I used to play a game when I was young – one with a little barrel and lots of plastic monkeys inside (12 to be exact). The aim was to use one monkey to pick up another, and then use the two connected monkeys to pick up another, and so on and so forth, until you had a long chain of little plastic monkeys. With over 80 different ways a pair of monkeys can connect, the different sorts of chains that can evolve are are mind-boggling, but in the end the aim is still the same: make a single chain, pick up all the monkeys, and don’t let the monkeys fall.

Collaborative environments, call them communities of practice or virtual teams, are a lot like this metaphor. They exist for hundreds of different reasons, but their aims are still the same — collectively perform a task, exchange information, support social cohesion.

For collaboration in online environments, trust is often considered the most important factor [1]: trust in those who will use the social computing tools; and trust from users of the organisations who offer the tools. Trust is a vital pre-requisite for non-members in establishing relationships with a community, as well as a key factor in supporting members, and maintaining group cohesion through commitment and cooperation. But is there more to it than just trust? Will trust give you all this? Or are there other factors that will actually make individuals remain a member of your community, and what are the steps to turn an individual into a member even when money is involved?

Ultimately, building trust is only one factor in establishing the value proposition of membership. At the point at which trust is realised, an individual understands the intrinsic and extrinsic value had from involvement with a community and is either consciously willing to continue with that relationship or makes the decision to withdraw. There are, however, a number of other important factors that contribute to, and lead up to, the point of trust [2] that are often missing from the debate: interaction and identification.

Interaction
Interacting with a community provides an individual with a sense of identity, that is, how they relate to individuals within the community, as well as to the whole [3]. Specifically, interaction will provide those who are not members of a community a means by which they can assess those individuals and gain a more accurate perception of whether their actions are consistent with their written thoughts. Ultimately, interaction is a conversation that helps to create trust [4].

The tools an organisation needs to provide to support interaction should therefore include:

• Article’s number of views, number of comments, and ratings given by others: Allows individuals to see whether others value a specific instance of someone’s communication of information
• Reviews, comments and opinions by others on the website: Permits individuals to see what others have to say about someones communication of information.
• Reviews, comments, opinions and recommendations by others through blogs on other websites: Allows easier discovery of the original communication as well as giving commentary on information. It gives insight into the information from the perspective of another trusted network.

Identification
Identification occurs when individuals begin to relate to those with whom they interact. Social and emotional bonds form and develop at this stage – an important mechanism in the formation of Communities of Practice, group-membership and leadership. Ultimately, the stronger an individual’s feelings of identification with an individual, and the more that individual relates to him and the group to which he belongs, the stronger the feelings of belongingness to that group and the stronger the group cohesion.

Research also indicates that these social and emotional connections are an important prerequisite for trust [5], and are based on:

• A belief of reciprocal caring in the relationship by the community and its members
• An assessment of the benevolence of the community and its members as a motivator, and
• An understanding of motives

The tools of identification are:

• Turn staff into members: Changes top-down communication into horizontal information sharing
• Allow members to create profiles: Provides for member’s egos, identifies its leaders, and gives you valuable information on who is in your community
• Encourage staff to create profiles: Puts a human-face to your company
• Provide profiles about the company
• Do corporate blogging: Shows your motives to your community
• Interconnect the company blogs: So there’s a visible consistent voice
• Cater for personal messaging: Between members in the community as well as between members and staff so that you can always put a face to a communication and get a direct response
• Utilise other low-risk, high-profile communities: (e.g. Flickr and Facebook) To expose some of what your community does elsewhere

Through interaction and identification an individual will be drawn deeper into a community until he reaches a point of cognitive dissonance. He will have been involved with the community, have got something out of it, and might even have gained some idiosyncratic credit from expertise, criticism, or comments shared, but will realise he’s not a full member yet.

People are always motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance when it arises either in one of two ways: deal with the situation or escape from it. Given individuals have already invested time and effort with the community, the most likely course of action will be to formalise the relationship and become a full member. This behaviour is even likely when there is money involved. Online games like World of Warcraft excel in the application of this model because they allow individuals to become immersed in the game, become involved in its community, for very little cost to themselves, over an extended period of time before they require money to change hands.

When it comes to taking care of your barrel of monkeys, be sure to take trust into consideration, but realise that there are other factors involved — interaction and identification. Add these factors and their tools to your strategy and your community of practice should be well in hand.

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[1]. Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette and trust drive online communities of practice. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(3), 294-302.

[2]. Morgan, R. M. & Hunt, S. D. (1994) The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing. Journal of Marketing, Vol. 58, No. 3, Jul., 20-38

[3]. E. Wenger (1999) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

[4]. Scoble, R. and Israel, S. (2006). Naked Conversations, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

[5] Das, T.K. and Teng, B. (1998). Between Trust and Control: Developing Confidence in Partner Cooperation in Alliances, Academy of Management Review, 23 (3), 491-512.