September 01, 2007
Sharp Responses to Flat Communities
I’ve often written here about the concept of emergence, or the appearance of high-level patterns and structure as the result of many unplanned and undirected low-level activities. I believe that emergence is central in explaining the power, novelty, and potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0; it’s what keeps large repositories of digital content from becoming hard to navigate, analyze, and use. Emergence underpins Google’s PageRank search algorithm, tag clouds, prices in prediction markets, and other useful digital resources.
But is it essential? Can an online platform be valuable to its members even if it doesn’t clearly display emergence? By the definition I proposed:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia’s definition).
Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.
Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data
The use of platforms that don’t include mechanisms for emergence such as links and tags doesn’t fully qualify as Enterprise 2.0.
This might be too harsh. For one thing, it excludes a lot of popular online resources such as bulletin boards, discussion groups, Q&A forums, and the comments section of blogs and other websites. These are all platforms on which a community builds up content over time. Such platforms fail a standard test of emergence because their content is essentially undifferentiated— there aren’t obvious ways for the cream to rise to the top. Some try to differentiate content by asking users to rate contributions, or contributors (Amazon does both of these). But for the most part these are flat communities.
Does this mean they’re not valuable? Absolutely not. When I have a technical question about a piece of gear that’s on the fritz, or when I’m data gathering about a prospective purchase I almost always find myself going through the content of a flat community on the Web. And I almost always find what I’m looking for, usually just by perusing what’s already there (My browser’s word search facility helps a great deal with this, even though it’s not particularly sophisticated.). I’ve rarely needed to ask a question myself; someone’s asked it before me. Flat communities are still very useful communities.
As Tom Davenport has pointed out, they’re not really new. The Usenet discussion system, for example, originated in 1979 and lots of websites had community features well before we started adding ‘2.0’ to everything.
So is there anything new or interesting to say about flat online communities? They seem like no-brainers for companies who are interested in better, deeper, and more frequent interactions with their employees, customers, suppliers, and other partners (and doesn’t this mean all companies?). The hosts and members of these communities will receive value even if full-fledged emergence doesn’t happen. They’re technically trivial to set up. And companies like Cisco have been saying for a while now how much customers love them, and how much money, time, and frustration they save.
And yet they’re the rule, rather than the exception. I was talking a little while back with some people at a very large logistics company that was thinking about how to use IT to help it stay on top of the tangle of requirements dictating what documentation is required to ship from country A to country B. These requirements can be different for each country pair, and are constantly in flux. The company itself struggled to stay on top of them, and they were acutely aware that their customers were frequently bewildered.
I asked them if their website, which was excellent and user-friendly in many ways, had a community section similar to Cisco’s where customers could contribute their knowledge and ask and answer questions. They replied that it had nothing of the sort. I asked them why not, and got back an answer that I interpreted as "some people pretty high up in the company think that would be a bad idea."
I mentally filed this as an example of particularly unenlightened leadership. I learned better this past summer when I taught in HBS’s Delivering Information Services executive education program. We were discussing the benefits of Enterprise 2.0, and one of the participants described the simple, flat community his company had established on their website earlier in the year. He talked about how much it had reduced the cost to serve customers, and how helpful they were to each other (the community was only open to current customers.).
I asked whether anyone had used the platform to badmouth the company, and he replied that there had been one instance of sharply-worded criticism. He said, however, that he was happy to learn about this displeasure sooner rather than later, and that it hadn’t poisoned the community in any way.
I then thought to ask "Why did you only set up this community within the past year? I imagine you’ve had a website for some time now— why wasn’t this community in place a long time ago?"
"Well," he replied, "our previous leadership wasn’t really comfortable with the idea. We got a new CEO a year ago, and he led the effort to build this community. We got a lot of resistance from some people, particularly our legal counsel, but our CEO really wanted to do it. We put disclaimers at the top of every page so people know that the content does not come from us, and we haven’t gotten into any trouble yet."
