Marketing executives have traditionally been weaned on the use of information channels to reach customers and prospects. First we had print advertising, then radio, then TV, then e-mail and the Web, and now social media. It’s important to make a distinction here, though. At the risk of sounding repetitive, let us again reiterate: social media is not a channel, it’s the platform that allows the Human 1.0 social instinct to scale.
Unfortunately, some marketers are in fact using social media as a channel—rehashing old press releases to tweet or to send to bloggers, and putting old customer testimonials or, worse, speeches by their own company executives on YouTube. Why is this happening? The answer: panic and a rush to fix what’s broken. Have you been hanging around a direct marketing department, an ad department, or a PR department lately? If you have, you may have noticed the severe mood swings that have been hitting those groups in the past few years. What they used to do is no longer working.
What we’re witnessing today is nothing less than a tectonic shift that is making the use of channels—any channels—to interrupt and intercept customers and prospects obsolete. Let’s go now to a couple of parties so that we can make this point clear.
In the old channel days, you used to go to parties where nobody knew one another. When nobody knows one another, it’s easy to start a conversation or interrupt an existing one to start a new one. OK, so now flash forward a few decades. The parties that you go to now have strong social cliques. When there are strong social cliques, you can stand in the presence of a group that is having a conversation for minutes (or hours in some cities) without being noticed or having anyone acknowledge your existence. That is exactly what Hyper-Sociality has done to the ability to have conversations with your target audiences. In the past, your customers and prospects had no way of communicating (in a scalable way) with one another, or to form tribes. Thus, it was easy for you to use channels of communication to interrupt people and bombard them with information and messages. Now they have found one another, and they are socializing around powerful networks and tribes. Combine that with the fact that most people no longer trust information that comes from the company, and you can stand there at the party all day, waving your arms, only to find out that not one person will acknowledge your existence.
In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the fundamental differences between channels and networks and how they require different approaches. We’ll also look at the differences between data and information, which typically flow through channels, and knowledge, which can flow only through trusted networks, and what that means for your corporate content strategy and your knowledge management strategy. Finally, we’ll explain, with some compelling case studies, how you can find and engage the networks that matter to your business. Sound like a good program? Let’s get started.
Channels are typically separate (and sometimes competing) ways of reaching customers or business partners with products, information, or messages. In the old days, information about the product traveled along with the product itself. When mass communication channels came into being, we could separate the two, and information about products and services started to travel alone. Increasingly, decisions to buy products and services were no longer made based on those products and services, but rather on the information about them. That was the beginning of advertising, direct marketing, and public relations.
With the number of channels proliferating—not only more TV channels and more print outlets, but also new channels such as e-mail, the Web, and more recently the mobile platform—it became easier to target specific people with messages, but at the same time it became much harder to get their attention. Take this passage from Martin Lindstrom’s book Buyology,1 which, we believe, illustrates that point beautifully:
By the time we reach the age of sixty-six, most of us will have seen approximately two million television commercials. Time-wise, that’s the equivalent of watching eight hours of ads seven days a week for six years straight. In 1965 a typical consumer had a 34 percent recall of those ads. In 1990, that figure had fallen to 8 percent. A 2007 ACNielsen phone survey of one thousand consumers found that the average person could name a mere 2.21 commercials of those they had ever seen, ever, period. Today, if I ask most people what companies sponsored their favorite TV shows—say, Lost or House or The Office—their faces go blank. They can’t remember a single one. I don’t blame them. Goldfish, I read once, have a working memory of approximately seven seconds—so every seven seconds, they start their lives all over again. Reminds me of the way I feel when I watch TV commercials.
Scary, isn’t it? The typical response of marketing executives to this conundrum is indicative of the push that many felt to come up with the next breakthrough in spreading awareness as the statistics turned unfavorable. Some went looking for new channels to continue to interrupt people—for example, by placing promotional messages on the interactive voice response systems that sometimes prohibit you from talking with a human being when you make a call. Others thought of putting promotional messages on conveyor belts at supermarket checkout counters.2 Still others, like Procter & Gamble (P&G), are trying to turn everyday social relationships into a channel by commercializing them. Through Vocalpoint, P&G mobilized an army of 600,000 moms to chat up its products and distribute coupons for them.3 The company makes sure that it recruits well-connected mothers, those who generally speak to 25 or 30 other moms during the day, instead of typical moms, who speak to an average of only 5 other moms a day. Prior to Vocalpoint, it set up Tremor, a similar program for teens to chat up teen products. In the case of Tremor, it recruited 225,000 teens who had social networks of 150 friends in their instant message buddy list, compared to a teen average of 25.4
One of the biggest issues with programs like these is that not all sponsors require “buzz agents” to disclose that they are being compensated for buzzing about the products. As a result, some people fear (and probably rightfully so) that such practices could result in “the commercialization of human relations” and the erosion of social trust.
