5 Skills for Online Community Managers

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Online communities about which I have blogged often - are virtual places where people who share similar interests congregate and share information and connect with each other. They are distinct from "social networks" which are the relationships that you have with people you know or you get to know.

To think about it - online communities are like "Pages" on facebook (like this blog's page on Facebook, or the HR Professional's community) while a social network is what you see when you log into your Facebook account.

I first came across online communities long back. In 1999, I joined Satyam Computer Services and was soon part of the Knowledge Management team. One of the terms in vogue in KM circles around the world those days was "Communities of Practice", and we had created some communities using rudimentary bulletin board technology. These were organised around specific technologies which were the subject matter around which people would post queries and reply to others' questions.


Over the years I came across many other examples of such communities - both within organizations - like Hewlett Packard - and externally like Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms community or plain email listservs.

I have created some communities and have been sometimes an active and sometimes a passive  member of various communities.

Based on my understanding - here's what competencies the person managing the community needs to have:

1. Depth of knowledge in the subject of the community - This is what I'd put in the top of the list. Knowledge of the subject would make him/her credible and that would be the main asset to seed and grow the community.
2. Passion about sharing knowledge - A community may have lots of different objectives - but the primary behaviour that makes it successful is a small group of people incredibly passionate about sharing their knowledge with others. In the core of this group and probably the initiator and instigator in chief has to be the community manager.
3. Comfort with asking for help - As a community grows the conversations will get more and more complex and sometimes even the dedicated group may be at a loss. This is when the community manager (or someone else too) needs to go out of the community - find an expert, and bring them into the community to join the conversation. 
4. Comfort with technologies - Let's face it, online and virtual communities reside in cyberspace (whether within the company or externally) and knowledge of the tools and latest development in that space would be expected by the person who manages the community. If the community runs on a self-developed platform then relationship with the tech group that developed it is critical. If it runs on an white label platform like Jive or Lithium - then connections with the vendors' troubleshooters is important. The last thing you'd want is the community to be offline
5. The ability to showcase results and tell the story - For hard headed business folks online communities can seem to be very fluffy and a drain on resources, so an ability to showcase examples and results is important. It ensures the "mainstream" organization seeing real business value.

So those are the 5 skills that I think a community manager should have.

What do you think? Would you like to add any more?

Enterprise 2.0 - Corporate Social Networking in India

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An interesting article on how IT firms in India like Cognizant, TCS, Wipro are using inhouse social networking platforms to retain GenNext. I have posted earlier that there is a generational change coming which is driving these changes - one must realise two things:

1. It's not just a generational thing - sure the young have more comfort with such technologies - but it's wrong to say that such tools are focused only for them
2. The benefits of social networking is not just higher engagement - collaboration leads to business benefits - like reducing time to market and impacting productivity if used in a strategic way - and not just left to be "emergent"

An excerpt from the article:

Top tech firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries, which is already considered hygiene by new recruits. Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and the site records over six million page views every month.
“That’s how close you can get a Facebook to the business processes,” said Malcolm Frank, senior vice-president and Cognizant’s chief strategist. “The millennial actually have a completely different expectation in terms of how they work, they love to have virtual experiences,” added Frank.
From the time a new customer project is kicked off, to when it’s actually delivered, Cognizant 2.0 glues the entire workflow together, across varied skills, geographies and business units. “The work flow is not a boring experience, it’s so much refreshing,” agrees Pendse.
For Cognizant as an organisation, the system helps it not only knit the project groups together, but also reduce the entire time taken to identify who can do a particular project better than the rest.
“It’s like a Google search—we put the skill set required, and it throws up different project teams and individuals with prior experience in dealing with such situations,” says Frank. Some 7,000 projects are already registered in the system, and employees have shared around 200,000 posts about these projects.
At TCS, the country’s biggest software exporter, nearly one third of its over 1,50,000-strong workforce is actively participating in the company’s social media platforms already. TCS uses wikis, or personalised, websites that bring together specialised communities, apart from other tools to help its employees collaborate better. While Justask enables employees to ask questions openly, Ideamax encourages employees to share their ideas about a particular technology or a process.

Read my earlier post on the Social Business Employer manifesto - to think about it in a strategic manner. Also go through my presentation for a detailed explanation

The social business employee manifesto

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

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Training and Learning using Social Technologies

There's an interesting question that is posted to Julika Barrett who works for Dell Corporation in the newly formed service division as part of an account team that supports health-care clients in its information technology (IT) needs. As a learning and development specialist, she supports the IT associates with skills development, career management, and process improvement. She has held roles designing training, implementing training programs, instructing, coordinating projects, and providing consultation in documentation and training.

