Embracing the "Groundswell"

The "social web" enables smart companies to engage in conversations at any scale with their customers, from product support to "ideation" that leads to new products, features and more efficient operations. Companies ignore the reality of social computing at their peril; new and evolving web technologies make it increasingly easy for sufficiently-motivated customers to spontaneously generate and maintain communities around a company's products and services in order to offer mutual support, accolades, but also to air grievances they feel those companies are ignoring.

Smart, proactive companies understand that committing themselves to maintaining healthy community-based relationship with their customers is not only the right thing to do, but is essential in this age of the digital native.

Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff discussed this reality in their 2008 book groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies, the culmination of their research since 2006 on role that social computing plays in the enterprise. groundswell (Harvard Business Press) contains many rich case studies illustrating how companies have successfully applied social web strategies to foster communities internally and especially with their customers.

One thing that impresses me about groundswell is that it recognizes that companies must have a wide variety of "critical conversations" (to paraphrase Peter Block) with their customers, and that there is an equally diverse palette of technologies for implementing these conversations. Here is a sample of the social technologies --- Li and Bernoff call them "strategies" --- that they examine in detail:

Ambassador programs; Blogs; Brand monitoring; Community (ideas); Community (private); Community (public); Crowd-sourcing; Discussion forums; Q & A; Ratings and reviews; Social networking sites; User-generated videos; Voting; Wikis; Widgets;

This is a great book targeted at decision makers who need to understand the rich set of relationships they must establish with their customers, and how to apply social computing tools to maintain those relationships.

The Care and Feeding of (online) Communities

I love the topic of "communities": how to build them, how to maintain them, and understanding the critical factors that determine their success or failure. It's fascinating to me to discover why many ad hoc, unplanned communities succeed while so many more intentional communities fail. The answers are in the common, essential elements that successful communities embody, often organically, and which failing communities neglect.

A colleague recently asked for a short list of recommendations for resources on "community." Here are my top picks:

1. A great "pure" book on building community -- in general, not specifically online -- is Peter Block's Community: The Structure of Belonging. Block's book focuses on the sorts of critical conversations that must happen for communities to happen. It is a "bible" for community organizing, etc.

2.Perhaps the best, ready-to-apply overview I have seen is Guy Kawasaki's How to Change the World: The Art of Creating a Community which (like much of Kawasaki's material) is based on insights dating back to his days as The "Software Evangelist" on the original Macintosh project. His points are nicely mapped onto non-SW and even non-Web communities.

3.The site CommunitySpark.com regularly provides excellent advice. I've followed it for more than a year and have found it to have very good articles, discussions and podcasts on online community construction and maintenance, including very practical articles on dealing with trouble-makers, inciting conversation, etc. I like it because it puts into practice many concepts I've seen in the Block book, etc.

4.Finally, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Church is full of proven advice on community building from a spiritual perspective, 100% in synch with the practical advice provided by the resources above. Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA grew from nothing into one of the largest and most successful evangelical congregations in the USA based on these principles.

A little about me...

"For the record," here is a little about me:

I have spent many years studying the unique social, legal, and technical problems that arise when managing and disseminating information in the digital environment. In my role as a principle investigator on several projects at HP Labs, I have focused on the policy-based management and personalization of distributed, heterogeneous digital object repositories and content processing architectures. Most recently I was co-PI on Fractal, research focused on delivering a platform for content-centered collaboration spaces "in the cloud." Before joining HP Labs in January 2000 I was the architect of Copyright Direct (tm), the first real-time, Internet-based service to fully automate the complex copyright permissions process for a variety of media types.

Since 1998 I have been awarded multiple US patents for digital rights management (DRM) and information security technologies; numerous related patents are pending. have been an active participant in a number of international metadata and rights management standards efforts and currently serves on the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) advisory committee, the DSpace Architectural Review committee, the Handle System Technical Review committee and the Global Handle System Advisory Committee. In early 2007 I was elected to the board of directors of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). In the past I have served on the Industry Working Group for Digital Copyright Submissions for the U.S. Copyright Office, the OASIS Rights Language Technical Committee, and the W3C Digital Rights Management Program Committee. I was a charter editorial board member of IEEE Security and Privacy magazine.

From 1997-1999, I was VP of Technology Strategy and a co-founder of Yankee Rights Management. From 1995-1997, I was VP of Product & Technology Strategy for NetRights, LLC, a company I co-founded in 1995 to commercially deploy his research in technologies for copyright management in the digital, networked environment. NetRights was sold in 1997 to Digimarc Corporation (DMRC), a leading provider of digital image watermarking technologies. From 1984-1992 I was a systems architect and project leader for Digital Equipment Corporation.

I hold a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College (1997), an M.Eng.(EE) from Cornell University (1989), and a BSEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1984).

Open for Business!

Prompted by the changing climate in corporate research, I am looking for new opportunities and especially collaborations. "Bitwacker" is my new public home!