I then asked the group of about 80 participants (from a huge range of organizations— big and small, domestic and international, public and private sector) "How many of us work in organizations that are like this gentleman’s used to be-- resistant or hostile to the idea of hosting a customer community?" About two thirds of the people raised their hands; many did so emphatically.
As I’ve stressed before, an E2.0 philosophy of "If we build it, they will come" is unlikely to succeed. But a philosophy that’s hostile to building it in the first place really has no chance. I’m honestly not sure where this hostility comes from— if it’s rooted in concrete fears of a lawsuit, more abstract fears of a loss of control, or something else.
If you have any insight on this, please share it with us. Why are online communities so often so frightening? And when, if ever, are the fears warranted? I have so far seen virtually no evidence, and heard no stories, that corporate digital communities of practice blow up in the faces of those who host them. Am I missing something?
The fear that keeps the people I’ve talked with from building communities is their belief that the worst will happen absent their control. One who defines his/her role as maintaining control is reluctant to admit that role is not needed. Control is justified by distrust of people: employees, customers, and unknown others.
While most people live up to (or down to) expectations, control freaks inevitably imagine the worst. “If we give our people open connections to the net, they will spend hours watching porn or playing fantasy football.”
Andy, the logical argument you present, that horror stories about communities are extremely rare, doesn’t sink in if the resistance is emotional. A fellow who once worked for me in the investment banking business called this the “Pencil Theory.” He meant that if he backed something new and it blew up, he’d be the fall guy, and soon he’d end up selling pencils outside the Wall Street subway stop.
jay
What one manager perceives as a major crisis is nothing but a minor wrinkle to another. A nonchalant reaction will also not compound any “problems”.
I suspect that managers open-minded enough to include corporate digital communities of practice are more likely to be cool-blooded when things start to heat up. More likely to view it as a simmer than dangerous boiling over.
Several comments.
First, as to the fear that community = loss of control, I think that fear is overrated. Moderators retain the right to moderate. They can choose to review any inputs before posting or change them after the fact. In additon, there are examples of companies that have made a virtue out of limiting community access to registered customers and making that registration difficult for outsiders to come by. The virtue comes through a shared sense that the customers don’t want the “noise” of non-customers to intrude on their experience. In exchange, they get an environment where candor can be encouraged to everyone’s benefit.
Second, even flat communities when properly enabled can yield emergent behavior. So long as I can include microstructure (e.g. links) and so long as the flat community is searchable by the same tool that searches the emergent communities, we can still contribute emergent behavior from flat communities.
One of the great difficulties is doing all of this for internal audiences discussing things that absolutely cannot be in the open. I’ve written more about this on my blog as well as more about what the minimum requirements are to foster emergence:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/why-cant-i-search-my-enterprise-data-as-well-as-google-searches-the-internet-enterprise-page-rank/
It’s not just opening up to customers, it’s also opening up to employees. I suspect that those who freeze up with respect to creating an open forum for customers are the same as those who fixate on formal hierarchies and are unwilling to open up a forum for employees that might further empower the informal networks.
You are right Kelly. I must agree.
An interesting thread, and now a question related to the point itself as it pertains to HBS.
Why does HBS insist on pre-screening the comment posts to these here blogs before they are made available to the public?
There is a disclaimer at the top of the page already ... (HBS Faculty Blogs are a forum for presenting and encouraging discussion of ideas and activities related to research, course development, and teaching conducted under the auspices of Harvard Business School. All opinions expressed are those of the faculty owner of the blog and respondents, not of the School.) ... so is this thread, and thus the practice of HBS itself not excerbating your point Andrew?
Hi Andrew. I wonder if this story from Australia throws any light on the subject? A software company is taking legal action against the moderators of a forum for negative comment about their products.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/2clix_sues_site_over_critical_comments/
For many companies, E2.0 communities are simply the imaginary ‘monster under the bed’. Prior to ever seeing the light of day, many executives assume that communities will cause all manner of harm including productivity loss, lawsuits, and (worst of all) workers using it as a platform to bad mouth their employer (sadly, in the case of airlines and other highly unionized environments, this concern is probably not so imaginary… especially as contract renegotiation approaches). We’ve all seen examples of the latter happening anyway, through forums such as Yahoo! Finance message boards for public companies.
