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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?

You may recall the Tribalization of Business Study, a study sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, which looks at how companies leverage communities and social media as part of their business. The yearly study has come to be known as a valuable resource for companies that plan on leveraging social media and communities as part of their business, as well as a benchmarking tool for those already engaged.

We have just opened the survey for the 2010 edition (http://2010tribalizationofbusiness.com) of the study. If you are involved with communities or social media, we hope that you will join us in taking the survey and perhaps also participate in the upcoming qualitative interviews that make up the second part of the annual study.

In return for your time (the survey should take no longer than 20-25 minutes) and your valuable input, we will send you preliminary results of the complete survey results.

Who Should Participate?
If you are involved with a company’s social media programs or communities, as an executive sponsor, community manager, or outside advisor, we are looking for your feedback.

What’s in it for you?
We happily share the results of the Tribalization of Business Study with those that participate – the companies and/or individuals that are willing to share their learnings and are interested in what others are doing and what it takes to succeed. We also share our interpretations of the results through blog posts, articles, and conference presentations.

What is in it for us?
Two of the sponsoring organizations are strategy consulting companies that help clients connect their needs and problems with the best available knowledge. The other sponsoring organization is a research organization that aims to serve its members and other constituents by providing unique industry-specific insights.

What else can you do to help the industry?
Pass the survey link around to friends, peers and colleagues who are involved with communities and social media – the more people that take it, the better and more accurate the results!

Thank you for your time – we look forward to hearing from you.

Kimberly-Clark launched a grant program targeted at mom entrepreneurs (see article in Brandweek here). The website, HuggiesMomInspired.com, provides business resources for women who want to start a business, a way to submit your idea, and a few case studies. They are leveraging social media to get the word out.

It probably will be a somewhat successful program, but the minute they stop granting money, all will disappear – there is clearly not a movement of mom entrepreneurs going to emerge from this program. I also wonder if K-C will be able to achieve its goals – which is  “to further strengthen its relationship with its core consumers, many of whom are business-minded, social media-savvy moms.”

What’s missing from this program is the social. There is no social component in this effort at all (although I am sure that for some people leveraging social media as a channel of communications for the launch will qualify as social – it’s NOT!).

Here are some of the things that K-C could have done to make this more of a social program.

1. Socialize the Business Plan Development Process
   Turn the web site into a community for mom entrepreneurs, where business teams can form, where people can find help to refine their plans, and where they can rate plans as they proceed through some sort of gated process, the way the Cisco iPrize works.
2. Socialize the funding process
   It would be much more powerful if the program were built in a way that other companies and VC’s, who might be interested in that same tribe of mom entrepreneurs, could participate in the funding process – possibly creating multiple categories of funding and making the whole effort more valuable for all parties involved.
3. Forget the company and its product – be member-centric
   Make the community totally member-centric, with mom entrepreneurs at the center and not diapers. Sure, K-C and Huggies can be sponsors of the site, but that does not need to be front and center if your goal is to create a relationship with mom entrepreneurs.
4. Don’t use social media as a channel to get the word out – engage where the tribes hang out.
   Chances are that mom entrepreneurs are already grouping together in some online or offline communities. If so, then engage them where they already hang out. If not, then you may have found a rare opportunity to host a vendor sponsored community that could turn into a movement – one that could not be shut down even if you were to stop the grant program.

Too many social media based programs lack the social that could turn those programs into huge successes.

What do you think? Let me know.

A few weeks ago, Ed Moran and I conducted a webinar, hosted by Monster.com (disclosure: Monster.com is a client of Beeline Labs), about Social Talent Acquisition. Unfortunatelly, and as is often the case with webinars, we were not able to get to all the rich questions that came from the audience. This is the reason for this post. If you have any comments about our points of view, we would love to hear them.

Q: How would you recommend using social networks to recruit high volumes of candidates, like call center roles?

Social Media allows you to change the nature of the relationship you have with potential candidates from a transactional and episodic relationship to an ongoing relationship. In that vein you really need to shift your thinking from staffing a big  call center once to setting up ongoing relationships with a large number of people who are motivated by “wow-ing” the customer.  The next time you need to staff up a call center, those people will act as an army of volunteer recruiters for you. That could involve setting up a community for people to network with one another, or engage with them on someone else’s platform if that is where they already hang out.

Q: With all the choices of social networking, the difficulty is not only managing the social network but knowing it is working – especially when as a Recruiter we are looking to fill a position by 30 to 45 days.  How can we approach social networking knowing it is working?

First off, chances are that if you have a successful social environment, whether a community or a network, you will not be “managing” it. Most successful social environments are run by the users and members, even when they are sponsored by companies.

Social recruiting and talent acquisition is NOT about recruiting in social media – it’s about leveraging the social for which humans have been hardwired for tens on thousands of years as part of the talent acquisition process. If you recruit in social media you may have some success, but the biggest benefits will come from turning the process into a social process – one which can expand beyond online communities and social networks. Turning the process into a social process means finding others, who’s job it is not to recruit, to help you find the right talent for the opportunity you are trying to fill.

Q: can you give more specific feedback on how a company would start posting/using social networks to recruit employees?

We answered part of this question in the previous answers, but the key here is to start establishing meaningful relationships with people who potentially could help you find the right talent in the future. It could be that those people already hang out on social networks like LinkedIn or FaceBook, or maybe in more specialized communities like the ones sponsored by Monster.com’s Affinity Lab communities. It could also be that they do not have a place to hang out yet in which case you may have an opportunity to host them on your platform.

Q: How do you recommend developing social network policies, especially for employees? We need to create some type of framework so users know what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Telling your people how to behave online or in social media should not be all that different from telling them how to behave on the phone, email, or in face-to-face situations. Another factor to consider before putting out intimidating or restrictive social media policies is that most customers purchase your products and services based on TRUST – and how can you expect your customers to trust you if you cannot trust your employees.

When putting together corporate social media policies, it is a good thing to understand what others have done and also to include those employees who are active in social media in the process of crafting the policy.

Q: Which social network would you suggest for solely recruiting for a non-profit company?

Again, maybe it would be better to look at this problem from a different angle. What is the non-profit about? Is it like Love 146, which fights against child trafficking, or is it like Mensa, an organization for highly intellectual people? People with a passion for those different causes will not likely hang together and so there is not one place where you will find them.

When trying to engage in social media you need to find the tribes and where they hang out. You also need to be human-centric to a fault, and not wear your company or organization-centric (in this case non-profit) hat.

Q: Working for a real estate company, it’s hard to provide incentives in terms of reciprocity. Any advice on how to appeal on a national level for the recruitment of sales agents?

While not claiming to be real estate experts you should be able to find reciprocity everywhere. Think of the last party you went to and the conversations you had with people – if you remember them, then those conversations were reciprocal – based on value going both ways. If you don’t remember them, then it was probably a conversation that either did not interest you (non-reciprocal from your point of view) or with a people who could not stop talking about themselves.

Q: How did Fiskars communicate out of the scrapbooking community?

We interviewed the CMO of Fiskars who explained the program in detail here.

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.