One Problem with Online Communities
SteveIf you have not subscribed to Graph Jam yet I suggest you stop reading this post immediately, and head over there straight away. Graph Jam, a collection of normally amusing and occasionally devastatingly funny graphical interpretations of some of life's little struggles, usually provided a few moments of amusement to help you get through the day.
A few days ago, Graph Jam had a killer graph about online support forums, one that could be more broadly applied to any online community that organizations could create to further their objectives for candidate engagement, brand building, constituent outreach, or whatever. So first off, take a look at the graph and see if it resonates:
see more Funny Graphs
A biting and kind of true to life observation about many of the purported 'communities' that exist online today, be they for customer support or designed for other purposes. Communities, forums, fan pages, LinkedIn groups - it doesn't really matter what the platform is or the type of technology that underpins the community, if the exchanges of information and value become completely one sided, then you really don't have a real community by any definition. You have something, it just probably isn't something you envisioned when you set out down the path of crowdsourcing, community engagement, or whatever cool and trendy descriptors you attached to the effort.
I think the lesson here is more about commitment. If you create an environment, invite stakeholders of any sort to the party, and expect it to develop into a wondrous kumbayah Kool-Aid drinking festival of fun and value creation; you'd better be prepared to do the hard and time-consuming work of ensuring that the value creation and consumption is a little more equal than in the amusing pie chart depicted on Graph Jam.
Community as a term is flying around fast and furious these days. It probably is a good idea to check on yours to make sure it actually is a community, and not a 'I have the same issue too', bulletin board. Or even worse, a mailing list or contact database that you've just re-branded as a 'community.'
Reader Comments (3)
Hi Steve
I couldnt agree more that "community" is overused and moreover misunderstood in terms of talent and the talent acquisition space.
As you mentioned above it is fallacy to think that communities are for job seekers to sit around a virtual camp fire regaling stories of how wondrous the employer is that they are currently engaging with - THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN ;)
There are some very real commercial reasons why Tribepad our innovative end to end recruitment platform is built with a community bias and not unlike Facebook, the largest community in the world, we see the data produced from this as being where the real value lies.
Like Facebook with their targeted advertising for us to be able to serve the right jobs and content to job seekers and attract the best talent for our clients we need intelligence - the more "data" we have on that job seeker the more we can refine our algorithms to match them to their perfect role and other roles they hadn't considered. The more "data" we collect on how they are attracted from source of hire to time to hire, their skills, their locations and their networks on other platforms enables our clients to make decisions that save them time and money.
Most people are looking at the community concept from a pure front end user experience viewpoint but for us its about giving our clients the right intelligence to make real commercial decisions with concrete data backing those decisions up.
Lisa
CEO
Tribepad
Steve,
Agreed - the build it and they will come and it will run itself planning doesn't work. In the end, you want your community to support and help build your bottom line. It needs to be strategically part of your business plan and have appropriate people in leadership overseeing it with enough resources to keep it vibrant. Which all sounds like a lot of work. But all of that work pays off with the long tail. Because if you build real relationships with your customers, users, employees there is more forgiveness for mistakes and longer lasting loyalty.
As usual, great post!
Leanne Chase
Lisa - Thanks for sharing some insight on the real and important benefits that increased awareness and intelligence into the activities and preferences of job seekers can bring to organizations. I think you make some fantastic points about how this approach benefits both sides of the table. Thanks for sharing your approach here.
Leanne - Thanks Leanne - I appreciate that you mention that these efforts are generally quite a bit of hard work, a concept that can be easily forgotten in the 'build it and they will come' mindset. Thanks again for reading!