10 things for ‘10 part2

The other day I kicked off my 10 things for ‘10 learning list. The idea is to give myself a learning task list,  otherwise I just spend all of my time reading about football and formula1! I listed my first 5 items the other day, now on to the rest of the list.

The secret sauce of collaboration

Ok, I know there is no such thing. Fostering collaboration is what my job is all about. So reading what lots of smart people have to say about collaboration seems like a good idea. I have a general idea about this, my experience says find areas of common interest and common need and point people in the right direction… although it rarely works out like that. I’d probably like to develop a clearer framework for thinking about fostering organic collaboration and encouraging people who should collaborate but don’t know how.

Learning about learning

This one is another long termer. In part it is about revisiting a lot of the stuff I studied at uni, but also about diving deeper. I did my degree full time, while working full time, as you can imagine this load only allowed me to dive to a certain depth (think the toddler’s pool). This year I’d like to make it into the big pool, even if I only stay in the shallow end.

How to write

I used to love to write, so much so in my year 12 English assessments at high school I managed 2 A+’s and an A (I missed out on the plus by a couple of points and am still irritated by it!!). Back then I loved to write, but now I seem to find it more of a burden. I’m happy to write conversational stuff like this, as it is just guff that flows out of my brain, but I want to put a bit more effort into the process of writing to see if I can come up with some things that are more substantial.

GTD

I love getting things done. I hate it when I look back on a week and think ‘what did I do this week?’ While in reality I probably did quite a bit, it often doesn’t feel like it.  There are a bazzilion (this is accurate, I have counted them) GTD tools, systems and processes out there, over the years I have tried a few with varying levels of success. This makes it to the list to I can see if I can find ways to improve what I do and quiet that ‘you’ve not done enough this week’ voice.

Latte` Art

This is potentially very sad, but I think our Espresso machine is about my most favourite possession!  I’ve been working at home a lot over the past 6 months or so, it has it’s pros and cons, but without a doubt the best pro is I get ot make my coffee every morning!! I have got to the point where with it I reckon I can make a pretty mean latte` (I’m sure if you gave me one of those commercial jobs I would fail miserably!), but  I have never managed to make latte` art work. It makes it on to the list.

So there we have it, my #10thingsfor10 learning list. Over the next year or so I’ll blog about each of the topics and how I am going. Hopefully this will prove to be a fruitful experiance.

10 things for ‘10 – part 1

Hello and Welcome to 2010!!

I wonder if my posting will be a little more regular than it was in 2009? Time will tell. I’ve decided to kick of the year with a to-do list of sorts. I’m a big fan of lists, every Monday morning, I flick back through my diary and my emails and figure out what I want to get done during the week, inevitably the list is far longer than what I can hope to achieve but it helps to keep me on track, and moving forward.

In this style I’ve decided to write my 10 things to learn in 2010 list. Like my weekly task list I possibly wont achieve every item, but I am going to give it a red hot go. The is is made up of a mix of work interests and personal interests, some seriousish, and some just plain fun. So far I managed to come up with 5, I’ll post the second five this week, if anyone has any ideas about what should be in it let me know!!

On to the list (I’ve not numbered them as I think they all have equal importance.

Prince2

I’ve had ‘project management’ training on my Learning and Development schedule for 3 years now. I don’t harbour any desires to be a full time project manager, but there is plenty that can be taken from project management frameworks and applied to normal everyday work. Why Prince2 and not PMBOK? Simply our company is implementing a Prince2 framework… seems like as good a reason as any.

Design Thinking

This phrase has appeared all over the place in the last 12 months. I must admit for most of the last 12 months I dismissed it as yet another bullsh!t bingo buzz word that would disappear soon enough. Well it has not disappeared yet and from the little reading I have done it seems an interesting concept, more investigation and understanding is required.

Managing Complexity

I’m not even sure if that is the correct term. Simply put this is a phrase I have heard quite a bit around the traps and I don’t know much about it at all. It seems Dave Snowden is the place to start I saw this video he posted last year, so far that is all I know.

Taking decent photos

I’ve had a quiet desire to learn to take great photos for a few years now. Over Christmas, my lovely wife gave me a great book that covers a lot of the basics, you know all that stuff that we normally let the camera figure out, aperture, exposure, white balance etc. I want to understand how all of those things come together to create the final image.

