Voice of Community

Exclusivity and inclusion: The yin and yang of community?

I saw the Social Network over the weekend, the story of the start of Facebook starring Jesse Eisenberg (no relation) playing Mark Zuckerberg the co-founder of Facebook,  and interestingly Justin Timberlake (he was pretty good) as the founder of Napster and the force behind the move to California . It was very different to what I had expected and definitely not a feel-good bio pic. Also, if the story is to be believed, Facebook was in large part created as the adolescent retaliation of an embittered undergrad nerd rejected by Phoenix, a privileged Harvard WASP jock fraternity. It might go some way to explaining a lot of the mean-spirited outing-like functionality of Facebook – it was its start in life.

Facebook was originally a social networking infrastructures created  solely for undergrads of Harvard University: you had to have an hu.edu address to be able to access the site. It was developed for the members of one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world and reveled in its exclusivity. Later it was released to other universities on a university-by-university basis until it went global, and the rest is history.

Although its basis was more benign and altruistic, the trajectory of TED has followed a similar exclusive trajectory of top world cognoscenti and politicos , and now who does not want to go to the TED event and rub shoulders with Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and a host of brilliant absent-minded professors.   Morsels are doled out to the rest of us in the form of videos that allow us onlookers to gaze through electronic windows into the salons of th intelligentsia.  Mini TEDx events around the world also enable the rest of us to pretend that we’re going to TED, even down to a repetition of parochial restrictions on videos and attendance at the local level.

This paradox of exclusivity and inclusion lies at the very heart of community. They are the yin and yang of community. One of the key identifiers of a sense of community is the definition of boundaries: who is in and who is not, the feeling that I’m in and just as important, that you’re out. The determinants of “in” similar to many tribes can include many attributes such as clothes, looks, age, mannerisms, dialect, jargon, political views, interests, and so on. The opposite tension in community is that of inclusion – the ability to reach and link to anybody, anytime, anywhere, on the planet; the ability to cross any physical, cultural, political, and social boundary. What use is a social network that reaches few people? Our communities are often measured in such raw numbers: size of network, number of members, number of so-called “friends,” hits, eyeballs, impressions. Maybe it’s time to shift our focus to the more qualitative measures for community, and move our emphasis to aspects such the closeness and cohesion of community rather than the numbers in it.
 

Community and walled gardens

There has been renewed interest in the issue of community “walled gardens” - corporate owned and managed customer community web sites.  I was thinking about this issue on a recent trip to Brazil. The Autodesk Brazil Community has approximately 4,000 registered members - not too bad considering the short amount of time that it has been in existence. But then I checked on Orkut, the Google-run social networking site which is very popular in Brazil, and it has several Autodesk product-based groups including an AutoCAD group. The AutoCAD group has over 30,000 members. 

Similarly in CIS/Russia, the Autodesk CIS/Russia Community has about 4,000 registered members. But checking out some of the Russian-language 3rd-party Autodesk product-based community sites, there are many with tens of thousands of  members.

In China, there are 3rd-party forums with over 750,000 member strong Autodesk product-based communities. Yes, that’s not a typo – 750,000 people asking questions and talking about Autodesk products. Take a look at JXCAD.

Try searching on Yahoo Groups: the term “Autodesk” brings up 190 groups; “AutoCAD” reveals 985 groups; “Revit” displays 73 groups.

Obviously it would make no sense to try and get these customers and potential customers to abandon their loyalties and adopt the “official” corporate sites. Why would any customer do that? But what should companies do in relation to these sites that are totally out of corporate control?  Are walled gardens dead? Should “official” community sites die and wither away?

I don’t think so, not when you look at the total inter-connected community ecosystem.

There will be some discussions that community members feel they can have unfettered only in a 3rd-party or grass-roots community. There will be times when corporate sites will be there to provide content that only the corporation can provide in a setting that it feels is more appropriate for the corporation .Also,  I think that customers would think it strange if a company had no garden at all where they could play. The garden can be walled but there can and should be plenty of gates both into and out of the garden, and plenty of parties to go to whether hosted in the walled garden or hosted elsewhere by others. For companies, in community just as in life, the important thing is that you show up. It should not matter where. 

I’d be interested in hearing how other people interact with groups, forums, and other forms of community outside their corporate community walled garden. What have been the approaches, the challenges, the successes, and the failures?

AA and Community: What can we learn?

You might be asking yourselves, what on earth does Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), have to do with community. What does it have to do with Autodesk user groups and user communities? And I might have had the same opinion but on a plane a few weeks ago, I was reading an article in Wired Magazine about the history of AA (The Secret of AA, Brendan I. Koerner. Wired Magazine, July 2010) which made me think again.

