors to implement, maintain, and improve platforms. Answer questions, respond to people seeking help, and talk to those requesting new communities and ESN groups. •  Report: Produce and publish periodic health reports for communities and ESN groups. Produce and distribute periodic reports on new communities and ESN groups. •  Govern: Establish guidelines, principles, and creation/ retention/ deletion criteria for communities and ESN groups. Monitor creation and activity, moderate content according to guidelines, intervene as required, merge redundant groups, delete inactive groups, and help retire communities when no longer needed. •  Deliver and use thought leadership: Post in and follow external social media; post, reply, and learn in external communities; and publish and read articles. Present at industry conferences and network with colleagues at other organizations. A communities program manager needs to perform the following tasks: •  With the help of the senior executive and the other leaders in the organization, improve business results by institutionalizing a culture of sharing, asking, finding, answering, recognizing, and informing in communities. •  Define, maintain, and execute the communities program implementation plan for the organization. •  Define, communicate, and implement people, process, and technology components for sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning in communities. •  Define goals, measurements, and rewards for participation in communities. •  Report regularly on the organization’s performance against community metrics. •  Implement action plans for people, process, and technology projects related to communities. •  Lead the organization’s communities team. •  Manage the organization’s communications. •  Actively participate in communities. Model the desired behaviors by being visible as a manager and member of multiple internal and external communities. •  Network with other communities program managers.

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One key expectation for communities program managers is to recruit and develop good community managers to ensure the success of all communities. Here is how to do that: •  Suggest to new community managers that they join a few established communities to observe how they are led and to follow their examples. •  Lead a community for community managers and encourage community managers to join and participate. Use this community for two main purposes: to share ideas, tips, tricks, and proven practices; and to provide a working example of a community that the members can apply to their communities. Ask the managers of all communities to take turns presenting on community calls to show how they manage their communities, ask for advice, and share useful insights. Encourage members to post to the community threaded discussions to ask questions, share knowledge, and practice threaded discussions. •  Provide recorded training, reading materials, and one-on-one coaching (upon request). •  Invite speakers from other organizations to tell their stories about communities to your community managers. Often there is great interest in hearing from fresh, outside voices, so take advantage of this. •  Have members of the knowledge services program team or communities program team join multiple communities to observe their activities and discussions. Offer positive reinforcement (praise and thanks) and helpful suggestions (not criticisms) to the community managers.

Promoting and selling Another important responsibility is regularly promoting and selling the communities program. Sell the benefits to individuals and the organization. To help people understand the benefits for them personally, and for the organization overall, provide answers to the following questions: •  What’s in it for me? For any change initiative, all stakeholders want to know what’s in it for them. •  Why should we implement a communities program? Articulate your vision for how communities should work. See Chapter 1. •  What are the benefits of the communities program? Select from the list of benefits listed in Chapter 1 and tie these to your organization. •  How will the communities program help our organization accomplish its key objectives? Tie the communities program objectives to the organization’s overall priorities. •  How will our people’s needs, opportunities, and challenges be met by participating in communities? Explain the compelling use cases for communities. See Chapter 5.

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•  How will our organization improve as a result of having active communities? Establish a good business case for the communities program.

Develop the business case for communities Make a logical case for how the communities program will help achieve the key business objectives of the organization. For example, if the top three objectives are increasing profits, accelerating sales, and improving customer satisfaction, explain how communities will have a positive impact on these. If profits increase, sales accelerate, and customer satisfaction improves, and there is a rational explanation for how communities supported these results, then take partial credit. On the other hand, if the business results are not achieved, then the fact that communities were active will not likely be well-received. You can try to argue that things would have been even worse without communities, but that would be a hollow victory. Establish a plausible scenario and then extrapolate the benefits. For example: If we save one project from repeating the same mistakes as previous projects, that could save $2 million, which will more than pay for the program. If we repeat this, the impact on profits is very large. If by responding quickly to an opportunity with a proven solution using acknowledged experts we win one $10 million project that we otherwise would have lost, that’s incremental revenue of $10 million. If we repeat this, the impact on revenue is very large. If by ensuring that the best engineering product knowledge is reused we avoid one product recall, we save the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

This type of business case can be very persuasive. Note, though, that it is not a strict Return on Investment (ROI) analysis. You can’t prove that the sole cause of any outcome was the communities program, and you can’t prove that a costly recall was avoided if it never happened. But you can point out that the probabilities of positive outcomes are significantly increased through active communities. Choose the most relevant benefits from the list in Chapter 1 and ask the program sponsor to confirm that these are the right ones. Tailor your efforts to achieve these desired benefits. Define the most painful problems that communities can help prevent, such as product recalls; injuries or deaths; lawsuits; unprofitable products and services; low employee morale; lost customers; damage to the brand; inability to attract or retain talent; diminished productivity, revenue, growth, profit margin, shareholder value; or becoming a takeover target.

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Pose questions that support the business case. For example: •  Do we want our people to be able to readily find deliverables from previous projects so that they can reuse them, and people who can provide useful advice on how to deliver the next one? •  Do we want anyone who has a question, seeks a resource, or requires help to be able to easily, quickly, and reliably get what they need? •  Do we want to prevent redundant effort, stop repeating the same mistakes over and over, and avoid keeping important information from reaching the very people who need it? Do a one-time study to show the business benefits. Caterpillar commissioned a onetime study by an independent consulting firm to identify the benefits for two established communities of practice: Joints and Fasteners and Dealer Service Training. The results were that productivity increased 40%, costs were reduced 25%, speed increased 15%, and quality increased 4%. Based on these results, Caterpillar’s program was justified. There was no need for ongoing collection and reporting of similar data, as it had been done already. Motivate participation through goals, incentives, recognition, and rewards. See Chapter 10. Lead by example. Get senior leaders to do so as well. Communities program managers have many tasks to perform, and they need to model desired behaviors to get others to follow their example. They should work with senior leaders to get them to also lead by example. Leadership participation is crucial for successful collaboration across the enterprise. Instead of issuing formal communications through conventional channels, leaders should be active in communities to lead by example. They should ask everyone to do the same – to share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest in communities – instead of sending email. They should regularly participate themselves and show the way for members of the organization to do the same. Leaders should avoid ghostwriting, corporate-speak, and posts that sound like press releases. Instead, they should use their own authentic voices, ask and answer questions, share what they are doing and thinking, and look for opportunities to praise and like the posts of those using communities effectively. Leaders need to make time for doing this regularly – at least once a week, even if it is just for ten minutes. Communities program managers can offer to sit down with senior leaders to help them do this at a specific day and time each week. Communities can be used effectively to improve internal messaging from senior leaders. Here are three ways: •  Switch from push to pull. Allow people to choose which communities to join and how they wish to be notified of new communications, rather than sending out email messages to large distribution lists, most of which are ignored.

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•  Enable two-way communications, soliciting feedback, questions, and suggestions for each communication. Communities are ideal for this. Leaders can demonstrate transparency by communicating more frequently and openly. •  Encourage leaders to demonstrate the desired behaviors for communicating and collaborating. They can post, reply, like, and praise in a community, which will encourage others to follow their example. And they can act on feedback and suggestions that are submitted, thus showing responsiveness. Tell stories to inspire people to use communities. Before launching a program, tell stories that show the value it will provide. After the program starts, tell stories of early success, As the program matures, document wins using the voices of actual users. Good business cases are developed using numbers, but they are typically approved on the basis of stories. A story can translate dry, abstract numbers into compelling pictures of how the deep yearnings of decision influencers can come true. The effectiveness of education and communications will be enhanced by using narratives rather than dry bullet points. For example, instead of creating the usual PowerPoint slides to present the communities program, tell the stories of some typical users and how they use communities to help them do their jobs. Collect and promote success stories taken from the community’s threaded discussions. See Chapter 3: Solicit, find, and publicize success stories. Work with analytics experts, statisticians, and academicians to produce correlations between desired knowledge-sharing actions and desired results, including employee advancement, project success, and financial results. For example, a research paper states, “a range of empirical studies in organizations have shown that this type of social capital is associated with better individual performance evaluations, greater promotion chances and higher compensation payments as well as an increased team performance.” (Bridging or Bonding: Do Individuals gain Social Capital from Participation in Enterprise Social Networks? by Kai Riemer, Jan Finke, and Dirk Hovorka, mafiadoc.com/bridging-or-bondingdo-individuals-gain-social-capital-from-_59bb16811723dddac6d89aeb.html)

Basic principles There are a few basic principles that communities program managers and ESN administrators should follow: •  Don’t be too heavy-handed or you will scare away users. Tell them how to use communities for their gain, not what is prohibited. •  Moderate with a light touch. Do so personally, privately, and with understanding. Explain why you are intervening, don’t embarrass anyone, and offer to help. •  Keep the communities program team small and focused on what’s important. Resist spending time on bureaucracy or being Big Brother. Help, support, and praise community managers and members.

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•  Explain to senior leaders who want communities to grow that they must participate in them routinely and regularly. They should not rely only on edicts, special promotions, and one-time events. •  Don’t just tell everyone to join communities and to start collaborating. Tell them specifics of why, how, and when to use them. Use SIRCL, SAFARIS, and COLLABORATION to explain recommended use cases. See Chapter 5. There are not huge differences between the different vendors of platforms for communities and ESNs. For products under consideration, look at the number of existing users, how the product integrates with other tools already in use, what current users have to say, and how the products meet your requirements.

Enterprise social network governance If you are a network administrator for an ESN, one of your responsibilities is to govern the network. You should establish guidelines, principles, and creation/ retention/ deletion criteria for groups and networks. To ensure the guidelines are followed, you need to monitor activity, moderate content according to guidelines, intervene as required, merge redundant groups, delete unneeded groups, and help retire groups when no longer needed. Here are details on when and how to delete groups, users, threads, posts, and files. It is specific to Yammer but can be adapted to other ESNs.

Groups Publish guidelines for group deletion as described below. Regularly search for + “has created the” + group and immediately delete redundant, inappropriate, or inadvertently created groups. Conduct weekly and monthly reviews as described below. Regularly delete inactive groups with “test” in the name. Post a policy that states that groups that are redundant with other existing groups, are poorly described, or have no activity may be deleted by the network admins. For example: If you create a public group for a subject that is already covered by, or is a subset of, an existing group, the new group may be deleted. Start with an initial post defining the group’s objectives and target audience. If you don’t post to the new group within one week of creating it, it may be deleted. If a group will include confidential or sensitive discussions, it should be private. If you create a public group for this purpose, it may be changed to private.

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Each week review all groups created during the past week. Look for those groups with: 1. A subject that is already covered by, or is a subset of, an existing group 2. No posts within one week of creation 3. No description 4. A description that does not help explain the group’s purpose 5. Inappropriate privacy (should be public, not private, or vice versa) Each month, review all existing groups to find those for which: 1. There is no admin. 2. There has been no post in the last month. 3. The only posts are made to give the appearance of activity. 4. There is no description. 5. There have been no posts. 6. There has been only one poster. 7. There are fewer than two members. 8. The name of the group is very similar to another group. 9. The privacy is inappropriate (should be public, not private, or vice versa). 10. There are questions which have not been answered within 24 hours. Provide guidance to all group admins to help them keep their groups active. For example: Groups that have had no new posts in the past 30 days or that have multiple unanswered questions may be deleted. To prevent a group from being deleted, do the following: 1. Subscribe to email notifications for the group to monitor what is being posted. 2. Make sure that questions receive answers within 24 hours. 3. Intervene as necessary if something posted is inappropriate, or contains confidential, sensitive, or third-party content not owned by the organization. 4. Set a calendar reminder to check the group at least once a week to see if new posts have been made. 5. If no posts have been made in the past week, start a new thread, or share relevant conversations taking place elsewhere. Groups may also be deleted if: 1. There is no group admin. 2. Multiple questions are unanswered after 24 hours. 3. Posts are all cross-posted shares from other groups. 4. Posts are all from the same person, with no replies. 5. Posts were made to keep the group from being deleted but are not of any value.

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If any of the following conditions exist for more than a month, your group may be deleted: 1. No posts in the past month 2. No group admin 3. No group description 4. Unanswered questions 5. Posts are all cross-posted shares from other groups 6. Posts are all from the same person, with no replies 7. Posts were made to keep the group from being deleted, but are not of any value 8. If membership requires approval, there are pending requests that have not been responded to in the past month 9. If it is a public group, it overlaps with other public groups focused on a similar subject 10. If it is a public group, it has fewer than 30 members

Public groups with a small number of members Groups with 200 or more members tend to be more active and provide better business results than smaller groups. See Chapter 11.

Groups with no admin If the group is important and active, post to ask someone to volunteer, or assign the most active member as admin. Here is a message you can post: “This group has no group admin. If you are willing to take over as the group admin, and agree to monitor the group, make sure questions are answered, and that it is active with regular posts, please reply to this thread to volunteer. If no one volunteers, the group will be retired.” If the group is not important or not active, determine if it should be merged with another one. If so, merge and then delete. If not, delete.

Redundant communities Regularly review existing communities to ensure that they are still at the right level of focus (not too broad, not too narrow), are still active, and have managers who are regularly managing them. Merge groups that overlap. See Chapter 7.

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Defunct groups The lights are still on, but no one is home. The group admins are not paying any attention. Delete such groups or merge them with a related group.

Poorly managed groups Creating a group, but never answering any questions in it. Publish expectations for group admins, post them prominently online, and send an email to all group admins: if questions remain unanswered for more than a month, a group may be deleted. Posting to a group just to make it appear active, so it won’t be deleted. Publish expectations for group admins, post them prominently online, and send an email to all group admins: if posts were made to keep the group from being deleted, but are not of any value, and these are the only posts for more than a month, a group may be deleted. Promising to make a group active, but not actually doing it. Reply with suggestions: follow tips for actively leading communities. Merge the group with another, similar one, or retire the group.

Group admin archetypes Create-only admins pay no attention to what is being posted. They leave questions unanswered.Message: Start answering questions or your group will be deleted. Launch-and-leave admins post only once, then nothing further.Message: Get some more posts from multiple members, or your group will be deleted. Sole-proprietor admins are the only member posting at all.Message: Get some posts from other members, or your group will be deleted. Need-my-own admins don’t want to use existing groups. And they don’t want co-managers.Message: Merge or accept co-managers, or you will be replaced by another admin.

Other actions besides deletion Make a private group public. Do this with the consent of the group admin if the group’s subject is of general interest and the discussions don’t need to be private. Make a public group private. Do this if a public group is discussing things that should be private, e.g., client-specific, confidential, sensitive, etc.

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Remove a private group from search results. Do this if a group’s name, description, or discussions should not be visible to non-members; the group admin does not want people asking to join it; and it does not need to be findable and removing it from search results will simplify the list of available groups for a commonlysought subject.

Users If this is not automatically done using directory synchronization, remove users who have left the organization. If other means don’t work, or if there is an active case of improper posts, deactivate users who violate conduct guidelines. You can reactivate them or delete them permanently depending on how they respond to intervention. Those who change their name, email, or network may need to be deleted and re-invited using their new email address. Users who might need to be deactivated or removed: •  Trolls: Those who try to start online arguments and get other people riled up. •  Spammers: People who post over and over in every possible group. •  Ranters: Users who are mad and won’t take it anymore. Their posts are angry and not useful. •  Bullies: Those who attack others.

Threads You may decide to delete redundant threads that have been copied and pasted into multiple groups, retaining only the one in the most relevant group and sharing it into whichever of the other groups is appropriate. Threads started in the wrong group should be copied and pasted into the right group and then deleted from the wrong group. Spam should be deleted, and you should explain to the poster why this was done and how to post appropriately, as well as that repeated offenses may lead to account deactivation. Threads started long ago that continue to receive replies but that are no longer relevant should be deleted.

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Posts and replies Delete posts that violate published guidelines, such as: •  Confidential, private, or sensitive information that should not be disclosed in the group in which it is posted. •  Abusive, insensitive, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate content, language, or tone. •  Third-party content not owned by the organization. Posts containing undesired hashtags need to be deleted so that the associated topics can be renamed. Posts containing incorrect information should be deleted, and if appropriate, replaced with new posts with correct information. Encourage the proper use of the Share function Instead of copying and pasting the text of a post and posting it into multiple groups, use the Share function (available under any post) to post a link to a thread in another group. Copy and paste some descriptive text to use when sharing the post, so that email subscribers will know what the shared post is about, but don’t copy and paste the entire post unless it is very short. Don’t post the same query or request in many different groups. Post only once, and then share it a few times using the Share function in only the most relevant groups. Posting the same message in so many groups will likely be perceived as spam. So, be more targeted to ensure that the group members will appreciate your post.

Files Files already posted in public groups should only be stored once and linked to from other groups. Files that should be findable in the organization’s knowledge repository should be deleted from the ESN, contributed to the repository, and linked to instead. Content for which the rights do not belong to the organization should be deleted from the ESN and linked to instead, if possible. Inappropriate content should be deleted and the user who uploaded it should be contacted to explain why.

Community managers survey Communities program managers not only govern community managers, they also support them. Part of doing so is managing a community for them, and it’s useful to ask them what they want they want from that community.

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This survey can be used to ask community managers for feedback and suggestions about existing and planned communities to support them as community managers. The first 6 questions list some ways that members of a community of practice for community managers could interact. Please give your opinion of how valuable each approach would be. Q1.

An online threaded discussion on the topic of community management. •  High Value •  Moderate Value •  Low Value •  Negative Value •  No Opinion

Q2.

A monthly 1-hour conference call with community managers from across the entire organization. Calls would feature 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of open questions and answers. •  High Value •  Moderate Value •  Low Value •  Negative Value •  No Opinion

Q3.

A monthly 1-hour conference call with community managers from only your region or business unit. Calls would take place at a convenient time during your regular workday. •  High Value •  Moderate Value •  Low Value •  Negative Value •  No Opinion

Q4.

A 2-day face-to-face meeting for community managers from across the entire organization to meet and exchange ideas. •  High Value •  Moderate Value •  Low Value •  Negative Value •  No Opinion

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Q5.

A 2-day face-to-face local meeting for community managers from the same location to meet and exchange ideas. •  High Value •  Moderate Value •  Low Value •  Negative Value •  No Opinion

Q6.

Of the six options just presented, which is the one that you think would have the highest value for you relative to its cost? •  Online threaded discussion •  Cross-organizational monthly conference call •  Regional or business unit monthly conference call •  Cross-organizational face-to-face meeting •  Local face-to-face meetings •  Don’t know

Q7.

Are you a participant in an existing community whose topic is collaboration, knowledge services, or ESN usage? •  Yes •  No •  Formerly, but not any more •  Don’t know

Q8.

If you answered “Yes” or “Formerly” to Q. 8, how would you rate the value of this community? •  High value •  Moderate value •  Little value •  Negative value •  No opinion

Q9.

How likely are you to participate in a community for community managers if it has the feature(s) you rated as highly valuable? •  Very Likely •  Somewhat Likely •  Not Likely •  Don’t know / No Opinion

Q10. If you have ideas about other good ways for community managers to learn from each other, please list them.

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Community campaigns As a communities program manager, you should create appealing, fun campaigns to encourage community managers to improve and sustain their communities. You can use one or more of these suggestions or come up with your own. Try them out, keep the ones that are effective, and abandon the ones that are not. Community Crafting: On a rotating and ongoing basis, engage with each community to ensure that the latest templates are used, all recommended tools are implemented, and they are used properly. Review the community site to ensure that it looks good, is userfriendly, and has no broken links, missing information, or obsolete names. Community Certification: A voluntary process of reviewing the community core team make-up and activity levels, geographic and functional distribution of leadership and membership, health indicators, site metrics, content comprehensiveness, and content currency. Certified communities can add a badge to their sites to indicate their status. Community Call-in: An hour each week (except the week of the monthly call of the community managers community) where community managers can dial in to talk with the communities program team about anything. This is source of advice, assistance, and validation. Community Challenge: An individual recognition program (point totals are displayed on users’ personal profiles and a leader board is posted on the communities program information site) that awards points for joining a community, posting to the threaded discussions, contributing content to the community site or newsletter, attending and presenting on a community call, and posting an anecdote supporting the value of the community. Community Cup: A recognition program for the geography, business unit, function, or similar organizational entity with the highest percentage of membership based on their headcount. Community Conference: An event for all community managers in or near a specific location. Conference sessions can include training on people, process, and technology components; workshops on reviewing and improving community sites, tips and tricks, brainstorming, problem resolution, questions and answers, and networking (like speed dating); and speakers such as community sponsors, external communities experts, communities program managers from other organizations, and successful community managers. Get the Red Out! Send messages to community managers and sponsors of communities that are rated Red in the community health report (see Chapter 10). Here is a sample message: Your community is at high risk!

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Have you had a chance to look at the most recent Community Health Report? According to our records, your community has been Red for three consecutive months. ACTION: Select how you plan to address your community’s red status: 1. Go Green or Yellow (Overall Health) by the next Community Health Report 2. Retire the community. If we don’t hear back from in one week, your community will be scheduled to be retired by the end of next month. Go Green! Green Communities have met the defined criteria for Green in the monthly community health report. They get a Green badge for their community sites and are listed in a special tab for Green communities in the community directory. Elite Communities: Those communities that achieve green status for an entire quarter are designated as elite. They receive recognition from senior leadership, get an Elite badge for their community sites, and are listed in a special tab for Elite communities in the community directory.

Critical success factors As this chapter shows, communities program managers have multiple things to address. They are all important, but if they can achieve these top priorities, their programs should be successful: •  There is one (and only one) community for every subject of importance to the organization, its businesses, and its people. Each one of these communities has 100 or more members. •  Everyone belongs to at least one community (including the one most relevant to their work), and possibly other communities. All community members pay attention to the discussions and activities. •  All community managers actively monitor their communities. They ensure that all questions receive an answer within 24 hours. •  When channels other than communities (e.g., email, phone, text, chat, instant messaging), are used to share, ask, or find, those who receive these messages redirect them to the most relevant communities. If a help desk receives a question via email, they reply in the most relevant community, and then send the link back via email. Every support channel, help desk, and call center does this, saving them from having to answer the same questions over and over, and allowing many others besides the person submitting the query to benefit. •  Leaders routinely post, reply, like, and praise in communities and don’t just use it for formal communications, events, or jams. Community managers help their leaders to do this, even if it is just for ten minutes each week.

Chapter 9 The role of the community manager Each community should have someone committed to doing a good job as community manager. Community managers should have expertise in the community’s topic, have a desire to promote participation and activity, and have enough time to do the job well. This includes regularly spending time increasing membership, lining up speakers, hosting calls and meetings, asking and answering questions, and posting information useful to the members. Full-time community managers are ideal. The role can be part-time, depending on the size, activity level, and importance of the community. But there must be enough time available to do the job effectively. One way to manage communities is to have a single community manager for several communities. In this way, community management is all that they do, but they spread their activities across multiple communities. Community managers should Schedule, Host, Answer, Post, and Expand (SHAPE) (from Chapter 1): Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events. Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings. Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate. Post: Share information useful to the members by posting to the community site, threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter. Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts. A community manager needs to perform the following tasks: •  Improve business results through the activities of the community. •  Define, maintain, and execute the community plan. •  Implement people, process, and technology components for sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning in the community. •  Define measurements for the community. •  Report regularly on the community’s performance against goals. •  Communicate regularly to the community and to potential members. •  Ensure fresh content is being shared in the community, multiple voices are being heard, lively discussions are occurring, and questions receive timely replies. •  Actively participate in the community, model the desired behaviors, and be visible as a leader and member. •  Network with other community managers, both inside and outside of the organization, to stay current in the field of community management. •  Demonstrate, document, and train on the use of communities and ESNs. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-009

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Community managers create, build, and sustain their communities (from Chapter 3): •  Carefully choose the community’s topic. •  Publicize the community. •  Increase membership. •  Post and reply in the threaded discussions. •  Use newsletters, blogs, and wikis. •  Schedule and host events. •  Provide useful content. •  Tell members how they should participate. •  Set goals, measure progress, and provide incentives. •  Solicit, find, and publicize success stories. A community manager should ensure the following: •  There are is at least one co-manager or backup manager for the community. This shares the load, provides backup, and provides different backgrounds and perspectives. •  All assigned community managers are actively monitoring the community’s activity. •  If membership must be approved, pending requests are reviewed and accepted or rejected in a timely manner. •  There are posts at least once a week to the threaded discussions. •  There are multiple new threads created during each month. •  Posts are made by multiple members. •  Posts receive replies from multiple members. •  All questions receive timely answers. •  Posts are not just duplicating those made in other communities. •  Posts are of actual value to the members. •  Content is appropriate: no documents have been uploaded that the organization does not own, conversations are civil, and confidentiality and privacy guidelines are being followed.

