CTC on Social Media & Collaboration

I'm at the CTC (collaboration conference) in Boston this week, where client KnowNow is exhibiting. There are tons of fabulous tracks and hallway conversations that focus around people's issues inside and outside the enterprise.

Examples include: globalization, innovation and collaboration in a networked age, creating a culture of collaboration, brain drain and youth culture, effective virtual meetings, and a discussion around 'virtual work.'

Linda Stone leads a session on Attention in an Always On World, The Burton Group's Mike Gotta drives a discussion on a comparative analysis between Microsoft and Lotus and Ross Mayfield has an interactive discussion on social software.

Issues across the board and reality checks are raised. A lot of time is spent inside the organization handling exceptions to process, not process itself. The moment process is put in place, something changes that impacts a department or group, which needs modificaton.

Someone references a Clay Shirky quote: "Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity." Also, that attribution is important and continues to be more important as sharing increases. You need to know what is said in an enterprise and by who, since this ties to regulatory compliance. Says Ross, "what is key is getting people over sharing control."

We talk about examples of where people do 'get over that shared control,' such as the IBM example of inverted pyramid of authorship.

By contributing to a 'database,' you benefit from it as does the rest of the community, i.e., contributing metatags and information to del.icio.us, flickr, and other community sites, you're giving value to a community but knowing that this value extends across a wider group.

But what about the need to differentiate in an online world where every day, there's more clutter, noise and sites popping up, since the barrier to entry is lower and is getting even lower every day. People worry about competition, even one who is first to market with a large networking news site that serves 10 million technology users.

When you own your own content, you need to continue to build and manage:

community
content
collaboration

and then lock people in to a conversation where they feel their contribution is valued. Ross pipes in, "one approach would be to share more control. Have a conversation with a community on how they can contribute while respecting copyright issues. Work out a creative commons license on the contributed content, which gives the community more control of authorship." Bottom line: hand over more sense of ownership.

And on advice: "don't anticipate what the community wants too soon." SocialText often does a beta pilot with a smaller group privately so they can get a feel for what the community wants and what form it should take. It's a good idea to try this out for 30-90 days before going public. Delay structure and constitution for as long as you can.

Tag: collaboration
Tag: CTC
Tag: collaboration strategies
Tag: social media