Earlier in the year, I was asked to organize a summit for some of our key customers. The objective was to share with them some key thought leadership and start a dialogue around a number of topics including sustainability, cloud computing and innovation. As preparation progressed, so did the enthusiastic responses of our customers, unfortunately to tell us they would love to be there, but that the economical situation did not allow them to travel. This got us to completely rethink the approach resulting in us launching a virtual community. The stealth launch was June 1^st and we are now ready to communicate more about it.

What I want to do in this blog entry, is not so much talk about the community itself, but give you some background on how we built what we ended up with.

The first step was for us to identify the key principles and features of our virtual community and we came up with following:

• The community should allow members in multiple time zones to share ideas and exchange information, which meant that the community should essentially be "asynchronous" in nature, allowing members to interact and consume thought leadership at a time that is convenient to them
• We wanted to combine provisioning of thought leadership (one way communication) with interactions (two way communications) between the members of the community. These interactions should be public or private, this means that for the public ones the other members could see them and potentially intervene in the conversation, while the private one should remain private.
• Thought leadership should be able to be provided in multiple formats including documents, podcasts, slide presentations with voice over and video. (This turned out to be a headache just before we got the community on line, but I will come back to that.)
• Community members should be able to share ideas publically, and to comment on other people's ideas. With the platform we decided to use, we have an additional capability that turns out to be quite interesting. The members can promote or demote an idea. This means that they get scored and that the most relevant ones bubble up to the top of the list. It's a sort of a vote of interest from the community and provides us, facilitators, with a good understanding of what interests our members.
• The community would be limited to Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers to ensure common interests and a particular level of dialogue amongst the members. We would invite external guests to share their knowledge in the community, and initiate focused dialogues around particular topics of interest.

We choose a platform, www.brightidea.com, focused on innovation, and developed our community on top of the platform. Obviously, we struggled a little with the design of the site and its home page, but that actually turned out to be the easy part. However, we learned a lot along the way, and I would like to share with you some of those experiences.

• We realized that thought leadership, to be effective, should be short and sweet. So, we are urging our content providers to give us material (in particular multi-media) in around 20 minute chunks, as we discovered this is about the time somebody remains concentrated on a particular subject. Longer pieces are split in parts.
• It is not easy to "stream" multi-media" and as our system was in the cloud, it took our partner and us some time to experiment how to approach things.
• Sharing a slide presentation with voice over on the internet sounds like the simplest thing to do, isn't it? Well, that's actually not the case. Microsoft used to have a tool, but sunset that one with Office 2003. So, after a long search time, we finally found a tool converting to flash, allowing a simple view on a screen without having to wait for hours that the whole presentation is loaded on the local PC.
• To be able to refresh the content regularly, it is important to plan a pipeline of content providers with clearly defined due dates. This turned out to be one of the difficult things as for most people it's not their primary job. On the other hand, being able to refresh regularly is mandatory to have members coming back on a regular basis, which in turn fuels the conversation.
• The last one was how to motivate sales teams to invite their customers. Here reactions were very different, going from extremely enthusiastic people to people that did not want this ever to happen. It turned out that, when showing them what we were trying to achieve, many changed their mind and supported us well, but it took quite some effort to get there. Same applies to guests, some enthusiastically want to join and contribute, while one in particular, told us bluntly he did not want to get involved, demonstrating to us the still existing distance between university and enterprises.

We are now looking at refreshing the site, making navigation easier and creating some sub community pages. This will allow particular groups to have their own environment while still getting access to the other assets available in the community. We received quite some interest from members for this new feature. As any website, we see this one being in constant evolution. It has been an interesting journey, and continues to be. We are also looking at doing some events on the site, actual webinars on particular subjects. We realize this goes against one of the principles established at the start, but it fosters the community spirit. Obviously, those webinars should be recorded for inclusion in the thought leadership library.

If you happen to be a Manufacturing & Distribution Industry CIO or CTO and wish to experience our community by yourself, feel free to sign up here.

One last point that has nothing to do with the above. I am taking some time off, so my next blog entry will take a while to be posted. I do hope you don't mind, and wish all of you a great summer.