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My colleague Gautam Ghosh (@gautamghosh) on rewarding employee contributions in enterprise communities –

Behaviors like sharing and collaboration are organizational citizenship behaviors – and are a product of employee’s engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay. Highly engaged employees who would indulge in organizational citizenship behaviors follows the power law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.

I mostly agree with Gautam. However, the problem with assuming the 1:9:90 rule (that only 1% of the community members will create most of the content, only 9% will curate it, and the rest will be lurkers) in enterprise communities, and especially employee communities, is that such emergence doens’t scale in a team of 15, 50, or 500. So, the challenge in enterprise communities is to turn the 1:9:90 rule into something like 10:20:70. Your thoughts?

Chris Messina (@chrismessina) re-imagines the browser as a “social agent” for Mozilla Labs — and defines how it can do more to facilitate various social behaviors by supporting three verbs that can “socialize” the browsing experience: Connect, Follow, and Share.

- Connect: acting as your social agent, the browser becomes an extension of yourself, making it easier and more secure to participate in the social web
- Follow: as a replacement for the antiquated notion of “subscribing”, “following” becomes the general way to track the activities or feeds associated with a people, brands, celebrities, or social objects.
- Share: as the fundamental activity of the social web, sharing media, content, and information is integrated into the browser and enhanced through making available social connections and publishing services.

Ross Dawson (@rossdawson) shares an excerpt from his book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 –

The primary way in which pilots projects will become visible to other people the organization and adapted to new issues is through the personal networks of the pilot team members. Strong personal networks within organizations emerge through both personality, organizational role, and work history (e.g. having worked in multiple divisions or locations). In most organizations networks are fairly strongly correlated to longevity in the organization, meaning that recent recruits are unlikely to have strong personal networks.

You can also download four free chapters from the book.

At the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action, Nokia’s Director of Strategy Serge Ferre talked about why Nokia should focus on solutions like Nokia Music, Nokia Maps, Nokia Life Tools, and Nokia Money instead of trying to build an Apple-like app store —

Later, we had an interesting conversation in which he said that telecom operators and device manufacturers won’t be able to beat Apple at the application marketplace game, unless they build strong solutions that consumers can use repeatedly. Third-party application developers, then, will play a role in enhancing these solutions, instead of building standalone apps.

Venessa Miemis (@venessamiemis) –

As we become more interconnected and accessible, we need to be able to search for each other not only by topic of interest, but by the types of people with whom we’d like to collaborate. I imagine an index that would travel with us around the web, comprised of our strengths, our skills, and our social connections. As networks take precedence in the way we orient ourselves on the web, it will be useful to have visual maps of how we’re connected. Our personal skill sets, knowledge, and expertise will become our virtual resumes, constantly updated and vetted in real time. And our strengths are our underlying ‘human factors’ that act as the foundation for our personal operating systems. This might emerge as a visualization, or possibly as a series of tag clouds, or as images, like archetypes or badges.

Dell’s Jacqui Zhou (@jacquizhou) who ran Direct2Dell Chinese blog in the past and is responsible for much of Dell’s globalization strategy in social media —

Earlier this week we launched Dell’s official microblog in China. The microblog will serve as a channel for corporate news, technology discussions and even coupon and deal information. Instead of duplicating what we have in the US, we localize the content and platform to appeal to interests in China and go where our customers in China are.

Three years ago, we started Direct2Dell Chinese, the first corporate blog in Chinese in the computer industry. It has become an invaluable tool for Dell to listen, engage and converse with local customers. Our Dell tech support forum has accumulated a big user base where customers assist each other in technology needs. We have started listening and outreaching program in China where our customer care and tech support agents tune into online conversations proactively and help address customers technology needs. We have implemented ratings and reviews program on dell.com, where Chinese customers can share their feedback of products and help each other make more informed purchase decision. Very soon, we will have our community presence on key local social networking sites like Renren.  Read More

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider (@tonydotorg) –

I’ve noticed a new trend in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are beginning life as distributed companies, and investors and partners are starting to accept it as normal. Our company Automattic is distributed, and I’m ready to sing the praises of running a business in this way. BTW, I thinkdistributed (“evenly spread throughout an area”) is a better description than the more commonly used virtual (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) for a company that has people working from all over the place instead of a centralized office. In Automattic’s case, we currently have over 50 employees spread across 12 US states and 10 countries.

Interesting counterpoint to my earlier post about The Myth of Frictonless Free Agent Networks and Anywhere Anywhen Collaboration .

Richard Millington (@richmillington) —

Your community name is a powerful symbol. Don’t waste it. Picking the wrong name can do real harm. Picking the right name can do wonders.

