If you follow industry news around social business topics you’ve probably heard something to that tune recently. And you might have thought to yourself, wait, isn’t a portal and a community the same thing? Sorta…They both share the same purpose – to bring users together into a central website where resources and information are provided. But the way they execute their objective is completely different.
Think of it this way, take your company intranet which is a “portal” and add Facebook to it where all your users can meet, collaborate, share, and build relationships in a protected and safe environment. It’s a match made in heaven and if you aren’t already using a social collaboration platform at work, you will be soon! Platforms such as Jive, Yammer, Lithium, and many others are an evolution of business not seen since the advent of email. In five years we will all look back on this period in time and think, how did we ever work without our social platform? Or, for your external communities, how did we ever attract and
engage customers without it? I’ve been working with and building social platforms for over three years now, and when I think about the old-school “portals” we use to build I can’t help but think, how in the world did we ever get users to use those dreadful things? They were, and are terrible!
So, what does a community have that a portal doesn’t? I’ll talk about the top 5 below, but first let’s follow an example as we walk through it to better understand the impact of each element. Imagine you have a crucial online training that you want your entire audience to take part in, how does each element help you accomplish this goal?
#1 Social
First, is three-way communication, or “social”. Gone are the days of pushing content to your users and not allowing them to respond to what you are pushing onto them. In today’s communities you push content, your audience is able to rate, like, share, and comment on that content. That’s two-way. What’s the third? Your audience can also have discussions among themselves making for a true “community”. Social platforms are allowing us to interact as humans again, rather than interact with technology. This is why Facebook is so successful and this is why you WILL be using a social platform at work very soon…hopefully you already are.
Example: Your audience shares the training with their network after completing it and engages in conversations about the training.
#2 Mobile
The world went mobile years ago. Mainstream social platforms have grown up in the mobile world and have dedicated apps or optimized web interfaces for mobile devices which is vital for sustained engagement with users. Users rely on mobile every day to get work done and having a great mobile interface for your social platform will all but guarantee usage.
Example: I don’t have time to take this training in the office, but during the train commute home I can take it on my smartphone.
#3 Collaboration
Collaboration goes hand-in-hand with social. It’s the tools users need to not only have a conversation online, but also to gather together and get work done. The ability to create an ad-hoc group, invite my co-workers, upload necessary content, and begin collaborating together on a single focused goal is very powerful. I’m seeing a reduction in meetings, increased efficiency, better documentation, and better communication from collaborating online with my co-workers.
Example: Before creating the training video I created a private group to collect input from the business on what content the training should contain.
#4 Trending Content
Remember your old company portal? Every time you visited the home page it was exactly the same, and it was oh so boring and useless. Tools in the new social platforms use analytic data such as number of views, likes, shares, behavior from other users like you, and more to identify trends in the content of the site. This allows the site to automatically update on a consistent basis, showing the most popular and important content and in some cases even customize it for each individual user. It’s a powerful tool that keeps the community fresh and constantly relevant to it’s diverse users.
Example: As people take the training, discuss the training, and share the training it begins showing up in the popular content areas of the site helping expose it to more users to take the training.
#5 Gamification aka Motivational Design (aka ‘What’s in it for me?’)
Ah, the big gamification buzzword! What does it mean? No, it’s not playing Angry Birds at work! In essence gamification comes down to points, reputation, and competition. You use gamification to motivate your audience to do the activities you want them to do within your community. It’s a very powerful tool as it serves dual purpose: No. 1 it gives you the ability to motivate desired behavior, and No. 2 for your end users it motivates them to keep coming back and participating.
Example: You create a new mission within the community. This mission is worth points which your users are hungry to earn to increase their reputation and to compete on leader boards and maybe even spend in a rewards store. You design a custom badge to go along with the mission which is a mini trophy for your end-users. Since this is an important training, and you are offering a lot of points, you want more out of your audience than just viewing the training, so you design a multi-stage mission where after taking the training, they must also pass a test with a minimum score, and also share the training to their network before completion and points are awarded. So, not only did you get your audience trained, but you leveraged their social network to spread the word, and your users are happy because they received lots of points…it’s a win-win!
The social platform helps you do your job so much more effectively that you now have a little extra time to ponder:
How in the world did we motivate people to take our trainings in the past?