(Excerpted from the November 2008 Issue of Business Management US
http://www.busmanagement.com/currentissue/article.asp?art=275618&issue=287)
“Community”
is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Pretty much
everyone under 30 has heard of MySpace and Facebook, and professionals
are using the LinkedIn service more and more to connect with people
they know. Given the rising tide of what analysts dub “social media”
there has been increasing interest in the business world to determine
what can be done with the new technology.
Unlike the myriad twenty-somethings who are mostly looking to market
themselves through blogs, photo galleries, YouTube, and the
what-am-I-doing-this-second Twitter, businesses are focused on the same
thing they always have been: ROI. Companies are witnessing adoption of
community tools into different business units such as marketing and
support for obvious reasons. For many of the same reasons other
departments have picked up on social media, even something as integral
to business as the company Intranet is being affected as well.
The Driving Factors
Initially the main reason for businesses to review the possibilities
of social media is the fact that people have not been responding to
traditional marketing as much these days. The Internet provides a
one-stop resource for product analysis, specifications, and reviews.
Even if you do reach a potential buyer with a 30 second spot for say a
new sedan, that person is still likely to head to some of his/her
favorite online car communities to read “unbiased information” about
your product. Alternatively, that person might not even view your
commercial because he or she is already doing research online on what
to buy. There is a discussion going on in the Internet, and marketing
professionals know that it’s important to participate through
communities. This is done in order to quickly disseminate information,
collect demographics and also to help improve the product through
feedback.
Another factor which drives companies to start looking into social
media is support. Traditionally, support forums have taken center
stage. Software companies have used them to great success to resolve
client issues, and to quickly inform clients about possible solutions.
Also, non-corporate enthusiast forums have come about to help people
with problems ranging from partitioning a hard drive to rebuilding a
Nissan SR20DET motor. Forums become an online knowledgebase where
questions can quickly be answered either by asking a new one, or by
reviewing past conversations which have taken place.
More recently, a new type of community has emerged. This has nothing
to really do with external influences, but rather as a place where
employees of a company can find and interact with one another. It is
entirely in-house, and can be used for a variety of purposes such as
finding experts within your company, project collaboration, onboarding
of new employees, or improving worker satisfaction by giving them a
voice within an otherwise monolithic enterprise.
Like a Company LinkedIn?
Social networking is the first thing people bring up when they
discuss communities. This is due to the free consumer sites such as
LinkedIn. While this is just one of the many tools that exist within
any professional community platform, it’s important to address. Large
companies typically have large campuses, or many regional offices. One
of the side effects of this is that as an employee, you have your
assigned team and your assigned desk, and that’s mostly it. You know
who you interact with on a daily basis. For managers, you know who
works directly under you, but are not well acquainted with everyone on
your floor, much less everyone in your organization.
At Blogtronix, we used to find it somewhat amusing when we would
receive multiple calls from multiple people in the same company looking
for essentially the same thing. Naturally those people looking for a
community building platform didn’t know each other. Some of the time
they even had very similar backgrounds. This type of thing occurs all
the time in large organizations because there’s no way of finding
someone with particular knowledge or skills except by either talking to
HR (good luck) or by passing the word around.
A business social network is useful for identifying those folks
within your company who you might need at a certain point in time. This
can be for something like a multiple division project, pinpointing an
individual with a particular skill (i.e. language or educational
background) or simply for being more in touch with the individuals at
your organization. In addition to this, your employees can find and
connect with one another, much like adding friends (on MySpace) or
connections (on LinkedIn), which brings them closer together as a team.
A person’s profile can contain all of this information and be indexed.
Let’s say you need a project lead to coordinate with your new
outsourced development team in Brazil. So you need to find someone
who’s an expert in Java, with a certain amount of management
experience, and who speaks Portuguese. People who meet this description
can be found instantly on the system. You can then find which of those
people are the best informed or influential by viewing their author
ratings. You can also identify that person’s supervisor to iron out
scheduling details.
Didn’t You Get the Memo?
So assuming that you were able to find your Portuguese-speaking Java
coder, you now have a manager who might not be in your office, and a
team that’s offsite. Of course you’ll have operational procedures and
reports to gather information about the project. There are two current
gold standards for assessing the performance of your new team. The
first is a standard project management tool which includes Gaant charts
and task assignment. The second is email. Did you notice a gap there?
Email is the primary tool for actually explaining tasks, and continuing
dialogue about the project. It is also the only way ideas can be
solicited from various members of the team without having to schedule a
conference call for everyone. (And we know how much fun those are)
Email, in spite of the latest software offered by Google and Microsoft,
is inefficient and difficult to keep track of.
