The following came to me via my inbox this morning, from an individual I know, an advocate for Jive, who shall remain nameless. I asked if I could share this with all of you, and they said yes. Enjoy.

—

More often than not, toward the end of demonstrating [name of internal Jive community platform, known hereafter as "Jive"] to potential new users, I get some crusty, arms crossed, knowledge management denizen that informs me “they have a highly structured document management process”, “they need folder and sub folders and auto-tagging to ensure everything is in its right place”, “they don’t see that in Jive”, “they don’t think Jive would be useful”, “they think social is a fad like tv or venereal disease”.

These guys, ya, they are usually guys. Usually wizened (read wrinkled with gray hair). Usually unkempt (oddly). Usually ponytailed. Always unpleasant. These guys always take the wind out of the conversation. It is not for a lack of something to say in response, most times a good portion of the room rolls their eyes and we lurch past the objections by getting the conversation back to their business objectives.

Of late, I’ve decided I am going to start carrying a manilla file folder in my bag. From this manilla folder I will produce a single piece of paper, perhaps a nice linen sheet watermarked with my initials. The sheet of paper will be completely blank. I shall place the sheet in front of me and say, “Thank you for that question. I’ve prepared a response in advance.” And then …

“You’re a hoarder, aren’t you?”

“You go home in the evenings and have to navigate through corridors of newspapers to such an extent that you’ve created some bizarre human habitrail maze. But everything is in its place isn’t it. You can find it all – that receipt for sweatsocks, yes the ones you are wearing, the ones I can see poking through your Birkenstocks – you can find that in an instant if need be – it is precisely where you put it 6 years ago. Good for you. In all seriousness, it’s good to see someone embracing their pathology. Keep it up and keep fighting the good fight because sooner or later I am sure we will recognize you for the genius you are – we will build monuments of cardboard boxes that have been purposely set aside in the off chance they could be useful again; such a shame to throw away a box used just once isn’t it? You will be vindicated and I am sure this meeting is just the start of it. In the meantime, those around you have a business to run.

Now I am not here to throw chaos in your face and call it sunshine. But I want everyone to think about the way they use documents today, your SharePoint sites, your shared drives with team project folder structures, your Atlassian Wikis. You’ve invested a lot of energy into finely crafting an organizational structure that will last a thousand years. Does anyone really use it? Do people still put things where ever the hell they want to? Do people create their own organizational structures because, like Goldilocks, some of the other structures just aren’t quite right?

Well for all your hard work, you’ve designed a Leviathan, it protects your information in a maze of organization and it defeats any ability you might otherwise have to elaborate on the work of others.

“Invest your energies in doing your jobs, not curating your insecurities”

But I understand your fear. I am here today to tell you that you need fear no more. I am here to tell you that you can go about your business, you can ask one another questions, you can search and find information and you can invest your energies in doing your jobs rather than curating your insecurities. You are afraid because you can only think in 2 dimensions, you are Cartesian – and there is nothing wrong with that – but it will drag you down and will keep you from reaching your potential because you exist in a multi-dimensional world and there are advantages to gain from the other dimensions; advantages that will make you more productive and more successful.

Your sacred organizational structures are irrelevant. When you want to find something, do you cast that objective into some unnatural hierarchy of storage – through some Linnean taxonomy that has been imposed? Or do you think about that thing in terms of it’s immediate context? Who are the people responsible for it? What type of thing is it? What collective is most knowledgeable? And that is the beauty of Jive, it exposes the dimensions upon which you naturally traverse. With Jive you have access to the authorship, not just of a single element but a whole body of work – I can find you as a subject matter expert and I can traverse the content you have contributed to our community. I can see all the places you contribute, I can access the contributions of others against that topic and I can find other content similar to my interests based on it’s contextual relevancy rather than its imposed catalogue. I can also focus on content as a type – find only dialogue, text, video, analysis as needed. These are the natural content types that have meaning to you in the manner in which you really prosecute your responsibilities as an employee.

“Don’t meander through a haystack – Search!”

Beyond the benefits of contextual relevance, that today, sadly, have been kept from you; beyond these amazing benefits, you can now search. Search! Actually look for natural language descriptions of what you need and have relevant results returned to you. You don’t need to meander through some haystack of organization – you can simply, search. You expect that of the world-wide-web; why do you not expect that of your workplace? Your simple search will then facilitate you back into the virtuous cycle of contextual relevancy and then you have the opportunity to enhance the community through your own contributions.

