Companies aren't communities

Companies aren't communities. They aren't forums.

Companies are companies.

Of course company life has a community aspect, but a lot of social software folks seem to forget that there's a lot more to a company than community. They treat companies as if they were consumer communities or forums that all just happen to have their paychecks signed by the same person.

Why does the difference matter? The answer is in the numbers. Online communities and forums typically attract very small audiences relative to the total target population: Less than 1% adoption is typical, and 5% adoption would be a grand-slam. That's fine for the consumer web, but those numbers inside the enterprise aren't exactly a ringing endorsement.

Successful enterprise implementations of social software have orders-of-magnitude higher adoption rates. For example, yesterday I was in New York meeting with Getty Images. Getty's Socialtext implementation is seeing 95% active adoption. Those are the numbers we're looking for inside the enterprise!

So how do we get there?

Companies, by very definition, have reporting structures, established workflows, shared systems and processes, defined roles and responsibilities, and closely managed performance. Those are assets we don't have in communities and forums, which are typically ad-hoc groups of individuals--mostly volunteers--in a collective endeavor without clearly defined roles, processes, reporting, deliverables, or metrics.

Getty and others achieve the adoption rates they do by integrating their social software into all those structures, workflows, systems, processes, roles, and responsiblities. As Getty's Director of Learning and Development, Jennifer Fox, told me today, "We no longer going to teach people how to use Socialtext. We are going to teach them how to do their jobs...which happen to require the use of Socialtext."

I've been saying for a few years now that companies achieve adoption and business value when they place social software in the flow of work. The tools achieve real benefit when people do their jobs--not their evenings-and-weekends jobs, but their actual "day" jobs in social software. That's when it becomes woven into the fabric of a company's business processes. Adoption is almost a foregone conclusion, because that's where you do your work. Business impact is demonstrable because business processes are measurable.

What, specifically, does this mean? It depends on your business, but it's things like:

• Marketing and Product post sales collateral in your social software tool (not in email!)
• Customer Support's knowledgebase is collaboratively maintained in social software (again, not in email!)
• The executive team and other key teams keep meeting agendas and notes in social software
• CRM, ERP, and Enterprise Learning systems automatically post major events in social software
• Quick links to important resources are available--and maintained--in social software
• Technical Help Desks and other internal support functions field requests via social software

Contrast that with an online community, like a gaming group or a technical forum. In communities, there is no flow of work. That's because most people don't come to communities to do work. They come to get support help, to swap tips, to praise, to complain, to socialize. Even those people who come for professional reasons are casual, sporadic visitors. The only person who really works there day-in-day-out is the forum/community manager.

There are three groups of people who cling to the "company as community" concept: the "kumbayeros" who wish that companies were as open and democratic as communities, public community managers whose consumer-facing experience has shaped the way they view all online social interaction, and community software vendors who are looking to repurpose their consumer-oriented products for the internal market.

In the enterprise, we need to take a more pragmatic approach. As Milton Friedman famously said, "The business of business is business." Social software fails when it tries to turn businesses into communities. It succeeds when it turns businesses into better businesses.

Comments

[David M. Sherr]

Just a quick correction on the origin of "The business of business is business." It was Herbert Hoover who first said that, circa 1927. Friedman just retweeted him 50-60 years later. Friedman and company want the only business to be business. His current acolytes are bent on destroying government at all costs to the community of the citizenry. This starts with the Citizens United case affirmed by the Supreme Court with two compromised yea votes. Citizens United wasa direct response to Obama's successful use of Social Media to win hi 2008 election. What is in store for Social Media in Round 3?

[Michael Idinopulos]

Thanks for the correction, David. There's a phrase you don't hear every day: "Milton Friedman retweeted him." Nice!

[Absolutesubzero]

Michael,
while I clearly agree with most of what you said (enterprise organizations are based on traditional flows, processes, structures, rules, authority, etc), I still believe Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business carry a deeper and broader transformational message that is not so far from communities.

If you reread Thomas Malone's "Future of Work" book (2004) or Gary Hamel's "Future of Management" or John Hagel's "The Power of Pull", you see a new paradigm evolving and growing inside corporations that yes, is able to better engage employees, customers, suppliers, partners but towards a very clear destination: making a more efficient, reactive, innovative, at the end profitable business.

