Estudio “Comunidades Online 2009”: en marcha

Con unas cuantas horas de retraso, por fin se abre oficialmente la toma de datos de este Estudio. Si llevas una comunidad, si trabajas con una comunidad, estás cordialmente invitado a participar en ella (haciendo click aquí). Son apenas cinco minutos, como mucho, y los resultados merecen la pena.

¿Porqué lo se? Porque llevamos una semana probándola “bajo el radar”, y con los datos recogidos de los primeros participantes ya se pueden empezar a sacar conclusiones sorprendentes.

Pero empecemos por el principio.

Objetivos del Estudio

Si uno hace caso de los medios de comunicación masivos, en el último año, las “redes sociales” han pasado de ser un peligro para la infancia a una herramienta sin la que ningún profesional puede funcionar (y ningún joven divertirse). A lomos de esa percepción, las empresas por fin están prestando atención a toda la familia de “social media” que hay más allá de los blogs (que estuvieron de moda el año pasado).

Lo cierto es que, más allá de modas y epidemias mediáticas, Internet nos ha traído unas nuevas formas de comunicarnos y trabajar que son mucho más avanzadas que el email y la página estática. En torno a esos medios se han formado no sólo redes, sino comunidades: conversaciones permanentes en el tiempo, cuyos participantes comparten intereses privados o fines profesionales.

Estas comunidades tienen a su vez la capacidad de generar un impacto muy serio en la actividad productiva (económica o no). En muchos aspectos, entre ellos:

Gartner and Forrester on collaboration

This month promises to be interesting in more ways than expected. Starting on November 18th, my people at the company I work for can expect some nuggets of wisdom from approved sources .

In short, on November 18th we’ll have a face-to-face (or face-to-teleconference for some) with Gartner’s research director Nikos Drakos on “Social networks, Collaboration, and High-performance Workplace”. He doesn’t blog much, but he has a serious pedigree in the CMS arena and Gartner’s latest offering in the area is not bad.

Then on November 19th I’ll drag some of them to a webinar by Forrester, sponsored by Socialtext, about “How to create a winning collaboration strategy” (o about “Social computing redefines collaboration”, depending on the page you land on ). It’s relevant, because Forrester has just released a report con collaboration which I’m curious -and sceptic- about, and Socialtext has recently released version 3.0, which is much more than a plain wiki and much closer to a complete collaboration platform with a new twist.

We’re bound to learn something along the way, don’t you think? We’re already doing interesting work in the field since a while back, but it should be nice to hear where they think things are going.

CPSquare’s Long Live the Platform Conference report

And while we’re out there reading a bit (not for much longer today). I just came across something that I already knew was out: the report on CPSquare’s latest conference, this time about the infrastructure needed to sustain community interactions (aka “the platform”). The report itself has interesting nuggets on the issue, but more on the organization of this type of complex online events; they’ve done a lot of things for this conference. Any which way, an interesting read.

Besides, I missed nine tenths of it, so I have to make up…

Matt Moore and talking about KM ROI

This is a very interesting set of slides. Not just because it does give a couple of inklings on how to build some business-relevant metrics, but also because it helps a lot to frame the question that needs to be answered, and gives some practical tips about the mindframe you need to be in… and the influence of the audience.

As Matt says, the presentation is evidently missing some juicy comments on the final slides. On the whole, while it will not answer the concrete answer of how to magically generate believable metrics on the returns of KM, it does set a very good stage in which to do your own homework. Which is what it is about.

Also, if totally unrelated… while seizing the occasion to trawl along his blog (it’s been many weeks since I last had time) I found the usual lot of jewels, including this podcast about blended facilitation, with Nancy White and Ed Mitchell. Not to be missed. Even if Ed’s gone and copied the skin we’re using at iPhoniac.com…