I recently published an article about the top 5 portal project resources. That got me to thinking about who is important to a social software project.  Social software projects are a bit different from your typical portal endeavor.  First off, the technology is much more out of the box.   Social Software gives you tools to share content and find people.   The value comes from people using them.

Because it’s dependent on people using them, we no longer need to rely as much on a set of developers.  We instead need to identify and engage the people who will form the core of a company’s social network.  In other words, these types of projects may have put the business front and center for the first time in IT history.  It’s an interesting place for them to be.

So, here are the people I think are extremely valuable to a social software project:

1. Social Software guru
2. Installer and Configure guru
3. Champion
4. SMEs
5. Hubs

Update: After some good user feedback, I posted a follow up to this here.

Social Software guru

With Social Software, the planning becomes more important.  It doesn’t matter if you are using IBM’s Lotus Connections, Sharepoint 2010, Jive, Confluence wiki, or any of a host of other tools.  You need to start with a plan to find and engage the key people in your company.  I don’t have a cool sounding technical name for this person but the social software guru understands both the software involved and how it will mesh with your company culture.   He or she will work with a company to figure out the best way to get things going and how to identify the people that must be involved.  In short, social software may look like it’s an if you build it they will come tool but if your company culture isn’t that attuned to technology specific social constructs, they won’t come.

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This guru has also been through the governance gauntlet. Many companies are scared of social software and will throw up roadblocks related to governance.   They are afraid of the wild, wild west.  They don’t want this tool to make more headaches than it’s worth.   The Social Software guru will work to identify who needs to approve a more open type of software, what processes to put in place, and what policies to put in place or leverage. These policies could include: employee handbook, ethics, codes of conduct, etc.

Install and Configure guru

Depending on the size of a company, this may include multiple gurus and one of them may well be an architect.  But in keeping with the theme of more out of the box functionality, this guru is only doing the work necessary to get it up and running, configuring it to meet key technical needs (Uptime, scalability, etc.), and securing it.  Typically, the installer(s) will also do a few updates to ensure that your favorite search engine works or that your branding is in place on the site.

Champion

This is the person in your company who gets an idea and then just runs with it.  He or she talks to people about it. He or she gives demos with the tool. He or she finds the core group of people who will really make the tool worthwhile.  I’ve seen a couple people who have done a great job of this.  Typically, they have some influence but they don’t control the budget.  They do a great job of getting those who do control the budget to pay for the software and to put people in charge of it.  In today’s business climate, that’s not small potatoes.  Without a champion, you won’t find and enlist the SME’s and Hubs that truly launch your social network.

SME

Subject Matter Expert.  These are the people who know things.  It could include:

• The guy who has been around for ages and understand all the company processes
• The researcher who knows everything there is to know about a tool, chemical, flavoring, etc that is vital to your business
• The passionate person involved with accounting procedures, knowledge capture, manufacturing processes, customer service procedures etc.

SME’s will form the heart of your community.  If they buy into your technology version of your social network and start contributing then you will be successful.  If they don’t buy into it or not enough of them buy into it then your social software will limp along until they do.

Hubs

Some people aren’t the most knowledgeable.  They are however, very good at making friends. They are good at ferreting out who knows what.  This is the person who takes your expense coordinator to lunch every month and finds out what works and what doesn’t when submitting expenses.  This is the person that you think about when you are stumped.  You pick up the phone, give them a call and ask, “Do you know who…….”  Once you have SME’s on board and they are contributing content, tagging content, and building out their profiles, the Hubs take over from there.

They will build out their profiles, bookmark a lot of content, join communities, etc.  They will then invite all their friends to do so. They will start to point out what’s available on the social network to those people coming to them with questions.  Just as with the SME”s without them you limp along. With them, you start realizing huge value from your social network

Where to go from here

As I noted in my top portal resource post, I don’t want to disparage the myriad of other people who get the software up and running, keep it running, or contribute to your social network.  We all have our place.  These five types of people represent those who bring key value to your project.