Supernova2008 just wrapped up this past week. If you’re not familiar with this conference, you may learn more at conversation hub. Last year, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) engaged the audience in a lively and insightful summary. You may watch the video that closes the interactive loop here.

As I listened to these passionate interpreters extrapolate from the experience, a few points jumped at me:

Access is ubiquitous - access to capital, relationships, resources.

Things get better the more people use them - these are betters, not goods.

All of your metrics are crap (they do not look at measures of devotion) - eyeballs and buckets don’t tell you the details about what matters and what’s going to be successful.

We don’t have a culture of getting good data - we have data filtered through the people who often have the least reason to give us accurate information.

Backchannels matter - at the event and to your business. If you’ve failed to engage, you will know because the backchannel will boycott you and join another conversation.

We need to pay attention to humans - we need to make things available to customers. They are people in their normal lives, not consumers, targets, or impressions.

Silence has value - we talked about how silence has a sound and a place at Conversation Agent last year.

Purpose beats profit - craft a strategy by who and why and bake that in the DNA of your business.

Your company can be a platform for customers to remix - firms are one economic component. The others are networks and community.

Plastic beats specific - today the economy is made up of plastic things. Things that can be duplicated and remixed and tweaked and hacked into in many ways.

If relationships are liquid, flows beat assets. How do you harness the power of these new forces for your business? Ask ourself, is there a DNA build underneath these technologies? How does what you do provide an experience, how does it make your customers feel? That is the component that is game-changing, not the technology.

… that is the question. I’ve seen many discussions listing the pro’s & con’s as to whether a company should build a community or not? But I think they’re missing the most important question that should come first.

Where are our customers? And have they created their own communities?

Tom O’Brien calls it social media madness when clients want to immediately build a community.

He makes the point that communities are not about increasing the value of your brand. They’re about the common interests of the members. And if you respect that you’re welcome to join them, but those that practice traditional marketing & push their messages won’t be welcome long.

So before you say, ‘Let’s build a community’, please take a minute to step back. Here are some steps:

Use brand monitoring

• remember that discussions in password protected forums won’t be caught

Identify where people are talking about your products at?

• this may surprise you

Have they built communities already?

• if they have, they will prefer to stay there amongst others with their interests

If there are a number of micro communities, here are some ideas:

• offer a central place to aggregate them so that people can interconnect
• encourage user generated content & provide a place for it
• connect with your advocates & reward them
• invite influencers to participate in a group blog
• provide places for gathering product development information

And most importantly interact with the customers throughout.

So what may have started off as a question, "Should we build a community?" turns into these types of questions:

• What is best for our customers? What would they prefer?
• How can we as a company facilitate them in their interaction?

What are your thoughts on this?

One of my most trusted friends and mentors recently joined a very intriguing company called – SuccessFactors (stock symbol SFSF). They specialize in HR software with a SaaS product that is second to none in the market.

From a marketing and social media perspective several things about this company got my attention and my envy as a marketer.

First was the clear communications from the top down. The CEO Lars Dalgaard uses email to the entire company much like an internal blog at all hours of the day reporting back on things like successful client meetings and other interesting findings. Best of all it creates an open dialog with the entire company and builds an internal sense of community and esprit d’ corp.

Next was the sheer amount of new client wins that are coming out of this company. I monitor their RSS feed and every time I turn around they are pumping out press releases with another new client name in it. Kudos to the communications department and the sales team for making that happen!

But what really got my attention was how they unleashed their own internal community on rating and ranking each of the Presidential Candidates by 10 different competencies and published it on their public website. This is a fabulous example of demonstrating your product and its possibilities by connecting it to something that everyone is interested in.

So when last I checked here was the tally…

1. Budgets/Cost Controls – Vote McCain
2. Communication – Vote Obama
3. Decision Making/Judgement – Vote Obama
4. Dependability – Vote Obama
5. Global Perspective – Vote McCain
6. Integrity/Ethics – Vote Obama
7. Listening Skills – Vote Obama
8. Leadership – Vote Obama
9. Managing Conflict – Vote Obama
10. Planning – Vote Obama

Overall Winner - Obama

Sorry Hillary but I guess you already knew that!

