One of my favorite blogs, Business 2.0, pointed me to a post by media maven Jeff Jarvis that declared, provocatively, that content is NOT king. And neither is distribution of content. The king, he argues, is trust.
This caught my attention. Now, his commentary is focused on the “old” media, like newspapers and record labels, who attempt to “control” content or the distribution of content. He is arguing that in today’s hyper-connected world, that old model is starting to fail. His alternative is to simply get out of people’s way and let them create and distribute content themselves. Help people have conversations, and build enough trust so they want to come to YOU for those conversations.
He does not talk about associations in his post, but I think the topic is very relevant. Controlling content is central for many associations, but I don’t think that is sustainable. Associations may be able to control some content and its distribution, but I agree with Jarvis: there is another much larger batch of “value” to be created simply by letting people get together and generate their own content.
This is exactly what learning communities, or communities of practice, are about. In learning communities your members come together around specific domains and generate knowledge themselves, to be distributed through many channels, including traditional association content distribution channels. Some associations are starting to do this, but even those developing communities often overlook the issue Jarvis starts with: trust.
Trust is the engine that drives learning communities. Communities whose members do not fully trust each other will generate new knowledge that has less of an impact on the field, and they will do it more slowly. More time, less impact. If an association is not a solidly trusted convener, very few people will participate in the communities. When trust is high, controlling content or distribution channels becomes less important, because the people’s ownership and energy will be so high, content will be created and distributed faster than you can imagine. And the value you are providing—the value these members experience by actively participating in the creation and distribution of content that is meaningful to them—will be phenomenal.
Yet associations who want to start communities don’t start with trust—they actually revert back to their old model and focus on content (the domain of the community) and distribution (the electronic infrastructure of collaboration). The domain of the community is obviously important, as is a technology platform the community participants across the country can use to work with each other. But for some reason, these two issues become more important than trust. Associations insist on spending time, energy, and resources to establish these pillars without paying any attention to the pillar of trust. This is both unfortunate (the community’s long-term success is at risk without trust or the promise of trust at the foundation of the community) and unnecessary (because all three areas can be developed simultaneously).
I’ll post more later on how to actually build trust.
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