Read an Excerpt
Design to Thrive
Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last
By Tharon W. Howard
MORGAN KAUFMANN PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Company
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-08-095720-3
Chapter One
Why Design to Thrive?
Why?
BUZZ—WHY SHOULD YOU BE INTERESTED?
Social networks and online communities are very much in the popular consciousness these days. Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg. com, Yahoo! groups—everywhere you look on the Net, there are new "communities" or social spaces popping up, clamoring for your attention. Forrester Research reported that four out of five online adults visited a social media site at least once a month in 2009. Second Life, a popular three-dimensional social network, reported that it had over 14 million registered users in June 2008, users who completed $19 million in "Linden dollar" transactions during the month of May 2008. By April of 2009, Second Life's total transactions had grown to $27 million Linden dollars.
Obviously, social networks and online communities are big business—or at least the successful ones are. Facebook, which was started by 20-year-old Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg as a means for college students to keep up with the dating games among friends, sold Microsoft a 1.6% interest in the company for $240 million. This kind of rags-to-riches story has become a meme with social networks and has garnered a lot of attention in the popular press. As a result, it has also gotten the attention of many young entrepreneurs, marketing directors, PR specialists, and Web consultants—all of whom are seeking to cash in on the Web 2.0 revolution.
The problem is that while online communities are extraordinarily powerful and useful, the rags-to-riches mythology that surrounds many of them belies the tremendous amount of work and rigorous thinking that goes into their design. This has resulted in what I like to call the "field of dreams" approach to designing social networks and electronic communities. The attitude here is "if you build it, they will come." That may have worked for Kevin Costner and baseball fields in Hollywood's version of an Iowa cornfield, but it doesn't ensure success when you're designing the architecture for an online community. As Carl Zetie, formerly of Forrester Research and now a senior marketing strategist for a major technology company, points out here, we may be facing a situation like the dot-com bubble of 2001:
I'm baffled to be receiving invitations from numerous brand new sites who all seem to think they have identified some unique niche in the market. The worst of them are "targeted at professionals" (oooh, good thing nobody else thought of that!), the best have some unique aspect that can be easily imitated if it catches on. It's a profound mystery to me why anybody or their V[enture] C[apitalist] backer thinks they can jump into the Social Network game at this point without some radically better idea, and it's oddly reminiscent of the late stages of the Dotcom bubble when every VC seemed to think that their portfolio was incomplete without an online medical site. What happened to the good old days of VCs who would dismiss these things with a curt "that's not a business plan, it's a feature"? [7], personal e-mail
You can avoid the problems Zetie describes. And you can avoid the consequences associated with building a failed internal social network or online community for your own organization. Whatever background you come from (Web designer or developer, information architect, content manager, usability or user-experience specialist, PR, or marketing professional), this book will help you build successful and sustainable social networks and online communities.
WHAT EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT ME
I've tried to take an approach in this book that shares both my successes and my failures building these online communities and networks for more than 20 years now. My experience with online communities goes all the way back to the "bad old BITNET days" when e-mail distribution lists were all the rage. Back then as a graduate student in the 1980s, I had the opportunity to work in a natural language processing laboratory at Purdue University where a team of computational linguists were working with industry professionals across the country to try to figure out ways to make computers understand human communication.
Of course, despite the best efforts of natural language processing professionals, we still haven't figured out how to talk to our computers and get intelligible answers the way that Captain Kirk or Commander Spock could talk to computers on the TV show Star Trek. Still, what I learned from my experiences watching those early efforts to smash geographical and temporal barriers to online collaboration was that although we couldn't talk to the computers, we absolutely could use computers to transform the ways we talked to each other. I discovered the power of online communities through those e-mail lists and anonymous FTP sites. I became fascinated with the impact, even then, that these early social tools were having on the ways that knowledge was being made among academics and researchers on the one hand and revolutionizing business practices on the other. I recognized that, as Clay Shirky so aptly put it, "Whenever you improve a group's ability to communicate internally, you change the things that it is capable of" (171).
As an educator, I realized that I needed to start preparing my students to work in a radically different world than I had been trained for. I realized that my students were soon going to be working on cross-functional teams solving business and industry problems for multinational corporations. So in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I began experimenting with like-minded colleagues at universities in France, Germany, Japan, and Spain, where we would connect our students in virtual teams and have them work on solving real-world business problems. These pre-worldwide Web international exchanges gave students who had never experienced any cultures beyond those you could find in the cornfields surrounding West Lafayette, Indiana, an opportunity to have something like a study-abroad experience without having to give up a whole semester and paying the travel expense to do so.
During this period, I also found colleagues in industry who were willing to form academic-industry partnerships that allowed students to use online communities and social networking tools to collaborate with corporate professionals on real research projects—projects that were important to the organization but that the company was forced to abandon for some reason.
For example, during the mid-1990s my students in South Carolina collaborated with Time Warner's team of New Media Editors in New York. At the time, women didn't feel compelled to connect to the Internet and were an underserved market on the Web. As a result, the students conducted usability testing research and wrote recommendation reports aimed at helping Time Warner better understand how to meet the needs of women through a portal called "Pathfinder," which the company was launching as an experiment in online publishing. Everyone benefited from these experiences—the companies benefited from the time they invested in the students' education and the students developed hands-on experience with solving problems in online environments.
Not only did the students learn from these "service learning" projects, but I personally gained invaluable experience building social collaboration spaces. In addition to learning how to build "safe" spaces where my students would and could collaborate with other students and/or industry professionals, I also learned to design spaces where my colleagues and I could meet in order to plan the work that the students would do. In these groups, my colleagues from industry and education began talking about our shared passion for understanding what makes for successful online collaborative projects, and I got a reputation for being able to build successful communities. As a result, I began to consult on projects where managers recognized that—if they could figure out how to design them effectively—they could also profit from online communities and social networks the way my students were benefitting.
