Notwithstanding excellent thought leadership from companies like Forrester and Gartner, we still run into a lot of people who are either paying the price for jumping into social media too quickly or who are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to make of it all. Since the proper knowledge, appropriate strategy, and right technology can make the difference between a raging success or a miserable failure, we wanted to reiterate a few of the lessons we have learned while “getting our hands dirty” by helping corporate enterprises build successful communities.
Previously, we discussed the merits of using corporate social communities with often-neglected audiences like employees, partners, vendors and customers. In this post, we will discuss what behaviors to expect from those who gather in your community.
Human Behavior: An obvious element that is critical to the success of your corporate community is the amount of contribution your would-be participants are willing to make. After all, how compelling can you make your community if the “community” isn’t willing to talk to each other? What does research show that you can realistically expect from your community audience and will you have enough people to make your corporate community a success?
People’s behavior online does not necessarily reflect their behavior in person. Most would agree that even the worst social introvert becomes an extrovert online and will share their opinion unashamedly. The problem is the consistency with which people will speak up. According to Gartner research, only 3% of your community users will be active content creators while another 3-10% will contribute to that content. Everyone else is either a Lurker or Opportunist (source: http://www.gartnereventsondemand.com/event.php/CRF10/B). As such, if your target audience consists of 100 people, then according to Gartner, only 3 will initiate content within the community and only another 3-10 will comment on that content. Will that be enough? If not, then an online community may not be the right tool for you.
There is an elusive number at which point your community reaches “critical mass,” the point at which the community takes on a life of its own and there is enough interaction to keep people coming back. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a tried-and-true formula in determining how many people it takes to reach that “critical mass,” but I have observed that it is largely a function of your audience. Certain demographics tend to be more outspoken and more willing to participate in online conversations. The more active interaction you have, the fewer community members you will need to reach that critical mass.
We have learned that you can help stimulate conversation by interjecting training content into the right audience (the subject of my first post). Be aware that merely throwing a training video at a group will likely backfire on you. But when your community has the expectations to congregating to learn and are willing to share and learn from each other as well as from your trainers, interjecting social media into to appropriate places of an eLearning system can better engage your audience and yield pleasantly surprising results. Each audience will obviously yield different outcomes but what can you expect from better engaging your employees? Hewitt Research in 2008 found that increasing employee engagement from low to high on a workforce of 10,000 employees could yield a financial impact exceeding $42 million (source: http://www.hewittassociates.com/_MetaBasicCMAssetCache_/Assets/Articles/DDGEngagementfull.pdf).
Peer Ranking of Your Contributors: By rewarding those who speak up in your community can also help drive more people to interact. A few systems like LearnSocial by Wi5Connect offer the ability for users to “vote” on both contributed content and on those who made the contribution. This not only gives your contributors recognition, it allows you to identify your subject matter experts – go to people for your organization. Using an algorithm of ratings and the number of posts, Gartner presents a five-tier scale for contributors raging from Guru, Wiz and Master to Guide and Apprentice.
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