Attributes of community managers A good community manager consistently demonstrates a wide variety of positive attributes. These include: Adaptable •  Flexible: willing to try different courses of action •  Resilient: overcomes difficulties, withstands setbacks, and meets challenges •  Open-minded: considers the opinions of others

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Assertive •  Takes initiative •  Consistently achieves challenging objectives and meets commitments •  Makes effective decisions in a timely manner Calm •  Maintains a high level of performance even when under pressure •  Even-tempered even when dealing with unpleasant circumstances •  Balances logic and emotions when interacting with others Member-focused •  Understands members’ needs and concerns •  Responds promptly and effectively to member needs •  Eager to be of help to users Creative •  Develops innovative approaches to problem-solving •  Invents new ways of doing things •  Willing to try out bold ideas Collaborative •  Acknowledges others’ contributions •  Works effectively with individuals of different backgrounds and from different groups •  Willing to seek help as needed •  Shares personal knowledge •  Builds partnerships and networks Curious •  Stays current in the field •  Open to new ideas •  Asks others to share their knowledge and experience Dynamic •  Gets results •  Balances analysis with action •  Sets high standards Influential •  Gains support and commitment from others even without formal authority

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•  Resolves differences by determining needs and forging solutions that benefit all parties •  Facilitates teamwork across organizational boundaries Personable •  Gets along well with many different types of people •  Nurtures new relationships •  Well-liked as a community manager, professional colleague, and friend In a threaded discussion on the role of community managers summarized by Arthur Shelley, the following attributes were supplied by the participants: Arthur Shelley – Community manager key responsibilities: •  Lead the community and engage with members and other stakeholders. •  Organize community interactions and activities on a regular basis. •  Ensure the purpose of the community remains aligned with the personal aspirations of the members and with business goals. •  Create an identity for the community to which people want to belong. •  Generate an atmosphere of fun to keep the interactions vibrant. •  Network with potential new community members to promote community benefits. •  Collate feedback from members and facilitate responses to the source of feedback. •  Ensure collaboration activities are beneficial to the community members. •  Engage members and generate a sense of commitment to community activities. •  Network with human resources and communications personnel and advise them of interest stories. •  Communicate community benefits and successes to wider stakeholder groups. •  Establish (with members) processes for community activities and events. •  Establish accountabilities and time frames for projects, tasks, and activities. •  Identify objectives, roles, and responsibilities for community members. •  Determine resource requirements and any funding arrangements. •  Anticipate risks and explore impacts of non-delivery of desired outcomes. •  Establish a monitoring and review process. •  Work with content managers to discuss layouts and formats of content on the community site. •  Screen submitted content for appropriateness and relevance. •  Encourage members to contribute useful content to the relevant community pages. Shawn Callahan – Here are the character traits I think a community manager should have: •  Well respected •  Knowledgeable about the community’s domain (but not an expert)

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 Well connected to a range of community members  Keen to develop the community’s practice  Good communicator  Personally interested in community management  Good workshop and meeting facilitator  Likable

The other critical feature is that the manager should be approved/ accepted/ chosen by the community sponsor. David Smith: Our community managers: •  Act as the intermediary between people seeking knowledge and people who can provide the knowledge. They actually seek out experts to support community requests for assistance. •  Identify, maintain, and make accessible the collection of knowledge sources in their area of responsibility. •  Facilitate validation of knowledge before updating the repository. •  Monitor other communities and other reporting systems to extract new knowledge or identify issues that require solutions. •  Identify needs for new knowledge and stimulate its creation. •  Assist management in prioritizing new technology developments based on community needs. •  Manage the community site. Competencies: •  Recognized by peers as competent (not expert) in a broad range of community subjects •  Good people skills •  Passionately interested in the community subject area •  Proficient in knowledge services processes and tools Matt Moore: Some community manager attributes: •  Passionate about the domain and the development of a community •  A practitioner of the domain themselves •  Respected and liked by their peers •  Aware and prepared for the organizational politics they will encounter •  Skilled in facilitation process (be it virtual or real) •  Willing to persevere on this for months rather than days

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25 Tips for ESN group administrators These tips are for community managers who use ESN groups for their threaded discussions. 1. Be sure that the group has a compelling subject that will attract members who are passionate about it. 2. Look for groups with overlapping subjects and contact their admins to see if the groups can be combined. 3. Set email notifications for your group. 4. View all posts by reading all email notifications for your group. 5. Set an Outlook reminder to review your group each week. 6. Make sure questions receive answers. Respond to unanswered queries in one of these ways: •  Answer the question yourself. •  Reply and mention one or more other people who are likely to be able to provide an answer. •  Send the question to you by email, and then forward that message to one or more other people and ask them to reply, either by clicking on the link to the thread, or by replying to your email with an answer that you can then post as a reply in the group. •  Share the question in one or more other relevant groups and ask the members to reply in the original thread. 7. If there have been no posts in a week, share a link, start a discussion, or reply to a previous post. 8. Communicate widely to let people know the existence of your group, its purpose, and its target audience. Promote the group by mentioning appropriate people who can help by replying to the post to raise visibility through their followers. Send out an email to a distribution list or to individuals, or mention specific people in a post, with a message such as: TO: All Gamification Enthusiasts We have created a new group called Gamification for those who are interested in the subject. We encourage you to join the group by visiting , clicking the join button, and setting email notifications for the group.

9. Link to or embed the group in relevant intranet and other websites. 10. Ask key leaders and subject matter experts to post, reply, like, and praise in the group. 11. When you receive email messages sharing information, asking questions, or seeking resources, reply to the senders by asking them to post in the group, or if they would prefer that you post on their behalf. Then reply in the group. 12. Thank and praise people who post and reply in the group.

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13. Let members know what specific actions they can take to get value from the group. For example, customize SAFARIS for your group. 14. Make sure there are good examples of these actions in the group so that when people check out the group, they will join it. 15. Take steps to increase membership to achieve critical mass. 16. Get leaders to lead by example by routinely posting, replying, and praising in the group. They should do this directly themselves. 17. Provide training to all group members on setting notifications, following people and topics, and customizing their feed. 18. Edit your group name to make it clear, specific, and helpful. 19. In the group description, provide sufficient details and keywords so potential members will quickly grasp the intent of the group, and so others searching for groups will find it and know what is about. Edit your group description to remove redundant, non-essential text and misleading keywords and ensure that all meaningful keywords are included. 20. Remove non-essential text and add key links in the group information box. 21. List related groups with links to other groups of interest to members and add links back to your group from those groups. 22. If your group has no image, add one, and make sure it looks good. 23. Have at least two admins, and welcome others who wish to become co-admins. 24. Measure your group’s performance: •  At least one post to the group per week •  Posts by more than two different people •  No questions left unanswered after 24 hours •  At least 100 members after the first three months, with growth in membership every quarter thereafter 25. Respond to queries and requests, reply to discussions started by others, and mention other people to ask them to also reply.

The importance of trust in community management People may be afraid that if they share their knowledge, people they don’t trust will misuse it or use it without attribution. Or that if they ask for help, they will be criticized as ignorant or not able to do their job. And they may think that their leaders don’t trust them, and thus might be afraid of being told to stop wasting their time. Their concerns include: •  Can I trust the answers and advice provided by others? •  Can I open up and be candid? •  Can I share information without being embarrassed? •  Can I ask a question without appearing ignorant? •  Can I trust people not to misuse the content I share?

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 Can I trust people to give me credit for information I provide?  I’m worried about giving the wrong answer to a question.  I’m reluctant to share information that may not be the very best.  I’m worried about being criticized, blamed, or ridiculed.  I’m afraid that I might be perceived as wasting my time by participating in a community.

These concerns may prevent them from asking for help in the open, from sharing information, or from spending time participating in communities.

Building trust in a community Facilitate conversations between members online, on calls, in meetings, and outside of the community so that they get to know each other. Encourage storytelling, allowing members to tell their personal stories to help the community to understand their backgrounds and perspectives. Hold periodic face-to-face meetings to establish trust between members. Encourage members to post, reply, present, participate in calls, attend meetings, and get together informally to build trusting relationships. Allow members to express their individual personalities. Have members provide some information about themselves so others will feel as if they know them a bit better. For one community at HP, we asked people to supply the following in their profiles: •  Name •  Location •  Time in the field •  Time with the company •  Organization •  Personal background and interests •  Area of expertise •  Current responsibility •  What do you consider your greatest success? •  Name one thing that you would like to achieve For the SIKM Leaders Community that I lead, I require the following: “When requesting membership, please provide your name, location, organization, and a links to your LinkedIn profile.” This ensures that the identity of everyone in the community is known, which serves as a deterrent to trolling, spam, and negative comments.

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The community manager should: •  Review all membership requests. Require members to provide their name, location, and organization. Admit all who appear to practice or have a sincere interest in the community’s topic. Welcome new members. •  Allow most types of posts within a few common-sense limits. Encourage diverse opinions if expressed in a collaborative manner. Require all posts to be personal, relevant, and not advertisements or spam. Keep the tone civil, friendly, and supportive, with no intimidation, blame, or ridicule. •  Moderate with a light touch using proven practices to ensure that queries and requests for help receive prompt, helpful replies; members are able to post without negative consequences; and members help, thank, and praise each other.

Community management mistakes and problems As a community manager, be aware of these common mistakes, and take active steps to avoid them: Not having a compelling topic: The members and potential members must be passionate about the subject for collaboration, and it must be relevant to them. If potential members don’t strongly identify with the community’s topic, they won’t join, participate, or pay attention. Not achieving a critical mass of members: You usually need at least 100 members, with 200 being a better target. If you don’t properly promote the community and attract new members, it is not likely to become or remain active. Not having a committed manager: The community manager should know the subject, have energy for stimulating collaboration, have sufficient time to devote to leadership, and then regularly spend time increasing membership, lining up speakers, hosting calls and meetings, asking and answering questions, and posting information which is useful to the members. If the community manager does not have time, energy, or skills to do the job well, the community will likely fail. Failing to actively monitor community activity to ensure that questions are answered, members are posting appropriately, and there is regular activity. This is a core responsibility of community managers, and if not performed, leads members to become frustrated and disengaged. Rigidly enforcing rules without applying common sense to each situation. Rules should be treated as flexible guidelines and enforced sensibly for the good of the community.

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Dominating discussions, posting too frequently, or always being the first to reply. This can result in other members being reluctant to post or reply. Communities can encounter the following problems There is a lack of activity in the community: posts and meetings are infrequent, questions are not answered, requests for help are not responded to, posts receive few replies, and posts are not moderated appropriately. Schedule time to regularly perform the SHAPE activities. Membership is too restricted (keeping out deserving members), or not restricted enough (allowing in trolls, spammers, and anonymous members). Make sure that you get this right and take steps to encourage membership and remove bad actors. The community’s topic overlaps with one or more other existing communities, causing fragmentation of membership and confusion over which community to join. Either clarify the topic or merge with a similar community. The community’s topic is esoteric, uses company-specific nomenclature, is too broad, or is too narrow. Rename the community to one with which many people will identify. There is a lack of interest in the topic, or a lack of awareness about the community by prospective members, and it never achieves critical mass. Either change the topic or devote time to better promoting the community. The community lacks a capable community manager who has the time and passion to lead it effectively. If this applies to you, reexamine your priorities, rededicate yourself to the required tasks, recruit a co-manager, or find someone else to take over your duties. The culture of the community is negative, intimidating, or alienating. Make every effort to turn this around. See Chapter 12. There is a lack of diversity of thought and experience among the members. Actively recruit new members with different backgrounds and ask the members to help bring in diverse colleagues. Community posts are not perceived as valuable, are always from the same few members, or are perceived as spam. Examine why this has been happening and take corrective action to change it. There are overly restrictive rules about what can be posted. Ease up on enforcement and use common sense about when to intervene and when to let something go.

Examples of community manager messages A big part of managing communities is communicating with members and potential members. Here are examples of posts that can be made publicly in the community:

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Welcome: Last week the 800th member joined our community. Welcome to Polly Sherman, Director of Knowledge Services at Big Four, a professional services firm! Request to clarify: Thanks for posting here. Please reply with a few more details on what you are seeking. This will make it easier for the members to respond helpfully. Post call: Today we held our 169th monthly call. Here are the . Thanks to Dorothy for presenting, to Linda and Andrew for their questions, and to those who attended. Please continue the discussion by replying to this thread. Sharing: I just updated my recommended reading list. If you have other books or reading lists you think I should add, please reply with links. Thanks! Ask a question to stimulate discussion: The thing I want to find out is: What is the most confronting and challenging question for our community? What is our biggest fear? Find presenters for future calls: If you would like to speak on a future monthly call, please reply with your topic. I will add you to the schedule. Here is the of future presenters so far. Answer and ask for others to reply: Thanks for the clarification. Here are that may be helpful. I encourage other members to reply with their suggestions. Inform about upcoming event: Please join us for our annual community dinner held during the annual industry conference. Here are the . Recognize for posting: Thanks for posting in this community. Here are that address the topics you mentioned. Suggestions request: I have been dealing with our platform vendor on two problems with our community site. They recently responded with this message: “The engineering team is spread thin and has to prioritize issues.” One member suggested that we consider migrating our community’s threaded discussions to a new platform. Which of these alternatives do you prefer? Stay on this platform, Migrate to the new platform, or Move to something else (specify which platform and why you prefer it). Some communications should be between the manager and an individual only. These examples are private messages sent to one member or prospective member via email: When people ask me questions via private email, LinkedIn message, or Twitter direct message, I ask them to join the community and post there. If I can answer, I

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will do so in the community, and so will other members. This benefits the person asking the question by allowing additional answers, and the other members by allowing them to see the discussion. If a question is vaguely worded, I will suggest that it be expanded and offer these 10 Rules of Asking Others to Share Knowledge (linkedin.com/pulse/how-askhelp-10-simple-rules-stan-garfield/): 1. Make the subject line very specific; use 5–10 words, not 2–3. 2. Identify yourself by name, role and organization. 3. Identify the problem briefly and clearly. 4. Explain why solving the problem is important to the reader. 5. Explain exactly what kind of help you want from them. 6. Specify your deadline. 7. Tell what you know (and how you learned it), and what you don’t know. 8. Ask for suggestions about who else to ask and what else to do. 9. Tell what you will do to share what you learn more broadly. 10. Explain how those who help you will be rewarded or recognized. Here are some other examples of when I use private messages related to the community: Redirection of a private message: >Member: Here’s a question for you: what is the most confronting and challenging question for the knowledge management community? What is its biggest fear? >Manager: Please ask those questions of the community. I will answer, and I hope that others will as well. >Member: Lovely idea! >Manager: Would you be willing to present on the responses you received to your query, on a future call? If so, I can add you to the schedule. >Member: I sure am. Book me!

Ask to answer: This question was just posted in the community, and it’s one that I think you can answer based on your experience. Could you take a moment to respond by clicking on this link? Thanks very much for your help. Rules reminder: I appreciate the posts you have been sharing in the community. I want to call your attention to the community policy that is posted on the home page: “Members should not send messages that are duplicates of those distributed through other channels, or regular blog posts. Instead, post one-time invitations to join or subscribe.” Instead of posting each new LinkedIn article, please invite the

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community members (one time) to follow you in LinkedIn to be alerted to future articles. That will allow those members who want to read all your articles to opt in to do so. If you wish to start a discussion in the community, that’s fine. But please don’t make it solely about your new LinkedIn articles. Instead, please make it specific to our community, with unique ideas and questions. Thanks for your understanding. Tone warning: I appreciate your participation in the community. I want to call your attention to the community policy that is posted on the home page: “Diverse opinions are welcomed if expressed in a supportive and collaborative manner.” I noticed that a couple of your posts contained what appeared to me to be harshly worded criticisms. I suggest that you take a more congenial approach to commenting. Thanks for your understanding. Request to present: I met you at the conference last year when you delivered a keynote. Since 2005, I have been leading the SIKM Leaders Community, a community of practice for knowledge management. Every month I host a call with a featured presenter. The calls are the third Tuesday of the month from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET. Speakers last year included . Upcoming speakers include . I would like to invite you to speak on a future call on a topic of your choice. The next open slot is . Is this something you would consider doing? If so, I would be very grateful, as would the members of the community. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for considering this request. Ask for identification when joining: When requesting membership, please provide your name, location, organization, role, and a link to your LinkedIn profile.

Critical success factors Expectations for community managers are extensive. If the following are achieved, their communities should thrive: •  The community being managed has a topic that is of widespread and enduring interest. No matter how good the community manager is, if people don’t care about the topic, the community will fail. •  The community manager has a deep and ongoing interest in the community’s topic. This passion must persist for as long as the community is managed. •  The community manager has the time and energy to devote to regularly performing all duties. No matter what other pressing priorities arise, some time is always spent managing the community. •  The community manager is tenaciously dedicated to keeping the community active. This means recruiting and welcoming new members, inviting and scheduling

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speakers, starting and responding to threaded discussions, and managing the tools and logistics of the community. •  The community manager’s enthusiasm for the community’s topic and activities is authentic, persistent, and infectious. People are attracted to join, contribute, and present in the community.

Chapter 10 Community goals, measurements, and incentives Setting goals for communities, community members, community managers, and community program managers helps ensure successful communities. Measuring actual performance against those goals is essential. Providing incentives to achieve the goals motivates people to comply and emphasizes the importance of doing so. Goals for communities should be established during the community creation process (as described in Chapter 6). A community charter can be used to document the desired goals and measurements. Three different kinds of metrics can be captured and reported for communities. These are goal-oriented, operational, and business impact metrics. Goal-oriented measurements relate to employee goals and allow assessment against those goals. Goals for community members: These are set by communities program managers for all members of the organization, and by community managers for their members. Join at least one community of practice, including the one most relevant to the work you do, and regularly perform the following SPACE activities: Subscribe: Get email notifications or other alerts and regularly read the threaded discussions. Post: Start a new thread or reply in the threaded discussions. Attend: Participate in community events. Contribute: Submit content to the community newsletter, blog, wiki, or site. Engage: Ask or answer a question, make a comment, or give a presentation. Goals for community managers: These are set by communities program managers. •  Improve business results through the activities of the community. •  Define, maintain, and execute the community plan. •  Define measurements for the community. •  Report regularly on the community’s performance against goals. •  Communicate regularly to the community and to potential members. •  Ensure fresh content is being shared in the community, multiple voices are being heard, lively discussions are occurring, and questions receive timely replies. •  Actively participate in the community, model the desired behaviors, and be visible as a manager and member. •  Network with other community managers, both inside and outside of the organization, to stay current in the field of community management. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-010

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•  Demonstrate, document, and train on the use of the community. •  Regularly perform the following SHAPE activities: Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events. Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings. Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate. Post: Share information useful to the members by posting to the community site, threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter. Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts. Goals for communities program managers: These are set by the knowledge services program manager, or by the senior executive to whom the communities program manager reports. •  Improve business results by institutionalizing communities, with the help of the senior executive and the other leaders in the organization. •  Define, maintain, and execute the communities program implementation plan for the organization. •  Define, communicate, and implement people, process, and technology components for sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning through communities. •  Define goals, measurements, and rewards for community members and managers. •  Report regularly on the communities program’s performance. •  Lead a community of community managers. •  Manage the program’s communications. •  Actively participate in communities to model the desired behaviors by being visible as a manager and member of multiple internal and external communities. •  Network with other communities programs and stay current in the fields of communities and community management. •  Implement action plans, including: •  Review and approve requests for new communities. •  Fill gaps by recruiting new communities for key topics. •  Prevent and remove redundant communities. •  Recruit, nurture, and support community managers. •  Lead by example. •  Attract new communities. Retire inactive communities. •  Report on community health. •  Develop, publish, and maintain documentation including frequently asked questions (FAQs). •  Develop and deliver training.

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Operational metrics are typically based on data captured by systems but may include some data that needs to be captured manually. For example, members, posts, and replies. Measurements for a community: These are used to monitor the actual performance of each community using the ACME metrics: Activity: At least one post to the community threaded discussions per week, posts by more than two different people, and no questions left unanswered after 24 hours. Content: At least one document, newsletter, announcement, or blog post added to the community site per month, and content is reviewed to ensure that it is appropriate, current, and accurate. Membership: At least 100 members after the first three months, with growth in membership every quarter thereafter. Events: At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting every quarter, listed in the community events calendar, held as planned, with at least 10 people participating in each event. Community health indicators: Each community should be assessed each month using standards such as these: Green 1. At least one post to the threaded discussions every week. 2. All questions are answered within 24 hours. 3. At least one newsletter or blog post per month. 4. Number of members increased over last month. 5. At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting every month. Yellow 1. At least one post to the threaded discussions per month. 2. All questions are answered. 3. At least one newsletter or blog post per quarter. 4. Number of members stayed the same as last month. 5. At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter. Red 1. No posts to the threaded discussions in a month. 2. There are unanswered questions. 3. No newsletter or blog post in a quarter. 4. Number of members decreased since last month. 5. No conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting in a quarter.

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Overall health indicator 1. Green – 4+ green health indicators 2. Red – 4+ red health indicators 3. Yellow – Neither green nor red Measurements for a communities program: The overall success of a communities program can be measured using PATCH metrics: Participation: percentage of target population that is a member of at least one community. Anecdotes: percentage of communities displaying on their sites testimonials by community members on the value of participation, stories about the usefulness of the community, or posts thanking other members for their help. Tools: percentage of communities having all five key tools (Site: home page; Calendar: of community events; Events: meetings, conference calls, or webinars; News: email message, newsletter, or blog; Threads: threaded discussions). Coverage: percentage of desired topics covered by at least one community. Health: percentage of communities meeting these criteria: at least one post to a threaded discussion per week, at least one newsletter or blog post per month, at least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter, at least 100 members, and at least 10 members participating in each event. Here is an example of communities program metrics from a monthly report:

Figure 14: Communities program Key Performance Indicators.

Communities program managers should publish a community health report every month, and either nurture the inactive ones back to good health or retire them. Here is an example:

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Figure 15: Community health report.

Business impact metrics are harder to capture but are the most worthwhile. For communities, they can include: 1. Costs saved 2. Costs avoided 3. Incremental revenue 4. Improved quality 5. Increased employee satisfaction and retention 6. Increased customer satisfaction and retention 7. Increased partner satisfaction and retention 8. New business attracted 9. Increased market share 10. Revenue and profits from innovation One way to determine business impact is to include a question about it in a survey of community members. Here is a survey that can be used, in which business impact is the final question: 1. How satisfied are you with your ability to do the following? •  Share and receive new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions. •  Innovate through brainstorming, building on each others ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments to develop new and better ways of doing things. •  Reuse solutions and good ideas, apply shared insights, and retrieve posted material.

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•  Collaborate through threaded discussions, conversations, and interactions with other community members on an ongoing basis. •  Learn from other members of the community; from invited guest speakers about successes, failures, case studies, and new trends; and through mentoring to deepen your understanding of the subject. •  Ask questions and receive answers to questions. •  Help solve problems for others and receive help to solve your problems. How satisfied are you with the community’s tools? •  Site: home page •  Calendar: of community events •  Events: meetings, conference calls, webinars •  News: email message, newsletter, or blog •  Threads: threaded discussions How satisfied are you with the support provided by the community manager(s)? •  Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events. •  Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings. •  Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate. •  Post: Share information which is useful to the members by posting to the community site, threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter. •  Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts. How satisfied are you with the style, tone, and culture of the community? How has the community helped you to accomplish the following? •  Save time. •  Avoid or reduce costs. •  Increase revenue. •  Improve quality. •  Increase your job satisfaction. •  Increase customer satisfaction and retention. •  Increase partner satisfaction and retention. •  Win new business. •  Increase market share. •  Generate revenue and profits from innovation.

Reasons for metrics There are three main reasons to collect and publish metrics: •  Take action based on what the numbers indicate. For example, report on the health of each community every month, and retire the inactive ones.

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•  Track and communicate progress against goals. For example, track and report on how the organization is doing overall in using communities in a monthly report, and inspect and discuss progress (or the lack thereof) in management team meetings: •  Persuade others, answer typical questions, and refute baseless assertions. For example, I sometimes received comments such as “no one uses our Enterprise Social Network (ESN).” I refuted these by pointing out that the ESN had 118,652 total members, 1,256,806 total messages, and 144,432 total files. Apparently, someone was in fact using the ESN. On the other hand, be wary of publicizing numbers that reflect actions you don’t want to encourage. For example, if you don’t want lots of groups being created in your ESN, don’t promote these metrics: 30 New Groups Created, 1,148 Total Public Groups, 1,186 Total Private Groups, and 2,334 Total Groups. Here is an example of metrics that don’t necessarily adhere to any of these reasons. The following graphs depict data collected as part of a survey:

Figure 16: Pointless metrics.

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The problem is: what will be done with this data? Are there any important conclusions to be drawn, key insights to be realized, or actions to be taken? If not, then the charts don’t offer any useful information and need not be produced. Many people express a desire for data that doesn’t drive any action or insight – collecting data for data’s sake. For each metric to be captured and reported, there should be an associated action or insight that is expected to be driven. Avoid collecting every possible statistic just because it’s possible.

Metrics for enterprise social networks Lee Romero wrote a series of posts on Community of Practice Metrics and Membership in November 2008 (bit.ly/2m6Yj8A). Since then, he had this to say about how to report metrics for ESNs: “Focus on reporting KPIs and not just raw counts. KPIs almost always are ratios or percentages, because just a raw number is pretty useless. As an example, total members, new members, and posts are raw measures. None of those tell me anything. Posts per member is more useful. Measure membership as a percentage of a given population. That is a useful insight.” Here are my views. The following analytics can be used to take action, track and communicate progress, persuade others, answer typical questions, and refute baseless assertions. Members: Number of members, percentage of population, rate of increase in membership – total and by organization, location, level, and other demographics (both raw numbers and percentages). Participation: Percentage of population which is a member of at least one group and has notifications turned on for that group. Posts: Number of posts, posters, frequency of posts, average time between posts, number/percentage of each type of post (share, query, praise), number/percentage of praisers. Replies: Average time to reply, average number of replies, number/percentage of answered and unanswered queries, number/percentage (of posts) of likes, number/percentage of likers. Views: Thread views of all kinds (web, mobile, email), number/percentage of each kind. Users: Individual dashboards and overall leader board: To help recognize and encourage participation, it’s helpful to prominently post leader boards. These should allow filtering people by attributes such as organization, location, and level, including those with the most:

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Thread views of all kinds (web, mobile, email), number/percentage of each kind Likes made to their posts Replies made to their posts by others Replies made to the posts of others and answers supplied to queries Praise received Praise given Number of successful examples shared to a wins group Number of followers Number of groups posted to Number of topics used

Groups: Individual dashboards and overall leader board: 1. Number of members and rate of increase in membership 2. Number/percentage (of group membership) of posts, number/percentage of unique posters, posts per week, average time between posts 3. Average time to reply, average number of replies to a single post 4. Number/percentage (of total posts) of queries, number/percentage answered, number/percentage unanswered 5. Thread views of all kinds (web, mobile, email), number/percentage of each kind 6. Number/percentage of group members with at least one thread view of all kinds (web, mobile, email) and average number of thread views by each of these members 7. Number/percentage of members with notifications turned on 8. Number/percentage (of posts) of likes 9. Number/percentage (of group membership) of people giving praise 10. Number/percentage (of group membership) of successful examples shared to a wins group Topics/tags: Individual dashboards and overall leader board for the network, each group, and each user: 1. List of all topics with number of times used, number of unique users, days since last use 2. Trending topics 3. Tag clouds 4. Clusters of topics which are variations on the same topic 5. Topics which appear to be typos 6. Topics by group and average number per group 7. Topics by user and average number per user 8. Average number of topics per post 9. Number/percentage of new topics and number/percentage of new topic application 10. Number/percentage of existing topics and number/percentage of existing topic reuse

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Wins: Number/percentage (of total posts) of success stories shared to a wins group, number/percentage (of total members) of unique sharers. Includes testimonials by members on the value of ESN participation, stories about the usefulness of the ESN, and posts and replies thanking other members. Value: Correlate desired behaviors with desirable results, e.g., active users are more likely to be promoted, businesses with active groups have better financial results, leaders who participate regularly have lower employee turnover rates, etc.

