Tribalization of Business - an interview with O’Reilly’s Joshua-Michele Ross.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in NY I had the privilege to speak with Josh Ross from O’Reilly about the Tribalization of Business Study. The interview is up on O’Reilly Radar.

You can also see the full interview in three parts here, here and here.

Let me know your thoughts - especially as we are in the midst of updating the study which is done in partnership with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research.

Lessons from the Obama campaign - traditional marketing vs. cause marketing.

Marshall Ganz is the person who designed organizational systems for the Barack Obama campaign. In listening to him on NPR’s On the Media about how they motivated and coached Obama volunteers to promote their candidate and recruit other volunteers, I was struck by the following passage:

What we helped them understand is that the first thing they need to learn is how to articulate their own story, in other words, what is it that moved them to become involved and engaged, because it’s from their own story that they’re going to be able to most effectively engage others. So when people leave, they leave equipped to do that. That’s sort of the foundational piece.

And in the initial series in California, we launched 200 teams in two weekends that, with the support of four staff people, built that operation out there to the point where it could make 100,000 phone calls a day. This is like an investment in civic assets, in local communities that no political campaign has done for years.

The right benefited from being rooted in social movements, which do this because that’s what social movements do. They translate values into action; they bring people in to work together. But on the progressive side, everybody had become marketeers. Everybody’d been marketing their cause or marketing their candidates as if it was another bar of soap, transforming people from citizens into customers.

What we did was bring the citizenship back in and put the people back in charge, and then put the tools in their hands.

For me the biggest difference is not to bring the citizenship back, it’s about realizing that the power of personal stories - what motivated you to buy into this cause - is much stronger than that of talking points about the cause.

The same is true for brands, products and services. Let people tell their own narrative about why they like it instead of trying to get them to sing from the same song sheet with canned corporate speak.

Social media IS counter cyclical - so engage NOW!.

When economic times turn bad and unemployment is on the rise, people tend to network more. In this social media-enabled era that means that many increasingly turn to online social networks and communities.

So the counter-intuitive thing to do in this economic downturn - engage more aggressively with your customers, prospects and detractors in social media and social networks.

And when you do, remember that the most important behavioral attribute is not transparency, but empathy and reciprocity.

What do you think? Are you using LinkedIn or Facebookmore often? Would you network more heavily on Twitter or in other communities right now?

Social network-based relationships are not shallow - they are stronger.

Many people my age dismiss social networks and the friendships people have on those networks as a waste of time and shallow. I think that they totally missing the point - and creating another class of ludites that will be laughed at in a few decades.

Let’s take three common scenarios and analyze whether those relationships are indeed shallow or not.

If my 13 year old son has friends on Facebook or some other social network, and he uses those networks to continue interacting with his friends after school, or when then move on to high school - are those shallow relationships? Of course not, it enables him to extend his interactions with class mates beyond school hours, stay in touch with people who change school, or extend his relationship with weekend-only friends or summer camp friends to everyday relationships. It makes his relationships stronger - not weaker or more shallow than the friendships I grew up with.

Now let’s look at people who I know professionally and befriend of Facebook. I get to know people from a totally different angle than I would have ever gotten to know them from our professional interactions. Through social networks I will get a better sense of their hobbies, their music taste, their reading preferences, or even their family struggles - strengthening that relationship beyond the weak ties that professional relationships typically lead to.

Ok, so how about those people you accept as friends on Facebook or Myspace that you do not really know. In my case I am a blogger and I have an audience. Whenever someone befriends me on Facebook and we have more than 10 friends in common I will friend them back. I look at it as an audience - and through social networking I actually strengthen the relationship I have with my audience. The same can be said for bands on Myspace - they can create relationships with their fans that is much stronger than we ever had with the bands we liked.

Now I will not befriend someone who I do not know on LinkedIn. Why? Because on LinkedIn the reciprocity that makes that network work is based on social capital I have with others instead of just myself. For LinkedIn to work I need to try to get you some time with someone else I know, not just give you my time as is the case with Facebook and some other networks.

So all in all I think that a majority of online social networkers benefit from stronger relationships with people they interact with online, not weaker or shallower relationships. Social networking adds a dimension to most relationships that was previously not there.

Sure, there are outliers out there who do not benefit from stronger relationships by being online - and a ton of them who are wasting their time and your time - but those are outliers. They actually exist in the physicall world as well.

More than 60% of companies are not ready to engage in social media.

This morning a friend of mine forwarded me an email from one of the many companies which are encouraging their customers and prospects to start monitoring their employee’s web usage.

That drove me to do a little research on how many companies are already monitoring their employees’ email and web usage. Depending on which survey you look at, it looks like between 60% and 75%+ of companies are actually tracking employees’ web usage (some are capturing every single keystroke) - with about 50% of companies firing employees for email and ‘net abuse.

