Summary : communities are a very trendy topic for enterprises. And yet it’s not a new matter at all. Communities form and live so easily on the net that enterprises thought they could do the same with their employees and clients…with mixed sucess. The purposely sustained impression that tools create communities while they only create the conditions to host them and marketing discourses according to which everything should be community got the better of years of work and researches on communities, leading organizations to many dead-ends. It’s high time to call these groups or spaces differently and manage them accordingly before the “2.0 madness” turn this powerful concept into a deprecated buzzword.
When I’m asked “how to create, manage and energize communities inside and outside my company” I often feel like answering this :
“There are communities that exist and don’t need you and those that don’t exist and aren’t worth wasting your time to make them live”
I have to admit that it’s simplistic and, in some ways, wrong.
• Communities need a shared interest, a shared goal and the will to interact together. At first sight, it only need the rigght people to be identified and provided with the means to exist and exchange as a community. Let’s admit that sometimes it works (as soon as means and tools that will help the community to live, exchange and exist as such are available, members find one another and the communty forms and structures itself), but sometimes not (the community exists in people minds but don’t form in a tangible way). That’s often caused by two factors : lack of trust towards the organization (sometimes these communities live outside or the organization, under the radar but refuse to become official and institutional) or management issues (is participation a part of people’s job or wasted time, even stolen information ?).
• Communities can be created ex-nihilo but awareness has to be raised before in order that the willingness to “do together’ emerge. Only then it will be time to tools things. Here again, before creating and managing a community, the first step is to creat the conditions that will make it exist.
In fact, in my opinion, communities can’t be created. But its success factor do. Then it can be managed, moderated, facilitated but it will always be impossible to make a community do what it doesn’t want to.
You’ll tell me that all that is obvious and you’ll be true. Communities are not a recent concern. We always knew that they would be very hard to build, that there must be barriers at the entry, that they need a lot of time etc… A tough work which principles have been clearly established by Etienne Wenger.So things were clear. But it seems to me that, these last years, the ‘community thing” become more and more confused and confusing for enterprises, what was recently confirmed by some researchers I talked with.
In one word : while organizations used to know where to head to even if it was difficult, now they’re totally lost. Consequence : they invest a lot a time and money and are often deceived. One reason to that : no one knows what a community is anymore.
You may have noticed that I’m often skeptical when talking about community management. Not because I don’t believe in it but because its importance and role are so impressive that it must not be led astray or neglected.
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
