10 Principals for Communities of Practice

The other day I spotted Bill Ives blog reporting on Stan Garfield‘s talk at KM World conference, which I thought was very interesting.

Stan is Community Evangelist, Consulting - Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and Author,  Implementing a Successful KM Programme.

Here are Stan’s ten principles for managing a Community of Practice:

1)    Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.

2)    Communities are different from organizations and teams.  People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.

3)    Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct. 

4)    Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community.  You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.

5)    Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.

6)    You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.

7)    Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.

8)    Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary.  Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.

9)    Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.

10)  Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members.  Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.

- Nicola Franklin

Product Placement

 Product placement will be allowed on UK TV from 28^th February 2011, OFCOM has confirmed.

Well, whilst this is hardly a surprise to all in the industry, it certainly does raise some interesting questions.

Firstly, will it make commercial TV unwatchable?  First guesses are that the product placement advertising will be just about acceptable – OFCOM restrictions require the products to have relevance and context to the programme.  This is likely to remove the most jarring and obtrusive product placements, however, those familiar with US TV may fear the worst.    To see quite how not to do product placement, check out Mac & Me, an ET rip-off involving an alien that needs Coca-Cola to survive and seeks refuge in McDonalds.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdvO0tmNjGo 

Secondly, and possibly more importantly for marketers, will product placement generate new ad revenue or simply cannibalise other channels?  Well, on this one, the jury’s out.  Whilst it is unlikely to affect PPC budgets, it is highly likely that TV ad budgets may simply be moved to product placement – ie. not generating additional revenue but potentially annoying customers.  Product placement currently generates 5% US ad revenue – I am highly sceptical that the UK will see anyway near such take-up...

- Tom Lakin

No objections?

The UAE government made, by local standards, a seismic shift in labour law on January 1^st 2011.  From January 1^st, foreign workers switching jobs will no longer need a no objection certificate (NOC) from former employers.  Humaid Bin Deemas, acting Director-General at the Ministry of Labour, announced that “Workers, skilled and unskilled, who end their job contracts legally and complete at least two years of service, will get a labour permit outright.”.  Previously all foreign workers were required to get a letter from their former employer that gave them ‘permission’ to go ahead and  take up another job.  If the employer chose not to issue the letter then the individual was banned from working for six months and would have to return to their country of origin. 

Flexible labour markets allow for the fluid movement of talent within an economy; providing flexibility for business and the freedom for individuals to build careers.  It demonstrates confidence in those that govern.  It is a wise decision to make in the middle of a global recession and the UAE government should be applauded.  It will make life much easier for residents choosing to move jobs and it will provide more certainty for employers when recruiting. 

- George Stothard  

Records Management or Information Governance?

Twitter came into its own again yesterday when I spotted a re-tweet from FoIManUK of a post from Peter Kurilecz (RAINbyte), with a link to an excellent report of the ARMA International conference in San Francisco in November 2010. 

“It’s not your parents’ records management anymore. Old-fashioned library services, full of retention schedules and version control, recede into the wallpaper. Now new media, hosted solutions, e-discovery, contextual analytics, cloud computing and more converge, transforming records management into information governance.”

Among the many questions being discussed at the conference, the report highlights:

• How can we build alliances with IT?
• How can we harmonize record retention schedules across many continents?
• How can we manage records in the cloud?
• How can we produce Facebook correspondence for e-discovery?
• How can we control derelict collaboration sites?

And there is also mention of “the threatening issue that almost no one mentions: long-term preservation of digital records”.

Overall the report’s conclusion is that traditional records management challenges aren’t getting any easier, while technology’s challenges are adding to the mix and have the potential to transform a records manager’s role.

- Nicola Franklin

Digital Marketing Recruitment

If I were a betting man (which, incidentally, I am not – I have many vices but betting is not one of them....), I would put my money on a few shake ups in digital recruitment this year.

Here are my predictions for 2011:

PPC & SEO  - Think there are still a lot of opportunities for intelligent search marketing in the UK.  Candidates with SEO or PPC will continue to have the pick of jobs with near endless agency or client side vacancies.

Ad Operations – Campaign management is key and the role Ad Ops/trafficking specialists play in this has long been underestimated.   Expect lots of opportunities for hands-on trafficking gurus in 2011.

Insight – Digital marketing is getting more and more targeted to reduce wastage and insight specialists will find their knowledge in much demand over the coming 12 months...

Mobile Marketers – With even my great aunt doing the weekly M&S shop on her iPad, this is officially no longer a niche channel.  Those with the experience, knowledge and passion will be snapped up.

Social media – I think we may begin saying goodbye to social media as a separate specific marketing tool and it will become an extension of digital marketing channels such as search.  Expect social media agencies to be snapped up by Media or PR agencies...

- Tom Lakin