The Long Tail of Community
Many businesses outside the Internet-focused world are scoffing at social networking and online community development. They’re calling Facebook and Twitter and social media applications a waste. Some companies are forcing their community teams to demonstrate a ROI for their efforts, while others are miscasting community as either marketing or business development. When shifts come along in culture, in the way things are done, they aren’t obvious.
The Marketplace is Shifting
Gone are the days of simple demographics and targets. There are rough edges to all this, but there are too many outlying statistics, too much “noise” that can no longer be just deleted from the graphs. People are choosing to spend money and commit their time along lines of preference, trust, and perceived value in ways different than what companies might normally have predicted. We aren’t buying something because we saw an ad. At least not right away. I believe the ad now moves us into a conversation mode that wasn’t there in the past. As companies seek to find a way into that conversation, they need to tread carefully.
Cluetrain is Alive
The Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999(*updated twice: thanks, Dan York!), and probably the first thing anyone remembers from the book without doing much recalling is “Markets are conversations.” It’s the first of the 95 Theses. I recognize that this book has been widely accepted by the Internet circle for a while. When I’m at Gnomedex tomorrow, if I say, “Hey! The Cluetrain Manifesto is NOW!,” people are going to laugh and wonder if this is Scoble’s secret Facebook prank.
But I believe that NOW, more so than the first wave of the Net, the notion that markets are conversations, that social sculptures and networked people are better able to represent products than the paid representation. I think that everything being done in the name of community (at least the online type with evangelist roles and manager roles, or whatever you want to call us) is the embodiment of this premise.
But We’re Probably Doing it Wrong
First off, the premise that companies can hire someone to make their product more loved by a group of people is kind of silly. It’s somewhere between the promise of advertising and the Kool-Aid of social media.
Instead, I think this: I think that the BEST use of assets on a community manager/evangelist/developer is to have a way to EQUIP the lovers of your product and service to do great things with them. Go out and scour the landscape for the users of your software, the consumers of your media, the appreciators of your favorite flavor of chip, and MAKE IT REALLY COOL and easy to share your love for X,Y,Z product.
How much money was spent hyping the Transformers movie? I saw the side of Optimus Prime’s head EVERYWHERE. You mean to tell me that it wouldn’t have cost less to let people mash up their own commercials, or interview people who grew up with the Transformers, or whatever. Just something OTHER than your typical promotions?
Why not make the role of community types to go out and find the community, equip it to do cool things, and expand your universe that way?
It’s Who You Know
This is more true than ever. But in a stranger way. We need to manage and nurture our networks and relationships because jobs aren’t sticky any more. We’re not working 10 years in the same place. Two or three seems good. And you never know where the next business opportunity will land. Make colleagues and partners everywhere. Build potential networks all the time, to be helpful, to know the pulse of things, to better understand where it’s going.
Traditional hierarchies in companies are fading. People have learned to move laterally instead of up, out and over instead of within the same walls. My next role, your role, most people’s role, will be with another organization, and very likely with a wholly different job function. Keep your networks close, and make those YOUR networks, not your company’s network. Share with them. But keep the keys.
It IS Business Development
Spreading the seeds of relationships and face-to-face interaction are just like planting in a garden. You don’t eat the seeds; you nurture the plants and harvest the results. There is business inherent in community work. There is marketing insofar as we both agree that markets are conversations. There is a financial bottom line to all this effort, but it’s not the leading position. It’s not a quick return. It is not SEO and SEM. It’s messy, slow, and unpredictable. And yet, I maintain that it’s a core aspect of a growth engine for future development of most organizations.
My Amanda Chapel / Andrew Keen “I’m Not Just Singing Kumbaya” Card
I want to further state that there is a place for professionals, that marketing isn’t dead, and that brevity and clarity are arts that require relentless pursuit and application. I don’t think friendly conversations sell everything. I don’t think blogging replaces journalism. I think it’s much more messy than that. There’s how things are probably “supposed to work” and how things will likely work.
I believe community developers will be another player in the landscape, alongside and around these other roles. I think that professional marketers, professional salespeople, and professional editors of content will have jobs in perpetuity, but that perhaps the percentage of spend on these shifts. Is that not likely? How important are steam engineers, until New York City has a steam pipe explosion? How many telegraph repair people are there?
Your Community, Your Way
We’re in a world of self-identification. We move where the action is. As Eric Rice says often, it’s not about the platform. I’m over here with my friends. Community is at once a stored value pool waiting to spend intelligently on products and services that they find valuable, as well as a scattering and reorganizing arrangement of somewhat fickle consumers, seeking what’s hot, what’s useful, what’s interesting, and what has everyone’s attention.
