If you want to really understand how social media/tools are changing how we work, play, activate change and live, pick up Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And if you are seriously considering communities as part of your marketing strategy, Do Not Pass Go without reading this.

Here are some of my takeaways:

There are three essential pieces of a community, starting with purpose:

1. Why: what’s the the promise of the group/community? Why would anyone want to join or contribute? “Creating a promise that enough people believe in is the basic requirement. The promise creates the basic desire to participate. ” Note: in my experience this is where marketers usually spend too little time. Or, rarely challenge their own. assumptions.

2. How: this is where you figure out which tools will help people do what the community is all about. Note: too many companies are buying tools and then trying to make a community fit the tools. A recipe for disaster — or, at a minimum, enormous frustration.

3. Rules of the road: this the what Shirky calls the bargain: “If you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?”

People have always wanted to share and help one another. Pervasive, easy-to-use communications tools and ” the collapse of transaction costs makes it easier for people to get together — so much easier, in fact, that is changing the world.” “Social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones and websites, because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their dauly lives.”

Incentives for participating are not financial: Attention, the desire to see your work spread, the desire to help others and be helped.

Why some communities grow and others don’t: “They grow if enough people care about them, and die if they don’t.” (This goes back to getting the promise right.)

How did you do that?: communities where a group of people help one another get better at some share task or interest — called communities of practice — are especially pervasive and appealing. The basic question that can trigger a community of practice: “How did you do that?”

Not everyone needs to be passionate, participate a lot: in the old model we had to work hard to get people passionate enough to act, because acting was a lot of work. Today you can have a handful of highly-motivated people participating a lot — and “people who care a little participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate.”

A small number needed to get things started: “The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.” Tap into a small core of passionate people; don’t expect a lot of people to contribute at the get-go. Many are more comfortable adding to what someone else has started.

Next Wednesday afternoon, The AppGap, the blog we publish on the future of work that’s sponsored by Intuit’s QuickBase, will be hosting a webinar on how businesses are using Facebook to raise awareness, build buzz, gain customer insights, and increase sales.

The hour-long event will feature some of the stories and learnings that came out of the recent study conducted by AppGap contributor Jenny Ambrozek and her colleagues Victoria Axelrod and William Anderson in which they took a close look at how Facebook business group owners are putting the site to use for the good of their company.

Among those who participated in the study and will be appearing in the webinar: Beeline’s very own Francois Gossieaux. Francois started the Marketing 2.0 group on Facebook, a community that’s grown to more than 9,000 individuals since its launch, and will be sharing his observations from that experience as well as discussing communities in general.

Find out more and be sure to register for the event which will take place at 3 p.m. EDT.

This is my first post. Why haven’t I gotten on the blogging train before now? Maybe because there’s 100 million blogs out there already. Seemed like enough. Or because I’m doing something else. Curious about my own motivations and questions, I have become a student of Why People Blog.

Reason #1: Because it’s fun! Last week AdAge reported on the recent BlogHer and Compass Partners research pronouncing that blogging is now “mainstream” among women. What’s inspiring them?

• 65% do it for fun
• 60% to express themselves
• 40% to connect with others
• 34% blog as a personal diary
• 26% to give advice or educate

The reasons women read blogs provide good advice for marketers seeking to attract them:

1. Make it fun and entertaining (46% read because it’s fun and 26% for entertainment)
2. Provide useful information (41% are seeking information)
3. Make it timely (34% want to stay up to date on specific topics)

And as blogs morph into more participatory communities, we’ll see shifts in motivations, with a rise in giving and getting advice and accomplishing a common purpose.

More to come on Why People Blog and what makes good posts.

PS You know a trend has crested when there’s a book list on it. Check out these 10 books about blogs and blogging from The New York Review of Books.

Patti Anklam, a contributor to The AppGap and longtime observer, researcher and practitioner of collaboration, KM, and network analysis, weighs in on the Community 2.0 Conference workshop led by Beeline partner Francois with panelists Mark Yolton of SAP, Ed Moran of Deloitte, and Rachel Makool of eBay. The session’s starting point: some of the early learnings from the forthcoming 2008 Tribalization of Business Study that we’re producing in concert with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research.

Says Patti, in sharing her take on the initial findings: “…The good news is that what the study has found (and what many attendees at C2.0 are demonstrating) is that communities can be built with predictable success. We have been working in online communities long enough to understand the pitfalls and the success factors. Being in communities will be a way of life at work…”

And in closing: “The better (or perhaps best) news — and the parting message from this workshop is that once communities have been introduced into an organization, they are transformational (”game-changing”). They have a huge impact on the organization and offer new job roles and responsibilities, closer relationships, greater transparency, and a better work environment.”

Also be sure to catch her first post about the Community 2.0 Conference on The AppGap in which she discusses another workshop she attended on the design and architecture, both technical and social, of communities.

An interesting question that came up during our workshop (slides here) at the community 2.0 conference was whether CMO’s and their marketing departments are changing with the advent of successful customer communities.

The answer so far is unfortunately: no… While a majority of customer community initiatives seems to migrate towards marketing, they are doing so by accident – not by design. In fact we have seen cases where communities were transitioned under marketing, only to have marketing push back and have them end up with the CFO.

It makes sense for customer communities to end up under marketing – whether new product innovation communities, customer support communities or marketing communities. But they should come with a transformation of the CMO role and that of their marketing department – one in which they become the representative of the voice of the customer within the company instead of the brand builders or the sales support department.

