March 2007 - Posts
I'm spending the next two weeks meeting with Microsoft subsidiaries. I, of course, am interested in community. How do these teams view community? How do they see their conversations, online in particular, evolving over the next months and years? What is likely to work where, and when? Who are my most likely partners?
First stop is the MSCom summit in Barcelona. I couldn't have wished for a better start. There are around 60 MSCom (Microsoft.com) web professionals in one place.
I speak tomorrow. It should be interesting. I'm learning that my views are somewhat uni-dimensional. Specifically, I tend to see the online world as a conversation only, while these folks do a lot of publishing -- or broadcast communications. I have only one hour. I wish, oh how I wish, I had three or four.
I'll be trying for some interviews.
So far so good. Here's a quote worth remembering:
Quoting Pierre Levy: "No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity." I wonder if Pierre would be unhappy if I substituted community for humanity? I suppose we'd have to recast the whole sentence. In that case we're bound to end up with more words, and therefore less punch -- but it should still work.
- The first 27 pages.
- The discussion of the Catalyst -- especially in contrast to the CEO.
- The notion of attacking decentralization by centralizing them (if you really must act offensively)
- The (imho more enlightened notion) of attacking decentralization by decentralizing yourself -- gosh, what a thought...
- A reasonable chunk of the Hybrid Companies and the Sweet Spot sections "...enough decentralization for creativity, but sufficient structure and controls to ensure consistency." (Easier said than done.)
- Honorable mention to "Diseconomies of scale": "... as counterintuitive as it sounds, it can be better to be small." (I've heard my manager say this a thousand times. He's right. And just because you're in Microsoft doesn't mean you can't act small. In fact you can act, be, and benefit from small even in the belly of the beast. But, it takes a fairly enlightened hierarchy to support it.)
- And to close, "The Values Are the Organization" (If you have to be told what your corporate values are, then they're not.)
From Wikipedia: A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.
Social networks, then, cover a range of associations between members in some relationship to one another. Communities, then, are social networks. And like communities, social networks come in many forms. The different forms have different value propositions for the members.
Taking this a little farther, MySpace is often considered a social network. Okay, fine. But MySpace equals social networking to the same extent that that a cruise ship equals transportation. Yes it's true that a cruise ship is transportation for people with some very specific transportation needs. In the same sense MySpace is a social network for people with some very specific needs.
And the needs of that very specific audience happen to revolve around private spaces and identity production.
Now, below is a screenshot of another social network. This social network has no single "site" at its social center, though there may indeed be several management tools to help create and maintain it . People in this type of association typically have different needs than those in play on MySpace. (They better, because this social network isn't likely to meet their needs otherwise.)
This social network (one of mine, actually, and currently managed in an online reader called Feedraider that has some great features) is optimized for professionals seeking to maintain their knowledge and discover new information as it becomes available globally and in near real time in the area of web2.0 community technologies, tools, and techniques. Yes, it's nothing but a collection of RSS feeds. But a collection of RSS feeds -- the right collection of RSS feeds -- can change your life.
It's probably obvious, but the subject of the Feedraider social network portrayed above is only one of a nearly limitless number of possible subject areas. Others might include things like movies or books, sports fitness, hiking, Windows Vista deployment, ASP.Net development, Microsoft Small Business Server, or -- you get the point.
If you're reading this, you probably already have one or more of these types of social networks. Good for you. In fact, very good for you. You've already tapped into the latest generation "community" solution that is either already, or soon will, make you far more productive (for so many reasons) than any single resource in the past -- at least any that I've known about. It's a fabric that can and will underlie every other online community type.
Why this should be so, will be the subject of a later post. In that post I'll detail why this type of social network makes every participant more efficient and it can, for instance, answer most of your questions before you even know to ask them. I know, if you haven't experienced this first hand it sounds crazy. It's not. It's common sense. It's an everyday experience. It's unavoidable if you just plug in. In fact in its essentials, it's nothing new. It's little more than an online version of old old game -- it's another one of those disruptive things that have emerged recently on the web.
And it's one type of community my team is set to support, to accelerate, to simplify, and to introduce to a broader audience, when we release a new set of beta services in April.
Weak-tie networks rock.
Their own Second Life clone as the front end to their gamer social system. If history is any teacher, we should start a poll to see how long it takes us to do something similar. Hmm, while likely accurate, it does sound like a cop out -- criticizing without offering an alternative is so lame. So, what would I do? I'll have to think about it.
I found the story on Engadget.
I can't help myself. I'm bent on doing my utmost to come to some agreement on the meaning of terms under discussion. It's become top-of-mind for me recently because my group has been part of a general reorganization and the slow process of understanding between the new housemates has only just begun.
I took a stab at defining community a couple of years ago. The diagram that resulted is below. (And yes I admit I snagged ideas from a lot of places to put it together).
I suppose many of the terms used in the diagram above deserve some clarification, but for now I'm going to risk misunderstanding for the sake of brevity. I liked it, and continue to find it useful because it speaks to a range of associations, makes clear the overlap that exists between them, and points out that many community "types" can exist based upon a single fabric (forums, blogs). There are also several weaknesses. For instance, it does not make clear that strong-tie associations of the user group kind often employ many tools. That is, they may visit the same forum or forums, read each others blogs, or participate on the same DLs. There's a possible apples and oranges problem with the examples -- though I think it's a minor one. And, it's not remotely complete in terms of the channels available to "community" -- email isn't listed at all (sell that to the burning-man communities).
Finally, my diagram doesn't call out the fact that both no-tie and strong-tie associations tend to be predominantly "site centric", while weak-tie associations are more likely to be "net-centric". It doesn't in part because I'm not sure I buy it just yet, though I'm aware of a lot of anecdotal evidence that supports that contention.
All pro's and cons aside, there are other ways of looking at the subject. It's just one way to get to some common ground.
Below is another. It's from Rawn Shah (a Community Program Manager at IBM's Developerworks).
What I like about this is that it starts from "General Population" and ends with "Organization". That's a perspective my version misses altogether and that I find interesting. Also, by avoiding the word "intimacy" and instead describing the more concrete forms increasing intimacy delivers or enables (levels of involvement, complexity, focus, shared identity) it is perhaps easier to understand.
The downside is that what he calls audience and "social network" is what lots of people in my world call community. Telling them they're not community managers, but are instead audience managers, or social network managers, is asking for trouble.
In both cases, however, the range of possibilities is clear. And that is the central message. People are almost always in more than one type of association based upon needs and disposition. I, for instance, have very few online (or offline) strong tie relationships. I am, however, very much into weak-tie associations for purely utilitarian reasons. Even where I do engage in strong-tie associations, in those same areas I fully employ every weak-tie association I can find.
One type of association is not better than another -- though there may be reasons to strive for one over another from a corporate perspective in that there appears to be a correlation between strong-tie associations and customer satisfaction. (Sadly, the research I have available does not make these critical distinctions and so have less value than they otherwise might.) And apart from simple discovery, it's not clear that one type necessarily leads to another. Though we shouldn't discount the discovery/awareness angle. Seen this report?
Once we agree on a rational definition of community -- one that in the very least draws distinctions between types -- we can talk.
Tags: community social network socialsoftware microsoft