Motivating community participation A common concern of communities programs is how to get people to join, participate in, and benefit from communities. Objections include “I don’t have any time,” “I don’t know what is expected of me,“ and “What’s in it for me?” If people won’t spend time sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning in the ways promoted by a communities program, it will fail. How can you get people to share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest in a community? Motivating people to demonstrate desired behaviors can be attempted in many ways, and there is considerable disagreement on the best ways of doing so. The best way is through inspirational leadership – communicating regularly, setting clear expectations, monitoring performance, regularly thanking and praising, and most important, leading by example. But you can also motivate people through goals and measurements, incentives and rewards, gamification, and badging. Let’s start with some definitions. •  Goals are employee targets included in performance plans. They are communicated and inspected regularly. •  Measurements are numbers and graphs that are collected and reported regularly. They track organizational performance against goals and operational indicators. •  Incentives are programs designed to encourage compliance with goals, improve performance against metrics, and increase participation in initiatives. They include points, badges, and competitive rankings. •  Recognition is praise, publicity, and job promotions. •  Rewards are financial and tangible awards. •  Badging is providing a validated indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality, or interest. It can be earned and displayed on a personal profile. •  Badges are digital emblems awarded for completing specific tasks. •  Leader boards are displays of the current names and scores of competitors. •  Progress bars are graphics that brandish the progress users have made in completing tasks. •  Personal profiles display skill levels, achievements, live activities, progress, interactions, and more to create multi-dimensional views of individuals.

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•  Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity to encourage engagement with a process or tool. •  Incentive points tracking systems award and track points for desired behaviors, both automatically as triggered by events and manually through forms entry.

Communicating goals When communicating individual goals, spell out what each goal means in detail. Here is an example: We’ve set individual community goals for all employees in the company. Everyone should have these goals in their annual performance plans. The first goal is joining at least one community of practice, including the one most relevant to your work. Goal number two is paying attention to the community’s threaded discussions by subscribing to and reading all notifications. And the third goal is participating in the community by asking questions, answering questions, sharing insights, and attending calls and meetings.

Measuring performance against goals At the end of the performance review cycle, it’s useful to provide a tool for employees to use to gather data to use in their review discussions. It can prompt them to summarize their community activities. And it can link to online sources of data to back up their claims. The following questions can be used as prompts for reviews. 1. Did you have community goals for this past year? If yes, what where they? 2. Which communities did you participate in? 3. For each community, were you a manager, a champion, a frequent contributor, an occasional contributor, or a reader/listener? 4. Which threaded discussions did you subscribe to? 5. How many posts and replies did you make during the year? 6. What content did you submit to communities? 7. What content did you reuse from communities? 8. Did you present on community calls or at community meetings? 9. How did your community activity benefit you, the organization, and your clients? 10. Are there colleagues who will acknowledge the help you provided to them through communities?

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Incentives and rewards These are designed to encourage compliance with goals, improve performance against metrics, and increase participation in communities programs. They include performance ratings, salary increases, promotions, promotion requirements, tangible rewards, recognition, competitive rankings, badging, and gamification. There are several differing schools of thought on whether to provide special rewards for desired knowledge-sharing behaviors. One school holds that incentives can yield short-term results when introducing a change initiative, but that the effects wear off over time. Another is that people will manipulate such programs to gain the rewards without achieving the desired results (e.g., make lots of posts with low quality and no benefit). And a third is that you need to provide incentives for people or else they won’t do what you want. It’s worth testing these assumptions with pilots for different types of programs. Here are five types of incentives you can try:

Performance ratings and salary increases In conjunction with goals and measurements, you can specify that those who excel in achieving their community goals will receive higher performance ratings and associated salary increases. Another option is to require that individual community goals must be achieved in order to receive an above-average rating or increase. For example, if a firm has three levels of performance ratings – fails to meet expectations, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations – you can specify that only those who achieve their community goals can receive the highest rating, despite what other great accomplishments they may have. This will likely get everyone’s attention.

Promotion requirement For some job types, you can require that community participation be consistently demonstrated as a condition of advancement to higher-level positions. For example, technical experts, project managers, and people managers can be held accountable for providing examples of how they shared, collaborated, and innovated through community activities. If they don’t provide such evidence, they are not promoted. Communications announcing promotions should be widely distributed and should include details on how the individuals participated in communities. This will provide examples for others working toward career advancement and give them something to strive for.

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Require that employees who wish to be promoted must demonstrate that they have consistently achieved their community goals, shared their knowledge, and set a good example for others. Regularly and widely communicate this.

Tangible rewards With the approval of your human resources function, you can give money or prizes for the top community members, community champions, community managers, those who achieve targets, or those selected by leaders or peers. Communicate the rules in advance so everyone will know how to win the awards. Here are ten examples of different ways to offer rewards: •  The top community members in each community based on the quantity and quality of their contributions win a financial reward. •  The top five community managers as voted on by community members can attend the industry conference of their choice. •  For every presentation given on a community call that meets quality standards, a community member earns a gift certificate. •  Those who helpfully answer the most questions in each community win the book of their choice. •  All community managers whose communities are rated green for one year win the latest in-demand piece of technology. •  Everyone who participates in a community content initiative for three months or more wins a subscription to the journal of their choice. All members of a region that achieves its community goals receive a bonus. •  The community members who receive the top ten most votes from their peers for sharing the most win a weekend trip for two. •  The community managers of the communities that achieve the greatest membership growth are invited to attend a gala event. •  The community members who receive the top ten most points in competitive rankings (see below) win a financial reward. The value of rewards does not have to be great in order to motivate people. The desire to compete, earn something free, and be acknowledged as a winner can be powerful incentives.

Recognition Encourage collaboration, sharing, and reuse by recognizing those who perform in the desired ways. Every Thursday, praise those who share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, or suggest in communities. If your ESN has a praise function, use it,

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and tag it as #ThankfulThursday. Especially recognize those who are posting for the first time or who were redirected from email to a community. A good way to encourage praise is to promote a weekly theme called Thankful Thursdays. Here is a message that was used to launch such a campaign: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” – William Arthur Ward Let’s unwrap the gifts of gratitude every Thursday! We all work hard day in and day out, and it can be challenging to look up from our various projects to thank the people who have made a difference for us. With that in mind, the leadership team would like to designate Thursdays as “Thankful Thursdays.” Just use the hashtag #ThankfulThursday to recognize a colleague or team who has made significant contributions to you and/or the team. The best way to post is using the praise function of our ESN. Thank you for making our Thursdays thankful ones.

Here is a hashtag and some text to use when making a praise post in your ESN: #ThankfulThursday – Recognize a colleague, show appreciation for an accomplishment, or let others know what you are thankful for. You might praise someone for providing extraordinary effort, answering questions, responding to queries, or supplying needed resources. Or sharing information, Working Out Loud, or suggesting good ideas. You can thank people for presenting on community calls or posting a query in a community instead of via email. Praise the most followed, liked, or replied-to ESN users. Thank community managers who agree to use an existing community, site, or collaboration space rather than creating a new, redundant one.

Competitive rankings Healthy competition can motivate people. Here are three examples: •  When people see where they stand in rankings, they often are motivated to move up in the standings. I used to manage a team of salespeople. After I started producing a weekly ranking report for the team, every one of them achieved their goals. •  The HP KM Stars program (see details below) resulted in many winners from the UK. They had a friendly competition that frequently yielded monthly winners from the UK. •  The competition does not have to be with other people. It can be against a target such as profile completion percentage. Some people become obsessed with achieving 100% completion as reflected in a visible badge, and this will yield desired results.

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Try to combine as many of these five types of incentives as possible. For example, implement a competitive rankings system. Employees can use data from the system during performance reviews. They can submit details from the system when applying for promotions. The top point earners can be given tangible rewards. Those who exceed a targeted point threshold can be recognized as community stars. And communications vehicles can provide profiles of leaders and interviews with details on their success stories. You can use a points system with or without rewards. An example of one without rewards was HP’s IT Resource Center Forums which offered a points-tracking system to recognize those who shared their knowledge. The “Submit Points” option allowed members to rate replies to their questions by assigning points to those community members who provided replies or solutions to problems. On the website, the top 25 members and the top 10 new members were listed prominently, and this helped encourage community members to help each other and award points as a result.

Example: Hewlett-Packard When I led the communities program at HP, my team was able to launch an incentive points program after wanting to do so for many years. Participants could earn 5 points for joining a community, 1 point for each post to a community threaded discussion, and 5 points for each document contributed. HP’s program was called KM (Knowledge Management) Stars and started with recognition only. This was done through a monthly list of the individual rankings, which was promoted on the intranet, in the monthly newsletter, and in the program’s blog. Later, the senior vice president agreed to add financial rewards to the program. Three winners were selected each month. The winners were required to write a story on how they became a KM Star. Winners were widely publicized. An email message was sent to the leadership team and to the management chain of each winner. A lively competition ensued, especially in the UK. No repeat winners were allowed, and all three regions of the world were included in the selection process. There was one instance of gaming the system, in which someone posted regularly in the threaded discussions with little value. This was addressed successfully, and that behavior ceased. KM Stars points were included in everyone’s personal profiles in the HP social networking platform. The success of the KM Stars program led to its adaptation and use at other companies, including Accenture and IBM.

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Gamification Recognition for contributing in communities can help encourage people to continue to do so. Financial or other tangible rewards can be used in conjunction with recognition but are not necessarily required to motivate the desired behaviors. Incentive points tracking systems can be used for awarding and tracking points for desired behaviors. There are commercially available tools for this, including Badgeville, Big Door, Bunchball, and RedCritter. You can also develop your own web-based application to keep track of points. These points can be earned by contributing content to a community that is later reused by other members, regularly answering questions in a threaded discussion, serving as a community manager, or presenting on a community call or at a community event. These ideas give you a starting point for designing your own system. You can choose to include any or all of these concepts or think of others that are more suitable for your organization. The key is to try something simple to see if it works. You can try giving financial rewards to those who earn the most points or recognize them in some other way. Publishing the leaders on the communities program home page, in newsletters, and in special messages from the senior executive will help reinforce the importance of the program, spur friendly competition, and recognize those who excel.

Badging Here are examples of badges that can be given to people based on qualitative or quantitative factors: Assigned Badges 1. Contributor – based on contributions to the community 2. Innovator – based on suggestions made in the community and participation in community innovation challenges 3. Recycler – based on downloading and reusing community content 4. Collaborator – based on participation in the community 5. Community Manager – based on performing this role Levels for each badge 1. Bronze – some activity 2. Silver – moderate activity 3. Gold – frequent activity 4. Platinum – extensive activity 5. Diamond – exceptional activity

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Earned Badges Connector – based on people connections Influencer – based on ESN Influence metric (see below for details) Maven – based on votes ESN leader – based on 1. ESN actions liked 2. Replies 3. Posts 4. Most-replied-to conversations 5. Conversations with the most participants 6. Followers 7. Times praised SAFARIS Star 1. Share – 1 point for each post sharing information, 2 points for each like or reply to such a post 2. Ask – 2 points for each post asking a question 3. Find – 2 points for each post finding a resource 4. Answer – 5 points for each post answering a question, 5 additional points if the person asking the question acknowledges that the answer provided was helpful 5. Recognize – 1 point for praising someone, 5 points for being praised by someone else 6. Inform – 1 point for each post informing about activities, 2 points for each reply to such a post 7. Suggest – 1 point for each post suggesting an idea, 10 points for each idea implemented

ESN Influence This is a quantitative measurement of an individual’s overall impact in the network and ability to encourage others to interact using the following factors: •  Number of posts by the individual •  Number of followers for the individual •  Number of direct replies to posts by the individual •  Number of posts in conversations started by the individual •  Number of likes received by the individual’s posts •  Number of distinct people who have liked a post by the individual •  The ratio of likes/ post by the individual

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•  The ratio of likes/ liker for posts by the individual •  Average lifespan of a conversation by the individual This can be displayed on the personal profiles of each individual. Similar to a progress bar or a completion percentage indicator, this can motivate users to become more active in the ESN in order to increase their influence number.

Health reports You can produce and distribute regular reports including a list of specific elements with a rating for each (e.g., green/ yellow/ red). If the executive sponsors are included in the distribution, and they see that their community is shown as red, they may instigate corrective action. This can be done for communities of practice and ESN groups. Green communities can proudly display a badge reflecting this status on their home pages. Conversely. red communities can be motivated to improve their health by the desire to get the red badge of shame off of their home pages.

Critical success factors This chapter has focused on quantitative measures of community success. There are key qualitative indicators that should also be considered. If I had to choose three things that would tell how healthy a community is, here are the ones I would pick: The value of the community as articulated by its members. Do they find it worthwhile to spend time participating? Have they received help, learned about the topic, and enjoyed sharing with the other members? The diversity of perspectives, experiences, modes of expression, personal attributes, and locations of the members who actively participate in the community. Is the community made up of a wide variety of members across multiple organizations? The depth, variety, frequency, tone, and quality of the member interactions. Are there regular discussions of real substance? Do members feel a sense of belonging and fellowship?

Chapter 11 The 90-9-1 rule of thumb for community participation In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, or otherwise participate actively. The rule of thumb is that 10% of the members will participate at all, and only 1% will regularly be active in discussions and presentations. 90% will not post or speak up at all. Some have questioned whether this rule of thumb really applies. From my experience, the 90-9-1 rule of thumb might be optimistic. This chapter provides actual data from an Enterprise Social Network (ESN), a community, and a social media platform. It also quotes other articles, including a wide range of perspectives.

Enterprise social network data Here is the analysis done in a very large Enterprise Social Network with more than 130,000 members: Lee Romero put together an analysis of public groups in the ESN for two months. Here are his insights: For Month 1: •  Average Inactive (members who do not post): 96.61% •  Average Active (members who post > 2 times in a month): 0.62% •  Average Mildly Active (members who post one or two times): 2.35% •  Average of members who post anything at all: 2.97% For Month 2: •  Average Inactive (members who do not post): 96.99% •  Average Active (members who post > 2 times in a month): 0.75% •  Average Mildly Active (members who post one or two times): 2.26% •  Average of members who post anything at all: 3.01% I chose > 2 to mean “active” because it is so minimal that I couldn’t go to 1 or 2, and anything higher saw a big drop-off in that percentage. I provide two months of data to see if it’s stable (and it is). It’s possible that it’s closer to the 90-9-1 if you think that the 97 is really split itself between lurkers and join-only people. If a typical group is 50% join-only (join but then completely ignore it) and we remove those join-only people, the percentages become something like 94-5-1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-011

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Community of practice data Lee and I also analyzed data from the SIKM Leaders Community. Here is Lee’s summary: Taking 16 months of data and averaging the percent active and percent very active, it works out to 2.1% and 1.77%, respectively. Which is more like 96-2-2.

LinkedIn data One more set of data comes from my LinkedIn posts. Looking at the number of views, likes, and comments for each post, out of 6,229 followers at the time I did this analysis, I saw numbers like: 1. 308, 52, 5 2. 589, 72, 11 3. 557, 60, 7 4. 635, 68, 14 5. 416, 27, 4 6. 476, 45, 9 7. 847, 70, 5 8. 805, 119, 19 9. 384, 33, 2 10. 475, 69, 3 The ratios form a pattern of 5–10% of followers who read a post, .5-1% of followers who like a post, and .05-.1% of followers who comment. This is a familiar power law distribution, in this case 90% don’t read, 10% read, 1% like, and .1% comment.

Join-only members Expanding on 90-9-1, it would be useful to add a fourth number representing the people who join communities, but don’t pay any attention to what is going on. This makes a distinction in the lurkers between learners and join-only members. Learners pay attention to the community’s discussions, shared content, and events. Join-only members may have good intentions, but they end up being essentially the same as non-members, because they receive no benefits from being members. There is nothing wrong with the 90% not posting, as long as they subscribe, read, listen, and pay attention. But if they don’t, then they are not getting value from the community, and the organization misses out on their personal development and/or their contributions to the other members.

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Is the 90-9-1 rule of thumb valid? Some argue that the 90-9-1 rule of thumb understates the percentage of inactive members: “I think it’s clear that the reality could well be more like the 98/1.9/0.1 rule, instead of what the accepted reality has been so far.” (Guesstimating the accuracy of the 90/9/1 rule, reddit. com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2x0jj5/guesstimating_the_accuracy_of_the_9091_rule/)

Others assert that the rule of thumb is invalid: “So, maybe we don’t need to be so dire about how many people engage in your online community. Based on this data I would suggest a new rule (with a little rounding): The 70-20-10 Rule of Community Participation.” (Is the 90-9-1 Rule for Online Community Engagement Dead? by Paul Schneider, blog.higherlogic.com/2011/08/11/Is-the-90-9-1-Rule-for-Online-CommunityEngagement-Dead-Data)

I haven’t seen this for communities. In fact, I see more evidence of 95-4-1, even in communities focused on knowledge services and collaboration. For example, there are over 800 members of the SIKM Leaders Community, but usually only 20 people attend the monthly calls. This is despite my attempts at active community management. Some claim that the typical percentage of inactive members should be much lower: “Myth: The 90–9–1 rule – just one percent of members of a community are truly engaged, while 90 percent lurk. Reality: More like 55–25–20. Communities are complex organisms, and really, no one ‘rule’ will define engagement percentages for every community. But consistently over the past three years, our research has found that engagement levels in communities are consistently higher than the old assumption. That’s not to say there aren’t big, external (usually) communities that aren’t 90–9–1. And whether you count inactive but registered members, how you set up the community permissions and other items can have an effect on your numbers. But when you normalize for members who log into a community during a given month – you’re more likely to find that a sizable minority are posting, commenting, creating, liking, sharing and collaborating.” (Three Community Myths Busted by Ted McEnroe of the Community Roundtable, communityroundtable.com/state-of-community-management/three-community-myths-busted/)

Lee Romero commented: “A big caveat in that last line. That is like the join-only member. So, if you ignore the fact that, say, 50% (or whatever the percent is) just join and then ignore everything, you can argue that the percentages are higher, sure. You could extend that point, though. ‘When you normalize for members who post in a community during a given month, we find that 100% of members post at least once a month.’ A true statement but it doesn’t necessarily change anything.” “Demystifying the myth of the 90-9-1 rule: The biggest finding of our research was quantifying just how much active community management correlates with high levels of engagement. Most community management professionals are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule of online

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engagement and some communities do track very well to that engagement pyramid. But many question this rule because it can be unreliable or an underestimate. What we found in our survey was striking – an average engagement profile of 55-30-15 – wildly different than the common rule of thumb. More surprising, the average of the most engaged communities reported more creators than lurkers – at 17-57-26. For best-in-class communities there are more content creators than there are lurkers.” (The 2013 State of Community Management by the Community Roundtable, s3.amazonaws.com/thecr/SOCM_2013.pdf)

Note that this data is taken from a survey, which is different from directly measuring data in actual communities. I prefer to rely on empirical data, rather than survey data.

Can participation be increased? If you can generate a higher percentage of active community members, that’s great. For internal communities, this usually depends on factors outside the direct control of the community manager, such as senior leaders who are active and get others to follow their example. “How to Overcome Participation Inequality: You can’t. The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied. Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve’s angle. Are you going to have the ‘usual’ 90-9-1 distribution, or the more radical 99-1-0.1 distribution common in some social websites? Can you achieve a more equitable distribution of, say, 80-16-4? (That is, only 80% lurkers, with 16% contributing some and 4% contributing the most.)”

Figure 17: Participation Inequality (The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities by Jakob Nielsen, nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality).

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What would happen if 90% of community members posted regularly? In a small group, that might be okay. But in a large community, the volume and frequency of posts would likely become a problem. More frequent posts from more people can result in more noise and can cause members to stop paying attention. So, those who lament that only 10% of a community are active should consider the possible negative consequences of a dramatic increase. If people will just pay attention, read, and learn, that is valuable. And based on my experience, that will be the most we can expect from most members.

Power laws and power curves The order of magnitude differences between the percentages of very active, active, and inactive members is a power law. Another power law is Zipf’s law: “The current analysis broadly replicated the findings of van Mierlo (2014), that the top 1% of registered members contribute the vast majority of posts, the next 9% a minority, and the last 90% very few. Thus, the 90-9-1 principle appears to provide a reliable means of broadly categorizing participant contributions. However, the graph shown below, and the associated best fitting power curve provide an alternate and more precise means of describing the distribution. In fact, the distribution shown below adheres to Zipf’s law – that the frequency of posts made by a member is inversely proportional to their rank in frequency. This is a widely observed phenomenon spanning areas such as linguistics, populations, income and Internet traffic. This model gives a more nuanced image of the distribution. It shows a gradual reduction in contributions rather than a quantum leap at the boundary between superusers and contributors as the 90-9-1 principle implies.”

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Figure 18: Log–log scatterplot of the total posts made by each member ranked in descending order and a power curve which best fits the data (Describing the distribution of engagement in an Internet support group by post frequency: A comparison of the 90-9-1 Principle and Zipf’s Law by Bradley Carron-Arthur, John Cunningham, and Kathleen Griffiths, sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S221478291400027X).

Does size matter? Lee Romero did a study on Enterprise Social Network groups and business value, answering the question “Does size matter?” with “Yes.” He found that groups with 200 or more members are more active and provide better business results than smaller groups. Group size is almost always the key determining factor of activity. Here are key graphs from his presentation:

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Figure 19: Activity Levels by Group Size (Yammer Groups and Business Value: Does size matter? by Lee Romero, slideshare.net/pekadad/group-size-impactonvaluesikm).

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Figure 20: Activity Levels by Group Size: Another View. (Yammer Groups and Business Value: Does size matter? by Lee Romero, slideshare.net/pekadad/group-size-impactonvaluesikm).

Figure 21: Achieving Green community status: minimum activity (Yammer Groups and Business Value: Does size matter? by Lee Romero, slideshare.net/pekadad/group-size-impactonvaluesikm).

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Figure 22: Likelihood of a Reply (Yammer Groups and Business Value: Does size matter? by Lee Romero, slideshare.net/pekadad/group-size-impactonvaluesikm).

A LinkedIn article I wrote attracted a large response: 13,561 views, 1,648 likes, and 108 comments. This seems like a lot, but when you look at the LinkedIn channel in which it appeared, Leadership & Management, there were 9,759,914 channel followers when the post was made. This means that only about 0.1% of those followers viewed my post, 0.01% liked it, and 0.001% commented. The huge number of subscribers to the channel was essential to giving wide exposure to my article. However you go about it, the more people you can persuade to join a community and pay attention to it, the better. One way to increase membership is to encourage both communities of practice and communities of interest. When I joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983, there were online communities called VAX Notes Conferences for both business and non-business topics. I believe this was a good strategy, because those who joined one for the New England Ski Club could get used to the tool, and thus were more likely to use it for other topics like VAX/VMS.

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Critical success factors At a minimum, community members should pay attention to the community’s discussions and events. And some will post, reply, present, and speak up on calls. Those who do none of these are join-only members, and they may as well not have joined, as they get nothing out of being a member. Those who don’t post, reply, or speak up on calls can still get value from community membership. Often derided as “lurkers,” they are merely part of the 90% of members who aren’t active. But as long as they pay attention, this is to be expected, and there is no problem with it. They will learn about the community’s topic, and that is an important form of community participation. It’s also important to ask questions, answer questions, share useful content, and participate in conversations and calls. The 10% of members who do so provide a great benefit to the other 90%.

Chapter 12 Culture and communities Culture is the way things are done in an organization, and what things are considered to be important and taboo. There are two ways that culture applies to communities programs. The culture of the organization in which the communities program exists or will be launched is a key determinant of the success or failure of the program. And the culture of each individual community is important to establish, monitor, and maintain. Understanding how people interact with each other in your organization, typical styles of behavior, fundamental operating principles, and the code of conduct is a necessary prelude to introducing a knowledge services initiative and subsequent communities program. If the culture of the organization already includes sharing and collaboration, the communities program will be adopted more readily. If not, a significant management of change initiative will be needed to start changing the culture to one more conducive to communities.

Organizational culture Moving from “need to know” to “need to share” A knowledge services paradox is the existence of private communities and Enterprise Social Network (ESN) groups. Knowledge sharing is best done in the open, allowing anyone and everyone in the organization to participate and benefit, but some argue that this is not always desirable. I have heard the following reasons for preferring to share or ask in closed, private groups: Comfort: People are more comfortable sharing or asking in a small group of known colleagues. Trust: People don’t want to share with anyone unless they have an existing, trusting relationship with them. Fear: People are reluctant to expose their ignorance broadly. Theft: Others will steal our valuable intellectual property and benefit from it unfairly. Abuse: Others will misuse our materials and cause harm, or require us to have to clean up their mess. Need to know: Only those with a need to know should have access.