As a community developer seeking to build relationships with a scattered and loosely joined “Internet video” community, not to mention my role in the new media / social media community, and the other places where I claim a stake, this is a crazy and potential-filled time. How will we seek to derive value from our communities, both as members and as potential guides? What services and offerings will be worth exchanging money? When will relationship currency be transformed for companies into bottom-line revenue? I can’t answer for Wall Street. I’m still working on this.
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Comments
hello chrisbrogan! i learned about community development for the first time from you. it is the most useful concept i have ever found on the web. useful means which i can implement in my profession at my place. thanks a lot for that. Of course, some times i find it little bit difficult to understand you. no, i am not complaining. i am telling you this because i have started looking at you as my teacher. teacher who makes you think and work on it.
thanks for visiting my blog.
thanks for twittering about this post. i have started looking for your tiny url to visit. thanks!
The funny thing is that I don’t know that the market has changed, only where the market is. I’ve done some research on fund raising, and what people have noticed is that people give to the causes that their friends are involved in. I suspect that purchases are similarly influenced. How many tweets have said “I’m going to movie X have you seen it”?
The thing that I think is derailing people is that some people don’t seem to grasp that communities created in virtual environments are as real and influential, and in some ways more real and influential as those created at workplaces and neighborhoods.
For those who have adapted to the new environment it is obvious that those I twitter with and facebook with and blog with know more about me than possibly the hypothetical guy in the next cube. Because our environment is conversational we talk about more as who we are is defined by how we project ourselves.
I think the social networks may be more influential because of:
1) the amount of dialog/discussion (or conversations to use the parlance of the cluetrain manifesto)
2) the ability to connect on interest - down to very specific interests.
3) The global nature. My network covers the nation and so the impact goes beyond a small circle. The connections may be looser but there are so many more.
You’re being honest, Chris - to the point of endangering your cachet with the Bloggerati.
Keep asking the right questions. I’ve got a few of them hitting tomorrow.
I wonder how closely Neville Hobson’s conversation at Podcamp Ireland will follow your conclusions here. We’re asking Neville to explain the way the FIR Community sustains its energy and much of what you say would be solid reasons for the growth and development of a business communicator’s community.
I’m going to have to read the Cluetrain Manifesto now. But despite my ignorance, I get your message.
This is an amazing post.
I had lunch with an amazing guy yesterday, Doug Taylor, from Podcast People. We spoke about many things, but the personal interaction, the “I’m here in the moment and interested in finding out about you, how I can help You today and in the future” rather than “What can I get from you?” makes all the difference in the conversation.
This is part of the shift that’s happening, I think- a bit of a rebellion against rapacious capitalism, and more thinking about planting seeds for long term, not just quarterly results. It’s hard to think long term when you’re worried about tommorrow, but if you can”t keep an eye on both, all you have is short term results and nothing in the end.
Whitney says it well with “rebellion against rapacious capitalism.” For myself, I love that I can have a network of people that I know personally, with whom there is no expectation of business or profit or sales. I like that they don’t see me as just a potential customer, with a big bull’s-eye on my photo. I like people that aren’t constantly “on message”, that aren’t relentlessly professional, that are themselves not an employee of a company.
This is the same reason I avoid Walmart whenever possible, that I take my car repair business to a local guy that actually knows my name, and my liquor purchases to a guy that’s a member of my golf club. I think people are very weary of being analyzed, polled, and manipulated like they were just so many cattle. They are hungry for and very welcoming of being treated as a potential friend as opposed to a potential mark.
JoeC said:
“I think people are very weary of being analyzed, polled, and manipulated like they were just so many cattle.”
Amen, brother.
Community developers and marketers alike would do well to bear this in mind.
-Jon G.
Funny how “conservative” values, like keeping our conversations / problems / business transactions “in the family,” marry so easily with “liberal” ideals like open communication, transparency and anticapitalism.
We’re a complex bunch, we social media types…
I think (and have found) that internet communities are far to internecine to be a large revenue source as yet.
People involved with social media think ‘wow this is huge’. Well, in terms of the number of people we communicate with bi-directionally, yes they are huge. But in terms of the mono-directional media like advertising, social media are very small.
Then you add that issue that people involved with social media are leaders more than sheep. The media is so young that the sheep are only just joining. Hey - you guys are so well clude in that some of you realised the iPhone was a pointless waist of money! People who can THINK are not what advertisers want.