There are myriad examples of companies that have tried to turn social media into traditional marketing communication channels. Think of those that are setting up company or product profiles on Facebook and measuring their success by the number of “friends” they have. Is that really success? In most cases, the only reason that people “befriend” brand fan pages is the couponing that takes place on these sites. So these companies are failing to leverage the Hyper-Social potential of social networks—they are merely using the age-old monetary bribes known as discounts. Doing so continues to destroy the market for the rest of us. Companies like Xerox, on the other hand, which uses its Facebook fan page to engage with alumni, are leveraging the Hyper-Social potential of social networks to their advantage.
Channels stop working when the customer is collaboratively involved in the delivery of the message. With the customer’s involvement, the message (and sometimes the very definition of the product and its value) changes as it is propagated through the network. Moreover, some customers will be more “important” than others because of their status or their location in the network, which could be more central, and thus better connected.
The message may also change in response to what the network feels the message is or should be, or simply because of the typical sharpening (emphasis)5 and leveling (deemphasis) that happens to messages when they travel through networks made up of Humans 1.0. (Think of the kids’ game Telephone.) Accordingly, the company might have to clarify the message, or the actual propagation might force a review of what the desired message was or should be. What’s the upshot of all of this uncertainty? One clear answer is that discrete business “channels” are an endangered species.
In a networked world, where your customers, potential customers, and detractors are all nodes that are equally visible to every other node, there is no opportunity for the company to control “the channel” as it might have done in the past. In a Hyper-Social environment, where you don’t know who will be participating in the conversation until the conversation actually begins, it is impossible to create separate pathways over which you can send a message to a retailer, a customer, or a business partner.
That being said, you need to be aware of the topology of the networks that exist within your tribes, as differences among them call for different approaches. In some cases, you will have very tightly connected members at the core of your network, with others at the fringes who are less connected; in other cases, you may have more evenly distributed networks; or you may even have networks that have ring networks inside of them. The characteristics of the tribal network will determine where you might want to position yourself within the network (if the tribe allows you to become part of it) and how to have your content travel through the network most effectively. In some cases you will want to target the members who are the most connected at the center of your network, and in other cases you will be better off if you target those who are loosely connected to them.
You should also understand the nature of the social bonds and leadership structures that exist within your Hyper-Social networks. If the leadership does not rotate on a periodic basis, or doesn’t allow newcomers to achieve status within a reasonable amount of time, that is a problem. The type of bonds that people have with one another is also an important characteristic. In certain environments, such as sites with product reviews, connectedness is not all that important, but status might be. In other environments, such as those where people are helping one another in the context of complex problem solving, connection is an important factor that will determine how knowledge flows within those communities. In all cases, you will need to gather network characteristics for active lurkers—the largest and potentially most influential participation group within your community. They are those who participate and share information with others, but do so using channels (phone, face-to-face, or e-mail) other than the public community forums.
Another fundamental difference between channels and networks lies in what flows through them. Data and information flow through channels, whereas networks allow knowledge to flow. As John Hagel said when we talked with him,6 “Unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily—as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships.”
Buyers and companies both have reasons why it is important to make this distinction.
Besides the fact that as potential buyers, most people don’t trust the nonreciprocal communications that companies want to have with them through fixed interruption-based channels, they also turn to their trusted networks because there they can gain actual knowledge about products and services—a commodity that is much more valuable than plain old data or information about them.
As for companies, they need to increase their external knowledge flows if they are to survive. When we spoke with John Hagel, he explained that he believes that in this era of intensifying competition, we need to shift from a knowledge stock mentality, where you aggressively protect and hoard proprietary knowledge, build scalable offerings around it, and then extract value from it for the longest possible time, to a knowledge flow mentality, where you realize that what you know today has rapidly diminishing value and where you refresh your knowledge stocks by participating in knowledge flows. So the key to success in this new economic reality is to move from a transactional world to a long-term trust-based world. Examples of taking on a knowledge flow approach include letting your key customers participate in product innovation and turning them into affiliates to allow them to help one another, as many tech companies do with their developer communities.
