Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has made a very useful blog post asking what we mean by engagement online. Nancy is the preeminent online facilitator, and her answers to her own question are a great outline of best practices for supporting engagement. Examples:

• Time is different online. People who are always on and respond quickly experience online interaction differently than those who log on less frequently. (Gilly Salmon called this  ”snowflake time“.)
  The latter can experience a sense of overwhelm and being “left behind.” Make this dynamic visible to the group and encourage the fast posters to slow down a bit and the others to log on a bit more frequently. Understand that if this gap persists, the group may  splinter. If that is the reality, consider sub groups and weave ideas between them as their facilitator.
• Punctuate time. Alternate synchronous with
  asynchronous as a way to keep the “heartbeat” of a group going. Like a first time runner, groups “heartbeats” have to be faster at first to build relationships, establish norms and patterns of interaction. Over time as the runner “trains” the heart beats slower. So with the group.  For example in a three week online workshop I like a  minimum of one synchronous telecon interspersed with asynchronous activity. This is a simple matter of attention – which we always find is in short supply!

Ran across this helpful video (embedded below) wherein several clueful people talk about the importance of listening as a first step into social media. In the earliest days of online community, the best participants would hang out quietly and listen before they would engage in conversation. By listening they would get an understanding of the conversation and its cultural context, and they would have a clear sense how to communicate most effectively in that context.

In the contemporary world of social media, we advise clients to start with what we call a listening platform to track and understand online conversations, determine who has influence within those conversations that are most relevant, and create a strategic analysis to drive a smart social media strategy.

Here’s the video, just listen:

e-Patient Dave deBronkart, my colleague at e-Patients.net, is concerned about the reliability of Medpedia, which has just launched its public beta. Dave is coming from the perspective of an advocate for the concept of participatory medicine, defined in Wikipedia as

a phenomenon similar to citizen/network journalism where everyone, including the professionals and their target audiences, works in partnership to produce accurate, in-depth & current information items. It is not about patients or amateurs vs. professionals. Participatory medicine is, like all contemporary knowledge-building activities, a collaborative venture. Medical knowledge is a network.

Medpedia’s collaborative knowledge base, they say, “provides medical professionals and organizations a central place to record their knowledge and receive national and international recognition and visibility for their expertise.” They also have a professional network and directory, “a free communications and networking system, a place to organize conference attendees and speakers, a professional expertise directory, a recruiting tool for research collaborators, and a clinical referral network.” In summary, “only physicians and Ph.D.s in a biomedical/health field can edit the Medpedia knowledge base directly, and only health and medical professionals are to use the professional network,” however “consumers have an important role to play in the evolving model of Medpedia. They can suggest changes to the Article pages, and they can participate in ‘Communities of Interest.’ ‘Communities of Interest’ is the part of the Medpedia Platform that brings consumers and medical professionals together to share knowledge around conditions, treatments, and lifestyle choices.”

There’s a barrier here between the patient and the medical professional, and the nature of that barrier is suggested by the3 use of the word “consumers” above. Participatory medicine suggests that patients can be partners in, rather than consumers of, their treatments. Dave makes good and reasonable arguments for modifications to Medpedia to manifest and facilitate the physician/patient collaboration – let patients as well as clinicians comment directly on Medpedia articles, and rate their helpfulness. He suggests a model similar to the Amazon review.

Why include patients? As e-Patients instigator, the late Dr. Tom Ferguson, as well as many other physicians in recent years, learned, patients empowered by knowledge can come to understand their bodies and their conditions better than anyone – they have literal skin in the game. e-Patient Dave notes how he was saved by a treatment that most patiens with his condition (stage IV, Grade 4 renal cell carcinoma)never know exists, or if they hear about it, they’re told that it’s “high risk.” Actually many physicians are simply not knowledgeable or not current4 with their knowledge. This isn’t surprising – there’s more knowledge emerging than anyone could hope to track. But many patients with a specific condition will dig deeply into whatever knowledge is available. As Dave says, “people get radicalized when it’s personal. When it’s your life, your child, your mother, and they’re in peril, it matters whether the info you’re reading really is current, up-to-date, the best possible.”

The possibility for a “participatory medicine” was less likely before the Internet emerged as a platform through which anyone could potentially have access to any and all knowledge. Now that we have the platform, the question is, who has the right of access to what knowledge, and who should be in which conversations? This is a big question for the healthcare establishment and industry, and the nature of the Medpedia project puts it squarely in the middle of a knowledge revolution.

What do you think – should professionals have a monopoly on healthcare information? What role should informed patients have in gathering and assessing medical knowledge?

George Colony at Forrester posted a call for input on a January 29 discussion at the World Economic Forum at Davos. They’re discussing how social computing will transform corporations and markets, and he’s asked on his blog for input on a specific set of questions. I responded based on months of research and conversation by David Armistead and I as we’ve evolved our consulting practice here at Social Web Strategies. There’s a lot more to be said about each point, so I suppose I should write a white paper.

The questions:

• How can enterprises (companies with $1B in revenue or greater) use social to gain an advantage?

• What are the greatest risks of social to an enterprise? How can these risks be mitigated?
• How can social be used to improve leadership and decision making in the organization?
• How can social be used to drive product development and innovation?
• How can social be used to improve investor relations?
• How can social be used to improve recruitment and human resources management?
• How can social be used to improve customer/client relations?
• For the average large company, what should its social profile look like by the end of 2009? End of 2010? End of 2011?
• How can you rally top management to support social? How should the social effort be organized internally? Who should own it? Who should lead it?

