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Most communities have 90% of users who are lurkers – people who may consume things from the community, but who don’t contribute. Through our yearly Tribalization of Business Study, we found that many companies who run communities consider this a problem (30% of respondents considered it an obstacle) – and that of course is a problem all by itself.

You see, not all lurkers are created equal.

While it is inevitable that larger communities will end up with 1% of their members being very active users who provide enough value for the 9% of somewhat active users, who together provide enough value for the 90% of lurkers, the largest form of participation in online communities happens to be active lurking, which according to an MIT research study can make up 40-50%  of your community membership. Active lurkers are those that may take something from the community and pass it along to others using different channels – so they participate in your word of mouth. Active lurkers also include those people who may visit a customer support community and find a solution to their problem without contributing to the community. Those people derive a lot of value from that community interaction and so does your company since they do not clog up your customer call center. Active lurkers also include those who will contact the original poster through a different channel, like telephone, email, or perhaps a face to face meeting – in effect continuing the conversation outside of the visible public side of the community, but not outside of the community itself.

Thankfully we found that 18% of companies who participated in the 2nd Annual Tribalization of Business are starting to track lurker metrics. It’s not easy to measure the impact of active lurkers, but without some sort of measure about their activity, you could miss a lot of the value that they bring to your Hyper-Social processes – especially in a world where the customer lifetime value is directly proportional with word of mouth activities.

When you think about communities, you need to think about the tribes and their members first, not just one of the public places (the online community forum) where they can interact with other tribe members. They will inevitably interact in multiple places, both virtual and physical.

Some pundits will tell you that you should do away with brand messaging and positioning all together, since you cannot control it anyway. Not so fast! People need to know what bucket to put your offering in, and if they can’t, they won’t know how to assign value to what you have to offer. Tivo ended up in that pickle, with consumers not quite sure what category of products to compare the offering with. Was it more like a DVD player or was it more like a computer?

Knowing that a good positioning will impact your revenue and profits, and realizing that you still have a seat at the customer decision making table (it’s just a much more crowded table and your share of voice has significantly been reduced) you need to develop a point of view about your positioning and try to get it co-opted by your tribe. Like in most social interactions, your chances to get someone to adopt your point of view are going to increase if you involve them early on. The more say you give them in the process of co-creating your products and services, and the earlier you get them involved (preferably at the product concept stage) the more they will embrace a shared view of the brand and product positioning. An added benefit of co-creating products with your customers is that those who are involved in the design of new products will typically pay higher prices for those products .

Marketing executives have come to understand, sometimes the hard way, that brand perception is only as good as the last interaction the customer had with it. When I spoke with Mark Colombo, senior vice president of digital access marketing at FedEx he described the challenge as follows: “In the 50’s and 60’s, brands used to be built on a set of attributes. Now brands are built by customers, one experience at a time, and those experiences are, obviously, more and more online experiences.” So you cannot just convey a brand’s promise or a product’s positioning through advertising and packaging anymore, you also need to deliver against that promise across all your other customer touch-points, and at any time. That becomes especially challenging when you have complex product distribution channels, high numbers of people involved in your service delivery, or a high level of interaction between your customers and your customer service and support center. It gets further complicated by user generated touch-points that people will encounter in the form of online reviews, blogs, and online communities. All those touch-points can make or break your brand, product, or service promise and position. Like many other things in marketing, this is not something new; it’s just something that we used to get away with because our customers, prospects and detractors could not behave Hyper-Socially and hold us accountable for our actions.

The way you control a brand promise through multiple touch-points is not through elaborate process manuals that we have grown accustomed to in business. The way to do it is by embracing Hyper-Sociality and all the messiness that comes with it and allow all the people involved in the process to behave like humans. Some companies like Zappos and JetBlue achieve that through a shared values-based culture that creates a common sense of belonging among their employees. Others like Western Union achieve it by becoming customer-centric to a fault. Still others, like IBM, are doing it by encouraging all their employees to set up communities with whomever they want, wherever they want, and about anything they want.

The key to success is to embrace all four tenets of Hyper-Sociality: think tribes, knowledge networks, customer-centricity, and be willing to accept some of the messiness that comes with Hyper-Sociality.

What do you think? I would appreciate your feedback.

One-to-one marketing was supposed to be the holy grail of customer relationship management.