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Secrecy: We need to hold confidential discussions and keep others out. We can’t allow others outside of our team to see what we are doing and discussing. Soft launch: We’ll start out as a small private community, and then we’ll open it up later after we are ready to do so. Here are counterarguments for each of these: Comfort: Discussing in a closed group is like talking in an echo chamber. The same ideas are repeated and agreed upon, but fresh insights from a more diverse set of people are missed. Trust: Ask people if there would be any harm if those they don’t know join the group and answer questions or benefit from what is being shared. The answer will likely be a reluctant “no,” which should help them realize the benefits of being more inclusive. And once outsiders join and contribute, they become trusted, and the original concern is reduced or eliminated. Fear: This is natural, so take steps to praise, thank, and recognize those who share and ask in the open. Theft: Remind people that everyone works for the same organization, with the same overall success goals. Thus, “stealing” is not the best way to perceive crossorganizational reuse. Abuse: Most presentations and documents are of limited value without the context for using them. If you share them openly, it’s more likely that you will be asked to deliver your presentations or implement projects using your documents than that others will try to use them without your knowledge. Need to know: The problem with the term “need to know” is: how do you know who needs to know? It’s impossible to know in advance all the people in your organization who could contribute or benefit, so posting in private risks missing many of these people. It’s better to change from a mindset of “need to know” to “need to share.” Secrecy: This goes against the whole idea of knowledge sharing. Challenge those with this view to define the actual dangers posed by operating transparently. Chances are that the threats are more imagined than real. Soft launch: This is just an excuse for not doing it right the first time. Small private groups are unlikely to grow and become active, and as a result may fail. The people who will help the group grow and thrive may not be known to you, so being open enables them to join and help lead the way.

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Here are three additional arguments in favor of public, open sharing and collaboration: Reach the right people: Posts made in small private groups are likely to miss those who could benefit, and many questions may go unanswered or receive inadequate responses. Get your ideas out there: Sharing broadly allows your team’s thoughts, plans, and actions to be tested, challenged, and adopted. This enables growth, innovation, and proof of value. Create demand for your team’s skills and expertise: For authors, publishing books leads to more consulting and speaking opportunities, not fewer. In theory, others can read your ideas and use them without your involvement, but in reality, they are more likely to invite you to come meet with them, present during a meeting, or deliver an engagement. The sound of silence There was a time when it was hard to get a slot to present on community conference calls, and people had to wait their turn to speak up during the calls due to so many active participants in the discussions. That appears to have changed to where it is now more difficult to line up presenters, get people to attend calls or meetings, and hear from more than a few voices during the calls. Here are my thoughts on why this has happened, and what to try as a result: Lay low: There once was a time when corporate layoffs were not as commonplace as they are now. When people’s jobs became less secure, this increased their desire to stay out of spotlight. The prevailing notion is to keep your head down, don’t call attention to yourself by speaking up or expressing an opinion, and don’t rock the boat. To overcome this, recognize those who are active, so that community participation is associated with high performers, not with layoff candidates. Attention deficit: Another trend is the rise of multitasking, and as a result, not paying attention to what is being said on a call. In this case, you hope that your name will not be called, and you may be reluctant to ask a question or make a comment because you have missed some or all of the details of the discussion. To help overcome this, try to have engaging speakers, interesting visuals, and a brisk pace. Wait, wait, don’t speak: It’s human nature to wait for someone else to speak first. Once the ice has been broken, the floodgates often open. This frequently occurs in face-to-face meetings; after the first question is asked, many others are asked, and then time runs out. I haven’t seen this happen as much on calls. But it is worth trying to prime the pump by asking a few participants to ask questions to set the example for others. Planting questions may help get the discussion going.

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Do it in private: Some people will type questions into a private chat, rather than ask them in public. This is similar to the people who come up to talk one on one with the presenter at the end of a conference session. Offer this channel, and then voice the questions on the call without naming the people who submitted them. Wasting time: Community members may be wary of the stigma associated with spending time on a voluntary activity such as attending a community call. Community participation can be viewed as a frivolous waste of time, and not doing real work. Get the support of respected leaders for community participation, or even better, get those leaders to attend themselves and to communicate their wish that others do the same. Provide summaries, recordings, and presentation decks from calls so that others can see what they are missing, and to demonstrate the value of the calls. Too busy: Some people are join-only members. They have good intentions, but rarely actually attend community calls or meetings. They prioritize other mundane, routine, or time-sensitive tasks before learning, sharing, and connecting on a community call or at a local meeting. Remind community members that they are expected to do more than join and remind them of each call the day before and right before it starts. You can also offer continuing education credits or learning hours for community participation, which may count towards personal development goals. Lurkers anonymous: These are better than join-only members, in that they will attend calls, but not speak up. As long as they are paying attention and learning, this is fine. They may not be contributing to the call, but they are benefiting from it, and that helps justify the effort of scheduling and hosting the call. Never disparage lurkers; instead, thank them for attending. Seen but not heard: Some people prefer to type into a chat window, Twitter chat, or instant message. They have something to say, but they prefer to do it by text rather than by speaking. It pays to provide a channel for this, and to monitor that channel to relay questions and comments to the presenter. This can be the webinar tool’s chat window, a predetermined hashtag in Twitter, or a whiteboard or similar tool. If you can offer an anonymous channel, even more people are likely to use it. You can also solicit questions in advance by email or threaded discussion, and then you can read these questions without using the names of those who submitted them. Any questions? Few are motivated to speak up if you ask, “are there any questions?” during a presentation. Instead, ask more specific questions of the audience. For example, “Has anyone experienced what the presenter just described?” Or “What are some other techniques being used by our community members?” You can also try calling on people by name to offer their thoughts, but some will be unprepared to do so. One time when I tried this on a call, I heard a barrage of exit tones as participants left the call in fear that they would be called next. So, be prepared for that to happen by muting the exit tones.

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Fear factor: People may avoid talking on calls because they are afraid they will be contradicted or attacked. They may be unsure that what they have to say is worthwhile. And most people are afraid of appearing ignorant, or worse, looking like a complete idiot. Try to establish a supportive tone, use humor, and celebrate those who overcome their fear to say what’s on their mind. For many of the same reasons why people don’t attend or speak up on community calls, it’s often hard to get volunteers to present or lead a discussion. Here are five ways you can appeal to potential presenters: •  You may have submitted proposals to speak at conferences but have not been accepted. Here’s your chance to present, receive helpful feedback, tune your message, and hone your presentation skills. •  You appreciate what others have presented and would like to reciprocate by taking your turn. •  You want to help keep the community active, varied, and lively. •  You have presented before and have something new to share. If you are reluctant to volunteer because you don’t think you have anything special to share, this is a common thought. Once you get past that concern and actually present, you will find that the other members will appreciate your efforts, and you will be more comfortable presenting in this and other settings.

Why won’t people ask questions in the open? When someone needs to find the answer to a question, what do they tend to do? Try searching their hard drive, a frequently asked questions (FAQ) database, or the Internet. Turn to the person sitting next to them. Call or instant message a trusted colleague. Send an email to a few people or a distribution list. If the first four options don’t work, give up. The one that would likely work the best, but is not used nearly enough, is to ask in the most relevant community of practice threaded discussion. It’s a paradox that the one option with the greatest chance of success is the least likely to be tried. Why is this? One common reason is that people are afraid of asking a question in public because it may expose their ignorance, make them appear incompetent, or subject them to embarrassment. According to Nancy Dixon, there is a common problem with asking for help: Knowledge sharing begins with a request, not with a solution. No matter how much knowledge is presented at conferences, held in databases or emailed to colleagues, knowledge won’t be reused unless a team has a need, something they are struggling with.

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Managers sometimes tell me that people in their organization have a problem with sharing knowledge; but more often than not, people aren’t “asking.” The organization has an asking problem, not a sharing problem. When people ask, the sharing problem becomes moot. How organizations talk about “asking” is critical. When company officials say to professionals, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” their words actually work against asking. Asking for “help” denotes helplessness. No competent professional wants that image attached to his or her performance. What professionals do need is to be able to tap into organizational knowledge that is growing and changing – to tap into what others are learning from their ongoing experience. I have labeled this step “scanning,” which connotes an active seeking for something of value. (Does Your Organization Have an Asking Problem? by Nancy Dixon researchgate.net/publication/301650976_Does_Your_Organization_have_an_Asking_Problem)

When I receive a question via email, LinkedIn message, or Twitter direct message, I reply that I will be glad to answer the question if it is posted to a specific community, and I provide a link to that community’s threaded discussions. I give three reasons for making this request: It will allow additional answers to be posted, which may be better than mine, or provide additional information to what I can offer. It will allow others to benefit from the exchange. It will provide a public record of the exchange, which can later be searched for, linked to, and reused. However, people will often resist this request, and either fail to post their question, or respond with one of the following reasons why they don’t want to post in public: I don’t want to bother everyone. I just need a quick answer. I figured you would have the answer. I don’t want to bother with all that. I didn’t know where to post. These are really just different ways of saying: I’m embarrassed. I don’t want to appear ignorant. I should know the answer. No one else needs to know that I had to ask. I don’t want to bother figuring out where to post. Some people will just not ask in public. You can help these people by posting on their behalf, answering their question, and sending them a private message linking to the posted question and answer. You can do this without mentioning them by name, but if you copy them on the reply, but don’t explicitly state that they asked the question, they may be willing to ask directly the next time they have a question. Here are some additional ways to encourage people to ask in public: •  Facilitate ways for people to establish trusting relationships in communities so that they will better know those whom they will be asking for help. •  Make it easy to figure out where to post a question by having a list of communities, easy-to-use search, and a single obvious community or ESN group for each important topic. •  Provide ways to ask questions on behalf of others, including anonymous askthe-expert tools. •  Redirect queries you receive and ask others who frequently receive queries to do the same.

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•  Ask call centers, support hotlines, help desk operators, and contact email boxes to answer in communities, not by email, instant message, or other private channels. •  Use a combination of threaded discussions and frequently asked question (FAQ) lists to reply to queries, copying questions and answers from the threaded discussions into the FAQ list, and then linking to the FAQ list the next time a similar question is posted. •  Make sure questions are answered. People who are brave enough to overcome their fear of asking in the open should be rewarded for doing so by receiving useful, timely, and varied answers. •  Recognize those who ask in public by thanking and praising them for doing so. •  Provide a points recognition system and give points to those who post questions and to those who provide answers. •  Train people on how to find the right place to ask questions, the most effective ways to ask for help, and that they should acknowledge those who provide answers by replying in the same thread where they initially posted.

Community culture Each community has its own culture, including rules, typical behaviors, and activity patterns. Communities can be described by several archetypes:

Isolated These communities cover a subject that would be better handled more broadly. For example: •  Internal: A knowledge management community within a single company. Questions are often posted that would receive better and more varied answers if they were posted in an external community. •  Location-specific: A community limited to a specific geography, such as European Information Management. Sharing and asking about information management would be more effective if done globally. •  Private: A private community for a topic of general interest such as solution architecture. Making it open would make it more valuable. •  Niche: A community whose topic is so narrow that it has limited membership and activity, such as 1975 Ford Pinto Repair. Members would be better served as members of a larger community such as Car Repair.

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Noisy Communities with threaded discussions filled with “Congrats!” and “Great post!” and “Me, too!” and “Looking forward to it!” replies are noisy. They have many lowvalue posts, push announcements, and cross-posted links, and can appear to be more about members posting selfies than about the community’s topic;

Defunct Anyone can join and post in these communities. The lights are still on, but no one is home. The community managers have departed or are no longer paying any attention. Most posts are spam.

Restricted These communities set and enforce strict limits such as no links to the blog posts of members, no self-promotion, and no job-related posts. Members sometimes ask the community managers to enforce the rules when they see posts that do not comply.

Debating In these communities, discussions are often about fundamental principles, abstract concepts, and theory. There are frequent back-and-forth exchanges between the same few people, often quoting each other to debunk opposing views. Other members may be afraid to post due to the possibility of receiving challenging responses or because they lack the same rigor and fervor as the dominant posters.

Practical Practical communities are moderated with a light touch using proven practices. Membership must be approved by the community manager, but most applicants are admitted if they appear to practice or have a sincere interest in the community’s topic. Most types of posts are allowed within a few common-sense limits. These communities focus on what is valuable to the members, e.g., job search, job openings, links to articles and posts relevant to the community’s topic, queries, and requests for help. There may be quiet periods followed by spurts of activity. Queries and requests for help usually receive prompt, helpful replies from multiple

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members. The tone is civil, friendly, and supportive. New members feel welcome and can post without negative consequences.

Culture examples: Knowledge management communities Here are the descriptions of global communities focused on knowledge management:

actKM The actKM Forum was once very active, but it is no longer online due to the loss of its web domain. It was a “not-for-profit learning community dedicated to building and sharing knowledge about knowledge management, and contributing to improved organizational performance through effective management of knowledge and information resources. It aims to provide an environment where members can create and share knowledge about both public and private sector knowledge management issues. Please think of the actKM Discussion List as being like a dinner party. Lively, interesting conversation that is respectful of the other guests is encouraged. Just remember that you have been invited into the home of others and that the host might ask you to tone it down if you go too far. Our aim in actKM is to provide forums for information exchange, discussion and debate. We have created these Community Rules (the actKM Netiquette) to foster an environment of shared values, mutual respect, honesty and trust. •  Respect the netiquette. •  Be concise. •  Keep the focus. •  Be responsible. •  Show respect. •  Don’t spam. •  Be honest. How NOT to post on this forum: •  Five minutes after your initial post you reply to your own post writing something like ‘Why is nobody helping me? I’m sure you know the answer’. •  When somebody replies to your thread but doesn’t give you exactly the answer you’ve been expecting, you insult them. •  Posting just to increase your number of posts. •  Posting anonymously or using a pseudonym that conceals your identity.”

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KM4Dev Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) is a “community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches, and who seek to share ideas and experiences in this domain. The KM4Dev list is a practitioner-oriented forum. Although discussions can center on KM theory and more philosophical aspects, they are not meant to focus on conceptual debates but rather on the implementation of KM principles, approaches and tools within international development organizations. The wiki and other side channels are always available for ‘side’ conversations. We encourage leaders of side conversations to share a summary back to the full group on the mailing list. The primary purpose of the list is to promote dialogue. Community members are also welcome to post short messages pertaining to: •  KM events they are organizing or suggesting, including those with fees •  KM URLs, books or articles written by members or others •  KM for development job announcements or job ads (please put the word JOB in the subject line of your posting) The following postings are discouraged on KM4Dev: •  Postings that are outside the scope of knowledge management and international development •  Postings of a purely commercial nature (e.g., ads for commercial software or systems) •  Postings containing political messages. KM4Dev is not to be used as a political platform or to transmit political messages •  Messages asking for assistance or donations, even if for very worthy causes such as humanitarian disasters •  Spam or repeat postings of the same content over a short period of time •  Service adverts or job requests – the Jobs Center section of the KM4Dev website should be used for this purpose •  Jobs announcements that are not KM4dev-related Please: •  Keep your messages collegial and non-aggressive. This is not to discourage critical thinking or disagreement. Diverse perspectives are welcomed and encouraged. We are more likely to learn from people who disagree with us than from other people but friendly dialogue about disagreements is an art we all need to cultivate. •  Support your ideas with data and examples. •  Use questions and active, careful reading which can be useful in gaining understanding in a text-based environment.

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•  Pay attention so that discussions that could turn into disagreements do not veer into making the debate a personal one (i.e., where members personalize the disagreement). If you see this happening, try to focus on the content, not the person. Otherwise, the members will be asked to take their disagreement off-list. •  Don’t flame (name calling). Be sensitive to the fact that our diversity may also mean we have different levels of sensitivity. •  Because we are a global community, consider how your words might be interpreted by people from any corner of the globe.”

SIKM Leaders Community “This is a global community of knowledge management practitioners. It is open to everyone with an interest in KM. The goal is to share experiences and insights on implementing knowledge management. Diverse opinions are welcomed if expressed in a supportive and collaborative manner. Members are encouraged to share KM-related job openings and details on their own availability for employment in the field. Posts should be personal, relevant to KM, and not advertisements or spam. Members should not send messages which are duplicates of those distributed through other channels, or regular blog posts. Instead, post one-time invitations to join or subscribe. When requesting membership, please provide your name, location, organization, and a link to your LinkedIn profile. We hold monthly conference calls on the 3rd Tuesday every month at 11 a.m. ET.”

Culture examples: Community management communities Here is a sampling of the descriptions of communities focused on community management and social media management.

CMX Hub “Our mission is to help professional community builders thrive.”

Friendly reminder of some of the guidelines we have in this group (facebook.com/ groups/cmxhub/permalink/1079978958692339/) “We don’t have many guidelines, but we care very much about the ones we do have because it keeps this community positive and valuable for each of you. You SHOULD use this group to:

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 Ask questions.  Share your challenges.  Start thoughtful conversations.  Inspire debates.  Share your plans for future CMX events.  Work together to build communities that improve the world.

You SHOULD NOT use this group to: •  Promote or share your own products, links or articles. •  Post articles without a focus on starting a conversation. •  Talk about things that aren’t relevant to the community industry. •  Be rude, hateful or insulting (zero tolerance). Gracias for helping us keep this community amazing and if you ever have any questions or feedback on the guidelines, we’re always here to help and to adapt.”

The Community Roundtable “This group is designed to share ideas, questions and information about communities, community management and the impact communities have on business. We collaborate with clients to implement proven, practical strategies for better communities.”

Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist “A place for Online Community Professionals to connect. You’re welcome to share useful information that is related to online community management (but that doesn’t mean you share your latest blog post/product – remember this isn’t Twitter) and ask questions. Please be sensitive to the pace of the group and refrain from ‘flooding’ the group with announcement type posts. Job posts are fine as long as we don’t get inundated. (This is not a good place to post “looking for work” announcements or resumes.) Please keep in mind that this is an international group and composed of people with differing skills, backgrounds, interests, and focus. Not all topics will be of interest to all members – and that is ok! Please report any spam/inappropriate content.”

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FeverBee Experts “Swap tips and ideas with your peers to build an indispensable community for your members, your company, and your career. Get help from your peers. Use your experience to help others.” What If Everyone Did It? (feverbee.com/everyone) “We recently removed a post from FeverBee Experts. The post wasn’t too bad. One member felt information from a personal blog would be relevant to the broader community so posted a link to it. Was it useful information to the community? Quite possibly. Should we have allowed it to remain? Probably not. Our yardstick on these decisions is what if everyone did it? If everyone shared blog posts to external sites without any filter the community becomes a LinkedIn/ Twitter wasteland of links. It becomes impossible to filter for quality. If, however, everyone shares the same information within relevant discussions instead, then everyone benefits. That’s a valuable contribution to the group. And if there aren’t relevant discussions, the information wasn’t relevant in the first place. There are other systems too. We could let each member share one great external post a month or put forward their links for a quality review before posting. Both take up more resources than we have. So, for now we use the simple metric – what if everyone did it?”

Social Media Managers “Looking to Connect, Share, Learn, and Grow in the ever-evolving world of Social Media Management? Then you’ve found the right group. We are Facebook’s oldest and most active free group of Social Media Managers. All skill levels welcome. All questions answered. This group hosts conversation about all aspects of Social Media Management. Our members range from seasoned social media pros and industry thought leaders, to folks who are brand new to social media management that are looking for guidance as they get started. The group is run by our dedicated moderator team. We are here to guide new members, answer questions, keep the peace, and uphold community policy. We have ZERO tolerance for self-promotion, spam, and bullying of other members. No Self-Promotion or Spam: Posts with links to your blog, articles, business pages, affiliate offers, lead capture offers, spam, or any other sort of solicitation of fellow group members (including asking for likes/shares/followers/direct messages) are not allowed. Stay on Topic and No Mentor Requests: We’re here to connect with each other about social media management and strategies. Please keep politics and other off

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topic matters out of the mix even if it relates to social media. Memes may be removed. Requests for mentorship will be deleted. Avoid Duplication and Foreign Language Articles: Sharing hot new articles or the latest industry is awesome. Please skim through the day’s posts or use the search feature to make sure your post is not a duplicate. All non-English articles shared within the group will be removed. No Facebook Live: Please do not live stream your questions or videos inside the group. We would love it if you would share when you plan to go live on your own channels on our Friday thread instead! Use our Admins and Moderators: We have a great team of moderators who will ensure the community policies are followed so we all get the most out of our participation. Feel free to reach out to them with questions. Participate and Have Fun! Engage with one another, share your knowledge to answer member questions, and have fun. We’re happy you’re here! Most of all, be kind to one another. Utilize our Weekly Threads! #MarketingMonday – Our once a week self-promo thread! #WinsWednesday – Celebrate YOUR wins! #FeedbackFriday – Your chance to give or get specific feedback. No Politics or Negative Social Slams: We have a ZERO tolerance for political posts as well as what we consider ‘negative’ social content. We are not the group to be slamming other social media channels or managers.”

Examples of community culture in action In one community, I posted a link to my LinkedIn article, Community of Practice: A Real Life Story. I received a private message from the community manager asking me to remove the post and to repost with some context. I did so by adding the following: “This is the story of the internal knowledge management community at my company. It includes insights and 10 tips which you can use. What stories can you share about communities you have joined or led? Please comment on the post. Thanks.” Three people liked this post, and it received two comments: “Great piece” and “Great article. I will be launching three communities in the coming weeks. So, this was very helpful.” But this still apparently violated the community policy against self-promotion: “We define self-promotion as sharing your own products, links. or articles. Even if it’s knowledge sharing (as most articles are), it’s a standard we’ve had here since launching this community that’s important to keep it focused on serving each other. If someone else were to organically post the article here, that’s okay.” My reply was, “Sharing your own thoughts is the essence of knowledge sharing. Asking someone else to do so is not organic; it is inauthentic.”

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In this community, I now only post in reply to a query from another member. I am complying with the rules, but I am sharing less than I might otherwise post. In another community, a member posted this in response to the community policy on not posting links to one’s own articles: “Your limits make it hard to contribute. Yes, this is not Twitter – it’s FACEBOOK! What you’re prohibiting is what we all do.” In a third community, a member posted this in a thread about the policy of not linking to personal blogs: “The perspective or fit-for-purpose of a community probably needs to be taken in to account. The home page says, ‘Practical tips to build online communities.’ Since the blog post in question is a thought leadership series about incorporating ideas, there was a genuine desire to share this with everyone in the community. Instead of removing the information, I would have hoped that the community managers would have jumped on the bandwagon and simply created a new category or home for such articles.” A now defunct, but formerly vibrant KM community provides several examples of the impact of community culture. It was fully moderated; all posts had to go through the community manager, who edited each one before it was posted. There were some very knowledgeable and opinionated members, who were not shy about voicing their views in a spirited fashion. The community held regular online dialogues led by guest hosts during which a predefined set of topics were discussed for a week. This was an innovative and successful approach, but it also required guest hosts to hold their own during their stints when the opinionated members weighed in. During a few of these dialogues, the guest hosts struggled. In one case, the host just stopped responding, unwilling to stand in and keep replying to the challenging posts. When the community manager refused to post one member contribution, this led to the removal of another member who protested, which in turn led several respected members to leave. This spelled the eventual demise of the once-lively community.

Community user archetypes In addition to the community archetypes previously described, I have observed patterns of activity in communities, ESN groups, and social media tools by members, managers, and posters. Some of these types, e.g., trolls and spammers, need to be counseled or removed. Recognizing these patterns and offering helpful guidance to steer members toward more appropriate ways of participating can help maintain a productive community culture. You may also see a bit of humor as you recognize some of these behaviors.

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Community members •  Join-only: Members who don’t subscribe to notifications or pay any attention to what is going on. •  Interested: Members who subscribe to notifications and pay attention, but don’t post or attend events. •  Active: Members who post to the threaded discussions and attend at least some of the community events. •  Trolls: Agitators who try to start online arguments and get people riled up. •  SPACE Cowboys: Active members who subscribe and read the threaded discussions, post to start a new thread or reply in a threaded discussion, attend and participate in community events, contribute by submitting content to the community, and engage by asking questions, making comments, or giving presentations.

ESN group posters • • • • • • • • • •

 Sole proprietors are the only one posting information in a group.  Spammers post over and over in every possible group.  Clueless people post “Hey, everybody!” in a group with one member.  Mentioners tag people in their replies, but add no context explaining why they did so.  Bashful people post only in private groups.  Trivial pursuers post only meaningless comments, e.g., Welcome! Congrats! Me, too!  Risk avoiders answer when there is no chance of getting the answer wrong, e.g., What country are you in?  Town criers share lots of links to articles, books, blogs, etc.  Know-it-alls want to be the first to answer every question.  Routing nodes cross-post to make sure that no one misses anything.

Community managers and ESN group administrators •  Create-only managers pay no attention to what is being posted. They leave questions unanswered. •  Launch and leave managers post only once when the community is launched. Then they post nothing further. •  Sole proprietors are the only one posting in a community.

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•  Need my own managers don’t want to use existing communities. They also don’t want co-managers. •  SHAPE the future managers regularly Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events; Host: initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings; Answer: ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate; Post: share information useful to members by posting to the community site, threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter; and Expand: attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts.

Facebook posters • • • • • • • • • • • •

 Wendy Whiner laments every one of life’s cruel twists.  Debbie Downer regularly reminds us about all that is wrong in the world.  Peter Pontificator shares every thought that enters his mind.  Joe Journalist is a would-be Pulitzer Prize winner who posts links to news.  Don Diarist documents all events in his life.  Polly Polemicist regularly unleashes political diatribes or religious pronouncements.  Fred Foodie photographs all dishes at all meals.  Val Video shares videos of cats, dogs, babies, humorous moments, and shocking incidents.  Phil Photo perpetually post pictures.  Betty Banal replies to all photos with predictable comments, e.g., Oh, so cute! How beautiful! Great! Enjoy! (but often with many more exclamation marks).  Luke Liker compulsively likes all posts.  Diane Deep Thoughts posts images of quotes, opinions, and bromides.

Critical success factors No one culture is right for all communities. Here are my suggestions for nurturing a positive community culture that is sustainable: •  Be somewhat selective in admitting new members, and then trust them to use common sense when they post. If they violate that trust, then intervene as necessary. •  If someone posts things that are not valued by the community members or go against the community’s guidelines, contact them privately. If they persist, remove them from the community. •  Prefer knowledge sharing over suppressing posts. If a post provides useful information, don’t worry about whether it was a response to a query, self-promotion, or a link with little or no context.

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•  Don’t turn off those who have valuable content to share by telling them not to share links to their posts and articles. They are unlikely to come back, and the community will miss out on what they have to share. •  Maintain an environment in which all members feel that they can post without negative consequences, where their contributions are valued, and where members try to help each other out as much as possible.

