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• The CMO Survey – Duke University's Fuqua School of Business->

• Currents – A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide – NYTimes.com
• What Gets People Talking? New Research from Wharton Reveals Surprising Answers – Ed Keller – MediaBizBloggers – Ed Keller – MediaBizBloggers.com – Jack Myers
• Older Adults and Social Media | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
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• A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

What do you think? Research based on eBay support communities that was published in the Harvard Business Review a few years back seemed to indicate that it did.

Some of those same researchers, including Utpal Dholakia who helped us with the writing of our book, The Hyper-Social organization, went back and re-examined the eBay support communities – this time making sure that they corrected the results to account for self-selection bias. The results – community participation could actually have a negative impact on buying and selling. The recent study was published in an article titled “Impact of Customer Community Participation on Customer Behavior,” in the Journal Of Marketing Science, and can be accessed online here. What they found is that community participation has mixed effects on customers’ likelihoods of participating in buying and selling behaviors. In fact, they found that community participation had a negative impact on the number of listings and amount spent, suggesting that people who participated in the communities were educating themselves to be more efficient.

That does not mean that you should do away with online communities! Even the authors of the paper say so themselves.

There is also other research that looks at the impact of peer buying on buying behavior in communities. What this study found is that people with high status within the community would buy less than average – suggesting that they have nothing to prove by buying anymore. Those with low status were not very well connected to the community and peer buying did not influence them much at all. The middle tier – those with medium status – were very much influenced by peer buying and made up amply with their buying for the other two groups.

So while education may lead to short term efficiencies and less revenue from the buyers and sellers in eBay communities, they could also lead to increased customer satisfaction and higher lifetime customer value – which was outside of the scope of this research project. It could also lead to more customer acquisition through word-of-mouth, another metric that felt outside the scope of this research.

What do you think?

• Seven misconceptions about corporate social networking – SmartPlanet
  Review from The Hyper-Social Organization
• The FASTForward Blog » Hyper-Social Enterprise: What it Takes to Lead One: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  Another good review of The Hyper-Social organization by Joe Mckendrick

Following the release of our book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we are now launching the first two Hyper-Social Mini-Summits.

Reading a book is one thing. Turning the ideas presented in a book into actionable and measurable programs is a different thing all together. That is why we created the Hyper-Social Mini Summits – one day events to help you turn the ideas that we developed in the book into actionable programs, tailored for your company.

The first Hyper-Social Mini-Summits will be in New York City (Columbia Faculty House on 9/30/2010) and Boston (Harvard Faculty Club on 10/05/2010). The cost is $499 and it includes participation in the whole day event, a great networking dinner with 50 of your peers, a copy of the book, a pre-conference call to assess your specific challenges and expectations, and a post-conference call to make sure that we can address all the questions that will come  up as you bring the concepts back to your organization.

If you are a marketer thinking of leveraging or already in the process of deploying social media and communities as part of your business, you should attend, as this event is designed for you. And no, we are not offering an early bird discount. If a $50-75 discount is the only way you would register, then maybe this event is not for you. You need to see the value – and we believe  that the value that will be delivered as well as co-created will be outstanding. Not only will the session be somewhat tailored to your needs and challenges (not totally as there will be 50 0f you),we will also share the results of the third annual 2010 Tribalization of Business Study, and have a follow up call to ensure that you can maximize the learnings from the session within your organization’s context.

For more information and registration links, please head over to our Hyper-Social Mini-Summit page. We hope to see you there and maybe even bring a colleague or two. And if you have not done so yet, stay up to date on everything Hyper-Social-related by following us on Facebook.

I am a big fan of jetBlue, and of many employees that I have met during my travels. In fact, it is my favorite airline and I would fly it everywhere if I could. I also love the way they think about their business and how (in my opinion) they execute flawlessly against one goal – bringing humanity back to the airline industry.

That is what we all want, isn’t it? We do not want to be treated as cattle or  indirectly be told that we will suffer while flying – as some airlines seem determined to do.

Right?

