Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 4)
by Matthew Lees
In this fourth 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 managing communities, whether communities of employees or communities of customers.
The Practitioner Perspective
We’re still in the very early days of social software and online communities. Practitioners are the ones at the forefront of this field, which is at the interaction of sociology, technology, and business. And they’re breaking ground daily.
They’re the knowledge management strategists who think about ways of getting colleagues to collaborate more openly; they’re the HR professionals who want to retain top talent by ensuring all voices are not only heard, but also help shape what’s important within the organization; they’re the community managers and moderators who work to get customers to support and learn from each other; they’re the marketers monitoring brand value and customer sentiment across the social Web; and they’re the marketers, developers and researchers who look to engage with customers (and prospective customers) and glean insights in order to innovate and improve.
What they’re not, though, is omniscient. Because social practitioners are working in such a new space, success is a moving target. They don’t know – they can’t know – what things will be like in six months, in a year, or in five years. The guidelines, benchmarks, and best practices are largely still being created every day. Sure, some organizations and vendors are ahead of others, and there’s a lot that (happily) is known and at least somewhat agreed upon, but compared to more traditional disciplines, there are few, if any, codified bodies of knowledge.
Pulled in Multiple Directions
What this means is that it’s tough enough being a social media practitioner in the first place, let alone trying to work in multiple domains, specifically internal and external. Some of the tools and techniques involved in building, managing, and getting the most out of a community apply to both internal and external communities…but many don’t. And, as Post 2 touched on, the business goals are very different.
Last month I wrote about a practitioner in a marketing communications group whose B2B online customer community initiative was sidetracked into becoming an internal collaboration-based community. She was caught in a tug of war between the internally focused IT team and the outward-looking marketing group, with execs on both sides knowing they needed her social media expertise, but not realizing how vastly different their business goals were.
And she’s not the only one in this predicament.
The Downside of Employee Community and Customer Community Convergence
For practitioners, the downside of such convergence is the potential for being pulled unwillingly and/or unexpectedly into initiatives that you’re unprepared for, unsuited for, or uninterested in. It’s nice to ride the excitement of the social media wave, and to be appreciated and in demand for one’s expertise. But the excitement can easily turn to frustration. Here are some things to keep in mind:
• Bring it back to business goals and business use cases. You may need to hammer on this over and over. It’s a big red flag if business sponsors are unclear on the business goals, or not in agreement with each other.
• Make sure the technology platforms under consideration fit these use cases. Only a handful claim to support both internal and external communities, and they don’t necessarily do both things equally well.
• Stay true to yourself. Boy, does that sound corny, but I’ve seen more than a few people take on something they knew they were ill-suited for, uninterested in, and/or knew things wouldn’t end well. It’s a good thing — really, an essential thing — to challenge yourself by going outside your comfort zone, but do this with your eyes open. And if you know it’s not right, try not to go there.
The Road Ahead
While I fully resonate with the holy-grail concept of having a single ecosystem in which both employees and customers participate, the realities of organizational behavior, social dynamics, and technology limitations will preclude this from happening on any sizable scale. Some organizations will continue to move in this direction, and some vendors will support them, but for the most part, inside will remain inside, and outside will remain outside.
The good news, though, is that while this wall will continue to stand, it will continue to become more permeable, with (1) customers and others outside the organization (e.g., customer advisory groups) being able to come in behind the firewall as warranted, and (2) employees being able to participate in more ways in customer communities.
For social media practitioners and community managers, who by nature and by practice place a great deal of stock in the value that customers can provide, this can be a good place to be.
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Community Moderation, Social Media Industry, Social Media Trends. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jim Storer, Community Roundtable, Matthew Lees, Lisa Scales, topsy_top20k and others. topsy_top20k said: Final post in 4-part series on "Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?" Practitioner POV. – http://bit.ly/bdVGdJ [...]