Community = CRM Community companies -- those that provide the applications and services for community programming, such as message boards, chat, email, personal home pages, customization, are moving hard into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and enterprise Knowledge Management (KM) area. A year ago PeopleLink, for instance, was a B2C instant messaging turnkey solution provider. Now, PeopleLink markets itself in the CRM space with a slate of community tools and integration with Siebel Systems. A mere six months ago, CoolBoard attended Basex's Communities2000 West conference touting itself as the "coolest" message board app out there and looking to pitch the iVillages and About.coms. Now, CoolBoard's youthful CEO Josh Duhl spends an entire presentation talking about knowledge management and customer relationship management. CoolBoard, too, is trying to move inside the enterprise.
It's Mundane, It's Expressive…But Is It a Business? Dan Brickland of Trellix -- the producer of personal home page authoring tools -- riffed on communication, noting that most communication happening online (and off) is "mundane." It's the "hey, how are you, how about pizza tonight" kind of thing, rather than targeted purchasing or stock checking. He mused about the hype surrounding m-commerce, wondering aloud whether people were really going to be making major purchases via mobile phones anytime soon. He's right. And his thoughts on how and why people communicate was interesting, and emphasized how each of us is at the center of our own narrative.
His presentation had a steam of consciousness quality that was refreshing but also danced around the issue of his own company. For Trellix, the question of the day is: What is the business justification right now for offering your audience personal home pages. Even if Brickland is right, that most communication is of the mundane kind, and even if home pages are a good medium for mundane expressions of self, that doesn't make them a good strategic programming options for most companies. Trellix has created an excellent web-page authoring tool, chosen by community leaders like Tripod. But Trellix is struggling with figuring out where the future of their business lies. ISPs? Enterprises? KM? Trellix has a longer road to go than most companies to transform its offering into something obviously valuable to businesses.
Innovation Comes from Weak Ties From Dottie Agger-Gupta of the Fielding Institute and recent Fielding graduate Yvette Burton, now at IBM Global Services, we heard about communities as complex adaptive systems and the importance of maximizing a company's social capital. Dottie and Yvette's presentation resonated with many ideas I have been reading about and discussing with my community colleagues.
First, communities are complex adaptive systems. For more on this heady topic, Dottie sends us to John Holland's work. But the key take-away is that communities are changing and adapting all the time. When you're doing strategic planning, remember that the community you're creating -- be it among customers or within the enterprise -- is not static but organic. Complex adaptive systems are unpredictable and nonlinear. The better you understand this, the better you can plan.
Also, remember that initial state matters. The initial infrastructure, leadership, rules, culture will greatly affect the community. As one conference participant said, once a community has matured it's like a giant elephant. You can try to change it's direction, but you're as likely to fail as to succeed. Better to get the elephant moving in the right direction when it's still a little calf.
And finally, the sentence I underlined and starred in my notes: Innovation comes from weak ties. Remember this. The idea here is that real innovative, out-of-the-box thinking is most apt to occur when people who do not normally work together bump into each other. For instance, when the customer support rep just happens to mention to the product manager that the call reps love to joke about all the dopes who think the CD-ROM drive is a coffee-cup holder. Hey! Maybe computers need coffee-cup holders! (Okay, so I didn't say it would be good innovation.) People who work on the same team or in close proximity tend to be mired in the same problems and perspectives. But when people with "weak ties" get together, everyone benefits from new perspectives and innovation can occur. Networked communities afford lots of opportunity for these weak ties and innovation.
John Lester of Massachusetts General Hospital runs a support community for neurology patients. He told me the story of how a group of patients with a particularly rare disease were talking on the message boards and discovered they all shared particularly odd, and seemingly unrelated, symptom. They took this discovery to a research neurologist who then made an important discovery about their disorder. The patients had, essentially, weak ties. They didn't have identical home or work environments or even healthcare experiences. The information they discovered was fresh and could only arise in the world of networked community, where people can bump into each other for a variety of reasons and have all sorts of mundane and profound conversations.
Families Are In A conference attendee noted that most presenters included anecdotes about wives, children or grandparents as part of their presentations. Whereas fifteen years ago, talking about family might have signaled weakness or lack of focus, now talking about family demonstrates a holistic approach to life and business.
Girl Talk I moderated a panel on Jonathan Spira's new concept, Communities of Reliance. The panelists were all female, except for one call-in participant. We dedicated most of our time to questions and answers. Afterward, a (male) conference attendee noted that during the day almost all questioners had been male, but for my panel many women raised their hands and got involved. Could it be that women still feel uncomfortable challenging men with questions?
Everyone Loves a Winner And another observation from my panel. The panelists came from GEN.com, iVillage, About.com, Participate (on the phone), and eBay. Who got the most questions? eBay's Mary Lou Song. Now it could be because Mary Lou is a good speaker with a lot of charm and energy. But one conference participant wryly noted, "Everyone loves a winner. A year ago the iVillage rep would have been getting a lot of questions and six months ago the About person would have. But right now, eBay is the last man standing."
