Who are your tribes, and where do they hang out?
No matter whether you plan to leverage social media to enhance your product innovation process, your lead generation process, or to amplify the word of mouth that may already exist for your products or company, you first need to find out if your customers, prospects and detractors are already forming tribes in social media circles, and if so, where they hang out.
Understanding who your tribes are and where they hang out will allow you to decide how to engage them – on their own platform (e.g., Facebook group, Ning community, Twitter, or other proprietary platform), on your platform, or on a combination of platforms – a “federated” engagement strategy that most companies eventually will have to adopt. Knowing where your tribes hang out will also allow you to identify the tribal leaders and define strategies to engage those leaders across all your efforts.
Note that tribes almost never form around products, services, or companies – they form around shared passions (e.g., fan clubs), shared pains (e.g., cancer survivors), shared sense of duty (e.g., school alumni communities), or around categories based on common traits (e.g., poor frugal moms). So the Harley community is not a vibrant brand community centered around Harley, as some will lead you to believe, but rather a community based on a common sense of belonging around a shared lifestyle – riding. Tribes are also different from market segments, which are centered around categories based on individual traits, mostly geographic, demographic, or psychographic (e.g., moms who have children) and not around categories based on behavioral traits (e.g., frugal moms who love the art of the deal ).
Failing to understand who your tribes are, where they hang out, and who their leaders are, will result in misguided efforts that will have no measurable impact on your business, or worse, misguided efforts that will anger your potential tribes and their constituents.
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I’m interested in how the natural conflict between tribes and colonies will evolve, in part due to the urgency which brands feel and act out on in their overly-hurried (read: doomed) pursuit of altering tribal perceptions before they have delivered value (serving passion, reducing pain, rising to the call of duty, etc.).
What tangible instances of this conflict are most obvious to you?
kind regards, Rich
p.s. I’m still studying your Tribalization presentation to NewComm Forum 2009, and considering where to focus my interpretive video vignette. You will be the first to know when it’s ready.
As always, the proof is in the pudding. Finding the tribe, engaging with it, figuring out our relationship with it. S/he who does that is the business genius.
Can we dig a bit deeper into the first question?
Defining where ones tribes hang out, in the context of brand or product innovation, was a subject of some contention at OMMA Metrics and Measurement last week. One POV was that the Influencers choose the hang-outs, while others felt that it is the Influenced who, by way of logical, virtual, or locational clustering, select the hang-outs as if it were a wisdom-of-the-crowds by-product.
I like the latter alternative. Surely there must be some other possibilities. How do you feel about this?
Good stuff, reminds me to go read that Seth Godin book. I wish more people understood stuff like this instead of going and spamming twitter or any other social media site.
Have fun!
Sean
I am trying to find a tribe for a Rabbi. I haven’t done the research and I am NOT Jewish and I asked him for some keywords but I still need to do some research.
[...] when you think about communities, besides making sure to base them on a shared passion or pain among the members, think if there are other symbols or rules that you can leverage to make the [...]