As a result, however, companies miss such a wonderful opportunity to find out who their employees are, their interests, needs, concerns, etc. Employee surveys are a good tool for certain quantitative feedback but, for qualitative intelligence, communities will soon be viewed as essential.
Hi Andrew,
As someone who has been evangelising the use/testing of Social Software tools at a big financial institution (120.000 people), I must say I really agree on the former commenters in terms of the reasons not being willing to experiment with external or internal communities. However, next to fear there are also more rational arguments.
To give you an interesting case. A bank department introduces a very important and big system of dealing with a credit application from start to finish. It is a multi-year project (5-10 years) and has a very big budget. Now, obviously the 10k users of the system need to be trained and updated on system changes and get support on bugs or issues they find. Up till now that support effort has been in a very controlled way. A support desk picks up your question and then answers it after a while. Now, I have discussed with the people involved about shifting a bit of the support into an open forum, where not only can users help each other (like happens so much on the Internet with software), but owners of the tools can also listen in about potential wishes via discussions that arise and can actively participate. On top of that the users from all corners of the globe could very easily find each other and exchange experiences on issues related to the tools or “anything credit risk”: a real community with a lot of potential.
Well, why then was this not yet established:
+ reason mentioned: the systems owner wants to very tightly control the quality of the support provided
+ a highly probable other important reason: open discussions about the systems quality (uptime; speed; quality of information, features etc.) could put the manager in an awkward position. The potential reward of having users connecting and supporting themselves to some extend could - very understandably - not outweigh the risk perceived by the manager, like facing bad comments on an open discussion forum. Especially, if the culture is not yet one where one openly admits things are not always perfect.
+ or, and we should not forget this, the potential of social software for use within enterprises is just not as well known as we think!!
By the way, almost a year ago, Rod Boothby and I shared some thoughts about discussion forums being killer Enterprise 2.0 tools (see http://www.shapingthoughts.com/2006/10/16/are-discussion-forums-the-ultimate-enterprise-20-killer-app and http://www.innovationcreators.com/2006/10/hybrid_discussion_forums.html. Might be interesting.
This issue of control fascinates me because Brands, marketers, mangers, etc. have never had ‘control’ over their customers or employees but in the past, without the IT enablement, they could ignore that fact if they wished. Customers have always defined the brands they purchase (the explosion of Cadillacs in the ‘hood was not driven by Cadillac marketing). Online communities have just served to accelerate how quickly and efficiently customers can establish their impact. The best marketers - and managers - have always known this and welcome the fact that is now so cost effective to converse with their customers and employees.
Great thoughts, but nevertheless Enterprise 2.0 is about breaking down organizational and technology barriers and adopting new ways to communicate and share information and I must agree to this statement.
I agree that communities are becoming more the rule than the exception but when you look around many are un-original and are trying to do everything. A community should be targeted and try best to integrate what you talked about without overwhelming the user. I guess it can only be so interactive until we transition to 3d models, aka virtual reality.
I completely agree with much of what is posted here, particularly with the comments shared by Marcel. Control over brand, identity and information has always been a fallacy. Before the emergence of the information super highway, companies like Exxon, Phillip Morris and others were only able to counter negative press rather than control it. Damage control doesn’t exhibit any actual “control” but instead seeks to dilute any bad press, similar to the political strategy of “Muddying the water.”
Instead by opening lines of communication and embracing feedback from employees, customers and vendors it allows a company to directly address complaints in public, before they spread, and not only appear responsive but actually become more responsive. And isn’t efficiency the goal of business?
Cisco Kid makes a great point, as well as having a cool nickname. Without taking into account the feedback of employees, especially those on the front lines, the business will be lost!
It’s a fundamental rule in business that feedback and action from those on the front lines of a business serves as a crucial component to any business, both big and small. It amazes me just how many business (even fortune 500’s) that don’t take this into account.
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Great article indeed! I’m pretty sure the Enterprise 2.0 will take the lead.
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