One of the main themes of the article is that although AA and many of the 12-step programs have been very successful, nobody really knows why or how they actually work. One of the main reasons that , despite its longevity, because the participants in AA by definition are “anonymous” then it’s been very difficult to do any large-scale long-term studies. However, there is a growing feeling that the program might be working because of something very fundamental: the power of the group.

“Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups rather than treat them individually.” The article points to a physician, Joseph Pratt, who back in 1905 organized weekly meetings of patients suffering from tuberculosis. The meetings were designed to teach his patients better health habits, but he noticed that by sharing their stories, they were also very effective at lifting each other’s “emotional spirits”. Koerner also points to a  pair of Stanford researchers who reviewed over 200 articles on group therapy who concluded that group therapy works so well because “members find the group to be a compelling emotional experience; they develop close bonds with the other members and are deeply influenced by their acceptance and feedback.” Is this starting to feel familiar?

Another study showed that in treating post-traumatic stress order (PTSD) over 80% of those in group therapy stopped displaying signs of PTSD as opposed to 31% who had one-on-one treatment. AA members who more commit to the group also do better. Studies at the University of Mexico show that AA members who are involved in activities like becoming a sponsor or mentor to other members are more likely to stay dry than people that just attend meetings. This activity and engagement in the group should also resonate with all of us involved in community.

The article goes on to point out that addiction specialists are often concerned that medical professionals are not involved in AA and are not permitted at meetings. However, “there is evidence that this may actually help foster a sense of intimacy between members since the fundamental AA relationship is between fellow alcoholics rather than between alcoholics and a the therapist.”  Similarly in community, we know that the majority of purchasing decisions are made on the basis of recommendations from friends and peers and not from so-called experts.

AA clearly has a lot to teach us about community. We might also be able to give something back and contribute to the body of knowledge through our experience and expertise in fostering engagement, deepening relationships, the wisdom of crowds, and the power of the peer.  I wonder what other collections of individuals exhibit the power of the group?

Second life or last legs

Last week I read that Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life,  laid off 30 per cent of its staff and replaced its CEO. Now I’m not sure how many of you have an account or have even experienced Second Life but I’ve personally never been able to establish much meaningful one-on-one contact there (unless you really think being assailed by half- or fully-naked people sporting studded dog collars meaningful) let alone community.
 
I used to hang around in the Autodesk virtual AU pavilion for many hours without as much as a teleported blip appearing in the space. Not surprisingly, Autodesk stopped supporting this virtual infrastructure a while back. Judging by the Linden Lab announcement, other companies are also voting themselves off the island.

It’s an interesting concept and it has quite a lot of advantages: you can become younger and thinner and infinitely cooler depending on your avatar.

 
 
And depending on how many Linden virtual guilders you want to expend real dollars on, you can also become much hipper. As you can see from my avatar’s unkempt appearance, I settled for some cheap stone-washed baggies and effected a pre-war Berlin, modish, intelligentsia black t-shirt.  (As an early adopter many moons ago, I had to accept a system-chosen last name.)

At first blush, this environment would seem a shoe-in success for a community environment: it definitely has the cool factor; avatars afford some indication of character and interest while not having to reveal all; it continues the metaphor of a physical meeting place; it allows voice as well as IM communication; as well as all the content sharing features of any online community site; it is an immersive and engaging 3D environment; everything we were asking for.

So why has it not been a runaway success? Why is not the defacto environment social interaction?

My own feeling is that the environment was and still is not ready for prime time. For one thing, it’s still too clunky to move around in:  I still find myself sailing over territories and have to slowly treck back to where I was trying to get to, or I find myself on the wrong side of a wall, and so on. Document/video/PPT  sharing was not that easy. Threaded conversations and multiple threaded conversations were not that easy to have. It was not possible to post and have people comment and then return to comment on the comments. No wonder that Facebook is the de factor environment for online social interaction.

What has been your experience in this or similar environment? Did you or do you enjoy your time  in Second Life?

Unconferences: a Tool for Community

Last week, I attended the Forum One Online Community Unconference  in Mountain View, California, a gathering of online community practitioners - managers, developers, business people, and tool providers, - to discuss experiences and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.

There were about 150 people in 60 sessions, and the format was unconference, a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants themselves on the day, rather than by the organizers in advance. For those who don’t know what an unconference is, the process worked like this:

1. At the beginning, we all sat in concentric circles.
2. The facilitator briefly re-stated the theme of the gathering and the process we would follow.
3. Participants briefly introduced themselves – name, location, company and a “tag line” (a few words or a phrase that describing themselves – some were very  humorous)
4. The facilitator invited attendees to identify any issue or opportunity related to the theme and reminded those that wanted to raise a topic of their responsibilities:
• The person who posts the session, was expected to have a passion for the topic
• They must show up and start the session.
• They must also make sure that a writer is appointed and a report of the discussion is done.
5. Then, those attendees willing to raise a topic
a. Stood up and announced their topic to the group
b. Came to the center of the circle
c. Wrote the topic on a sheet of paper (there was a whole bunch of paper and pens in the middle of the circle)

 
  
d. Posted the topic on the wall, choosing a time and a place for discussion.
 