Driving a race car

This seems a little odd, but isn’t as as out there as you think. I got hooked on iRacing.com over Christmas, it is an online racing simulator. If you listen to their marketing it is as about as real as you can get without either buying a race car or spending $190K on one of these. iRacing has an enormous amount of detail in the physics, tracks, cars and set up options. From what I have found in my first 3 weeks, it is bloody hard! You really do need to understand about how to drive a car fast, that is picking the right line through corners, breaking while maintaining momentum and getting on the power without inducing over/under steer. It is great (albeit very nerdy) fun but to do it well will require lots of learning – so it makes it to the list.

Oi You Lot! Collaborate Now!!

If only community building were so simple! I’ve spent the last couple of months working on the first two of what will hopefully be many online communities for our members. This has proven to be a bit of a  challenge for a few different reasons,  the one I want to talk about now is the concept of collaboration. For me and the other guys in the team at work, collaboration is what we do. We encounter a problem and we either turn around and say “hey waddaya reckon about this” or if we’re not in the same location, we jump onto the wiki or instant messenger (or lately google wave) and throw ideas around. If no one in the team is free we jump on twitter and say “hey tweeps waddaya reckon?”. Collaborating to get stuff done is intrinsic to what we do. Sure if we are on twitter we might not be quite as specific as we would be in the office but we still talk about what is going on with the twitterverse.

The thing is not everyone does it and (amazingly) not everyone wants to do it. For many people they don’t want to collaborate, they don’t want to participate they just want to be fed the info they need. I guess most people fall into this category but I admit to being caught off guard at how disinterested some people are at jumping on the collaboration bandwagon. So what the hell do you do about it? These are my thoughts… time will tell how effective they are.

Find people who ARE collaborators!

Well duh! I know this one is stating the bleeding obvious, but I reckon the best way to help people to learn how to be collaborators is to watch it happening around them. If the group we have at the moment is not loaded up with collaborative types then we should find some to help get the ball rolling.

Start with easy opportunities for collaboration

In one of the communities, my idea was that the community would collectively write a community charter. It didn’t happen. So I re-jigged the approach and organised a few phone hookups to discuss what they thought should go into the charter. During each session we also used a webinar to record notes, which helped to fuel the discussion. These sessions gave me with heaps of insight into the needs and wants of the community. I’ll take that away and turn it in to a draft of a charter, then ask the community to provide feedback. By adopting this approach the community members are commenting on something they have already contributed to which means it isn’t as scary, as hard or as time consuming as starting with a blank page.

Change the environment

This is kinda the same as the last point, if the members are not really jumping onto the online environment to collaborate, give them a chance to chat somewhere else. It could be like that example: a phone hook up, or even better if it is possible, organise an f2f meet up. Something as simple as catching up for a coffee can be enormously beneficial to encouraging collaboration.

Ok so that’s my thoughts. They are all pretty much following the conventional wisdom. So waddaya reckon?

 

Sitting at perfection station and watching the trains go by

I can be a picky bugger. I like things to work exactly how I planned and I get more than a little peeved if they don’t. That’s the main reason I’ve not posted anything on this blog in over two months. As always life takes over and the blog gets neglected, that’s cool everyone’s blog gets neglected sometimes. The thing is once I decide that I want to write something I feel the I need to change the world with one blog post.

Inevitably I’ll write many many drafts, which funnily enough wont change the world, so I don’t post them. Then I start getting pissed off about not coming up with anything ‘good enough’ and before I know it, two months of work, conversations and learning have drifted past with no reflection or analysis.

The thing is in the last two months I’ve worked on some cool things, encountered some big challenges and are now spending lots of time thinking about what the next step is. Surely stopping a few times along the way to record where it was going would have been a good idea.

So there it is, “release early, release often” sound familiar? I’ll try to apply that mantra to my blog… maybe I’ll actually learn something.

UPDATE: In true realease early release often fashion… I hit the publish button before I proof read this! It must be fate

Charting a course to community awesomeness!