FIVE TYPES OF ONLINE GROUPS CLIENTS SEEK
What I've discovered through my consulting work is that my clients and volunteer projects tend to fall in five groups, and it's these five groups upon which I base most of the experiences I share in this book.
Internal project and professional development teams
In the first group, there are clients who want to build internal groups of project teams or departments in order to promote collaboration and professional development. For example, the manager of an end-user support department recently contacted me. She wanted to connect all the information product developers who create user-support manuals and training materials for the mainframe computer software that her company sells. Her staff members were all busy professionals assigned to work on different product teams and were located at different sites throughout the $1.6 billion corporation, so they rarely had time to meet, socialize, and share ideas as a department. She wanted to have her staff meet online in order to share new ideas and techniques. She was concerned that her department was still cranking out the same old print-based documentation they had been writing for the past 20 years (which is why I'm not using her name) and she wanted her people to start considering alternative distribution media such as video tutorials, wikis. She thought that maybe, by pulling her folks together into an online community, they could support each other and think creatively about ways to enhance the ways they deliver user support and training to their customers.
Communities of practice
The second type of social group with whom I have worked extensively involved professionals working for lots of different companies who come together in order to enhance what Etienne Wenger calls their "community of practice." These groups are primarily made of practitioners in a field or profession who are passionate about the work that they do. For example, one of the online communities I've successfully maintained since 1993 is made up of professionals in the usability and user experience design field who—even though they work for competing companies—come together to help each other better understand the best practices and latest techniques being used in that community of practice.
Networks across disciplinary boundaries
The third type of social groups with whom I've worked have been large-scale social networks where people were working across disciplinary and functional boundaries in order to share information. For example, I worked with the Breadloaf Rural Teacher Network (BLRTN) where middle school and high school teachers in rural states such as Vermont, Alaska, New Mexico, and South Carolina could find other teaching professionals and collaborate. Despite differences in the grades they teach or their disciplines, BLRTN teachers are able to find support from colleagues who also have the same educational "dirt under their fingernails" and can sustain their peers.
Diane Waff, a member of BLRTN, describes her experience this way:
Moving out from the isolation of the classroom to the shelter of inquiry communities that provide safe spaces for real dialog, the sharing of stories, relationships with colleagues, and reflection helped me to develop a critical reflective stance with regard to my own teaching and school reform efforts. [3], 70-71
Similarly, I also worked with an organization that had 35,000 employees with different job titles, different responsibilities, different skill sets, and different educational backgrounds who nevertheless needed to share information across those boundaries in order to help the organization achieve its goals. Like the BLRTN network, a primary goal of these types of clients is their interest in retaining employees by providing them with the social support of peers.
Brand communities and user group communities
The fourth group with whom I've worked are either public relations and marketing specialists or user support professionals who are caught up in the buzz about social networking and what are often called "brand communities." They see the success that Apple or Adobe Systems has had at building a loyal group of customers who are so passionate about their experience with these companies' products that they want to share their experiences with other customers. Typically, these clients end up wanting to build online "user group" communities where their customers can go to share ideas about ways to use their products. These clients hope that these communities will reduce their customer support costs by getting users to support each other and that they will build greater customer loyalty.
Gaming communities
The last group that I've studied closely and learned a great deal from may, at first, strike some as odd. However, my experiences with online gaming communities have actually provided some of the best techniques for designing strong, sustainable communities that I've found. Indeed, as James Paul Gee has also argued in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, I discovered that the problem-solving behaviors that gamers use translate perfectly into strategies that both educators and business professionals can leverage.
This is particularly the case in what are called "Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games" (MMORPGs). The most popular of these today is Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which, as of 2009, boasted over 11.5 million online gamers. Affectionately known as "WoW" by players, this game is an incredibly valuable tool for understanding communities and social networks because WoW is a three-dimensional world where players are required to build and join communities in order to enjoy success in the game. In other words, just like many competitive business ventures, WoW players have to learn to build strong, successful communities or they will fail. Unlike business, however, if you fail to design an effective community in WoW, you don't get fired or lose all your investors. In MMORPGs, you have the opportunity to restart and you get to try again—only this time having the benefit of learning from your previous mistakes. This makes games such as WoW, Everquest, America's Army, Halo 3, and other MMORPGs perfect test beds for learning how to be a successful community designer.
TECHNOLOGICAL TESTOSTERONE POISONING
Working with social technologies for more than two decades now has taught me that success isn't determined by technology alone. My diverse experiences working with the five types of groups listed above have given me the opportunity to work with a number of different software packages: Listserv, Listproc, major-domo, Lyris, PostNuke, Geeklog, Cascade, Druple, FirstClass, phpBB, Wikimedia, Lamba-MOO, IRC, and many, many others. The list of "killer apps" that could be used for community building and social networking these days is obscenely large. And I'll admit it—I do suffer from a kind of technological testosterone poisoning, which makes me want to play with them all. What's more, I find that many of my clients also suffer from this same poisoning.
However, working with all these different tools has made me keenly aware of the fact that it doesn't matter what technology you're talking about—the likelihood of success or whether or not your community or social network will still be around in 6 to 8 months depends on factors beyond the particular engine you're using. I still have online communities functioning today that are tremendously successful and recognized as the go-to places in their respective fields—and yet these communities continue to run on technologies that were created in the 1980s. Online communities that have been in existence for going on two decades now have taught me that it's not about technology. It's about the design of the community and four core principles, which I call RIBS.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Design to Thrive by Tharon W. Howard Copyright © 2010 by Elsevier Company. Excerpted by permission of MORGAN KAUFMANN PUBLISHERS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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