Online Communities & The Living Enterprise

I spent a good part of the last year researching books that I’ve decided not to write. One of them had more titles than Lady Gaga has controversial moves. But I kind of liked “The Living Enterprise.”

The Living Enterprise looked at really big companies like IBM, SAP, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle to see how these companies are using social media, and how they are integrating, measuring and scaling social media programs into their everyday businesses.

Most of my research centered on IBM, SAP and Intuit and what I saw at each of these large and established companies surprised and impressed me. While each of these very large entities are highly active on the public platforms that get so much attention: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on, the really big action takes place in their hosted online communities.

Each of these three companies began by building communities for the most technical of their employees, partners and customers. It began small scale and the focus was on the customer’s needs rather than the hosting enterprise’s agenda. Each became the living heart of the conversation, of ideas, of news of resolving support issues. Te value to the company is that they were hosts to a place their customers increasingly could not live without.

The companies set rules of conduct, invested in hosting and community platforms. Each company soon discovered that the conversation had moved beyond their tech sectors, spilling in every possible direction, so they each built another community, and another, and another and they made it easy for members of one community to talk with another.

They became massive in memberships. IBM’s developerWorks is probably the grand daddy of all enterprise social networks. It has eight million members and is growing at the rate of 1000 per day. In all IBM has 20 million community network users.

These communities look and feel very much like the tools that you use and popular end user venues. But the talk is more seriously focused on the business at hand. You’re unlikely to every see a report of a celebrity sighting or a review of what was had for lunch.

But if you have a problem with a product, you’re likely to get accurate help in minutes rather than days. If you have an idea of how to make a product better, you can chat in public with a product developer. If you are a second tier player, competing with a Tier One, you can get recognition of your abilties on a community network faster than you could on, say Facebook.

Each of these companies have no problems measuring the return on their investments. Each says they are making revenue and profits, perhaps not a lot right now, but it is growing.

More than that, these communities are at the very heart of what is emerging as a new kind of corporation, one who uses community collaboration to blur the boundaries that have traditionally constrained companies, customers and partners.

The three groups are discovering they are on the same side, sharing the same goals and needs. When one member profits, so do others. When one is suffering so are others.

I see the new enterprise as a living enterprise and I see these communities as the pumping heart that has put life where it did not previously exist.