While early research shows that fundamental social behavior does not change as Hyper-Sociality scales, there are fundamental differences between our Human 1.0 ancestors, who roamed the earth for tens of thousands of years, and our Human 1.0 contemporaries, who inhabit our Web 2.0 world. For one thing, our ancient tribes were limited by geography, and we usually belonged to only one tribe. Now we can belong to tribes that span the globe, and we typically belong to multiple tribes at the same time.
As Rob Kozinets, marketing professor at York University and one of the editors of Consumer Tribes,1 said in a recent interview we conducted with him: “Today’s tribes have looser affiliations and are more hedonistic in nature than ancient tribes. They are nomadic by interest, rather than geography, and centered around expertise and commercial culture.”2
Let’s take a closer look at some of the differences between the Human 1.0 in today’s world and in the ancient world, and what that means for Hyper-Social organizations.
Humans form tribes because they have evolved to gain advantages as tribes, not just as individuals. We developed a symbiotic relationship between individual biological evolution and culture as a way to bypass what would have taken us too long to achieve through natural evolution. This whole yin and yang relationship between individual natural evolution and culture is best described by evolutionary biologists Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, who write:
Culture is information that people acquire from others by teaching, imitation and other forms of social learning. On a scale unknown in any other species, people acquire skills, beliefs, and values from the people around them, and these strongly affect behavior. People are heirs to a pool of socially transmitted information that affects how they make a living, how they communicate, and what they think is right and wrong. The information thus stored and transmitted varies from individual to individual and is a property of the population only in a statistical sense.3
In a Web 2.0 world, social media allows modern tribes to form in an instant, and because we are driven to be tribal and to learn from our tribes, tribes appear around almost any topic your imagination can conjure up—Belgian American fly-fishing enthusiasts who love beer and work for Cisco, passionate scrapbookers who use Fiskars tools, or passionate private BitTorrent communities interested in Asian action flicks and Manga. Combine that with the fact that we don’t seem to trust what organizations are telling us,4 and you have a new world order in business—one in which the most important conversations are no longer the ones that organizations have with their customers, prospects, and detractors, but the ones that happen among tribal members.
So how do business tribes form and coalesce, and how do you know that they have the right attributes and forces to support your efforts?
If you want to become a Hyper-Social organization and leverage the power of modern tribes as part of your business, you need to be able to identify the types of tribes that are most likely to benefit your organization. Failing to understand who your tribes are, where they hang out, and who their leaders are will result in misguided efforts that will have no measurable impact on your business—or worse, misguided efforts that will anger your potential tribes and their constituents.
Modern tribes almost never form around products, services, or companies; they form around shared passions (e.g., fan clubs), shared pains (e.g., cancer survivors), a shared sense of duty (e.g., police officers), or categories based on common traits (e.g., poor frugal moms). So the Harley community is not a vibrant community centered around a brand, as some would lead you to believe, but rather a community based on a common sense of belonging to a shared lifestyle—riding. Tribes are also different from market segments, which are centered around categories based on individual traits, mostly geographic, demographic, or psychographic (e.g., moms), rather than categories based on behavioral traits (e.g., frugal moms who love the art of the deal). We’ll touch more on segmentation vs. tribes in Chapter 6.
Another important distinction between communities and tribes can be found in how they deal with diversity. Understanding this distinction is key to determining the value that a community or tribe can bring to your business.
On the one hand, some communities and tribes are made up of people who share a common belief and simply prefer to hang out with other people who share that belief. We call these folks defenders of belief. They frown upon diversity and operate in an insular fashion. Business communities and consumer tribes that fall into that category can be found everywhere—think of the Apple zealots, who would not want to be caught anywhere near a PC owner; or the Ducati motorcycle riders, who certainly don’t want to be confused with Harley riders.
On the other hand, you have communities and tribes that embrace diversity—within certain limits. We call them seekers of the truth. They realize that the best ideas and solutions come from diverse groups of individuals, not from groups with a common sense of belief, since the latter often perpetuate an echo-chamber effect, or groupthink. Commercial communities and tribes in the seekers of the truth category include cross-industry professional affinity groups, like IBM’s global CIO community, and software developers, like the SAP community that we discussed in Chapter 1, where people are willing to help one another and share even with competitors in order to find the best solution in a timely manner.
Why is it so important that you understand this distinction? For starters, if you are looking for input into your product innovation process, a community full of defenders of belief would yield pretty poor results. If your goal is to involve customer tribes as part of designing new products, you need a community of people who are seekers of the truth, embrace diversity, and enjoy a good difference of opinion. The more diverse your community is, the better the products they will codesign with you. Some companies, like Intuit, will go so far as to embrace what many would consider extreme diversity, inviting not just their customers and prospects but also their detractors as part of the process.
