SM Global Report: Beeline's Francois Gossieaux

Tribalism in the Online Community

            [Francois Gossieaux speaking at SuperNova. From his file photos]

Back in Naked Conversations, we talked about how people were hot-wired to collaborate and that people have remained essentially unchanged since the time when we hung out in caves and collaborated for survival. Of course, we had scant evidence to back this up, just our usually strong opinions.

Now comes Francois Gossieaux, a co-founder and partner in Beeline Labs, a marketing 2.0 firm and the substantive Tribalization of Business study. Beeline, Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research have produced the first report drilling into the early experiences of more than 140 organizations who are pioneering online communities at business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies and nonprofits. The communities range from fewer than 100, to more than 10,000 members.

Francois' interview answers should prove valuable to anyone managing, participating in or considering a business-related community.

1. What was the study's objective? Did you achieve it? There were 140 corporate officers interviewed. What were their most common titles?

We wanted to understand how companies leverage communities as part of their business processes and how they measure the progress and success of those efforts.
We quickly realized that for those companies who were doing it right we were looking at something that was transformational. We were tapping into an age-old human behavior, which we came to recognize as “tribalism.” Halfway through the project, we changed the title because of that observation.

2. Who did you speak to? What were the most common titles?

Most community efforts ended up reporting in to the CMO, even though that is not where they all originated. In the recent past, most community activities started somewhere as a skunkworks project - only to be rolled into the CMO’s turf after the program gained recognition. It is a more recent and still relatively rare phenomenon in which companies launch community activities as corporate marketing initiatives from the get-go.

3. What surprised you? What didn't?

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the scalability issue. Many reported that community initiatives, especially for large companies, did not have enough business impact to make it onto the CMO's dashboard.

When asked about the associated budgets and expenses, those same budgets and expenses did not make it onto their radar screen either. So, in effect, many CMOs keep programs deliberately small and then complain that they cannot see results that move the needle.

Another surprise was how many companies started their community initiatives as a technology platform decision - only to realize that if you build it, they may not come. Some very successful community executives suggested that if your community cannot survive in a Yahoo! Group-like discussion environment, it will probably not survive anywhere. One of the more important factors for the success of community initiatives is the content strategy for the community – not the technology strategy.
Least surprising  is probably what motivates community members. They want to talk to other people, not companies, and they want to help one another.

4.  What do you think makes us tribal by nature and why should a business strategist care?

People want to hang out with like-minded people and want to help and be helped by people who care. By providing a massive platform for participation, social media has allowed that tribal behavior to return to the forefront. Whether you like it or not, there is probably a good chance that your consumer tribe already hangs out in some corner of the online world. While at times a bit dense, you can find a collection on the most recent research Consumer Tribes.

5. Your survey showed the five most frequent goals of a corporate online community were close to tied: (1)insight, (2)idea generation, (3)loyalty, (4)word-of-mouth and (5)marketing. Did you find communities do better when they serve multiple purposes or a single purpose?

Communities can start out with a single purpose, but inevitably, they will end up serving multiple purposes. You need to prepare for that. If you start a customer support community, for example, people will eventually give you new product ideas. If you are not set up to execute against those product or service suggestions that the community finds important, they will lose interest and leave - it's as if you are not listening to them. They don't care what your internal goals are for the community. They care about having a better complete life-cycle experience with your product.

6. Your study seems to indicate that engagement is a more valid goal of an online community than say, revenue per customer. How would you measure either?

I am not sure that we found engagement to be a more valid goal of an online community, but it is what many companies try to measure. I assume that much of the reason why companies are looking at engagement as a success metric is because many of them are building their communities in partnership with their agencies.

What we did find is that those companies who were most satisfied with their community efforts were those who measured the effectiveness of their communities in the same way as they would measure the effectiveness of the business processes that the community was intended to support. For example, if you measure the success of your customer support call center in a certain way, then measure the impact of your online community-based support program in the same way.

The same is true for new product innovation-focused communities or co-marketing communities. Whether the original measurement framework is the right one or not, it is one that the department heads understands and which tends to be institutionalized across the company.