That means that at least 60% of companies are not ready to have their employees engage in social media. If you cannot trust your employees to do the right surfing, then how can you trust them to engage in social media on your behalf?

I understand that there are inherent legal issues related to employees visiting inappropriate sites. What I don’t understand is how this is somehow different from an employee bringing in, and leaving on his desk, an inappropriate magazine. Now companies didn’t develop policies to search people’s bags upon entering the company in the morning. So why do they think that they should monitor people’s keystrokes? How is this somehow different?

If you “spy” on your employees, even if you are transparent about it, you will create a culture of distrust and anti-loyalty - not to mention all the other bad behaviors that come with big brother spying. The difference between a company spying on its employees and a country spying on its citizen are not all the different - and there are some gruesome lessons to be learned from the latter.

So again - if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries - they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.

If this is your company culture, you risk to forever miss the boat when one of your competitors which trusts their employees to do the right things and not be stupid will find a way to humanize their company by having their employees engage in conversations with their customers and prospects.

Scaling social media programs.

A number of people have picked up on the scalability issue of social media programs which I mentioned a while back. Some questioned the need for super large communities, while others wondered about the viability of those communities.

Let me take a few minutes to expand on my views around scalability - as I think this is a very important topic.

Scalability does not necessarily mean having large number of people in your community, or a super large number of bloggers in a social media outreach program. Having programs with the right scale means that they impact your business in significant and measurable ways. Sometimes you can achieve that with small crowds, sometimes not.

Take an influencer program in customer support for example. Comcast can do with 5-10 people on twitter what thousands of people in the call center cannot. Or take a new product innovation initiative. You can get significant customer insights with communities that range in the few hundreds. Of course I would argue that you would get better results with larger communities if you have thousands of customers, but the point is that you can do it. And then there are also those cases where you will need hundreds of thousands or millions of people in order to move the needle - especially in communities which are focused on increasing word-of-mouth, those that are meant for customer support, and even in certain developer communities.

The issue with scalability is not a people issue - it is one of business results. You want to make sure that the results you are getting are going to make a significant impact on your business. If you have 600,000,000 people visiting your stores every year and you try a social media program that will increase that traffic through word of mouth - having a target of a 0.1% increase in traffic means getting 600,000 additional visits. You won’t get that with a community of 10,000 people. Now if that same company is trying to get feedback on how to improve the store experience so that customers stay longer and buy more, they could do that with 10,000 people.

Again, scalability is not a people issue - it’s a business impact issue.

The issues with determining “influence”.

Most social media “listening” systems have a way to evaluate the influence of the various sources in your social media ecosystem. They do that by looking at a variety of factors, such as number of incoming links, number of comments, number of unique commenters, Google Pagerank, etc.

The problem I have with these systems is that an influential person for one company may not be so influential for another. For example, a blogger could score really high on all the above metrics yet only influence other social media pundits. That might be a good influencer for one company, but not for a company who is trying to influence traditional press people or a business audience. They would need a blogger who appeals mostly to those audiences.

Does that mean that the only way to determine influence is to look at those influencers manually?

This is a great way to piss off prospects… [Amended].

I’ve decided to take this post down. It was posted in good fun and I’m glad it provided amusement for most all but, upon reflection and a related conversation or two have decided to take it down. I’ve no desire to cause personal pain and as I hope you know do not make a practice of taking posts down.

My belated New Years wishes to all of you!.

Between trying to take time off, volunteering as a mountain guide/ambassador at my favorite East Coast ski resort (which is a fascinating f2f community experiment - I will write about it later) and now struggling with flu, I totally neglected my blog.

I apologize for that and wish you all a prosperous and healthy New Year.

As many others, I developed some social media marketing predictions and directions for the new year. I did so by affiliating with other marketers to provide you with higher value if you are looking for direction and meaningful advice. As soon as those pieces get published I will link them from this blog.

For me, 2009 will likely be a year full of energy - not all that different from the last 10+ years when I sort of became a permanent startup junkie. Between scaling our new business, Beeline Labs, potentially writing a book around the Tribalization of Business Studies, continuing to be permanent student/experimenter of our industry, and achieving a variety of personal and family goals, I expect to have a full plate this year.

Happy New Year!

Our next CMO 2.0 Conversation - a conversation with Kodak’s CMO Jeff Hayzlett.

As part of our ongoing CMO 2.0 Conversation series that we are hosting in the Marketing 2.0 Community, we will have our next one this coming Monday from 2-3pm ET with Kodak’s CMO Jeff Hayzlett.

Jeff is pretty active in the social media marketing space, both as an individual and as a marketing leader - which should make for another interesting conversation.

We hope you can join us for this event. The format will be similar to other CMO 2.0 Conversations - I will first have a 10-15 minute conversation with Jeff after which you can join in and ask questions directly from Jeff.

To attend, please register here (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/253084364)