I’m cheating on my blog posts again! But I wrote this for one of my recently kicked off online communities and thought it might be worth posting. What do you think? Am I on the right track? I will be very interested to see how the community members respond.

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I have been saying from the beginning of this project that one our key objectives for the community leadership group will be the development of a community charter. The charter will be vital to the community’s success. It is your (the community leaders) opportunity to agree on what you want this community to be. You will make this community into the thriving place that can create opportunities and provide support to yourself or other members. The thing is, this will only happen if you make it happen.

Some questions to think about:
• What is that you think this community stands for?
• Why is it here?
• When we promote it why would people want to join it?
• What can we bring to the community?
• What do you expect your fellow members to bring to the community?
• Most importantly what can you bring to the community?

Now you’ve have think about that let’s look at what this charter will actually look like. The great thing is that every community is unique so every charter will be unique, but I have a couple of thoughts to get us started. First I reckon we must keep it short; we don’t need anything that rambles on for pages and pages (like this post does!). I propose the following three sections.

Community Purpose

An example might be “to provide an environment for North Melbourne supporters to discus the horror of 2009 and how awesome 2010 will be”

The community will…

“Hear North supporters concerns about our list and provide constructive criticism for players that perhaps might seek new opportunities at another club next year”

“Help to generate opportunities for North supporters to car pool to games (and then donate the money to the club to set up a fund to lure Garry Ablett and Lance Franklin to Arden St)””

The community members will….

“Not be too harsh on players who have under performed”
“Will be supportive of other members and provide constructive advice”

Ok so clearly I have been a bit silly with my examples, but I hope you get the idea. Under each section we use bullet points to outline why the community exists, how the community will aim to support or provide value to its members and how the community’s members will provide value to the community.

So what is next?

There is a new tab at the top of the screen called Charter. It simply has the words “Community Purpose” on the page.

I would like as many of you as possible to click on edit on that page and add a bullet point describing what you believe the community’s purpose is.

Editing is anonymous so no one else will know what you have added. Please don’t remove anyone else’s points, just add to them. Don’t be afraid, all ideas are valid, the more ideas we have the better the result.

If you want to comment on this to tell me that the whole thing is a stupid idea, suggest another section of the charter or anything else feel free to comment under this post.

Next week we’ll work on the next section and keep refining over the coming weeks till the leadership group as a whole agree that the charter represents what we all believe this community is about.

Businesses on Twitter

I was asked this question in relation to our corporate twitter account on LinkedIn today

Mick – Great idea but do you have any examples of this being used in a business context before and the value it could bring?

My response got kinda long so I decided to post it here Enjoy!

There are hundreds of examples of businesses using twitter to achieve a whole range of objectives. The two most common objectives businesses set out to achieve via twitter are to raise their brand’s profile or provide proactive customer service. Proactive customer service, where an organisation ‘listens’ to the conversations happening on twitter for mentions of their brand and steps into help is becoming more and more common.

The best local example of proactive customer service using twitter is Telstra BigPond (twitter.com/bigpondteam). The team at BigPond search twitter for people talking about Telstra and BigPond products and offer to help.

Sometimes this is as simple as answering a question, other times they will ask the person with the problem to send their contact details via direct message (a private message between two twitter users) so it can be investigated further.

In many cases a twitter user will simply complain about a problem with their Telstra service to their friends and a BigPond representative will contact them directly and offer to help them solve it. In the US, Comcast (twitter.com/comcastcares) have been very successful with a similar system.

Many organisations are using twitter to distribute news and information to their customers; many AFL football teams are doing this very effectively. I particularly like twitter.com/northkangaroos… but I might be biased!! Other examples include twitter.com/SouthwestAir, twitter.com/jetblue, dell.com/twitter, twitter.com/gimmecoffee and twitter.com/5senses

Others conduct competitions to raise the profile of their brand. Two weeks ago I won an LCD TV after participating in a promotion run by Kogan Technologies (twitter.com/KoganTech), as a result I told my 460 followers all about my new Kogan TV.

These are all great examples of how businesses are using twitter for their brands, but there are infinitely more examples of individuals using twitter to find, share and discuss information relating to their work on twitter.