It was amazing to see companies, who normally measure all their marketing programs based on increased sales, all of sudden measure community efforts based on page views and time spent on the site - even when the community interactions were happening mostly through email and text messages. These are all clearly signs of an early market with lots of customer confusion.

7. Speaking of measurement, your report indicates that companies could do a better job of measuring communities. What would you suggest?

Besides measuring their community efforts the same way that they measure the underlying business process, we also found that those companies who were most satisfied with their communities effectiveness were those who were funded by the various business groups they were supported, instead of by a central community slush fund. When you have to justify results to the business units in order to get your funding, it's amazing how you automatically align the way you measure success to the way that the rest of the company measures its success.

8. You seem to think an online community should be the purview of marketing and ultimately the CMO. Why? Why not have it under a Chief Communications Officer, reporting to the president or CEO?

We believe that CMOs have an opportunity to transform their role into that of Chief Customer Officer - and represent the Voice of the Customer at the executive table. As Peter Drucker said many years ago: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation."

Leveraging the power of communities and the customer insights that they provide could put CMOs back in the strategic seats where they belong. I know that we have had a long history of marketers with very bad habits, which is why many people want to do away with them. But, at the end of the day, companies will need to fix the problem--not bypass it.

I believe the CMO role will evolve--encompassing all touch points that a customer can have with the company instead of being primarily pre-sale focused.

9. In that case, will the CMO obsession with ROI go away?

ROI is not something that will go away anytime soon – although, hopefully, it will shift away from a programs-based ROI thinking to a customer life-cycle ROI mentality.  You should also note that CMOs are not the ones who are so ROI focused. It’s their companies.

10. What core differences do you see in running an internal social network, v. an external one?

In many ways, the dynamics are the same. Yet there are also fundamental differences. Many companies confuse collaboration projects with community projects. You can have a core product innovation team whose mission it is to develop your company’s next big thing. If and when that team seeks participation from broader employee communities whose job is not to come up with the next big thing, then the dynamics are fundamentally different.
The core team is driven by team dynamics - clear goals, well-known project beginning and end times, and a well-understood process - it's their job.
The broader community does not behave like a team, nor does it have visibility into most of the things that drive your core team, and it's not their job - they will only do it because they feel passionate about your company’s success.

11. Do you have a good anecdote about something that happened while conducting the survey?

I like Cisco’s iPrize project story. They set out to develop a program that would lead to Cisco’s next billion-dollar business. They were not focused on developing an external product innovation community, but that is exactly what they ended up with. Not only did posses develop to self-police the rating and ranking process, but many teams formed online to compete for the iPrize.

12. What is the single most important piece of advice you have for a company starting a social network?

Use Barry Nalebuff's PARTS acronym.  Start with taking an inventory of the “parts” of your game plan:

•    Who are the Players?
•    What’s the Added value (especially for the community members)?
•     What are the rules?
•    What tactics should you use?
•    What’s the Scope of your effort?

Then, develop a detailed roadmap for how you will approach the project: With whom will you launch? Will you start by engaging people on other sites or will you just start by sensing what is going on so you can decide how to engage? Which business processes you will activate, etc?
Also, realize that the dynamics of small scale community efforts are very different from those of large scale efforts – so the lessons learned from small pilots may not apply to big deployments, and the reasons why small communities fail are not at all the same as to why large ones fail.
And please, don't start your community project as a technology platform selection.

Comments

[Tarah Cammett]

I have worked with Francois on a webinar discussing the results of this study - I have read about it, and listened to him speak about it in detail and I still find myself continually educated by it. I truly feel that the findings are a solid foundation and starting point for businesses engaging in social media marketing and I look forward to future studies tracking the progress and trends of this research.

Great read! Thanks.

[Bud Gibson]

I agree that content is king and not technology. The question I have after reading this piece is what is the core content that defines the community. That's the part that has the sticking value and draws people in.

