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June 07, 2006
Google and the quest for community competence, Pt. 1
Are the opinions of evangelistic customers with deep knowledge of your products essential to the growth of your brands, products, services or membership?
If so, then write this in bold type in a memo to your CEO: community should be a core competency of the organization.
A core competency is, as Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad wrote in their groundbreaking 1990 HBR article, "an area of specialized expertise that is the result of harmonizing complex streams of technology and work activity." In other words, it's the fundamental 3-4 things an organization does exceptionally better than its competitors.
For the sake of example, let's say Google's core competencies are:
- Search
- Direct advertising
- Portable applications
(Without doubt, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has identified Google's core competencies to his employees; we're just not privvy to them. If you happen to know their defined core competencies, leave a comment.)
Forgive me, Eric, Sergey and Larry, but building community is not a Google core competency. Perhaps your view is that it's not required; community isn't necessarily essential to the growth of every company. But if community was a Google core competency, then:
- Google would have hundreds or thousands of employee blogs as Microsoft does. A preponderance of Google's 5,000+ employees would have qualitative, first-hand knowledge of what the Googlesphere is loving, hating or wishing for. A case could be made that Microsoft's 2,000+ employee-bloggers today have a much better idea of what their highly involved customers think about Microsoft's various products, systems and processes than they did three years ago.
- Google would host multiple customer input points -- product-specific forums, in-person events, frequent power-user meetings, to name a few -- as eBay does.
- Google would have social search capabilities prominently built into all of its products (as Yahoo is doing). If this were the case, Google would have released a much-better version of Google Video than it did. Google Video competitor YouTube clearly has established community as a core competency. YouTube's social media functions have propelled it into a high orbit of popularity and usage.
Google competes with Microsoft and Yahoo on multiple fronts, not to forget dozens of smaller, more nimble companies like YouTube that have been founded with community as a core competency. So if Google is to maintain its enviable stockmarket ride, it should be doing a far better job of focusing on community as a core competency.
This discussion isn't limited to the techno-elite and their deft programming skills.
For instance, community is a core competency for Harley-Davidson. Some 600,000
customers are members of the Harley Owners Groups (or HOGS). Its members are scattered across 1,200 clubs in 100 countries, and they get together regularly for communal rides. Harley supports the group with how-to information and community facilitation.
Discovery Education facilitates online and offline teacher community via its Discovery Educator Network. The company sponsors more than a dozen in-person events every month, reaching thousands of K-12 teachers.
For any core competency to take root, the CEO must define and hold the organization (and herself) accountable for its success, as McKinsey rightly points out (PDF). The CEO should assign its development to a marketing, operations or product chief.
If the CEO is on board, then what? That's the subject of Part 2.
Thoughts, disagreements, annotations? Comment or trackback to the post and we may include them (with your permission, certainly!) in the book "Citizen Marketers."
Other blogs that reference Google and the quest for community competence, Pt. 1:
» Community as a Core Competency from Certified Association Executive
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