Where the real money (bottom line) of social media lives is that, done properly, you might just be able to reach a few high value individuals who are very resistant to main stream advertising. This is very interesting.
It is not a replacement for normal marketing it is an addition. Those people who aggressively do not follow fashion. Not because they are unfashionable, but because they hate being told what to do. This is where I think social media can really boost bottom lines.
AJ
Chris, Great post… but one little detail - the Cluetrain Manifesto was published online (http://www.cluetrain.net/ )back in early *1999*. It came out in “treeware” form in 2001, but it was already causing a stir out in Internet-land. In fact, one of the reasons I moved to Ottawa in 2000 to join a startup which led down the path to where I am now was because the folks at that startup (”e-smith”) were very interested in direct engagement with customers and creating conversations. The marketing director had lactually eft Macleans magazine where he was an editor to work for the startup precisely because he had read Cluetrain and wanted to try out some of the principles in a startup. So it was making waves even then before it appeared in printed form.
I do agree with you, though, that it took a while for the conversations to really start happening in a massive way. In, I think, 2003, I vividly recall a series of conversations with a marketing director I knew who, after reading the whole book, still didn’t buy it. “Show me the conversations about my product?” she said. I couldn’t then, but can today. The newer tools we use in social media - blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. - and also the more “traditional” tools of web forums have enabled those conversations to occur in ways that weren’t as easy before. Today I would definitely argue that Cluetrain is here, now, and happening all around us.
Anyway, thanks for the great post and the cautionary words as well.
Chris, it turns out that you and I were both wrong on the first publication date of Cluetrain as a book. I found a mention of the book in my first blog entry in May 2000 and after finding my copy on my bookshelf discovered that the *first* printing was actually in December 1999. This also lines up with the copyright shown on http://www.cluetrain.com/book/ - I assume the 2001 date (which is also what Amazon currently shows) must be for a second edition.
I think the problem that non-online-centric businesses have is a lack of understanding, and people tend to fear what they don’t understand. Communication professionals have spent decades honing their media and public relations skills, and now there’s a whole new facet of “new media” that they likely feel intimidated by because they don’t know it inside-out like they do other forms of media.
What it comes down to, though, is that there’s an ADDITIONAL facet to the realm of communication, and any serious professional needs to understand this new media facet as well as the more conventional forms if they are going to be effective communicators. I’ve tried quelling Strumpette-style backlash against this facet, but to no avail as of yet: http://gypsybandito.com/front-page-20/
I think “the premise that companies can hire someone to make their product more loved by a group of people” actually worked fine in the “olden days” when the only form of communication was radio, the new invention called the television, and any kind of billboard ad. It worked well then because people at that time mostly communicated within their neighborhoods and possibly at the workplace, which wasn’t far from their neighborhood, and most likely everyone agreed on a particular way of life. It was The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” era. But you’re right that today it is silly to follow that premise because communities are no longer defined by your neighborhood and workplace. Technology has widen the definition and now it is associated more with reaching out i.e. social networks. I think Facebook is a prime example of this just in it’s platform (compared to Myspace) as it use networks to show how we are reaching out. I have friends in Canada, Scotland, Pakistan, all over. This is my community. Can they honestly feel that we all agree on liking everything the same. NO. So you need to start looking inside the community and finding out who likes what and letting them reach out to their “network buddies” as if they are campaigning for the product, the idea, or possibly a solution. I honestly do feel that if you try to use the concept “make their product more loved by a group of people”, today you will turn away even the person who may be able to use what you have to offer. Because now people are starting to interact in a way that requires the connection of these new networks. If I buy an iPhone, is it really a cool device to use because of it’s cool capabilities or is it more because I know that I have friends who use it as well and can share in the experience of those capabilities. In some cases those capabilities can only be used by sharing.
Just my thoughts
Great post, great point. You said what I’ve been thinking for a long time. You just said it way better than I ever could have.
[…] abreast of the conversations and the needs of different sets of people. That makes me more of a communities manager. Is this the natural evolution of the brand manager. Wait, that’s not all, I also have a […]
You twittered that you might get beat up for it, but I’m on board Chris - and I’m not a very good groupie so that’s saying something.
I’m nurturing relationships for the conversations they make possible; for the ideas and the sparks. I’m interacting because these ideas turn into other ideas and help my clients down the road.
Thanks for giving me ways to connect with some fine people and do what I’m doing today.