Just come across this set of useful looking slides from Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang. Thanks Jeremy.
Also as a model of best practice for an ‘About’ blog page Jeremy’s is certainly worth benchmarking.
Anyhow here’s the best practices deal..
One interesting thing I heard at the MLK event in Memphis in 1998 was an expert comment that community doesn’t exist anymore in the way it meant in the 1960s. That’s because we all talk about community without ever questioning if in real world terms it actually exists. So here’s to online communities helping to bring the community ideal back to life!
This looks useful as a starting place for thinking about proprietary community platforms. Also check out Sift of course! There’s a bigger analysis of using open source software for online communities by IBM, undertaken in 2006, here. There’s also a fun-looking forum on the subject hosted by IBM, though perhaps a tad too techi for me.
My colleague Jeremiah Owyang has spent a whole lot of time in the last 4+ months looking at Community Software platforms from companies like Telligent Systems, Jive Software, Pluck, and Mzinga. The full report is available to Forrester clients or you can pay for it separately.
You can get a lot more detail on Jeremiah’s blog post. He’s going to be one busy boy helping companies make these choices, now that the Wave is out.
“Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks,” says David Armano, VP at marketing firm Critical Mass (5,582 Twitter followers). Excellent blog you’ve got there David.
Funny, I said pretty much the same thing about the value of small networks in discussions about what makes an online community work best last week. Along the lines of instead of trying to make one big community to use microblogging within a site to allow many mini-communities to flourish. Then allow cross-over. After all you’ve got (as with all community development) to start off from where people are ‘at’.
While web 2.0 senior positions often appear slanted towards technical expertise, I believe there’s a strong argument for clients to consider people who’s strengths are grounded in a deep understanding of how web 2.0, online communities and social networking works, as this is what brings in the business. IT skills come second to that.
IT people get the technology but making that pay in the web 2.0 world is a lot tougher, partly because traditionally IT culture is often ‘object-orientated’ rather than user-centred. Online community development requires the skills of IT management, but crucially the very best people possess a different mindset. This is because it involves working *with* customers at every level in a fully collaborative approach, so that the end web 2.0 product achieves the user-centric result aligned fully with business objectives. Matching means to ends to achieved the desired results requires this end-to-end understanding. And it is something I’ve worked hard to achieve myself.
Deloitte’s Service Study on value of online communities: Tribalization of business study.
Critique of value of communities: Companies learn online communities are often a waste, Deloitte doesn’t.
After the 90-9-1 ratio, another one for building online communities. Within any 30-day period, 10 percent of people who see an invitation will come, and 10 percent of those will post. Visibility is key.