But guess what – in order to bring humanity back to the airline industry you have to do one thing: allow your employees to behave like individual human beings, not corporate automatons that spew corporate speak all the time or try to sell you credit cards while they have you trapped in their seats. And that is what jetBlue does – their front line employees are genuine human beings…If you ever spoke with one of them, you would know. They are friendly, they have opinions, they are different from one another – they are genuine social human beings that treat us as if we were long lost friends.

And humans also have emotions…sometimes they will get mad and sometimes they will do crazy things – that comes with the territory. We are all fine with that when it happens in the real world, that which we inhabit outside of work. If someone from our tribe screws up, we put social pressure on that person to get their act together, we apologize, and we move on.

Why cannot we do that in business? Why do we have to ostracize the whole jetBlue tribe because one human being exhibited a side of humanity that “maybe” should not have been expressed in public – frustration and anger?

I am fine dealing with an occasionally frustrated flight attendant if the brand promise is to make me feel like a human being while flying with jetBlue - any day!

And I think you should too. jetBlue deserves our business and our support, and they surely have mine. It angers me to hear all the pundits jump on this occasion to talk about their puny little agendas.

The only thing I wish for is that the response from jetBlue would have been more human and less corporate-like, but with all the legal issues floating over this incident, I am sure that there are limitations as to what can be done while protecting the corporate legal entity.

No one will argue that privacy is slowly disappearing in online environments – it is just a fact of life when every thing you do can be recorded and stored in databases.

But it goes beyond that – we want status in online environments. It’s an age-old thing that humans have wanted for hundreds of thousands of years – it gave us access to better mates and more food. As Lahlou says in his paper “Identity, social status, privacy and face-keeping in digital society” – it still allows us to control our environment.

So how is our drive for status in online worlds driving out privacy?

It’s simple, really – in most cases, achieving status in online environment can only be achieved by showing proof of past activity, which is why we have an interest in having our actions traced, recorded and displayed.

So it is interesting how privacy is not just being lost because of the ubiquity of the technology that we use to establish and maintain social relations, it is being driven out of the system by our desire to achieve status.

Another Human 1.0 consequence…

I have hammered on this topic before, but as I keep talking to people about communities, I keep hearing them think about it the wrong way.

Here is how to think (and not to) about them:

1) We’re having a problem with engagement in our community

Are you sure about that? How do you know?

Let me guess: you are looking at one place (url) where you expect your community to interact and you only see a 10% participation rate.

If it works, your community consists of a group of people who are together because they share a particular interest. If they do, then they may hang together at the URL you are expecting them to hang out or they may not. Think of any offline community you belong to – sometimes you congregate for big get togethers, but often times you have smaller sub-groups who get together in different places, or pairs talking with one another over the phone. Why is it that you expect this to be different in the virtual world?

The largest active group within your community is the active lurkers – that group is very active, but just not in the visible public space. A good portion of your community is also hanging out in other places, not just the URL where you are expecting them at.

2) Should I run my community on SharePoint or should I use some other technology?

Don’t take me wrong – technology can make a difference. But it can only make a difference if you already have a successful community. Technology is not going to determine whether you can have a successful community. In fact, and if your community would not survive in a bulletin board, it will not survive anywhere.

3) I have an “addressable” community of a few thousand people – do I need to develop content?

Ok,  so if you succeed you can expect a few hundred people to engage with you. What do you think will engage them? You?

Forget it!

They will engage along a common interest. If they do that, you better have some valuable content about that interest before they first show up. If you don’t they will never come back. And even if you have thousands of potential contributors, you will need to develop content for them. It is very hard to develop communities that can sustain themselves on user-generated content – in fact those communities are extremely rare.

Think of your community’s lifecycle

Modern tribes are nomadic by interest – and at some point people in your community will move on. Your community has a lifecycle, and you need to watch out for end-of-life situations. Just like off-line conversations, some will peter out. And just like brainstorming sessions, some need to be shut down after a certain time. When that happens you need to provide closure for your community – develop a white paper, a web site with the results/findings of the community, etc.

