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My thinking is that if we have a handful of small, vibrant, passionate communities — they’ll serve as the model for new ones, and we’ll get some organic expansion.

I’ve mentioned before that a community without authoritative voices runs the risk of being irrelevant. Not only do we need one or more authoritative voices, they’ve got to be committed to playing the role: showing up frequently, getting involved, being responsive, and so on.

Going a bit further, we want this stuff to spread virally. One of the ways to enable this is to make it as self-documenting as possible. To the extent that potential users can be educated on context and process using the platform itself — that’s a good thing.

We needed a couple of basic processes. First, how does someone figure out the context here, e.g. what is all this about, and how do I use it? Second, if someone wants to play, how does a user register? Third, how does a community get built?

As far as “creating a context” goes, we created a “Getting Started” space and started to populate it with all sorts of contextual documents — e.g. what was this all about, what it could be used for, some basics on blogging and creating communities, and so on.

We also had to think through the process of how does a community get built. To do this, we created a “New Community Forum” space to help.

In this space, there’s a few coaching documents on how to think of a community: focus, roles, etc. We also created a template to help people answer a few basic questions.

The idea is that prospective community builders can post a proposal for their new community in the space, and we all can review and discuss it. Once approved (by consensus), the admin will create a new space and assign it over to the new community builder.

I think it’s worth pointing out the inherent futility of pre-ordaining what types of communities will be built.

We’ve made it really easy for anyone to start an informal discussion or community. This means we’re gonna have lots of them. I’m looking forward to being surprised at the types of communities that spring up.

Some will thrive. Some won’t. Some will spring into existence, passionately flame around a hot topic, and quiesce once the challenge has been solved, and people move on.

All part of the natural ecology of social media environments.

Who are we to pre-ordain what types of things grow? It’s the difference between a garden and a meadow. A garden has weeds, a meadow doesn’t.

I used a bit of my perogative to force a very simple top-level schema.

The first community space anyone sees is “Getting Started”. Lots of new users, we want them to go there first.

The second community space is ‘Active Communities’. The message is clear — go here to look at a linear list of communities that are up and running. I think the expectations here are pretty clear.

The third space is “Under Development”. I felt we needed a sandbox where prospective community developers could build their spaces, configure, add content, etc. before going “live” and promoting their community to new members.

The fourth space is “Archived Communities”. At some point, activity in a space tails off, but you don’t want to delete anything. At the same time, you don’t want people wandering in and contributing if there’s no one there. So everything in this space has the write permissions turned off — it’s still accessible and referenceable — but no comments, edits or discussions.

If I had to do it again, I’d do it the same way.

But the second order effect was more interesting. Before long, we saw people on the platform that none of us knew. Yes, they were EMC employees, but they weren’t who we expected to join in initially.

But we’re finding out that a little effort in creating context can go a long way to easing the process.

We made sure that our “Welcome” page had a clear, upfront message about what this is all about, and had an obvious link to follow if people wanted to find out more.

We wrote short docs on how to get an account, rules of the road, etc.

We also don’t want to spend a lot of time hand-holding users, especially new ones.

Part of social media skills is learning how to size up an environment when you’re new to it. Just like you wouldn’t go barging into a party and start acting inappropriately, the same statement applies to any social media platform.

A third problem is arising in community building. We get these great proposals for new communities, we approve them, we create the space, and then … well, nothing. The people who took the time to create the proposal aren’t following through with the basic steps of building their communities.

The person who approached building the community did it totally different than everyone else. He gave careful thought to his initial community members. He prepopulated his community with great content. He encouraged targeted people to come, participate, post, contribute, discuss, etc.

For me, the trick will be to develop community developers. And, because I want scale quickly, I can’t do this function all by myself.

Second, they’re going to have to assemble a list of known “best practices” around designing and building a community. I have a lot of that in my head, but they’re going to have to pull it out of me and other people, and then validate that with our prototypical community developers.

Key learning: viral launches of platforms are best. Makes people get curious, explore, etc. — better than an Official Announcement. You also get a more patient breed of user, which has been helpful as we experience growing pains.

The best part — people are finding each other and productively interacting in ways I had never expected. I’m using the analogy of a “social computer” to describe what we’re building here.

I’ve found strong sponsorship in our HR group. They’ve appointed a leader around “social media proficiency at EMC”, building a team, and figuring out how we as 35,000 people get good at this stuff in a directed, thoughtful way.

And, of course, they’re forming an online community to discuss, debate and coordinate.

What I quickly realized is that we needed a message: a tight, focused communication that clearly set expectations for everyone.

