According to a 2011 survey, almost 50% of the top 100 global brands host some kind of network or community but are there any indications that these investments are paying off? Strategy and Business Magazine have just published an article which suggests the answer is "YES".

Most online communities are simply online ghost towns. People register, get their login details, visit once, decide its not for them and never return. This pattern is repeated over and over. Maybe online communities are not for you? Here is how to decide, and if you still want one - here is how to avoid the most obvious mistakes.

Imagine the scenario. The all-day team workshop went so well. You just stopped short of a group hug. You finished off by agreeing the actions. Everyone was so pumped up and committed. Fast forward 2 weeks and all the actions are forgotten - just words on a page somewhere! Sounds familiar? What went wrong and how do you stop it next time?

A lot of my work involves facilitating large meetings where groups need to collaborate to resolve difficult issues or develop future plans for working together. Over the last 12 months I have started to share 4 Golden Rules with the participants which always seem to significantly improve the results we get. Here they are!

The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina recently published a useful white paper on the topical area of developing skills for virtual teams. It is available online and in PDF. What I found most interesting was the section on Virtual Team Challenges.

I have been looking for way to monitor and track all my websites/blogs plus all my social media accounts (linkedIN, Twitter etc) from a single dashboard. I figured this would be pretty easy - a thing that most people would want to do! Not so - despite the abundance of great social media tools I found it surprisingly difficult to find one which met all my requirements.

I am always on the lookout for good simple visualisation techniques to support change management. Chris Collison has introduced me to The River Diagram - a great strategic tool for moving a community of groups forward via common initiatives and best practice sharing.

I have been piloting a radically different approach to meetings which I am calling "Egoless Meetings" which addresses three popular unwritten rules about good meeting practices which are unfortunately totally wrong. RULE 1 is that everybody gets to speak. RULE 2 is that discussions in themselves can be useful. RULE 3 is that when you meet you must work as a team not as individuals.

Team Beliefs are the fuel which can really energise or kill team effectiveness. Unfortunately this is often the most neglected aspect of a high-performing team initiative. In this article I remind people of the key beliefs of high-performing teams.

Most collaborative ventures don't turn out quite the way we envisage. It would be great if we could determine in advance if a particular collaborative project or joint venture will be worth the required investment. Here is a simple way you can assess the merits of any collaborative endeavour BEFORE you invest time, effort and money in failing to make it work.

Very interesting article in The Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Bacteria and the power of teamwork, which reveals the amazing ability of bacteria to "quorum sense" - i.e. know when they have critical mass to achieve their objective. Quorum Sensing is hugely important for human groups and one we often get badly wrong!

When trust levels are high, so is the quality and performance of business and the reverse is also true. These facts are demonstrated dramatically when we look at the financial outcomes of companies that are among the best to work for and their peer companies that aren't.

Brainstorming is one of those things which some people believe is natural and easy - they are wrong! There are 7 things which will make your team brainstorm go brilliantly .... and 6 things which will absolutely kill it. Find out what they are here.

I spoke at the inaugural TEDx event in Belfast on March 23. My argument was that we have all experienced high-performing teams but mostly not at work (sports, music, adventures, holidays, family etc)! In the video The Lost Secrets of High-Performing Teams I remind us of what we may have forgotten about great teams and make a plea to bring these sensibilities back into our work teams.

This week marks the 6th anniversary of the publication in April 2005 of The Bioteaming Manifesto by ChangeThis. The manifesto is the foundation of the Bioteams book, published March 2008, and is a comprehensive conceptual framework for the effective management of today's Virtual Teams, Multi-Enterprise Teams and Cross-Functional teams. Download it here

One of the challenges for teams is that the achievement of some of their goals are not fully under their own control - they need to be achieved in partnership with, or even in spite of, external parties (stakeholders) who are working to their own agendas and priorities. The Stakeholder Collaboration Game allows teams to simulate increasingly complex scenarios involving multiple goals and multiple stakeholders.

I spoke at the inaugural TEDx event in Belfast on March 23 on "The 7 secrets of High-Performing Teams". Here is a link to a nice blog post by Alan in Belfast on the whole Belfast TEDx event with a collection of short video interviews with all the speakers.

The Guardian reports on the growth in "Persona Management Software" which individuals use to engage in web conversations using multiple identities on forums and social sites. The aim is to create the perception of a (fake) upswell in sentiment on a given topic (a practice is known as astroturfing). The most disturbing revelation is that the US Air Force have tendered for such software.

New McKinsey research shows that a payday could be arriving faster than expected. "A new class of company is emerging--one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization's reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company The Networked Enterprise".

Major Article in Stategy + Business Magazine about how companies, governments, and other organizations are working together across traditional boundaries to solve problems which are too big for one enterprise to solve by itself.