One of the big shifts in the marketing paradigm today is in the relationship of customers to the sales process. The broadcast marketing model was all about persuading customers to buy (by interrupting with effective, outbound messages). The P2P marketing model is based on inspiring customers to both buy and advocate your brand to others (by providing relevant products, service, content, and dialogue).

Last week’s BusinessWeek cover story showed the new model at work – in the nascent growth of Mac computers in corporate environments. The Mac may finally be getting some traction in companies outside of the traditional niche of design and communications firms.

The intriguing part of the story is that this growth is happening despite the fact that Apple has no corporate sales force. This is intentional. Steve Jobs has argued that companies can succeed by focusing on corporate or consumer buyers, but not both. (Agree? Comments? Counter examples?)

What is driving the Mac’s entry into the corporate environment is that managers are finally giving in to growing requests from employees to bring a Mac into the office place. Companies like IBM and Cisco are allowing pilot programs where a few dozen employees are allowed to switch from Windows to Mac OS, in order to gauge the impact on the organization. (Has any manager ever been faced with employees clamoring to allow Windows into the workplace?)

Part of this shift may be driven by the catastrophic roll-out of Microsoft Vista last year (like many, I’m sticking to my XP guns). But the Mac “pilot” programs are also testament to the power of inspiring a community of customers to support your brand, rather than persuading them to buy from you because they have no other viable choice.

Personality Not Included – a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone?

You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

But new media changes that paradigm and enables every brand to have a voice. From the smallest of firms to the largest and from the most obscure products to the most complex services. This is something every brand manager in every company should be working on right now – opening up your brand to be more conversational!

Which is exactly why Rohit Bhargava wrote his new book entitled Personality not Included. It’s not just another book about social media – it’s a book about how to regain a brand personality.

I had a chance to catch up with Rohit and discuss questions I had after reading the book. I hope you enjoy my interview with him as much as I did.

About Rohit

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, a leading agency, in helping clients navigate the social media universe. He publishes the Influential Marketing blog, ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world, and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company.

Rohit is also the author of the newly released book, Personality Not Included, published internationally by McGraw-Hill. A guide for companies on how authenticity is the new standard that brands need live up to in the social media era, the book has received significant early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

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Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

That’s the reason that Charlene Li and her Forrester Research colleague Josh Bernoff wrote their new, appropriately named book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

In the book, they describe the strategies and stages every company needs to go through to listen to, talk to, energize and embrace the groundswell. I had a chance to catch up with Charlene to get some answers to questions that came to me as I read the book and compared my social strategy with their recommendations. So I hope you enjoy this podcast …

About Charlene

Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0 through her work over the past nine years with the respected technology and market research company Forrester Research. She is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts. An accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, she often appears at industry events and delivered the keynote speech at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in 2007.

Charlene analyzes how companies can use technologies — like blogs, social networks, RSS, tagging, and widgets — to meet business objectives. She started her own analyst blog in 2004 and is regularly cited as America’s most influential analyst blogger. She shares her blog with Josh Bernoff.

Previously, Charlene led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and ran its San Francisco office. She has also been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, and served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Charlene has managed new-product development for the San Jose Mercury News and has also been a strategy consultant for Monitor Company. She holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

Charlene lives in San Mateo, Calif., with her husband and two children, all of whom are happy, engaged members of the groundswell.

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 Riding the Groundswell of Social Media: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (16)

This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

• Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
• “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
• “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
• While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
• Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money-making model.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

Ok, here is something I’m wrestling with: Can a community be successful with low brand awareness?

If you are a big tech brand like Dell or Microsoft, you have no problem launching a community. In fact, many of these organizations have several communities.

But what if you are a small SaaS vendor? Forget costs for one moment, and resources for another (chuckling) – can you attract enough community members to make it go?

Think about the last great party you went to (technically I have never been to a party – but if I had…) where there were a ton of interesting people, lots of great conversations, etc. Now contrast that with the opposite – the party where only 10 people showed up and there were too few conversations happening in too large room. Can you really blame the partygoers if they feel weird and don’t come to the next party?