The wall became the agenda for the meeting. Some duplicate or very similar topics were combined by the participants. Time slots and rooms were negotiated.

 
 
 When all the topics had been posted, the sessions started and everyone went off to attend those individual sessions in the allotted rooms and times.

The sessions lasted about 45 minutes to an hour. If you were not getting anything out of a session, you could (and several people did) switch to another one.  All discussion reports are to be compiled in one report  and sent to participants sometime after the event.

We followed the principles of  Open Space Technology, developed  by Harrison Owen. If you want to know more, check out the Open Space Technology definition on Wikipedia. 

The whole process worked very well and I think that it’s an ideal vehicle for user group and community discussion. Rather than the organizers decide on the agenda, the membership decides. It’s you who gets to set the agenda, take the session or meeting in the direction you want, and move on if you’re not getting your needs met. Have others had success with unconferences or have you run into problems? I love them but have they in fact, NOT met your needs?

Autodesk Discussion Groups Revamped

The technology behind the Autodesk Discussion Groups has been significantly upgraded. The discussions are now hosted on the Lithium platform. The result is a significant improvement to posting, replying, navigation, search, and other forum features.
  
Although the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is no longer supported, the update include a simple, intuitive interface to post questions and reply, with new bookmark and e-mail notification features to track favorite posts.

There is also a more powerful search tool Autodesk Discussion Groups that gives you suggestions leading you to similar questions that have been posted and answered previously.

 

There are multiple forums based on individual products, as well as forums based on general and industry areas. In addition there are international, language-based forums currently in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Russian.  You will also see different icons indicating new topics, hot topics, Autodesk employee participants, and who the moderators and administrators are.

Check out the new Autodesk Discussion Groups. Ask a question and if you see something that you know about, post an answer yourself and add to the posts of your professional peers. Establish yourself as the expert!

This is an exciting change, and these forums will continue to get better as more features are rolled out.  The Autodesk Discussion Groups are the heart of Autodesk community activity and whether posting questions or providing answers, you can only benefit by participating.
http://forums.autodesk.com/ 

New Look AutoCAD Exchange and AutoCAD Plant Exchange Communities

AutoCAD Exchange
Check out the revamped AutoCAD Exchange, the online Autodesk destination for AutoCAD family product users to learn, share and network.  You can showcase your work, communicate with peers, share tips, learn from others, and ask questions of the experts.

 
 
AutoCAD Plant Exchange
Check out the new AutoCAD Plant Exchange  community, a single information hub that offers learning and productivity tools, news, discussion forums, blog posts, expert tips, and more for Autodesk Plant products and solutions.

A Practical Guide to AutoCAD Map 3D 2011

Just taking a little time out here to shamelessly promote the latest publication on AutoCAD Map 3D from Alex Penney and myself, Ray Eisenberg: A Practical Guide to AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011.

This training course in AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011 focuses on what you need to effectively use AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011 in your daily GIS and geospatial tasks. Each lesson contains, mapping concepts, principles, and exercises to provide you with the background and foundation of knowledge that you need to effectively apply AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011 features directly to your job tasks. You work through real world exercises to reinforce your understanding and provide you with practice on common tasks that other professionals are performing with AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011 in the workplace every day."

A Practical Guide to AutoCAD® Map 3D 2011 is available from Digital Node.

Lithium Users Conference

I attended the Lithium Users Conference the other week. Lithium  is a Social CRM community platform vendor with a very strong community offering especially with regard to their online discussion forums and recognition/reputation system.

Lithium-Powered Communities
If you want to see Lithium in action, check out one of the following company communities based on Lithium:
• Betfair 
• Paypal 
• Verizon 
• Best Buy
• T-Mobile 
• HP support forums
Lithium is growing rapidly and has doubled its staff over the last 12 months. Over and above the features and new functionality of coming versions of the platform like closer integration with Facebook, increased data reporting capabilities, and more self-service capabilities, and their acquisition of ScoutLabs (a social media monitoring and analytics application), some interesting general community and social media themes came out of the conference.

Distributed Integrated Networks
We’re no longer talking about single or multiple communities, but distributed networks of intermingled social and professional relationships. Also, community is increasingly being viewed not as a separate “thing”, but an integrated and integral part of the way companies work in Support, Product Management, PR, Legal, Sales, and so on.
Corporate community sites are changing from destinations to portals, linking to the whole panoply of social media platforms: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and so on – wherever the conversations are happening.

Community Heroes
Community is a land of heroics. “We never sleep.” I’m sure that this resonates with all community managers, and points to the need to automate a lot of our manual processes.

