The number of ways that implementing an in-company community platform can make staff more productive is growing all the time. These are my top ten.

1. Get started fast. Collaboration software is intuitive. Learn a few basic rules about where to do what, and then be guided by what you would do in the real world. So users can get started fast.
2. Focus on the task. As less mental real estate is given to the application, more can be given to the task.
3. Ease of sharing. Users don’t have to wonder which form of communication suits the task best, or try to fit in with others’ working styles, as everyone is using the same toolset.
4. Valuing content over delivery. Ease-of-use means IT-savviness does not distort the perceived value of the  input, so people see ideas for what they are - and are more confident about submitting them.
5. Credit where it’s due. A more transparent platform means less chance of credit-stealing (claiming authorship for others’ work). When work processes and output are directed at the community, it is clear who has done what - which is better for the morale of those that actually do most of the work!
6. The power of the group. The impact of the single creative individual is important, but can be overstated. We are all creative, but mostly more so when we work closely with others.  Innovation works better when we have people to fire ideas off and be inspired by.
7. Chance encounters. The more users get a chance to decide what they need to follow, the more chance that good ideas are seen by the people most interested in them, not just by a pre-determined distribution list. That increases the chance that good ideas have productive consequences.
8. Retaining talent. One of the main reasons that talented people switch jobs is that they feel they don’t make a real difference where they are. It’s not just financial rewards that inspire creative people, but having their work generate tangible results.
9. Retaining knowledge. When key people are out of the office, or even have left the company, does the knowledge go with them? And who has access to that knowledge? The more resources are in a shared space, the more their expertise is kept live and can be absorbed and developed by others.
10. Fewer meetings. The saying “you can meet or work, but you can’t do both” has some truth in it! The group aspect of community communication reduces the need to meet - and of course also cuts across geographical and time-zone barriers.

People read blogs because they are interested in the thoughts, experiences and knowledge that a blogger has. The best blogs also entertain, too. But what they do not do is paid editorial advertising - that’s for the banner ads. When a blog writer gets caught accepting payment for positive product mentions, what follows is a PR disaster, all the worse because other bloggers feel that their world has been tainted.

That’s why TechCrunch quickly made a big deal of it this week when an intern of theirs got caught being rewarded with a laptop for a post: he got fired and all his posts got wiped immediately. No names were given, and reaction seems to be that TechCrunch’s responded well and maintained their credibility. A few bloggers though, traced the guy’s identity and wondered who was willing to pay him - it’s a known rule of the game that any interests must be declared. The unfortunate thing is that innocent startups had posts about them removed and may also come under suspicion of bribery, too!

If a positive blog post is worth getting, it is prominent enough to get some scrutiny too. If the writer gets paid, the truth will comes out, readers will naturally react in three ways:

1. Not to trust the writer again
2. To assume a company paying for positive mentions could not get them any other way
3. Not to trust such a company

This is something that has not really dawned on some European companies, who see blogging as a legitimate form of paid advertising - in fact, one Swiss social media marketing company, Trigami, bases its business on getting paid blogging coverage. It will eventually dawn on their customers, I think, that this is not what social media marketing really is. The fact that their business model is not big news in the blogosphere is probably simply because they are only doing it in German - if they start with English-language ones, wait for the storm! However, regardless of language, the basic rules of SMM - be open and helpful, and network for all you are worth - may mean hard work, but they are there for a reason!

Alex Williams at ReadWriteCloud just wrote an interesting post about social media and business, based on a new IDC survey stating that “57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week”. According to the survey “While marketers are the earliest and largest adopters of social media, these tools are now gaining deeper penetration into the enterprise with use by executive managers and IT.”

What Williams adds is that it is not just social computing: “if social computing represents the new business process then cloud computing is the delivery mechanism.” That’s a nice point - the two have developed in step. The cloud is group-friendly. It is much easier to maintain participation in a group when backing up or transferring data across hardware is not an issue, and sharing is helped hugely by platform independence. A newer phenomenon, being able to use whichever device is at hand including smartphones and netbooks, makes communication much more fluid, too.

However, another factor may be even more important in the development of social apps: the cloud makes it easier for users to switch, combine, and experiment. A few favourites apps of mine are Stixy, a kind of online cork board, Doodle, great for planning meetings and get-togethers, and Slideshare, for uploading and sharing presentations. But there are hundreds (or more) of useful cloud-based apps that can be used alongside the major application suites and even mashed together.