In most community efforts, I'm less enamored of interaction as a fundamental organizing principle. Interaction is ephemeral. It generally tends to occur around content artifacts. You want to own the content around which the interaction occurs. What is that content? That's the fundamental question.

[Nettie Hartsock]

Great insights! One of my favorite quotes of Peter Drucker's is, "The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said." I think what Beeline has tapped into is that the only place a company can truly go to "hear what isn't being said" is through establishing a community that feels completely free to share everything with one another.

Through that free and fostered exchange companies have a giant opportunity to listen to the community and its needs and meet those needs.

This also ties into what Francois says, "If you are not set up to execute against those product or service suggestions that the community finds important, they will lose interest and leave - it's as if you are not listening to them. They don't care what your internal goals are for the community."

Really brilliant work.

[Zena Weist]

Excellent post, Shel! I had the opportunity to see Francois at SNCR's NewComm Forum where he walked a group through the topline findings of this study. His session was extremely relevant and timely.

I have recommended this study's webinar: http://is.gd/1dSJ to community managers and companies that are considering creating communities. And now, I'll point them to your interview as well. Thank you!

[Bryan Person, LiveWorld]

Nice interview with Francois, Shel. A couple of important points that I took from the survey:

1) Companies getting bogged down with the technology instead of focusing on how to meet their business goals and meeting the needs of the community.
2) Companies not willing to put enough dedicated resources behind their communities -- and that includes community managers and moderators who will help support and build the community over time. As Francois alludes to in your interview, they're almost *expecting* the communities to fail.

[Nate Ritter]

Great interview (both Shel and Francois). It's not too often these days that I read something about marketing and community that has been able to teach me much. This interview (and I'm sure the survey itself) definitely has that potential.

Great work guys. Thanks for making me think again.

[Ari Herzog]

As I seek ways to enhance my own efforts to be a CMO to multiple organizations, this Q&A is very useful and right-on.

Thanks for posting it, Shel.

[Paul Chaney]

I am experimenting with the use of online communities, not from a large corporation standpoint, but rather SMEs. I have to believe the dynamics are much the same because human behavior is the same. Still, I have a couple of concerns:

One is the issue of scalability. Small businesses quite simply don't have the customer base a Cisco has, for example. Does size matter? If so, is there a number that represents the "tipping point" toward the greater chance a community will thrive and be successful. Is it a numbers game in any respect?

Another concern has to do with the availability of community organizational/maintenance "rules of the road," or best practices. Is community management a matter of both art and science, reason and emotion, objective logical steps and subjective intuition?

I appreciate the reference to the PARTS analogy. That's a place for me to start in terms of utilizing a methodology.

Lastly, what do you (Francois and whomever else may wish to weigh in) perceive to be the future of online communities? Will Fortune 1000s on down embrace the use of these in increasing numbers?

Also, you mentioned that the technology platform should not be the driver. That being the case, what role should it play? I mean, because platforms have constraints and limits to what functions they offer, are out of the box solutions a bad idea? Do platforms have to conform to the business processes, goals and outcomes of a given community? If so, does that necessitate the creation of custom platforms designed with a specific community in mind?

Obviously, I have many questions, but am all ears and eager to learn.

[shel israel]

Paul,

Francois, as you know said the issue of scalability looms large for where a skunkworks project winds up in a large organization. I think scalability is becoming the key issue among large organizations right now. Hw are you seeing it in SME's?

[Aaron Strout]

Shel/Francois,

Kudos for a great interview. We need more insightful data like this in the enterprise community space. I am recommending this to all of my colleagues and will share it around on Twitter!

Best,
Aaron | @astrout

[Giovanni Rodriguez]

Francois is one of the most capable communication consultants on the market today. Thanks for the great interview, Shel.

[Romain]

To me what's not been enough highlighted is what objectives we can set to community and how to shape it to generate results. That's by setting up objectives that we can measure and calculate the ROI of the community.

