Global Neighbourhoods

Cluetrain, Naked Conversations & Groundswell

--3 Points in a Revolutionary Bitstream


[Charlene Li (l) with Shirley Owyang at Silicon Valley Party. Photo by Shel]

David Weinberger, Charlene LI and I were keynoters at Community 2.0 . It's a bit daunting to follow those two but I think I was pretty well-received anyway. At the break, we were asked to sign books and we were pretty much surprised by a long line that waited patiently to have us sign our works. For any author I've talked with it is always a kick to sign a book, but to do it with David and Charlene made me feel pretty proud.

Someone in the line said, "Wow, the authors of the three seminal social media books in one place at one time." It was a comment that resonated with me. At first I wanted to discount it as overly flattering, But after a few days, I've come to think:

• Cluetrain ignited the fire that caused the revolution. People did not just want to be message targets. They wanted to talk back. We who followed Cluetrain were the insurectionaries generally ignored by the keepers of corporate power.
• Naked Conversations, written in 2005, gave a compelling case for why businesses should use social media. It's followers took the revolution inside the enterprise walls, where small bands of zealots have been spreading the word often with mixed results and great frustration.
• Groundswell presents an understanding of the processes that will normalize social media, taking it to the point beyond conflict and controversy. It is the least revolutionary in tone, but just might be the book that finished the coup the Cluetrain started and Naked spread.

I never quite saw this so clearly until someone made that comment and I feel good about it. I hope sometime the three of us get to speak again, perhaps on the dais at the same time.

Jeremiah posts his 1st Forrester Report

Jeremiah Owyang has published his first report as the new Forrester senior muckymuck on social media and he has posted brief excerpts on his blog.

This is the one covering communities, and regular readers of this blog may recall, I had some trepidation on what he would say, based n some of the questions he was asking. From the excerpt it appears that I should have feared not:

"First of all, many companies have a hard time being successful with their community if they want to control it too tight. The most successful companies let go of the control and acted more like a host, rather than a policeman.   Secondly, many companies had a hard time kick-starting a community, just because you build it, doesn't mean they'll come."

Heh. It seems to me his diligent research that included interviewing 17 companies came to similar findings that some of us who just sit here and wing it, have been telling you all along.

Good to see, Jeremiah. Good to see.

Communities: Doing it wrong & Doing it right

Over on Jive Talk, Sam Lawrence, a Twitter pal, picks up the community conversations with a good piece on how Xerox's new community becomes an instant example of how to get it wrong. He writes:

"Many of those companies marginalize the effort as some sort of "feel good" check-box they know they need but aren't sure why. Worse case, they really just want another place to Market their stuff. In these situations, the initiative is never connected to their business strategy or seen as core."

But he also points to a company that gets it right, one whose users are loyal to their product and help the company improve it. "These community managers (and their bossess bosses boss) can learn a little from our beefy friends at Orange County Chopper," then gives readers five things to learn from the motorcycle company, ll of which would apply for companies even as conservative as, well, Xerox.

Nice piece.

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.