Sensemaking | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

33 things to know about those who make your online social spaces live

May 3, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I wrote a lot about community management these last month for a simple reason: there’s so much confusion about a topic that’s said being strategic that heading for disaster and throwing the baby with the bathwater is a really actual risk. But by dint of thinking about it again and again, it seems to me that some guidelines are slowly emerging.

• That’s not because there are social medias in the workplace and that employees use them to do their work that the person in charge of managing their use is a community manager.

• A group of people doing things and interacting through social is not necessarily a community or a social network.

• A corporate social media strategy has to be driven at several levels which are often embodied by different people who have specific roles, responsabilities and objectives. These individual works has to be coordinated and articulated.

• Ca n’est pas parce qu’il y a échange entre des individus en utilisant les médias sociaux qu’on à affaire à des communautés. Ni à des réseaux sociaux d’ailleurs.

So, here’s a few things to know about all these players…

Does driving adoption mean being off the point ?

November 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 4 Comments

I’ne never been that comfortable with the concept of adoption when applied to enterprise tools. More precisely when the point point was “driving adoption”.

Of course adoption is necessary. And, like every necessary thing, businesses can not afford not to drive it. Nothing but pure logic…but it can’t prevent me from feeling its sounds odd. I was slowly getting used to these words when Paula Thornton brought it back to my attention.

Let’s start with the meaning of words.

Driving : giving oneself the means that are necessary to achieve someting and the appropriate indications to pilot actions.

Adoption : action of making something one’s own in a voluntary way. Supposes the benefit, sense and implications are understood.

If both are necessary, I still can’t put them together in the same sentence. The reason is obvious : if adoption implies spontaneity and a choice that’s not made under duress, driving means make people do something unnatural because if it were natural people would adopt without any external intervention. Some may say that driving only means “create a breeded ground” but I don’t think that’s how companies see things : it would mean they don’t have any hold on the result and, as a result, they only try to make their best so things can happen instead of considering they have an obligation to produce results, what is not conceivable for most businesses. So driving adoptions means making people do unnatural things and such an approach explains how things are so difficult, why people don’t adopt or adopt reluctantly.

Is it a dead end ? Not at all. If both adoption and driving are necessary, we have to be cautions not to mistake what has to be driven and the final result.

To build strong online social networks, better focus on your offline networks

October 29, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Businesses begin to be more and more aware of social networks’ benefits. I’m, of course, talking about online social networks, a topic that’s been hot for several months. Talking about social networks for businesses often makes me think about two things :

- since the network logic has been know and used by many professionals and managers for years (even centuries), everybody seemed to be under panic when the social networks trend emerged. What the difference between both ? Can we imagine that networks could not be social ?

- the great transhumance toward social networks made people forget offline networks (ie in real life with visual and hearing contacts). Since internet was about to allow us to connect to thousands people without leaving our chair and screen, to generate networks in one clic, why should have we wasted our time with people who don’t understand what we’d like them to do, who ask questions and even have doubts.

This second point is what this post is about.

As surprising as it may be, one click self-generated networks, that work and produce great tangible results on their own, never existed nor worked. The only issue is that lots of people believed that, hence painful wakenings and a sudden questionning : how to make these networks work ? How to create and build them ? The same questions also works for communities…

When I’m asked to define what online social networks are and what are the benefits, I often say they allow to get rid of time and space constraints we face in our real and “physical” life when we need to deliver something, engage conversations with people we know or ask our contacts to identify people we don’t know and who can help. That implies we can rely on a “real” network, that actually works, and which results are only limited by its members ability to “materialize” it (have a view on people outside our level 1 contacts) and to find the time to organize it and use it.

Any network or community won’t be created by a tool, the latter only helping to materialize and fluidify. That’s also what says this report on social networks

“Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks,”

The conclusion is easy to draw : starting from a tool, as brilliant as it could be, to generate networks fails most of time. What should be done is to built real networks and communities in real life and then bring them online. Explaination : thinking that launching a technological project will prevent to work on issues like sense, teambuilding, membershif, the understanding (and even the definition) of a shared goal etc…is a mistake. On the contrary, it’s a preliminary work that has to be done before the launch of any online project. Of course, tools increase the power of what is done “IRL”, they serve as catalysts. They increase…but seldom create.

This is valid for businesses who aim at improving the value they draw from any kind of network, whether internal (with employees) or external (with clients, prospects, “people”). As the post concludes, it’s not one more communication chanel that has to be managed like any other, but a strategy has such that needs a new state of mind.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: community, membership, sense, sensemaking, social networks

Satisfaction Vs. Engagement

January 12, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I learned from an IPSOS study that’s focusing on employee’s satisfaction is unuseful, and that we’d better focus on their engagement instead. I won’t comment the whole document since you can find a good analysis here, but let me tell you a few conclusions I made.

I see some main topics :

- top-down culture is dead (or have to been killed )

- you have to valorize and give consideration to employees, and take them into account.

- need for transparency

- sense-driven management (sensemaking)

- trust in indivuduals

This change in focus will suppose deeper reflexions. Satisfaction depends on “global organization politics”, and while focusing on it we didn’t impact on its core : decision making, power, organization. Indivuals were only a subject.

This new focus implies we work on sensible topics and give more consideration and autonomy to employees : that’s to say to trust them and take them into account as individuals and not anymore as parts of a process.

Rethink management ? Adopt suitable tools ? Unavoidable.