Chapter 13 Tools for communities Although communities are not tools, tools are very important to the effective operation of communities. To enable communities to collaborate, offer one or more tools for members to use. People make up the community, and tools support interaction between the members.

Tools for communities programs Communities program tools should provide information about the program to those wanting to find out more about it, offer a list of all communities available to join, and give those wanting to create new communities a way to submit a request. There are three key tools for communities programs: an information site, a community directory, and a request form. Information site: A place to find out more about the communities program. It usually includes a community directory and a request form for creating a new community.

Figure 23: Communities program information site.

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Community directory: A list of all communities in an organization. The directory increases awareness for each community and allows people to join. It should allow searching and sorting by text string or by categories or tags. Each list item should include the community name, type, creation date, and a link to the community site.

Figure 24: Community directory.

Request form: A way to request a new community. See Chapter 6 for details on community creation.

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Figure 25: Community request form.

Tools for individual communities Community tools should help attract new members to join and support participation in communities. There are five key tools for communities: SCENT – Site, Calendar, Events, News, and Threads.

Site A community site should provide information to potential members. Details on the community’s topic, sponsor, manager, members, events, and links to other resources should be included. And of particular importance, it should offer an obvious and easy-to-use way to join the community, through a single click if possible. A community site should prominently display the most useful content, including the latest threaded discussions, and be updated regularly. The site should be easy to navigate and visually appealing. It should link to all the important elements

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of the community and aggregate multiple sources of relevant information. Optional features for community sites include lists such as frequently asked questions (FAQ), document libraries, bookmarks, a blog, and a wiki.

Figure 26: Community site.

Community sites can be created using a variety of tools. Platforms, Internet sites, and intranet sites can all be used as community home pages. Team spaces, portals, blogs, and wikis can serve this function as well, and can also be used as sub-components of community sites. Here are details on each tool. Platforms are designed specifically to support online communities. They provide functionality that would otherwise need to be built using generic websites. Here are some of the main alternatives for three types of community sites: Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), internal communities, and external communities. For ESNs (accessible only within one enterprise, or accessible by multiple selected enterprises):

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 Atlassian Confluence (atlassian.com/software/confluence)  Aurea Jive (jivesoftware.com)  Workplace by Facebook (workplace.fb.com)  Google G Suite and Google Currents (gsuite.google.com/products/currents)  HCL Connections (hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/connections)  Limeade (formerly Sitrion and Newsgator) (limeade.com)  Microsoft Yammer (products.office.com/en-us/yammer)  Salesforce Chatter (salesforce.com/chatter/overview)  SAP Jam (sap.com/products/enterprise-social-collaboration.html)  TIBCO tibbr (tibbr.com)

For internal and customer community sites: •  Drupal (drupal.org) •  Jostle (jostle.me) •  Khoros (khoros.com) •  Microsoft SharePoint (products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/collaboration) •  Neudesic Pulse (neudesic.com/products/pulse-enterprise-social-software) •  Ning (ning.com) •  OpenText Tempo (opentext.com/what-we-do/products/customer-experience-management/tempo) •  PBworks (pbworks.com) •  Vanilla Forums (vanillaforums.com/en/software) •  Zimbra (zimbra.com) Free platforms for public and private communities: •  Facebook Groups (facebook.com/help/162866443847527) •  Groups.io (groups.io) •  LinkedIn Groups (linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/1164) There are many additional options listed in Online Community & ESN Platforms (linkedin.com/pulse/online-community-esn-platforms-stan-garfield). To help compare and select from these alternatives, use analyst reports such as Real Story Group’s Enterprise Collaboration & Social Networking reports (realstorygroup.com/Reports/Collaboration). When selecting a platform vendor, here are the requirements that are important: Customer orientation: responsive to customers; actively uses a customer advisory board; takes customer input and acts on it for future releases; regularly shares the product roadmap; assigns a dedicated and helpful liaison; offers priority support for problems; communicates changes regularly with advance notice; avoids surprises; provides good info on updates; and provides expert, responsive, timely, and persistent support. Vendor: stable; well-funded; and enterprise collaboration is an important part of the company’s strategy and product line.

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Platform: user experience is the same for all users; good response time; good availability; robust security; rapid remediation of problems and defects; and enables the different needs of large organizations and smaller organizations through configurable admin options. Admin configuration: allows changing the default for a user’s feed; defining what should go in daily and weekly digests; limiting group creation to verified admins only; and customizing invitation message text and other similar communications. Posts and replies: allows users to edit their posts and indicates that the post was edited; forces posting in a group; and looks for already-posted links and alerts users to share rather than repost. Share a post: includes context of shared post and allows sharing into multiple groups at once. Files: allows embedded images and video; allows large (e.g., 5 GB) files; and offers file management. Questions: enables tagging posts as questions; tagging replies as answers; and finding all unanswered questions. Email: offers group digest option; suppresses email signatures and out-of-office replies; can show which group members have email notifications turned on; allows turning on email for all group members as the initial default; and email notifications are in rich HTML and display the full threads. User experience: easy to join; low noise level; and a consistent user experience across all mobile apps and the desktop app. Groups: allows optional control of group creation; enables sorting and filtering groups on date created, date of last post, name, text string in name or description, number of members, number of posts, missing description, and no admin; suggests groups to join (but not to create) when a new member joins, based on their interests; allows posting to multiple groups at once, with a single thread instance; shows related groups; offers group badging (e.g., official or verified); allows suppressing groups from public search results, but enables admins to search for them; allows moving a thread from one group to another; allows converting between public and private groups both ways, with alerts; enables merging groups; allows emailing all group members, exporting content, sorting, and filtering; and enables tagging groups with topics. Topics/tags: allows anyone to add or remove a topic after posting; allows inline hashtags and removal of hashtags; offers email alerts for topics; enables displaying all topics with number of times each has been used; allows topics to be edited, merged, and deleted; shows all topics that match entered text; prevents redundant # signs in topics; and enables displaying a topic feed in a website.

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Analytics: offers rich analytics for networks, groups, topics, members: metrics, leader boards, badges; offers group reports with number of posts in a group, posts read, email notifications, number of members and rate of increase in membership, number of unique posters, number of posts, frequency of posts, average time between posts; average time to reply, average number of replies, and number of unanswered queries; offers social listening, trending, sensing, social intelligence, and risk detection; and provides a robust set of APIs and full data exports to allow rich customized reporting. Integration: integrates with SharePoint (or whatever is used for collaboration spaces and intranet pages), the personal profile system, enterprise search, Active Directory, and Single Sign On; allows receiving tweets from Twitter and posts from LinkedIn and automatically posting them in the ESN. Search and sort: allows searching on partial text, not just full words, e.g., show all instances where appears, not just that exact word, so that variations such as will appear in the results; allows searching within a group or topic; search works as it does in most commonly-used search tools, including advanced search, Boolean operators, and refiners; and allows sorting and filtering search results and lists of groups, people, tags, and files, Other functions: offers following users, multiple feed options, profiles, likes, bookmarks, announcements, mentions, notifications, praise, polls, surveys, private messages, notes, external networks, translation, lists, calendars, events pages, wikis, thumbnails for images and links, rich text formatting, and co-authoring of documents. Internet sites are websites that can be navigated to, searched for, and viewed by anyone. They may require a login and password to access the site’s content. Internet sites can be used for open communities with public content, members-only communities that must be joined first, or hybrid communities with some public and some members-only content. Intranet sites are based in a private computer network that uses Internet protocols, network connectivity, and possibly the public telecommunication system to securely share part of an organization’s information or operations with its employees. The intranet is typically accessible to all employees, and to contractors and partners who have signed appropriate nondisclosure agreements. Being a part of the intranet provides a way for users to navigate to a community site, find its content using organization-wide search, and take advantage of standard templates for headers, footers, and menus. Team spaces are collaborative workspaces designed to allow teams to share documents, libraries, schedules, and files; conduct meetings, calls, surveys, and polls; and store meeting minutes, discussions, reports, and plans. They can be used as the home page for a community or as a part of a larger community site. A team space is a site that enables community members to post and retrieve files, share information, and carry out group activities. A collaborative team space can be

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used for document sharing, meetings, lists, polls, photos, and schedules. Instead of using email to send meeting details, presentation files, and minutes, these can all be posted to the community team space and thus reduce inbox flooding. Documents and files intended for a community can be posted in a team space. Schedules and agendas for meetings, including dial-in instructions, presentation materials, attendees, minutes, and links to recordings can be provided. Community polls on governance issues, opinions, and member feedback can be conducted and summarized. A community roster can be provided for self-maintenance, including photos, profiles, and links. Portals are websites that provide personalized capabilities to users through customization, building blocks, and integration of multiple sources. The term “portal” has several meanings. It can be a gateway website offering an array of services, a personalized home page that aggregates content from multiple sources, a document repository, or a sophisticated customizable user interface. Portals provide structured content and customizable user access. For those communities with a significant number of contributed documents, storing them in a portal or repository with rich metadata tagging, search, and alternate viewing capabilities may be worthwhile. For other communities, this will not be needed, and a team space or website will be sufficient. Enterprise portal vendors offer tools that promise to integrate diverse content through a highly personalized user interface and advanced search capabilities. To help vendors, use analyst reports such as Real Story Group’s Enterprise Portal report (realstorygroup.com/Reports/Portals/). Blogs are websites where posts are made (such as entries in a journal or diary), combining text, images, and links to other blogs and websites, and displayed in a reverse chronological order. They often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, and some function as personal online diaries or logbooks. Blogs typically provide archives in calendar form, local search, syndicated feeds, reader comments, trackback links from other blogs, blogroll links to other recommended blogs, and categories of posts tagged for retrieval by topic. A blog can serve as a community’s home page, but it is better used as a way of communicating updates to the members and as an archive of community newsletters. Blogs are a way of empowering users to express their ideas, record their thinking, and link to others who are doing the same. Organizations can use blogs to communicate, solicit comments, and engage in online conversations. Blogs serve as a good archive of communications, since each entry is stored by date, and it is possible to search just within a specific blog to find previous posts. A blog is different from a threaded discussion. A blog is a one-to-many form of communication, usually read by visiting the website or through an RSS feed reader. It is well-suited to supporting personal expression, news updates, personal note taking or journal writing, links between the blogs of multiple bloggers, and comments from blog readers. A threaded discussion is a many-to-many form of communication. It is well-

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suited to supporting a community. Typically, threaded discussions can be used by visiting the website or entirely by email. The email option makes them particularly popular. Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 offer blog functionality. Many competing collaboration platforms also have blogs.

Figure 27: Community blog.

Wikis are websites that allow users to easily add, remove, edit, and change most available content. They are effective for collaborative writing, self-service web page creation, and shared maintenance of information. A wiki page can be edited by anyone, thus making it easy to collaborate on writing a document, creating a website, or collecting information on a topic. A wiki can easily serve as the home page for a community.

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Figure 28: Community wiki.

Participation in wikis can be a challenge. They are often created by a committed individual who hopes that others will share a similar passion for the topic and add to the content. When these other people fail to materialize, the wiki ends up being maintained primarily by the original creator, and thus is more similar to a blog or website. For communities, wikis enable collaborative editing for meeting agendas, position papers, and self-maintained lists of resources. Wikis enable collaboration on shared documents and content. If the community wishes to capture a body of knowledge that will evolve through iterative contributions from multiple members, a wiki is well-suited to this.

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There are several advantages of wikis over conventional websites. If a change is needed to the content of a wiki page, there is no need to contact the page owner and request the change – everyone can make the change themselves. A revision history is automatically maintained for all wiki pages, with a list of all versions and the ability to undo changes and revert to a prior version. Wikis offer automatic generation of links and new pages with no extra effort to create new wiki pages other than editing an existing page. Here are use cases for wikis: •  Collaborate on planning the agenda for a community meeting. •  Compile the minutes from a community meeting. •  Provide a list of community resources that can be updated, added to, and corrected by any community member. •  Capture and maintain a body of knowledge that will evolve through iterative definitions from multiple contributors, compiling diverse inputs to create a thorough content collection. •  Collect, enhance, and maintain reference information for a community. •  Create an outline that will be fleshed out over time by a variety of subject matter experts. •  Enable community members to create and collaboratively edit their own content pages. •  Encourage customers to collaboratively edit user community support pages. •  Brainstorm to come up with new ideas. •  Achieve consensus on a topic, e.g., drafting and developing a position paper, policy, or procedure.

Calendar Communities need a page to list all upcoming community events with links to additional details for each one. This page should be prominently linked to from the community home page. A list of previous events is also useful, with links to available content for each one. The calendar should include all instances of recurring community events: The schedule of upcoming events should show all scheduled events with details on dates, speakers, and topics: The list of previous events should include links to details for each event where slides, recordings, chat transcripts, and files are available: It’s important not only to have a calendar, but to make sure that it actually contains upcoming events. If a potential member is checking out the community to see whether it is worth joining, an empty events calendar may be discouraging. A calendar showing valuable upcoming calls provides an incentive to join.

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Figure 29: Community calendar.

Figure 30: Recurring event.

Calendar

Figure 31: Upcoming events.

Figure 32: Previous events.

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Events Regular conference calls or face-to-face meetings are an excellent complement to online community discussions and content. Schedule recurring community events on predictable days and times, e.g., the third Tuesday of every month at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Create an agenda page for each event. Post agendas ahead of time and upload presentations in advance so no one needs to ask if they will be posted or where to find them. Here is an example of a Microsoft Teams page for this purpose:

Figure 33: Event agenda page.

The purpose of regular community calls is for the members to stay connected, share progress, reuse one another’s good ideas, collaborate on common needs, and learn together about the community’s topic. A variety of activities can be supported in calls and meetings. Members can share an idea, tip, trick, technique, proven practice, or insight. They can request feedback on a presentation, document, website, idea, program, or problem. Anyone can lead a discussion on any topic of interest or provide an update on a project, program, initiative, or organization. Training can be conducted on a one-time or ongoing basis. A typical use of a community call is to feature a speaker, either a community member or an invited guest.

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Tips for community calls Set up recurring conference calls that last 60 to 90 minutes and are held biweekly or monthly. Send out a recurring meeting invitation to lock the calls into members’ calendars. Create an online agenda space for the community calls. Use a different page for each call, with the agenda, logistics, and files that are easy to find from a calendar or list interface. This is a convenient, one-stop shop that serves as a chronological archive of all calls. Post files in the agenda space before each call. This will prevent members from asking “will the slides be shared?” Record the calls, with the consent of the members. Make the recordings available through the community site. Share the link to the slides and recording in the threaded discussions, blog, and newsletter. Avoid formal organizational announcements and anything else perceived as boring by the members. Ask the members what they want to see on the calls and deliver that. Choose a theme for some of the calls. Invite multiple speakers to present the same subject and discuss it with each other and the audience. Invite both internal and external speakers. Line them up well in advance, and send them reminders one month, one week, and one day in advance of their scheduled appearance. Vary the format of the calls. Hold a member roundtable, a question and answer session, or a discussion on a topic of interest to the community. Use some calls and meetings to introduce members to one another, including their personal backgrounds. This helps build trusting relationships between the members. Suggest to those who want to present or demonstrate a product to one member or to a small group that they do so on a call instead. Encourage the community to provide constructive feedback to the presenter. Send reminder messages a week before and the day before each call. Post in the threaded discussions, the ESN, or in Twitter the day before and right before the call starts. Prime the pump prior to the call by asking specific members to ask questions or share their thoughts during the call. If they fail to speak up during the call, prompt them by name. Be prepared for speaker no-shows, last minute switch requests, and speakers who are confused about the logistics. Ask them to get on early to test their connections and to make sure they are ready to present. Post in the threaded discussions following each call with a link to the slides, a link to the recording, and the transcript of any group chat held during the call.

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Community call technology Virtual collaboration tools such as Adobe Connect, Cisco WebEx, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, HCL Sametime, LoopUp, Microsoft Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack Calls, and Zoom allow slides, desktops, and applications to be shared online. These tools are quite powerful, but they can have their drawbacks. Technical problems, missing or incorrect links and passwords, and slow or erratic performance can reduce the effectiveness of virtual meetings. A significant percentage of the limited time available for a conference call can be wasted due to the need to respond to attendees who are unable to connect to the collaboration tool. Slow refresh times can make following a demonstration very difficult. Technical problems that lock out the presenter or freeze their screen can ruin a meeting. Those who are unable to connect due to travel or lack of Internet connection may be unable to see the slides or whatever else is being shared. You may have been on calls when the following have occurred: •  The presenter is repeatedly interrupted by questions from participants about how to connect to the tool. •  The presenter is informed by one or more participants that the tool is not working for them (e.g., Microsoft Teams not working on a Mac). •  The presenter has technical problems with the slides or with sharing the desktop or an application. •  Screens don’t refresh or are slow to refresh. •  Presenters or participants become disconnected or lose control of the tool. •  The audio degrades, breaks up, fades in and out, or drops out altogether. •  Multiple attendees ask, “Will the slides be made available?” The impact of these problems is wasted time, ineffective communication, and lost opportunity. And great frustration for the organizers and participants. Here are some actual examples: In a recurring video chat for community managers, the audio frequently broke up, one or more of the presenters couldn’t be easily heard due to low volume, participants were dropped, and the presenters were not sure who was supposed to speak next. This significantly reduced the effectiveness of the event. Group calls experienced the inability of some participants to connect, video that was dropped during the call, and differing user experiences for the mobile and laptop versions. At any given time, one or more participants was typically trying to connect, being dropped, or struggling to get their video to work. A social media marketing webinar totally failed due to severe technical problems. The event had to be canceled. An all-hands call was plagued by numerous interruptions, including voicemail messages, loud feedback noise, and participants who could not be heard. The first 30 minutes of a 90-minute call were wasted in dealing with these problems.

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How to run a community call Low-tech approaches can prevent most of the potential problems that arise when using virtual collaboration tools. Using a combination of slides posted to a collaboration space, a conference call line, a simple recording process, and threaded discussions with email capability, effective calls can be conducted with a minimum of problems. No one will ask if the slides will be available, because they will already have been provided in advance of the call. Create a collaborative team space. Inside an organization, use a tool such as Microsoft SharePoint. Across organizations, use a tool such as Google Sites. You can use SlideShare as a way of sharing presentations more broadly and to reach members whose organizations have blocked access to other sites. If SlideShare is blocked for some members, post in multiple places, e.g., LinkedIn Groups and SlideShare. Provide a channel for online interactions, questions and answers, and discussions during the calls. For internal calls, use the ESN. For external calls, use Twitter with a unique hashtag to connect participants. Set up a conference call and recording capability. Use a paid conference call service that offers operator assistance; VOIP software such as Skype; or a free conference call service such as FreeConferenceCall.com. Use your conference call line’s recording service, or record using a phone tap along with open source software such as Audacity. Before each call, create a set of slides in PDF or PowerPoint format. Capture screen shots to use instead of attempting to share your desktop or an application in a live setting. Post the file to the collaborative team space in an area that is well-known to the participants (e.g., the meeting agenda site, the main site under announcements, or in the files folder) or in an easily accessible site such as SlideShare. For SlideShare, the well-known place can be a specific SlideShare account, or the file favorites of a specific SlideShare account. Using the team’s threaded discussions, send out a reminder message to all participants with the conference call details and a link to the slides. Do this far enough in advance so that those who will be unable to connect online during the call will be able to download or print the slides so they can follow along during the call. During each call, before the speaker begins, turn off entry and exit tones to avoid disruptions when people enter late or leave early. Remind everyone of how to mute and unmute lines. If available, use the option to mute all lines except for presenters, or mute all lines and then ask presenters to unmute their lines. When questions need to be asked, participants can unmute their lines, or all lines can be unmuted by the host. If there is a disruption during the call, and you are using a conference call line with operator assistance, signal the operator to mute the offending line. Otherwise, if you have a dashboard that shows which lines have active sound, mute the ones other than the presenter(s). Ask the presenters to mention the number of the slide they are currently presenting so that participants can follow along.

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After each call, verify that the recording was successful, and post the link or the actual file to the collaborative team space or to a file sharing site such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive if it is too large to post directly. If you had a group chat or Twitter chat during the call, copy the group chat text, or use Wakelet to publish the Twitter chat transcript. Add an entry to a list or database with details on each call, including the date, subject, presenter(s), link to the slides, link to the recording, and group chat text or link to the chat transcript. Using the team’s threaded discussions, send out a summary message to all participants with links to the slides, recording, and chat transcript. Encourage follow-on discussion by replying to the same thread.

Examples of posts Before the call: This is a reminder of tomorrow's monthly SIKM Leaders Community call from 11 a.m. to 12 noon EDT. September 17, 2019 call: Dorothy Leonard on Sharing Deep Smarts – Experience-based Knowledge Link to slides Link to speaker profile For online chat, use the #KMers hashtag in Twitter. When: Date and time Where: Phone number and passcode Link to international dial-in numbers Link to join online

After the call: TO: SIKM Leaders Community Today we held our 161st monthly call. Here are the details: January 15, 2019 call: Jean-Claude Monney – Digital KM Transformation Link to slides Link to recording Link to Twitter chat transcript Thanks to Jean-Claude for presenting, to Tom, Linda, and Lee for participating in the conversation, and to Dean for live tweeting. Please continue the discussion by replying to this thread.

Face-to-face meetings Some communities can meet regularly in person, especially those whose members all reside close to one another. Those communities that are unable to meet frequently in person should try to hold a face-to-face meeting at least once a year. This can be in conjunction with an annual meeting or conference where many of the members will be in attendance. For example, the SIKM Leaders Community holds an annual dinner during the KMWorld industry conference.

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Here are tips for making the most of opportunities for communities to meet face-to-face. Ask the community members to help review and approve the agenda, using the community’s threaded discussions. This will give them some ownership of the meeting and ensure that it meets their needs. Test each agenda item: could this be just done just as well on a call or webinar? If so, don’t include it in the meeting. Make each agenda item include interaction, specific planning, decision-making, and/or action. Use threaded discussions before, during, and after the meeting. As the agenda for the meeting is being developed, solicit ideas for the meeting, ask what the attendees hope to get out of the meeting, and find out which speakers they want to hear from and what they want to hear about. Before the meeting, ask attendees to introduce themselves with their locations, organizations, roles, and specialties. They should provide Interesting details about themselves and links to their personal profiles. Initiate discussions to be continued at the meeting, post polls on key topics, and request questions for an ask the expert session. During the meeting, encourage live tweets or ESN posts using a standard hashtag. Attendees can ask questions and request assistance, take notes to share with people who are not there but would like to follow along, and provide feedback to the leaders of the meeting. Display a live stream of posts during the meeting on a large screen. Conduct a few live polls. Have speakers present useful information using graphics-rich slides and screen shots of what they would demo. Avoid live demos as they often go awry. Plant some questions that multiple audience members will ask. They will be the catalysts to get others to also speak up. Spend a good portion of the time on conversation. Ask some questions to stimulate discussion. Invite one or more guests to join you. Outside voices break up the session and lend different perspectives. Avoid anything that may sound better than it will likely end up being. Examples are skits, rap songs, and complicated technology demonstrations that may not work. Schedule time during the meeting for members to meet one on one or in small groups with other attendees. Set up birds of a feather sessions at breakfast, lunch, and dinner to allow those with shared interests to meet, talk, and establish ongoing personal connections. Launch an innovation challenge in which attendees find others with complementary backgrounds with whom to work to produce a deliverable by the end of the meeting, Allow attendees to get personal instruction on useful methods, techniques, and tools. Have booths like at a trade show, and let attendees move freely from booth to booth. Have experts in the tools available for demos, hands-on training, and questions and answers. Give out points for mastering the content at each booth and recognize those with the most points at the end.

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If you invite outside guest speakers to present at the meeting, involve them in workshops following their talks. In these workshops, participants can discuss the presentation, talk about how to implement the ideas, and commit to specific actions and follow-up checkpoints. Provide the opportunity to discuss and exchange books. Send out a relevant book to all attendees before the meeting. Hold a book club discussion at the meeting about that book. Conduct a book exchange at the meeting where people can bring other relevant books to swap. Include an attendee-driven segment in the agenda, also known as an unconference or BarCamp. This gives attendees a role in leading sessions, voting on which ones they prefer, and providing smaller, more interactive breakouts. Attendees can suggest topics and offer to lead sessions. Then they can vote on which sessions they want to attend. Based on the responses, you can hold one session, several sequential sessions, or multiple parallel sessions. An unconference is a loosely structured conference emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured program of events. This can lead to comments such as this one from an actual event: “At this unconference, attendees created sessions on the spot, making for an energizing and freewheeling exchange.” A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. Here is an example of how such a session can be communicated before a meeting via email: Last year, we introduced BarCamps as part of our annual community meeting. We plan to hold another set of 9 BarCamps this year. Please edit the BarCamps wiki page to add proposed topics for this year. We're looking for at least 9 BarCamps for day two of the meeting: three per hour for three hours. Consider suggesting a BarCamp to take advantage of being together in person. A session can be focused on discussing and resolving a problem, conducting training, or creating something new. BarCamps can originate with the attendees, not necessarily the organizers of the meeting. They can be organized in advance or can spring from ideas at the meeting itself. Anyone can lead a BarCamp and attendees can vote on the ones they want to attend. The format is up to you. A common format is to state the topic and objectives, give the background and context, present the questions for which you want feedback, and then work toward some kind of demonstrable or practical conclusion.

After the meeting, solicit feedback from the participants. Conduct a post-meeting survey and start a threaded discussion to allow everyone to see each other’s comments and to build on them. Conduct a post-meeting review, including what went well,

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what didn’t, and the feedback provided in the survey and threaded discussion. Then act on the lessons learned and feedback received when planning the next face-to-face meeting. Report back to attendees on the highlights and outcomes. Let them know what was learned, what worked, and what didn’t work. And communicate all commitments, actions, and associated dates.

