R&D | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Community management is about business, not claptrap

I recently bumped into a post putting community managers on their guards : if they can’t demonstrate / deliver any ROI they may face very hard times in a near future.

In the one hand I share the idea according to which, “external” community management (that is not the same thing as community management for internal teams), despite many famous successes, is not that fruitful. But I’m far from thinking community managers are responsible for that.

We are forced to assume that when goals are not achieved, the guys at the end of the chain are often the only to be blamed. But statistics show that, generally, when something goes wrong, it’s not individuals that are responsible, nor any external cause, but the system in 90% cases. I don’t think that these figures that date back to Deming’s work in the 80s have changed since then.

I think that the problem is not the community manager himself, even if this new kind of job, still not well defined yet, isn’t given to the right people at the beginning (but it’s also the system’s responsability to identify the right people and make them improve their skills), but very definition of community management.

In a previous post I was saying that, one day, enterprise’s main role will be to organize a value chain and coordinate expertises, some of them being internal and some others internal. Economy’s “knowledgization” where assets resides more in individual knowledge, transaction costs near to zero which may cause a reversed application of Coase’s law, and the ability go organize without organization can make us think that enterprises will only have a role of principal and skills unifier.

I won’t be listing again the long list of thinks that are or can be outsourced today, from recruitment to innovation, without forgetting manufacturing, invoicing, R&D.

Fortunately, companies keep what matters : knowledge, expertises. But, perhaps, not for long.

Have you ever heard of KPO ? No ? So please be informed that after Business Process Outsourcing, here comes Knowledge Process Outsourcing

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