The Global Neighbourhood's Challenge to Enterprise Marketing

[This is the 5th in a series about Online Communities and the Enterprise. Each has been tagged Community Conversations, if you wish to follow.]

The essence of the Global Neighbourhoods concept is that people go online and self-organize into small groups, groups small enough so that the active members of it, get to know each other, trust each other and influence what each other buys, watches, listens to, and other incidentals such as who they vote for. Another key point is that very few sites are a community. There is no community of 60 million Facebook users. Members of thousands of smaller communities who share common interests sometimes meet on facebook as well as numerous other places including physical confernce rooms.

I started thinking about this when I was rereading The Tipping Point, where Malcolm Gladwell talked about the maximum intimacy of a group being about 150 people. They were an example illustrated in the book's subtitle: "How little things make a big difference." Global Neighborhoods started me looking at little things online. Those things turned ot to be overwhelmingly human.

How little? It seems to me that technology has expanded the size of these neighborhoods from malcolm's 150 to as large as 500. To a mass marketer, a number as miniscule as 500 does not even justify rounding off a decimal.

Until you realize there are millions and millions of Global Neighborhoods. If you are a company like Coke, or General Motors, tens of thousands of Global Neighborhoods, very often comprised of no more than 12 members are influencing the perceptions of your company, not to mention sales.

This is why I so adamantly argue that traditional marketing just won't work. Traditional marketing is designed to reach mass audiences simultaneously. The Superbowl is a great example.  But if you apply Superbowl marketing approaches to Facebook you have a recipe for failure. There's only one network you can turn to if you want to see live Superbowl coverage. More than a billion people share a common interest.  But the 60 million or so people who go to Facebook are a diverse group. They share as much common interest as people in an Internatinal airport. They all want to get somewhere--and that somewhere is often a community. But the 60 million pretty much ignore each other as best they can because they share so little in common.

Traditional marketers look at online communities. They look at what measurements of popularity exist and they try to apply time-proven techniques. They queue up to pitch Scoble, Arrington, Om and the other luminaries. They try to "score hits." And in fact, the online superstars have transcended the Global Neighbourhood concept.  They behave as media stars. Like actors and models, they do what it takes to have as many followers as possible.

There is reason to pitch the community superstars, but it may be less than you think.  As the Edelman Trust Barometer points out year after year after years--we trust our friends more than our superstars.

I maintain that the superstars ar diminishing in their influence even as their ratings grow,  When I first started collaborating with Scoble, his total reach (through all his social media activities) was perhaps 60,000 unique visitors a month. There were, as I recall about 6 million bloggers and no one was counting heads in online communities. Scoble is now about 10 times more popular. Hell, lets give him a following of a million. But now, there are at least 100 million bloggers, according to Technorati, and I would guess there are over 500 million members of online communities.

So if you score Scoble on a key story, it can help a lot. Just remember that you may have missed about a half billion other people, many of who may impact your company. How do you get to these millions of global neighbourhoods, many of which are miniscule (Biz Stone told me that the average Twitter user is followed by just 12 people).

If you use traditional mass merchandising approaches, you simply cannot succeed in the thousands of micro communities that may influence purchse of a next car, or the movie to see this week end or the best Chinese restaurant in the Plo Alto area and so on.

An entirely different approach is needed and one that does not fit into a traditional marketing department.  And branding groups for the most part to not understand the power a personal brand can have on a corporate brand, no matter how many times we roll out Scoble at Microsoft and Schwartz at Sun.

If I were an enterprise decision maker I woud hire a whole new roomful of young bright people, people who have been engaged, immersed and passionate in social media and online communities for a large percentage of their lives; people who care about communities, who understand their dynamics and I would pretty much leave them alone. I would order my CMO to stay the Hell away from them. I would tell my marketing and branding people to ignorethem and just keep doing what they are doing.

I do not advocate any company abruptly halt their existing programs. I see the situation for most large organizations very much as I see a large supertanker going at full throttle on open seas. On the horizon, you can observe a small reef, but the tide is going against the ship and it needs to adjust course now before that reef gets closer and larger and survival threatening.

Let that roomful of community kids bail you out.

Comments

[Natalie]

I have often wondered what number of followers will make my Twitter feed turn into a mosh pit. Twitter is my preferred professional networking tool and is more dynamic and useful than LinkedIn and is not as committed as FaceBook. For me it is the perfect blend of social and professional networking.

I think Tylenol and HP have made excellent use social media in advertising. This isn't easy for large firms to do considering longer lines of communication and corporate-mindsets that consider this kind of media risky.

[Jonathan Trenn]

Shel

I disagree with the kids part. I'd hire a roomful of people who understand social media. And I'd try to make it relatively diverse. That's because the users of social media are relatively diverse. Granted, it would likely lean relatively young, but there are certain touchpoints amongst divergent populations.

It's like in politics. The young back Obama, women go for Hillary, independents want McCain, religious conservatives support Huckabee. Why? Because each of those groups can relate to that particular candidate. Not to get too political, but that's why Romney is having trouble. No core constituency.

I think that's going to be a growing challenge for social media. Actually I blogged about it here http://marketingconversation.com/2007/12/20/a-coming-problem-of-diversity/

To me, I've felt that the ad industry as a whole isn't diverse enough and it shows. I just hope that that doesn't happen with social media.