launching communities, letting others do the work, and taking all the credit
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Launching communities, letting others do the work, and taking all the credit Mario Herger October 14th, 2011
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 2 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Me 1.0
Founded and have been operating for more than 14 years • Dancilla (largest folk dancing community worldwide)
Had been • Expert in the MS Access forums in the 1990s for 6 years • Moderator in a literary community for 3 years
Developer, DevManager, Architect and worked for years with SAP Community Network both as contributor as well as team member. Launched communities around topics like
• Composite Application Framework • Visual Composer • Business Process Experts • and others…
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 3 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Me 2.0
Starting 2010: Doing Technology Strategy, Developer Evangelism, Innovation Events & Communities Started in 2010 multiple groups on the Employee Network
• iPhone / iPad group (May 2010, today 900 members, 400+ discussions) • Gamification @ SAP (Aug. 2010, today 400+ members, 200+ discussions) • Innovation Steampunk (January 2011, today 360+ members) • HANA Content developers (since December 2010, today 900+ members)
co-moderate groups like • Android (since May 2010, today 400+ members)
Total Reach (the movie): ˜2,500 individuals
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 4 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Disclaimer!
I published multiple books, including a really funny joke book (honestly!)
I won a standup comedy contest and founded a satirical magazine
With other words: I believe I am somewhat funny – and I am pretty talkative too Whatever works for me and my communities / groups, might not work for you.
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 5 www.enterprise-gamification.com
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 6 www.enterprise-gamification.com
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 7 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Universal truths
It’s not about me, it’s about us. But you are the me, that is driving the us.
As community leader you are the • Cheerleader in chief • Sherriff • Organizer • Sales rep • Idiot who does most of the work • Psychiatrist and emotional garbage can • Target for attacks from trolls and any form of paranoia
Creating of a “community” is easy, bringing it to live is hard. Most are stillborn.
Know your community.
YOU set the mood and spirit of the community.
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 8 www.enterprise-gamification.com
How do you start?
You have this great idea for a community (and hopefully not somebody telling you to create one and you are half-heartedly behind it and in reality you have better things to do and WTF)
• Search, if such a community / group already exists
• Find a crispy one-sentence purpose / goal for your group
• Pitch it to colleagues and listen to their feedback
• Find a compelling short name
• Create a charter and keep it “work in progress”
• Don’t invent your own terminology (yet) – people won’t find you, won’t understand you and create their own communities
• Don’t waste your time with defining categories and subcommunities – add them over time, if necessary at all (more often than not you don’t need them)
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 9 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Who do you want?
Members should be (and/or)
• Experts / gurus
• Beginners who like to participate (they will become your most loyal advocates and helpers)
• Lurkers (they talk about it and will bring you unexpected opportunities)
• polite, helpful and respectful
• bring in the right mood and attitude
• able to structure stuff, correct it, answer it etc.
• passionate about the topic
• honestly leading discussions
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 10 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Who do you want? The other angle…
Here is a different angle of the crowd you want*) • The community needs to contain at least a few people capable of innovation.
But not everyone in the community need be. There are plenty of other necessary roles:
• The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early. • The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y. • The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group. • The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest. • General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.
Different people may occupy these various roles at different times, including that of innovator. *) Chris Anderson: Crowd Accelerated Innovation, Wired Magazin, January 2011
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 11 www.enterprise-gamification.com
How do you get them?
• Do good things and talk about it
• Identify experts and ask them about their opinion or nudge them to contribute (keep your expectations low: only few will contribute)
• Pay attention to members who show initiative and nurture them
• Trust people, give them chances, let them grow into the roles and provide constructive feedback
• Don’t apply unrealistically high standards to all members
• Join other interesting communities and keep your eyes open
• Be a good example yourself
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 12 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Who do you not want?
Assholes for more on that consult “The No Asshole Rule” from Stanford professor Robert Sutton
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 13 www.enterprise-gamification.com
How do I get rid of them?
• Stay alert and make yourself familiar with dialectics and negative patterns
• Act fast, warn them privately, don’t argue to much with them, it’s not worth the time
• Remove them from the community / group, if behavior continues
Why should you do it?
• Assholes create more assholes
• The spirit of the community goes down fast, and it looses a significant amount of (constructive) activity
• For your own sanity: dealing with assholes amounts to 80% of your workload that you should better spend on constructive community work
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 14 www.enterprise-gamification.com
What do I do?
• I organize events like • presentations, • brainstorming sessions • pitches • virtual and real-life meetings
• I try to identify the • pain points • interests • newest trends • stuff that needs my help
• I send newsletters every 1-2 weeks and highlight • great shit that members are doing and discussing • awesome articles and blogs • mind-blowing ideas that I encounter • fun poking at me
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 15 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Newsletters
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 16 www.enterprise-gamification.com
Newsletters
My newsletters • have their own style and
language • are not “one-voiced” • are not politically correct • have attitude • are not bloodless • work with humor • are not for the faint-of-
heart
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 17 www.enterprise-gamification.com
What else do I do? (still more that you do?)
• I talk to many people individually and • recognize their work • ask them for their opinion • politely kick their ass to engage
• I cross-promote topics in different groups
• I connect individuals, e.g. • Kinect (5 different locations) • Marketplace for developers and projects
• I take pain points to higher places, pain points like • using private mobile devices in the corporate network • obstacles of developing iOS apps • the broken Android app development process • mobile strategy
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 18 www.enterprise-gamification.com
What else do I do? (jeez, are you starting to brag?)
• I engage the members • with open ended questions • by soliciting their opinions • challenging them with “missions”
• I try not to be an annoyance (at least not all the time)
• I have fun
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 19 www.enterprise-gamification.com
How many years of your life will this cost?
• When you start, expect 1-2 hours per day to spend on the community for a minimum of 3 months
• Don’t expect that it will become less work; when it takes off, you’ll be the most popular kid on the block
• At the beginning you will do most of the work alone
• Expect to own the community / group for 1-2 years
• You should make yourself familiar with the topic
• Be extremely polite and patient with members
• Members are doing you a favor (yes, in the end they are doing themselves a favor, but that’s not what they perceive)
• Allow imperfection, that will allow more discussion
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 20 www.enterprise-gamification.com
What’s in it for you?
You will
• have an opportunity to assemble and meet a crowd of interesting people
• be exposed to a lot of good things and ideas
• receive invitations to other exciting opportunities (conferences, expert panels, presentations…)
• be moving from whining and complaining to having an impact and doing great things
• receive recognition from colleagues
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 21 www.enterprise-gamification.com
My advice for you? (beside showing you pictures of pretty steampunk girls)
• Your personality, character, interests, style etc. make an imprint on the community – use it to your advantage
• People will feel your passion and whether you have fun – show it
• You have no formal authority over people; whatever you do has either to catch their interest or make them want to be part of it
• Inspire them
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. 22 www.enterprise-gamification.com
How do you know you are on the path to success?
• When you return after two weeks of vacation, you find in your community / group dozens of new postings, and not questions only or trolls spamming it
• Your community / group starts looking more like a valuable archive of knowledge and resources instead of a forum of mindless gossip
• You find other colleagues linking to your community / group when questions about the topic area pop up (and the links are not placed between irony-tags)
• Unknown colleagues greet you in the cafeteria by name, want your autograph or a baby from you
Keep Punking!
Mario Herger Email: mario.herger@gmail.com Twitter: @mherger Web: www.enterprise-gamification.com
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