Participating in communities that are leveraged for business is not all that different than participating in communities in your personal life. You know how to manage your behavior or lead people in your personal life – apply those same principles when you are at work.

It’s simple – Be Human!

As I wrote a little while back, the thinking that went into our latest book, The Hyper-Social Organization, affected me profoundly. So much in fact that I decided to refocus and rebrand my company around it.

Well today it’s official – we are now Human 1.0!

We are now focused on getting companies to become Hyper-Social by turning their business processes into social processes. In a way, that is not all that different from what we did in the past as Beeline Labs. The big change is that we are drinking our own Kool-Aid and that we soon will be delivering our consulting services using a social consulting service delivery model. After all, how could we expect our clients to buy services that are not based on the same principles that we preach? We are also terribly proud of a new consulting collaboration that we have with Deloitte, as well as a great advisory board with senior executives from some of the biggest companies to advice us on our business model.

I am also unbelievably happy with the new website, which was designed by my good friends at Brains On Fire – thank you Robbin, Geno, Megan, and Justin! They also joined our Human 1.0 Network, which will be an integral part of how we deliver consulting services using a social consulting service delivery model. The model is being developed with the two dozen people and companies that are part of it and will likely stay in a permanent state of beta-ness as we constantly fine-tune it for better results. Stay tuned for updates on the model as we test it and launch it over the next several weeks.

We hope you will find the way to stop by and let us know what you think. And if you have time, let us know what it means to you to be human in business again…blog it, tweet it  (tag it #hypersocialorg), or send it to us and we will publish it. If you want to create a picture about it, we may even put it on our home page and add it to our Flickr account.

The big day has arrived – our first book is officially out and can be purchased at Amazon.com (Borders and Barnes & Noble still show the old release dates for some reason).

Needless to say that this  is a moment that I am very proud off.

Over the next couple of weeks and months, I will write about some of the principles that we developed as part of the book. Many of those posts will be repeat topics as I tested a lot of those concepts as we were writing the book.

The writing of the book and the sense-making that came with it has had a profound impact on my thinking – so deep in fact, that I am repositioning my company around it. I had hoped to re-launch my business before the book was out, but that was preempted by the early release of the book by Amazon. Stay tuned for an update on that in a few weeks.

The book has three parts to it. The first part deals with the fact that if you want to understand this current wave of innovation – powered by social media, social computing, or social networking - you are in fact better off understanding what we termed the Human 1.0, which has been around for tens of thousands of years, rather than the Web 2.0 tools. We describe the main elements of the Human 1.0, including reciprocity, our innate sense of fairness, our need to look cool and to attain status and power, and other human quirkiness that can explain a lot of what is happening in business today.

The second part of the book deals with the fact that companies that are successful in harnessing the power of Social Media, Communities, or the Web 2.0, think differently about their business and they act differently. They focus on Tribes and Knowledge Networks instead of the more traditional Market Segments and Information Channels, and they are human-centric to a fault, ditching the old company and product-centricity.

The third part of the book talks about what successful companies actually do differently: they turn all their business processes into social processes and they embrace the messiness that comes with the social. In our research we have found examples of companies turning every business process into a social process except two – finance and legal.

I have not frequently asked for help, and have focused most of my work on this blog on providing value. Today I will ask for your help. Please buy the book, help promote it if you like it, and help us develop a better second book. Here are some ways in which you could help:

• Buy the book – for now the best way is on Amazon.com – http://amzn.to/9hRSok
• Become a fan of our Hyper-Social organization fan page on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/hypersocialorg
• Sign up for our upcoming webinar about the book – https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/558348201
• Leave us comments, write reviews, and let your friends know.

We have many more endorsements of the book, but for now I will leave you with what Barry Judge, Chief Marketing Officer for BestBuy had to say: “To the extent that we can be human with what we know, and share it as freely as we possibly can, we’ll go a long way towards gaining a higher or stronger level of trust with our consumers. The authors of the Hyper-Social Enterprise not only explain why that happens – they also provide a roadmap for how to embed it in all your customer-facing processes.”

THANK YOU!