Read the full interview here
Who Else Wants to Take Training & Development to “The Next Level” Like Dell?

Q. What are your thoughts on “online learning communities,” especially when proposed as a solution?

The potential is very high to capitalize on social networking. Online learning communities formalize the informal information pipeline that goes on in an organization but I have only seen aspects of these communities in action.

For example, I have seen in companies that employees share ideas and solutions to problems by blogging, Skyping, and texting. Online training, through synchronous web meetings, provided opportunities for networking, problem-solving, and collaboration that transfer back to the workplace.

I still would like to see a plan with a vision of what an organization can become using social networking. These communication tools take time to use and for people to gain confidence in connecting. In a reactive environment, social networking becomes more of a distraction than a positive strategy.
Q. Change is definitely a process. What should corporate trainers expect in the 21st century?

Eventually, we go back to basics—what do we need to do and what do we need to know in order to make it happen. We, as learning professionals, need to develop 360-degree vision, to understand what has passed in an organization, what an organization strives to be, and what we need to do now to get there. We can have the best tools and technology possible, but their use still depend upon solid instructional design principles, learning theory, and performance management. The trick is to be so fluent in our knowledge and performance that we can provide structured design quickly to keep pace with the speed in which organizations operate.

5 Steps to Build an Employer Brand using Talent Communities

I've blogged about the subject before - and I consolidated my thoughts for B2B Marketing site Paulwriter.com on Talent Communities - 5 steps to to building an Employer Brand

The two objectives organizations will need to start thinking about are:

How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of the key talented people and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
Understand where these talented prospective employees are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

Organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool.

To read the article you might require to sign in to the site - but it's free and you should do so - if you're a B2B Marketer

Ex-Wipro CEO Vivek Paul enters the Enterprise 2.0 space

I've blogged about the use cases for employee and talent communities earlier as well as 3 scenarios and stories on how social technologies can help organizations build culture, foster innovation and build a connected team - and thereby move to being Organizations 2.0.

So it's quite interesting to come across a news item that says that Vivek Paul , that the ex-Wipro CEO is now targeting the Enterprise 2.0 space as this article in the Economic Times says. There is only one big Indian player in this space - Cynapse and it'll be interesting to see how Paul's sales abilities and Rolodex takes KineticGlue.

It's more interesting to note that Paul is targeting the domestic market and employee collaboration is one big promise being made. Would it end up confronting Wipro's old rival Infosys' new offering?

Here's the article:
Vivek Paul turns entrepreneur with KineticGlue

Paul’s first entrepreneurial venture, KineticGlue, is helping hundreds of employees at companies such as Dell India, Yes Bank and L&T Infotech collaborate better by using an online social medium. Essentially, KineticGlue will help every company set up its own ‘official’ equivalent of Facebook for employees—only it increases productivity, not eat into it. L&T Infotech, an early user of KineticGlue, has found that collaboration between 500 workers using this platform has helped it discover new revenue streams.

L&T Infotech, an early user of KineticGlue, has found that collaboration between 500 employees using this platform has helped the company discover new revenue streams. Unlike traditional email groups, wherein users interact with each other through chains of messages, corporate social networking solutions like KineticGlue enable project groups within companies to have open conversations, with each discussion thread linked to relevant topics.

This not only helps in forming focused discussion groups, but also breaks hierarchical barriers and encourages bright and less experienced professionals to participate.

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What would a Talent Community Manager do?

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Earlier I have posted about whether Talent Community Managers should or would exist in the future and how organizations are using Talent Communities for hiring as well as building their employer brand.

I also have looked at what community managers do.

So was excited today when I came across this job description of EMC's Community Development Manager[pdf] as well as Credit Suisse's Alumni Network Director.

Yes the future is here already!

As blogged earlier - these roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/HR), technologist and social anthropologist.

Check out both the job descriptions - they combine technology expertise with an ability to engage online groups.

What are the characteristics of online communities - and how are they different from social networks like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. Lithium Software's Principal Scientist of Analytics had a series of great posts on the same subject. This one for example is about Communities vs Social Networks and this one is about how they help in developing weak ties to Strong Ties.

So can we say that the focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help members develop strong ties.

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