News In addition to the discussions and activities that take place organically in communities, it’s also a good idea to explicitly communicate news. Newsletters, blog posts, and threaded discussion posts can be used to stay in communication with members and potential members. There are several alternatives for publishing community news. You can post in a blog as a formatted message. Internally, this can be done using a tool such as Microsoft SharePoint or other collaboration platforms. Externally, blog platforms such as Medium can be used. Another option is to post smaller, more frequent updates. Internally, an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) can be used. Externally, this can be done on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Then you can periodically collect the individual ESN or social media posts and compile them into a nicely formatted document, blog post, or email message. Regular newsletters can be created as documents in Word, Google Docs, PDF, or as HTML within an email message. They should provide community updates, facilitate knowledge sharing, and help recruit new members. Newsletters are helpful in reminding members of upcoming events, linking to posted materials, and including articles of interest to members. Here is an example of a monthly newsletter that I used to publish for the HP Knowledge Management Community:

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Figure 34: Newsletter.

Tips for successful community newsletters Community managers should publish newsletters once a month. More often is too frequent, and less often is not frequent enough. It helps to publish at a predictable frequency and according to a dependable schedule so that members know when to expect to receive each issue. Keep the newsletters as short as possible – one page – to encourage people to read them. Otherwise, they will be ignored, deleted, or set aside for later reading, which means they are unlikely to be read at all.

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Use the newsletter to remind the members about community calls. Time the publication and distribution to occur immediately prior to the calls. A newsletter can serve as a monthly reminder that there is good content being shared in the community. Reuse content that has already been produced by the community. Link to community call presentations, contributed documents, recent threaded discussion posts, blog posts of interest, and recently edited wiki pages. This highlights content that might otherwise be ignored and reminds members to learn from it and reuse it. Think about the content from the point of view of the reader, not the publisher. Do people really want to know about this, or do you just wish that they did? Provide news updates, success stories, event announcements, recognition of members, and other content that members are likely to find useful. Solicit content from the community members. Invite those who would like to reach your members to contribute articles that are more than just advertisements or promotions. Include only useful content. Leave out boring announcements and predictable leadership messages. Include reminders of upcoming events and recaps of previous events. Use clear and concise language. Avoid buzzwords and jargon. Spell out any acronyms, initialisms or abbreviations. Keep each story short and sweet. Link to longer articles, posts, and discussion threads. If your newsletter contains multiple topic categories, try to include only one story per category in each issue. If you include images, make sure that they are relevant to the content, not generic, stock photos. Avoid attachments by posting any necessary files to the community site and including links. Recognize the members and their contributions. Thank and praise those who ask questions, provide answers, start discussions, present on calls, speak up on calls, contribute content, and reuse content. Feature a success story in each issue. Solicit these from community members. Mine threaded discussions for examples of how members helped each other or learned something valuable. Look for testimonials by community members on the value of participation, stories about the usefulness of the community, and posts thanking other members for their help. Provide multiple alternatives for subscribing, including email, mobile alerts, and desktop notifications. Allow opting in and out to allow people to subscribe and unsubscribe easily. Don’t subscribe anyone who didn’t request it. People do not appreciate receiving email they did not request, and if they continue to receive unwanted distributions, they will most likely delete them unread, or set mailbox rules to do so automatically. Include clear instructions in each issue on how to subscribe and unsubscribe. Store an archived copy of each newsletter. A blog is an excellent way to do this. In each issue, include a link to the archives, which will also allow others to link to your newsletter.

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Threads Threaded discussions enable community members to interact. They include online and email posts and replies, searchable archives, and discussions grouped by threads to show the complete history on each topic. This is where questions can be asked and answered, ideas can be shared, links to posted documents can be communicated, and an archive of discussions can be preserved and searched. This is the key tool for any community. Threaded discussions have also been known as bulletin boards, listservs, newsgroups, message boards, discussion boards, online discussions, forums, and microblogs. They are the core functionality of Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) such as Microsoft Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, Google Currents, and Salesforce Chatter.

Figure 35: Threaded discussion.

Threaded discussions provide benefits to their subscribers and to the community. They enable members to learn from other members; share new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions; reuse solutions through asking and answering questions, applying shared insights, and retrieving posted material; collaborate through conversations and interactions; and innovate through brainstorming, building on each other’s ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments. The community benefits by having a reliable place where people with questions and problems can be directed to get answers and solutions, a searchable archive of the discussions, and a way for people to learn about their specialty and to develop in it. The broader the participation in a threaded discussion, the greater the benefit to the community. This is due to having the widest possible range of perspectives, the greatest possible number of people to answer questions and solve problems, and greater leverage of all knowledge shared. Providing a way for questions to be asked and answers to be supplied is a key function of threaded discussions. Members post questions such as “has anyone done this before?”, “does anyone know how to do this?”, and “where can I find this?” and other members respond with answers, suggestions, and pointers to more information. Another use of threaded discussions is sharing insights, techniques, and innovations with community members. Posting a tip on how a problem was solved, a

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customer was helped, or a breakthrough was achieved allows many others to reuse that knowledge in other contexts. When used in conjunction with community events, repository contributions, and published articles, threaded discussions allow communities to reflect on the events, provide feedback on the contributions, and debate ideas in the articles. This extends the useful life of events, publicizes submitted content, and stimulates the lively exchange of ideas. Email is the killer application for communications, and threaded discussions are the killer application for communities. There is a connection between these two applications: threaded discussion tools need to allow for reading and posting entirely by email. Although people frequently lament that they receive too much email, it is the only application that can be relied on for communicating with most people in an organization. The participation rate in threaded discussions can be maximized by taking advantage of this fact. Threaded discussions should have email fully integrated so that community members can read, post, and reply to discussions entirely by email, without having to be connected to the Internet or their corporate intranet, and without having to visit a website in order to participate in discussions. When acquiring or implementing threaded discussion software to support communities, include a requirement for full email integration, not just email alerts. Also desirable is the ability for threaded discussion subscribers to receive all posts, a daily digest, or a weekly digest of all posts through email. Threaded discussions have advantages over ordinary email distribution lists. Community members can typically choose to collaborate using threaded discussions in one of three ways: online, with mobile apps, or entirely by email. This provides flexibility and accommodates personal preferences. Discussions are maintained in threads and can be more easily found and read. Threaded discussions can be searched from the specific platform or from enterprise search. When integrated with a recognition program, points can be automatically awarded for posts and replies to encourage participation.

Tips for threaded discussions Community managers should post at least once a week to the threaded discussions. Include a summary of a community event, a useful link, or a thought-provoking topic to stimulate discussion. Look for relevant discussions that are taking place in email exchanges, distribution lists, or outside of the community. Then redirect those conversations to the threaded discussions, copy or link to the key points, or summarize the highlights. Ask all subject matter experts, support staff, and help desk specialists who regularly receive queries via email to redirect them to community threaded discussions and then respond there. Regularly suggest to those with questions or interest in a topic that they join the community for that topic and post to its threaded discussions. If

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someone asks you a question privately, reply to let them know that you will be glad to answer it in the community. If your organization has people who don’t all speak the same language, you may wish to implement threaded discussions in varying local languages. If English is the organization’s main language, then for topics of worldwide interest, ensure that at least one subscriber who speaks English well is assigned to subscribe to the corresponding English language discussion. Then, if something important is discussed in the English version, the assigned translator can relay this to the local language version, and vice versa. For the tasks for which threaded discussions are best suited, i.e., the SAFARIS use cases of Chapter 5, encourage people to post in communities instead of sending email messages. There are several disadvantages of email when compared to threaded discussions. Email messages are often fragmentated into different threads by being forwarded to people not on the original distribution. This can result in different people being on different threads and out-of-sync replies. Email is not open or transparent, and messages are not available for public reference. Not all replies are kept together, and it doesn’t reach people you don’t already know but who could benefit or respond helpfully. For those who still prefer email to posting, try having this conversation with them. The last time you needed to ask a question, find a resource, or share useful information, did you send email? Did it work well? Do you know everyone who might be able to help you or benefit from what you know? If not, your email may not reach the right people. How much time do you spend in email sending, reading, replying, and trying to find messages in order to ask, find, and share? Threaded discussions allow everyone to see useful answers, information, conversations, and all of the participants in the conversation, not just the sender and selected recipients. If you tell people you want to replace email, they will resist. If you ask them to use community threaded discussions for what threads do best, it’s less scary. Acknowledge that email is best for private communications and that it is not going to be replaced. Show how threaded discussions can be used with email to get the best out of both tools. Explain that you want people to use email only for what it does best and to use threaded discussions for what they do best.

Critical success factors Communities should have a site, a calendar, regular events, monthly newsletters, and active threaded discussions. If you could only have one of these tools, threaded discussions would be the best choice. Threaded discussions can be used as a community home page, to publicize and document events, to post newsletters, and to allow members to interact with each other. Make sure that your community has a good platform for threaded discussions, that members can use their preferred ways of reading and posting, and that new threads are started regularly and receivle replies from other members.

Chapter 14 Examples of communities This chapter provides details on several different kinds of communities. I have had personal experience with each one, either as the community manager or as a member. These examples can provide ideas for community managers to reuse in their communities.

External communities SIKM leaders community

Figure 36: SIKM Leaders community home page (groups.io/g/SIKM).

This is a global community of knowledge management (KM) practitioners, open to everyone with a legitimate interest in the field. Its goal is to share experiences and insights on implementing knowledge management. The community has over 800 members and has held over 175 monthly calls. I review and approve all requests to join. If people don’t provide their actual name, their request will not be approved until they do so.

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Origin In 2005, I presented at my first knowledge management conference, APQC’s 10th Knowledge Management Conference, held May 5–6, 2005 in St. Louis. All speakers were asked if they would host a birds-of-a-feather lunch session, and I agreed to do so. I placed a sign at my table saying, “Consulting & Systems Integration KM” and invited conference attendees from that industry to join me. We had a full table of 10 people, and when lunch was over I asked them if they wanted to continue the discussion. They agreed, so I collected their business cards, and when I returned home, I launched the community. I contacted others I thought would be interested in joining, and membership started to grow. The community site was created on July 19, 2005 by Raj Datta. It hosts the conversations, files, schedule of upcoming monthly calls, archives of previous monthly calls, and membership directory. Activities The community’s main activities are threaded discussions, monthly calls, and an annual dinner. Online threaded discussions include posts and conversations on the field of knowledge management, questions and answers, and links to job postings. These can be accessed online or entirely through email. Monthly calls offer presentations and discussions led by members and invited speakers. The calls use an audio conference call line, SlideShare for presentations, and Twitter for live chatting. The annual dinner is a gathering of members and other KM practitioners. It is held during the annual KMWorld Conference in Washington, DC. Sue Hanley organized the first annual SIKM Leaders Community dinner at KMWorld 2009 in San Jose, California. She wrote: “I’ve volunteered to organize a dinner for the members of the SIKM Leaders Community who will be attending KMWorld in San Jose. I’m doing this to honor the memory of Melissie Rumizen, who would have done the same. I’m looking forward to getting an opportunity to meet in person!” She has continued to organize the dinners every year since then, missing only two years since the first one. Policy Diverse opinions are welcomed if expressed in a supportive and collaborative manner. Members are encouraged to share KM-related job openings and details on their own availability for employment in the field. Posts should be personal, relevant to KM, and not advertisements or spam. Members should not send messages that are duplicates of those distributed through other channels, or regular blog posts. Instead, one-time invitations to join or subscribe can be posted.

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Culture Most discussions are very cordial. Occasionally they may heat up a little but haven’t ever crossed the line into personal attacks. I have only had to intervene twice based on posts in the threaded discussions: A new member posted multiple times to promote his own community and events. I sent him a private email to remind him that members should not send messages that are duplicates of those distributed through other channels, and to post one-time invitations to join other lists instead. When he persisted, I removed him as a member. That was the only time I had to do so. He sent me a blistering attack in an email, which I ignored. When I later compared notes with other community managers, they told me they had to do the same with this person. Another new member replied to a couple of posts with harshly worded criticisms. I sent him a private email to suggest that he take a more congenial approach to commenting. He replied to acknowledge my point, and shortly after left the community voluntarily. In general, the community is positive, helpful, and insightful. I believe this is one reason for its longevity. How the community operates Requests to join must be approved by me, but I approve most applicants if I know their identity and they appear to practice or have a sincere interest in knowledge management. I don’t permit anonymous members so that the identify of all people posting is known, and the community builds trust among the members. Most types of posts are allowed within a few common-sense limits as noted in the policy listed above. The community focuses on what is valuable to the members, e.g., job search, job openings, links to articles and posts relevant to the community’s topic, queries, and requests for help. When people ask me questions about knowledge management via private email, LinkedIn message, or Twitter direct message, I ask them to join the community and post there. If I can answer, I will do so in the community, and so will other members. This benefits the person asking the question by allowing additional answers, and the other members by allowing them to see the discussion. There may be quiet periods followed by spurts of activity, and that’s fine. The volume of posts is seldom overwhelming, and this makes it more likely that members will pay attention to discussions. Queries and requests for help usually receive prompt, helpful replies from multiple members. When questions are asked that I can answer, I usually wait a bit to see if other members will respond first. I don’t want to always be the first to do so. If others respond, then I add my reply after them. If there is no response, and I can answer the question, I do so. Sometimes this involves doing a quick search and providing

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the results. If I can’t answer and no one else has replied, I follow up to ask others to reply. I may do this within the discussion (see below for an example) or through a private email to someone I know is likely to be able to help. This has always worked. The tone is generally civil, friendly, and supportive. New members feel welcome and can post without negative consequences. Monthly calls Community calls are held on the third Tuesday of each month at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Slides are uploaded to SlideShare before each call. Twitter is used for live chatting using the #KMers hashtag, and a Twitter chat transcript is published in Wakelet after each call if there have been live tweets. Audio connections are made through phone dial-in or computer login using FreeConferenceCall, which is also used to record each call and provide the archive of previous recordings. I line up speakers by personally asking people individually to present, and by posting a call for future speakers in the threaded discussions. I try to have speakers lined up for the next year. If someone needs to reschedule a presentation, I ask the other scheduled speakers if they are willing to swap dates. This has always worked. I use a low-tech approach to running the calls to prevent most of the potential problems that arise when using virtual collaboration tools. The calls are held with a minimum of problems by using a combination of slides posted to SlideShare, a free conference call line that includes a simple recording process, Twitter for online questions and chat, and threaded discussions with email capability. No one needs to ask if the slides will be available, because they already have them in advance of the call. And technical problems are rare due to using simple tools such as the phone, SlideShare, and Twitter. I request that presenters use screenshots instead of live demos to avoid any technical problems using webinar software. Before each call One week before each all, I send a reminder to the upcoming speaker. I ask the presenter to post the slides in SlideShare and send me the link, or send me the slides, no later than one day before the call. Using the SIKM SlideShare account, I post the slides (if not already posted by the presenter) in SlideShare. I use SlideShare’s Like function to like the presentation so that all slides are easily available in one place. The day before each call, I send out a reminder message to all participants by making a threaded discussion post. It has the conference call details and a link to the slides. I also post a link to this in Twitter and Linkedin.

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During each call For online interactions, questions, and note taking, we use tchat.io, which uses Twitter and the unique hashtag #KMers to connect participants. I turn on the recording and introduce the speaker. I monitor the background noise and mute any noisy lines using the conference call host web interface. I ask the presenter to mention the number of the slide they are currently presenting so that participants can follow along. If there are few or no questions or comments from the participants, I am ready with questions to get the conversation going. I let others go first, but if there is silence during question and answer time, I wait a moment and then speak up. After each call If there was a Twitter chat, I use Wakelet to create a transcript, with all tweets in chronological order, oldest first. I confirm that the recording was made correctly. I send out a summary message to all participants with links to the slides, recording, and chat transcript. I encourage follow-on discussion by replying to the same thread. I then send a reminder message to the speaker for the next month’s call. Example thread A member posted this query: “Has anyone run Prisoner’s Dilemma for a large number of people? I am anticipating 80–100. I was thinking of splitting them into 20 groups. Any suggestions or advice would be most welcome.” After several days there had been no reply, so I replied: “Does anyone have any advice on running Prisoner’s Dilemma for a large number of people?” The next day, another member replied: “Workshop Bank provides a red/blue example for a larger group (although the maximum is 16), but maybe this can bring some beneficial insight into the process and mechanics of the game.” (Link to: Team Building Activities Explained Simply – Learn New Team Building Activities to Use in Your Next Meeting, Event or Workshop) To which the member who made the original post replied: “Thank you!” Presentations All presentations are uploaded to SlideShare and can be found on the SIKM account’s likes.

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Figure 37: SIKM Leaders community SlideShare account (slideshare.net/SIKM/favorites).

SIKM Boston

Figure 38: SIKM Boston logo (sikmbostonopen. pbworks.com/).

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There is a Boston chapter of the SIKM Leaders Community led by Kate Pugh. The SIKM Boston Chapter’s central goal is to be a mutual resource: a sounding board and creative presence in each other’s KM practices. This is accomplished through workshopping, sharing proven practices, and sharing member networks. On the SIKM Boston community site are the detailed charter, meeting notes, announcement, job opportunities, and discussions. The site is a place to share and access insights from peers. Consider it a place for mutual inspiration to give and receive links, documents, ideas, references, and even referrals. SIKM Boston hosts a meeting on the fourth Thursday of the month at 8:00 a.m. at a member’s workplace. It also held the Summer 2019 Retreat, a lively workshop, in August 2019.

Midwest Knowledge Management Community

Figure 39: Midwest KM Community LinkedIn group (linkedin.com/groups/82139/).

In February 2004 I attended the APQC workshop Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management held at Ford’s Information Technology Headquarters in Allen Park, Michigan where I met Sanjay Swarup of Ford. Sanjay and I subsequently started meeting periodically for lunch to talk about knowledge management. At one of these lunch meetings, I suggested that we try to find other KM practitioners in the Detroit area. Sanjay had written a blurb for Steve Denning’s book Squirrel Inc. I noticed that one of the other blurbs was by Steve Wieneke, listed as lead knowledge asset manager at General Motors. I tracked him down, and he and his colleague Karla Phlypo were the third and fourth members of our new local KM community. I then searched the APQC member database and posted in the SIKM Leaders Community, and we found several more local people who wanted to join. We expanded by asking the initial members to help find others.

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In April 2006 Sanjay created a Yahoo group for the Midwest KM Community. We later decided not to use this group for threaded discussions as it overlapped with the SIKM Leaders Community. Subsequently we created a Google Site and a LinkedIn Group for communications about our annual symposium. Originally, we met monthly at the site of one of our members. We rotated the location to give every member organization a chance to host a meeting. At each meeting the host organization chose a topic for discussion or for which to receive a peer assist. The other members came prepared to help, for example, by bringing along the job descriptions each organization used for KM roles. When we ran out of steam using this approach, we switched to monthly lunch gatherings with informal discussions. This worked quite well for several years, with Karla Phlypo taking over the lead. She also arranged annual Christmas suppers. Eventually the lunches dwindled to the same few attendees, leading to a temporary hiatus. When a new local KM professional, Susan Ostreicher of Nielsen, moved to Ann Arbor, she and I started meeting for lunch. This made me recall the lunches I had with Sanjay, and I invited Lee Romero of Deloitte and Steve Kaukonen of Accenture to join us. Additional people have since joined us and the monthly lunch meetings have resumed with Susan as the coordinator.

Figure 40: Midwest KM Community Google Site (sites.google.com/site/midwestkmcommunity).

In 2008, we decided to hold a one-day symposium in Detroit. The Midwest KM Symposium has since been held in Chicago (2009 and 2010), Cleveland (2011, 2017, and 2018), and Cincinnati (2019). The objective was to offer a free, short conference

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within driving distance of most Midwestern cities that would endeavor to accept most, if not all, proposals to present. It was an alternative to higher-priced, longer, more distant conferences for which getting a presentation accepted was more challenging. The seven events have proven to be successful due to the extraordinary efforts of the volunteer planning teams for each symposium.

Local Knowledge Management Community Leaders

Figure 41: Local KM Community Leaders LinkedIn group (linkedin.com/groups/2713946).

This community came about after a conference call initiated by Patti Anklam. She was interested in convening those who were managing knowledge management communities based in specific cities to find out more about their activities. I followed up on this initial call to create a distribution list and then a LinkedIn Group to support a quarterly call. I sent out a meeting invitation with a recurring calendar entry. We held a 60minute call on the last Friday of the last month of each quarter. The format was a round-robin where each attendee provided a brief update on their recent and upcoming activities. There was also the opportunity to ask others for advice and guidance. Participants included both managers of established local communities and those who were trying to start new ones. I led the quarterly calls until I retired from Deloitte in 2016. John Hovell then took over as community manager. This is an example of a very simple community with no online discussions or content, no formal presentations, and regular but infrequent meetings. It shows that you don’t need much in the way of effort, content, or technology to make a community work.

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Professional Services Knowledge Management Group

Figure 42: Professional Services KM Group member organizations.

When I worked at Deloitte, I started an informal community of knowledge management leaders from the major professional services firms shown above. This was by invitation only and was limited to a select number of companies and roles. The only community activity was monthly calls. The community had no site, no threaded discussions, and no technology other than a conference call line. The calls featured a mix of presentations and discussions. There was a limit of two participants from each firm. The exclusivity, small size, and informality of the community appealed to the members. They could let their guard down and candidly discuss issues of mutual interest among a group of trusted colleagues. On one occasion, the community worked together to confront a vendor that was trying to introduce a change to its product that would have had a severely negative impact on the use of that product by many of the members. The members provided a united front to the vendor, and the change was modified at the last minute to mitigate the problem. The community met every month until I retired from Deloitte. At that point, no further calls were scheduled. This is an example of a very small community that worked. Most small communities don’t last, but this one had no online discussions, and it was able to succeed by having only regular conference calls.

Internal communities HP Project Management Community This community was for people interested in information about project management. Some of the topics covered include training, PMP® certification, project management activities, news from PMI®, and project management publications. Newsletters were

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Figure 43: HP PM Community SharePoint site.

periodically distributed on these topic areas. The global audience shared information on a wide range of project management topics. The community started in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which was acquired by Compaq in 1998, which was in turn acquired by HP in 2002. It started out as an “affinity group” at DEC, then became a “competency circle” at Compaq, and ended up as a “profession” at HP. HP organized practitioners with similar roles into “professions,” providing an integrated development framework focused on career planning, competency development, and community learning through networking and information sharing. As practitioners increased their knowledge, they became more effective and efficient at knowledge generation and sharing, and they delivered better solutions to HP’s customers. HP made a major commitment to nurturing project managers, including having a Project Management Office, a full-time competency manager who also served as the community manager, and a major training and development program called Project Management University (PMU). Here is an example of one PMU event and how it incorporated knowledge services. PMU offered a special stream on knowledge services called The Knowledge Garage. 25 participants walked through the door of the Knowledge Garage and went to the Reuse or Capture Corners. In the Reuse Corner, the project managers searched the HP Knowledge Network Communities and other repositories for information and knowledge to reuse for their own projects. Many participants succeeded in finding a similar project with

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contacts, a project document, a template, a reference, a white paper, or peers in a community working on the same topic. In the Capture Corner, the project managers wrote down and submitted their knowledge. Three Knowledge Briefs were written, project profiles were completed, project and technical documents were submitted, a SharePoint Project Workspace was created, and a reference was created.

Deloitte Excel Tips & Tricks Yammer Group

Figure 44: Deloitte Excel Tips & Tricks Yammer group.

This is the largest community at Deloitte with over 15,000 members. It’s not part of any organization and has no official sponsorship or resources. It is a community driven by the passion of its managers and members. Its purpose is to share Excel tips & tricks, including Excel VBA (Excel Visual Basic for Applications) and all other aspects of Excel. Deloitte is a leading professional services firm, with a long history in accounting, auditing, and financial services. The manipulation of numbers is a core competency of most employees, and Microsoft Excel is a tool in widespread use. Thus, participating in this community is of great value to many employees. Questions are answered immediately in this community. If anyone has an Excel question or challenge, they can post a query or request in the ESN group and receive multiple, helpful replies. It’s a simple community, with nothing beyond threaded discussions, but it’s extremely valuable.

Deloitte Knowledge Management Community This is the story of the internal knowledge management community at Deloitte. I worked there from 2008 until I retired in 2016.

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Figure 45: Deloitte KM Community Yammer group.

Background I joined Deloitte as the community evangelist. The first thing I did was to initiate a series of discussions with others who were interested in or involved with communities and collaboration. My first call went well, and at the end, I asked my colleague if she would like to continue talking every other week. She agreed, so I scheduled a biweekly call with her. At the end of my second call, I repeated the offer to the next colleague, and he also agreed. It made more sense to have one biweekly call than two different ones, so I invited him to join us on a three-person call. This pattern continued as I talked to additional colleagues, all of whom agreed to join the biweekly call. I called this the Communities Interest Group call and created an email distribution list to invite the members and remind them of the calls. By word of mouth, people contacted me and asked to be added to the list, which I did. At that time, there were other groups that held periodic calls on topics related to knowledge management (KM). The Global KM Network was led by the global knowledge management organization, and typically held quarterly calls. The Collaboration Community was considered a subset of the Global KM Network and met monthly. There were similar communities for taxonomy, culture, and a few other topics, but their calls were held sporadically. I was asked to become co-moderator for the Collaboration Community, so I was now directly involved in leading two of the communities. I also was asked to present on the Global KM Network calls on several occasions.

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There were several problems with these communities •  Having multiple communities for sub-topics of knowledge management did not appear necessary. Interest waned in several of these communities. •  Governance was inconsistent. Some were very formal, with core leadership meetings and formal processes, and some were less formal and did not have core leadership meetings. •  Leadership varied. Some leaders were active, and some were not. •  Calls were not always held as expected. Some that were supposed to be held every quarter were not held as planned. •  Collaboration tools were inadequate. The Global KM Network had an email list that could be used to reach all members, but that led to spam. The subcommunities had wiki pages, but they did not lend themselves to effective threaded discussions. Evolution Several of the sub-communities stopped having calls. The formal core group calls for the surviving groups also stopped. As leaders of the communities left the company or moved on to other roles, some communities came to an end. The Global KM Network went through periods where quarterly calls were skipped, where they were held monthly, and when they stopped altogether. The Communities Interest Group continued to meet every other week, and the Collaboration Community continued to meet every month. Eventually, the Communities Interest Group and the Collaboration Community were combined and continued to hold biweekly calls. When attendance on the calls dropped, the Collaboration Community was renamed the Knowledge Management Community, and the calls were switched to monthly. Calls I tried a variety of approaches for community calls, including: •  Alternating biweekly calls between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. US Eastern Time to allow people with standing conflicts or in different time zones to attend every other call. •  Having a fixed agenda covering a variety of short topics of 5–20 minutes each, with people assigned to provide updates on a periodic basis, using a predefined schedule for the topics. •  Presenting internal and external guest speakers, including vendors wanting to present or demo their products, those with ideas, those with problems, those looking for feedback, thought leaders, fellow practitioners, and others.