The result is a high rate of evolution of social apps, with winners offering the most useful features and the most intuitive interface. Application suites then have an incentive to get into the cloud, so they are in the same ecosystem and co-evolve.  These phenomena mean that the overriding limitation for users is not the platform, and not even what applications are available, but simply how clear they are about their group’s aims, processes, and how well they can select the features that fit them.

SWR3 is Germany’s favorite radio station, daily reaching 3.82 million people across the country. The program is accessible through FM, cable, the Astra satellite or web radio - so, theoretically, you can listen to your SWR3 everywhere there is internet. But that’s not all. The station also offers a social community to its listeners and fans, dubbed “SWR3land.de”, German for SWR3 country. Currently, there are 39139 members and 1246 groups online there.

Those groups are searchable by activity or by number of participants. Additionally, there are photos, forums, blogs, a chat and a studio webcam available to users. The groups are mostly topical, e.g. fan groups of certain shows and their hosts or numerous groups for lovers of cats, bbq or travel. Among the more unusual ones are one for singles, one to combat smoking and a continuous, user driven story about a character called Alfon Erbsengrill. This group actually is among the most active at the moment. It was started in June 2009 and already features 54 pages of forum posts, together making up one huge story - or fairy tale, as the original poster calls it.

This example shows the whole point of creating a social community and at the same time demonstrates what is needed for it to succeed: People need to be motivated to participate and fill the community with life - and thus be positively inclined towards the brand behind the community. Such a favorable opinion creates positive word-to-mouth advertising, or viral marketing, if you will.

Now, how to make this happen? Well, first of all the platform needs to be as open as possible, i.e. leave people room to express themselves and use the community in the way they want. Because who better to know which topics the users might be interested in than the users themselves? Nevertheless, there are certain to be some fail-safe, premier topics a company can create in order to seed activity in the community. In the case of a radio station these would obviously be fan groups of its signature shows, like SWR3’s “Wirby & Zeus” show for example. Reference the community group in your show, host “bring your own content” competitions, ask for listeners opinions and so on. Once the community gets under way, more groups will start to sprout and the users will “take over management” of the community content and activity.

What else is out there? The very popular KIIS-FM, from Los Angeles, also lets its listeners sign up online. The KIIS VIP club isn’t really a social community, though, more a straightforward means for marketing and marketing research. Users can earn points by participating in surveys, listening to the station and referring friends. Points can then be traded in for special prizes and promotions. In short, there isn’t much interactivity or user generated content. America’s most popular radio station, talk radio WABC from New York, offers a similar insider club, where people benefit from promotions and special alerts in exchange for their personal information. Additionally, WABC has an official fan site on Facebook, though only 1798 fans, which doesn’t even come close to the numbers of SWR3!

So, what can businesses learn from SWR3land.de? Well, certainly that it helps to have a positive and distinct brand to serve as a label for the community. But THE winning arguments for a community are its openness and the liberty of use it offers to users, as opposed to being “just” another marketing platform. People tend to notice this and are more inclined to participate if they feel that their efforts and opinions are genuinely appreciated. And that’s what viral marketing is all about. If people feel they are being coaxed into providing free advertisment or buying stuff, however, they won’t take part and the community won’t work.

Did you know that (depending which survey you read) between 25 and 54 per cent of the US companies block social networking sites such as Facebook at work. Eight per cent also fire employees for posting criticism of the company outside of work. That is one way to handle such problems, but in fact that is both wasting talent and squandering an important opportunity. The cause is misunderstanding that different generations work differently.

