Here’s the catch. Duncan Watts is an academic, a sociologist. Neither he nor I should ever come into contact with each other according to his theories. Yet I am now connected to him, albeit in an ancillary way, yet connected enough to have read his Fast Company article and his book Six Degree’s.
How is this possible? It turns out that Duncan Watts, in order to reach a greater audience, got published in an online magazine that is trusted and highly connected to the technology world. This in turn got him noticed by Guy Kawasaki. It turns out that Guy is also a trusted source of original content and he is highly connected to people via his blog. He is the very definition of an Influencer or to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology he is a connector.
Sure these connections are not strong ties as in a familial tie, but weak ties (the topic for another blog post). Enough of a connection exists that someone living in north eastern Wisconsin (virtually the middle of no where, serious it just down the road) is connected via a connector in California, to a Academic at a college in New York.
This very connection seems to imply that something may not be entirely correct about the interpretation of Duncan Watts’ work.
It’s interesting how a passing thought becomes a blog post. John Tropea microblogs about the 90-9-1 rule, which leads me to the idea of participation inequality, which in turn makes me remember Jason Calacanis blogging about creatives, contributors, and consumers. This finally leads to this post.
In a nutshell participation inequality, or the 1% rule, basically states that 1% of your community members will create the content, 9% are moderate producers, and a whopping 90% are lurkers. I don’t see a problem with this when building communities, but the interesting question is, “Do you know who the 1% are?”
I have a customer with a very active message board based community. We measure the normal variables: New subscribers and posts per month. The problem with this is, it doesn’t identify our 1%.
It’s important to identify who are the creatives (1%), contributors (9%), consumers (90%). Track these and find out is the community growing. If your total creatives are growing, that is a good sign. The top 10% are the people you need to get to know and they are who you spend your time and effort. It’s likely that these people are the ones with some social capital to expend and with a little care and feeding will do so for your brand.
Measuring the health of your community is important. Getting the right mix of creatives, contributors, and consumers is important. Getting the contributors (1%) to work on behalf of your brand is the ultimate goal.
Today we have access to a river of data bombarding us from all angles. I used to send coworkers links via AIM or e-mail if I thought it was something that was useful for their job, a project we were working on, or if it was something I knew was of particular personal interest to that individual. That is fine but it’s a time consuming interruption for me and for them.
I decided to use some of the tools I have hanging around to streamline this flow of good information. The bulk of the links I wanted to share come in primarily via RSS feeds. Since I use Google Reader for all my feeds, and it has the ability to share posts, I thought this would be sufficient.
But it turns out that this solution isn’t ideal. Although I can share posts through my shared feeds url, I can’t tailor them for the different individuals I want to share with. Everything is rolled into this one feed and it’s up to them to sift through it. If you make it difficult it loses it’s value.
Instead, I decided to use del.icio.us because it gives me the ability to tag each item. So I tag an item with my company name if it would be of interest to the company or to an individual if I think it will be of interest to a specific person. Now all that has to happen is each person subscribes to the feed for the tags with their name and the one for the company and they get a highly tailored stream of interesting articles. The added bonus to this method is that if they ever want to revisit a link later, they can just go back to del.icio.us with their tag and find the link.
This is a good solution but a better solution, which I have yet to find, would enable me to add my friends list (like FaceBook), it would be my feed reader (like Google Reader), it would let me tag (like del.icio.us), but would add the ability for us to comment in a threaded way. If I only had the time this would be a great product to build. Basically it is what I was hoping Spokeo would morph into and with the latest changes they have made, who knows they might get there. Maybe Digg or Propeller are closer to this but nothing I have found is right on yet.
I work with a number of B2B companies and hear this a lot: “We don’t need social marketing, we only sell to businesses.” It might be true that you don’t sell direct to consumers, but a business doesn’t use your product, people do.
I am a man of many hats. By day I am a technologist, community marketing evangelist, interactive marketer. When I leave my day job I am a second year psychology student. How does this matter to the topic at hand? Well it turns out that we all have an innate need to belong to groups. We search out groups in which to belong. Being in a group is how we define ourselves. We need what is called an ingroup, “a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group.” It turns out that a brand tends to become an ingroup for us.
Certainly everyone knows of the Microsoft and Apple ingroups. In general, most of us fall into one of these two ingroups whether we have done so consciously or not. Being a member of an ingroup leads us to develop what is called an ingroup bias. Ingroup bias simply means that we favor our own group over another group. If you know of the Microsoft and Apple ingroup’s you certainly have seen how passionate members of each group can get.
By seeking out and fostering these natural ingroups that form around your brand you can develop a stronger ingroup bias. This causes the people actually using your products to recommend your brand more often to those making purchasing decisions. The more often your brand is recommend the more likely a business is to purchase.
B2B companies may not sell directly to consumers, but consumers are the one using, and more importantly recommending, your products. Using social media to strengthen your brand affinity is a fantastic way for a B2B company to market their products.
While Google and Microsoft prepare quotes to purchase Digg (finally), AOL squandered their social news site Netscape .. er .. Propeller. Yet, while AOL shows us that they have such fine acumen for anything but running an internet business, Yahoo! would rather have AOL kill them off than Microsoft absorb them. I am no Microsoft fan, though recent internet offerings and courting of more open projects have taken the edge off, but courting a company that so lacks the ability to compete online seems just crazy. I guess I need to get an MBA so stupid decisions will suddenly make perfect business sense to me. Who knows, it might help me understand GM’s rebuilding strategy of producing fewer cars that no one wants to buy?
I love these short video’s. This is a great way introduce clients to the possibilities of new applications in a clear plain way that a non-techie can understand.
This may or may not be a viral campaign by Starbucks. If it isn’t, shame on them for not figuring it out first. If it is, fantastic job. This video is funny, well done, and most of all - the Starbucks logo is in front of the camera the whole time.
By now everyone has some issue or another with Facebook. I think applications are great but Facebook is killing me with kindness. But this isn’t my big issue, or really issues since I have two that I just can’t get over.
First, we need levels of friendship. Some people I am acquainted with others I am friends with. Acquaintances want to follow me and sometimes I want to follow them. But friends I want to keep in touch with much better than an acquaintance. Give me a variety to choose from and allow me to tweak how much I want to follow the person.
Second, search. Didn’t we figure this out in the 90’s? If I search for George Jetson I don’t want to wade through a list of George Jone’s. I want search to be relevant not filled with irrelevant people.
I guess I have these issues with nearly every social network. Why does simple stuff like this seem so obvious, yet so ignored?
I found this via Web Strategy by Jeremiah. This is the best in depth look at utilizing community in a large company I have seen. This presentation details how much work it is to cut through the artificial barriers companies put up that hinder progress and growth.