Unfortunately, and in a majority of the cases that we surveyed as part of our study, that is not what is happening. In companies with large marketing budgets, community spending is too small to even make it on the radar screen of the CMO – who often manages the importance of programs and initiatives relative to marketing dollars spent on it. In many companies, the CMO does not have the mandate to represent the voice of the customer within the company – sometimes having no say on new product innovation and in most cases being completely detached from customer support. Yet when looking at companies like Zappos.com, you could argue that customer support is the new sales and marketing channel.

So where does that lead us? For those companies who are not transforming the role of the CMO and their marketing departments, many community activities will fail – as there is no connection between what customers do and expect in those communities and the internal business processes that can actually make things happen. In the long run, and because of the game-changing nature of successful communities, those marketing departments will become totally irrelevant to the company strategy.

I opened the Community 2.0 conference this morning with a few observations about what transpired so far. Personally I was left with the impression that we are facing a series of expectation gaps – many of which are related to language.

The first expectation gap happens between us, community managers, coordinators and facilitators, and corporate management. Much of that gap can be attributed to the “curse of knowledge” – which happens when your language, which is based on your knowledge, is not understood by others. Think about what we’re talking about – engagement, awareness, general marketing benefits, and customer sentiment – take that your CFO… No wonder that corporate management believes that we have a love affair with vague strategies and squishiness.

The second expectation gap is between us and the people who participate in our communities. Think about a successful community that you have participated in. What made it successful? Things like trust, ability to connect with peers, get help, get the right recommendations are probably things that come to mind. Yet as managers you are looking at success by measuring the growth of visitors, pageviews, awareness, etc.

The third expectation gap happens between the community managers and the business people whose business process those communities are supporting – customer support, new product innovation, new product development, etc. If only we could use the same language to evaluate what actually happens in those communities as it relates to those business processes, we would be much better off.

The last issue with language that struck me at the conference was how people make a distinction between B2B and B2C communities. Not too many people talked about B2E (employees) communities – even though they should be considered as low hanging fruit when it comes to leveraging communities to improve your business. More importantly – are any successful communities really B2B, B2C or B2E? Or are they P2P, C2B, C2C, E2E? It may sound like a subtle distinction, but by calling a community a B2C community you may risk to start developing bad behaviors – like running marketing campaigns within your community. That is a B to c activity after all – isn’t it?

This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

• Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
• “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
• “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
• While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
• Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money making model. In fact, if newspapers don’t downsize fixed operational costs like printing presses and distribution assets, they may never be able to make model in this new world.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

One interesting observation from the ongoing “2008 Tribalization of Business Study” is that while the state of communities has progressed by leaps and bounds since the last community 2.0 conference, the market is still very young with many people confused about what to do and what to expect.

One way of gauging this is by looking at what people found to be unexpected as part of their community efforts:

• Reach of Word of Mouth for free
• Knowledge about customers
• That our market really will tell us what they want — if we just ask
• Greater visibility
• Lots of active users
• Ideas generated by communities
• How happy customers are with the outreach

It is sort of funny that most people will setup communities to get to know more about their users, get ideas from the outside inside the company faster and increase word of mouth, just to name a few, and then get surprised when this actually happens.

Another unexpected consequence, this one potentially dangerous is “Advertising Revenue.” If the purpose of your community was not advertising, and so far no companies in the study have indicated that as a goal, then discovering advertising revenue as a by-product may potentially lead to spamming your community and eventual failure.

In my update on the 2008 Tribalization of Business study on business communities that we are doing with Deloitte and The Society for New Communications Research last week – I pointed out how some companies are totally misaligning their measurements of community effectiveness with their goals.

As you will see from the slides, many companies measure effectiveness by looking at page views and time spent on the site. Yet not one company listed ad revenue as a goal for the community – which is what page views and time spent on the site would be good for. Let’s assume that your goal is to have a support community – one in which people can help one another or get help from some your employees. If you could deliver the support in a way that never required people to come to your site, you would still achieve your goals. In fact, if you build your community so that people do not have to come to it, chances are that you will have more people participating in it. There are only so many destinations that a person will visit on a regular basis, and chances that your business community becomes one of them are fairly slim.

Another interesting wrong-headed metric-related finding from the study is that a majority of respondents found that “getting people to engage” was one of the biggest obstacles to making a community work. Now if you have a small community, chances are that you could get a fairly high engagement rate. The larger your community becomes, however, the more its profile will resemble that of large public communities – 1% of hardcore contributors, 10% of active users and 80-90% of lurkers. Now does that mean that the lurkers do not get value from your community? In the case of the customer support community, lurkers who do not contribute could still find the help they need and feel better about you than if they had not found it and also save you the cost of a call into the call center. So measuring community effectiveness by measuring engagement is just not a representative metric of community success.

Now the real issue with all this is that if you have a community development team who is being measured by those wrong-headed metrics, they will invariably develop bad behaviors in order to maximize these metrics. They could in fact develop community features that will stand in the way of success for your communities, or close down communities that are in fact doing really well.

If you missed it, there is a dynamic conversation on managing communities going on right now…Chris Brogan kicked it off and Nancy White wrote some interesting musings and also kept track of many of the other interesting links.

Here is the presentation with the preliminary results of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study (produced by Deloitte, Beeline Labs, and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)), which I presented at the SNCR New Communications Forum yesterday. The findings are very preliminary as the study is still in progress.

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If you are interested in more information about the study, or in participating in the study, please email me at francois [at] beelinelabs [dot] com.