Here’s the response I posted as a comment. Of course, we invite your input:

More questions: How will new companies in the era of “social” organize – e.g. will we see more coworking clusters that form into larger entities, or perhaps form into networks of companies that remain independent, but share personnel and capacity to scale work? And assuming new companies emerge and grow differently, what effect will this have on existing larger companies? To what extent might they emulate by becoming more like networks?

To your specific questions…

How use social to gain an advantage? Knowledge processes are social, and with more social transactions there is the potential to produce more knowledge. Challenge: how to capture knowledge effectively, and how to maintain a high signal to noise ratio with more (omnidirectional) information channels. Companies that are more effective in leveraging social technology to produce, capture, and use knowledge will have an advantage.

Risks of social: Multichannel omnidirectional communication flows are potentially chaotic, could result in high noise to signal, loss of focus, information inefficiency. Highly competitive internal environments where everyone is entrepreneurial could breed contention and create power vacuums. Avoid this by creating a collaborative culture and being clear about values and goals throughout the organization.

Improve leadership and decision making by using social media to create and find more and better leaders within the company. Learn to spot emergent leadership. While existing lines of authority and responsibility within the organization won’t go away, those in acknowledged leadership roles must learn to see and acknowledge where knowledge and social capital are produced and where natural leaders exist within the company, build collaboration around hubs and high knowledge productivity areas of the company. Leverage collaborative communication networks internally to crowdsource decisions where it makes sense.

Product development: use social media to collaborate with customers as well as internal innovators.

Investor relations: Build social networks for ongoing communication with investors and staff the business of listening to what they say. Company reps in communication with investors have to be well-trained and sensitive to the issues inherent in that communication. Don’t be afraid to accept the challenge inherent in this communication.

Recruitment and human resources: You now have ready access to data about potential employees via systems like LinkedIn. You can search and find potential employees who weren’t necessarily searching for work, and make offers – much larger base to consider, and with robust search, you can zero in on ideal candidates. You can often assess potential hires in social contexts where you get a much clearer sense of who they are and how they might fit.

Customer/client relations: Build customer communities, not necessarily on a single platform, but leveraging social media platforms that make sense – go where your customers are, and invite them to come to you. The challenge here is in staffing ongoing robust, and more direct, communication with customers online, and scaling that activity. Many companies are saturated with knowledge/information that customers never see through traditional channels, so it’s compelling to find ways to connect internal knowledge resources with the customer base. We envision a whole new discipline growing around this activity, using already existing best practices for online facilitation and community development.

Large company social profiles: By the end of 2010, be working on a communication strategy that includes analysis if internal and external social networks and value networks, and definition of robust communication stragegy internally and externally: for managers, employees, shareholders, partners, customers. Consider that these communities are not defined but their platforms, but leverage many existing platforms. By the end of 2011, have clear authority, responsibility, and staffing for social/community development and interaction, and be attentive to change management (transformation management) issues as you open up communications and begin sharing knowledge. Become adept by the end of 2011 at identifying and acknowledging social capital emerging from value networks around the company, both internal and external.

Your last question about rallying top management, how to organize, etc. is probably defined differently for different companies. You’d have to have c-level support. As to who should own it, that’s already been a barrier. Is this marketing or operations? It’s both, it works across the traditional lines of demarcation within the corporate environment, so ownership and responsibility for what I’ve described requires new thinking about how we organize. It really is a transformation.

We see a clear connection between social media and sustainability, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Willie Dixon’s great blues song, “I Ain’t Superstitious,” had him saying he ain’t then proving he is, and I think most of us fall into some kind of superstitious thinking; it’s just a matter of accepting something on faith rather than verifying it for yourself. That’s the point of an insightful article in the “Developer Wisdom” series at CIO (thanks to Tim Walker for the link). It’s called “Fighting the Superstitions of Software Development: Questioning the Assumptions,” and it’s about examining your assumptions (and the prerequisite: learning to understand when you’re making assumptions and accepting things on faith without knowing whether they’re verifiably true.

At Social Web Strategies, we’re learning that we’re only better off if we question our assumptions and everybody else’s. The article I’ve linked talks about assumptions as superstitions, “information accepted on faith, without personal knowledge or examination.”

People pass along “everyone knows” data without questioning it, and others repeat the superstition as though it’s undeniably true. Confidence isn’t knowledge; in fact, confidence can prevent knowledge and innovation from happening, because an unquestioned belief means you never measure, never test, never look at alternatives.

Another point from our perspective: we know that, going into a project, there are all sorts of assumptions on our end and on the client’s that could prove incorrect as we get into the project and begin to learn (because every project is a learning experience, and what you thought you were doing is often not what you actually find yourself doing as the project evolves). Projects fail because these assumptions aren’t examined up front, so we make a point of identifying assumptions and listing them in our contract, with the understanding that a busted assumption can have an impact on project cost and duration. This also means that a project begins with real clarity and a true meeting of the minds, something you don’t get if you’re using a boilerplate contract with limited up-front discussion. The lack of clarity at the beginning of web projects leads to failure: even if a functional web site results, the client isn’t satisfied that they got what they wanted or needed. (There are other resons for this, such as a lack of clear strategy behind technology planning, something Brian Massey and I addressed in a presentation a couple of months ago.)

Our colleague and strategic partner Brian Massey explains the disconnect between business owners and web developers. This is a must-read for both. Brian makes the case for the cost of hiring professionals who have a discovery process and making sure you have effective, attentive project management on the customer side of the project – and I would add to make sure the developer has a responsive project or account manager on their end.

A strong discovery process produces a clear, coherent strategy, as well as a project plan that defines tasks, timelines, and deliverables. Ultimately this kind of planning will more than pay for itself.