I recently attended a webinar hosted by LearnShare on the topic of “Learning with Social Networking Tools”. In the webinar, Dr. Art Paton of Motorola presented some stories and experiences in creating and sustaining online communities focused on knowledge sharing and learning. The webinar provided some value information on how Motorola has used online communities of practice websites (that leverage Social Media tools) to solve business challenges and deliver measurable results.

In the question-and-answer period of the webinar, an attendee asked a great question: “How did you encourage initial participation in new communities that are created?” I found his response to be very insightful, and worthy of sharing. As new communities of practice are created around specific topics, interests, initiatives, and projects, Motorola employs four best practices to gain and sustain involvement in the community. Below are some of the key points discussed and commentary based on our experiences in similar capacities.

1. Encourage community leaders (people with direct leadership and management responsibilities of the community) to reach out to members to populate the community very quickly. The reason offered for doing this is that people will not see value in joining a community until they start to quickly see the richness and diversity of information they can obtain by joining and participating the community.
2. Encourage the use of initial and ongoing incentives for joining and participating in the community. The types of incentives can vary greatly based on the culture of the organization; however not all incentives have to be monetary in nature. In some cases, featuring or spotlighting good ideas or contributions can be just as or even more powerful as the mighty dollar.
3. After the community has been established, educate and encourage community leaders to consistently encourage members to share ideas and information in the community. At Motorola, they described this as the “Dispatch Mode”. In this mode, the community leaders are encouraged to reconnect with members on a frequent basis to reinforce the value of placing new knowledge and information into the online community. Also, as knowledge is gathered and shared and the community becomes more tacit, the community leader should encourage the community to create more formal training (e-learning, white papers, presentations, etc.) so that they can be distributed throughout the organization.
4. Provide community leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to educate their community members on how to best use the technology available on the community of practice site. People have varying levels of comfort with technology, and often they are unaware of the capabilities of the technology available to them. By educating community leaders (who are often viewed as trusted resources to community members), a larger population of the workforce is able to learn and begin leveraging the value the online community.

A big thank you to Dr. Paton for sharing his experiences!

Tags: Art Paton, Communities of Practice, LearnShare, Motorola, Social Media

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