Running virtual groups

Here are some lessons learned from my interviews last week with a company that lives and breathes community.

Few people willingly change the basic way they send and receive information. Email messaging is more likely to take hold than a portal.

Internet software travels with an invisible companion, the memes and processes I call internet culture. The net is an environment for sharing, optimism, and friendliness.

In email and on blogs, people speak conversationally, absent the officiousness of a traditional business memo.

Behind the firewall, behavior is casual but professional. People don’t foul their nest.

Live on the web inside your organization to learn lessons to share with your customers.

People who don’t visibly take part in virtual communities are not lurkers; they are silent partners. Thank goodness, for otherwise everyone would be talking at once.

Group membership should be selective. A couple of hundred people is a common group limit to growth.

Filter out the noise of mediocre and erroneous elements of raw knowledge to increase the fidelity of the knowledge flow.

People will read ten messages embedded in a weekly email. They will not read thirty.

Don’t think learning; this is raising collective intelligence.