and the sociologist David Brain said: “Community is something we do together. It’s not just a container!”

Web based communication systems first began offering features and functions that require a totally new task force: The Community Management.

Thus, the online community manager’s role is a growing. It’s a new professional profile many organizations and companies need urgently in order to face the complexity of the new social media interfaces. It’s also a new job profile crossing the borders of the existing departments and that’s why it’s so uncomfortable. People in this position work to build, grow and manage communities around a brand or cause. They are also connecting the corporate identity, the inhouse workflow to the users, customers and possible co-workers.

As more and more companies are convinced of the necessity of a CRM 2.0 and a smart viral marketing trying to involve UGC and the benefits of CTA (call to actions); they need also a multi tasker managing the different communities. Online community managers may serve a variety of roles depending on the nature and purpose of their online community, which may be part of a profit motivated enterprise. “Every network has an underlying purpose and motivations for such network creation include:

• Mission, Business, Idea, Learning By Doing

Online Community Managers are representing and visualizing the collective vision, creating and managing relationships and manage collaborative processes. Their role is as complex as the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 grid and under permanent construction. That’s new and part of the new Enterprise 2.0 and Business 2.0 issues. We have to think different and manage differently.

The Communit Mangers are managing the social profile of the Corporate Identity (collectively and individually), the human interaction inside – outside the company, the image, the reputation They have also to manage the social loop.

Unfortunately, there is no curriculum preparing the future managers leaving the business school for this very complex and highly requested job. Once again, we are facing a quite confusing situation. A growing demand without any clear and convincing

The Community Manager’s job profile

«It’s a missionary work for online and offline community building, social media, and customer-company interaction working with online communities, fan groups, and consumer groups. It’s a full time job for evangelists, always ready to convince and to convert all the change resistant people inside the organizations. The biggest challenges is not to connect and follow the communities on the Social Web or outside the company.  

The Community Manager needs a background in

• Social Media Engineering
• Community Management
• Online collaboration tools and strategies
• Web 2.0 and Web 3.0  cross-media communication know-how.

The Community Manager is the face and the interface of a company, managing the communication flow in both directions.
This digital-savvy evangelist  is responsible for all communications, PR, social media, events, and content creation, and, last not least the curator of the immaterial capital any company wants to keep and increase.

His daily workflow

• Content creation – publishing blog posts/ videos, articles, communications materials, and material for social media channels. He has at least to know how it works and to respond to comments, when appropriate, in order to foster a positive community and add value to the user’s experience
• Total Web Awareness, setting the relevant alerts, monitoring the flow, with an open mind and open eyes  for  user generated comments and posts with a MOON ( massive open online network).
• Smart Social media engineering– creating, managing and growing the company’s presence through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other strategically relevant online properties.
• CRM 2.0 – the Community Manager is often responsible for customer support – answering questions however they come in (phone, e-mail, Twitter). The new business of kindness is part of his job.  
• Liquid Learning Management and Knowledge Management, the information flow, the user generated content, the co-workers’ know-how and knowledge has to be harvested and curated in order to remain visible and accessible.

New Skills for a new job profile

To do this job efficiently, a Community Manager should have all these skills:

• Resilient personality – they will be required to walk into networking events and be comfortable introducing themselves to strangers.

• Publishing skills – blogging creates authenticity, if you don’t spam, but videos become  a performant communication channel, as nothing is so convincing as the human voice and an image. Many new tools and new tasks require a permanent up-date of the PR strategies and performances.

• Social media experience – experience with social media tools isn’t a must, but it’s definitely helpful and cuts down on training. Look for someone who can navigate Word Press and understands Twitter and Facebook for business. Be smart enough to realize your cross-media communication engineering, inhouse.

 Do you know any European institution (except St. Gallen) where future community managers are prepared for this amazing job?

Since Web 2.0 technologies are impacting all aspects of our lives it becomes very trendy to add 2.0 at the end of all these prickly topics as entrepreneurship, education, workplace, performances.Enterprise 2.0, education 2.0 or cooking 2.0, these mundane words sound suddenly good and get a taste of openness. The 2.0 becomes the universal panacea.

Language, as we know, evolves with use, but people are not really evolving by using these new terms.The Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way people connect and communicate, but they didn’t really change the way they think, learn, and work together.

Just take a CEO or entrepreneur, one of these fiftysomething men personifying leadership, responsibility, power and influence at the Entreprise 2.0 or Business 2.0 summits everywhere. « Let’s become a real enterprise 2.0 », announced the Siemens chairman. Really? What did he had in mind or was he just reusing these portmanteau words?

If you ask the people working with and for these 21st century leaders, they will tell you off-the-record about unused software, expensive collaborative tools nobody knows, except the IT guy who installed it, management strategies full of fear, distrust, non-sense and decisions made by deciders they never met inside the organization.

