Community Overload: Overwhelmed with Too Many Options

Finally there’s an online community at the office for me to share my ideas about employee benefits.  Oh nice, now there’s a community to talk about healthy options as they apply to my employee benefits.  Hmm, here’s another invite to join the community for employees to talk about work life balance.  So now I have three communities just to talk about benefits at work?  What about the other communities I’ll want to join to share my ideas about my job, or locating information and other work-related interests?  Will I end up belonging to a hundred communities just at work? 

Employee-based communities and groups are being created everyday around every subject at the office.  That is unless the company and the community/communication manager has a strategy for natural community growth.  That’s a big IF. 

If you’re a company that has recently implemented social media tools that allow for communities or groups, then you’re the prime candidate to be affected by this problem.  So let me dissect this community overload problem.  Companies (and certain employees – early adopters, mandatory participation folks) often jump in to the community space, building and creating without much planning.  There’s no roadmap, organizational structure, business function grouping, business flow grouping, etc.  All of the sudden, communities are created for anything under the sun and even worse, there’s no hierarchy or structure.  Companies literally end up with duplicate communities for the same discussions and sharing of resources.  Community creators mean well, but the magnitude of available communities ends up being overwhelming and many of the spaces lack interaction and useful information.  Sound familiar?  It’s the same story of a bad intranet from a few years ago that we all know so well - too many sub-pages with static information.

Fixing the problem before it starts

So how do you go about not letting this community weed patch overgrow and smother the real social garden you’ve dreamed up?

1. Get to know your organization:  Take a step back and holistically review your company to find the common and natural threads.  For example, if your company is segmented by different businesses, yet has HR Business Partners residing in each business, create a community for all HR Business Partners company-wide.  This way, all of the HR Business Partners can share and network throughout the company, not just within their business unit.  Remember, communities allow for great networking based on shared interests.
2. Create a plan:  Start with a long-term strategy and then create a plan for today.  For the long-term, think about what you want to see in a year or two from now.  Also, what value do you expect to grow from creating over-arching communities?  Once you’ve determined what you want in the long haul, create your short list plan of tactics to get you started.  Plans that include month-long objectives work best for me in projects like this.  I suggest starting one or just a few communities and getting those right first. 
3. Connect the dots:  Just like when you create organizational charts for your company, build a similar template for your communities.  Which communities will be on the top?  What will the sub-communities be?  Communities can be more than just connected top to bottom.  Connecting communities by relation is also helpful.  Related should be used when a community doesn’t speak to the same subject of another community, but may share some of the same ideas or concepts.  This will help employees find other spaces of interest.  Think of that phrase we always see when registering for a conference, “You may also be interested in”.
4. Who will create the communities:  There are two schools of thought here.  You can choose to let only a select few community managers own the process of setting up communities.  If you do, I suggest building in a process for employees to request new spaces to share and chat.  If employees are not involved in creating their own social world, you’ll have less engagement.  The other option would be to let all employees create communities.  The negative here is a giant mass of communities that may not work.  The positive to this option is possibly more employee participation.  I would challenge you to find a happy medium. 
5. Be nimble:  There will undoubtedly be communities that have not been set up.  In fact, it should be part of your plan not to know everything.  You should be asking yourself, how will these communities grow and stay current?  As community requests are received or the current community structure seems out of shape and misguided, take a fresh look at your social garden.  Maybe you need more of one thing vs. another.  It’s normal to adjust and tweak as you go.  Just like your company, your communities will take new directions.    

As you can see, it’s not rocket science at all.  Of course, these are my thoughts based on my experiences.  I’ve seen bad examples and I’ve seen some good successes.  The real trick is creating a strategy, laying out the community outline before you start to build, and be part of the success.  Repeat after me, plan and be nimble.