This month’s Online Community Expert interview is with Rawn Shah, Practice lead with the Social Software Adoption team in IBM. He has worked in various roles as a software developer, production manager, a journalist and community program manager in his career. His current focus is on understanding and measuring business value of social computing within the enterprise. As a writer and journalist he has written or contributed to over 280 articles and 7 books, including his latest Social Networking for Business (Wharton School Press, 2010) released this January and available through Amazon and other bookstores and retailers.
Q: What excites you most about your current community work?
Working across the IBM enterprise, we have a fairly extensive network of social ecosystems involving hundreds of thousands of members across many geographical regions. It allows me to investigate the differences in how people use social software and participate in online communities from different job roles, cultures, languages, and attitudes. Within the 400,000 or so employees in IBM, there are several thousand communities of various combinations of users. In addition, social software is receiving a great deal of interest and support from our executives and managers, which makes my job significantly easier. It opens the opportunities to work with smart people in the CIO Infrastructure and Innovation organizations, IBM Research, the many product groups, and social software developers and users worldwide. In my focus on metrics and business value, there is so much social computing going on that we have tons of data provides truly invaluable research and analysis opportunities. I certainly also have the freedom to work with brilliant minds outside the company, and wherever I go, the IBM brand helps to open the way. People want to know what we are thinking and doing and that makes me feel useful. I get the best of both worlds.
Q: How are the areas of internal collaboration (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0), Online Community and Social Media intersecting in your work?
While I work primarily on internal collaboration these day–in contrast to my prior job as Community Program Manager for our external developerWorks community–I brainstorm weekly with my peers focused on social media and marketing on topics ranging from metrics to tactics to governance. What this brings is different perspectives on how internal and external collaboration consider business value and what they count as metrics.
For example, internally we have a closed, albeit large, population of users where we know all the individuals involved. Therefore our internal metrics can be focused down to the activities of specific groups and populations of individuals–we avoid getting down to specific individuals to protect privacy. In other words, we can get data on how all people in, for example, sales roles globally or even in a specific region, use social software applications. Externally however, the population is much more mixed and rarely do we have data per specifically identified people. This leads us to very different types of behavioral information: internally we can categorize users by their level of participation (zero, low, medium, high, elite) in our social environments, and then examine the actions or distribution of these members across the geographies. With the external environment, social media monitoring tools and services from other companies allow us to take the pulse of activity along different topics. We then have to infer behavior based on the level of interest in topics across the Web.
That is not the only intersection of course. Very often we have IBMers who are active in social environments within our company as well as externally in many different levels or roles in the company. They do this on a personal or even a professional basis for their own reasons but the key value is that they help to communicate ideas back and forth. There is no hard communications firewall or who is allowed to speak but we do have official blogs and sources, and social computing guidelines for all other employees.
Q: Can you talk about the evolving role of online communities at IBM?
Online communities have existed inside IBM in many shapes and forms for decades. The oldest began as instruments to share wide-scale announcements across business units, as well as specific interest discussions in newsgroups. We went from a multitude separate systems at the department level towards standard online community and collaboration services from the CIO’s organization.
Today most online communities and social computing systems are available commonly across our global intranet. It has changed from being regional discussions that isolated who was talking to whom to global venues. Local discussions and communities still continue of course, but there are no artificial borders for the majority of our systems.
Our challenge today is more in trying to figure out ways of working across the differences in cultures and attitudes: job-role specific cultures, geographical or national cultures, and generational cultures. This is ongoing work to learn and understand and, in my view, likely something that will never end. This challenge is what keeps communities isolated, whether in the physical world or online.
In the past two years, we have looked substantially into how social computing fits into many different core business processes. Using social media and computing for marketing is becoming quite common in many businesses. IBM applies social computing into our innovation process both internal and with customers to discover new opportunities, business areas or products to focus on through social brainstorming methods. We use it in many different steps of the sales process to mine and manage opportunities, work on request for proposals from customers, present and confer on options for customers. IBM Research uses it to prepare and present at conferences, investigate ideas for patents, and collaborate across research teams. We also use it to identify and discover skills and expertise across our 400,000 employees across the dozens of countries in which IBMers are located across the world. Even our HR and Learning organizations are investigating how to shift from formal classroom and module-based education to the informal mechanisms of online communities.
The general feeling is that social computing is now finding its way into improving the core way we do business, from everyday interactions to complex decisions. While the software is there to help us manage how we interact, the core issue is still on learning how to improve how people interact with each other to productive ends.
Q. What is the most valuable online community or social media touchpoint for IBM that provides clear and compelling value to both your customer and IBM?
I’d say its IBM developerWorks, our community for developers, designers and software users. We have about 7 to 8 million registered members who take part in the community, and learn from IBM as well as each other. In particular, I use MydeveloperWorks as the home for my external blog as well as some of the communities in which I participate. This customized Lotus Connections environment integrates the learning environment of developerWorks with its community mechanisms to present and distribute ideas. Members from IBM, our partners, customers and even non-customers create blogs, forums and other communities as relevant to the many topics covered in developerWorks.
To IBM, it serves to support the many topics around the different technologies and products across the IBM software portfolio, as well as serve as a channel towards becoming product users. While this community is not filled with marketing messages, the marketing groups provide offerings to the members, and track these tactics, thereby integrating the online community alongside the other standard marketing processes in the company.
Q: What role do you feel online communities play for businesses, in the context of the current economic environment?
I think people across the world have now solidly felt the impact of adversities to the vast network of business factors as a result of globalization. Now more than ever we are interdependent of each other, and our successes depend on how well we work with our relationships and how we deliver to them. Online communities are a manifestation of these relationships, allowing us to feel the pulse of the community as it happens. The advantages that online environments offer relative to their offline counterpart is a wider scale of relationship networks, faster communications out to your network, and better tracking of your history of interactions. If you’re not participating in the online communities that matter to your business, then you become that person at a party who’s perennially asking “What did I miss?” This impacts your character and your brand both as an individual and per the organization you represent.
Regardless of the economic environment, online communities are also the trend towards a new approach to working with people both within and beyond the organization. Gary Hammel refers to this as Management 2.0 but that word, “management” itself is a legacy artifact. Rather than hierarchical reporting structures in most organizations, it is closer to partnerships with individuals both on your team and outside it. This trend towards partnering depends strongly on influencing opinions and shepherding ideas to get results; quite different than handing out assignments. It also applies to different models of conducting tasks or projects and knowing what approach works in each model. The structure of such institutional changes and business models are the core of my book Social Networking for Business (Wharton School Press, 2010).
Q: What advice would you have for a beginning community manager?
Community management is both a learnable skill and a personality trait. The best community managers (CMs) that I know have survived the long term are active listeners, strong relationship builders, and see themselves as a voice for the members. They are resourceful people and always looking to find ways how members can help others rather than trying to be gatekeepers or central clearinghouses of information. CMs generally “work” for the sponsor, whether officially or otherwise. They voice the ideas, feelings and pulse of the community to the sponsoring organization, but they are also not “willows” who bend entirely to the will of the community.
As a new CM it is important to understand not just how you are to serve people, but also what you need to produce or deliver and how to measure them. If these are countable in distinct ways, then you have a way to capture metrics. Otherwise, if these are qualitative ideas and results, then you have relevant stories that may be representative or repeated across the community. My suggestion when it comes to metrics is to look for repeatable ideas or artifacts relative to what your community is doing. They should be meaningful towards delivering the end business goals, even if they are only parts of the whole picture.
Again, Rawn’s book “Social Networking for Business” is available at Amazon and other booksellers.
