6 core principles to get people collaborating on social media

If you’re reading Memeburn, chances are you get that social media is important. It’s incredibly unlikely that you start talking about young people “always being on the Facebook” whenever it gets mentioned.

You’re probably also aware that the more successful a company is, the more likely it is to be using social media. But you could still be getting one vital aspect of it wrong.

That one aspect is probably the most important too: it’s the “social” part of social media. Most companies still don’t get that social media is about collaboration rather than the technological functionality.

According to Anthony Bradley, group vice president at tech research company Gartner, “Far too many social media endeavours are failing because the managers leading the efforts lack knowledge of the fundamental principles of mass collaboration. Business and IT leaders must understand the basic nature of mass collaboration and how to deliver on its unique value. Like never before, millions of people can simultaneously create content, share experiences, build relationships, and engage in other forms of productive work and meaningful activities.”

In other words, no social media technology is strong enough to save your efforts if you get collaboration wrong. Here are six core principles the research company suggests you follow if you want to get it right.

1. Participation: get communities to work for you
Using social media successfully means getting as many people as possible to participate. The people who get it wrong see social media as another channel for corporate communications rather than an opportunity for mass collaboration. Gartner reckons you should design collaboration in from the get go, with everything else revolving around getting the community to contribute valuable content.

You can get people started by providing seed content to promote community contributions, and motivate them with incentives — such as social status and gamification.

2. Collective: unleash the ‘swarm’ mentality

With social media, people “collect” around a unifying cause. That’s what gets people go to the content to contribute their piece to the whole. The most challenging thing about social media is getting people to come to you quickly. Getting people to swarm is almost entirely dependent on the specific reason you want people to collaborate. This is what draws together a community and gets them to contribute. More importantly, purpose also identifies the “what’s in it for me” for the individuals involved. What’s unique about mass collaboration is that people are self-motivated to participate if the purpose is compelling enough to them personally.

Pursue a specific and well-defined purpose that is easily identifiable and meaningful to the target audience. It’s important to capitalise on physical world events, as well as online events, as part of a “tipping point plan” to rally people and catalyse a community.

3. Transparency: put the community in charge if the content

When your social media effort (on whatever platform) is transparent, the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement. This principle of transparency distinguishes social media from other forms of content sharing, such as web content management and traditional knowledge management systems.

Make sure that people can view, use and provide feedback on the contributions of others: with functionality such as thumbs up and thumbs down, tagging, voting, star ratings, and social commentary. Employing transparency in your incentive programmes (such as leader boards, virtual currencies and badges) also helps show that you really recognise valuable contributions.

4. Independence: the “mass” in mass collaboration

People have to be able contribute completely independently of each other no matter where they are. Consider how big your social media efforts could get, and design for anything that could impede anytime, any place and any-member collaboration. You should also eliminate, or at least minimise, anything (including controls, administration and moderating, or other gating mechanisms) that could slow down collaboration.

5. Persistence: social media isn’t a quick-fix

One of the cornerstones of social media is that people can see, share and add to what other people are saying. This one of the big differences between it and “same time” conversational interactions, such as telephone and videoconferencing, where the information exchanged isn’t captured effectively. You probably already know this, but you have to bear it mind all the time.

If you want your social effort to last, you have to make it easy for people to use new technologies that excite them. You should also examine how much people want to stick with what you’re doing on social, how to manage and maintain the content you’re putting out. Importantly, make sure that the content is relevant to what you’re trying to achieve.

6. Emergence: groups of people tend towards productivity on their own accord

Mass collaboration cannot be modelled, designed, optimised or controlled. They emerge over time through the interactions of community members. This is what allows collaborative communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

That means you have to give people the time and flexibility to find their own way of achieving results. Observe social media behaviours, examine how community interactions affect productivity, then guide the community and make the changes that accommodate new ways of working.