Corporate community strategy: communications as the safest choice.
Why is investment in online community communications -- specifically enabling social networking and social computing -- unlike most innovative efforts you'll ever undertake? Two reasons: the strategy is rock solid, and the community will do all the real innovating. How can the strategy be considered so solid, and what would ever entice the community to do all the innovating? The same thing answers both questions: genes.
(http://members.cox.net/darkened-past/evolution.html)
It is that simple. Birds flock, fish school, people associate with one another, and some of those associations we call community. We are a social species. We are a "we". Community, broadly, is among the adaptive responses our species -- our evolutionary lineage in fact -- has developed to cope with the requirements of survival in the complex adaptive landscapes we have inhabited, and that clearly characterize our lives today.
What's changed now is only the revolution in community that has emerged from the evolutionary development of several internet technologies relating to personal publishing, web20-style development, and syndication.
At least the communications world.
This makes the strategy unassailable. People are hardwired to associate and to use those associations to achieve their own goals. Give people the opportunity to interact and they will. Increase the communications capacity of your audience and they will -- in time -- make the best possible use of it. Even if you can't foresee what they'll use it for. (Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, felt the telephone would be most useful as a means of broadcasting symphonies and news. He did not anticipate it's popularity as a means of 1:1 interaction.)
Sadly, that doesn't mean that the tactics are foolproof. There's a lot of room for error in exactly how we deliver these new communications tools to our customers. Plainly, an agile methodology is called for that assumes some missteps and focuses on short turnaround iterative development. What's the right path?
To decide what to build we elected to stick with the basics:
- Know your customers as individuals
- On the basis of that knowledge help to connect them to experts and peers (emphasis on peers)
- Given them venues in which to interact
- Reward them for participation.
We have projects aligned with each of those four pillars.
Along with those basics, we've adopted the following user experience design principles:
- Every customer visit should result in a community connection
- Let customers feel the presence of others
- Customers are in control of their self expression and their consumption
- Customers should have access to the tracks they leave
- Build for the long tail
- Wed participation architecture with personal utility and a focus on a specific activity
We believe we can deliver on each of those design principles through tight integration between the components. (Will we get it right the first time? Probably not. But we're in it for the long haul.)
As far as I know, we didn't actually create any of those principles -- they're a product of the community of people interested in social software. It's our community; one which we appreciate; and one in which we make every effort to contribute to.