Engagement is a nice metric but doesn't mean anything when looking at the bottom line. Ability to speed up innovation, time spared when using a community to provide users with support, amount of ideas generated, visibility and reputation generated by the community, ... those items have value. Not engagement by itself. Engagement is the result of objectives. And that's what's missing in the PARTS method. I do prefer the POST method (Players/ Objectives/ Strategy/ Technology) that starts with people involved and finishes with Tech that would generate the user experience that would help achieve the objectives.

[Francois Gossieaux]

Thank you all for the great feedback and the good add-on questions. Here is my take on some of those questions:

@Bud - I believe that the content requirements depend on the types of communities. In a customer support community I am expecting serious and accurate content, where in a sports community I might enjoy more goofy stuff. What most people don't realize is that the content from the users will usually not provide sufficient value to the other members. It is therefore important to understand that the key to success for most communities will be a mix of user generated content and professional content.

@Bryan - exactly. It was amazing to see how many companies had huge expectations from their communities but then only had a part time person dedicated to it.

@Paul - I believe that the dynamics of small communities are very different from that of large communities. If you have a 300 people community and only 1% participates actively and 10% somewhat and the rest are lurkers (which is typical for large communities) that community will soon look like a soapbox for the minority who contributes. In small communities the importance of moderation and outside content becomes even bigger than in big communities. That is why I am always a little skeptical about small pilot programs.

An opportunity for small business is to go and see if they can get a community of likeminded people going on existing large social networks. I personally started a Marketing 2.0 on Facebook, which has unfortunately been overtaken by spammers, which grew to more than 10,000 members. There is little I could have done outside of Facebook that would have attracted that size community.

As for the future of communities - I see consolidation happen in the future. How many communities can you belong to? Bank of America, Intuit, Microsoft, HP, Staples all have small business communities. At some point some small business community will emerge where most small business owners will hang out, and all the companies who want access to those members will have to negotiate the terms of engagement with the community organizers.

Platforms are important. One of the most important parts of a platform is how they deal with member profiles. The reason for that is because member profiles can be used to filter what content gets presented and which other users get recommended to the member. And the easier you make it for members to find what has value to them, the higher the value to them and the more friends they will tell. Other elements are important as well, but only as they relate to your business goals. I have seen communities cluttered with stuff that had nothing to do with what the members were there for - and that is just bad.

@Romain - I agree with you. The best way to measure the impact of communities is by measuring it the same way you would measure any other program in support of that business process. You can take that further and make sure that the stakeholders that benefit from the community also become those who funded. That will force the community group to report back on results that the business units understand.

[Toby]

Adding my congrats! great insights on a side of the smm business that has not had a lot of coverage. I would be interested to know if the study looked at closed and open communities;and if so, were there differences in engagement? ie. .. Were people in a closed community more open and willing to share experiences? Also did the enterprises interact with community members and if so what was the impact?

[Andrew Finkle]

I never thought of this as "Tribalism" (though I guess it is no different) - I just believe the web has been (and will continue to) going more and more vertical in focus.

This is a result of "like interests", The manner in which websites are found on Google, and the higher value to advertisers in being able to target their specific markets.

www.twitter.com/A_F

[Jon Bishop]

I must say Francois, your analysis of your findings is very interesting and a breath of fresh air to those better trying to understand how communities become successful.

"As for the future of communities - I see consolidation happen in the future." - Francois

I definitely believe that it will be in everyone's interest to have an online presence that fills the role of customer service, sales, product innovation etc .... but the consolidation (and separation) of these communities and services will be key to the individual companies success. I'm interested to see what communities will form that might govern one particular service across multiple businesses. I think http://getsatisfaction.com/ is a great early example of this.

[dominic]

Great interview, thanks.

I'm wondering however, why enterprises should "build" community and not just participate as a business/enterprise in existing communities.

You've natural, bottom up, people built communities around almost any topic, from "greenhouse gas" to "personal finance", from "football fans" to "skin care consumers".

Communities even pop up around brand and products (ipod users, walmart ..) without any business igniting them.

Why don't businesses just tap into this huge asset, get insights about what consumer are looking for, feedbacks on their products and brands, and interact with these communities as a group.