A member should feel a sense of affiliation and familiarity with the name of your community. It should identify why the group feel they are special. They should be proud of the name. They should be happy to wear the t-shirts.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on TechCrunch –

Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement.

I agree with Marc Benioff that enterprise 2.0 needs to become people-centric, instead of being document-centric or task-centric. I also agree that Salesforce Chatter is likely to be a big driver of this shift.

Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) thinks that Google Apps will win the enterprise 2.0 game.

Adrian Chan (@gravity7) –

Social is all about putting people in motion. And people move each other as they are also moved. So what kind of audience are you assembling? Is it a public, a crowd, an attentive audience, a gathering of individuals? Is it groups, passersby, or players playing social games?

Audiences have different psychologies and are moved in different ways, according to their collective sense of presence and involvement, and their individual sense of participation. So think first about what kind of audience you are assembling, and how it is moved.

Mark Fidelman (@markfidelman) —

Companies should create a “Mayor” concept for the company where enterprising employees earn the right to become departmental or functional Mayors.

In other words, create content or knowledge experts that are socially elected by their peers based on the frequency and quality of the knowledge shared.

So in addition to expert search, you create an environment where experts self-proclaim – motivated by social recognition.

At the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action, Mozilla Europe founder Triston Nitot (@nitot) talked about how Mozilla’s Drumbeat project (@mozilladrumbeat) aims to keep the web open for the next 100 years:

Drumbeat seeks to bring together a community of creators, who will work together to build a better internet that is open, participatory, decentralized and generative:

Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of Mozillians who *use* web technology in new ways to understand, participate and take control of their online lives. At a practical level, Drumbeat community members use web technology to make things that improve and protect the open internet. They run local events where people propose and work on these practical projects. They encourage others to get involved. Mozilla helps find contributors, funds and advice for the most promising Drumbeat projects.

Drumbeat also has an ideation platform where Mozillians submit ideas for projects that make the web more innovative and more open by using open-source technologies.

Last month, I met Mozilla localization and community lead Seth Bindernagel (@binder) in Bangalore and talked about how working with local volunteer communities to drive the localization of Firefox in 75 languages with only 4 employees.  Read More

Brian Vellmure (@crmstrategies) –

What if we were to not just know about our customers, but also about the groups of people that they were part of, who they interact with, how they interact, and why?

We all have circles of friendships, professional relationships, patterns, etc. that we live by. We have patterns of decision making, and we all make decisions based on influence of those we know and trust.

By understanding more about those who influence our customer’s decisions; we may discover valuable insights that may help us to meet our customer’s needs better, and if your organization is prepared enough, even co-create solutions with them.

Conversely, we may also begin to understand who our customers influence, and why a successful sale might not only allow us to recognize revenue from that single purchase, but also a chain of purchases based on the influence and recommendation of our customer’s purchase decision.

These insights are not only valuable for each individual prospect or customer, but also in aggregate. By profiling groups or segments of our customer base (or our target market in general), we can potentially gain key insights into who is likely deriving the most value from our products and service offerings.

Here’s a video of myself in conversation with Luis Galindo (@luis_galindo, who runs the WIMS 2.0 project at Telefonica) at the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action:

I talk about election monitoring platform Vote Report India and citizen action platform iJanaagraha and the importance of having a web-mobile-offline hybrid model to drive citizen action.

I talk about how crisis reporting platform Ushahidi has transformed a SMS-map mashup four people hacked together in four days into a global organization and ecosystem of passionate users and volunteers like myself.

I talk about ideation platform Dell Go Green and the importance of building a community around a social object (a lifestyle or cause) that is bigger than the brand itself.

Finally, I talk about how businesses, civil society organizations and government agencies can learn valuable lessons from each other on how to engage their constituents using social technologies and online communities. If you want to learn more, here’s a mammoth 150+ slide deck on how social technologies are changing media, business and society:

I think of myself as a Digital Nomad. My closest friends and co-conspirators are spread over a dozen cities in five continents, but all of them seem equally close to me on my Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter activity streams.

I travel a lot and literally live my life out of a tiny backpack. In 2010, I have already traveled to half a dozen cities for client meetings, conferences or workshops and spent more time in Mumbai and Bangalore than in Delhi itself, but I feel as if I am never really out of touch, as long as I have my phone, my laptop and my data connection.

I am also a big believer in the idea of social technologies bringing together communities distributed across time and space. During the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha election, Selvam and I ran Vote Report India from Seattle and Washington DC respectively, with a core team of volunteers spread across at least ten cities across three continents.  Read More

My post on the biggest Social CRM (SCRM) use cases set me thinking about the biggest use cases for corporate online communities.

A company can build and host ten different types of communities to serve different business objectives:

1. Communities of Interest: to connect customers and influencers around a lifestyle, an interest or a cause that is related to the company’s or brand’s values.

