Passion: The Secret Ingredient?

We spend a lot of time as a team debating why certain people are getting proficient at social media (or 2.0 behaviors, or whatever you want to call them), and others -- well -- just aren't.

We've studied it from just about every angle I can think of.

But maybe, just maybe, we've stumbled on the quintessential ingredient that makes this stuff work.

Passion.  Maybe it's that simple -- and that hard.

So, What Do I Mean?

Let's take blogging as an example.  We're trying to encourage all sorts of smart, knowledgeable people here at EMC to blog behind the firewall at EMC|ONE. 

We've tried making it attractive to them.  We've tried scaring them a bit with what could happen if you don't.  We've even tried the "make your life more efficient" logical angle.

All with very little success.

But, despite our frustration, we now have something like 20-30 good bloggers on the platform.  The speak from a personal perspective, about things they care about.  They are like lighthouse beacons in the dark, attracting others to the discussion and the engagement that lies behind social media proficiency.

And -- to an individual -- they are all passionate people.

They have a zest and enthusiasm for what they do.  They welcome sharing their energy and wit with others.  It's a part of who they are.

For them, blogging is nothing more than a natural extension of their personality.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Old Wisdom = get people to blog

New Wisdom = find the passionate people, and get them to blog

What About Community Formation?

If blogging is about individual passions, then communities are about shared passions.

The best -- and most proficient -- communities have formed around topics where there is deep shared passion on the parts of many people.

EMC is in the technology business.  Technology vendors tend to be very passionate about the competition.  Hence, one of the most vibrant communities at EMC is the competitive community.

We also have a great "green" community -- not entirely related to work, but it's something some people really, really care about. 

Ditto with career development.  And, of course, the totally irreverant discussion around who EMC should buy next.

Old Wisdom = build communities around what's important to the business

New Wisdom = build communities around what people really care about

And What About Discussion Threads?

One of the most vexing things on our platform is that someone will start a nice, orderly discussion, and then -- whango! -- someone drops in a view on something else, and -- before you know it -- the conversation has shifted over to something entirely different.

Well, in my view, that's a good thing.  Obviously, they seem to care more about the new topic than the old topic.  Previously, there was an urge to "moderate" these discussions.  Luckily, I suggested we let these discussions emerge and go wherever they want to go.

And, as a result, we end up getting into fascinating discussions that are well off the road of where we started.

Old Wisdom = keep the discussions on the original thread

New Wisdom = keep the discussions where people want them to go.

I Know This Is Going To Sound Soft and Mushy ...

If you know me personally, you know I'm not a cuddly SNAG (sensitive new-age guy).  I've heard the terms "crusty" and "hard nosed" applied to my demeanor.

But I'm looking it as a simple sequence of logical equations.

1 -- Social media proficiency is essential to the long-term competitive success of our company, and perhaps yours as well.

2 -- To get people proficient, you're going to have to get them to engage.  Not because they have to, but because they want to.

3 -- The #1 incentive for people to engage is because they're passionate about something -- they really care, and they want to engage. 

This leads us to something very strange to contemplate -- a passion-driven model for social media proficiency in large enterprises.

But, like any other journey, if you end up in a strange place, you are where you are.  And there are real, tangible consequences about how we think about structuring our model if this turns out to be the case.

And I think that's where we are.

Comments

[Rex Lee]

Passion is such a critical concept. I am big fan of Jim Collin's work. In "Good to Great" he explains that the role of leadership is NOT to motivate people. That if you have the right people with the right opportunity, they are self-motivated. Leadership is therefore about finding the right people and not letting them get de-motivated. My own personal experiences echo this ten-fold. In a conversation I had with my CIO, I expressed how working on one of our first large-scale social computing applications had to be one of the best experiences I've ever had. He asked why that was. And after some pondering, I explained because everyone that was on the team (which by the way were all volunteers) were there because they wanted to be there. It made those late 7PM meetings on a Friday night fun. This actually was the basis for some of the work we've now done in changing organizational structure and borrowing concepts of web 2.0 self-organization and applying it to enterprise 2.0.

If you're interested in it, you can read about that at my blog.

http://rexsthoughtspot.blogspot.com/2007/03/enterprise-20-organizational-structure.html

[Dennis McDonald]

Another important component is being able to share the passion with others on the team; this is certainly true in non-IT situations as well, I would think. This post has some related concepts: http://www.ddmcd.com/defining.html

[poetryman69]

interesting comments

the heart rises with sun over still and peaceful waters.

Be thou blessed.

[Sean ODriscoll]

Can you forecast the "passion population" to know how you're doing? In external communities, we see about .005% of the unique population make up the most disproportionately passionate group of community contributors.

I know your work is focused on internal communities, so the comparitive math got me curious. 20-30 bloggers would suggest you have about 4000 - 6000 uniques thus far in your internal communities.

Does this math jive with your experiences inside the firewall. I don't think at this stage any firm conclusion could be taken from a yes or no, but curious how this normalizes over time. And of course blogging is only one type of contribution - at a mature stage, you could argue the "thin" contributors who are rating and ranking (filtering) all the UG content are as valuable if not more valuable than the "thick" contributors blogging and answering forum questions.

I've never seen a behavioral analysis of participation data that looks at inside the firewall community vs outside the firewall - it would be interesting to better look at this to become more predictive of expected impact of implementing recommended practices.

Sean

[Sean ODriscoll]

of course now I just read your previous post that says you have about 3000 uniques - which with my math would suggest that you'd have 15 or so top notch bloggers. So you are either ahead of the curve with your internal push or yet to normalize as higher probability passionates are a slightly larger population of the first 3000 or so users. I don't know, but I am curious about this. Thanks for the posts, sorry I read backwards:)

sean

[Chuck Hollis]

Now that you mention it, the ratios seem about right. Actually, we have more like 100+ bloggers (not all of the good bloggers), but maybe 20-30 who are good and have acquired audiences.

[sean o'driscoll]

thanks for looping that back. Interesting. Sounds like we might get to catch up in early April. Look forward to meeting.

sean

[Stuart G Hall]

Be interested to know how you use software and comms tools to ensure 'the community' provides positive feedback to top contributors to help sustain their contributive passion?

HP Labs wrote a report on the importance of top contributors recently, which I've blogged: http://tinyurl.com/lrabcs

Cheers
Stuart