Open innovation, user generated content, creative collaboration remain just portmanteau words 2.0, nothing but a smokescreen hiding the unwillingness to articulate the social and economic challenges that most of the decision makers, whether they are in the private or public sector, because they just don’t understand why they should do it.
For them, there is no emergency.

Imagine the scope of functions of a Community Manager 2.0 inside one of these enterprise silos and try to make the profile of this man/woman telling you after one year,without double talk : « I’m doing a great job. » Just imagine.

This social transition is a result of 5 key changes:

1. The transition from separate social collaboration environment to collaboration where employees are working together, in different places, in different time zones.
2. The shift from generic social capabilities to applying social capabilities to solve specific business problems.
3. The emergence of social platforms vs. siloed social solutions which often proved to become either dead ends or the beginning of the chaos.
4. The growing demand for decentralized collaboration und coordination reducing cost and time.
5. The slow but steady awareness that knowledge connectivity facilitates innovative and creative processes.

But to avoid the risks of information overload and snippet working generated by too many open Social Channels, the Social Streaming Platform brings method in the chaotic confluence of Social Media flow and work flow.

The benefits of Social Streaming platforms are immediate and sustainable.

• Vendors incorporate social technologies directly into HR processes and applications.
• HR management can be streamlined in order to connect the right person with the right place, to facilitate human interaction and dynamic knowledge transfer.
• Social learning becomes also a permanent interaction inside and outside the organisation. Social learning enables any person in the organization to discuss, share documents, or even record video on the fly, but also to integrate in real time information and knowledge input from the Social Stream.
• Formal training from learning management systems (LMS) with social and collaborative capabilities become informal ways to capture and share key information, reducing the overall cost of creating and delivering training, as well as shortening the time to productivity for a new employee.

Let’s take an example:

In the past, a junior sales representative would learn about the company, its products, competitors, and priorities via

• scheduled meetings,
• hallway conversations and chats at the coffee machine,
• formal training sessions,
• some smart incentives,
• internal collaboration system,
• weekly team discussions.

But it’s the informal conversations that provided the additional business context needed for sales people to be successful. This is part of Social learning enabling any person in the organization to discuss, share documents, or even record video on the fly.

And the ROE?

•  product managers can share the latest competitive positioning,
•  customer service can highlight how to solve top issues
•  sales operations can provide quick insights into how to process orders.
•  Product developers get feedback about their products directly from the users, the vendors, the retailers.

Using the collective wisdom of the organization exposes a wealth of information to help these new sales representatives to become productive faster, thus enabling greater revenues, shorter sales cycles, avoiding common errors made by others before, and last not least customers who appreciate to keep in touch with the vendor.

There are many other examples of how companies can take advantage of social and collaborative capabilities in their HR business processes.

With social applications, the ability to capture and analyze the work history of employees makes it easy to give praise to top performers.

Social collaboration helps companies recognize employees’ achievements and promotions, and some organizations already give employees promotions based on their social engagement.

Rewarded employees are persuaded to remain loyal to their company.

At the same time, other employees will be aware that hard work is recognized and be influenced to perform at the top of their ability.

Social software also enables employees to locate experts in their organization, connect better with colleagues, and leverage knowledge that employees have shared, even after they have departed from the company.

With the need to tie together an employee’s actions, information, discussions, and work across many processes and applications, these social capabilities can’t be limited to a single application, but instead require a comprehensive social ‘fabric’ that weaves through every place an employee works – HR processes, sales processes, operations, etc.

This social streaming enables a seamless and aggregated experience for a business person while they work with other employees, customers, partners, vendors, or suppliers, allowing them to avoid unnecessary interruptions and providing them with value that motivates them to adopt and continue using social technologies.

The IT guys will appreciate the multiples interfaces implementation of social applications.

The persistent economic crisis become a permanent challenge for entrepreneurs, their employees and their future coworkers, the  students.  As the waves of economic and financial environment are rolling in faster and stronger, we are all involved in a steady update of our skills and knowledge in order to preserve our immaterial assets and to develop our creative and innovative potentialities.

Disruptive shifts and  in the world economy will significantly reshape the workforce skills required in the next decade. Many global economists have made clear analysis of the disruptive forces that are already inside our daily life. The problem is that despite predicted and tangible changes, many people believe that the skills needed to be successful in the future are just minor ajustments and that the major part of the Internet revolution is already behind them.

Despite the very clear analysis of many economists, the field studies in Europe are still indicating misperceptions, lack of understanding and action and this may lead students and employers down the wrong road. What are the emerging realities ? Simple tangible facts such as

• a new media environment requires computational thinking.
• A globally connected world creates a new media literacy.
• The new connectivity requires transdisciplinarity,
• virtual collaboration and a Social Intelligence.