While reading these books, I couldn't avoid thinking we are moving from a tyranny to a democracy to an open market. In other terms we are moving from command and control to a more diffuse involvement and responsibility of every employee in decision making and ultimately in the future of the business.

I agree, this is not talking about online communities as we know them on the web, but it is still a community-based concept of the organization enabled by embedding new tools and new management, leadership, incentivation, engagement approaches into the organization core.

So companies could look much more like communities, if you look at it from the right perspective :)

[Andy Jankowski]

Michael,
I like this post on several levels. I've researched many failed "enterprise social" implementations. The formula is quite simple and almost always the same. If the focus is on the tool, the implementation generally fails. If the focus is on people and process the implementation generally succeeds. I firmly believe that any enterprise social implementation should begin by looking across the business at which processes can and should be improved by changing the process to leverage enterprise social capabilities. I also believe that training people to use tools puts the emphasis on the wrong things (e.g., which buttons to click), but that training people new socially-enabled ways of working is paramount. A company will know they have succeeded in this area when employees independently start to think through processes, issues and challenges in context of what is possible in a socially-enabled enterprise.

[Andy Jankowski]

Michael, Your post inspired my blog entry today >> www.enterprisestrategies.com
Thanks again for your insight and inspiration. I welcome your comments.

[Aaron Kim]

I'm puzzled by what you mean by "Getty's Socialtext implementation is seeing 95% active adoption." How do you measure "active adoption"? I would expect 95% adoption if counting active + passive. Do you see any rate close to that across all your Socialtext clients?

[Michael Idinopulos]

Aaron, thanks for your comment. Absolutely! We're seeing quite a few clients hitting 95% when you count both active contributors and their colleagues who are lurking but not contributing.

[twitter.com/themaria]

Hi Michael,

I appreciate your thoughtful post, and thank you for drawing my attention to it. I think the distinction you are highlighting is actually key: internal social networks and communities are very very different than communities of consumers. The main reason is because their motivations for joining, and the jobs they are trying to get done are very different. You join a network / community at work in order to effectively and efficiently work across silos, get information faster, avoid working on stuff that's being already worked on. As a user, you also join so you can network across your organization; as a manager, you join so you can identify expertise on your team (and other teams) and possibly even have that play into your decisions to promote someone. Let's face it: being well networked internally, as well as externally, does help you propel your career forward. You join a customer community, however, in order to connect with other product users, or others who have a similar pain point as you. Very different end goals, and very different behaviors while engaging.

We polled our customers at Yammer to understand what the most significant benefits of collaborating have been: more effective communication, finding answers faster, saving time. Those are definitely improvements directly and indirectly to the bottom line.

As far as adoption numbers, that really depends. I've seen numbers vary all the way to around 80% of adoption (we don't have public numbers on this, but this is what I've seen personally). Why does it depend? On how the community is rolled out: is there a community leader, is there senior management buy-in, is there education, have you answered the question of "what's in it for me?" I wrote about engagement here: http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2011/03/engaged-community-best-practices.html

You are right on the money with regards to business process integration. That's something we always recommend to our users. We are working on better product integrations to help people manage their workflows, information flows, etc.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. I'd like to make myself available to you via email(maria at yammer-inc.com) or Twitter (@themaria) if you so choose.

Sincerely,

Maria Ogneva
Head of Community, Yammer

[Ipttoolkit]

Great post Michael. I definitely agree with you and I also agree with AbsoluteZero. Companies are constantly trying to measure the ROI of social media or social learning. To me that is a way to put "slow down the train of change". I am sure when the telephone came out, there was HOOPLA about how it would affect productivity. Businesses that uses social media should see it as a means to an end, just as a telephone or email allows communication (we don't try and ROI that). As you stated, if your social media strategy if focused on people and not on just the tool then success is more likely. I agree with AbsoluteZero that a paradigm shift is happening an customers/employees will have more of a say in company development. Just as Web 2.0 pushed out Web 1.0, social media is helping transform Business 1.0 into Business 2.0.