sociALCHEMY

Over on Web Guild (no relationship to Guildsmiths), Daya Baren wrote yesterday about a Gartner, Inc. finding that, “Many social software projects fail because IT managers wrongly believe that successful communities form spontaneously after social software tools are installed…“

If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

This knowledge has a long history, as does the understanding that the IT department is not the best place to initiate, design and lead the implementation of social media within an organization. Certainly, IT has a valuable and – still, for many technologies – essential role in the installation and management of software and connectivity. But social platforms are more dependent on participation and community creativity than on the design judgment of technical systems specialists.

If you build it wrong, they may come, get frustrated, leave, and never come back.

Reading this article (which goes on to provide some spot-on Gartner observations about how successful communities come to be), prompted me to recall what was probably the most expensive case of IT trying to lead an online social initiative that I’ve been associated with.

My client was, at the time and still is today, one of the world’s most powerful technology companies. They felt well-versed and state-of-the-art in all of the basic web practices except one – customer community. I was contracted to lead them to their first one. My role was defined as being on the business side, with a stark partition between me and my team and the technical side.

I’d recommended a community discussion platform with which I was quite familiar. My client hired another consulting firm to search for the best platform; they ended up choosing the same one. So, along with my recommendations that they “just leave it the way it came in the box,” that software interface was handed over the the technical team for – what I assumed – was a cosmetics job. They would wrap the discussion interface in company branding to make it match the rest of the redesigned web site.

Long after the supposed deadline, the new UI was unveiled and I was shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you – to find that several of the most essential features had simply been removed from the community platform. Things like navigation buttons, user customization options, tools that allowed users to get different views of the activity and flow of discussion. Meanwhile, the strategic marketing department to which I was reporting seemed to not notice that anything was missing.

IT at the table, but not at the head of the table

Long story, short, I called a meeting to warn of the certain negative reception that would result if the alpha was launched with the disabled UI. A representative from the technical side was then added to the team on the business side – to take direction from the business team – and the UI was returned to the shop for restoration of the original features.

My engagement ended soon after that, but my client company went on to adopt online community and other social practices at an accelerating rate, first externally and then internally. They learned that the successful knowledge sharing community grows out of the needs of its members, not out of the preferences of its system technicians.

With the proliferation of free and public domain social tools on the Web, there’s plenty of natural selection going on. Thousands of users will try out a tool, see if it fits their needs, then decide to keep it, drop it, or wait to see if its makers improve it. There’s no penalty for trying out these tools, if you’ve got a little time to devote to it. For many web-connected offices, the tools that make the cut may be introduced to serve social business purposes without even the awareness of IT. When workers discover that they can improve their own productivity through use of social media, it’s hard to go back to IT-limiting technologies.