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I observed that • Attendance was always lower than expected. Even when people contacted me to request that they be added to the list, they would often never attend the calls. • Even in a group of people called the Collaboration Community, participants were reluctant to speak up. • People ignored calendar reminders, email reminders, or online posts asking them to join the calls. • People didn’t pay attention during the calls, as they were most likely multitasking. • While we had as many as 100, typically around 30 people attended the monthly calls. This is a very low percentage of the people who belonged to the ESN group for knowledge management. Threaded discussions There was little to no use of the Global KM Network email distribution list and the sub-community wiki pages. We wanted to have threaded discussions for the KM community, but we were stuck using primitive technology: a SharePoint 2003 discussion board for which email alerts didn’t work. I have long held that threaded discussions without email alerts do not get used by many people. So, we coded our own RSS feed and tried to get people to use it for alerts, but the process for setting up the feed was so complicated that few people did so. To compensate for this, I manually compiled a monthly digest of threaded discussion posts and sent it out to the email distribution list. This worked, but the problems with this approach included: • Members had to be manually added to the email distribution list. • Digests had to be manually prepared and sent out. • There was a lag between when a post was made and when most people became aware of it. • There were very few people posting. We eventually were able to migrate to SharePoint 2007, which had working email alerts. This was better, but still was imperfect: • Email alerts were difficult to turn on. • There was no ability to reply to an email alert and have that reply posted in the threaded discussion. • We were using a US-based SharePoint farm, and it sometimes proved inaccessible from other countries. In 2011, we rolled out a global Enterprise Social Network (ESN). A KM practitioner created a group called Knowledge Management, and we decided to use that group for all KM-related sharing and discussions. There were some who wanted to have separate groups for each KM sub-topic and organization, but we resisted that approach,

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and stuck to the concept of having one public group. The group grew to over 6,000 members. It was active, but only a very small percentage of the members would post, reply, or pay attention to its discussions. How did I know that members were not paying attention? When we had to change the online connection details for the monthly calls, I posted an announcement in the group with the new information. Despite doing this for each call, there were always about a dozen people who didn’t get the message and connected to the old link and were left out of the call as a result. Insights Once the Global KM Network missed holding calls at its expected times, there was talk about starting it back up. But once a community stops meeting, it’s hard to start it up again. Resist the temptation to take a break, reimagine, relaunch, or plan to start again at some future time. Keep holding calls at the scheduled times. Quarterly Global KM Network calls were not in people’s minds; they were not part of a predictable rhythm, were not already in people’s calendars, and thus would end up conflicting with other meetings. Pick a frequency (monthly or biweekly are best), get a meeting invitation in people’s calendars, and stick to the schedule. Even if you send meeting invitations by email, send reminders by email, post reminders in your ESN group, and be prepared for people who will be unaware of your calls. There are join-only members who sign up because it sounds like they might like it, but never do anything again after joining. To increase participation on our calls, we posted the following in the ESN group. When we posted this, we received 122 replies. Are you a knowledge management professional? Or a KM advocate? Are you interested in staying on top of the latest insights in knowledge management both within and outside of the company? If so, we are looking for you to join the Knowledge Management community and promote KM principles by actively learning from and sharing your knowledge with other community members! Please reply here to note your interest. By doing so, you will gain the following benefits: •  You will receive the calendar appointments for monthly KM community calls. •  You will receive reminders about the calls. •  You will have opportunities to help guide the KM community by identifying potential topics for upcoming calls and prioritizing those topics.

Critical success factors These examples of communities provide several lessons for successful community management: Start by choosing a topic for the community that is at the core of what people do as part of their work. If people strongly identify with a community’s topic and

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want to deepen their expertise in that topic, this significantly increases the odds that a community will take off and endure. Capitalize on this by dedicating a skilled community manager to lead the community over a long period of time. Providing professional training to members helps achieve one of the fundamental goals for communities – learning about the community’s topic. It also helps if the community manager tirelessly pursues lining up great speakers for community calls and posts valuable content. Nurturing a helpful, supportive culture in the community as opposed to one where members are afraid to post or speak up makes a big difference. The community manager needs to set the example for this, actively watch for any undesired behavior, and take appropriate corrective action when warranted. Any member who takes the time to post, overcoming any reluctance in the process, should benefit from doing so. The community manager should thank people for posting and ensure that all questions receive at least one answer. This can be done through answering directly or getting another member to do so. Communities may interact mostly online, but they also need to meet in person at least some of the time. Some communities are only about meeting in person. Other communities only have online discussions and no meetings. Still others only have calls and no online presence. Each of these approaches can be valuable to the members of these communities. Select an approach that matches the specific needs of the community you manage.

Chapter 15 20 Pitfalls to avoid There are many potential traps that communities program managers and community managers will encounter and be tempted to stumble into. Knowing about them, being able to recognize them when they appear, and taking steps to avoid them can make the difference between success and failure. Here are 20 pitfalls to look out for and avoid.

1 Trying to take on too much There are many different approaches, techniques, and tools available for implementing communities. Avoid the temptation to try all of them, and instead keep focused on choosing the few that will yield the greatest benefits in the short term to your organization. And watch out for the allure of the latest technology, the current fad, or the tool that sounds too good to be true. Stick with proven approaches, even if they seem boring and predictable.

2 Focusing on technology It is common for communities program managers and community managers to immediately be drawn to technical solutions, including collaboration platforms and supporting tools. These can help make a program or community succeed, but they should always be in support of the people who belong to and manage communities. Implementing cool new tools will not automatically address whether people use the tools or how using the tools yields beneficial results. Communities are groups of people, so focus on them and what you can do for them as community members.

3 Not engaging the constituents Any new initiative will fail if it does not meet the needs of its intended audience or is perceived as being created in isolation. To prevent this from happening, treat your community managers and members as customers whom you are trying to acquire, satisfy, and keep. Continuously solicit, capture, and respond to the needs of community managers and members. Establish ongoing methods for two-way communications. Conduct

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surveys, publish newsletters, and maintain websites. And above all, listen to what your constituents tell you, and take timely action in response.

4 Doing too much studying and planning and not enough prototyping and piloting It’s necessary to study and plan before starting a new communities program or community. However, there is a time to declare success for your planning efforts and move on. For example, after conducting a survey of community tools, you may not need to conduct another one. And if you conduct regular member satisfaction surveys and find that the results are not varying, you can probably stop doing them after you act on what you learn. Prototyping and piloting allow you to test out new ideas, gain experience, and make iterative refinements. You can quickly learn that an assumption was wrong and modify your direction. Instead of planning for a new version of a tool for six months, try making regular, small, incremental improvements. Users will benefit immediately from the changes, and they will perceive you as being dynamic and responsive instead of slow and plodding. You will encounter people who will want to plan and prepare endlessly rather than try things out. They will say, “We should probably do that, but let’s develop a plan,” and there will be an endless planning cycle and “We’ll start up a task force.” We’re so busy with our mundane dreary work that we don’t realize that we could be doing something else. We could step back and figure out a better way that would end up saving us time. Instead of endless planning, we should Implement, Improve, and Iterate.

5 Not reusing what others have already learned and implemented Community management has been around for many years. A lot has been learned during this time, and you can benefit from this fact. See the appendix for resources you can use to do so. Reusing the ideas and experiences of others is what you hope community members will do. You should model this behavior by applying it yourself. By sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning with other communities program managers and community managers, you will show your organization how it is supposed to be done, and, in the process, accelerate implementation and ensure success.

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6 Not meeting in person Online communities are the most common today, with members scattered geographically. But this does not mean that they shouldn’t be able to meet in person at least occasionally. Doing so builds trusted relationships and strengthens the community. In this era of virtual communities, face-to-face meetings are rarely held any more, although they should be. According to Eric Ziegler, “Face-to-face meetings are an investment, not a cost. While people work remotely, meeting face-to-face is necessary to build stronger relationships, increase trust, and improve collaboration. This is an absolute must.” Bruce Karney wrote, “Face-to-face knowledge sharing is not a luxury. The pity is that in many organizations it is perceived as being one. There are indeed examples of effective knowledge sharing in the absence of face-to-face, but these are far outnumbered by examples of ineffective computer-based and phone-based collaboration. It is a dangerous delusion to believe that frequent face-to-face knowledge sharing meetings are a luxury.”

7 Relying on maturity models and benchmarking Each environment is unique. Use frameworks, models, and benchmarking as sources of ideas, not as precise prescriptions to be slavishly followed. Seth Godin wrote, “Benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing.” People believe they need to benchmark competitors in order to do what they’re doing. It’s valid to find out what other organizations are doing. This is the value of going to a conference. We can learn from and innovate on what we hear from other people, but if you only want to do exactly what other people are doing, then you’re just leaving it to someone else. You’re not thinking about what’s good for your organization. You’re saying, “We’ll do just exactly what someone else does,” and that’s not very innovative or may not even be relevant to the problems that you face.

8 Reporting metrics for the sake of metrics Avoid collecting every random statistic, sliced and diced every possible way, which someone might want to know once. They probably have no intent to do anything with this data, other than to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” The main reasons to collect metrics are to take action based on what the numbers indicate, track and communicate progress against goals, and persuade others, answer typical questions, and refute baseless assertions. See Chapter 10 for more on this.

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9 Talking about rolling out tools and driving adoption Don’t fixate on rolling out tools, and then trying to drive adoption, which is a losing proposition. Start with the needs of the organization, not with finding a use for a tool that you have already bought. Rolling out technology implies a tool in search of a solution. We don’t know why we’re rolling it out; we just are. In the early days of SharePoint, for example, people would say, “We want to roll out SharePoint.” They wouldn’t explain why or what it was going to be used for. It just existed for its own sake. Today, we hear that about Enterprise Social Networks. The wish for everyone to start using the ESN leads to vague messages like, “We want everyone to start collaborating globally. We want everyone to make connections. We want everybody to interact.” If you don’t get more specific than that, you don’t have a very appealing use case. If you say, “Will you please start collaborating globally?” it doesn’t mean anything. If instead you say that you want people to share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest, and then you go into a little more detail about each one of those use cases, people can better relate. You could have a conversation with them; ask them, “The last time you wanted to share something, what did you do? Did you share by sending an email? How did that work? The last time you had a question, what did you do? Did you ask the person sitting next to you? How did that work?” You can interact on the specific use cases, and then you can talk about how the tool that you want them to use does that better.

10 Telling others to do as I say, not as I do Not practicing what you preach sets a bad example. People will closely observe the actions of leaders and mimic them. So, lead by example and model the desired behaviors. This starts with leaders who initiate a communities program and then leave it to others and say, “Okay, you take it from here.” Or people who work in a communities program, or manage a community, but who don’t lead by example. They want everyone in the organization to be active in communities, or the members in the community they manage to post regularly, but they don’t do it themselves. They figure someone else will do that. They might say that we should all use an ESN, but then they continue sending email. You may encounter this when encouraging a leader to interact in a community and they delegate that to someone else. They say, “You post for me.” We can all sense when that happens. If you really want someone to do something, one of the very best ways to make this happen is to do it yourself. Not only will you learn

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about how it works and the pros and cons of it, but other people will also see you doing it and do so as well.

11 Saying that social media is frivolous We’ve all heard the claim that social media is frivolous, social media is not serious, or it’s a waste of time. You shouldn’t call your ESN “Facebook for the enterprise” (unless you are using Workplace by Facebook as your platform) because a lot of people will conjure up something different from work. Some people even say to avoid the word “social” altogether, giving the example, “I don’t care what you ate for breakfast.” I don’t actually see a lot of posts about what people ate for breakfast. I don’t think that’s the primary use of social business tools, but that’s a common lament. You have to cite your use cases and say, “No, we’re not really talking about sharing what you ate for breakfast. We’re really talking about these other uses that are valid and that social tools do better than other previous tools.” There is also the assumption that using social media means wasting time. People have told me, “I was chastised for posting in a community and was told to stop doing that and go back to work.” You can turn that around and say, “What were you supposed to do instead?” The time that people spend in communities, if it is for sharing useful information for the rest of the organization, or asking and answering questions, should be celebrated. We should not make people think that it is a waste of time.

12 Not controlling the creation of communities and ESN groups We often get into a debate about whether we should try to control the creation of communities. There is value in trying to limit the number of communities that any organization has. There are a lot of reasons to do this, but the counterargument is that we should let a thousand flowers bloom and rely on survival of the fittest. Let there be 100 different communities all focused on social media. One of them will emerge and that’s the way it should be. If you have 100 communities for knowledge services, there won’t be the survival of the fittest. They will all die. It’s because when someone tries to go and learn about knowledge services, they look at the available communities and see a bewildering list of communities to choose from. They just give up, or if they do pick one, they will miss lots of other people who would have benefited from sharing information or who could have answered questions. None of the communities ever achieves critical mass, and as a result, they all struggle.

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Allowing an infinite number of communities doesn’t work well. In this instance, limited control has value. Get ESN groups to combine. Make your communities so that it’s easy for the user to figure out which one to join, and to have critical mass where all people interested in the same topic can be together. You should try to prevent redundant communities, but it’s not because you’re trying to exert top-down authoritarian control. Rather, it’s to respect your users – to give them an easy-tounderstand environment where they know which community to join, and all the right people can reliably be expected to be in that community. See Chapter 7 for more on this.

13 Trying to eliminate all risks Some companies are very sensitive to risks. They are concerned that we might somehow share information that we shouldn’t share, or that information will be leaked. In some cases, they try to control all access to the outside connected world. If you have an ESN and it is open, then you will be aware if such a thing happens, because you will see it. If you don’t allow that, what happens? People do it some other way that you don’t see. You can’t prevent somebody from handing over a piece of paper, sending an email, sending a text message, or making a phone call. You can’t necessarily control that. Yet some think that blocking access to social media is the answer. It’s better to encourage things to be shared where you can see them, and if somebody does something inappropriate, you can then talk to them and intervene. Whereas if you drive it underground, the risk is still there but now it is invisible. Trust people to do no harm. It doesn’t mean that people won’t do harm. They may do it intentionally or unintentionally, but if they do it in such a way that you can see it, then you can counsel them, and you can intervene. If you don’t trust people, why did you hire them? People are working for an organization. You hire them and you entrust them with the work you assign. You should trust them also to use good sense when it comes to sharing information.

14 Approving requests from people who say they need their own community even if it is not unique Often, the reason for doing something is the belief that we need our own. I received requests like, “Can I have a community for SAP?” I replied, “We already have one. Why don’t you just use that community?” They replied, “I need my own.” They don’t articulate a good reason, but it’s generally some variation of “we need our own.” It could be for what they think is a valid reason. They said “We need one just for this country. We need a knowledge management community just for Portugal.” I replied,

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“Is knowledge management that different in Portugal from how it is in some other country?” If they wanted to have conversations in Portuguese, that might be a valid reason, but if they simply want an English-language community just for people in Portugal, then there are two problems with that. There aren’t going to be that many people in it. And they will miss out on all the other knowledge management people in the other knowledge management community. Tell them, “You don’t really need your own” and try to refocus their energy for starting their own new community into helping manage the existing one. In that case, the best advice is to say, “I’m glad that you’re excited to manage this new community. Let’s have you become a co-manager of the existing one. We can really use your energy to bring in your colleagues from your organization.” The alternative is to try to get a new one off the ground, which isn’t likely to go well. We also see the issue with internal versus external communities – the desire to have an internal community when, in fact, most of the wisdom about the subject may be outside of the organization. You see this in a community where people ask some question that could easily be answered if they were part of an external community, but can’t be answered that easily inside. The other case is the narrow niche, for example, a request for an ESN group for European specialists in the FI module of SAP. I have seen people create such a group and then write an initial post like, “Hey, everyone. We’re going to talk about the FI Module!” And they are the only member of the group. No one sees their excited post. We need to help them understand, educate them, and guide them, but we also need to help them to see that when you don’t get critical mass in a community you generally don’t have an active community.

15 Believing that smaller is better for community membership Some people believe that small communities are better than large ones, because all members know each other and thus have greater trust than in large communities. My colleague Lee Romero and I studied what number of people you need for a community to be active. That number turned out to be 200. If you have 200 or more, there is more likelihood of an active community. If you have fewer than 200, it’s less active. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t counterexamples. It just means that on average, if you don’t get to that magic number, it’s not as likely. The more community members who are paying attention, the better. There is no good reason why the size of a community should be limited. Sometimes people ask me, “Is there an optimum size, or should you try to keep it small?” If you have 1,000 members in a community and then member number 1,001 joins, that’s not going to cause any harm. The 1,001st member may begin learning and benefiting

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from the other 1,000 members. They may be able to answer questions and share useful information. In the case of community membership, more is better.

16 Telling communities what to do and making people join a community There is disagreement on whether communities should be told what to do or not. One view is that because community members are spending time in their activities, their organizations should be able to direct those activities by giving them formal objectives. My view is that it is better for leaders to ask communities to help accomplish a goal. This slight difference can make all the difference in motivating the members. If they perceive that being a part of a community just adds tasks to their already busy work schedules, they may drop out or just go through the motions. If they feel appreciated and empowered to voluntarily lend their experience and expertise to a challenge, they are more likely to choose to do so. The expectation that we can make people do things is naive. Forced membership in communities isn’t a good idea. Participation in communities should be voluntary. Try to pull members in by making it attractive to join. If you need to locate expertise, instead of trying to make people fill in their expertise profiles, ask them to join communities and let the expertise emerge there instead.

17 Referring to everything as a community I have heard community used in some strange ways, as if everything is a community. I hear entire populations referred to as a community. My definition of community is a voluntary group that you join because you want to get better at something, not something that defines the organization you’re in, or defines the ethnicity that you have, or some other attribute. There are many different uses of the word community. A community is a group you choose to join because you want to meet up with other people who are interested in the same subject. A community is not a website. It’s not a wiki. It’s not a blog. It’s not an ESN. It’s not an organization. It’s not a project team. It’s just the people who choose to learn more about a subject by coming together.

18 Denying the 90-9-1 rule applies In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, etc. The rule of thumb is that 10% of the members will participate at all, and only 1% will regularly be active in discussions and presentations. 90% will

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not post or speak up at all. Some have questioned whether this rule of thumb really applies. Actual data from Deloitte’s ESN showed 94-5-1. The SIKM Leaders Community showed 96-2-2. So, 90-9-1 may be optimistic. From The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities by Jakob Nielsen: “How to Overcome Participation Inequality: You can’t. The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.” Don’t waste time trying to change this to 70-20-10 or 55–25–20, which some articles have suggested are the actual numbers. The power law (orders of magnitude increments) appears to be a law of human nature, so overcoming it is akin to repealing the law of gravity. See Chapter 11 for more on this.

19 Trying to compute the ROI of communities The subject of how to compute the return on investment (ROI) for knowledge services, communities, ESNs, collaboration, and social media has been around since the start of each of these fields. It is important to define and communicate the benefits of these programs, and measure and report on progress, but proving ROI should not be the point. It’s possible to compute the ROI of a narrowly defined project requiring capital investment, such as building a new plant or buying a new piece of equipment. But for broader programs that integrate people, process, and technology components, and work with other broad programs such as learning, talent development, and finance to improve the effectiveness of the organization, ROI is ill-suited. Do we ask what the ROI is for the human resources or finance departments? What about the ROI for the email or phone systems? For example, if we were to eliminate the human resources department because its ROI is too low, what might happen? Three potential problems could arise by leaving personnel administration to the individual managers. Certain employees could be wrongly classified as exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act and thus improperly made ineligible for overtime pay. Mistakes could be made with I-9 forms, causing immigration-related problems. And people could be fired improperly, which is the biggest cause of employee lawsuits. Having trained professionals in the human resources department can help avoid these and many other costly errors. But computing the ROI on preventing lawsuits is not possible. The same is true for communities. They can help avoid costs and prevent serious problems. They can be justified on that basis alone.

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However, making a strong business case is important. See the section on Promoting and Selling in Chapter 8 for more on this.

20 Starting a communities program without first determining the objectives I have heard each of the following statements or questions at one time or another. 1. We need to benchmark our competitors and do what they are doing. 2. We need to achieve a higher level in the maturity model. 3. We need to implement the latest technology solution. 4. Which tools should we use? 5. We installed an ESN and now we need to increase adoption. 6. We need everyone to post in the community. 7. We need everyone to contribute a document to the community. 8. Everyone should start collaborating on our new platform. 9. Everyone should start editing our new community wiki. 10. Everyone should start tagging and rating content. Without first defining clear business objectives, vision, strategies, and use cases, it is very unlikely that a communities program will succeed. Be sure to define those first, and only then proceed to implementation.

Appendix: Resources for learning more about communities There are many ways to learn about communities. You can visit sites; read blogs, articles, and books; attend training and conferences; join and participate in communities; and seek out the writing, presentations, and advice of thought leaders. This appendix provides suggestions and links to an extensive set of useful resources.

Resources: Sites CMX – David Spinks cmxhub.com Helping community professionals thrive in their strategies and careers. Offers networking with the top community professionals; educational videos, articles, and frameworks; and support, feedback, and advice on community projects. The Community Roundtable – Rachel Happe and Jim Storer communityroundtable.com Provides resources for community management professionals, backed by comprehensive research: The State of Community Management. Empowers community managers, program owners, and executives to excel through resources, training, and events. Offers advisory, benchmarking and audits, models and frameworks, research, training and events, and resources. FeverBee – Richard Millington feverbee.com Building online communities for customers, employees, and supporters using psychology, data, and technology. Offers consultancy: using social psychology to increase engagement and change member behavior; training: can train every member of a team; and technology; can recommend a community platform at the best possible price. Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner wenger-trayner.com At the interface between theory and practice. Offers strategy, implementation, evaluation, and writing; workshops for practitioners and academics; and theoretical and practitioner-oriented resources.

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Jono Bacon jonobacon.com Offers consulting, articles, videos, questions and answers, webinars, events, and content. Learning Alliances – John D. Smith learningalliances.net Coaching communities, their leaders, and their sponsors about technology, politics, and learning. The Community Manager bit.ly/2oxRXkx Community management-related tips, news and case studies. This site is no longer active. Orgnet – Valdis Krebs orgnet.com Services, Software, and Stories on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). Stan Garfield sites.google.com/site/stangarfield Resources for knowledge services: sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, learning, communities, content, culture, Enterprise Social Networks, goals, metrics, and motivation.

Resources: Blogs CMX cmxhub.com/blog See details under Sites. The Community Roundtable communityroundtable.com/blog See details under Sites. Their list of blogs: communityroundtable.com/what-we-do/resources/blog-roll Community Manager Musings evanhamilton.com Evan Hamilton on retention strategies, community building, collaboration, and tech.

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FeverBee feverbee.com/richs-blog FeverBee founder Richard Millington shares advice on online community management, strategy, design, psychology, measurement, and calculating return on investment (ROI). His list of blogs: feverbee.com/2011/05/free-community-management-resources.html Higher Logic blog.higherlogic.com/topic/online-community-management Features online community posts. Leader Networks – Vanessa DiMauro leadernetworks.com/blog Strategic research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital customer experience to gain competitive advantage. Works with clients to develop digital business strategies, launch new digital products and business models, and create and grow online communities. Real Story Group – Tony Byrne realstorygroup.com/Blog Strong opinions. Candid advice. Publishes vendor evaluations that sort out suitable technology choices for particular needs. Research is known for its technical depth, toughness, and absolute neutrality. Jono Bacon jonobacon.com/blog Posts about community management and collaboration. Helen Blunden linkedin.com/in/helenblunden/detail/recent-activity/posts See details under Thought Leaders. Lilia Efimova: Mathemagenic blog.mathemagenic.com/tag/communities Posts include the social web, collaborative technologies, and communities of practice. Stan Garfield medium.com/@stangarfield Includes posts on communities, community management, and knowledge services. Sue Hanley: Essential SharePoint computerworld.com/blog/essential-sharepoint Helping organizations build effective intranet and collaboration solutions using SharePoint.

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Joitske Hulsebosch joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com/search/label/communities%20of%20practice Shares about the new social learning. Started with a focus on communities of practice, but there are many new forms of social learning emerging. Shares personal experiences, articles, and cases. Dennis Pearce linkedin.com/in/dennispearce/detail/recent-activity/posts See details under Thought Leaders. Jeff Ross jeffrossblog.com/tag/community-management See details under Thought Leaders. Euan Semple: The Obvious? euansemple.com/theobvious See details under Thought Leaders. Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner wenger-trayner.com/blog See details under Thought Leaders. Nancy White: Full Circle fullcirc.com/category/cops See details under Thought Leaders.