This brings me to my second point: project collaboration via
communities. One of the first methods used by development and IT
workgroups was wikis. The reason for this is that a wiki allows you to
maintain a single version of a document online while allowing multiple
people to edit it at once. On top of that, a full revision history is
maintained so changes can be tracked and sometimes reversed, no harm no
foul. On top of this, the stream of consciousness link based navigation
of wikis is highly intuitive. If you don’t believe me, visit a
Wikipedia page for something and see how many other pages you travel
to. (You might be looking for the theory of relativity and end up
reading about Emperor Nero.) The usefulness of wikis was immediately
recognized, and they began to spread. Your development team can use
wikis to maintain project notes, and specifications. They can also use
it to update task lists and carry out countless other functions in a
multimedia-rich setting.
Another community driven aspect of collaboration is the blog. Most
executives think of blogs as very one-way styles of communication. They
also think of blogs as mostly being written by some tech uber-nerd or a
lonely guy out of his parents’ basement. Although those stereotypes are
humorous, as of 2008, they are simply not true. Within a team
environment, a blog can be used to create discussions. Someone can post
a blog in the team space, and everyone else can engage in threaded
comments in response. A blog doesn’t even have to be text. It could be
images, video, audio, interactive flash, HTML code, or any combination
of the above. This medium far surpasses things such as forums or email
for quickly sharing ideas between large or small groups of people.
On top of this, both wikis and blogs integrate numerous search
capabilities. Information is hard enough to find within your own email
box, much less within a project space comprised of 20 people. Blogs and
wikis incorporate a tag and category based system, so that you can
search by keyword, by author, by subject or more.
There is no “I” in Team
Everyone knows that when you hire a new employee, you have to get
that person up to speed. This can include assigning that person a
mentor, or even sending them to week-long educational seminars, and
everything in between, depending on your core business. Some things are
easier to learn than others. One of the advantages in having a
community is the ability to supplement this process. If you’ve been
using a community approach within your workgroups to collaborate, then
you already have an easy to navigate digital record of everything the
team has been doing. A new employee can review and comment on all of
the online materials. On top of this, he/she can use the social network
to find people to ask pertinent questions to.
In addition to being able to find people within the organization and
update him/herself on the goings on of the company, HR can create a
special workspace for new employees filled with training materials
which utilize blogs, wikis, and hosted documents. A blog might even
include an interactive flash video which the recruit can watch. This
way, it’s possible for recruits to be more dynamic in their learning
process, and reduce the amount of time HR takes to onboard them to
their new job. It will also be much easier for them to become
accustomed to some of the projects which are currently being worked on
in their department.
Giving Individuals a Voice
Now that you’ve onboarded your newest employee to your
multi-national team, you want to make sure that you keep him there.
Many companies, especially the larger ones, are looking to improve the
overall experience of working in their firm. Google does this through
exercise rooms, bring your dog to work day, and a gourmet kitchen
staffed by award winning chefs. While these initiatives address many of
the creature comforts involved in day to day life, people don’t
typically dislike their jobs because of the cafeteria food.
A main issue many employees have is that people aren’t listening to
their ideas. A community of all company employees (along with a blog
rating system and various other statistics) makes your employees feel
like they’re a part of something, not just one cog in a big machine.
Let’s say your company is a big hardware store, and you’ve decided for
whatever reason to stock something a floor worker needs to access every
day (like the caulk guns) on the top shelf. This annoys the worker
because he has to go get the ladder every time, and it costs you money
because it’s inefficient. How would that worker get the word out to
operations people to change it? The usual channels involve a lot of
static. With a community, that employee could write about it, and that
blog could be easily circulated company wide.
Now of course you don’t want everyone just writing everything that
they want, which is why you should have rights and content management
tools in place so that you can control or at least moderate the
conversation. But the important thing is that overall worker
satisfaction is increased since you’ve enabled your employee to
contribute to the company as a whole, and receive recognition for it.
On top of this, you’ve just improved productivity by relocating the
caulk guns.
It’s All About Community
As you can see, businesses can make a great deal of use out of
social media. Even though those tools started out on the consumer side,
you can improve many aspects of your corporate intranet by integrating
them. You will see results in all aspects of business via better
communication between people and between departments. A good community
platform will supplement your existing software and protocols to
improve your internal operations.
Brad Engmann, VP Operations, Blogtronix LLC