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Communities vs. networks vs. collaborative teams vs. Social networks

Several conversations in the last days have made me think that we need to progress on some definitions. The confusion between the terms might be troubling for a few.

Let me propose the following simple operation oriented set of definitions (as opposed to an academic one)

·         A directory is a facebook with more or less elements about the members, including in general their contact details. The most sophisticated directories describe the content of an individual’s experience and knowledge. LinkedIn or University alumni directories are the best examples. No specific activity is expected from a member (except to pay its membership or its usage fee, even the update of one's profile is voluntary).

·         A networking platform is a technical system allowing individuals to know that other individuals exist (like a directory) and proposing ways to contact them. It can be called “network” if there is no ambiguity (e.g. a telephone network, an alumni network, the Internet to a certain extent; LinkedIn). Such network has no activity in itself except as a connector and in some case as an aggregator of individuals according to certain criteria (like LinkedIn’ groups or Facebook’ networks and groups). No activity is expected from a member but anyone can propose things to others.

·         A social network is a group of people who are bound together through some social relationships. The bonds between some of them might be tight but in general the bonds between members are relatively loose. They more or less know each other directly or via one or two intermediaries. A social network has no strict boundaries and changes all the time as people join and leave. On the web, you belong to a social network when you are registered on a “social networking” platform. Older examples include the Lyons, the Rotary, etc.

·         A community is a group of individuals having some level of personal bonds with each other, for any reason that could range from friendship to business to family to residence to culture to religion, to politics, etc. A community can have all sorts of activities, from chatting to creating knowledge to organizing events to having fun etc. Communities are generally formed within networks. Therefore a professional usage of networks can accelerate the birth or growth of communities (it is particularly important within corporations). It requires, for being active, all the tools of the network, the collaborative team, the social network and the directory. Contributions from members are encouraged and are the very substance of the community. Without activity there is no community but not every member is required to be active on every activity and every time. A community allows members to be as active as they want on what they want. The “politics” of activity therefore is part of a community i.e. the fact that some members are more visible than other, that some appear as leaders, other as followers, others as neutral listeners. What distinguishes a community from a social network is the gate keeping:  the social obligation of its members for one another or the required closeness of ties implies that not everyone is welcome to join.

·         A community of practice is a community of professionals whose purpose is to create and share knowledge on a given practice common to all members (e.g. a community of cardiologists). Its objective is to foster incremental innovation. They are not necessarily “colleagues” nor “friends” and their relationship is purely on narrow professional matters.

·         A collaborative team has a purpose, producing an end product. It is a group of people defined by a final joint deliverable, which can be a methodology, a piece of software, or a complete knowledge repository. It may have an indefinite life or a finite life, the usual example is Wikipedia or Sourceforge. In many cases what corporations call Community of Practice are in reality collaborative teams expected to deliver regular updates and progress paper on specific issues. Contributions from members are expected along the lines of the purpose. Politics are not welcome and silent members are often rejected de facto if not de jure. In most cases members are “colleagues” and have no other relationship with each other than the project at stake.

Finally I do not approach “technologies” here because they might be very different for each situation. The most important difference might be actually in the content rather than in the name. A technology can provide a “directory” but the word might as well mean a simple address book or a sophisticated profile. The same is true for any feature and therefore does not deserves to be discussed within the same stream of discussion.

Conseil en management par les communautés

Un ami consultant, bon observateur du marché du conseil dans le domaine des communautés de pratiques et autres réseaux internes aux entreprises, me demandait ce matin:

"Mais quand le marché du conseil dans le domaine du Network Centric Management va t'il démarrer enfin? Les entreprises ont de l'argent, elles ont beaucoup de bénéfices à en tirer et elles hésitent, pourquoi?"

Impliqué tout comme lui dans ce marché j'ai plusieurs explications dont la combinaison explique probablement la lenteur effective du décollage de ce marché, et même si je reste persuadé que le marché va bientôt exploser, les raisons ci dessous vont perdurer quelque peu:

• Les entreprises ont de l'argent mais à l'intérieur de budgets spécifiques et s'occuper de communautés rentre mal dans la structure des budgets existants. Le même phénomène que l'on a pu observer aux début du web 1.0 pour trouver des budgets pour construire les premiers sites internets vitrines.
• Le ROI, retour sur investissement, reste trop conceptuel et peu mesurable concrètement pour beaucoup de clients. Les outils existent mais sont délicats à utiliser.
• Les directions IT sont très prudentes face à l'arrivée des outils collaboratifs car ils impliquent de nouvelles règles du jeu difficilement compatibles à leurs yeux avec les règles de sécurité les plus strictes.
• La plupart des consultants dans le domaine sont soit des consultants, souvent peu expérimentés en management complexe, proposant des logiciels qui "règleront tous les problèmes" et chaque homme d'expérience sait que c'est faux, ou des consultants en management qui manquent d'expérience dans les outils collaboratifs. La capacité à comprendre les besoins très spécifiques (et rarement exprimés clairement) des entreprises et à les traduire en un système opérationnel, des procédures, une organisation et un outil technologique n'est encore que très peu présente.