Something like this:

EMC is investing in social media. Not only is it an exciting area of technology for our product organizations, we think it has the potential to transform EMC’s overall effectiveness and competitive position.
To be successful with social media at EMC, we’ll need to learn some new behaviors: new ways of communicating, new ways of collaborating, and new ways of creating value.
We’ve created a safe and secure environment where all of us can learn how to use these new tools: http://one.emc.com
We encourage all EMC employees — both individual contributors and managers — to take the time to discover how these new capabilities can improve your working environment, and your contribution to EMC.
We’re interested in your feedback as we learn how to use these new tools. Simply let us know your thoughts by leaving your comments in the “feedback” forum.

We’re finding that there are a LOT of people who want to control who sees what and when. Or who joins in.

There are some painfully shy people out there. As they look at the platform, they’re asking that their true identity be masked in some way, so they can say what they really feel.

People have to learn to trust each other, even if they’ve never met. At the core of all this, that’s really what it’s all about.

They need to trust that their words won’t be twisted, that they won’t be bullied, or flamed, or singled out in a negative way.

Building trust takes time. I don’t think there’s any shortcut.

We’re at about 1000 active licenses. About 900 of them are “lurkers” — that’s OK, we kind of expected that. I think everyone has gotten over the economic waste of paying for 900 licenses that really aren’t being “used” as we’d like. Compared to what we’ve done here, that’s splitting hairs.

The “core” — about 100 hard-core early adopters — are making this a fun and useful place to hang out.

Our “hit rate” on community formation is improving. The first wave was awkward, most of it stalled, but the second wave — people who were able to watch the interaction on the platform, and propose/build communities from experience — well, they’re doing much better, I think.

There’s spontaneous, value-generating interaction. I don’t want to share company secrets on a public blog, but there’s at least 2-3 “aha!” moments I can point to that created substantial, non-arguable economic value through interactions and discussions.

There’s buzz. Everyone seems to have heard about it, is curious, comes over to check it out. Sometimes, they wade in and start participating.

We were concerned with rapid adoption swamping our ability to provide a service. That’s not happening. Given the viral form of promotion, plus the natural human reluctance to jump into a new social situation, we have a steady measured pace of people coming on board.

Our coolness factor increased a bit when I convinced one of senior execs to start a blog on leadership. He’s a great guy, and has wonderful stories about leadership, values, customer focus, etc.

In addition to being a good sport and just being generally willing to help out with cool projects, there’s a real benefit for him — he spends a lot of time telling the same stories repeatedly to different audiences. Now he tells it once (online) and everyone can read it.

It took a while, but it’s happening. People are getting comfortable enough to find each other (even though they’ve never met), discuss topics, find a problem, and start working to solve it. I don’t have a small number of examples, I now have a much longer list.

EMC has a Center of Excellence in China. I don’t know how many people are out there (probably more than I realize), but there’s a legit business problem in getting people on board, helping them feel connected, etc.

The fellow who runs this COE tells everyone something simple: go to EMC ONE and write a blog entry, introduce yourself, and look around. And, surprisingly, people from this part of the world are writing back and saying “welcome!”. More coolness.

I get dozens of interesting bits of research, reports, analysis, etc. that flow through my email inbox. So do lots of other people. They’re in email, and then they’re gone, never to be seen again.

I created a space, started posting stuff, and invited others to do the same. They did.

Pretty soon, we had a big pile of documents. All searchable. All discussable. Not particularly well organized, but better than buried in email, or living on my hard disk.

There’s a somewhat petty control battle going on as well. We’ve defined the boundaries as “the business controls the user experience, not IT”, which is a role partitioning exercise I would highly recommend for just about anyone considering this stuff.

And — like all behaviors — we’ve noticed a certain reticence in the masses to adopt many of these new behaviors.

Sure, we have our early (and vocal) adopters. But for every one of those, there are literally hundreds who are watching, and not participating.

And we’ve given a LOT of thought on how to improve the situation.

And, to be successful at social media behaviors and skills, we’re probably going to have to think about the problem in much the same way as a swimming teacher thinks about teaching kids to swim.

We were coming up with things like “Learning To Be Proficient At Social Media”. Hardly compelling.

Now, we have titles like “Learning To Swim: Getting Good At Social Media Skills”. Better, I think.

Secondly, we have a way of immediately establishing empathy with our target audience, e.g. “look, this is like learning to swim, it might be a little uncomfortable at the beginning, but before long you’ll be having a blast”. You do know how to swim, don’t you?

This week, I think we made a phase transition from “interesting project” to “corporate legit”.

Our communication strategy has been largely viral up to this point. Someone tells someone else about the platform, they get curious, they look around, and many of them participate — a bit.

One of our biggest obstacles has been “fear of swimming”. People have openly told me they don’t want to participate for a multitude of reasons — shyness, fear of retribution, getting into an ugly discussion, etc.

It’s the elepant in the room. There’s no getting good at social media if people are scared to participate.

