Stimulate the commitment of your market intelligence community 3/3

If possible, don't systematically impose your choice in the selection of articles; your contributors should be given as much responsibility as possible in the creation of this deliverable. Nevertheless, don't hesitate: sometimes you have to make a decision to avoid endless discussions about whether or not to keep an article in a newsletter!

A quick aside on Curebot: the EspritsCollaboratifs platform offers a number of features that are particularly well-suited to collaborative newsletter production.

A quick aside on Curebot: the EspritsCollaboratifs platform offers a number of features that are particularly well-suited to the production of newsletters in collaborative mode. In addition to the simplicity of setting up a newsletter, which is possible for every user of the platform, it's easy to associate with these articles insights (or “so what”, “decryptages”... depending on your preferred appellation) written by members of an editorial committee, or to highlight your contributors by quoting them. In this way, not only can you easily enrich the content of your newsletters, but your contributors are also promoted within your organization.

More generally, you can liven up the life of your community by taking time out to reflect on your watch. For example, you can :

• brainstorm on a complementary theme to explore,
• notify, challenge members of your watch community,
• review some of the articles qualified by the group, sorting them by one or more common tags, for example, to analyze trends,
• examine the sources used in your watch: highlight the most relevant ones, or on the contrary relegate those that are not, add new sources discovered by your contributors...

Finally, if your company has an internal social network, don't hesitate to use it to share the fruits of your community's intelligence more widely with all company employees. Having a space on your social network, dedicated to your monitoring community, will also be an additional lever for on-boarding new contributors, even on a one-off basis, by encouraging exchanges on shared information.

You're sure to come up with other ideas for animating your watch community: every project has its moments.

4 - Promote your contributors and support them in their own projects

However, beyond these collective opportunities, you can also, as coordinator of your watch project, have actions targeted at each of your contributors.

Share certain articles from your watch and provoke a reaction: with Curebot, for example, you can mention a specific user by tagging the article with @worker_name. He or she will then receive an e-mail notifying him or her that the information has been shared. This interaction will enable you to refocus your collaborator's attention on your shared watch, and give them the opportunity to react and contribute their personal expertise on the highlighted subject.

By valuing your contributors, you show that you take everyone's expertise into account; you remind everyone of the very reason for the existence of your watch community. Its purpose is not to create a common reservoir of knowledge, but to encourage the opening up of collective intelligence and the development of individual creativity at the service of the group.

In the same vein, you can also value your readers, and not just the designated contributors to your watch. Has one of your readers commented on an article that your community has qualified? Does this comment shed interesting light on, or introduce a break in the analysis of the subject? Then start by responding to the comments. All constructive comments. And, if the author agrees, you can also highlight and share his or her arguments in one of your deliverables, by mentioning this person.

You will demonstrate that :

• you listen to your audience,
• everyone can be a player in the intelligence process (at EspritsCo, we even believe that everyone should be),
• your watch is open to the company, beyond the teams that produce it.

Another effective idea: you can interview your contributors, obtain their point of view on current events and integrate the result into your newsletter, for example, around the reason for their participation in your monitoring project, or their analysis of a theme within your monitoring perimeter.

A “Our experts' point of view” section is an effective way of enhancing the value of your employees, enriching the content of your watch and demonstrating to your managers the cross-functional efforts involved in your project.

Here are a few other ideas for enhancing the value of your contributors:

• Invite them to participate in events (roundtables, trade fairs, etc.) for your watch community;
• If your contributors belong to a team other than your own, and in agreement with them, meet their manager (or ask your manager to meet theirs) to include monitoring in the objectives of this “partner” team; at the same time, show the importance you attach to the presence of this contributor in your project.

Last but not least, it will be all the easier to get your employees to contribute if they have monitoring practices of their own. So, if they have monitoring needs for their own missions, don't hesitate to help them organize them, if they need support at all. You give a little of your time in the form of methodological or practical advice (if a tool is used, for example), but you help your collaborator to place himself in the same position as you. This will make them more inclined to contribute to your own project in the future.

5 - Play it down: not everyone will contribute as much as you'd like.

Now that you've applied all these rules, your contributors are much more engaged and in tune with your collaborative intelligence project. Nevertheless, they're not 100% on board: there are still one or two holdouts.

No need to insist: just let go. Accept that there will always be colleagues who will never contribute to your watch. You've probably heard of Pareto's Principle (or Law), also known as the 80/20 Principle. According to this statistical law, 80% of effects are the product of 20% of causes, and vice versa. In other words, 20% of the members of a collaborative watch will be responsible for 80% of the contributions. It's often true...

20% of the members of a collaborative watch will be responsible for 80% of the contributions.

Of course, this proportion can be optimized by demonstrating to everyone the added value of the approach and the individual benefits that can be derived from it. The examples of actions listed above are just some of the ways in which you can stimulate your employees' commitment to a collective project.

As for those you haven't been able to convince at the outset, don't worry. The wrong idea would be to try to “force” them to contribute: this would be counter-productive and would introduce a feeling of mistrust into your community. On the contrary, continue on your way, with your most committed contributors, whom you will value and who will demonstrate the value of the approach. The reluctant ones may end up being stimulated. Maybe not, but there's not much you can do about it.

Whatever the case, you'll need to take regular action to stimulate contributions, avoid fatigue and refocus your community on its objectives. And engage new contributors in your collaborative watch, either to replace your collaborators who will inevitably move on to another project, or to enrich your watch with new expertise and angles of view.

EspritsCo consultants can help you boost your collaborative intelligence. They can support you from the outset of your project, not only in terms of methodology and overall strategy, but also in terms of all the animation and communication actions required to maximize the commitment of your contributors and generate new contributions. Of course, EspritsCo will also be best placed to help you optimize the use of Curebot, which will be a daily ally in your collaborative monitoring.