One example occurred this morning. I read your comment and thought to myself ‘hmm I can think of a couple of good examples I wonder what else is out there.’ I asked the question on twitter and was alerted to Southwest Air, Jet Blue, Gimme Coffee, Dell and Comcast.

Another example came up a couple of weeks ago during the Knowledge Management Australia conference. I was not able to get to Sydney to attend the conference but much of the content is directly relevant to my work at CPA Australia. Traditionally I would have just missed out, however using twitter I was able to search for the tag #KMAus09 and follow the key points that were being made at the conference. A tag is simply a word that users tweeting about a common topic include in their tweets. You can view the search results for #KMAus09 here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23KMaus09.

Following the conference on twitter was not as good as being there but it was better than not being there at all and provided a useful insight into the issues discussed.

Getting them talking

Part four in my ‘Getting an online community off the ground’ series. Today I’ll chat about Content.

Over the last week or so, I have blogged about finding great people to join your community, then having a chat with them to encourage them to join the community. In many ways getting them into the community is the easy bit; often people, if encouraged will sign up to an online community, the trick is getting them to come back a few times a week.

The people we have targeted to form the core of the community know their stuff and are eager to participate so we’d best make use of them! The community is all about the members so we can get them to do some of the planning. Ask them to debate the core purpose of the community, ask them to agree on the community’s rules of engagement. This can be confronting, at this point we are releasing some control, we’re no longer producing a product for the market to simply consume, we are letting the consumers shape the direction. While it is scary it will be helpful for a couple of reasons, firstly it will give those core people that you want to hang around something to talk about which is critical to keeping their attention. Secondly it will help them to develop a sense of ownership over the community. Finally it will give us an important insight into the needs of the people we are trying to engage.

It is great to hand the keys over to the community but  it is really important to stay involved in the discussion, this is our community and while we are working to help the community members we are not going to be able to meet the needs of everybody. Get involved in the conversation, talk about the motivations for creating the community and listen to the responses of the community members. If a suggestion can not be implemented, explain why and try to work with the community members to come up with an alternative approach. This is important work, it is laying the foundations that the community will be built upon so we need to get it right.

Throughout this process the most important thing we can do is listen, this will help us to understand the needs of the community, which will help us to identify the content that will bring people back. Understanding the content the community members are interested in will influence, the links we post, which discussion topics or members are featured and what events we run.

Next up – Events!

Why would I want to look at that?

Part three in my ‘Getting an online community off the ground’ series. Today I’ll chat about bringing people in the door. (Officially this is still linked to the last topic, People but in the interests of keeping things short I split them)

We have figured out why we want to build a community, we have figured out who the awesome people in the community will be, next on the agenda is to figure out  how we get them to join and then stay in the community.

My best bet is pick up the phone and call the people I really want to have involved. Richard Millgton recently blogged on this topic with some suggestions along the same lines, his key message was if  you are send out mass invites you are sending out spam.

I’d have to agree with him there, I tried using a  mail out last year to kick off a community and it is fair to say it didn’t go brilliantly.

My experiment was reasonably targeted, I sent an email to all delegates registered for selected sessions at one of our conferences. Each email went out to between 100 and 300 people, the email talked up the opportunities to discuss the topics covered by the session and ask questions of the presenter before or after the event.

Even though quite a few people responded to the email and logged in, they were greeted by an empty room, as a result it never got off the ground. Looking back I see that I would have been better to use this strategy once the community had been up and running for a while.

When the community is in it’s start up phase,  we need to find the people who we really want to have involved, these are people who fall into the second group described on Tuesday, they must be motivated and importantly they must have time to put into the community.  Find these people, give them a call and have a chat; explain the goals of the community and let them know that we value their insight. Repeat this process with the top 20 – 30 people and we’ll be on our way to getting our community off the ground.

Who are the ‘right’ kind of people?

Part two in my ‘Getting an online community off the ground’ series. Today I’ll look at People.

Yesterday I discussed identifying the purpose for an online community. This is a vital step that will prove to be extraordinarily helpful when it comes to finding the right people to get the community up and running.

But who are the right people?

On the surface the answer to this question is pretty simple, probably something like:

“I want to engage anyone who has an interest in X and Y”

Just like yesterday’s example of a description of a community’s purpose, this  answer is very broad, as a result it will not be much of a help when it comes to building a community, the answer we’ll want to come up with is something along the lines of

“I want to engage with a group of people with a passion for X and Y, people who are looking for others with a common interest to chat with.”