Social Everything
We went through the e-everything stage (e-Learning), and the i-everything stage (iPhone, iPad). Now we’re into the social-everything stage, including Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management).  We’re not going through a business revolution; we’re going through a social revolution. 74% of all people on the Internet are on a social network.  Companies are going from managing customers to engaging with customers, who themselves are engaging with each other, and the customer not the company “owns” the conversation. Customers want to talk to each other, but equally they want to talk to the company, and get involved with companies whose products they care about. The consumer-producer line is becoming blurred; consumers are becoming co-creators of products; and users and producers are encouraging each other in the process.

Differences in User Contributions
Regarding the 1-9-90 view of community, the goal should be not to try and move the inactive 90% into a more active role, but to grow the size of the pie overall. (Sean O’Driscoll of Ants Eye View ) Community in many ways is simply a matter of numbers.
Not all advocates or super users are created the same or respond to the same incentives. Using the Groundswell  definitions of types of community participants:
• Connectors want “access” to teams and to other MVPs
• Critics want you to “listen and respond”
• Creators want status, rewards, and points.
• Collectors want tools to publish, share, and store.
There is a need to respond to different kinds of community activities – post, tag, write, comment, solve problems – with different kinds of incentives. With regard to super-users, ask not “how super are you?” but “how are you super?” and reward those different types of behavior appropriately.

Marketing vs. Support
Interesting quote on the difference in goals between these two organizations:
• Marketing is all about getting people to talk to you
• Support is all about getting people not to talk to you

Successful Community-oriented Companies
“To be social outside successfully, companies need to be social inside,” meaning that companies should practice using collaborative tools such as wikis and the like internally, before they ask customers to do the same.  It’s hard to have a successful external social strategy with no internal social practices.
User-Generated Content
T-Mobile talked about their efforts to expand their knowledge base with content provided by end-users. They found that:
• Customers more likely to post in forums than directly into the knowledge base (KB)
• Writing an article for the KB was too much like work and not many contributions made.
• Customers preferred to comment on content rather than write it from scratch.
T-Mobile started to mine the forums, get people to “Nominate” a post for inclusion in the KB. T-Mobile would then clean up the content, tag it and label it, and then move it to the KB. They used a “light hand” in editing in order to ensure that the customer’s language and customer’s voice continued to be heard.

Importance of Mobile
How could we go through a conference without mentioning the growing importance of mobile to community?  Mobile means anytime, anywhere – your “friends” are now in your pocket, they’re always with you. You can always be connected and pinged “on the run.”  For many people in the world, a mobile phone is their first and only ongoing internet experience.

Conference Evening Reception at the Disney Museum
The reception on the second evening at the conference was held at the new Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, San Francisco. Three historic buildings constructed around the 1900’s have been converted to house the new museum. Well worth visiting! To see highlights of the collection and tour the galleries, click here http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/index.html

Additional Resources
The Lithium web site is a great source for community best practices. Check out their white papers at http://www.lithium.com/resources/

Web 2.0 Expo

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I went to the Web 2.0 Expo last week in San Francisco. It was pretty small this year with not too many exhibitors - none of the big community vendors were there - no Jive, Mzinga, Hive, or Lithium.
 
If I could characterize the event in one word, I would have to misquote Benjamin’s uncle at his graduation party in the opening scenes of “The Graduate” – “One word, platform.” "- Twitter as a platform, FaceBook as a platform, you name it as a platform. They are all vying to be the place we visit, play, and work.  Even Jane Cohen of TED in Tuesday's afternoon keynote described TED going from being a "conference" to being a "platform" for ideas.
 
Some interesting new applications from the Future Social Experience Lab at Microsott worth checking out are:
• Bing Twtter www.bing.com\twitter - displaying topics showing who is saying what about what
• Docs.com - http://docs.com - enables you to author, share, edit documents and Powerpoints on Facebook
• Spindex - http://spindex.me - gives you your own social profile index, that is, content is retrieved in searches based on  what you think is interesting and what your friends think is interesting
 
Another theme that emerged was the growing importance of gestures and lightweight interactions online - more thumbs up/thumbs down, and "I like this" and "like" type functionality integrated into more and more applications- meaning that you don't have to engage formally and type a or post a comment or write and send an email - just a simple gesture to stay in touch, or acknowledge the person, thus coming closer to those casual "glances" or "nods" that you get in real life.
 
I-Pads were everywhere - they looked great and were the envy of all the iPhone owners. iPhones are so 2009! Talking of iPads, there was an amazing demo by Ge Wang (Stanford Professor of Music), playing the iPhone like a flute, and playing the piano on an i-Pad, and playing both together with others on the web in different parts of the world. Check it out at http://ocarina.smule.com/  .

I’m off to a Lithium Users Conference at the end of this week. Lithium is a leading community platform provider. Really looking forward to it and will report back at the end of the week.