So, you can choose to confine yourselves to subfolders. You can choose to hack off your potential as though it were a vestigial organ. Or you can embrace the future unencumbered from the chains that have thus far rendered your best efforts useless.”

I would then like to vanish in a puff of smoke – I am still working on that bit.

Originally posted on Edelman Digital

Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked with several clients to plan and implement employee- and customer-facing social business initiatives. I’ve found it ironic that, while many enterprises decide to implement social business software and encourage social business behaviors in an effort to break down silos between employees and employees, employees and customers, and employees and the social Web, they approach their implementations from a very silo’ed perspective. For example, employee-focused pilots tend to take root in a business unit, then IT and/or Employee Communications teams take over when it grows into a strategic initiative. And in the mean time, Marketing and Corporate Communications are leading a completely separate customer- and social Web-facing social business initiative. The left and right hands often don’t meet until their procurement office gets the purchase orders.

From Silos > To Strategic Focus

However, if you can somehow remove these organizational-chart blinders sooner rather than later, the big picture becomes clearer. You can focus on the full business processes you’re trying to evolve, and all of the people who need to participate in social business transformation – employees, prospects, customers, and partners. You’ll then have a better chance of identifying the “from” you wish to leave behind, and the “to” you want to become.

In my new role as Communities Program Manager at Jive, I’m responsible for infusing existing business practices with social business behaviors (among other tasks). So, we focus first on the process and who enacts it before we figure out where social business software can improve or innovate how we do business.

Here are a few business practices we’ve evolved into social business practices, categorized by how most companies are measured:

REVENUE GROWTH

Attracting Leads: From Static Website Content > To Interactive Thought Leadership

To attract more leads, we’ve augmented our static website content – case studies, whitepapers, customer webcasts, etc. – with content from influential and, well, pretty damn smart employees, customers and partners in our customer-facing Jive Community. Most of these mavens and connectors are part of our newly launched Jive Champions program. But, while the content is great, it’s the willingness of these Champions to interact that puts the zing in this particular sauce.

We routinely market this thought leadership content in the social Web. We, of course, “FaceTweetIn” it, but we also use social media monitoring to listen for and then engage folks who are interested in our or our competitors’ products and services. My colleague, Mike Fraietta, listens to 100% of the Twitter stream, plus everything else out there, ready to share our community’s thought leadership when appropriate (he’s one of our Jive Champions, so he dispenses advice and shares his experiences along the way).

I also make sure to market this content and its resulting discussions to our employees in our internal social networking software environment. Sales, Support, Services, Product Management, and our executive staff are very much plugged into our prospects and customers, which means they can propagate our thought leaders’ content in a very targeted fashion to progress a sales opportunity, or increase customer penetration.

We have another social business practice focused specifically on progressing a sales opportunity that includes integration between Salesforce.com, our employee-facing Jive SBS instance, and our customer-facing Jive SBS instance. That’s another blog post, however.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Crisis Management: From Not Knowing > To Proactive Engagement

Before we had social media monitoring capabilities, the only way we’d know about a brand-related crisis was if someone accidently stumbled across a blog post, Facebook group, or tweet. We’ve evolved that practice into listening to the social Web, and proactively engaging our prospects and customers before sentiments get too out of hand. Now, when our brand starts to take hits in the social Web or in our customer-facing community, we post the negative items in our employee community so that we can get the right eyeballs and actions on it immediately.  And, we join the negative conversation as soon as possible, offering to listen and take their feedback back to our colleagues.

I think my favorite part about this scenario, however, is that our customers have come to our rescue on our behalf, both in our customer community and in the social Web. Many of these customers are now part of our Jive Champions program.

INNOVATION

Developing Products: From Bug Tracking > To Interactive Ideation

We’ve always loved hearing from our customers about what our products need to become to make their work lives better. But, collecting their feedback through support cases, then submitting it into feature/bug tracking software where nobody but our engineers saw it didn’t leverage the collective innovation our customers could produce. We evolved this process into one that promotes interactive ideation. Customers now submit, comment, and vote on product ideas in our customer community, playing off one another’s ideas to refine what they really want. Our product managers join these discussions to ask for more clarity, run initial product plans by our customers, and learn at a glance what the top ideas – i.e., the most wanted ideas – are. They sometimes bridge specific discussions into our employee community so they can collaborate with product engineers “behind the scenes” before responding to customers.