We understand the badge of “corporate legit, corporate endorsed” will go a long way towards making people feel more comfortable. If senior management likes the idea (and everything that goes with it), that’s a major obstacle removed.

Every year, EMC has a big leadership meeting in Las Vegas

Guess what? We got our airtime

Frank Hauck (the exec who leads the group I report into) spent 5 minutes or so showing screenshots from EMC|ONE (the name of our Clearspace-based platform).

He positioned it as a place to have conversations, and not a repository.

The facts are clear. New people are showing up on the platform — dozens a day — and are jumping right in. They’re blogging, they’re starting discussions — bottom line, they’re not shy.

I’ve mentioned before that this — above all else — will lead to social media proficiency as a business tool. And I also probably mentioned we’re pretty abysmal at this today.

So I decided to do something about it. I got approval to create a new role (Community Coach), and found a wonderful, enthusiastic person who agreed to give it a go.

Her job will be to work with people targeting the larger communities to help them get better at going through the process. As we get good at this, we’ll document what we learn, and use that as a basis of a self-help community for — you guess it — community builders.

But, about 20 minutes into it, one of the execs lit up and started talking about some of the real challenges in the finance group: developing leadership, helping them to understand the entire business, building a culture of continual improvement, etc. — and basically got the SM bug bigtime. She’s a natural leader, and I think others will surely follow her.

Our platform is being mentioned everywhere. There’s no formal campaign, it’s just the advanced stages of our viral program. I see us being referenced all over the place, pitched, described, etc.

The overall communications effectiveness is off-the-charts, in my book. And there’s no way we could have achieved this with a traditional, organized approach. Viral marketing takes a bit longer, but it achieves results in a way that’s truly amazing to behold.

We now have so many business value stories that we don’t really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic. I have a nice email I forward around that tells the story, and includes the links to the specific places on the site where it’s happening.

We had decided that — ahead of that — having conversations was a necessary and vital “feeder process” to document collaboration.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Document-oriented collaboration is pretty darn cool, and can create significant value in the right context.

And if you surf the E2.0 blogosphere, there’s an intense focus around wikis — the quintessential document collaboration model — as a stellar example of all things 2.0-ish in the enterprise.

Early on, I became fascinated with community dynamics at EMC. Sure, we were pretty adept at pushing tons of information at each other. Emails, web sites, portals, repositories, etc. — we were adept at creating content, and shoving it around at each other.

Terabytes of the stuff. All neatly written, organized and syndicated. We were not perfect, but we were reasonably proficient at generating and orchestrating static content. And it just didn’t ring my bell, so to speak.

But, I kept thinking, the really high-value stuff was the conversations I was having with other people.

About ideas, perspectives, context, etc. — the discussions I was getting into were very intense, and usually incredibly productive. They influenced me, I influenced them. And good stuff generally came of it.

These conversations were personal, honest and context-rich. And they were perhaps the most important source of innovation and value-add in our corporate culture.

To go even further, the really cool conversations I was having usually started with someone saying “you know, I was talking to so-and-so, and we came up with the idea that …” so we had one conversation feeding into another.

Now, if you come to the conclusion that conversations matter, you’re also struck by just how difficult it is to have lots of conversations with lots of different people.

Emails are poor substitutes for conversations, especially when distribution lists are involved. Concalls and large meetings are absolutely painful — I’m always the guy who’s politically incorrect, and tries to take the discussion into an area that might be interesting. Not to mention the pain of managing a calendar so you can synchronize with your peers around the world.

And, more subtly, there’s a skill (and a confidence factor) involved in having an open, naked conversation about what really matters. I, for whatever reason, have no problem saying what’s on my mind.

Others may not feel so inclined — so there’s a cultural aspect to this that is very subtle but oh-so-important.

If you believe that conversations were creating incredible business value, maybe the focus should be on having many more conversations, much more easily.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point a relational model appeared in my head about how all this stuff was related, and — since then — I can’t think about anything else.

Conversations lead to passionate topics of mutual interest.

Passionate topics of interest lead to ad-hoc community formation.

Community formation leads to collaboration around shared activities, including document collaboration.

Community collaboration is the quintessential magic of all things E2.0.

So, not to oversimplify, but if EMC got really, really good at starting interesting conversations, the rest would follow naturally and organically.

Not to oversimplify, but wiki collaboration assumes that there are people aligned around a common set of interests and goals who are willing to help out and make the wiki a success.

How do these people find each other? How do they debate their respective points of view? How do they decide what roles various people should play, and what the outcome should be?

That’s a conversation, in my mind. Hence my passionate interest in conversational collaboration.