So here is my question for you: Are community plays the domain of large brands only? Or can a small brand have a thriving community, too? What’s your view?

[While I am not a big fan of cross-posting, I thought it would be appropriate to cross-post this post with Emergence Marketing as I have had part of my recent community-based thoughts here]

Based on research in the field of virtual communities, most business thinkers will agree that there are 4 fundamental pillars to successful communities - content, members, member profiles and transactions. If managed properly, these 4 dynamics can lead to economics of increasing returns that characterize most successful communities. The more members you have, the more content they will create. That in turn will increase the value to the community members and attract more members. If you capture information about your members and you make it easier for them to find stuff in the community based on their profile, the higher the value of the community to the members and the more members you will attract. It’s easy to understand the workings and to get the benefits of the dynamics of increasing returns that happen in successful virtual communities. Many of those were first described by business thinker and management consultant John Hagel in Net Gain more than a decade ago.

There are other aspects that drive and define communities, such as the social and technology infrastructures of communities as well as the business processes that they support. But none of those characteristics have the power to create the positive value creation loops that the original four can.

While most successful communities will have a mix of all of the ingredients - we can characterize communities by their dominant dynamic.

First there are content-based communities, where members interact with one another primarily in the context of content - either consumer generated or licensed/acquired. News sites or blogs are communities that would fall in this category.

Then there are communities that are primarily member-based. Member-driven communities can take on many different forms. Brand communities like the Harley or the Ducati communities are clearly member-centric communities, even though some companies mistakenly think that the brand is at the center of those communities, and not the members. Networking communities like LinkedIn and Facebook are clearly communities that have members at their core. Many developer communities in the tech world also fall within this category.

Lastly there are transaction-centric communities. eBay and Amazon.com come to mind when talking about those communities.

Of course, all of those communities have content, and all have members, and most have transactions - it’s just that they are more heavily tilted towards one of the community ingredients than another. And in some cases communities with the same end-goal can take on very different forms. Brand communities could also be set up as content-centric communities or as transaction-centric communities. Customer support communities or developer communities could also be started as content-centric communities - and perhaps evolve into transaction-centric communities.

The reason it’s important to understand the different types of communities is because of the requirements to get them started. You cannot start a member-centric or a transaction-based community without a critical mass of members or offerings - something most companies do not have. Without a critical mass of members or offerings, there will not be enough content generated (i.e., customer reviews, etc.) in order to make the interaction for the community members valuable. So if you have a total potential number of users ranging in the hundreds, you will never be able to set up a vibrant customer support community as Intuit. Microsoft or Apple can. That does not mean that you cannot leverage customer support communities, it means that you have to start them up as content-driven communities. Instead of relying on the community members to re-write your manuals and to create meaningful FAQs, you may have to hire a few people to kick-start the process on a for-hire basis.

While the economics of increasing returns may be somewhat diminished with a smaller number of members and some hired guns, they are still very much present. Most likely they will handily beat the economics of diminishing returns that most business practitioners face when trying to interact with customers and prospects in the old-fashioned interrupt-driven way.

[While I am not a big believer in cross-posting, I thought it would be worth cross-posting this post with emergence marketing as I had some other posts on community building earlier]

Some of these thoughts have been triggered by the many conversations I have had the pleasure to have as part of the Community Effectiveness Study that we are conducting with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research. Some of the preliminary results of this study will be discussed at the Society for New Communications Research Forum in two weeks and more detailed results will be unveiled at the Community 2.0 Conference in May.

As a senior research fellow with the Society for New Communications Research I can extend a special discount to some of my friends who want to attend the forum. Email me if you want to attend at a special rate (francois [at] emergencemarketing [dot] com). Note that there are also 1/2 day flex passes available for those who can’t attend the full event.

Maybe it’s time to retire the war metaphor from business and marketing. “Winners” no longer defeat the competition by battling them, capturing customer share, locking customers in or making them loyal. (Sounds like some sort of waterboarding torture done to customers.) The new metaphor may be tribalism.