And, just to make sure our customers know they’re being heard, our product managers periodically blog in the customer community about the status of specific ideas and how they relate to our roadmap, which I then FaceTweetIn, naturally.

None of these From > To’s would have happened if we hadn’t gained buy-in from executives, mid-level managers, and most importantly, the people enacting the practices. Here’s the engagement plan framework we used to identify, incent, empower, and engage key actors in these processes.

My next big task is to measure how all this social business activity correlates to any changes in key business metrics. That, too, is another blog post.

I’ll be presenting the following at Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Diego July 28 at 9:45 am Pacific, in Sapphire M room:

Design, for Community’s Sake! (Note: I specialize in lame titles.)

Overview:

No matter whether you’re implementing an online community environment for employees, contractors, business-to-business, channels, partners, prospects, customers, or all of the above, design it differently than your typical intranet, internet, or portal websites. Why? To promote continual engagement.

In this session, you’ll learn five good practices for designing an engaging community site: 1) Identify Community Characteristics, 2) Determine Member Wants, 3) Balance Corporate and Member Content, 4) Express Site Identity, and 5) Add Concierge Services.

You also learn how to avoid common pitfalls, including one-way broadcasting, over-branding, under-positioning with other applications and websites, and more.

Finally, we will discuss how to check the health of your existing community’s design. We will take requests from the audience to review existing community sites that are publicly accessible, and answer questions, such as: Is the site’s identity expressed clearly and does it reflect overall community objectives, characteristics, and its members’ wants and needs? Is there a good balance between company and member content?

While this is based on the Jive SBS Design Practices series, it applies to any community or collaborative platform, so if you’re at the conference, please stop by!

Even though I’ve moved into a new role at Jive Software, I’m still providing consulting services to a few customers.

If you sign up for the Jive SBS Leadership Roundtable webcast with YUM!, Intel, and Forrester, you could win a half-day workshop with me. I promise it’ll be engaging, useful, and most importantly, actionable.

Here’s the blurb:

One webcast attendee will be selected to win a free half-day strategy workshop with Gia Lyons. Gia recently left Jive Strategy Consulting, where she advised some of Jive’s most successful customers, including CSC and Alcatel-Lucent, to become the Jive Communities Program Manager. But, she continues to provide consulting services to select prospects and customers. She will help apply Jive’s proven methodology and experience from our veteran Strategic Consulting services team — implementing a social strategy is much more than just choosing the right software. Whether it’s developing a business case for your community, mapping out your community’s strategy, or implementing new tactics for growth, Gia will help bring your social business initiative to life.

CSC‘s rate of adoption between their May 18, 2009 full launch date and June 15, 2010 was about 4,000 employees per month, out of approximately 95,000 employees. Claire Flanagan (@cflanagan), Director Enterprise Social Collaboration at CSC, shared in June that C3, CSC’s employee community powered by Jive SBS, was at 50,000 active users. Read how CSC implemented the plan they developed based on their Jive Strategy Consulting session.

Alcatel-Lucent‘s rate of adoption since their mid-April 2010 full launch of Engage, powered by Jive SBS, is at around 5,000 employees per month, according to Greg Lowe (@Greg2dot0), Social Media Strategist at Alcatel-Lucent.

I’ve also worked with several national and global health care organizations, as well as clients in retail, manufacturing, and consumer goods, for both employee and customer-facing communities.

Here are a couple of topics we cover in our sessions:

Starting June 1, I’ll be the Jive Communities Program Manager, reporting to Ben Kiker, Jive CMO. For those who’ve been with me from the beginning of my employment with Jive… back to the future, eh?

Instead of part-time-when-I’ve-got-time co-manager of Jivespace, it’ll be my puppy, full time. This means a lot less travel, and a lot more involvement with the thing I love the most – Jive’s community of prospects, customers, and partners.

We have a team of passionate, freaking-smart individuals – both Jivers and customers – who have already been involved in keeping our Jive communities’ fires burning, and I’m excited to work with them all!

More later…

The following is a result of Jive Strategic Consulting Practice’s extensive work with many large clients who have deployed Jive Social Business Software. It is Part 4 of a four-part series.

In Part 1, we explained how to use Barry’s Community Flower to determine the top three characteristics of your community.