Who, in their right mind, would invest serious corporate resources (IT, people, process, etc.) in just making sure that people are having more conversations? Isn’t it all an idle waste of time? Shouldn’t we all be spending more time on serious work? Way too touchy-feely for my tastes …

Well, I’ve spent enough time in the corporate world to realize that everything worthwhile started — at some point — as a conversation. In my mind, more business-oriented conversations lead directly to more business value. It’s that simple.

And that’s what I’ve got EMC focusing on — conversations that lead to communities that lead to collaborative work efforts. Right or wrong, at least I have the courage of my convictions. And, surprisingly, I’ve got other people agreeing with me.

I have come to the perspective that — in my defined world — it all starts with blogging behind the firewall.

A competent blogger is like a beacon in the dark, foggy night. Here I am. Here is what I’m thinking about. Here is what I’m worried about. Come, share your thoughts with me. I care, and if you care, we can perhaps work together.

Blogs can start conversations. Very interesting ones, based on my personal experience.

For this simple reason, my personal crusade for the next few months is to encourage more blogging behind the firewall. Sure, a lot of it will be fluffy stuff. But, somewhere in all the fluff, there will emerge the hot, burning light of intelligent discourse. Others will be attracted, and become engaged. And, if all works well, good things will inevitably happen.

People are coming out of their shells. They’re sharing what they know, and what they think. They’re coming together in unpredictable ways to create value for the company. There’s no project plan anywhere that could have captured what’s happening here. For those of us close to it, it’s truly a magical experience.

And we don’t need to sell this thing internally anymore. Our users are doing it for us.

If you remember, we opted for a viral ’soft launch’ of the platform (friends telling friends) for a variety of reasons, all of which turned out to be good ones.

We also opted for a ’soft sell’ — we didn’t want to push too hard on people, again for a variety of reasons.

First, I think this social media stuff has to be fun. You do it because you want to, not because someone told you to do it.

Second, even if they weren’t directly participating, we wanted to make sure that everyone knew that other people were participating — including, in some cases, your coworkers, your boss, your direct reports, and so on. Awareness was just as important to us as participation. This set up a fascinating social dynamic that was fun to watch.

Someone on the platform asked for a “business justification” around EMC|ONE — why it existed, why it was good to use it, and so on. A reasonable enough question in any business environment, no?

None of us who were on the core team really responded.

But lots and lots of other people did!

They offered up personal stories about where they saw the value coming from, including some pretty surprising ones.

They talked about how it helped them do their job better, how it helped them understand what the company was up to, how they could find out who did what quickly, or just ask a question and likely have it answered.

They spoke to it on an emotional level as well — how they now viewed their careers differently, their role as leaders differently, how they felt about working at EMC, and with other EMCers.

Dozens of personal testimonials, far more effective than any ROI study, or a spreadsheet, or a powerpoint deck.

It’s kind of cool when your best sales reps are the people who are using your platform, isn’t it?

I think the person who asked that question might have been a bit overwhelmed with the response. I wonder if she got what she was looking for, or was just scared to ask again!

I have been in the business world for about 30 years, and — as a result — I’ve problably seen perhaps every flavor of “business justification” you can imagine.

Usually, a business justifcation takes the forms of economic inputs in (time, money, people, etc.), anticipated economic outputs (money, market share, or other benefit), couched by risks, timelines and assumptions. And, for big parts of the business world, it’s an essential tool and methodology.

But there are some really important things in the business world that are very difficult to quantify in terms of economic value.

How do you quantify the value of making your knowledge workers more effective?

Or avoiding a big mistake on company strategy?

Or being able to drive hundreds of new initiatives across the company at almost no incremental cost?

Or having employees that really want to work at your company, and not another place?

Or, perhaps, the next product, market or solution breakthrough?

Traditional business justification has its role in the world, but — I’d argue vehemently — there is a class of real important things in this world that are inherently difficult to measure and quantify — we just don’t have the tools at our disposal to do this easily or cost-effectively.

So we have to use our good judgment. I tell people that a business plan is a poor substitute for good judgment.

We’ve now created something here that promotes itself, justifies itself to others, and answers the critics with a sharp community tongue.

Sure, it took a while to get to this state (about 6 months live), but I’m glad we had the patience to do this organically and naturally, rather than construct an arbitrary schedule with milestones that had no bearing in reality.

This is social engineering, folks. You’re creating social constructs, and — as a result — things tend to move at people speed, and not according to some project plan.

Sure, we had to do some selling (and defending) early on.

Old Wisdom = build communities around what’s important to the business
New Wisdom = build communities around what people really care about

Old Wisdom = keep the discussions on the original thread
New Wisdom = keep the discussions where people want them to go.

1 — Social media proficiency is essential to the long-term competitive success of our company, and perhaps yours as well.
2 — To get people proficient, you’re going to have to get them to engage. Not because they have to, but because they want to.

3 — The #1 incentive for people to engage is because they’re passionate about something — they really care, and they want to engage.