Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 1)
By Matthew Lees
Social technologies have had a big impact on the ways that companies do business, both inside and out. Organizations are using social tools – discussion forums, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, and more – to help employees be more productive and effective. They are also using the same types of tools to engage with those outside their organization, i.e., their customers (users, readers, members, etc.) and business partners.
Social media is helping to break down the walls that separate internal from external. Those traditionally outside the organization not only know more than ever before about what’s going on inside (thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), they also have more of an opportunity and ability to influence things within the company (for example, through crowdsourcing mechanisms). For the most part, it’s easy enough to set up a collaborative space for members of a customer advisory group, for example, to interact directly with a group of employees. And if you manage a customer community, you can – in fact, you should – have employees intimately involved. The lines between inside and outside are becoming increasingly blurred.
I’ve had a handful of recent conversations — with vendors and with practitioners at B2B, B2C, and employee communities — about this potential coming together of employee and customer communities. If social software and social media are at the heart of the shift towards increased interaction, collaboration, and transparency, perhaps there is an eventual convergence that can be supported by a single social technology system. Why can’t there be one technology platform and one set of resources supports (1) internal communication, collaboration, and learning, as well as (2) external collaboration, customer engagement, and peer-to-peer support?
After all, social is social, right?
Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Idealistic Answer: Yes
As someone who resonates with just about any customer-centric approach, I love the concept of an organization that values customer ideas and insight (and builds process around such input), and looks to connect employees working on specific initiatives to relevant and interested. A convergence of employee and customer communities would enable this to happen more painlessly and more frequently.
Employee/Internal and Customer/External communities have a great many similarities. Both types of communities…
• look to enhance communication and collaboration among individuals and groups
• leverage similar tools and technologies (e.g., wikis, forums, blogs, microblogs, etc.)
• have, at their core, user profiles and directories
• need to support both individual users and groups, all with granular permissioning to provide appropriate access
• require underlying technology that can integrate with other data sets and applications (e.g., CRM systems, registration and authentication systems, etc.), extend , be secure, and scale as needed
• depend upon authenticity and transparency
• benefit from data analysis by someone for whom the success of the community is important, and who can make improvements based on the analysis
Leveraging these similarities would mean streamlined technology and centralized resources, which are certainly directly beneficial to organizations, and indirectly beneficial to customers.
So there’s a lot to like about the concept of a single technology platform that supports both employee and customer communities. It fits in philosophically with the direction in which many social media enthusiasts think organizations should be headed. But there’s this little thing called “business reality” that sometimes gets in the way …
Next: Part 2 – Pragmatism Rears its Ugly Head
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Community Moderation, Social Media Industry, Social Media Trends. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
3 Responses to “Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 1)”
[...] first post in this series laid out the question and noted some important similarities between internally [...]
[...] and final post on the potential for convergence between Internal and External communities – see Post #1 to start at the beginning – I want to touch on the individuals who are charged with building and [...]
[...] Part 1 of this topic framed the question of whether internal/employee communities and external/customer communities can potentially converge, and be managed via one group of people using one (pretty darn robust) technology platform. [...]