Companies are right to have concerns about how employees use work time and about activities that affect their brand. However, most of the time, the employee’s intention is not destructive - if it is, then there certainly is a need to act. But in the typical case the issue is not a breakdown in trust, poor work attitude or even inefficiency, but just different perceptions and habits. Young, highly social employees need to be thought of and treated differently.  There’s been quite a lot of research on this over the last year or two, particularly comparing “baby boomers” (now aged in their 40s to 60s) and generation Y,  aka “millennials” or the “net generation”. A company with a good mix of ages can gain from the strengths of both generations - but only with knowledge and careful management. Here are the key findings of the research:

What makes the generations different

• Generation Y like to share personal information and thoughts on social networking sites and make little distinction between company and personal stuff. Baby boomers  are more cautious.
• Generation Y often judge people’s abilities by their technical competence. For baby boomers, technical competence is more of an add-on.
• Baby boomers tend to perceive knowledge as a useful card to hold onto until needed - a private source of power. Millennials gain kudos by sharing it.
• For baby boomers, who had been brought up with a linear, teacher fronted learning style, knowledge is assessed by coherence and depth. Generation Y prefer to learn by selecting from a mass of information, and judged it more by relevance than coherence.
• Generation Y’ers are attracted to jobs by how interesting they are. Can they be creative, use their own technology, express themselves? Job-hopping is seen as normal. Baby boomers, on the other hand, are more likely to look at the overall employment package, and pay more attention to the promotion ladder.
• Generation Y are particularly intolerant of being told  “This is the way we do it. We’ve always done it this way” and like to experiment: new is good. For baby boomers, experimentation is what you do when the normal methods have been tried and found wanting.

Now a certain amount of this is simply differences that have characterised the generations for centuries. But there are deeper differences. Millennials have not learned about the world from books, but from the Internet. What they have been learning is changing year by year, requiring a different and more flexible attitude to knowledge.

Working together

The main thing is to value the different generations within the company so each learns from each other. How would that work in practice?

1. Safety vs. self-expression - employees need an outlet to share experiences and be creative but be aware of consequences for the company of careless online behaviour (they of course also need to understand and adhere to well deisgned policies).
2. Internet time is not downtime - many creative and younger employees use all kinds of resources for information. Imposing rigid rules about how to use the Internet at work will feel too restrictive and insulting, will stifle creativity and create resentment. If an employee wants to do a good job, they need the tools that suit them.
3. Balance different knowledge bases - wikis need to work alongside accumulated specialist knowledge in formal documents, and companies should not forget the institutional knowledge that senior employees have - which can be sorely missed when they leave.
4. Be transparent - being explicit about differences in work attitudes and openly seeking practices that make good use of all talent will motivate employees and increase their productivity and creativity.

The banking services branch of the Swiss Post, PostFinance, has recently launched “EventManager“, an educational game for kids and youths between 14 and 20. Its goal is to educate young people on how to be responsible consumers and manage their own finances. It’s designed along the latest didactic insights, conveys financial knowledge in an understandable way and is mainly meant to be used by teachers during class.

How does it work?
Students are asked to plan and run an event, real or fictional, using EventManager. In doing so, they develop knowledge and competencies related to running projects. Initially, you have to create your group or join an existing one. Then there are three different rounds of play: Budgeting, Financing, Investing. Each of these educational modules offers different clips for participants to watch, e.g. “account types“ or “my budget“. The idea is for students to work on these educational modules and clips and prepare for the event manager job. To give feedback and check on progress, there are five test questions to be answered afterwords. And then the actual game starts: Firstly, the event has to be planned by booking artists and providing infrastructure. Then the whole thing is run and, finally, the results of the job are analyzed and feedback is given.

I think that this is an interesting project, as it isn’t your typical one-size-fits-all social community.  Still, it shows the main ideas behind using social media for business purposes:

• interactivity; students budget, plan and run their own events, fictional or real
• entertainment; students are educated by guiding them through a game instead of just a textbook lesson
• benefit; educational software usually costs something while EventManager is free, making it easy to use for teachers
• viral; of course, PostFinance’s logo is there, but the game itself does not bear the typical hallmarks of a marketing campaign, giving credence to PostFinance’s claim of primarily wanting to educate young people on consumption and money.

What’s your take? Please comment here or send me a tweet.

Swiss energy and energy service company Alpiq has just launched a community-based website at www.immergenugstrom.ch (immer genug Strom means “always enough electrical current”), and at first glance this is a really nice initiative. There is a forum, a TV channel, surveys and lots of content. Quite a big move for a company of this kind in Switzerland, or at least at first glance. But, being Swiss, it is also a bit conservative, and actually not as social as it looks. So the good news is that it is a first, here; the bad news that it’s not all there and others will do it better, or maybe not at all if it doesn’t work!

