Bloghound

If you want to really understand how social media/tools are changing how we work, play, activate change and live, pick up Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And if you are seriously considering communities as part of your marketing strategy, Do Not Pass Go without reading this.

Here are some of my takeaways:

There are three essential pieces of a community, starting with purpose:

1. Why: what’s the the promise of the group/community? Why would anyone want to join or contribute? “Creating a promise that enough people believe in is the basic requirement. The promise creates the basic desire to participate. ” Note: in my experience this is where marketers usually spend too little time. Or, rarely challenge their own. assumptions.

2. How: this is where you figure out which tools will help people do what the community is all about. Note: too many companies are buying tools and then trying to make a community fit the tools. A recipe for disaster — or, at a minimum, enormous frustration.

3. Rules of the road: this the what Shirky calls the bargain: “If you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?”

People have always wanted to share and help one another. Pervasive, easy-to-use communications tools and ” the collapse of transaction costs makes it easier for people to get together — so much easier, in fact, that is changing the world.” “Social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones and websites, because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their dauly lives.”

Incentives for participating are not financial: Attention, the desire to see your work spread, the desire to help others and be helped.

Why some communities grow and others don’t: “They grow if enough people care about them, and die if they don’t.” (This goes back to getting the promise right.)

How did you do that?: communities where a group of people help one another get better at some share task or interest — called communities of practice — are especially pervasive and appealing. The basic question that can trigger a community of practice: “How did you do that?”

Not everyone needs to be passionate, participate a lot: in the old model we had to work hard to get people passionate enough to act, because acting was a lot of work. Today you can have a handful of highly-motivated people participating a lot — and “people who care a little participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate.”

A small number needed to get things started: “The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.” Tap into a small core of passionate people; don’t expect a lot of people to contribute at the get-go. Many are more comfortable adding to what someone else has started.

On Friday, June 27 at 1 p.m. EST, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned so far about marketing, social media and word of mouth marketing over at Learn From My Life. (And answering calls and email questions.)

There are some great interviews over at Learn From My Life from people like free-agent author Daniel Pink, former CNN reporter Daryn Kagan, legendary basketball coach Dale Brown, and Dan Ariely, author of the must-read new book, Predictably Irrational.

Hope you can make it!

Is there value in Facebook for businesses? Or is it just a cool way to stay connected with friends? I have no answers but look forward to tuning in to a Webinar on Wed., June 25 at 3 p.m. EST over at The App Gap,
“Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?”

The Webinar is based on a research study led by Jenny Ambrozek that looked at the value of Facebook to six different types of business.

I’m hoping Jenny will cut through the social networking hype and hoopla and share some pragmatic advice about specific ways businesses can get value from Facebook — as well as Facebook limitations for business.

My friend and business partner Francois Gossieaux has a great post over at EmergenceMarketing that nails why social media is a big deal.  It’s not simply another new channel like email.  Social media has given power to the people, which has changed the rules of marketing.

” Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game…The end goal of marketing has not changed - it still is to create a customer. It is everything in between to get to that goal that has changed!

In an age where people are tired of marketing hype and gimmicks, it seems odd that Verizon would decide to use a teddy bear as the spokesperson for its FiOs marketing campaign. What’s even odder is that the teddy Twitters, reaching an audience that is even more suspect of inauthentic marketing.

Jason Chupick of Campfire, the agency designing the campaign, explains in today’s PR Week:

“[We] needed a spokesperson, an ongoing voice that people will listen to because everyone is trying to come up with a novel Twitter campaign.”

If the teddy is really bizarre it just might become a viral hit. But sorry Verizon and Campfire, a teddy bear isn’t an a”voice” that this consumer is going to listen to, never mind take seriously.

The Ryan Montbleau Band is an amazing up-and-coming group that knows how to use Marketing 2.0 to build a fan base and sell tickets and music, with almost no money for marketing. Here are 10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the band for all marketers:

1. Love what you do: passion is the center of marketing and propels all tactical components. The greater the passion, the more powerful the marketing.

2. Listen to your customers (fans): Ryan Montbleau hung out after a recent performance, talking, signing t-shirts, and genuinely connecting with fans in the lobby. I had a great conversation with him about some of his lyrics and how he’s so come to be so wise at such a young age. (Which goes back to listening and passion again; he’s in the world.)

3. Make it easy for people to help you: The band makes it easy for people to act as word of mouth advocates, inviting anyone interested to join the Bleau Crew, their street team community.

“What is the Bleau Crew, you ask? We’re a community of fans that do our best to help the band on the road, giving them time to do what they do best: make music! Projects include postering for local shows, handing out handbills, posting banners on our Myspace pages, adding new songs to our profiles, and more! Benefits include free tickets, music, and being part of something truly special. We also get personal teleporters. Awesome, I know.”

4. Go where your fans are online: (Which also makes it easy to help you again.) The band doesn’t just rely on its site or a social network. They’re all the places their fans — and potential fans are — MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, even a simple message board community aptly named Bleauboards that is thriving.

