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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.

[warning: rant]

I have been harping on this topic too many times, but as I recently sat through many conference sessions, and finally opened a book on communities and social media marketing that defined social marketing as “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and to communicate with with and tap into a much larger community that may have been available via traditional channels,” my hair got on fire.

I mean seriously – a channel to pimp your wares that has the potential to reach a bigger audience than TV audiences? Get real! This is bad advice.

Companies that approach social media marketing from that perspective will fail… miserably. Those that realize the real potential of social media will win… big time.

You see, social media marketing is not about you talking with an audience – it’s about them talking with one another. It’s about having a real time window in what your market is currently thinking about – what they like, what they dislike, who has the trust and who hasn’t. It’s all ABOUT THEM – NOT YOU!

Social media marketing has to be steeped in humanity and reciprocity – you give and take. And I recommend you start by giving. If you don’t, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have ruled human societies for tens of thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are enjoying a person at a party who only talks about herself.

If you really want to understand social media marketing, start thinking about how you would help a friend or colleague make a buying decision. Would you send them your corporate brochures? Would you spam them the way you do with your corporate twitter feed? Would you use the words you use in your marketing materials?

Chances are you would not.

For some stupid reason, people forget to be human when they step into the office. It is as if they leave their humanity at home and reserve it only for friends and family.

Social Media Marketing is about common sense – it’s about being real, authentic (there is another word that takes on new meaning in the corporate world), and helpful.

It’s about being human.

It’s simple – really.

[rant/end]

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.

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?

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.

Many senior sales executives are still looking for a predictable flow of leads at the end of a lead acquisition and nurturing “funnel.” And while many marketers have been struggling with expectation settings around predictable lead delivery for more than a decade, their sense of panic and angst around this issue has risen to alarming levels.

So what’s going on?

First of all, the funnel metaphor is broken. People no longer make buying decisions in a linear fashion. Second of all, people no longer listen to companies, but instead they turn to advise from their peers, friends, and other users of those products. Third of all, the potential number of choices they can have in their product consideration set is much larger than it ever was before, and the information sources that can get products into a buyers consideration set has grown exponentially.

A new study published in McKinsey Quarterly (requires subscription) reports that 2/3rd of touch points in a buyer’s active evaluations process are now consumer-driven marketing touch points: user generated reviews, word of mouth, and in store interactions. Only 1/3rd of the touch points are still company-driven. DID YOU HEAR THAT? You still control 1/3rd of the touch points!

So how should you think differently about lead generation?

First of all, ditch the funnel concept, and educate sales why the funnel no longer works. Second of all, make sure that there is uniformity among all the different customer touch points that you control: in-store display, packaging, attitude of your customer service department, online product information, educational information, etc. Third of all, position yourself to be findable for when customers can be influenced during their buying cycle – and in many cases that includes post sales as well.

One of the best things to happen to marketers is that most buyers leave a digital trail as they move through their journey. When they ask friends on twitter, you can see it. If they ask peers in communities, you can see it. And when they read or contribute to online reviews, you can see it if you want to.

You just need to make sure that you are there and generally helpful when those interactions happen. You also need to make sure that your branded content can travel as part of word of mouth, not just sit idle on your site. As the McKinsey Quarterly study says, you need to give prospects reasons to switch to you instead of excuses to stay with what they have – and you need to make it super easy for them to progress through their buying cycle.

I know: easier said than done. I am hoping that in the next few weeks we can expand on some of those concepts with some real case studies.

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.

Everybody will agree that the social has reentered business and commerce as we know it.

In fact, in the beginning, all business was social. If someone sold you a bad chicken, you would badmouth the business and others would shun it until the merchant cleaned up his act. Then the business infrastructure scaled and we ended up with large multi-national companies. People were still social, but the impact of them being social was no longer affecting business – we became at their merci and the social all but disappeared from business. That is when businesses started to develop real bad habits – treating their employees as commodities and waging war with their customers. With social media, a massive platform of participation, the social infrastructure scaled to the point where the social made a difference once again. And because humans are hardwired to be the only Hyper-Social species without all being siblings – the social made a comeback in business with a vengeance.

So what do you do with that? Smart business people, like many of the ones I interviewed as part of the CMO 2.0 Conversation, will tell you that the only thing you can do is to allow your business processes to become social. Barry Judge, the CMO from Best Buy who I interviewed said: “So to the extent that we can basically be human with what we know, and share it as freely as we possibly can, I think we’ll go a long way towards gaining a higher or stronger level of trust with the consumers.” In talking with Luis Suarez recently, he told me that IBM went as far as letting its complete knowledge management process go social. Pfizer’s Sr. VP of Strategy and Innovation, Kristin Peck, was recently quoted in an interview about their innovation process as saying: “when we thought about innovation,we asked ourselves “how do we make it more social?”"

It looks so obvious, right? Yet what do many companies do? Looking at how to commercialize the social that is happening between their customers and prospects. Buying ads on social networks, trying to develop buzz networks, and paying people for recommendations and word of mouth.

That unfortunately will not work much longer. Let’s just hope that those who try to commercialize the social do not muddy the waters with decreased levels of trust among customers and prospects for the rest of us.