The Importance of Digital Stewards

Courtesy of NOAA

Monday’s for me are yi-tan days, a chance to jump into one of the many social groups I interact with, to learn about what’s happening and what others are doing in the information economy. Today’s discussion was with Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John Smith about social learning and online communities, and discuss the observations in their book “Digital Habits: Stewarding Technology for Communities.”

As always, yi-tan calls are rich in information and social interaction. Today’s call really made me think about some of the work I’ve been involved in lately, some of opportunity I’ve been trying to create for others, as well as some of the personal career focus I’ve spent time on in the communities space.

Today’s discussion focused on the importance of technology stewards. It included the interplay between stewards and the community, and between the technology itself and community members. Technology is both the physical tools for social networking and communications as well as the platforms for community building and management. As Nancy White pointed out, there’s a space between the interplay where tool review, selection, and implementation plays out. The stewarding role is a strategic one, but isn’t an IT one, with a bunch of SharePoint groups, which is where many companies put it. I myself have seen many postings lately for digital media and social media jobs, that are in essence stewardship roles, but while the emphasis may be on social media tool usage, there is a heavy requirement for backend IT application experience like MySQL and XML.

I think the digital steward’s role should be focused on creating communication channels with customers, with building and managing a community the biggest resource for that knowledge sharing and feedback. Therefore, it’s a role better aligned with marketing or creative teams in an organization. According to White, “a steward needs to understand the practices that need to be socialized within an organization, as well as the simple and more sophisticated tools that may help them reach their vision. I’ve seen companies many times deploy tools that are too sophisticated and end up overwhelming their employees and social media marketing staff, and don’t put a stewardship role in place. This diminishes their ability to build community and have it thrive to their original expectations.

Technology advances at a very rapid pace. Tools arrive at such a speed that the average person or company can’t study them or implement them in a reasonable amount of time before they seem antiquated. While we need new tools to share ideas, experiences, thoughts, and points of view, there is a scarcity of resources in most companies to collect all of these things in a central place and then open up new communications channels. That’s where the digital steward role comes in.

But being a digital steward does not limit oneself to an online presence and community. One must take the concept and the practice and go mobile with it. As John Smith pointed out, “Polarity is bread and butter,” meaning that within a community there is both togetherness and separation. Too much togetherness can result in staleness, while too much separation leads to a breakdown in community.  So if togetherness is the yin to separation’s yang, I see online and mobile in the same way. When we’re online we need times where we are plugged in and other times when we are not (to concentrate on a particular task for example). Mobility, with its very nature of always being plugged in, makes it a little more difficult to create true “separation.” And when we are connected within a community, and having a conversation, we do need to find a better way to hand off the interaction from a mobile environment to a fixed one, seamlessly without any community or communications disruption. We’re not quite there yet for the average worker.

As was pointed out on today’s call, a digital steward has both an inward facing (to employees and management) as well as an outward facing role (to customers and partners).  Companies that hire IT people to implement these strategies do so to exercise control in a somewhat static environment. They don’t hire stewards and experience the same outcomes that more visionary firms get exposed to.

I’ve recently looked at organizations trying to extend their online popularity into the mobile realm, some such as PR firms looking to add more value added tools to offer their clients, and others trying to take a primarily one to one business model and add subscription-based offerings. But without a digital steward role aligned to a marketing or creative team, they are destined to be overwhelmed by number of tools and platforms today as well as the ones emerging.

-Randy Giusto

@randygiusto

@newdigitalcafe

#newdigitalcafe

randygiusto@newdigitalcafe.com