Resources: Articles Articles and presentations about communities and community management by Stan Garfield stangarfield.quora.com/Articles-and-Presentations-About-Communities-of-Practiceand-Community-Management Introduction to Communities of Practice by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier by Etienne Wenger-Trayner and William M. Snyder hbr.org/2000/01/communities-of-practice-the-organizational-frontier

Resources: Articles

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Communities for knowledge management by Steve Denning stevedenning.com/Knowledge-Management/communities-of-practice.aspx Knowledge-based Communities of Practice at AMS by Sue Hanley bit.ly/31fket9 Knowing in Community: 10 Critical Success Factors in Building Communities of Practice by Richard McDermott mcdermottconsulting.com/images/Articles/Knowing%20in%20Community.pdf Designing Effective Knowledge Networks by Katrina Pugh and Laurence Prusak sloanreview.mit.edu/article/designing-effective-knowledge-networks A bibliography on communities of practice by CPsquare and com-prac bit.ly/2Hpc3n9 Other bibliographies by CPsquare and com-prac bit.ly/2ZjNmmU Communities of Practice Resources by Fred Nickols nickols.us/CoPs.htm Caterpillar Communities of Practice: Knowledge is Power by Sue Todd bit.ly/2ZpeRLR The Camelot of Collaboration – the case of VAX Notes by Patti Anklam thoughtsofanidlemind.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/vaxnotes.pdf Software Test Community Uncovered using SNA by Gerald Falkowski and Valdis Krebs orgnet.com/IBMCOPSNA.pdf

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Resources: Books The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes by The Community Roundtable communityroundtable.com/research/community-manager-handbook Community Management: Understanding Roles and Responsibilities in 2020 by The Community Roundtable tinyurl.com/s23r2dj Buzzing Communities: Build Bigger, Better, More Active Online Communities by Richard Millington amzn.com/0988359901 The Indispensable Community: Why Some Brand Communities Thrive When Others Perish by Richard Millington amzn.com/1947635107 Online Community Management for Dummies by Deborah Ng amzn.com/1118099176 The Complete Social Media Community Manager’s Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success by Marty Weintraub and Lauren Litwinka amzn.com/1118466853 The Community Manager’s Playbook: How to Build Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement by Lauren Perkins amzn.com/1430249951 Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last by Tharon Howard amzn.com/0123749212 Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design by Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick amzn.com/0262016575

Resources: Books

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Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim amzn.com/0201874849 Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards by Patrick O’Keefe amzn.com/081440197X Mastering Online Discussion Board Facilitation: Resource Guide by Terrie Wessel amzn.com/B004QT6ZQY Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Jean Lave amzn.com/0521423740 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity by Etienne Wenger-Trayner amzn.com/0521663636 Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder amzn.com/1578513308 Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Nancy White, and John D. Smith amzn.com/0982503601 CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession by Nancy Dixon, Nate Allen, Tony Burgess, Pete Kilner, and Steve Schweitzer amzn.com/0976454106 The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid amzn.com/1578517087 Knowledge Networks: Innovation Through Communities of Practice by Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble amzn.com/159140200X

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Going Virtual: Distributed Communities of Practice by Paul Hildreth amzn.com/159140164X Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage by Hubert Saint-Onge and Debra Wallace amzn.com/075067458X Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context by David Barton and Karin Tusting amzn.com/0521544920 Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability by Jenny Preece amzn.com/0471805998 Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace by K. Ann Renninger and Wesley Shumar amzn.com/0521785588 Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning by Sasha Barab, Rob Kling, and James Gray amzn.com/0521520819 The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold amzn.com/0262681218 Communities in Cyberspace by Marc Smith and Peter Kollock amzn.com/0415191408 Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom by Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt amzn.com/0787944602 Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community by Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt amzn.com/0787976148

Resources: Books

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Knowledge and Communities by Eric Lesser, Michael Fontaine, and Jason Slusher amzn.com/0750672935 The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon amzn.com/1449312063 People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams by Jono Bacon amzn.com/1400214882 How to Build Better Learning Communities by Sharon Lina Pearce amzn.com/150290456X Building Successful Communities of Practice by Emily Webber amzn.com/095749193X The Online Community Blueprint: A 9-Step Guide to Planning an Online Community for Your Customers, Members, or Partners by Katie Bapple, Joshua Paul, and Katie Oakes amzn.com/0692451587 Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World by Patti Anklam amzn.com/0750682973 Working Out Loud: For a Better Career and Life by John Stepper amzn.com/0692382399 Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-to’s of Working Out Loud by Jane Bozarth amzn.com/1118863623

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Resources: Training Community Roundtable: TheCR Academy communityroundtable.com/what-we-do/training-and-events/training-thecracademy Feverbee ondemand.feverbee.com/catalog CMX Fundamentals of Community Strategy training.cmxhub.com Community Management Workshops cmxhub.com/workshops Training Resources for New Community Management Hires cmxhub.com/article/48-training-resources-for-new-community-managementhires/ Khoros Community Manager Certification I: Online Training community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-View-Blog/Community-ManagerCertification-I-Online-Training/bc-p/179757 Community Manager Certification II community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-View-Blog/Announcing-CommunityManager-Certification-II/ba-p/176389 George Brown College: Online Community Management Course coned.georgebrown.ca/courses-and-certificates/community-management-distanceeducation/ Online Community Management Training econsultancy.com/training/courses/online-community-management Master Class on Community John%20Coate%20Community%20Master%20Class%202017.pdf

Resources: Communities CMX Hub Facebook Group facebook.com/groups/cmxhub

Resources: Communities

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Made up of thousands of experienced and novice community professionals from all over the world. The mission is to help community professionals thrive. This is where we unite online to support each other, share learning, and develop a network of peers. You can read case studies, watch expert videos, learn more about CMX, and find jobs in the Job Board (cmxhub.com/jobs). Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist Facebook Group facebook.com/groups/3553055120 Place for online community managers to connect. You’re welcome to share useful information that is related to online community management and ask questions, but don’t share your latest blog post/product. Job posts are also fine as long as there are not too many. The Community Roundtable Facebook Group facebook.com/groups/TheCommunityRoundtable Provides a forum for lively conversations and idea sharing about communities, community strategy, and the impact communities have on business. LinkedIn Group linkedin.com/groups/2230701 Designed for community leaders to connect and share information informally. TheCR Network communityroundtable.com/TheCRNetwork Private peer network for community and social business leaders. Community BackChannel (CMTYBC) Facebook Group facebook.com/groups/cmtybc A group of online community professionals where ideas are shared openly, help is freely given, and supportive relations are forged. It is a private community – a BackChannel members-only group. Post anything you wish for only CMTYBC members to see and discuss. e-mint: Association of Online Community Professionals e-mint.org.uk Established in 2000, this is the oldest and largest international group of online community professionals on the web. e-mint (e-mint.org.uk) is an independent group of professionals involved with virtual communities in various ways. Membership includes community managers, web designers, academics, software developers, consultants, IT managers, researchers, and more. It’s a network for anyone interested in the theory or practice of online communities. The community is concentrated in the

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UK with an eye towards European issues, although members are located globally, and the issues discussed often cross cultures. My Community Manager Site, Google Hangout, and Twitter Chat mycmgr.com Built by, for, and managed by community managers. The weekly hangout is no longer active, but archives of past hangouts are available, and the #CMGR hashtag is actively used on Twitter. The Community Management Group LinkedIn Group linkedin.com/groups/1819653 For those whose job involves the creation and management of online communities. It exists to help you network with fellow community managers, share tips and ideas on how communities can flourish, and discuss the latest trends in the sector. Community Managers (Social Media Managers) LinkedIn Group linkedin.com/groups/2499033 For community managers to share their experience, customer engagement knowhow, and general expertise. How to use social in new and different ways for community management. Community Managers LinkedIn Group linkedin.com/groups/59572 The Community management job is relatively new. Are you ready not to stay in your office, but to work online, communicating with web communities and bloggers, to visit events, and to build the necessary confidence in your company? Let’s work together. Feverbee Experts Community experts.feverbee.com Swap tips and ideas with your peers to build an indispensable community for your members, your company, and your career. Australian Community Managers (ACM) australiancommunitymanagers.com.au ACM was created by community managers for community managers. Our members are online community managers, enterprise community managers, and offline community managers. We are community builders, strategists, and social architects. Our mission is to grow the industry and enhance our practice through meaningful connection, resources, events, mentoring, and training. We want to see more thriving communities. We believe the world needs them and their custodians more than ever.

Resources: Conferences

211

Chicago Online Community Professionals (COCP) chicago-online-community-professionals.mn.co COCP is a guild of online community and digital workplace experts who organized in 2017 to share ideas and learn from each other. We believe in the power of community to change organizations and know that vibrant communities consist of many voices with many different experiences. Our mission is to identify and influence how successful social businesses will deliver value in the next ten years. We meet in Chicago and online. Our members include enterprise community managers, digital workplace and customer engagement strategists, knowledge managers, developers, consultants, analysts, and representatives from vendor organizations. We create meaningful conversations that shape the future of enterprise collaboration and customer engagement. Join us to participate in coworking days, events, and online conversation. Everyone who follows our guiding principles is welcome, including people who live outside of the Chicago area.

Resources: Conferences CMX Summit cmxsummit.com Over two days, seeks to expand discussions, techniques, and tactics applied to community building for businesses and support communities and their CEOs, CMOs, and builders at scale. Gain insights from the best in the industry and make lifelong friends. TheCR Connect communityroundtable.com/thecr-connect Three-day learning conference exclusively for online community practitioners – those engaged in the development, implementation, management, and measurement of community initiatives. For people who want to get their hands dirty in practical workshops, find solutions to their community challenges, connect with other community leaders, share their knowledge and learn from others, and walk away inspired to improve their community. Community Leadership Summit communityleadershipsummit.com The place where community leadership is crafted. Brings together community leaders, organizers, and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. Pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations, and online collaboration to discuss, debate, and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community. Mixes together

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keynotes, unconference sessions, panels, and more to bring a rich set of content driven by a diverse audience. Swarm Conference swarmconference.com.au Australia’s flagship community management conference connects local builders, thinkers, managers and makers with top international talent for two days of learning, collaboration, inspiration, and outcomes.

Resources: Thought leaders Patti Anklam linkedin.com/pulse/digital-equipment-corporation-dec-profiles-knowledge-stangarfield Offers consulting services that bring the network view into focus, enabling leaders and network facilitators to guide their networks’ purpose, structure, style, and value to achieve results that can only be accomplished through collaboration. “Collaboration is an organizational imperative of the 21st century. Networks of relationships are the ultimate resource. It takes work to create and sustain effective networks.” Author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World. Jono Bacon jonobacon.com/about Provides community strategy, management, and leadership for organizations. Founded a conference for community leaders, the Community Leadership Summit. Author of The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation and People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams. Helen Blunden linkedin.com/pulse/helen-blunden-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Specializes in workforce social learning, collaboration, Working Out Loud, and the effective use of social media. Founded Third Place, a co-working and networking community of over 500 learning professionals across six Australian cities to meet, network, learn, co-work, and share with each other for their professional and personal development. John Seely Brown linkedin.com/pulse/deloitte-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge since 2007. Co-author of The Social Life of Information, which shows how a better understanding of the

Resources: Thought leaders

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contribution that communities make to learning, working, and innovating can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives. Tony Byrne realstorygroup.com/About/Team/3-Tony%20Byrne Founder of Real Story Group with a personal passion for helping large enterprises make sound strategic decisions, based on solid research, that will set them up for long-term success. Believes the best companies of the future will be those that invest the most wisely in employee and customer digital engagement. Miguel Cornejo Castro linkedin.com/in/miguelcornejo Management consultant driving change, deploying tools, and building communities. Passionate advocate of communities of practice for knowledge services and support. Vanessa DiMauro linkedin.com/pulse/columbia-university-information-knowledge-strategy-ikns-stangarfield CEO of Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital and social technologies to gain competitive advantage. Strategist, advisor, researcher, author, speaker, and pioneer in the field of online communities and in using digital business solutions to gain customer insight and increase revenue. Nancy Dixon linkedin.com/pulse/nancy-dixon-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Works with organizations to create conversations where knowledge transfer and sharing happens, where knowledge is created, and where innovation arises. Focuses on ways to create trust and a safe space for online conversation. Author of Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know and co-author of CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession. Lilia Efimova linkedin.com/pulse/lilia-efimova-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Works at the intersection of social media, the changing workplace, knowledge, and learning. Rachel Happe communityroundtable.com/team/rachel-happe-2 Helps organizations implement emerging technologies to advance their business strategies. Understands how networked communications environments can transform how people work, their productivity, and their personal satisfaction by aligning

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their passions, skills, and relationships. Co-founded The Community Roundtable to support business leaders developing their community and social business strategies. Sue Hanley linkedin.com/pulse/susan-hanley-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Expert in the design, development and implementation of successful portal solutions, with a specialization in Microsoft SharePoint. She is a frequent writer and speaker on the topic of building effective collaborative portals, portal governance, user adoption, information architecture, building communities of practice, and measuring the value of knowledge services investments. Joitske Hulsebosch linkedin.com/pulse/joitske-hulsebosch-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Independent consultant working on learning, change, and technologies. Specialties include design of online and blended learning, learning in communities, knowmads, and chatbots. Valdis Krebs linkedin.com/pulse/valdis-krebs-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Management consultant and the developer of InFlow, a software based, organization network analysis methodology that maps and measures knowledge exchange, information flow, communities of practice, networks of alliances, and other networks within and between organizations. Richard McDermott mcdermottconsulting.com Helps design knowledge organizations. Co-author of Cultivating Communities. and author of many articles on communities of practice, expertise development, and sharing good practice. Subject matter expert for six international studies, including the largest quantitative study on how communities impact business and individual performance. Richard Millington feverbee.com/richardmillington Helps companies develop some of the world’s largest online communities. Founder of FeverBee, an international community consultancy. Author of Buzzing Communities and The Indispensable Community.

Resources: Thought leaders

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Fred Nickols nickols.us/resume.htm Managing Partner of Distance Consulting. His website is home to more than 200 free papers, articles, book chapters, and the award-winning Knowledge Workers’ Toolroom. Dennis Pearce linkedin.com/in/dennispearce Online communities, collaboration, knowledge management, and social business strategist with extensive experience in engineering, manufacturing, IT, strategic planning, process improvement, and change management. Lee Romero linkedin.com/pulse/deloitte-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Knowledgeable about knowledge services, web content management, and community metrics. Deep background in communities, Enterprise Social Networks, document management, taxonomy, and enterprise search. Jeff Ross linkedin.com/in/jeffkross Enterprise Social Network (ESN) expert, founder of a weekly Twitter chat about ESNs (#ESNchat), and community manager of a 40,000 member ESN. Specialties include ESNs, community management, employee advocacy programs, social media, collaboration tools and processes, online learning, instructional design, training, and social learning. Euan Semple linkedin.com/pulse/euan-semple-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield A leader and an influencer in the ever-changing field of digital technology. An early adopter of social media. Implemented one of the first Enterprise Social Network systems inside the BBC. Author of Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Catherine Shinners linkedin.com/pulse/columbia-university-information-knowledge-strategy-ikns-stangarfield Principal and founder of Merced Group. Works for clients at the nexus of organizational change and design, social and digital technology implementations, and individual work practice to help people embrace new skills to support digital and network competencies. Specialties include change management, communications, digital workplace, employee experience, intranets, knowledge services, marketing, networks of excellence, communities of practice, product management, and social media.

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John D. Smith learningalliances.net/background Coaches communities of practice, their leaders, and their sponsors with an emphasis on stewarding technologies and designing learning events. Co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. David Spinks cmxhub.com/about Founder and CEO of CMX. Helps community professionals thrive, advises organizations on community strategy, and offers frameworks that have been used by thousands of community teams. Jim Storer communityroundtable.com/team/jim-storer Helping people develop new appreciations while building deeper connections. His deep understanding of content and program strategies, grounded in his years as a community manager, helps him connect with community managers whether they’re just getting started or a seasoned professional. Co-founded The Community Roundtable to support business leaders developing their community and social business strategies. Luis Suarez linkedin.com/pulse/luis-suarez-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Veteran social/open business strategist and practitioner. Experience in knowledge services, collaboration, learning, online communities, and social networking for business. Helps organizations make the most out of their own change initiatives and digital transformation programs through making sense of data analytics visualizations. Founder of the #NoEmail movement. Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner linkedin.com/pulse/etienne-beverly-wenger-trayner-profiles-knowledge-stangarfield Etienne is best known for his seminal work on communities of practice and social learning theory. He is the author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, and co-author of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cultivating Communities of Practice, and Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. Bev is best known for her pioneering work in international settings, learning across boundaries, and the use of social media. She is a social learning consultant who works with organizations to develop strategies and practices for cultivating communities, networks, and other forms of social learning.

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Nancy White linkedin.com/pulse/nancy-white-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield Practitioner of online facilitation (group facilitation for distributed environments). Supports distributed learning, teams, and communities of practice, where technology is just the tip of the iceberg. Believes that organizational capacity and strong processes are the links to success. Co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities.

Critical success factors In addition to reading about and applying the principles, ideas, and approaches presented in this book, it’s important to continue learning about communities. Keep reading, enroll in training and workshops, and attend conferences. Join communities, look for opportunities to reuse the proven practices you pick up by participating in them, and monitor and post in threaded discussions.

About the Author Stan Garfield is a knowledge management author, speaker, and community manager. He spent 8 years at Deloitte leading communities and the Enterprise Social Network. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Stan launched Digital’s first knowledge management program in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq in 2000, and led the Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Program for HP from 2004 to 2008. Stan holds a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. He founded and manages the SIKM Leaders Community with over 800 members globally, and is invited to present at numerous conferences, including KMWorld, APQC, and SLA. Stan has published over 700 articles on leadership, innovation, knowledge management, communities of practice, Enterprise Social Networks, and social media. His previous books are Implementing a Successful KM Program (2007) and Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program (2017), and he has contributed chapters to four additional books. Stan lives in Northville, Michigan with his wife, Barb Hayes.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-017

Index 90-9-1 rule of thumb 117–126, 196 activities 14, 15 actKM Community 135 administrator 57, 69, 74, 75, 90, 142 Anklam, Patti 179, 203, 207, 212 Appreciative Inquiry 41 archetypes 78, 133, 141 attributes 14, 17, 39, 40, 86, 106, 116 Bacon, Jono 200, 201, 207, 212 badging 108, 110, 114, 150 benefits 1–8, 11, 13, 18, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 41, 45, 54, 56, 59, 60, 67, 71, 72, 73, 84, 88, 96, 108, 109, 110, 118, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 139, 168, 170, 173, 186, 187, 189, 190, 197 blogs 7, 10, 12, 30, 36, 43, 59, 86, 141, 142, 148, 152, 153, 199 Blunden, Helen 201, 212 boundaries 3, 4, 11, 36, 43, 62, 69, 88, 216 Brown, John Seely 212 building 17–33 business case 72, 73, 74, 198 Byrne, Tony 201, 213 calendar 26, 53, 54, 101, 155 Callahan, Shawn 88 campaign 63, 83, 112 Carron-Arthur, Bradley 122 Castro, Miguel Cornejo 213 charter 48, 56, 99, 177 checklist 56 CMX Hub Community 137, 199, 200, 208, 211, 216 COLLABORATION 46 communications 19, 113 communities program manager 1, 41, 51, 53, 64, 67, 69, 99, 100, 102, 189, 190 community management 53, 61, 81, 85, 89, 91, 93, 99, 100, 119, 137, 138, 186, 190, 199, 200, 201, 202 Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist Community 85–98, 99, 100, 104, 111, 112, 114, 120, 134, 138, 140, 141, 142, 160, 166,

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673739-018

169, 171, 173, 179, 181, 187, 189, 190, 199, 200, 209, 210, 211, 215, 216, 219 community of interest 13, 35, 36, 38, 39, 125 community of practice 12, 17, 29, 35, 38, 39, 43, 57, 59, 69, 73, 81, 97, 99, 106, 109, 116, 118, 125, 131, 140, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219 Community Roundtable 119, 120, 138, 199, 200, 204, 208, 209, 214, 216 community site 2, 10, 16, 18, 36, 43, 52, 53, 54, 56, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 100, 101, 104, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 159, 167, 172, 177 conference call 47, 48, 54, 55, 63, 71, 83, 109, 111, 112, 114, 130, 131, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 174, 184, 186, 187 content 31, 32, 54, 62, 86, 88, 126, 147, 167 creating 17–33 creation 12, 15, 51–57, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 70, 75, 76, 89, 99, 146, 150, 153, 193, 210 critical mass 12, 17, 24, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 67, 91, 93, 94, 193, 194, 195 critical success factors 7, 16, 32, 49, 57, 67, 84, 97, 116, 126, 143, 170, 186, 217 culture 127, 133, 140, 141, 143 Cunningham, John 122 Deloitte Excel Tips & Tricks Yammer Group 182 Deloitte Knowledge Management Community 182 DiMauro, Vanessa 201, 213 directory 1, 12, 14, 18, 24, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, 53, 54, 59, 70, 79, 84, 145, 146, 172 Dixon, Nancy 131, 132 due diligence 51 Efimova, Lilia 201, 213 Enterprise Social Network 2, 18, 32, 37, 39, 41, 45, 51, 52, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 80, 82, 85, 90, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 122, 127, 132, 141, 142, 148, 151, 159, 161, 163, 165, 168, 182, 185, 186, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 215, 219

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Index

events 3, 13, 15, 16, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 43, 48, 53, 54, 55, 99, 101, 102, 104, 114, 142, 155, 158, 169 examples 171–187 expectations 11, 14, 16, 26, 61, 71, 78, 97, 108, 110, 196 FeverBee Experts Community 199, 208, 210 Finke, Jan 74 gamification 31, 90, 108, 109, 110, 114 Garfield, Stan 200, 201, 202, 219 goals 8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30, 33, 99, 100, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 128, 137, 171, 177, 187, 191, 196, 200 Godin, Seth 191 good intentions 60, 118, 130 governance 35, 65, 75, 152, 184, 214 Griffiths, Kathleen 122 Hanley, Sue 172 Happe, Rachel 199, 213 health report 70, 83, 84, 102, 103, 116 Hovorka, Dirk 74 HP Project Management Community 180 Hulsebosch, Joitske 202, 214

membership 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 38, 52, 54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 66, 77, 83, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 101, 106, 107, 111, 125, 126, 133, 134, 137, 151, 172, 195, 196, 209 messages 94 metrics 53, 54, 55, 56, 83, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 151, 191, 200, 215 Midwest Knowledge Management Community 177 Millington, Richard 36 mistakes 93 Mohan, Mukund 56 Moore, Matt 89 Most Significant Change 42 motivation 73, 99, 108, 111, 112, 114, 116, 130, 196 Motley, Arthur 43 newsletters 18, 30, 54, 86, 114, 152, 165, 166, 170, 180, 190 Nickols, Fred 203, 215 Nielsen, Jakob 120, 178, 197 nurturing 69, 143, 181, 187 organization structure 9

incentives 30, 73, 86, 99 information site 83, 145 Karney, Bruce 191 Km4dev Community 21, 136 Krebs, Valdis 200, 203, 214 leadership 2, 10, 14, 17, 40, 47, 51, 63, 69, 73, 83, 84, 93, 108, 112, 113, 141, 167, 184, 211, 212, 219 leading by example 4, 70, 73, 91, 100, 108, 192 local chapters 13, 63, 67 Local Knowledge Management Community Leaders 179 McDermott, Richard IX, 203, 205, 214 measurement 8, 16, 31, 56, 70, 85, 99, 201, 211 meetings 16, 26, 28, 52, 82, 85, 92, 100, 104, 129, 143, 158, 162, 191

participation 13, 29, 108, 110, 117–126, 129, 130 participation inequality 120, 197 PATCH 15, 102 Pearce, Dennis 202, 215 Peer Assist 41, 48, 55, 178 pitfalls 189–198 Platt, Lew 6 portal 6, 20, 149, 152, 214 Positive Deviance 41 power curves 121 power laws 121 principles 5, 9–16, 74, 127, 134, 136, 186, 211, 217 process steps 53 Professional Services Knowledge Management Group 180 promoting 16, 71, 94, 198, 219

Index

publications 18, 23, 180 publicity 18, 27, 31, 32, 55, 74, 86, 113, 169, 170 questions to answer 52 recognition 31, 49, 73, 83, 84, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 133, 167, 169 redundancy 2, 6, 12, 57, 59, 64, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 91, 100, 112, 150, 194 request form 145, 146, 147 requirements 3, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 75, 88, 110, 149, 169 resources 199–217 – articles 202–203 – blogs 200–202 – books 204–207 – communities 208–211 – conferences 211–212 – sites 199–200 – thought leaders 212–217 – training 208 reviews 65 rewards 31, 70, 73, 100, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114 Riemer, Kai 74 Ritual Dissent 42 Romero, Lee 106, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 178, 195 Ross, Jeff 202, 215 SAFARIS 30, 42, 44, 75, 91, 115, 170 Santayana, George 6 SCENT 10, 14, 16, 147 scope 11, 13, 17, 56, 67, 136 selling 71, 198 Semple, Euan 202, 215 SHAPE 11, 14, 16, 52, 53, 85, 94, 100, 143 Shelley, Arthur 88 Shinners, Catherine 215 Sikm Boston 21, 63, 176, 177 SIKM Leaders Community 11, 21, 22, 63, 92, 97, 118, 119, 137, 162, 171, 172, 176, 177, 178, 197, 219 SIRCL 42, 75 size 61, 122 SMILE 15, 17 Smith, David 89 Smith, John D. 200, 205, 216

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Social Media Managers Community 139, 210 Social Network Analysis 25, 47, 200 SPACE 11, 15, 30, 99, 172 Spinks, David 199, 216 Storer, Jim 199, 216 Suarez, Luis 216 sub-communities 63, 184 success stories 18, 26, 31, 32, 33, 55, 74, 86, 108, 113, 167 survey 25, 56, 80, 103, 105, 120, 151, 164, 189, 190 survival 59, 193 sustaining 17–33 tags 39, 107, 150, 151 TARGET 14 team space 10, 12, 20, 26, 36, 59, 148, 151, 152, 161, 162 teams 4, 6, 9, 39, 162, 199 threaded discussions 1, 5, 10, 14, 16, 30, 32, 57, 75, 79, 86, 102, 104, 140, 147, 150, 167, 168, 170 tips 27, 55, 78, 90, 159, 163, 166, 169 tools 1, 16, 30, 114, 145–170 topic 11, 13, 17, 18, 24, 29, 32, 35, 37, 43, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 81, 85, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 126, 134, 147, 158, 159, 173, 187 TRAIL 14, 37, 38, 39 trust 91 types 35–40, 62 use case 41–49, 69, 71, 75, 155, 170, 192, 193, 198 vendor 95, 180, 201, 211 vision 1–8, 69, 71, 198 Wenger-Trayner, Etienne and Beverly 35, 36 White, Nancy 202, 205, 217 wikis 10, 12, 30, 36, 59, 86, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155 Working Out Loud 4, 5, 8, 112, 212 Ziegler, Eric 191 Zipf’s law 121