What is nice about the site? For one thing, the design is nice and the separation into different content and activities is good. For another, there is lots of content, e.g. lots of videos to see on the “TV” link. So what doesn’t work? Well, the problem is that it is not a full-on social site. The “forum” section is not fully-featured, much more like the comments list on a blog site. There are four “threads” — basically just a paragraph with comments, and no user-generated threads. On what looks like a community video page, the videos are from their four in-house “Strom Scouts”. The TV page is a page full of short videos and clips, with no live content. They videos are all good for a job, but there is no shared comment feature — the “comment” button leads to a normal “contact us” page with no mention of moderation or what would be done with the comment. The Q&A section is a very nice FAQ page, but again with nothing user-generated.

Now, I suspect the half measures are partly because it’s a trial run, and partly because this is a very technical area so Alpiq are probably wondering about the role of user-generated content. But its attractive content and one or two real social features are more than offset by the lack of full social media tools that will get users generating content — and energy is a topic that positively invites this content. If it does not come from users, you end up doing it all yourself and not getting their active engagement, so where is the real point? I think this site will end up in disappointment for Alpiq, which would be a pity as it is in some sense in the right direction. However, what bothers me most is that other utilities and service providers may look at this venture as an example for social media in this part of the world and draw completely the wrong conclusions. There is little doubt now that social media works, but it has to be done in a wholeheartedly social way.

So why did it turn out like this? Overall it looks like it was done and driven by IT departments with some oversight from Marcom and the - financial - blessing from management, plus one staged video clip done by the CEO. The results show the shortcomings of this compartmentalized approach. Real success depends on a business-centred planning approach. To do social media well you need to have sales, marketing, operational, and often HR and other departments involved, doing excellent planning that cuts across the departments. Not something where IT companies or even PR companies excel, as they both miss important parts — and may well not even have noticed the site’s deficiencies.

After one month of effort, we finally finished the Chinese version of the e-book and set up the e-book Chinese website, embedded with the most popular Chinese payment platform, Alipay. As of July 6 AliPay had more than 200 million users and a daily transaction volume exceeding RMB700 million (around CHF100 million), through more than 4,000,000 daily transactions. So we decided to use Alipay instead of Paypal in our e-book Chinese website.

I have started the promotion this week using many different approaches. Chinese internet users get used to keeping 2 or 3 different IM tools on at the same time, like myself — I keep QQ, MSN, and Skype on when I am online. So I used IM tools to promote our e-book. First I updated my QQ/MSN/Skype signature with “This is my first e-book I have translated, and please go to our e-book website to take a look. If you can help me promote it, I will appreciate it”, of course in Chinese. Then I sent the message to all of my contacts with the same content, informing some guys who are not always online. I have 200+ contacts at QQ and 100+ contacts at MSN, it’s already a good base, if some of them help me promote it that would be great. I also used QQ or MSN and posted some messages in group talks, which may have bigger influence.

I wrote some emails to Chinese general portals, tech portals, and specific IT or ICT portals, asking them to take a look at the e-book website and see if they are interested in promoting the e-book or not. Some bloggers and tech events have a big influence on the public opinion. It is definitely worthwhile sending them emails as well. Often they protect their e-mail inboxes from spammers and you need to subscribe first before being able to contact them.

Social media networks are actually a very important way to do promotions nowadays. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are a very popular way in China to deliver information. I wrote some posts in the most popular BBSs in China, such as MOP.com and Tianya.cn to talk about our e-book. Maybe I still need to find more professional BBSs related to IT or ICT, which are more targeted. Social Network Services (SNS) started to boom in China since 2006, I set up some group sites in Kaixin001, 51.com, Myspace.cn and Weaklink, which are similiar to our Chinese e-book website. Since Facebook and Twitter are disabled in China, I prefer using local stuff, naturally.

Since 2006, Chinese Social Network Sites have started to boom. After Myspace and Facebook became more and more successful in US and Europe, some Chinese Social Network Sites started to imitate the idea and gained momentum over the last several years, such as Xiaonei and Kaixin001. US is the origin of Social Network Site, and some of them also want to take market share in Chinese market. However, we can witness the fact that although Facebook recently celebrated 200 million active users, only 300,000 of those users are in China (only about 0.1% of Internet users in China). I’d like to talk about two most popular Social Network Sites in China nowadays, Xiaonei and Kaixin001.

