This past Sunday, I was derailed from my usual routine of bee-lining straight to the Modern Love column in The New York Times (by the front page of the business section), where the cover story read “Xerox’s New Chief Tries to Redefine Its Culture.”
Ursula Burns, who was appointed CEO this past July, describes an environment at Xerox where the employees are simply too nice to one another. She wants them to “become more fearless and be more frank and impatient with one another” to help the company grow.
Ms. Burns’ call for brutal honesty within her organization got me thinking—can Xerox’s 130,000 employees leverage anything we know at Communispace about building the kind of community that will cure Xerox’s internal positive bias? Here’s what I came up with:
1. Build intimacy.
Give Xerox employees a platform to be heard in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they are one of 130,000. Intimacy is what drives participation. For us, that means that a community of 500 members has better participation than, say, in a community of 2,000. With larger size comes increased anonymity, which means less engagement.
2. Talk to the same group of people over time.
Knowing what to ask is important, but knowing when to ask can be even more important. Our members become increasingly loyal about the companies who sponsor a community, and this makes them more honest over time. They become more committed to your success and stop being polite and when they feel you are committed to listening—and that you aren’t going away.
3. Close the loop.
Take listening one step further and close the loop. Tell them what you are doing with the information you heard, and how it is making a difference. This will make everyone feel that giving feedback—both good and bad—is a good use of their time.
4. Let your customers help.
Gather the customer stories—both the ones who’ve been loyal for years and the new ones you’ve acquired through Affiliated Computer Services—that will help open up the conversation. They are uniquely poised to keep everyone honest if you have the kind of relationship with them where they feel that you are truly listening.
And who knows—maybe in a few months the NYT headline will read something like “New Culture Redefines Xerox.”
Nicole Adriance 
I’m no social media expert, far from it in fact. I blog now and then, I’ve been a community manager for several years, I share pictures, and I like to tweet (
Barbara Vogel 
On my way to a recent conference, a stranger standing next to me in the elevator posed that question to me. Sometimes it’s the off-occurrences in life that stick with you and I’ve been contemplating the question ever since.
Chuck Katz 
In both developed and developing countries, birth rates are generally dropping, life expectancies are increasing, the average age at which women have their first child is also increasing, and the needs of the “sandwich generation”—those people concurrently caring for children and elderly parents—are of growing interest to marketers. So when we planned our corporate research agenda at the start of 2009, we thought some exploration as to how this squeezed demographic was thinking and coping could be useful, especially to our clients in financial services, health care, and insurance.
We learned that the sandwich is not a sandwich. The “squeeze” is not exerted or experienced equally. People are not stressed because they’re caring for kids and parents; it’s because they’re caring for parents and in-laws, period. But we also learned that the “burden” carries intrinsic rewards, that caring for elderly relatives yields moral clarity, a sense of purpose, opportunities to teach and model values for their children, and moments of surprising joy. And we were overwhelmed by the unmet needs that surfaced, by the opportunity for brands across industries to provide products and services that help care for aging parents, now and in the future.
Colleen Finnerty 
Ted Morris 
Ken 
foibles 
Thanks Karen! Here are a few more: 1) More than 10 people — Hooray!; 2) If someone in the community is adding no value or being obnoxious, you can (nicely) kick them out; 3) You can circle back and ask follow-up questions; 4) THEY can circle back and add additional thoughts that occurred to them after the “event”; 5) It’s easy to search the community for content; 6) Cost-effectiveness — one month of a community, with 8-12 separate projects, is less expensive than 2 focus groups. I’ll stop now. :)
Happy employees working for great companies deliver better results. Online communities are the way to go. Congratulations!