On first glance these two statements may appear to be similar, but there are important differences. The first statement describes the  group of people that are interested in a topic but are not necessarily committed to it and may or may not put any time into it. We would probably target this broader group once the community has been up and running for a while. Many of these people will become great community members but the strike rate will to be low.  If we take a quick look at the 90 – 9 – 1 rule that I blogged about last year,  only 1 out of every hundred site visitors will likely become active contributors, 9 will occasionally comment if something really grabs their attention and 90 will have a look around but keep to themselves.

The second statement describes the group that are the top 1%. These  people are already talking about the topic, they are highly engaged and are looking for new places to talk. If we can manage to bring a bunch of these people together and give them some interesting stuff to do or talk about, we’ll have gone a long way to getting the community up and running.

The next question is how we bring them together, I’ll discuss that in the my next post tomorrow!

People

Getting an online community off the ground

It has been very quiet here around here for the few couple of months, but I am back from a very nice break honeymooning with my lovely wife and am looking forward to getting some more thoughts written down!

This year  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing and talking about what we can do to encourage the development of great online communities. I thought I would kick things off again with some of my thoughts, these are the ideas that I’m in the process of trying to implement, I will blog about how they actually pan out over the next few months.

I have read about a bazillion articles and blog posts recently (my favourites have been, this great video from Patrick Lambe,  this article from Keith De La Rue, lots of bits and pieces from Richard Millington’s blog and some stuff from the Ant’s Eye View team)  the collective wisdom (mixed in with my own experiences) seems to suggest that there are a few ingredients that any community will need to succeed:

• Common Purpose
• People
• Content
• Events

Today I’ll chat about Common Purpose.

The first thing that needs to be considered when creating an online community, is why you  are doing it. No doubt there is a general objective that goes along the lines of ‘get people talking about our product’ or ‘reduce calls to our help desk’ or in my case, ‘help people to get better connected to other professionals to help them be more effective at their jobs.’

These are a great starting point but we need to drill deeper if we’re going to be successful. From what I have experienced and read in order for a community to really take off, we need to either tap into a person’s passion or provide a real tangible benefit.

If the community is designed to promote discussion around a product, for example running shoes, then there is a good chance the community will be driven by passion, it will be a place for runners to share their experiences of something they really care about. If the community is aiming to become a professional network, to improve effectiveness and increase access to information, it is quite possible if not likely that your audience are not going to be passionate about the topic but are simply looking to make their job easier.

This changes how we go about attracting people, the community must not just provide community members with a space to talk about something they love, it must prove to be invaluable. It must provide information and people that community members can not easily get to anywhere else. It must be so full of smart people sharing insight and resources that it becomes a central work tool. If it is anything less it will be relegated to the ‘I should get around to looking at that’ pile, otherwise known as a ‘nice to have’.

That is a big ask, particularly if you are looking to build a community around a very broad topic.  I’ll use the example of a community for Taxation professionals to talk about how broad is not necessarily good. Our objective could be:

“To help Taxation professionals get better connected to other professionals to provide easier access to the knowledge and experience of others”

This seems pretty clear, lets get people who work in tax to talk to each other. There are loads of people who work in tax so it should be easy to attract enough of them to create interesting discussion that results in valuable insight being shared…right?

If we look a little deeper the water becomes quite muddied. Tax is a very broad area, even at a high level personal tax and business tax are very different areas, if we delve into either of those we’ll will see many more disparate topics. This presents a challenge for community builders as what is interesting and valuable to a personal tax professional is probably of little interest to a business tax professional.

The lesson here, is take the topic area and drill down. Choose a specific niche and identify a need that the community will address. Aim to have an objective that is as specific as possible:

“To help personal income tax professionals, connect and discuss recent changes to federal tax legislation” – (I don’t know anything about tax so that might not make any sense, but you get the drift!)

This level of detail will set the expectations from the beginning, it will help with recruitment of the right people and will help to ensure that discussions do in fact prove to be useful and valuable.

Next  – Recruiting the right people.