As Vice President of Research at
Participate.com, Joe Cothrel directs the firm’s research agenda involving
a wide range of topics. We asked about his latest online community
research and expectations for the future.
What are you personally busy with these days?
The first thing that comes to mind is the research we’re doing on distributed sales forces.
Because Participate offers a solution (software, deployment, management) aimed specifically at sales professionals in global
corporations, we’ve been interviewing sales people around the world — understanding what’s working for them, what’s not working, what kinds of
things they expect from technology, what kinds of things would make them more productive.
This is my favorite kind of research, actually. Think about getting the chance to talk with the world’s leading expert in a topic — that’s what
I get to do every time I interview someone about their own work routines and
experiences.
We’re also doing more work on measurement, specifically on measuring
influence. We now have a significant data set for our clients, and we’ve been analyzing interactions to see what sorts of patterns emerge. I think
you really have to get beyond simple measures of contribution if you want to
understand and properly value what each member brings to the community. Obviously contributions are not all alike – some are valuable, instructive,
compelling, others are not. But the former have observable impacts, and they also share formal properties, which helps us identify them when they
occur. So we shouldn’t have to wait to see six months of data to identify
who’s influential and who isn’t – it’s all there in the first couple of posts.
I also have the usual number of projects going on with research colleagues
at other companies. I have an article in the most recent issue of Knowledge
Directions, the journal of IBM’s Institute for Knowledge Management, which I
wrote with Eric Lesser at the Institute. The subject is the impact of virtual community on social capital, and I think it turned out pretty well.
What receptivity are you finding in corporate America for community?
When we talk to our clients, or other companies thinking about how they can
use community in their business, obviously they’re pretty receptive. But you don’t know how representative they are of the general run of large
corporations unless you do a more formal study. So in December and January
we did a survey of 75 executives, mostly from Fortune 500 companies, in roles ranging from CEO to CIO to VP of Sales. Our purpose was to get a
reading on their understanding of community, and where they saw community could really solve business problems. And I was amazed at the conversations
we had with these folks. Almost all of them knew that community could help
them get business done. It’s not that there wasn’t some skepticism – in fact, they weren’t at all sure they could get it done. But there’s a huge
level of acceptance and understanding that community had with the average executive. And I guess I was surprised because it’s so common to hear
people say that big companies “don’t get community.” I knew our clients get
it, but it turns out that a lot of the others do too.
Where is the bulk of work for Participate? Has this shifted over time?
Well, our client base has stayed pretty consistent over time: Fortune 500
companies. Our oldest clients are AT&T WorldNet and Ace Hardware. But our
offerings have grown over the past four years – our fourth anniversary is this November – in response to what our customers tell us they want. We
started out as a pure services company: ongoing community management, along
with community design. Today, we offer software, deployment (which includes
strategy), and ongoing management – in other words, a complete solution.
Over the past four years we’ve managed on just about every platform you can
think of – at one point we were managing on a dozen different technologies
for discussion alone. So we gained knowledge of how these technologies work
and where they could be improved. This is a longer conversation, but I can
tell you one huge area of focus: administration. Most community tools are
simply not built to enable community management. We’ve tried to remedy that
with Participate Enterprise 2.0, in addition to providing some great new functionality aimed at employee communities.
Speaking of employee communities, that another thing that’s changed over
time: the type of communities our clients want to create. We began four years ago knowing that business communities were a great opportunity. When
the consumer communities got going circa 1998-9, we had enough experience in
that area, and had a sufficiently unique offering, that companies sought us
out. Now, over the past year, we’ve seen a strong shift to employee communities – probably two out of three of the in-bound leads we receive
today. This is fine with me, by the way – I’ve been involved with employee
online communities for almost a decade, and its great to be able to share that experience with clients.
What areas are promising in the future?
As I said, a lot of the spending that was going toward external e-business
ventures is now going towards internal efforts to “digitize” processes that
aren’t working as well as they should. At GE they talk about the need to get your house in order internally before you can reap the benefits of
e-business with customers, partners, etc. So we’re going to see the internal stuff continue to expand over the next year or so. But ultimately,
the potential for adding value with online community hasn’t changed – it exists wherever a business connects to other people or businesses over a
network. Companies that succeed, I think, are the ones that understand specific opportunities and audiences very, very well, and put solutions
together that meet their needs.