In Part 2, we discussed the importance of identifying community members’ wants.

In Part 3, we added the characteristics to the member wants to define your community’s overall expression. Now, we’ll determine members’ activity flow through your site.

“What happens when I click that?”

Once you’ve got your first landing page designed – by the way, you should do this entire process for every important landing page throughout your community site (e.g., All Content, Your View, major spaces) – it’s time to figure out where the member is taken when they start clicking around.

It helps if you’ve used Jive SBS as an end user before you do this.

How much concierge service do members need?

First, determine the level of concierge service your community’s design needs to offer. If you’ve ever stayed at a hotel with concierge services, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These patient people help you get tickets to the theater. They walk you to the corner, and point down the street you should take. In some cases, I’ve had to ask them where the hell the elevators are. In short, they hold their guests’ hands whenever necessary.

Your design’s concierge service level should be based on members’ overall familiarity with online community and/or social networking concepts, not to mention basic technical savvy.

For example, if you’re migrating an existing community to Jive SBS, members are already familiar with online community concepts, and won’t need very much holding of their hands. But, if you’re unleashing all this social business software goodness on what one of my clients calls “the crusties” – more traditional people with vasts amounts of experience, but new to community concepts – you’ll want to ratchet up the level of concierge service.

If it helps, score your members for the following attributes. The lower the overall attribute score, the more hand-holding you need to design.

* Use Forrester’s Social Technology Profile Tool to take a wild stab at this attribute.

In my personal consulting experience, I’ve found that many have little patience for learning any new technology, especially if participation is voluntary, as so many online communities are.

If it’s not obvious in five seconds or less what they’re supposed to do and how it’s going to make their work/life easier, they leave.

How to map activity flow

1:  Identify the call to action(s) that expresses your primary characteristic.

For example, for Relationships, a call to action might be “Introduce Yourself.”

2:  Decide what happens when a member clicks the call to action.

For a savvy audience, “Introduce Yourself” might take the member to the current month’s discussion thread that asks people to introduce themselves. The member would read the thread, then click Reply to add his/her introductory comment.

For a newbie audience, “Introduce Yourself” might take the member to a space that functions as a lobby.

• Purpose: space name is “All about Profiles”
• Call to Action: “Complete your Profile” link that opens the member’s profile in edit mode
• Motivation: description of the benefits of business networking and how it relates to better individual performance
• Example: a member’s profile is featured; profile guidelines are explained; link that opens help content about how to complete a profile

3:  Decide what the member’s next step is.

Continuing the newbie route, let’s say the member clicks the link to view help information about how to complete their profile. Make sure there is a link in that content that opens their profile in edit mode.

In short, ensure that the activity flow results in the member completing the call to action.

4:  Decide how the member gets to the next call to action.

Now, how do you get the member to answer the second call, or at least give them the opportunity to do so? This is why I’m a fan of adding the top two to four calls to action in the theme. That way, no matter what nether regions of the community a member finds himself in, he can always click “Collaborate” in the theme, for example. This might take him to a lobby-type space (e.g., “About Groups”), where he can answer the Collaboration call, understand why he should do so, and see how it’s done.

You could also be a bit more obvious by creating a custom widget named, “I want to…” that’s full of verby phrases voiced from the member’s point of view. If you get a developer to create this as a plugin, the widget would be available everywhere a widget can be placed. If you don’t, just create it as a Jive document somewhere, then use the View Document widget to refer to it wherever you want.

What else?

Test it. Be that newbie. Imagine yourself in their shoes. Or, call my mom and ask if she can test it. If she can figure it out, chances are your members will, too.

Well, I hope this helps all y’all. And for those of you who have a Jive strategy session in your future, consider all of this homework.

Call to action

It would be ironic if I didn’t include one.

If you’re interested in engaging Jive Strategic Consulting, please contact your Jive Sales Executive or Services Account Manager, or contact Jive Software to learn more.

The following is a result of Jive Strategic Consulting Practice’s extensive work with many large clients who have deployed Jive Social Business Software. It is Part 3 of a four-part series.

In Part 1, we explained how to use Barry’s Community Flower to determine the top three characteristics of your community.

In Part 2, we discussed the importance of identifying community members’ wants.

Express it!

Now that you have your top three characteristics identified in Part 1, and list of member wants from Part 2, let’s put them together to create your community’s overall expression. Once you do this, you’ll have successfully defined the boundaries of your community design!