Companies would no longer have to isolate us from the rest of world as a group to sell to us; they could actually do it on an individual basis. Problem is that we are hyper-social beings who prefer to operate within our tribes. We do not want to be isolated from our group so that sales people who know more about us than we feel comfortable with can give us the hard sell. We want the buying process to be a social process. We don’t trust companies to be on our side and prefer to get the information that will let us make sound buying decisions from our peers. The good news is that those hyper-social tribal peers cannot wait to help us and warn us about bad products and services.

As a team we may want to customize our group workspace, the tools we use, or the T-shirts we wear, but we don’t want one-to-one product customization. In fact we do not like too many choices. Research  has shown that it significantly reduces our willingness to actually buy something. Even mass-customization leads to “mass confusion.”

Forget one-to-one, it never worked and never will because we do not want to be unique, we don’t want to have one-to-one conversations with companies, and we do not really want customization.

Now, wait – don’t throw that CRM system out just yet. While we may not like to have you try to sell us on a one-on-one basis based on all that rich data you have about us, we love it when we are actually ready to buy your product, or when we have a problem with your product and we call your call center, to feel super special by having you recognize us and treat us as if you were a long lost relative trying to help us. We also like it when “the system” (your ecommerce site or your online community) recommends content and people for us that is highly valuable because it’s based on what you know about us – much like Amazon will recommend us books, or the Apple Genius music.

Remember this – when we are ready to buy or when we have a problem with your product or service we want to be treated as an individual, when we are in the process of making a buying decision, we want to be treated as a member of our tribe. And yes, the logical extension of that thinking is that all your behavioral and contextual targeting campaigns are in fact a colossal waste of time and money. During the sales cycle you need to target our tribes!

Do you buy this argument? Please let me know.

A lot of people are looking for a good classification system for communities, or some sort of community hierarchy. Most of the ones that we have seen so far (including some we tried to develop as part of the Tribalization of Business and our upcoming book, the Hyper-Social Organization) are rather lame – descriptive at best.

We finally came up with a high level distinction between communities and tribes based on how they deal with diversity – and would love to hear what you think. We believe that understanding this distinction is key in determining the value that a community or tribe can bring to your business.

On the one hand, you have communities and tribes that are populated with people who share a common belief. They prefer to hang out with people who share that belief. We call them defenders of belief. They frown upon diversity and operate much like a religious group would. Business communities and consumer tribes that fall in that category can be found everywhere – think of the Apple zealots, who would not want to be caught anywhere near a PC owner,  or the Ducati motorcycle riders, who certainly don’t want to be confused with Harley riders.

On the other hand you have communities and tribes that embrace diversity – within certain limits. We call them Seekers of the Truth. They realize that the best solutions come from diverse groups of individuals, and not from groups with a common sense of belief – let latter often causing an echo-chamber effect or groupthink. Commercial communities and tribes in that category include cross-industry professional affinity groups, like IBM’s global CIO community, and software developer communities, like the SAP developer community that we discussed in chapter 1 – where people are willing to help one another and share even with competitors in order to find the best solution in a timely manner.

Why is it so important to understand this distinction? For starters, if you are looking for input into your product innovation process, a community full of defenders of belief would yield pretty poor results. If your goal is to involve customer tribes as part of designing new products, you need a community of people who are seekers of the truth, embrace diversity, and enjoy a good difference of opinion. The more diverse your community is the better the products they will co-design with you. Some companies, like Intuit, will go to embrace what many would consider extreme diversity – inviting not just their customers and prospects but also their detractors as part of the process.

If on the other hand your goal is to increase word of mouth through communities and tribes or leverage the power of the crowd to help you with customer service, then having communities full of defenders of belief can work – and in some cases will work even better than with seekers of the truth.

What do you think? Please let us know as we refine our thinking…

There is a lot of research on Brand Communities, defined by Muniz and O’Guinn as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand.” (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001).

But do brand communities really exist?

Brand communities imply that the brand is at the center of the community. So in the Harley community it would mean that the Harley bike is at the center, in the Jeep community the Jeep Wrangler or the Cherokee, in the Mini Cooper community the Mini, and in the Fiskateer community, the Fiskars tools.

Is this really what is happening? I don’t think so.