The complexity of many-to-many networked communication requires different management activities and an ability to cede some formerly corporate functions to the other people in the conversation. Corporate marketing, sales, public relations, and communications professionals have grown up in a world in which the channel was clearly defined, the product was immutable, and the flow of the channel was basically one-to-one or one-to-known. Developing a culture, management processes, and tools that permit the company to leverage these knowledge-based neo-networks instead of well-understood information-based channels is proving to be a formidable challenge for companies as they make the Hyper-Social shift.
But when companies do successfully leverage networks of users, potential users, and even detractors, wonderful things can happen. As SAP demonstrated with its Developer Network, a network of humans can often leapfrog over what would have been obstacles to more conventional, rigid “channels.” By simultaneously leveraging a network of developers, potential users, and consultants (all of whom would have been engaged only individually via different, discrete, and more expensive “channels” in the past), SAP was able to inexpensively and expertly kick-start the adoption of its new software.
Chances are that your company has already started putting the infrastructure in place that will allow you to find the networks that matter. “Emerging Best Practices: Social Media Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement,” a Beeline Labs research project7 sponsored by FedEx, found that many companies have started monitoring social media conversations on blogs, forums, social networks, and microblogging platforms. They do this mostly as extensions of existing functions, not as part of new functions, which presents a potential danger if you count on this form of monitoring to switch your corporate mindset from a channel mentality to a network mentality. The function that is most likely to initiate a social media monitoring and engagement program is corporate communications. Not only is this the most channel-centric group within your organization, but its communications are often tightly controlled by the legal department, which makes it less likely to become part of network conversations that lead to buying decisions.
In order to find the networks that matter to your business, you will first need to map the ecosystem of the network conversations that relate to your company. While you will typically find the strongest networks in communities or tribes, you may also find them within the audiences of influential bloggers, microbloggers, or social network connectors. As we saw in Chapter 5, you may even discover networks with no home and decide to host them yourself, the way Jeep, Fiskars, and Monster.com were able to build vibrant communities. Most social media monitoring tools will allow you to start the process of identifying where your networks of influence are. Some even come with powerful “netnographic” tools, which are especially useful for mostly text-based online environments.
Once you understand where your networks are, you need to develop knowledge about the people in those networks—who they are, what makes them tick, who their leaders are, how they would like (or dislike) to have you engage with them, and so on. At this stage, it may be useful to develop some personas (fictional characters that represent groups of customers)—not based on individual demographic traits, as they are often developed for Web usability or store user experience projects, but based on their tribal traits. Personas will also help you down the line when you need to involve others within the company as part of your content and knowledge management strategy as well as your network engagement strategy.
At the end of the day, you want to have a deep understanding of the networks that matter so that you can participate in them and benefit from all the knowledge flows that happen within those networks. To the extent possible, you will want to participate in those knowledge flows—you want knowledge from the external networks to flow back into your product innovation processes, and you want knowledge from your internal networks to be used when people make their buying decisions or when they need help.
In order for this knowledge flow to happen, you will need to humanize your company. While the term is often misused, what we mean is this: People want to interact with other people and not with organizations, so you have to have “actual humans” participate in those knowledge flows, not “company spokespeople.” For some companies, especially tech companies, that may come more naturally. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and EMC will allow most of their employees to engage in social media circles, with few dos and don’ts in their corporate policies regarding social media. The biggest “don’t” is usually “don’t embarrass us.” In general, they trust their human employees to do what’s right for the customer, and also for the company.
Many companies outside of the tech sector have very different policies. They may not have as many tech-savvy employees who feel comfortable tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking, and they may also have much stricter legal departments that want much more control over what employees are saying in the marketplace. If that is your case, then you will have to select a group of internal ambassadors and train them on the use of the tools, and also on legal compliance. We have seen very traditional companies become highly successful in doing that.