2. Communities of Practice: to connect customers and influencers around a profession, a skill or an industry that is related to the company’s offerings.

3. Evangelist Communities: to connect customers who are passionate about the company, its products or its brands and energize them to drive advocacy and referrals.

4. Employee Communities: to connect the company’s employees, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

5. Partner Communities: to connect the company’s employees and partners, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

6. Talent Communities: to showcase the company’s work culture and employees and attract prospective employees to the company.

7. Ideation Communities: to solicit and select product and process improvement ideas from employees, partners, customers and influencers.  Read More

Altimeter Group has recently released a white paper in which analysts Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang have identified 18 use cases for Social CRM, based on conversations with almost 100 users, influencers and vendors.

Roughly, most of these uses cases can be classified across five business areas (Marketing, Sales, Support, Innovation, Collaboration) and four dynamics (Insights, Response, Proactive, and Crowd-Sourcing). I like this simple action-oriented classification better that coming up with names for each use case combination.

Owyang and Wang have further classified these 18 use cases based on market demand and technology maturity. Market demand reflects the urgency by organizations to deploy a use case while technology maturity reflects the market readiness and maturity of the available solutions.

In this matrix, Evangelizables present the most immediate market opportunity, for both product and consulting company, while Early Movers presents the most important marketing opportunity for product companies.

- Evangelizables (high market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by insights, response and proactive uses cases for sales, marketing and support.
- Near Tipping Points (low market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by crowd-sourcing use cases in collaboration and innovation.
- Early Movers (high market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by response uses cases in sales and marketing.
- Early Adoptions (low market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by insights use cases in collaboration and innovation.  Read More

At 2020 Social, we understand that the nature of knowledge is changing from stock to flow and knowledge will become redundant in the blink of an eye, if not shared with others. On the other hand, if we share knowledge with other, often for free, they repay us with attention, and we create more opportunities for ourselves to learn and share more.

In this spirit, we will be sharing all our research, point of view, conference and workshop decks with the community of social media practitioners and enthusiasts we have learned so much from.

We speak at almost a dozen events every month, and sometimes use the same ideas across talks. For instance, I have given several related talks on “how to scale passion?” or “what can entrepreneurs learn from activists?” at BITS Pilani, IIT Roorkee, TEDIndia, Startup Saturday Delhi, Social Media Club Mumbai, IIT Delhi and Pecha Kucha Bangalore. Each talk is a work-in-progress artifact and I have seen these ideas evolve, each time I talk about them. While individual slide decks for each talk are interesting as artifacts, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to share a master slide deck (that’s in constant beta) so that people can easily refer to the latest iteration of our thinking.  Read More

As 2020 Social’s suite of offerings have evolved, the senior team is increasingly getting stretched across our competency areas and practice areas.

So, Dave leads our business-to-consumer practice and the plan competency, Kaushal leads our business-to-business practice and the build competency and Gautam leads our employee and partner practice and the engage competency, while I help out across all three competencies and practices.

My target is to take Dave and myself off this grid so that 2020 Social can function even when we are away, let’s say, for speaking at conferences.

To get there, we will need to fill three key positions over the next three months: the business-to-consumer practice lead, the build competency lead and the engage competency lead.

Last week, we announced openings for the first two positions:

- Consultant (1): Ideally Mumbai, but also Delhi or Bangalore

Role: Develop the digital marketing strategy and define the business case for social applications and community platforms for consumer and media clients. Establish thought leadership in the domain of how Indian consumers engage with web, mobile and social technologies through blog posts, white papers and conference talks. Set up the Mumbai office for 2020 Social and establish and grow client relationships. Over a one year horizon, manage a team of 5-6 Associate Consultants and Analysts.  Read More

STAYING IN CONSTANT BETA WITHIN A SANDBOX

As an entrepreneur, you need to articulate your offering early in your startup’s life cycle, and still stay open to change, especially if you are in the fast-evolving social technologies space.

After nine months of running 2020 Social, I have learned that the key is to define a big enough sandbox early, then stay in constant beta, and play within that sandbox.

THE EVOLUTION OF 2020 SOCIAL

In June 2009, 2020 Social started off as an insights firm, focused on tracking conversations on the social web and identifying trends international clients could benefit from.

Within a hundred days, we realized that the social opportunity in India itself was big enough and reinvented ourselves as a consulting firm, focused on advising Indian and international clients on how social technologies are impacting their business strategy.

By October, we were ready to move beyond pure-play advisory services and offer full solutions to our clients. Since then, we have been working hard on building our BUILD and ENGAGE capabilities, apart from strengthening our already mature PLAN capabilities.  Read More