Cisco’s 2008 I-Prize was a good example of the power that a diverse community can bring to new product development. Cisco likely did not even know that it would end up with a community. It launched the I-Prize looking for the next billion-dollar product line—sourced from the outside. People and teams would submit their ideas and business plans online, where they could vote and comment on one another’s plans—even though those comments and votes did not count toward moving a business plan to the next stage. That task was reserved for a review board made up of Cisco employees. To Cisco’s surprise, a true community started forming online. People would team up, and some would form posses to “out” other groups suspected of unfair voting practices (even though those votes did not count). By the time the business plans moved to the quarter-finals, half of the business teams had formed online. The jury is still out on whether the winner, a “smart power grid” solution, will indeed result in a new billion-dollar business for Cisco, but what is for sure is that if the pool of participants had been mostly defenders of belief, Cisco would not have received more than 1,000 new business ideas from 104 countries.
Note that diversity is not a steady state. People mostly prefer to associate with others who are like them. The scientific term for this phenomenon is homophily.5 Research has proven the existence of homophily in all kinds of environments, which leads to a natural tendency for groups to be homogeneous rather than diverse. Even if you work really hard to hire diverse individuals, you cannot avoid the outcome that people in groups will influence one another over time. It is a well-known phenomenon that a conservative justice on a three-judge panel where the other two are liberal will start voting more liberal, and vice versa. So unless you shake it up every now and again, what starts as a diverse group may easily end up as a pretty homogeneous group. Take in-house product development teams, which are still the largest source of new products. They suffer from groupthink big time! How do we know? Because many product development teams have a homogeneous makeup, and here are the results: 80 percent of new products fail.6 In Japan, that number is actually 97 percent.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to increase word of mouth through communities and tribes or to leverage the power of the crowd to help you with customer service, then having communities full of defenders of belief can work even better than those made up of seekers of the truth. Note how many such communities are using goods with powerful symbolic values—e.g., BMW owners, who consider themselves drivers of the ultimate driving machine. This brings us to the next topic, the role of symbols, signs, rules, and culture in making communities and tribes scale beyond the smaller groups that we used to associate with in ancient times.
As we saw in Chapter 1, reciprocity is one of the key factors that allow communities to work—you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. In small tribes and groups, reciprocity is often based on face-to-face interaction—helping someone move his stuff, and expecting him to return the favor later on. In modern tribes and communities, reciprocity can work on a much larger scale—think of people supporting the green movement in Iran by traveling to New York and demonstrating in front of the UN. Think about how, after 9/11, empathy from around the world was so strong that even the French all felt like Americans.
What is going on here, and how does reciprocity scale beyond face-to-face interaction?
In his book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, David Berreby7 says: “My fellow feeling for the people of New York does not depend on everyone of us taking turns doing each other’s dishes…. For a city or nation to exist, its members must be good at satisfying their need for reciprocity with symbols, not actions.”
Bingo!
Symbols, signals, and rules are the key to scaling reciprocity and, by proxy, one of the keys to making large communities and tribes work. If I read advice coming from a community of firefighters, I may well trust that advice, even if I do not know anyone in that community, because in my mind I equate being a firefighter, and all the symbols that go with it, with a strong sense of duty and trust.
There are symbols and rules that are very strong; race, religion, and language come to mind. But there are others that are much more artificial—think of people who have a shared experience based on attending one of the Burning Man events, people who enjoy the riding lifestyle by riding a Harley, or the importance of uniforms in conveying a common belief or shared sense of duty.
Scaling reciprocity, however, is not enough to explain the existence of the large-scale communities that we find in modern business. In order to understand the other side of the equation, we need to take a walk through Robin Dunbar’s neighborhood.
Dunbar, a British anthropologist, first suggested that people can maintain a stable social relationship with only about 150 people.8 That number is related to our ability to remember people and their relationships with one another, so that, among other things, we can keep track of those who are truly reciprocal and those who are free-loaders. While inferring this number from data on other primates, Dunbar did verify that 150 is in fact the number of people you would find in ancient farming villages, ancient tribes, and Roman army units. Modern tribes and communities scale beyond that magical number of 150 not only because people use symbols, signs, and rules as proxies to scale their capability for reciprocity, but also because we have developed strong social and cultural norms for right and wrong. So the key to scaling communities is symbols, signs, rules, and culture.
If you are building business communities, not only do you need to make sure that those communities are based on a shared passion or pain among their members, but you also need to think about symbols, signs, or rules that you can leverage to make the bonds deeper—and you need to constantly monitor the community culture to ensure that it is one that fosters trust and cooperation.