For communities to work, the members need to be at the center of the community, and so the motivations have to be different from the pure hedonistic pleasure of owning a brand/product. The Fiskateers may be the people who come up with most of the new Fiskars products ideas. And they may be their staunchest defenders when the brand comes under attack. But the reason they form a tight-knit community, one that some members say changed their lives, is because they share a passion for scrap-booking. The reason that Harley owners get together is because they share a riding lifestyle passion. Jeep owners, probably because they have a shared aspiration for being adventurous by “off-roading” their cars. Mini owners? Not sure, but according to ethnographic research even people who no longer own a Mini Cooper stay with the community, so it cannot be that the car is at the center of the community.

So why Jeep and not Ford, why Fiskars, why Mini, why Harley ? Because in all those cases the companies have provided environments in which those member communities can operate and thrive. Jeep marketers are providing training camps, and are organizing the barbecues around which members can share their passion. Fiskars provided an online environment for their members to thrive and connected those with offline events as well. But in all cases they are enablers of a shared passion that exists within a tribe or community.

The result of that is what I described in a recent blog post – people use the Jeep, the mini, the Fiskars scissors, or the Harley as symbols to associate with others who share that passion. In some cases they take that a step further and create rituals around those brands, which make the brands more sticky. But at the end of the day, these are not brand communities, they are passionate rider communities, scrapbooker community, adventure seeker communities.

What do you think? Do you buy that, or do you think I am missing something?

Reciprocity is one of the key factors that allows communities to work. As science has shown, humans developed reciprocity as a reflex to become the only hyper-social species without all being brothers and sisters.

In small tribes and groups, reciprocity is often based on face-to-faceness – you physically help someone care for a child, or you help them move their stuff, and expect them to help you back later on. But reciprocity seems to work on a much bigger scale than face-to-faceness could ever explain – think of people supporting the green movement in Iran (#iranelection) by traveling to NY and demonstrating at the UN, or think how even the French all felt like Americans after 9/11.

What is going on here, and how can reciprocity scale beyond face-to-faceness?

In his book “Us and Them, Understanding Your Tribal Mind,” David Berreby says:

My fellow feeling for the people of New York does not depend on everyone of us taking turns doing each other’s dishes… For a city or nation to exist, its members must be good at satisfying their need for reciprocity with symbols, not actions.

Bingo!

Symbols, signals, and rules are the key to scaling reciprocity, and by proxy, the key to making large communities work. If I read advice coming from a community of Firefighters (disclosure: Monster is a client of ours) I will trust that advice even if I do not know anyone in that community because in my mind I equate being a firefighter with a strong sense of duty and trust.

There are symbols and rules that are very strong in humans – race, religion, and language come to mind. But there are others that are much more artificial – think of people who have a shared experience based on attending one of the Burning Man events, people who enjoy the riding lifestyle by driving a Harley, or the importance of uniforms.

So 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 bonds even deeper and the trust higher – which will then lead to decreasing transaction costs and increasing transactions.

And when you do leverage symbols and rules, make sure that they have a shared meaning among the people you want to engage with – Harley may be associated with the love of a riding lifestyle for most Harley owners, but may also be associated with gangs for people outside of that community.

So this may sound like stating the obvious, but too many companies overlook this key ingredient within their community activities.

What trust does in communities is to lower the transaction costs for all participants. If you pick up a piece of advice from a community member in a community that you trust, you will spend less time doing due diligence on that piece of advice than if you got it from a community in which you have less trust. The result is that more transactions will happen in communities or because of information coming from communities with a higher trust level.

Even though we inherently don’t trust information coming from companies, I contend that most companies who engage in community activities start with a positive influence on trust if they do it right.

So what is doing it right?

For starters, companies should host communities that are centered around the members and their shared passion or pain. If they have employees who are experts in the field, those employees should engage, as long as they identify themselves and as long as they do not all sound like corporate mouth pieces. The company should deploy its resources, which members may not have, to ensure quality professional content development, professional moderation services, online and offline events, and other activities that benefit the membership.

If companies provide a true quality service to their community members by having a community with a high level of trust among members, then that trust will implicitly get associated with that company. And because companies usually have the wherewithal to make that happen, they in fact start with a positive influence on trust.

In this social media age, everyone in your company should become a marketer. Like many companies before you, you should empower all your employees to interact with friends, customers, prospects and detractors. Going above and beyond that, let them set up communities within and outside your company’s firewall, about any topic and with whomever they want to hang out with. Many very large (and successful) companies like IBM, Best Buy and Cisco have done it before you – with real success and with very little downside.