Define the following elements:

• Purpose: “What’s this site all about in two seconds or less? Because that’s how much time you have my attention before I split.”
• Calls to Action: “OK, I’m here. What do you want me to do? Use clickable verbs to make it obvious.”
• Motivation:  “What’s in it for me if I answer your calls to action? Is it what I want?”
• Example: “What behavior do you want me to model? Give me an example.”

This example of expressive elements is based on the top three characteristics of Relationships, Sharing, and Groups. It is for a public community.

How do you design Jive SBS based on all of this?

Finally, we start talking about the technology.

Expression elements can help you decide the following:

• Which out-of-box widgets to put on your landing pages
  i.e., All Content, Your View, or any space or group Overview tab
• What custom widgets, if any, are needed
  e.g., giant green button with a call to action, like on Bank of America Small Business Stories, or the I Want To widget on the PayPal Developer Network landing page
• What customizations, if any, are needed to make an element more prominent
  e.g., the Superstars area on CNN iReport People page
• What modules are needed
  e.g., if members want to socialize Microsoft SharePoint documents, you’ll want Jive’s SharePoint Connector
• How to express these elements in your theme
  e.g., the calls to action in the banner on Arcsight’s Protect 724 community, or the purpose statement in Medco’s banner
• What the main spaces should be in your space taxonomy
  e.g., one Jive customer’s top characteristics were expressed as “lobby” spaces: About Groups (groups/collaborating), About Profiles (relationships/connecting), About Blogs (sharing)

Example

Nutshell

Your community’s Top Three Characteristics, member wants, and expressive elements can make it easier to design your site’s overall identity, and keep the design scope from creeping out of control.

If it doesn’t fit with your characteristics, member wants, or expressive elements, it doesn’t belong in your community.

What’s next?

In part 4, we’ll discuss how to map all this design goodness to Jive SBS capabilities.

The following is a result of Jive Strategic Consulting Practice’s extensive work with many large clients who have deployed Jive Social Business Software. It is Part 2 of a four-part series.

In Part 1, we explained how to use Barry’s Community Flower to determine the top three characteristics of your community. Next, we determine your community members’ wants.

“I want to…”

People often forget to identify the needs/wants/objectives of their community’s members. Not doing so results in yet another cold, lifeless website instead of a potentially thriving community.

For an example of how to avoid this, see this reference to Groundswell‘s case study about Proctor & Gamble’s BeingGirl site, in which the authors describe how P&G created a community to enable teenage girls to talk about teenage girl things, rather than tampons and menstrual pads – oh, I’m sorry, um, “feminine hygiene products” – can’t forget to sanitize biology for mass consumption, ha ha! I digress. Where was I?

Right.

To be thorough, you may want to do this next exercise for every persona that will interact in your community, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just lump them all together for now.

If you’re designing primarily an employee community, think about what your fellow colleagues want to get out of it, keeping the Top Three Characteristics identified in Part 1 in mind. If you’re designing primarily a public community, think about what members – both customers/partners/prospects/developers and employees – want to get out of it.

BIG HINT: “What will members get in my community that they can’t get anywhere else?”

Here are examples for an employee community:

• Find across all of ACME people who can help me get my work done (Relationships)
• Tap into ACME’s broad collective experience to help me be more innovative in my work (Groups)
• Give back – help others I may not know yet get work done (Sharing)

And for a public community:

• Find education and marketing information that will help me sell more of ACME’s products (Content)
• Build relationships with other ACME customers (Relationships)
• Learn from ACME’s customers about what it’s like to be an ACME customer (Conversations)
• Find what others are doing with ACME solutions and services (Sharing)
• Tap in to ACME’s expertise (Groups)

But, they can get this somewhere else!

Especially in the case of employee communities, the “I want to…” examples above are seemingly already satisfied by existing collaboration and networking applications. I’m not going to get into the colossal chasm that all too frequently exists between what the business really wants and what IT forces them to use, but I’ll just pull a Dr. Phil here and say, “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

Usability – and all-employee access – matters. But, that’s a whole other blog post.

As for public communities, probably the top reasons potential members will participate – what they can’t get anywhere else – are access to your company’s “official” information and more importantly, your employees. However, if your people are already interacting with your customers/prospects/partners on third-party message boards or in Facebook or LinkedIn groups or Twitter or whatever, you’ll obviously need to entice those employees to stop doing that as much there, and start doing it in your community more (assuming this jibes with one of your top three characteristics).