Je pense que le marché va décoller quand les responsables d'entreprises auront compris (dans chaque fonction) que les communautés et réseaux internes (et pour certains cas comme par exemple le recrutement, externes) leur apportent des bénéfices substantiels en termes de réduction des coûts et en termes d'amélioration de l'efficacité:

• Réduction des coûts par des effets comme l'impact des alumnis ou des communautés de référence sur le recrutement, celui des communautés d'utilisateurs sur la cocréation ou l'aide mutuelle entre utilisateurs, etc.
• Augmentation de l'efficacité par des effets comme les échanges internes de meilleures pratiques entre les silos de l'entreprise, des échanges émotionnels internes entre personnes partageant des expériences similaires (comme dans les universités d'entreprises), l'accélération de la documentation préalable à la prise de décisions et l'accélération des dites prises de décisions.

L'une des implications importantes, si ces quelques touches sont justes, est que les cabinets de consultants de demain dans ce domaine méleront une grande expérience de l'entreprise (donc surtout des séniors) une bonne connaissance des mouvements sociaux et des technologies (donc aussi des juniors).

Je reste convaincu que le marché du conseil en management par les communautés sera l'une des plus belles aventures des dix prochaines années car elle ne consiste en rien moins que la préparation de l'entreprise de demain.

marketing to avatars

Recently the Harvard Business Review published a jewel in the form of an article on “marketing to avatars”. Avatars refer mostly to those creatures, completely virtual, shaped by individuals on sites like secondlife.com. The reading of the article is both a must because it shows an other side of the virtual sociology, and a real pleasure because it is pleasantly written and extremely well argumented.

I think each of us will have soon avatars for living on the virtual world and even on the real one, and not only on games like Secondlife. Already many individuals use pseudos, the very first and simplistic way to hide one’s identity. But a pseudo is not an identity. It is a pseudo.

Already some individuals have developed avatars for practical purposes. A friend of mine, a male in his thirties, has three identities on Meetic, a  dating site: one as a girl in order to see the men and to have free access, one as a  seducer and one as himself for serious encounters. Each avatar has a number of characteristics, manages dialog with others, etc.

It is highly probable that in order to protect one’s real identity, and to let one’s psychological phantasm develop, individuals will create a number of avatars. I think that many will have avatars:

q       To play

q       To have immoral conduct (on the web or in the real world, the danger is well known in the field of child abuse)

q       To deal and buy

q       To have relations with some social network without wanting to be identified by Google immediately (e.g. most employees would not like their employer to see that they are gay or that they have “incorrect” political ideas)

But interestingly, all these avatars, are potential buyers of real goods. From music to books to equipment of all sorts. They might also be sellers.

Real world marketing to virtual world avatars is therefore an immediate potential. Probably it will be an interesting extension of the marketing concept famous in FMCGs where you sell two very different kinds of products to the same individual depending on the situation where he will use them (a classic case is beer consumed alone at home, with relatively glamour less brands, and beer consumed at home with friends with much more prestigious brands).

As an immediate implication in marketing, I wonder which bank will be the first to see the niche by which individuals will ask for additional credit cards with their avatar’s name (for the time being I have not yet seen this done as part of an advertising campaign) Only the bank will know about the links between identities. And one will in this way purchase on the Internet without to worry too much about identify theft or card number theft or just for worry to be too easily recognized and traced (a new type of Swiss bank secrecy will probably have to be developed). If it happens, one will just kill the litigious identity. One will even think of using an identity to have a mobile phone, to pay for highways, etc. all these places where one does not want to be traced but needs a card to be efficient and effective (in many cases cash will not be helpful anymore).

An interesting Pandora box is appearing here.

The Megacommunity Manifesto

Un document très instructif de Booz Allen Hamilton, que vous trouverez en pdf sur leur site.
En bref, l'idée défendue est que certains problèmes de société ou de civilisation ne pourront être réglés que si des hommes d'horizon différents se rapprochent pour en parler.
Plus loin même, les auteurs prétendent que les CEOs de demain devront avoir eu des carrières au carrefour de la politique, du business et des ONG.

Sans aucun doute!

Un excellent document et une thèse de grande qualité
bonne lecture

http://www.strategy-business.com/media/file/resilience-08-16-06.pdf