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Many companies are trying to understand and predict online social behavior using traditional marketing research techniques – both qualitative and quantitative. In most cases those companies are in for big disappointments.

Let’s take a classic social phenomenon to make the point.

You have a crowd of 300 people who come to fill a theater with 500 seats. When they are all set and done, you will have clusters of people with big empty chunks of seats in between them, maybe nobody sitting in the front, and perhaps some surprising groupings of people.

How would a market researcher approach this situation?

The qualitative person would probably try to interview everyone ahead of time and make cluster predictions based on kinship, friendship, professional affiliation, etc. Not knowing when people arrive, nor understanding the true social motives for sitting in a particular place at a particular moment, most of those predictions would be wrong. Yes, maybe a couple will tell you that they intent to sit with a pair of neighbors, but when they get there, spot a potential client who they did not know would be there, and realize that the neighbors are not there yet, they might very well change their mind. There is no qualitative data, that you could have uncovered ahead of time, that would let you make that prediction.

The quantitative person would wait until everyone sits, lift up the curtain and take a snapshot of the sitting arrangement for further data analysis. The problem is that the data won’t tell you anything. If there is a cluster of single women in the theater, you have no way to know, based on the data, whether those people were motivated by being with others who are just like them, or whether they maybe all came together as part of a mommy social group. If there is a cluster in the back, you have no clue whether those people were motivated by the desire to potentially leave early, or whether they wanted to be in a position where they could observe everyone else in the theater and just have a better people-watching vantage point. The data is meaningless when it comes to predicting social behavior.

So what can you do? You need to be more like an anthropologist and less like a market researcher. If you have the luxury to interview people ahead of time, and then watch the seating arrangement in progress, you will be able to make more informed assumptions, but you will still need to validate them through qualitative interviews afterwards. If you don’t have the luxury of interviewing people ahead of time and see the seating arrangement in progress, you can still make assumptions and validate them through qualitative interviews.

But by focusing on understanding the parts of the whole through individual qualitative interviews or the whole by capturing data about the end result only, you will not learn anything meaningful about the true social drivers of this social gathering.

The lesson – don’t try to understand online social behavior by doing traditional qualitative market research like interviews or focus groups (in which people will tell you what they want you to hear anyway),  nor by doing sophisticated quantitative analytics research. Neither one will give you good results. Instead, focus on observing what happens, make assumptions and predictions based on basic human cultural behavior (need for status, need to hang out with like-minded people, need to impress others, being competitive among groups, etc.), and validate those assumptions through qualitative interviews and more observation.

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.

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.

Both the slides and the Slidecast from yesterday’s 2009 Tribalization of Business Study webinar are up on slideshare. I am testing a new feature of Slideshare on the presentation version.

Let me know what you think.

Slidecast is here:

Presentation is here:

Well, the results from the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study are finally here.

As a reminder, the Tribalization of Business Study, sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, looks at how companies leverage communities as part of their business.

Over the next several weeks I will post the major findings from the study. The 2009 study draws on a much bigger base of companies than last year’s study as the number of companies which participated this time increased to more than 430.

Some interesting observations that are worth noting and which I may have mentioned to some of you are:

• We are seeing clear signs of maturity in the marketplace – they include companies realizing the importance of lurkers, their increased focus on providing a heartbeat to their community, and fewer of them being stuck in pilot mode
• At the same time we are still seeing plenty of signs of confusion – they include companies not knowing what objective they are least able to achieve, a continued focus on ad-driven metrics, and a lack of people commitment to communities
• Some big aha moments from this year’s study are that most communities still report in marketing, even though their goals are not all aligned with marketing, and that companies list social reasons rather than commercial reasons for success when asked what community features contribute the most to their communities effectiveness

If you would like to get a deck or a presentation on the findings of this year’s study, please email me at francois [at] beelinelabs.com.

Along with the other sponsors we will be posting a release soon.

[update] You can find the release here. We will also be holding a webinar on it next week Wednesday at 1pm ET – you can register here for the webinar.