Now, as you are harnessing the power of communities, realize that you may have a new asset on your hands – one that some companies have become pretty successful at harnessing, and one which is similar to that of media companies. You now have an audience that others might want to have access to – and that is worth something. Think of Virgin America, which was able to fund the launch of a new hub city through a paid media partnership with HBO. Or think of American Express, with its Open Forum, a community for small businesses, where they are now selling sponsorships on specific sections of their community to partners.

It goes without saying that you should first and foremost think about the value that you will provide to your community members through a partnership. Break the trust they have in you by spamming them and they will leave in droves – leaving you with no asset nor the value that the community was bringing you in the first place.

I get that question so often that I thought I would write a short post about it. What is the difference between a B2B and a B2C community? Or people will ask me, can you please only show me B2B examples because we are different than B2C.

When it comes to communities – especially successful ones – there is no difference between the two. The main interactions in communities do not happen between businesses and other businesses, or between businesses and consumers – they happen between humans and other humans. And that is no different in B2B than in B2C environments.

Sure, some people will show a greater affinity for a consumer product than they will for a piece of enterprise software, but successful communities are never built around products, they are built around the members and their shared emotions. Even the Harley community is not built around bikes, it’s built around a shared lifestyle of the community members. And so the dynamics within that community will in fact not be all that different from the dynamics you would find in a software developer community – it comes down to human to human interactions or h2h.

For my first CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversation, I spoke with Rob Kozinets, a professor of marketing from York University in Toronto, about communities, consumer tribes and word of mouth marketing – not surprising considering that Rob was the editor of Consumer Tribes, a collection of research papers on consumer tribes, recently finished a book on word of mouth, and is one of the few researchers looking at the practice of business through the eyes of an anthropologist/ethnographer (among other things).

We started the conversation by talking about the disconnect between the world of academics and the world of business, especially as it relates to marketing. It is an unfortunate fact that many mistakes could be avoided if marketers were making informed decisions based in part on some of the recent findings in the fields of behavioral economics, anthropology, complexity theory, sociology, and psychology.

One of Rob’s main themes is that consumer learning, opinions and transmission of influence happens in smaller groups – hence the idea of tribes. Today’s tribes have looser affiliations and are more hedonistic in nature than ancient tribes. They are nomadic by interest, rather than geography, and centered around expertise and commercial culture. Consumer Tribes are also not typically focused on a single brand but rather on a whole group, a whole culture or lifestyle, or a set of activities. Another challenge for marketers, according to Kozinets, is that consumer tribes don’t typically develop long-lasting relationships. Even some of the stronger tribes, like the Star Trek groups that were so popular in the 90’s, aren’t as active anymore – people move on as they get more options. It would actually be interesting to see if the Harley community is still as strong as it used to be. People move in and out of consumer tribes, and the tribes seem to have a natural life and death cycle – including a revival stage sometimes.

Of course, most marketers don’t think of their customers as tribes yet, or don’t realize the enormous impact that successful customer communities can have, so for many of them this is an non-existent problem.

According to Rob, one of the big problems with communities is that companies are setting them us expecting fixed ROI. In reality the measurement of the the impact of communities is very hard. They are hard to set up, take time to take off, and are challenging to maintain. And, as Rob points out, a lot of the successful community marketers have had their communities formed for them by their customers – much like Harley.

We also talked about the proliferation of special interest communities sponsored by various companies – e.g., small business focused communities, of which there are dozens. Obviously members will not want to belong to multiple small business communities, so what then? Consolidation, with most members gravitating towards the most successful small business community, or further fragmentation, with more user-driven communities aggregating around micro objectives? It’s hard to predict where we will see consolidation vs. fragmentation of communities as we do not quite understand how people move in and out of those spaces.

An interesting concept which Rob brought up was “share of community time,” which, in a way, is a measurement related to John Hagel’s Return on Attention (John has also agreed to conduct a CMO 2.0 Influencer conversation with me – stay tuned for a date). The problem with calculating share of community time is that there is a huge spread in the estimated number of people who participate in communities – between 100M and 1b.

Other things we talked about include:

• The role of payments and incentives in communities
• Whether online focus groups are stretching the possibilities of online community environments
• How to engage with your detractors as well as your champions
• How, if you are going to open things up, you should have a strategy to deal with criticism that will come
• The pros and cons of having a neat classification system for communities based on the different needs that they are trying to solve
• How community organizers need to think about members first and brand second

We also touched on word of mouth and how most marketers expect word of mouth to amplify their message, when in reality most word of mouth will transform your message.

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site, and we will be releasing transcripts soon.