E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

CommunityBuilders: The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe

If you would remember, late last year, over at CommunityBuilders, one of our IBM internal communities of community facilitators, we had the great pleasure, and true honour, of having with us guest speaker Rachel Happe, co-founder from The Community Roundtable, come and present, along with Jim Storer, on The State of CommunityManagement 2010. That session was one of the most commented and interactive we had throughout the whole year and, of course, we decided to go and come back for more. So I am pleased to share over here with all of you “The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe“.

That’s right! A couple of weeks back we had the opportunity of inviting Rachel again to come and talk to us about the absolutely wonderful piece of work by The Community Roundtable folks on the yearly free whitepaper “The 2011 State of Community Management“. And, once again, another rather popular session with lots of interactions and great conversations on the side. So after things have quiet down a bit, specially with my crazy travelling schedule as of late, I am really happy I am finding an opportunity now to come and share with you folks over here some further details on how you can get a copy of the slides that Rachel used, as well as the recording of both audio and video of the event itself.

As a starting point, you can download the slide deck from CommunityBuilders – The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe and the recording from this other link. The replay lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and watch it over a cup of coffee / tea, or two. At the same time, and as a teaser to what you will be able to find on that education session, Rachel pointed me as well to this Slideshare presentation they have which covers a similar set of slides you could peek through:

So, what else can you expect from watching the replay? Well, as a starting point you would be able to get a good reminder, and a refresher, of the excellent Community Maturity Model along with a good dive into the main key themes from the 2011 study / research:

• “Social Business Becomes A Strategic Imperative
  
• Interest in Community Management Has Increased
• The Community Management Discipline Is Evolving
• A Lot of Confusion Remains”

From there onwards, Rachel, once again, did a great job in describing how those new findings translate into a really nice bunch of good / next practices for each and everyone of the various elements from the Maturity Model, which would mean it would give folks a great opportunity to learn some new tricks on the art of community building, as well as find out some pretty interesting nuggets on how leadership stands with regards to Social Business and Community Facilitation, from a recent survey they conducted as well. Truly fascinating, specially, the data around culture lagging…

Now, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you any further, since otherwise you wouldn’t need to listen to the recording any longer hehe. Just hope these teasers would give you enough ground to go ahead and take a look, as we are approaching the weekend and have perhaps a bit more time to go through it than through the regular week at work  I can tell you though that it would be worth while your time. Every minute of it.

From here onwards, I would just want to take the opportunity to share a special Thanks!! with Rachel for being with us, once again, and we surely look forward to further interactions in this fine art of managing and facilitating online communities. Later on, in its due time, I will share across another blog post where I will comment further more in detail about The State of CommunityManagement 2010 full report, which I can surely recommend you have a read, if you would want to learn plenty more of the traits behind successful community management. That is, learning new tricks right from the horse’s mouth, The Community Roundtable, if you would ask me…

Why Social? To Help Colleagues Work Together Much More Effectively

One of my all time favourite social networking tools for informal learning, as well as information discovery, on a good range of interesting and relevant topics, and specially Enterprise 2.0 / Social Computing and Social Business as of late is Slideshare. I could spend hours and hours in there diving through slide deck after slide deck digesting some of the most amazing content people have been putting together over the course of time and never get tired of it! Can you imagine saying that about presentations? Goodness! That’s what I thought, too! Anyone on Presentation Zen?

I guess Slideshare has brought back to presentations, to some extent, the sexiness they once had, before we all got obsessed with them without remedy! No, seriously, you know what I mean, I even have got a lovely notepad text document where I keep filing some of these worth while slideshare links that I know at some point in time they would be having a mention, and a space, over here in this blog. That’s why today I would like to introduce to you a couple of them, in case you may not have seen them just yet: Why Social? and How Social Software Helps Get Work Done. Both of them would be worth while going through, for sure, as much as keeping them in mind whenever you would want to reuse them for your upcoming speaking gigs. Yes, indeed, they are both that good!

Both of them have been put together by a couple of really good friends who are very well versed on this whole topic of Social Business, Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing. The first one, Why Social?, was put together by Stu McIntyre and in it he covers, very successfully, the whole landscape behind Social Collaboration going from the problems it aims to address (Finding and connecting people, sharing information, contribute to the collective intelligence, informal serendipitous knowledge discoveries, etc. etc. pretty much the same ones traditional KM used to aim at back then), to the value / business benefits inherent to it (Business growth, deepening customer business relationships, innovation around both old and new ideas, a much more effective knowledge workforce, etc. etc.), to the implications of a collaborative organisation (And how to get there if you business is not that keen yet on true open collaboration).

The highly recommended part of Stu’s slides is coming towards the end where he shares a bunch of them around the topic of Where do you get started? No, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you, you will have to go through the slides yourself to find out plenty more about it. But one key message you will see permeating through all of them is the confirmation of how we are finally shifting gears, making a huge leap forward, and leaving both technology and tools far behind us, focusing on the business, or, rather, the people behind the business! Yes, I know! About time, too!

The second Slideshare presentation I would want to share over here with you folks is coming from Alan Lepofsky and it is titled “How A New Generation of Software IS Helping Colleagues Work Together“. Another worth while deck where Alan covers some very interesting and relevant topics, like the evolution of collaboration, its inherent changes at work and some “best practices” (Ok, ok, we will forgive him this time around for using such *cough* old business school terminology *cough*). Instead, we would stick around with rather good practices or next practices. Anyway, moving on to some of the most thought-provoking slides he shared across. Let’s start with slide #6 that sets up nicely the landscape of the evolution of collaboration over the course of decades. Simple, easy to digest, straight to the point. Priceless!

From there onwards you will embark yourself on a rather enjoyable and pleasurable trip, with some excellent imagery used to illustrate plenty of great points and exploring the real impact these social technologies are having in the way we work, collaborate and share our knowledge with others. Very inspiring altogether as it then finishes off the presentation with plenty of reflections and helpful insights on those good / next practices.

However, the key remarkable thing you will notice as well from Alan’s deck is, once more, the confirmation, along with Stu’s presentation, of how the conversation has evolved from that rather tenuous and everlasting focus on tools and technology to try to address and fix all of our business problems to eventually focus on the business itself as the major driver for fixing those problems altogether. And that major driver? Yes, I know you know where I am going… Of course, once again, the people! Because businesses *are* people. People who, actually, *do*care!

Or like Seth Godin brilliantly put together just recently under “Caring“:

“No organization cares about you. Organizations aren’t capable of this. [...]  People, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of caring. It’s part of being a human“

with one of the most amazing conclusions that I am going to shameless steal, errr, I mean, reuse and insert over here in this post, as I feel it’s spot on in helping us fully understand why social is now more important and critical than ever in helping us knowledge workers work together much more effectively and efficiently than ever before, and how every organisation or business that tries to put a stop to it and not embrace it, but neglect it will eventually suffer from it, sooner rather than later:

“If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When your organization punishes people for caring, don’t be surprised when people stop caring.

When you free your employees to act like people (as opposed to cogs in a profit-maximizing efficient machine) then the caring can’t help but happen“

I think you would agree with me we are reaching that point where we would need to decide for ourselves, not for the business, but for us, people, whether we would eventually want to care … or not. And live by it. Doing so will help us transform, for the better, not only the organisations we work for, and with no way back, but also the way we conduct and do business in the 21st century. Doing so will help us, essentially, become better at what we already do naturally: Connect people to people (And people to (relevant) content) to do real, meaningful, responsible, sustainable good business. Ultimately, and, like usual, the choice is all ours.

Have you decided yet?

(I have…)