By this I mean: with a measurable objective (expose xx people to a solution that our business provides, grow our influence over this specific target), and as a team (leveraging each and every participation and learning of their employees).

We're currently doing this as a small team and we measure our influence by the number of reference bloggers (we've id 800 of them), that any member of the team can reach directly in either Facebook or LinkedIn.

[Francois Gossieaux]

@Toby - we did interview both open and closed communities, although a majority were open communities. We did not measure the difference in engagement between the two categories. Anecdotally, I can say that some closed communities had higher engagement because they had a more rigorous process before allowing people in. We also saw many smaller closed communities that had higher engagement because they had much more activities and intense moderation - not because they were closed.

@Andrew - social media as a massive platform of participation unleashes the latent nature of humans - hanging out with like-minded and complementary groups of people.

@jon - I agree...not sure how the aggregation will happen but could take on multiple forms.

@dominic - I agree with you as well. Tivo was a great example of that, and there are some thriving communities on Facebook and elsewhere. Companies should first look at where the people they want to engage with hang out - and if there is a strong hangout already, don't try to have to move to your turf, play on their turf.

[diane davidson]

Great interview and post. A couple thoughts:

The measurements/metrics challenge continues to drive many of us. Using similar or equivalent measurements that you use in your business processes is a great observation. A lot of this ties to the maturity of the community. Measurments may begin as visits, return visits, members, time between visits but as the community matures, tying to traditional support, marketing, product innovation, etc. metrics feels right to me. Good observation.

Distributed funding - great idea. A healthy community serves many corporate functions. You need moderators with a variety of core competencies from accross your company; the results benefit each group; the distributed funding ensures buyin (yes, it's a pun) from all participatig groups. Share the cost, share the work, share the benefits! It's still a team effort.

I work at Cisco and the iPrize example is pretty cool. We had contestants who never met each other and worked virtually together on their entries.

CMO to CCO - hmmm - have to ponder that. Yes, I hear more lifecycle conversations. Yes, we are all trying to build customer loyalty but I'm not ready to make the leap that our CMO is becomming the CCO. I do believe that the Marketing organization is the best overall leader of the community effort. Of course it can be quite challenging when trying to make sure that your moderators do NOT do 'marketing speak'. For that very reason many would argue that the Customer Advocacy organization is the best overall leader.

I take slight issue with the technology platform comment - only slight. Technology is indeed NOT the deciding factor and communities are not a technology play. Understanding your corporation, and specifically your IT organization, its rules, controls, biases, funding, workload, is essential to your success. No matter what solution you pick - an integrated platform, off the shelf components, build your own, SaaS or enterprise model - you will eventually work with your IT organization. Knowing them and how they think and work is a leading 'critical success factor'.

The Sunday NYTimes mag did a great article on digital intimacy last weekend. The tribalization notion fits perfectly in this. With our individual digital universes, we are looking for ways to connect with like minded folks. The incredible explosion of groups on LinkedIn and Facebook demonstrate this. We still like to surround ourselves with people who have similar passions, perspectives, and values as we have - just human nature, whether by virtual tribe or physical tribe. Gotta love it.

So great interview with lots of good ideas to probe.

[Connie Bensen]

The focus on technology is misplaced in my opinion. I've experienced so many successful communities built on simple technology. It's the people and the motivation that surrounds their interactions that is important.

I like the study because it pointed to all of the additional important factors around community beyond the technology. There is more to it than providing a space for people. I think this will become more apparent as time goes by.

[Patrick Duncan]

I find it somewhat weird that these discussions about communities for businesses are very tacked on structures to the current systems. Seems to miss the point to me.

[shel israel]

Patrick,

Not sure I understand. What point is being missed?

[Heath Row]

I appreciated Francois's remark about companies confusing collaboration projects with community. It's a fine line that's sometimes worth straddling in order to gain further clarity on each side of the line. Communities are able to exist in ways that aren't necessarily purpose-driven (proximity, affinity, etc.), while collaboration projects always rely on that shared end goal.