I already wrote how dangerous it was to use community management for every kind of purpose, and that instead of seing communities everywhere (which need community managers), enterprises have to learn to recognize groups who only need a “simple” manager who’s doing his job right.
Using social platforms in the context of teamwork has a purpose : increase both individual and collective performance and I can’t imagine that a manager will let a community manager speak to his staff, start discussions or even try a grab a bit of their time. That’s not the purpose and, anyway, legitimity and competences related issues will quickly emerge. Exchanges, discussions, will be driven by people everyday’s work, by social routine, and in no way by marketing and communication established as a managent model.
On the other hand, there a cases when the purpose is to make a group emerge, convince them, make them aware of something… where community management is the right choice.
In the on case, a community manager, a “communication perso”, will be needed. In the other, it will be a manager (THE manager) who should has improved his practices, heading to what we could call management 2.0, social management or whatever you want. Reminding of the brillant speach of Andrew McAfee at the last enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and the discussions that followed, above all on twitter, I’ll suggest socio-collaborative management. Quite a bit longer but more meaningful, and does not sound “buzzy” than social. Anyway, it doesn’t matter since it’s nothing more than a manager with an improved toolbox (on both behavioral and technical sides).
So we need to know what’s the difference between community management and socio-collaborative management in order to make the right choices and apply the right model to each case. By the way, knowing how many people are offering community management services to businesses that are totally lost, it may be a good anti-quack weapon.
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Let’s be clear : communicating, explaining things, delivering a message and answering employee’s questions during a merger is about community manageamnt, your staff’s work is about socio-collabortive management and open innovation uses both.
Believe me or not, but it seems to me that the most common cause of failure for projets aiming at implementing a social platform is not that people did one or the other, but that they applied the methods that apply to one to the other…and vice-versa, for reasons like bad counsel, lack of understanding or fear of dealing with people day-to-day work.
