NewsGator Communities - Yes, We Use Them Every Day

 Communities and all that they entail have been fiercely top of mind for me lately.    While I have personally been involved in online communities since the early 1990s, it is my work related to NewsGator Communities, a core component of our social computing suite Social Sites, that has been consuming a majority of my waking work moments recently.

This increased fervor is partially related to my involvement with a couple of NewsGator sponsored extranets.  One of those extranets is the NewsGator Enterprise Social Computing Alliance, a private community of industry thought leaders and consultants.  I launched this initiative in the past two weeks and now find myself pondering all of those questions that delight and perplex community leaders.    By the way, if you are interested in becoming a member of the alliance, please reach out via your favorite social media mechanism.  Comment on this blog, DM me on Twitter (@karyngerman) or reach out via LinkedIn or Facebook (I'm pretty easy to find).

I have found a plethora of great resources related to building and promoting communities and that is certainly not surprising.  Online or virtual communities have been around for a very long time - remember Bulletin Boards and USENet?  Probably not, if you are a millennial.   But, the concepts have a good 20-year history and Web 2.0 has just shone a brighter light on the social nature of collaborative groups. 

The adoption and growth of communities behind the firewall at NewsGator has been a great learning experience. The diversity of our communities is impressive and we have been able to use our experiences to offer coaching to our customers.  Obviously, we don't share all use cases and participation characteristics, but the commonalities amongst all organizations are more pervasive that we would have thought.  Here are some of the types of communities we have built:

• Broad industry topics.  Example: Social Computing.    These communities tend to have a high number of members and are used for research and to keep interested parties abreast of industry news.  The usage is very steady and tends to build up an impressive library of content via RSS aggregation and social bookmarking.

• Department.  Examples: Marketing, Product Management.  These communities are surprisingly cross-departmental, despite the category.  Discussions are used heavily as is the sharing of relevant documents.

• Customer.  Examples:  Customer X - I have to show decorum on this one.  We create communities for every customer (there are a LOT of them) and these are some of the most heavily used communities within the company.  Discussions are used for all customer interactions and document sharing is important.  We also integrate RSS feeds from other CRM systems, as well as project management components from other team sites.

• Event: Examples:  Enterprise 2.0, NewsGator Product Advisory Council.  As expected, these communities peak as event preparation heats up, but are usually kept around for archival purposes. 

• Very short term project: Example: Social Computing ROI.  This community was a really cool example of using social collaboration for a "quick hit".  Our CEO was doing research for a speaking engagement and he encouraged us to share articles via bookmarking.  This is exactly the notion of collective intelligence and there is the nice side benefit in that contributors see a direct correlation to their efforts.

• Social:  Examples: Fitness, Philanthropy 2.0.  As in the consumer world, these types of communities tend to center around discussions as a way to build relationships amongst members.

• Functional:  Examples: Sales "Tidbits".   OK, the community is actually called Kibbles and Bits, because we have a sense of humor.  This is a community for collecting articles and resources that sales can share with customers to help them build business cases related to enterprise 2.0.

Would love to hear about your enterprise community experience!