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Originally published at OnCollabNet
Many a project has gone down in flames because they failed to take the time to really think through a communication plan that educated their stakeholders of the organizational value of their project. Communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your community. Without communicating your project or program’s benefits and successes, users and stakeholders alike won’t be aware of new offerings, program progress, or the goals and direction of your project.
“The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.”
–Sam Walton
The first step in any Communication Plan is identifying your stakeholders. This is a key step that is often overlooked. Many projects and programs focus only on keeping users informed about community news, however its important to look outside your active community members and find the stakeholders that are most important to your continued success. This may include management, partners, or even other projects and programs only tangentially related to yours. Putting together this list comes first and will help you not only identify key players but also will help you discover the correct communication channel to reach them.
I recently stumbled across a great post called Communities Manifesto by Stan Garfield that I highly recommend. In his post Mr. Garfield lays out 10 principals that define community and also has suggestions for helping them grow and mature.
What communities are not …
Two of his principals in particular caught my attention because I’m wrestling with how to explain the basics of community to a company that draws a distinction between where they are now and where they want to go, so these two really jumped out at me.
- Communities are not teams
- Communities are not websites
These two principles nicely articulate what a community is not and sometimes that’s more helpful and descriptive than trying to state exactly what they are. Communities are NOT some nebulous team to manage or a website to maintain, communities are people.
An article posted recently by Glyn Moody in ComputerWorldUK announced that email was dying. It’s an interesting assertion (which is why it shows up on my Interesting page), but one that I don’t agree with. Email is still going strong as far as I can tell. I get upwards of 100+ email a day with fewer than 1 junk message on average making it past my filters. And I don’t even classify myself as a power email user! Some people I know get at least double that volume and spend half their workday reading and responding to email. Again, this doesn’t sound like email is dying. What it does sound like is that email is broken or better yet our email habits are broken.
Email in most corporate environments has degenerated into a CYA system that sucks volumes of time and offers less and less value in the face of competition like IM or Facebook. In the golden age of handwritten notes writers tended to craft very thoughtful (more…)
Having the ability to combine data silos and reduce their contents to a single search box is the Holy Grail of computing, and like the Holy Grail it remains allusive. Google has made huge progress in integrating data from multiple sources for Internet users, however, Google can’t get behind company firewalls and it can only index what it can find. This means only a fraction of the data relevant to you has been indexed by Google or the like. The rest is locked in company databases and storage systems safe and sound from the prying eyes of YOU and Google. This means you still open your email client to search emails. You still go to the internal company blog to find that important message from HR. There is no Holy Grail of Integration that pulls everything together to make it easy for you to find and use or reuse. Or is there? (more…)