On the one hand the awareness (of  fearful few)  that a globally connected world, the rise of smart machines and systems are already creating a new work and learning environment. Both require cross-cultural competency and digital multi-taskers ready to define and redefine a permanent evolving social work skills. On the other hand, resistance to change, the lack of resilience of intellectually exhausted deciders.

This novel and adaptive thinking is already at work, but only at the peripherie. The core business is still going on as usual and that’s the problem.

So many reasons to resist to emerging realities

Only dipping a toe into troubled Social Media Pond

Your  company has invested in social technology and is thinking every Friday afternoon about a Social Media Strategy, because everybody is talking about. Anyhow, for you Social Communication looks like troubled waters.

Too many doubts, too much resistance to change and there is one thing that hurts the usual process management and all the QM ranking tools:  Social Media activity is driven from the bottom up and requires disruptive thinking. In other words :  top down communication was yesterday, the future  requires  a bottom-up communication, transparency, authenticity, reactivity in real time, they say.    

A Social Media Strategy will always be a moving interface. You have to define your

• Corporate Identity 2.0  and a clear web visibility.
• Identify the operative field(s) : CRM, KT, ERM, LMS or just PR ? But…
• The company should state explicitly what the employees can and can’t do on both, internal and external social media platforms, preferably via a formal policy : Freedom without rules leads to absolute confusion, even for the digital natives becoming your clients and coworkers or partners.

Profiling your activity on a Facebook landing page  inviting your clients and partners to become a fan, starting microblogging on Twitter and publishing on YouTube  and editing on Slideshare , blogging with Blogger or WordPress, there will be no short term  return on investment to justify all the time you will have to spend on all this new stuff you didn’t heard about five years ago. The good news ? You don’t need to invest in an expensive software generating once again stress and digital frustration, but you have to set up the  frame of a new kind of Time Management.  Let’s call it Time Management 2.0. It’s work in progress, never ending.

Where are the reasons of implementing a Social Media Strategy – tailor made for your business? More collaboration, engagement and informal learning, intergenerational knowledge transfer and a better CRM 2.0? Good idea, but inside or outside the daily workflow?  You are not really convinced that you need it to improve your business. And, are you sure, all your coworkers want to dive in to the Social Media pond?

Collaborate, share, participate are the magic words of Social Media Networking. Digital natives among your employees will take to social media like little ducks to water. They will be the indoor champions celebrating the concept of social media, participating without fear, and proactive in  collaboration, sharing, spreading and contribution to creative commons. But some of your employees will never be team players.  Sharing their knowledge and participating at creative commons means a paradigm shift for them and you will never force these people to collaborate and “abandon” their skills and experience inside a wiki. They won’t appreciate to elaborate charrettes.

But there are other reasons explaining  their reluctance, such as:

• Caution(and bad experience) to voice an opinion or to write a post or comment.
• Fear of overstepping your authority or to offend a supervisor.
• Struggling against overload.

To achieve the critical mass of users and ongoing participation rate, to get rich content and feed back , the sustained support of — and participation by — senior executives is essential.  Leadership means also to be an example. Perhaps your engagement will convince and convert reluctant coworkers. A CEO or a business owner has to know how a Social Media strategy looks like, but if you can delegate, just do it.

The solution ? Hire a Social Media Manager to centralise the authority, engage with the right people, and drive real outcomes. The Social Media Manager will need determination and creativity to overcome the risk that your Social Media trial gets lost in transaction. He needs also your (tacite)agreement.

• If you block access to social media frivolity, you also block access to useful resources. Of course, personal mobile devices can circumvent the company’s access policy anyway.
• If your company doesn’t want to dip the toes into social media, the Earth will still turn without you. If your employees don’t want to collaborate, participate and learn, that’s your problem first.

In summary, the potential of social media is not about the digital skills and viral thinking. It’s about resilience. To maximise the value of the available tools and platforms, your employees must want to be collaborative,  must want to try something new to achieve greater success. It’s your job to convince and convert them to think and work different.  You prefer to stay on the bench of the audience ? Your competitors won’t mind at all.

The world’s largest economies are evaluated on their ability to absorb information and communications technology and use it for economic an social benefit. Economists are talking about e-readiness and this word stands for

• the quality of a country’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and
• the ability of it consumers, businesses and government to use ICT to their benefit.

E-Readiness is the key for the future of many remote regions in Europe and should also become a ranking factor for PME Clusters. When a region uses ICT connectivity to enhance economic, social and cultural activities, particularly in  remote regions, the economy becomes more transparent, mobile and efficient and may also limit the rural exodus. The economic value that communications connectivity brings to business and individuals is substantial, as is the boon to society in terms of welfare, safety and community-building. Have a look at a digital info graph and you will see whether there is any chance for a PME Cluster!

