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Launching communities, letting others do the work, and taking all the credit
- 2. Me 1.0
Founded and have been operating for more than 14 years
• Dancilla (largest folk dancing community worldwide)
Had been
• Expert in the MS Access forums in the 1990s for 6 years
• Moderator in a literary community for 3 years
Developer, DevManager, Architect and worked for years with SAP Community
Network both as contributor as well as team member. Launched communities
around topics like
• Composite Application Framework
• Visual Composer
• Business Process Experts
• and others…
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 2
- 3. Me 2.0
Starting 2010: Doing Technology Strategy, Developer
Evangelism, Innovation Events & Communities
Started in 2010 multiple groups on the Employee Network
• iPhone / iPad group (May 2010, today 900 members, 400+ discussions)
• Gamification @ SAP (Aug. 2010, today 400+ members, 200+ discussions)
• Innovation Steampunk (January 2011, today 360+ members)
• HANA Content developers (since December 2010, today 900+ members)
co-moderate groups like
• Android (since May 2010, today 400+ members)
Total Reach (the movie): ˜2,500 individuals
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 3
- 4. Disclaimer!
I published multiple books, including a really funny joke book (honestly!)
I won a standup comedy contest and founded a satirical magazine
With other words: I believe I am somewhat funny – and I am pretty talkative too
Whatever works for me and my communities / groups, might not work for you.
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 4
- 5. © 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 5
- 6. © 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 6
- 7. Universal truths
It’s not about me, it’s about us. But you are the me, that is driving the us.
As community leader you are the
• Cheerleader in chief
• Sherriff
• Organizer
• Sales rep
• Idiot who does most of the work
• Psychiatrist and emotional garbage can
• Target for attacks from trolls and any form of paranoia
Creating of a “community” is easy, bringing it to live is hard. Most are stillborn.
Know your community.
YOU set the mood and spirit of the community.
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 7
- 8. How do you start?
You have this great idea for a community
(and hopefully not somebody telling you to create one and you are half-heartedly behind it and
in reality you have better things to do and WTF)
• Search, if such a community / group already exists
• Find a crispy one-sentence purpose / goal for your group
• Pitch it to colleagues and listen to their feedback
• Find a compelling short name
• Create a charter and keep it “work in progress”
• Don’t invent your own terminology (yet) – people won’t find you, won’t
understand you and create their own communities
• Don’t waste your time with defining categories and subcommunities – add them
over time, if necessary at all (more often than not you don’t need them)
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 8
- 9. Who do you want?
Members should be (and/or)
• Experts / gurus
• Beginners who like to participate (they will
become your most loyal advocates and helpers)
• Lurkers (they talk about it and will bring you
unexpected opportunities)
• polite, helpful and respectful
• bring in the right mood and attitude
• able to structure stuff, correct it, answer it etc.
• passionate about the topic
• honestly leading discussions
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 9
- 10. Who do you want? The other angle…
Here is a different angle of the crowd you want*)
• The community needs to contain at least a few people capable of innovation.
But not everyone in the community need be. There are plenty of other
necessary roles:
• The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early.
• The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y.
• The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group.
• The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest.
• General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.
Different people may occupy these various roles at different times, including that
of innovator.
*) Chris Anderson: Crowd Accelerated Innovation, Wired Magazin, January 2011
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 10
- 11. How do you get them?
• Do good things and talk about it
• Identify experts and ask them about their opinion or
nudge them to contribute
(keep your expectations low: only few will contribute)
• Pay attention to members who show initiative and nurture
them
• Trust people, give them chances, let them grow into the
roles and provide constructive feedback
• Don’t apply unrealistically high standards to all members
• Join other interesting communities and keep your eyes
open
• Be a good example yourself
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 11
- 12. Who do you not want?
Assholes
for more on that consult “The No Asshole Rule” from Stanford
professor Robert Sutton
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 12
- 13. How do I get rid of them?
• Stay alert and make yourself familiar with dialectics and negative patterns
• Act fast, warn them privately, don’t argue to much with them, it’s not worth the
time
• Remove them from the community / group, if behavior continues
Why should you do it?
• Assholes create more assholes
• The spirit of the community goes down fast, and it looses a significant amount of
(constructive) activity
• For your own sanity: dealing with assholes amounts to 80% of your workload that
you should better spend on constructive community work
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 13
- 14. What do I do?
• I organize events like
• presentations,
• brainstorming sessions
• pitches
• virtual and real-life meetings
• I try to identify the
• pain points
• interests
• newest trends
• stuff that needs my help
• I send newsletters every 1-2 weeks and highlight
• great shit that members are doing and discussing
• awesome articles and blogs
• mind-blowing ideas that I encounter
• fun poking at me
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 14
- 16. Newsletters
My newsletters
• have their own style and
language
• are not “one-voiced”
• are not politically correct
• have attitude
• are not bloodless
• work with humor
• are not for the faint-of-
heart
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 16
- 17. What else do I do? (still more that you do?)
• I talk to many people individually and
• recognize their work
• ask them for their opinion
• politely kick their ass to engage
• I cross-promote topics in different groups
• I connect individuals, e.g.
• Kinect (5 different locations)
• Marketplace for developers and projects
• I take pain points to higher places, pain points like
• using private mobile devices in the corporate network
• obstacles of developing iOS apps
• the broken Android app development process
• mobile strategy
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 17
- 18. What else do I do? (jeez, are you starting to brag?)
• I engage the members
• with open ended questions
• by soliciting their opinions
• challenging them with “missions”
• I try not to be an annoyance (at least not all the time)
• I have fun
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 18
- 19. How many years of your life will this cost?
• When you start, expect 1-2 hours per day to spend
on the community for a minimum of 3 months
• Don’t expect that it will become less work; when it
takes off, you’ll be the most popular kid on the block
• At the beginning you will do most of the work alone
• Expect to own the community / group for 1-2 years
• You should make yourself familiar with the topic
• Be extremely polite and patient with members
• Members are doing you a favor (yes, in the end
they are doing themselves a favor, but that’s not
what they perceive)
• Allow imperfection, that will allow more discussion
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 19
- 20. What’s in it for you?
You will
• have an opportunity to assemble and meet a crowd
of interesting people
• be exposed to a lot of good things and ideas
• receive invitations to other exciting opportunities
(conferences, expert panels, presentations…)
• be moving from whining and complaining to having
an impact and doing great things
• receive recognition from colleagues
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 20
- 21. My advice for you? (beside showing you pictures of pretty steampunk girls)
• Your personality, character, interests, style etc.
make an imprint on the community – use it to your
advantage
• People will feel your passion and whether you have
fun – show it
• You have no formal authority over people; whatever
you do has either to catch their interest or make
them want to be part of it
• Inspire them
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 21
- 22. How do you know you are on the path to success?
• When you return after two weeks of vacation, you find in
your community / group dozens of new postings, and
not questions only or trolls spamming it
• Your community / group starts looking more like a
valuable archive of knowledge and resources instead of
a forum of mindless gossip
• You find other colleagues linking to your community /
group when questions about the topic area pop up
(and the links are not placed between irony-tags)
• Unknown colleagues greet you in the cafeteria by name,
want your autograph or a baby from you
© 2011 Mario Herger. All rights reserved. www.enterprise-gamification.com 22