Attended the Jive Seminar on Building Communities to Grow Your Business yesterday. Was a great event and very well attended. Sam Lawrence from Jive stole the show with a very engaging presentation/discussion on the how’s and why’s of community building (both internal and external) without pushing his product.

Here is a brain dump of some of the points made (probably how I would have live blogged it…)

• On a non-scientific poll of the audience Sam thought there were definitely more people participating in on-line communities that he sees elsewhere in the world (close to 90% as opposed to an average of 50%). I think everyone in the room put their hand up when he asked if they read blogs.
• Nike’s community is really important to them. They fly the ’stars’ of their community around the world to talk to other community members, and one is even the star of their new commercial. The community is about running not about shoes.
• Gen Y will be 50% of the workforce in 6 years
• Social software is happening now because it’s cheap and easy to get going
• Comcast pay people to sit on Twitter and engage with people who have issues with them

Here are some things I’m really glad they said as it fits in very neatly with what I’ve been talking about here:

• It’s not about the technology, it’s the culture that will make or break “Enterprise 2.0″
• The most important question to ask yourself is “what is my community for?” and tie metrics and your focus to that objective
• The metrics and success criteria will depend on your strategy. The ROI or business value will come down to a business problem you are trying to solve - access information more quickly, product research with your customers, generate leads - and will be tied into the ROI of that initiative, rather than the technology having an innate ROI itself.

All in all a great seminar, also good to see Jive with a permanent presence in the UK! Hope to be able to work with some Clearspace projects in the future…

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