My original post on the top 5 people in a social software project seems to have gotten some attention. A number of people tweeted on it and gave some initial feedback. I want to address two items in the feedback since they have some merit.
Who is valuable
jasperdevalk on twitter noted that he would reverse the order of the resources. My initial thought was that I hadn’t intended to order the top 5 and make the Social Software guru the top person. But his comments also got me to thinking about when these people are valuable. So let me put revise my most valuable based on when you are doing a project.
First Three Months of a Social Software Project
- Social Software guru
- Installer and Configure guru
- Champion
- SMEs
- Hubs
If you note, nothing has changed. I don’t name them in any particular order. All are important to getting it up and running.
Three to Six Months on a Social Software Project
Here’s where things change. It’s less about getting things up and running and more about building momentum and additional value in the social network.
- Champion
- SME’s
- Hubs
- Community Organizers
The first three remain the same and are valuable in the building of these communities. I would agree with a comment of Jasper’s that hubs in our normal non social software world may not translate to ideal hubs in our online world. Just because you know a lot and you know a lot of people doesn’t mean you will make a great hub. It takes knowledge and willingness to post and connect to be a great hub in a social network. That’s actually something I want to post on at a later point around culture. If your culture is not ready to bring it all online and use these tools, then it won’t matter what kind of SME’s and hubs you have. You will have a steeper hill to climb.
Community organizers are important in this phase as well. They are the ones who keep a specific community going. They make sure it’s organized. They do the monitoring of the community and work around heated discussions, membership (if a community is closed), and other necessary tasks.
Hubs (those with a large number of connections) are ideal to announce change or lead initial messaging – after all, Hubs are characterized by a high level of trust due to their number of incoming connections.
However, when it comes to implementing the change (or Social Software implementation), the Hub may no longer be the ‘top player’.
What I would find interesting here would be to identify the social network ‘position’ of the “Champion”.
It may be that the “Champion” has unique network position – perhaps they broker to multiple groups and clusters in the firm. Better put, they better . . . because a “Champion” has to have savvy and political clout to be taken serious, right?
SNA can help you identify ideal “Champions” from a network perspective. It’s likely that their behavior itself is what has them in this unique network position in the first place! 🙂
Josh Letourneau
Knight & Bishop – http://www.KnightBishop.com
jl(at)knightbishop.com
I would agree that a Champion or Champions fulfill an important role. What we’ve done with some success is to identify those who can become champions. We call them power users and have had middling success in pushing them to become true champions of the social network. We had one Tweet comment that correctly identified the fact that we didn’t put analytics in the mix. Social Analytics is in its infancy and would be an ideal tool to actually figure out who should fill what role.
I’ll have to post on that sometime. That will happen once I do a little more research and solicit some information from those who have had a chance to use it.
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