This post was mentioned on Twitter by ekolsky: Posted: Why Pragmatic Enteprise 2.0 Should Also Become Pragmatic SCRM http://bit.ly/PKIlk...

I think you make an excellent point. The external community of known super-users and power-users should merge and work together with the internal communities. I wrote something to that effect many moons ago for Gartner, integrating social networks and communities with internal efforts, and i still believe that today… Now to convince the world.

Thanks for the comment,
Esteban

I could not agree with you more on Lithium and have said so in the past in postings. they track over 120 variables for each user using any of their communities. and they use those in tracking and managing super-users among other things (a lot of the other things they do are very, very cool – but they are also mostly for internal consumption).

as for internal communities, i also agree there. and socialtext is the tool equivalent of lithium for internal communities (in my most humble opinion). they are both established leaders by their sheer understanding of the data surrounding the communities – not the communities themselves. of course, there are other tools both internal and external that apply here (and as far as i can tell, none of the ones mentioned are customers, still covered by the disclaimer above).

the PE20 release covers, today, internal communities and i was trying to make a case for external communities. the fact that you related them so well makes my case (at least in my mind).

thanks
(someday me write with uppercases, promise)

If rolling out successful online customer communities requires identifying and nurturing superusers, you’ll be glad to know that this is already a feature of the nascent community solution vendors such as Lithium Technologies with their Reputation Engine (http://www.lithium.com/what-we-offer/social-crm-suite/social-crm-platform/ – and here your lengthy disclaimer applies to me as well).

But why limit this to external communities – the same approach can be applied to internal communities as well. You can identify the contributors who encourage other to collaborate, how the internal information flows are going, tweak the way people connect, find potential participants that can create synergies and connect them and so on. The same way as we are looking to manage customer communities, we can do as well internally which will greatly speed up successful Enterprise 2.0 implementations.

The ultimate benefit would then come when you link the external communtites to the internal ones (whilst managing “security risk” issues), thinning the membrame a little at a time.

And yet again, I’m not saying this is just another “Software Solves Everything” approach, but it can sure help identify and take measures to grow healthy communities.

Back to you!

Cheers,
Mark
.-= Mark Tamis´s last blog ..On Social CRM Options =-.