Earlier, I had shared my thoughts on the Social CRM use cases report from Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and Ray Wang (@rwang0) and shared ten use cases for corporate online communities.
Now, Michael Specht (@mspecht) and my colleague Gautam Ghosh (@gautamghosh) have extended the same thinking to talent and employee communities across the “employee life cycle”.
Gautam’s post also has implications for how we think about designing communities in general. Basically, Gautam says that communities can be designed to enable four types of communication:
1. From few to many: Blogs
2. From many to few: Ideation platforms
3. Between few: Wikis
4. Between many: Forums and social networks
It’s easy to see that the relationship between the host company and the community members is dramatically different in these four contexts and the choice of a platform will define (and limit) the relationship. It is true for employee communities, but it is also true for customer and partner communities. Fascinating.
