This is called clustering (putting together different informal communities) or swarming (creating an attractor mechanism and seeing what comes). The first of those articles includes some original research in IBM (which we checked out elsewhere) which showed that the ratio of informal communities to formal communities was 1:10K or put another way if you half the number of staff then you can assume that is the capacity for self-organising spontaneous CoPs that you can expect.

Well, a few weeks back Lee Bryant , CEO and co-founder of Headshift , part of Dachis Group , invited me to participate on the upcoming SOMESSO / Headshift Social Business Summit that will be taking place next week, on March 18th , where I will be moderating one of the panels: the one on Internal Use of Social Software, where I will try to share some further insights on what IBM has been doing for nearly three years now with one of its most successful social software adoption programs: BlueIQ . It surely promises to be a rather interesting one, since I’ll be moderating

Yet never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. Information about customers consisted primarily of aggregate sales statistics augmented by marketing research data. This strategy may be more challenging for firms whose distribution channels own Harvard Business Review Cart My Account Downloads Explore Today on HBR Blogs Magazine Books Authors Store Harvard Business School