And when you do leverage symbols and rules, make sure that they have a shared meaning and are top of mind among the people you want to engage with. Sometimes there are multiple symbols associated with the same category, as in New York firefighters—are they firefighters first, or are they New Yorkers first? Sometimes symbols have multiple meanings; for example, Harley may be associated with the love of a riding lifestyle for most owners, but may also be associated with a gang lifestyle for others. If some people feel that they are New Yorkers first and firefighters second, then you have to have a separate area for New York firefighters in your firefighter community. If a majority of people associated Harley with a gang lifestyle, then hosting a community centered around Harley would not be in the company’s best interest.
Because of their strong shared sense of duty, firefighters and police officers have always liked to hang out with one another. It was not until the advent of the Internet and social media that they could do that on a large scale. Today, PoliceLink (http://policelink.monster.com), an affinity-based community hosted by Affinity Labs, a division of Monster.com, has more than 1 million members. FireLink (http://firelink.monster.com), run by the same company, has an estimated 250,000 firefighters as of this writing. Of course, affinity groups would not grow to this level without technology, but they also would not be able to do so with technology only—they need symbols, signs, rules, and culture in order to scale. In both the PoliceLink and the FireLink communities, the symbology of the uniform is very strong.
Technology allows affinity groups to scale, and the larger an affinity group becomes, the more powerful it is. If there are only 20 members getting together to talk about a shared passion, they have a group. In fact, that was the original definition of affinity groups: small groups of activists (usually between 3 and 20) who worked together on a direct action.9 Groups can be powerful, of course, especially when they federate with other similar groups, but they have limited reach. When you get tens or hundreds of thousands of members that rally around the same affinity, however, you get a movement. And as most people will agree, it is hard to stop movements.
As we saw in Chapter 1, in the beginning, all commerce was social. As organizations grew, however, the social aspect slowly disappeared from the scene, and some companies developed terrible habits. One example is the way companies started abusing communications, which led to the current communications breakdown between organizations and their customers and prospects.
To understand what went wrong, we need to turn to the reciprocity reflex once again, as communications is in fact a reciprocal process. Thomas Gilovich, in his book10 How We Know What Isn’t So, best describes it when he says:
Because communication or conversation is a reciprocal process, it is not surprising that many of the needs and goals of the speaker and listener are complementary. This is well illustrated by one of the most basic goals of communication, to ensure that the act of communication is “justified.” For the speaker, this means, among other things, that his or her message should be worthy of the listener’s attention; for the listener, it means that the interaction must in some way be worthwhile. To satisfy this basic goal, it is necessary that certain preconditions be met. The message should be understandable (i.e., not assume too much knowledge on the part of the listener), and yet not be laden with too many needless details (i.e., not assume too little knowledge on the part of the listener).
Of course, that is what most companies do not seem to understand. For communications to truly work, they need to be reciprocal—there has to be value in them somewhere. Value in communication can come in the form of warnings (e.g., don’t use that product; it doesn’t really work), useful information (which in most cases is different from product specs), and, of course, entertainment (nothing beats a good story or a funny one). Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, this process was not always reciprocal, because companies did not need it to be that way. The only information you could get from some companies about their products and services came directly from them, and the only thing they wanted from you was your money. They did not care whether the communication was truly based on a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship—because they did not have to care.
So now that we have companies with really bad habits and a platform of participation called social media that allows people to engage with other people in conversations that are truly reciprocal, it is no wonder that two-thirds11 of all buying decisions are made based on information that does not come from the company selling the product or service. When people have a choice between a reciprocal conversation and a nonreciprocal one, they will tune out the one that is not. For instance, consider your level of interest in someone who babbles about himself at a cocktail reception.
As we saw in Chapter 1 and expanded on in this chapter, the Human 1.0 in the Web 2.0 world clearly has a lot in common with the Human 1.0 who roamed the earth thousands of years ago.
What that means for the world of business is that we have to understand the role of reciprocity in everything we do—from internal/external communications to new product development and customer support. Teaching leaders and workers by using the philosophy from The Godfather (you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours) may be a better solution than using Dale Carnegie or other classic business training courses.
Business executives need to stop thinking in terms of abstract business concepts and constantly evaluate what they do in the context of what makes people tick (in groups, not as individuals). They need to start asking some of these questions: Can I create a retellable story around what we do? Can I create symbols, rituals, or culture around our offerings? Can I create and mobilize tribes to help our cause? Can I leverage the power of every individual within my company to humanize our brand and create more passion around what we do?
In the next chapter, we will look at how the Human 1.0, along with Web 2.0 and new business practices, is affecting all areas of Hyper-Social organizations, and how the changes that are afoot are truly game-changing.