When it comes to dealing with online communities today there is some confusion between socialized services and communities of practices.
This confusion is similar to the one between collaboration and participation in enterprise social computing.

Most people see online communities as communities of practices, which are known to be hard to implement because they require engagement of of members and managers. Immediately people associate engagement as costly (time consumption from the financial angle) if not dangerous for the corporate reputation (B2C). Communities of practices also have the reputation of being not successful, because most of them have low activity.

What those people miss is that the wild wild web has demonstrated that:

• A community of practices is not the only form of social activity online
• There are ways of lowering the cost of participation to online communities, and as a result embark and be accountable for the lurkers.

I won’t detail the second point as I’m currently having some underground brainstorms with Patrick Lambe on this topic (and how it relates to information classification). Stay tuned

As for the first point, my stake is that we can take advantage of the “crowd” without demanding any engagement from any of its members.
This is what I call a socialized service. A socialized service is a service where the activity of an individual is made visible to others, so that it creates awareness among service users.
It relates to concepts such as “social translucence” and “ambient awareness”. The concept of “social translucence (of technology)” is almost ten years old now. It suggests that communication systems can be designed in such a way that they support social processes. Social translucence proposes that three factors support social processes in computer-mediated work environments. Those factors are: visibility, awareness and accountability. “Ambient awareness” is similar, it actually surfaced in a NY times paper later.
To illustrate the point, one classical example is Del.icio.us.

Now, what can you do for your organization with that? One simple way to start is to revamp your suggestion system, if you have one, whether for consumers or for employees.
Suggestion services are usually known for being a black-box. A user fills a form in to provide details. An automated answer may be delivered to its mailbox to acknowledge receipt of the suggestion. And then what? Most of the time nothing because the suggestion was not taken into account. And because it is regarded not good to unplease someone who took a bit of his time to help you, nobody dares inform her/him that the suggestion was turned down. Usually the user makes one suggestion and that’s it. S/he never comes back to that your suggestion system is poorly used and results costly. At the end you just unplug it.

Now what if you socialize your suggestion system?
Socializing a suggestion system means … and implies:

• Each suggestion can be made visible to others >  you positively impact the ego of the person, so that there is a higher probability that s/he returns to the system or the shop to buy your stuff. You also make the person more accountable.
• Each suggestion can be searched > you prevent duplications, so that you decrease the cleaning process that occurs on the back-end and you offer users an opportunity to discover more. Even if most organizations don’t really care about knowledge, this contributes to knowledge growth. This is a side benefit that you should not underestimate (remember: some people love trains potting, they contribute to the image of the rail networks ;-))
• Each suggestion can be voted > you get a sense of perceived value by others (qualitative information)
• Suggestions can be aggregated via voting (since search contributes to preventing duplications) > you get a sense of what people (the market, the crowd, no matter really as long as it implies “a lot”) want; people implicitly understand why their suggestion is turned down (even if in reality the selection of a suggestion surely relates to other criteria).

As you can see socialized services are different from communities of practices. They are far from new. The barrier to participation is low, the level of engagement is null, yet they are online communities.

The example above is just one simple example. In fact systematizing this approach shall help moving online presence from static contents to dynamic ones.