Online-platforms or any activity based on connectivity and digital skills are the business models of this century.  Internet access itself becomes as fundamental as voice  and this remote access imperative is shifting to deliver broadband services. Even the more labour-intensive businesses that support digital commerce, such as call centers or knowledge management outsourcing providers, move quickly into markets where there are clear cost and skills advantages, i.e. digital competancy to connect with knowledge and to communicate information.

How to evaluate E-readiness?

• Connectivity environment,
• government investment and policy sustaining Internet accessibilty
• the underlying social and cultural attitudes surrounding Internet adoption. Connectivity without digital fitness and viral proactivity doesn’t generate any sustainable added value.

The digital divide between urban centers and remote regions is an economic absurdity. Policymakers have to pull on many levers simultaneously to create an environment where digital connections can proliferate and where citizens and businesses find it. But where are all the proactive decision makers outside of the  numerous UE-Commissions ?

The global business environment will improve steadily over the next 2-5 years. Countries or regions missing the Internet connectivity at 95% will be left outside the global business interactions.

The power of innovation is one important asset. The facilities to connect and communicate innovative ideas is the other one. If you want to know why certain regions like Brandenburg or Basilicata will remain outside of 21st century Socialnomics, just have a look at the map above.

The world’s largest economies are evaluated on their ability to absorb information and communications technology and use it for economic an social benefit. Economists are talking about e-readiness and this word stands for

• the quality of a country’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastruture and
• the ability of it consumers, businesses and gouvernment to use ICT to their benefit.

E-Readiness is the key for the future of many remote regions in Europe and should also become a ranking factor for PME Clusters. When a region uses ICT connectivity to enhance economic, social and cultural activities , and particularly in  remote regions, the economy becomes more transparent, mobile and efficient and may also limit the rural exodus. The economic value that communications connectivity brings to business and individuals is substantial, as is the boon to society in terms of welfare, safety and community-building. Have a look at a digital infograph and you will see whether there is any chance for PME Cluster: 

Online platforms or any activity based on connectivity and digital skills are the business models of this century.  Internet access itself becomes as fundamental as voice this remote access imperative is shifting to deliver broadband services. Even the more labour-intensive businesses that support digital commerce, such as call centres or knowledge management outsourcing providers, move quickly into markets where there are clear cost and skills advantages.

How to evaluate e-readiness: 

• connectivity environment,
• gouvernment investment and policy sustaining Internet accessibilty
• the underlying social and cultural attitudes surrounding Internet adoption. Connectivity without digital fitness and viral proactivity doesn’t generate any sustainable added value.

The digital divide between urban centers and remote regions is an economic absurdity. Policymakers have to pull on many levers simultaneously to create an environment where digital connections can proliferate, and where citizens and businesses find it. But where are all the proactive decision makers outside of   UE-commissions ?

The global business environment will improve steadily over the next 2-5 years. Countries or regions missing the Internet connectivity at 95% will be left outside the global business interactions.

Social Media Manager – just another backpack word created for business on the move. As a matter of fact, more and more employers are looking for digital natives who fit the title of Social Media Manager with a perfect multi-tasker backpack: Speed, memory, flexibility, attention and daily fitness for Social Interaction. Digital background and viral thinking and all the Web 2.0 tools have to be also somewhere in his mind and on his dashboard with a sticky note: Stay online and in the timelines!

“Just hire one of these Garage Band freaks to run our Social Media Networking! ”sounds like the irony of a business manager, who has little or no experience with social media telling the HR Department to find people with social media experience whereas Facebook and Twitter are breaking into the business world only since 2008.

What’s the normal reaction by the HR people? They will define the job responsibilities, skill sets and compensation. One must wonder where does the HR Department go for information concerning “Social Media Jobs“? Most likely they will look for existing job postings for social media positions created by other companies.

Social Media Managers are new social professional networkers and their dominant qualification  that they relate to the “audience” in a very human, permanent and attentive manner. They are just using normal communication skills or are gifted for human interaction by using social tools, not only on behalf of the Marketing and Sales Department, but also in the name of knowledge transfer and innovation assets.

I’m talking about people who truly understand the value of social media for businesses engaging people into dialog and keeping their eyes and ears open for what’s going on outside the company and inside the Social Networks.

Where’s the problem? Hiring somebody to help your business maximizing the potential of Social Media? You don’t have the time to focus on all those new stuff like Hootsuite, diigo, delicious or Twitter and what the hell is Netvibes and Social Media Monitoring! You just need sombody who understands why micro-blogging is sometimes more effective than mails and that YouTube and Slideshare are very efficient tools for Knowledge Spreading and Social Learning 

Where? Inside and outside the company every day.

watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&feature=youtu.be&hd=1