Widipedia’s definition of tribalism: “Due to the small size of tribes, it is always a relatively simple structure, with few (if any) significant social distinctions between individuals… it is a precondition for members of a tribe to possess a strong feeling of identity for a true tribal society to form.”

In the book Consumer Tribes editors and university professors Bernard Cova, Rob Kozinets and Avi Shankar take a deep dive to examine how tribes work and possible implications to business and marketing. Here are a few highlights I found particularly interesting:

“The allure of the primitive, of the tribal, lies in its ability to arouse our desires and passions.”

The concept of a tribe is at the same level as that of entrepreneur and craftsperson. A craftsperson is a creative person who believes in a passion and transforms this into a business idea. This passion pushes the craftsperson to share ideas and emotions with other individuals sharing the same interest, thus forming a tribe.”

Takeaway: tribes need to be built around passions. If you’re considering a business community the first question to ask: how passionate are people on this particular topic/issue? If the passion exists, in what ways do people want to tap into the issue - learning from “experts,” sharing their experiences, helping others, simply being identified with the issue in some way? What business value might there be for us to be associated with this issue?

“The most potent tribes are built in the interstices, in the margins, on the fringes.”

Takeaway: some of the most thriving business communities are likely to be around issues that aren’t “core” to your value proposition or business strategy, but tap into passions on issues that are on the edges. If a goal is to engage customers or employees, we need to open up to those fringe issues that matter to them - vs. just the messages we want to convey. There may be more value sitting on the margins than anyone inside the company realizes. Also, creating “a” community may be a flawed strategy; perhaps a better approach is facilitating many tribes or communities around many issues.

“One of the most important ways in which members of a cool tribe distinguish themselves from mass culture is through an emphasis on authenticity….Authenticity is in any case a deeply ideological discourse that denigrates popular culture and privileges the exclusive.”

Takeaway: To really connect with cool people companies have to be willing to hear people talk about why the old ways and products are lacking (or worse.) Even if we’re hosting a community, people are likely to bash beliefs and products that we hold true. If we’re going after cool and innovative, we have to be prepared to hear the negative. Second, cool people want to be insiders and have exclusive access to information, ideas, and people. For companies, this may mean embracing smaller communities, where access and inside information is granted to the cool few. Once a community gets big and accepted by the mainstream, it may no longer be a community.

“Companies do not need to send totally coherent messages to the marketplace. Consumers fill in the blanks, and they often do a better job of colouring in the picture than marketers would do.”

Takeaway: Do we spend much too much time and resources trying to perfect messages? Perhaps it’s better to get our products and services out in the market and take a more iterative approach to branding and messaging, tuning in to what our tribe members have to say. This idea is similar to what Harvard Business School marketing professor John Deighton has said for many years, “Marketers offer brand ideas to the market, but those ideas don’t truly become brands until they are accepted, adopted and made over afresh as part of the lives of those who use them.”

Tribes, influence and persuasion

In thinking about tribalism, it’s interesting to go back to a Harvard Business Review article Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Science of Psychology, wrote in 2001, titled “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion.” Many of his fundamental principles of persuasion are also principles of effective tribes, social networks, online communities, and groups.

1. The principle of liking: people like those who like them. (Uncover similarities and offer praise.)
2. The principle of reciprocity: people repay in kind. (Give what you want to receive)
3. The principle of social proof: people follow the lead of similar others. (Use peer whenever it’s available.)
4. The principle of consistency: people align with clear commitments. (Make the commitment active, public and voluntary.)
5. The principle of scarcity: people want more of what they can have less of. (Highlight unique benefits and exclusive information.)

Cialidini had one other principle, which may not be relevant in a tribal culture: The principle of authority: people defer to experts.

Perhaps we do defer to experts. But who are the experts we defer to today? Aside from those we respect and trust in our various tribes, who do we listen to? And what are the implications to marketing?

War metaphors stunt problem solving

For starters, let’s stop using the war metaphor in marketing and think in new ways. Linguists have found that people who frame problems in a militaristic manner tend to have a limited perception of the problem and how to tackle it. As noted Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff has said, “This is not language, this is the way people think.”

I’m thinking tribes. And you?