Xiaonei, meaning “inside the campus”, has 40 million members already, and most of them are students. Actually, Xiaonei is known as “Facebook clone”, as it mimics Facebook in many ways. So why is Xiaonei much more successful than Facebook in China? It’s the issue of localization. When Facebook had a Chinese version, many users complained that the translations lacked accuracy. So when coming across Facebook’s apparent obliviousness to the Chinese language, many users got turned off. In a word, Facebook doesn’t understand Chinese culture. They thought other countries and cultures would adjust to US style. Xiaonei is more like a combination of blog and social interaction. It inherited the alumni website phenomenon which was very popular around seven years ago in China, by narrowing down Facebook’s usual targets to students. The interface is quite well designed. Clean and clear color with user-friendly format. Xiaonei is actually doing a good job as a copycat Social Network Site.

Kaixin001 (”Kaixin” means happy in Chinese) is another social media network with a  big focus on online games. It targets white collar workers. “Growing vegetables”, “snatching parking lots” and “friends for sale” are the most popular game applications of Kaixin001, and some people (called Kaixiners hereafter) are crazy about these games. This could be the most important reason why Kaixin001 can realize “viral marketing” among many companies. It’s not very good if you are too close to your superior or a female colleague in the company (in China, at least), but it’s OK to play Kaixin001 with them. Many white collar workers keep Kaixin001 pages open during work. This might explain why Kaixin001 can surpass Xiaonei in traffic: its white collar strategy does work.

Someone says Xiaonei imitates the idea of campus-oriented and real-name registration from Facebook, while Kaixin001 imitates game applications from Facebook. None of them imitate the whole thing. So actually if you want to be successful, you don’t have to be a lot better than Facebook, you only need to excel in one area to achieve success. Some Chinese Social Network Sites did some imitation and localization, and achieved some success as well. However, if they still want to beat the competitors and be more successful, they need to find their own path. Some large Chinese Social Network Sites have started to launch open API platforms one after another, I think it’s a good start.

This is a map of the world that demonstrates the most popular social networks by country. You can see at a glance that Facebook is the dominant social media in North America and Europe. However, as we mentioned previously, the largest social media forum all over the world is actually Tencent QQ in China (generally referred to as QQ).

QQ is definitely the most popular instant messaging network in China with 300 million users. However, QQ is not a pure social networking websites, it’s a “complex”, which includes IM (Instant Messaging), online gaming, online music, social networking services, etc., and that makes QQ different from other social networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace, or Chinese local SNS websites like Xiaonei, Kaixin, etc. So you might question whether it should really count in this table.

What is clear, though, is how successful it has become. QQ has its own IM base. At the beginning, it was just a simple IM tool with no difference from others (Picq, Ricq, Ticq(TQ), Qicq, Micq, PCicq, Oicq, OMMO, who all imitated ICQ’s idea and were published in China in 1999). But why did only QQ succeed while the others all failed? One of reason is QQ had a very friendly user interface from the very beginning, that’s why QQ has been able to retain the same style from the start. Later on, QQ integrated multiple mobile communication methods, enabling users to send messages to mobile phone users through the platform. QQ also offers several other services such as QQ.com (news portals), QQ Game (online gaming), QQ Show (virtual image design system), Paipai.com (e-commercial transaction platform), and QZone (social networking service). So if we want to compare QQ with other social networking websites, we can only count in QZone, maybe as well as QQ Xiaoyou, launched in January 2009, which targets students in high schools and universities.

So actually QQ is a special case. The service first built a huge base of users, then they tried to make use of this base to promote their social networking service, a different approach to those original social networking websites. A ranking list of Chinese SNS Websites from CR-Nielsen in December, 2008 shows: 51.com, Xiaonei.com, Chinaren.com, Kaixin001.com, Myspace.cn, 5460.net, Wangyou.com, Ipart.cn, 360quan.com, and Cyworld.com.cn. QQ (or Qzone) is not included in the top ten SNS websites in China. I agree more with this viewpoint, that QQ is more like a combined IM tool. Tencent have declared many times that in the future they will focus more on the idea “community-based instant messaging”, which could lead to their future success. All in all, social networking has just started in China!