01-20-2011 06:30 AM - edited 03-17-2019 02:09 PM
I see over the past month this community has gotten a little stagnant - I'm sure largely due to the holidays and people being away from work. But I think it also highlights the importance of Community Management. For example - if Megan Conley hadn't been sending our Cisco team continual usage statistics on the site and friendly reminders to visit and contribute, I'm sure I wouldn't be typing this now. ESS is self-organizing, but only to an extent. I think you still need to have something / someone helping to provide some semblence of structure and to light the kindling. On one of my first Quad engagements, we spent a lot of time dealing with Community Management to help spur usage and adoption. We spend a lot of time seeding content, providing metrics, responding to posts/questions on the site itself, etc. Over time I think the critical mass will take over and it will be truly self-organizing - but until that point, it's good to have the training wheels and someone to give you a push.
Message was edited on April 28, 2013: Kelli Glass, Cisco Collaboration Community Moderator, modified this post as part of the community restructure. I moved the post, assigned a new category, and added tags for greater ease in filtering (no change to content).
01-20-2011 07:59 AM
Hi Chris,
The holidays always result in down traffic and participation to high tech sites and communities exactly for the reason you mention, Chris, that most people are not working and instead taking some well-deserved time off. And here ar Cisco, as you know, most of the company actually shuts down that last week of the year. So at the start of the year, I did nudge Megan (for those that reading this from outside of Cisco - I manage the overall community and Megan works for me and specifically focuses on the ESS space within the overall Collaboration Community) to restart her reminders and the metrics which we took a slight break due to other priorities before the holidays and then for the holidays themselves.
For longterm success, we need to move beyond prodding :-). I don't have multiple Megans to constantly remind all employee content contributors across the Collaboration Community (Cisco is a large company, there are many). Not a scalable model. As I update the strategic community plan for the next year, I'll be reaching out to you and other contributors inside Cisco for face-to-face meetings to ensure I gather your valuable input regarding employee participation (and other topics) but here are some initial thoughts on employee participation...
People may have the best intentions to participate in a community but until it becomes part of their job, baked into key business processes, part of their strategic plans, and rewarded/supported/prioritized by management then often those best intentions fall to the side as there simply is not enough time in the day.
So as we move forward that is what is on my mind related to this topic. You'll see the same points be put up on slides at community manager's conferences so I'm not saying anything too visionary here. Many community managers everywhere face the same challenges.
I think we've had some success in this area but have a ways to go. Look forward to working together to remove the training wheels.
Would love to hear others here -- do you agree? are there other best practices you can share? how have you gone about increasing employee participation?
Laura Douglas
Collaboration Community Manager
04-06-2011 10:27 AM
Laura/Chris,
I agree with both of you. As Chris mentioned, we've seen that adoption is one of the key items that new engagements are facing. Also, to Laura's point. I think if could centrilize or adopt one Collaboration tool (ESS). It'll help for community members to participate, visit, post, blog, etc mor often and potentially add it to their work cycle.
But, if we have several Collaboration Tools. We might see the same behaviour we're discussing here. I am working on how to socilize and increase adoption on Collaboration among teams in Cisco. And one of the first items we idenfied is that, which Collaboration tool we're going to suggest and create a campaing.
My 2 cents.
Jorge Briseno
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