In almost every case, you will also need to train your people on how to develop content that will travel in those networks. As we saw earlier, McKinsey estimates that two-thirds of all buying decision–focused conversations do not involve anyone from the company. In a separate study, IDC estimated that only 20 percent of all content developed by the typical marketing department is actually being used by the typical sales organization. What we can extrapolate from this information is that the content developed by most marketing departments is used in less than 7 percent of all buying decisions. Surely, if more than $100 billion is collectively being spent on sales enablement tools, and if people are going to increasingly turn to their trusted networks of peers to gain knowledge from which to make buying decisions, some CMOs must be lying awake at night thinking about how to reinvent marketing content. To make one’s marketing content become part of the knowledge flows, it needs to become more findable, more retellable, more to the point, and clearly more mashable. Out are the corporate-laden white papers and press releases, and in are the short YouTube customer testimonials and the customer reviews.
When you are defining your engagement strategy, it is important that you not become just a sophisticated corporate response system for things that are being said about the company in social media. If you want true knowledge flows to happen among your internal and external networks, everything you do has to be based on reciprocity. That means that in some cases, you simply need to have some of your people be helpful to outsiders, even when being helpful does not involve recommending one of your products or white papers. If you base everything you do on reciprocity, which is what makes us human, value will flow back to your company in the form of ideas and profits. Dell, Best Buy, and EMC are examples of companies that have been successful in their efforts. They don’t just respond; they are generally helpful to others within their community.
Let’s close this chapter by looking at a company that truly made the transformation from a channel-based mentality to a network mentality—USA Today. Now, this is not just any company; this is a player from the publishing industry, the ultimate channel-centric industry. It made the transition successfully by embracing a community- or tribal-based approach to its Web site instead of a more channel-centric portal approach, which many other publishers used. When we spoke with Susan Lavington, the senior vice president of marketing at USA Today, she told us how the company’s mission, “Capture the National Conversation,” may have helped it to have the right mindset to make the transition from a news delivery site to a relationship-based environment—its subsequent ability to offer advertisers not just target audiences, but participation in network conversations that matter.8
The way the organization started was by having online sections on topics for which it knew there was an audience, but for which it could not have dedicated sections of the paper. One of the first online sections was a travel section on cruises. USA Today posted articles and allowed people to comment on them. Quickly it found out that people were leaving really thoughtful comments, and so it decided to turn this into a full-fledged community. As Susan said, “It’s been hugely successful not only with our readers, but with our advertisers. And we found we have this group of people that are cruise enthusiasts that really rely on USA Today to be their guide about all things cruising.”
USA Today constantly keeps looking for conversations that its marketing partners might have an interest in and for which it already has the tribes, and when it finds one, it creates a community around it. In some cases it has even found unexpected tribes, like video gamers who are into mixed martial arts.
Another area where USA Today is having success is to humanize its brand by putting the user at the center of all its efforts, rather than simply making the user the target of its content. As we saw in Chapter 6, doing so is one of the key ingredients in making communities work. It also realizes the value of reciprocity in communities by being generally helpful to its readers, even when that means pointing them to valuable but competing sources of information. Susan gave this example:
Gene Sloan, who’s the moderator of our cruise community, frequently points back out to what may be considered his competitors who are also covering the cruise industry. And, as a result, we’ve just found that the more you link out, the more you get back in and we’ve embraced that. Another great example is our pop culture community writer, Whitney Matheson. Again, she links out all the time to what other people are saying, what other people are covering and brings it into the conversation for her community and the more she does it, the more she grows.
In the end, USA Today doesn’t just deliver an audience to its advertisers, as many other publications do; it allows the audience to participate in those tribal network conversations that matter.
We hope that by now, you are thinking tribe and not market segment. As we saw in this chapter, not all tribes are created equal—it’s important to understand the networks that exist within those tribes. The way they look and operate will affect your strategy. Making the shift to a network view of the world is a hard one for most executives. In order to lead your team in the right direction, you will once again need to ask the right questions.
Is our Web site connected to the networks that matter? Would you send the content that comes out of your marketing departments to your own friends? Have you identified the types of networks that exist within your tribes? Do you understand how people achieve status in the networks, or how they become leaders? What sort of bonds exist in our tribal networks? Can we position ourselves within the networks? Do we understand why we are trying to influence which people? Are we trying to commercialize social ties? Are we thinking of social media as a channel? Do we participate in the external knowledge flows that are happening? Do we even understand what those knowledge flows are? Do we understand our internal networks and knowledge flows? Have we consciously tried to humanize our company so that we can become members in the networks and participate in their knowledge flows?