On Friday I had the pleasure of presenting at the first SOMESSO conference just outside of Zurich at the GDI Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. I presented an updated version of the presentation I put together, with input from Dennis Howlett and Philip Woodgate describing how you build sustainable corporate web communities. We've used the lessons learned from implementing a social network for the ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales), along with ideas from the other communities we've built, backed up by some great material from other sources. That includes Francois Gossieaux's excellent Tribalization of Business 2008 study from earlier in the year, Jeremiah Owyang's Online Community Best Practices, as well as recommending Stewart Mader's Wikipatterns for techniques to help foster community participation and adoption.
I've already mentioned how well organized the conference was (except for WiFi access failings), and I'll post some more thoughts on other sessions and who I met later.
The ICAEW are the professional membership organization you are most likely to belong to if you are an accountant in practice or in business in the UK. They've adopted our platform to take their regional groups, special interest groups and faculties (on topics like IT or Reporting) online to supplement their physical meetups. This also presents their business with some great sponsorship opportunities. Their IT Counts community is sponsored by Microsoft and Datawatch. So far they've won the Best New Web 2.0 Initiative at Web Strategies 2008, and they are shortlisted for Best Use of the Internet by a Business at next week's AccountancyAge awards.
Here are my slides from the presentation. A couple of the slides have too many bullet points. Good content, and useful for a handout maybe, but not very Presentation Zen, and definitely not conforming to the Guy Kawasaki 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. I'll do a proper revision at some point soon, spreading those bullet points out to more slides with more pictures.
The presentation was well received, and I'm very pleased with comments and tweets on the day. We're pulling all of our approaches and the lessons we've learned in to a structured methodology that we'll be using within the WordFrame partner ecosystem. We'll announce more on that here soon. I'm very interested to hear your feedback, or your own stories on community building - we don't have enough case studies and good material to help support the cause in enterprises and the corporate world.
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