Participation:
Getting Communities to Work for You
Successful
social media solutions tap into the power of mass collaboration through user
participation. Many organizations miss the participation principle and look at
social media as another channel for corporate communications rather than an
opportunity for mass collaboration. Instead, Gartner recommends that business
leadership set active participation as a priority design goal, with everything
else revolving around getting the community to contribute valuable content.
Providing seed content to promote community contributions, and motivating
content contribution through social incentive mechanisms — such as social
status and gamification — are recommended to drive participation.
Collective:
People Must Swarm to the Effort
With social
media, participants "collect" around a unifying cause. People go to
the content to contribute their piece to the whole. However, the most
challenging effort with social media is to gain community adoption, and speed
is critical. Swarming is almost completely dependent on the organization’s
purpose for mass collaboration. Gartner advises organizations to pursue a
specific and well-defined purpose that is easily identifiable and meaningful to
the target audience. It’s important to capitalize on physical world events, as
well as online events, as part of a "tipping point plan" to rally
people and catalyze a community.
Transparency:
The Community Validates and Organizes Content
A social media
solution also provides transparency, in that participants are privy to one
another's participation. It is in this transparency that the community improves
content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates
emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement. Gartner recommends empowering the community with a robust capability to view, use and provide feedback on the contributions of others: with functionality such as thumbs up and thumbs down, tagging, voting, star ratings, and social commentary. Employing transparency with social status and gamification mechanisms, such as leader boards, virtual currencies and badges, also helps to create incentives and recognize valuable contributions.
Independence:
Provides the "Mass" in Mass Collaboration
Independence
delivers anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration, which means any
participant can contribute completely independent of any other. To aid
independence, Gartner advises organizations to consider the potential scale of
the social media solution, and examine the design for anything that may impede
anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration. They should also eliminate, or
at least minimize, any workflow, controls, administration and moderating, or other
gating mechanisms that can create bottlenecks and negatively impact scale.
Persistence:
Contributions Must Endure for Scaled Value
Organizations
should make it easy for participants to capture content using evolving
technologies, such as contextual information capture, to help collect more
interaction content. They should examine how much persistence is desired, how
much of the contribution to capture, how to manage it and how long to maintain
it, whilst identifying content that is critical to the purpose of the social
media effort.
Emergence:
Communities Self-Direct for Greater Productivity
The behaviors
in mass collaboration cannot be modeled, designed, optimized or controlled like
those in traditional systems. They emerge over time through the interactions of
community members. Emergence is what allows collaborative communities to come
up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
An organization
should observe social media behaviors, examine how productivity actually manifests
itself through community interactions, then guide the community or make other
organizational behavior adjustments to accommodate new ways of working.
More information on CRM and social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com
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