BACKGROUND: PROFESSIONAL PEER COMMUNITIES

In our reports “Enabling Customer Communities”[1] and “Best Practices in Engaging Customer Community Members”[2], we covered various aspects of customer communities, groups that are built around the members’ interest in, and use of, particular companies’ products and services. But other types of online communities also warrant attention, not least because of what can be learned from them and applied to customer communities.

Professional Peer Communities (also known as Communities of Practice), for example, are built around a specific topic, industry, or discipline. They share many characteristics with customer communities, but have important differences as well (such as size of the community and restriction of membership eligibility, among others).

To explore these other types of online communities, especially Professional Peer Communities, we spoke with Vanessa DiMauro, principal of Leader Networks. Vanessa has been a virtual community builder for more than 15 years, having done innovative work with organizations such as EMC, DCI, and Cambridge Technology Partners. Her experience in interactive learning environments, knowledge management, and social networking gives her a unique perspective on why professional peer communities are important, what they have to offer, and how best to develop them.

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL PEER COMMUNITIES ONLINE

Q&A with Vanessa DiMauro, Principal, Leader Networks

PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP (PSG). What got you into the online community space?

VANESSA DIMAURO. Well, my first job out of graduate school was working for TERC, the Technical Education Resource Center. That was a government-funded think tank that studied science and technology in school settings for the National Science Foundation. I worked on a really innovative grant project called Labnet, that created an online professional development community for physicists and researched its implications from both social and technical perspectives. (This was back in the days before the Web.) Labnet was a social experiment to learn the boundaries and advantages of professional collaboration in an online environment.

We sent a bunch of teachers and physicists these 300 baud modems (they came in a giant box!) and they participated in this research project. We would have them undergo professional development activities, do knowledge transfers, and do all these wonderful thought-leadership initiatives online, and then we would study them to find out what happens.

After it was deemed a success, we transitioned that community to America Online, when AOL was just starting up. It became one of the Greenhouse Projects in the early 90s.

Since then, the past 15 years for me have been largely about building communities. I did extensive consulting on community building while at Cambridge Technology Partners, built a number of executive and professional communities, and recently launched a boutique community consulting company called Leader Networks where we enable companies to build online communities for their customers or constituents. Specifically, we focus on helping companies figure out revenue models for online communities, how to best serve their core constituents, the types of content needs their users have, the sponsorship or marketing opportunities, and how to create and deliver on trusted relationships with their community members. We also help companies figure out the key metrics and measurements for determining the returns on the community. Community building is definitely a passion for me and I can honestly say I have seen almost every permutation of community over the many community-building experiences.

Early Research Issues

PSG. What were a few of the key issues your early research looked to address?

VANESSA DIMAURO. Just as we can see in today’s business world, there’s always the problem or the puzzle of how you can bring fragmented specialists together to share information. While the technology changes rapidly, many of the driving forces for successful community remain constant.

Some of the issues that we grappled with were: How do you create mentor programs for people with a lot of experiential knowledge? How do you get knowledge transfer to take place online?

For example, there’s frequently a need to take experts and help make their tacit knowledge explicit. In traditional forms of knowledge transfer--we know it even in today’s business world--shadowing and training classes don’t always translate well to the online world. But what better way than to use an online environment to get senior people, very knowledgeable experts (in this case it was businesses, but it can extend to any senior professionals), to articulate the foundation for their thought processes and decision making? This can lead to very effective relationships that require little work and reap great rewards for an organization. Online was one of the best channels for doing so. That was really the basis of the research.

PSG. What did you see in the very early days of the Web that led you to think “You know what, this online community thing is something we should be looking at, because there’s something powerful here?”

VANESSA DIMAURO. Online communities are a great opportunity to extend the relationships that currently exist in the real world. In the early days of the Web, we were able to use telecommunications to transcend time and geography. Bringing people together from around the world via email and collaboration tools was such a revolution that its value was impossible to miss. It was all very exciting, and the excitement of the opportunities hasn’t wavered. The popularization of social networking, online gaming, and other online and mobile experiences just reinforces the opportunities to leverage technology as an additional relationship channel.

PSG. Continuing in a historical context, with this group of physicists and other professionals, you saw the promise of the online space for sharing information, for learning, for transfer of knowledge. In the real business world, that’s all important, but how did this progress from something theoretical to something practical?

VANESSA DIMAURO. When the Web happened, the world went crazy. And that’s when business communities started to crop up. The first business community that I really got deeply involved with was Cambridge Information Network, which was a division of Cambridge Technology Partners. And in that community, the puzzles and the practical applications were very, very similar. The Web was happening, and there were thousands and thousands of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who needed to create a community of practice to come together to share information and best practices to learn how to network and communicate, and to create supportive ecosystems.

That transition was very natural, to go from a theoretical sort of research project to a practical application, because there was a need. There was a need in the real world, as well, for people to come together and convene, because there was no old-boys network within technology. The CIOs needed to share information and grapple with what the Web was doing to their business.

This community really struck a chord with the CIOs and we quickly grew it to be about 7,000 of the top CIOs around the world. This community supported the changing role of the CIO, generated significant sponsorship revenue, and was deeply valuable to the community members (and to Cambridge Technology Partners). We eventually sold the community to EarthWeb in 2000, but many of the members still meet online regularly seven years later.

Dealing with Sensitive Issues

PSG. When you’ve got executives and professionals from other organizations, particularly competitors, how do you recommend that the sponsor of the space deal with sensitive areas, such as topics related to competition? How do you get people to open up and talk about things when there are other people there who are in competitive businesses?

VANESSA DIMAURO. The key requirement that surrounds the formation of any professional or business-to-business community is that there needs to be a burning imperative--a driving need--for people to share information. In the creation of any professional community, that need must outweigh any of the confidentiality issues that bring up retention of information. When dealing with executives, it’s always a safe bet that ...