Then, all those other social media interactions become engagement channels where employees can drive participation to your new community.

Now what?

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’ll add the top three characteristics to these member wants to figure out how to design your Jive SBS community.

The following is a result of Jive Strategic Consulting Practice’s extensive work with many large clients who have deployed Jive Social Business Software. It is Part 1 of a four-part series.

It’s not about you, Corporate MarComm. It’s about we.

It’s not just another website, and yet many approach the design of their community site the same way they approached their intranet or corporate Internet site.

Which are usually all about one-way communication and passive consumption.

To avoid doing this with your community’s design, try using what we here at Jive call, “Barry’s Community Flower” to figure out what your community is all about. This thing actually grew (ha ha!) from Gene Smith’s Social Software Building Blocks (which grew from a few other frameworks), but we like to name our stuff after the peeps who bring it to our frontal lobes.

What do the petals mean?

Can you identify what the main characteristic is?

To spark your thinking, check out these communities, powered by Jive SBS.  See if you can figure out what the main characteristic is.

• EMC Community
• Bank of America’s Small Business Community
• BlackBerry Community
• Alcatel-Lucent Ideation Community
• Medco Research Community
• CNN iReport Community
• Premier Farnell Element 14 Wireless Community

Identify your community’s top three characteristics

Now, pick the petal that best reflects what it is you’re trying to accomplish with your community, based on:

1. Corporate objectives – “ACME Inc. needs to get abc from the community”; and
2. Member objectives – “I really don’t care what YOU need, ACME Inc., but I want to do xyz here.” (more on this in Part 2)
   

How to pick your petals

1. A facilitator draws the flower on a whiteboard/flipchart/napkin/back of her hand.
2. Everybody gets to pick JUST ONE petal, silently. Shh.
   Note 1: It’s not like people are going to do ONLY that one thing, so don’t get your panties in a wad. They’re all relevant, but one has to be primary if you want an elegantly designed site.
   Note 2: Don’t think too much about the differences between these characteristics, as they will quickly all seem to mean the same thing, or overlap so much that you cannot make a choice.
3. The facilitator goes around the room, asking for each person’s vote – she places a mark next to each petal that receives one.
4. Usually, one petal will emerge as the primary community characteristic, and the next two petals that received the most votes become the two secondary ones.

Voila! You have determined the primary and two secondary characteristics of your community! Yay!

Now what?

First, make sure that your characteristics are in line with the community’s overall objectives. For example, talk/hug it out re: how “Relationships” will help meet the company’s objectives of “Driving Growth” – and make sure somebody is either taking notes or recording your conversation. Gold often emerges here.

If you simply cannot find a connection between the characteristics you’ve chosen and the objectives of your community, stick a tack in that discussion, and stay tuned for Part 2 in this series.

It’s been almost five months since I first scratched my head over the perception that Enterprise 2.0 and social media practitioners don’t ever mix their chocolate and peanut butter. I wrote that post soon after delivering this presentation.

Since then, I’ve conducted many strategic planning sessions with clients who are implementing online communities as part of their overall social media involvement, and have learned QUITE a bit about what sucks and doesn’t suck about trying to implement a nice, well-rounded social media approach.

Instead of blah blah blah-ing about it, I give you a short, incomplete list that you can challenge me about:

• Employees throughout your organization should be able to listen to what customers, prospects, and partners are talking about, and DO SOMETHING about it. This isn’t reserved solely for Corporate Marketing or your PR Agency anymore. (Shameless plug: My company, Jive Software, realized this, and bought Filtrbox to help make this happen.)
• Corporate Marketing can become Corporate Darlings just by including employees in writing social media guidelines and participating in social media activities. We non-Marketing folks are doing it anyway, so why not orchestrate us? (I recommend using my favorite Enterprise 2.0 application, Jive SBS, natch.)
• Make an online community place just one component of your overall social media plan – drive prospects and customers and partners to a destination place. You Twitter and Facebook and blog about marketing events and promotions and press releases, yet include links to your cold, dead, brochure-like website. Why not link to where your online community is discussing it as well? (Hint: it sure makes it easier to listen and act when the higher-value conversations are all happening in one spot.)

Confession: This blog post included links to mostly cold, dead, brochure-like websites until I wrote that last paragraph.