Almost two years ago I wrote the following blog post on the blog Innovation Factory . Since the subject is still very relevant, it seemed appropriate to translate into Dutch and here Communitymanagers.nl place. I like to hear in the comments what your experience with this subject and what new insights you have gained.

For many innovative initiatives to effectively manage communities of great importance. Innovation are important pillars of knowledge, internal and external generating ideas and collaboration. The success of these innovative initiatives, therefore, depends strongly on the effective management of the groups involved: "Communities". It is therefore important to understand good community management, which increases the chances of innovation success.

Several innovative projects for our clients we have helped communities to initiate and maintain innovation on the map within the organization. This blog post describes our experiences in managing these communities and combines this experience with theory in this field.

For a successful community are two basic elements: Critical mass and a high rate. These two aspects to stimulate asset must be anchored in the community management organization. Where community management is defined as the functional control of the systems by the community or their representatives (English definition of Wikipedia: Community Management ). The following sections present a list of activities that contribute to the success of a community.

Create critical mass

The value of a network will quadratically with the number of connected users ( Metcalfe's Law ) It is therefore important critical mass within the community as they generate the pilot phase is over. H. Kauppinen and V. Rissanen published an article about the five best methods to new users for a community to attract (in order of importance):

1. Word of Mouth
2. Chat Services
3. Network visibility
4. Public visibility
5. Targeted events

New users may also be attracted by the concept of group conformity. Clear goals, group attractiveness and successes already contribute to group conformity and then new members. Clear group goals contribute to the attractiveness of the group. While the attractiveness of a group activity within the authority of the group. Finally, if there are successes, these are clearly communicated. The above three points will help to attract new users.

When the initial community is too small to keep themselves active, the community manager required activity produced by placing interesting content, the involvement of senior management, finding interesting topics for discussion and active pursuit of users to activate it. Our experience shows that the first two years of hard work simply means to be a successful internal innovation community to get them going. This means lots of bubbles and keep in touch with users to allow them to post interesting content, sharper ask the questions and find out what plays in their daily work. We also organize regular workshops for offline users around topical themes discussed at the online platform.

Users develop perceived critical mass through interaction with others. Interaction between (potential) community members to create events can be organized. Offline events such as workshops, meetings and brainstorming sessions to support this goal perfectly. Even small measurement-ups contribute to the creation of perceived critical mass.

Encourage participation
Various activities can be used to the participation of community members to promote. First, several studies have shown that behavioral intention is directly affected by "subjective norm" (ie the perception of a person that most people who are important to him or her think that he / she is or not the appropriate behavior to perform) when compulsory use and experience is not great. This comes down to that commitment is needed from senior management to participate in internal communities, particularly in the early stages of the project.

From our experience with several customers we recognize the importance of senior management participation only stress. The innovation of a community of our customers for example, draws an average forum post 50 views and three comments. Where a forum post of a higher-level manager at least 300 views and 25 replies attracts.

For internal communities, it is wise to periodically issue to organize activities so that contacts between the participants can be placed. These relationships increase the involvement of members of the community. The feeling of belonging to a community to further improve a number of activities can still be pulled out of the closet: the generation of exclusivity, and introduce a common symbol frequency (high quality) interactions organize.

Since the pursuit of power or fame, the participation of community members could affect the status of members are linked to the level of participation. The willingness to share knowledge with colleagues (within single communities) can be enhanced by rewarding contributions. The effect of a (possibly orchestrated behind the scenes) positive management response here is much bigger than a reward in the form of a gift or monetary reward.

Active participation can be encouraged in several ways:

• Social interaction should be possible, for example by implementing a forum.
• Make sure members feel that they are part of the community.
• People often want other members within a community to help and support, so make sure this is possible and encourage this.
• Set members are able to interact with each other and make it possible that they can create a profile. To boost confidence, users real names and pictures to use in their profiles. Offline events will also trust. A lack of confidence can mean a barrier to participation.

Before you start with an innovative community
Internal resistance to change in order to prevent a kick-off meeting can be organized. Preferably hold a higher-level managers play an intro speech to the importance of community for the organization to emphasize.

For the next step, the start-up phase, a pilot group will be selected by the first activity is to stimulate word-of-mouth advertising should take care. It is essential that this pilot group perceived critical mass is created. Which, as noted earlier, it follows from activity and interaction in the community. Throughout the course of the project, a dedicated community manager required that the community keeps it in motion.

Innovation is vital for any community organization that formulates advance the goals it wants to achieve with the community. Restrictions should also be pre-defined and addressed immediately if possible. An example of a constraint is the amount of time employees have available to spend on community activities. This we have with our customers clearly seen. Where sometimes the active ones are commented with "They have nothing better to do down." Time for these activities must be made available and as community manager, you try to protect the active ones. Furthermore, the organization must first realize that the time will cost to build a successful community. As previously stated, it is our experience that it can take up to two years to the community successfully on the track.

Jurjan Huisman