5. Reveal your points of view and personal stories so people can connect with people in band, not just band. You get a sense of the artist and person Ryan is through his blog, and you get to know all the band members through their quirky profiles. (I especially love band member Ted Wilson’s profile — and that the other members welcomed someone like him.)

6. Keep “old” marketing tactics that work: Want to stay in touch through email? Montbleau also offers a newsletter.

7. Say thank you: When a recent tee-shirt order arrived there was a a handwritten note on the order form, thanking me for supporting the band. Small touches grow fans.

8. Be distinctive, even if people can’t categorize you. Old marketing was that you had to fit into an established category or create a new category. Yet too often trying to fit in to a category blands down the product or service. In today’s super-competitive world, distinctiveness can be a powerful differentiator. So what kind of music is Montbleau? He describes himself as “something of a Martin Sexton by way of Van Morrsion and Stevie Wonder.”

9. Give away free “products”: Giving away free stuff helps people experience the “product,” have something to share as they pass along word of mouth, and  builds fan-dom. You can download for free one of the band’s most popular songs, “How Many Times,” as well as tour posters and handbills. The band is also  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to Rock The Earth, and  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to HeadCount’s “Cents for Sense” campaign until the 2008 presidential election.

10. Make it easy to buy: The band makes it easy to buy music whether it’s on their site or on MySpace, and you can buy concert tickets right on their site.

One of my favorite lyrics from Ryan’s music is:

“It’s time to ease from concentration to focus.”

This is true for so many things in life, and  relevant to marketing. It’s time we stop concentrating on the tactics and tools, and flip our focus on earning customers with all the new 2.0 tools.

PS –  Montbleau won second prize in the 2007 International Songwriter’s Competition, competing with 15,000 songs written by amateur and professional songwriters from over 100 countries.

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. In fact, if newspapers don’t downsize fixed operational costs like printing presses and distribution assets, they may never be able to make model in this new world.

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.

Sen. Harry Reid , the House Majority Leader, sent me an email today about his new site:

“I believe it is important for you to stay updated on the work I am doing on your behalf in Washington. As part of this effort, my website has been completely redesigned with the latest online tools available to help keep you informed about the issues I am addressing and the services my office can provide for you. “

I checked out the site, but it misses something very, very big: there’s no way for me to talk back. No way to post comments. No way to see what other folks have to say and connect with them. If I want to send Sen. Reid an email I have to fill out a long form. Geez.

Social media has fundamentally changed our expectations. We don’t want to be communicated to; we want to be able to connect with.

Sorry, Harry. Hope you didn’t spend a lot of our money on just prettying up a Web site and adding a couple of videos.

PS — When I have sent Reid emails with questions and concerns, he sends back form emails saying he can’t respond to me as I’m not a Nevada citizen. If you’re the Majority Leader shouldn’t you be willing to listen to more of us?

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?

I love and hate shopping. Love finding quality products at bargain prices, but hate having to go to stores and wade through all the stuff. Now one of my favorite bargain-hunting haunts, Marshalls, the big off-price retailer, has opened an online community that hopefully will cure what ails me — and others.

Called What’s In, the site has plenty of features — maybe even too many. (Note: it’s in beta so I’m sure the kinks are being worked out.)

The feature that seems most appealing:

You can set up personalized alerts for your favorite brands and local stores; when someone posts that they’ve found that brand at that store, an alert is sent to your mobile phone or email, and you can then hurry on over to the store and get the deal before it’s gone. Due to its relationship with the brands Marshalls can’t advertise brands. So for the alerts to work people who shop the stores will have to go online and post what they’re seeing in the stores. Otherwise quasi-shoppers like me won’t get any alerts.

Two that have potential, but need work:

1. Blogs from buyers about what they’re seeing at shows and on their buying trips. Done right, these insights into what’s coming could be really fun to read. Who doesn’t want to be an trends insider? The Marshalls folks should think about more descriptive names of the blogs and profiles of the people behind the blogs. The two buyer blogs are currently titled like “MoJr15’s Blog” or MelSki17’s Blog.” Ugh. Turns out one blog is by Melissa who buys Ladies Activewear, and another is a nameless junior sportswear buyer. (Melissa, tell us more about the yoga clothing trend!)

2. Forum section, where people can post comments on different topics like “trends of the season.” This section has potential as so many of us are looking for advice and ideas from other women like us. What’s not working is that the Forum categories seem forced, like they were written by advertising copywriters vs. real shoppers for real shoppers. It may be me but Forums named, A Price Tag To Remember, Designer Dish and Star Style sound phony. Again, I think this could be easily fixed.

Overkill?

I’m not sure the Fashion Finds, Member Blogs and Photo Albums add value. They seem either redundant with other parts of the community or just unnecessary. I’m a pretty savvy Web user but I have to admit the navigation around “what’s in” lost me. There’s just too much going on. For the hard launch of this community I’d like to see just three great things:

1. Alerts (send and get)

2. Forums (sharing fashion finds, advice mong members)

3. Buyer blogs ( sharing insider views of what’s happening by Marshalls buyers)

Time to get back to work — unless of course I get an alert from the local Marshalls that a new shipment of Theory is in.