The book is not about doomsday by a futurist, but rather about common sense by an insightful sociologist who calls a spade a spade, sees that tomorrow is today – and writes beautifully! When two-thirds of American rely on e-commerce to shop and 43% of all online consumers are social media fans or followers, it’s somewhat perilous to assume that tomorrow’s business will be what it was five years ago. The end of ”business as usual” is the realization that, at a time when consumers are connected, the layers of non-communication and disconnectedness that businesses have built around themselves are irreversibly estranging them from customers. So, “rewire the way you work to succeed in the consumer revolution!”

Earn your way into the trust zone of social customers… Referring to a study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, Brian reminds us that forty-seven percent of retailers entered social media “because of competitive pressure to do so.” Clearly, “businesses must now find comfort outside of their comfort zones,” and had better get used to this sooner rather than later… Social media is not an option pushed by a bunch of social media aficionados. It’s the mandatory business operating system for companies to “earn their way into the trust zone of social customers.” Even though “customer-centricity struggles to find a home within the operationalized business,” brands are pressured into performing their own cultural revolution, no matter what.

At the dawn of new performance metrics… While leaders have been able to get away with simply giving speeches about adaptive companies and change management for the last 40 years without actually doing anything tangible, new forms of metrics are now good BS detectors. What is your Groubal customer service index? There is the brand that companies meticulously design and what customers make of it. “Connected customers define the value and the equity of a brand within social networks.” Actual social capital will drive stock value far more efficiently than PR games… That’s what you read between the lines of this book.

The laws of engagement… The book is a collection of essays organized in chapters that complement Engage or Die. While Brian’s books always include a conceptual dimension with very interesting and relevant references (I loved Pierre Levy’s notion of “collective intelligence”), you can still read in any order you want. All entry points lead to the idea of a new business reality: businesses aren’t selling products as much as they are selling experiences through myriad social touch points. Engaging is the art of unlocking the value of these touch points.

The End of Business as Usual is as much of a must read as Engage or Die.

What I like about long flights is that they enable me to read an entire book in one shot. This is how I read The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from Vonavona ventures (an advisory and consulting practice), published earlier this year.

This excellent book focuses on how social media have the power “to make a difference.” In a way, that’s what all the books about social media are about. However, the special focus of The Dragonfly Effect is to emphasize the behavioral components that drive the actual impact of social media campaigns, and “make them stick,” to reuse the expression coined by Chip Heath, who wrote the foreword of the book. The dragonfly metaphor gives the authors the four wings of the model that governs the efficiency of a social campaign: Focus + GET (i.e. Grab Attention, Engage, Take Action): “A dragonfly travels with speed and directionality only when all for wings are moving in harmony,” the authors note. Each wing constitutes a chapter, and each chapter details the specific design principles for building up the emotional contagion process.

The book starts with the powerful story of two teams who ended up joining forces, Team Sameer and Team Vinay. Contrary to most social media stories, we are not in a fairyland here: Sameer Bhatia and Vinay Chakravarthy both lost their battle against leukemia in 2008. But both teams achieved phenomenal success by making an impact, not only by raising awareness about donating bone marrow, but also by getting tangible results – i.e. changing mindsets and doubling the number of South Asians registered with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP).

The initial condition of success in social medial is to have a focus; in other words, “to hatch a goal that will make an impact.” This focus is driven by five design principles: Humanistic, Actionable, Testable, Clarity, and Happiness. Yet, focus, however clear it may be, is not enough. How are you going to stand out in an “overcrowded, overmessaged, and noisy world?” This is when the art of “grabbing attention” comes in, with its own design principles: send out a message which is personal, unexpected, and visual, triggers a visceral reaction, and subsequently enables people to connect with your goal — engage. People will join your cause if you tell them a story in which they can believe, if you are authentic, address them when they can listen, and if, in turn, you respond to their engagement. Once this is done, you have all the basic prerequisites for people to feel empowered and take action. This is the sort of groundwork that gets 100,000 people to join your Save Darfur Facebook group. “Your goal is to inspire and enable your group to take action.” In short, “movements that begin online must be backed by real-life action; otherwise, there is no point.”

The book reads well (and is well-written), and again, has the merit emphasizing the social psychology side of leveraging social media both for the initiator and the followers of a social media movement. Multiple examples relevantly illustrate the point of the authors. We may take some exception, to a certain extent, with the use of the Obama campaign as a model. While it is true that the Obama social media campaign itself exemplifies the four wings of The Dragonfly Effect and showed efficiency in making people vote, it is also obvious that Obama failed to create an enduring movement capable of morphing into a lasting political groundswell supporting him as President. An additional chapter could have dealt with the art of stringing campaigns together with a more precise analysis of the complexity of the dialectical interactions between the online and the real worlds – a topic that I partially addressed in a preface I wrote for Seth Godin’s Tribes. While it is customary to emphasize the social media aspect of the Obama campaign, the actual efficiency of the campaign was founded upon a complementary relationship between the analog and digital worlds.  The physical side of the Obama tribe fizzled out, which, in turn, made his team overlook the necessity of coining an efficient social media message moving forward. No Social Web can affect change without a “ground crew” on Terra Firma and, as Dan Ariely mentions in this afterword, an understanding of the predictable irrationality “of what motivates the people behind the social network.”

Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side of the equation. Reaching out to customers today also entails going where customers are and interacting with them where they are: social networks. In other words, you must interact with people your company does not already know because they haven’t already necessarily filled out a form on your site, chosen to get squeezed into giving their email address, or expressed that they “like” you.

Invite socializers to stretch their neck: Build up a base of followers. But you may not want to do this by blasting messages only about your company to people who didn’t especially care about you in the first place. Also send meaningful information showing that you care about them and that you are not simply company-centric. People do notice useful data and interesting messengers. Then, they feel like stretching their neck a little bit. Each time you send a message that includes a link (whether it leads to your company’s site or not), associate an ObjectiveMarketer landing page. Here is how it works:

• You write your message using ObjectiveMarketer;
• You choose the landing page you want to associate to your messages.

For example, at TWTRCON in San Francisco the other day, I sent this tweet:

When people clicked on it, here is what they could see: The page of the TWTRCON site I was referring to and a reminder of me, as the messenger, at the top of the page – the landing page- where my two latest posts are automatically displayed.

Think of the benefits for a company or a company division!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing page is:

• A frame of whatever size you like that accompanies the messages that you send.  You can create different types of frames depending on your campaigns.
• A stage where you can add information under any form: a link to your site, a video, a chat box, an image, coupons, a shopping cart, you name it!
• A Website on-demand on the fly. The department where you work may offer promotions at a faster pace than what the corporate Web development team can implement. So just tell your story through a dynamic landing page!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing pages present the capabilities of traditional lead capture pages and can be indifferently reference or transactional landing pages depending on how you decide to design those frames. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Just look at the wide set of features and designs offered by Marketing Hits, a Web Design, SEO, and Online Marketing company created by Brian Yanish, that also offers custom Objective Marketer landing pages: “MarketingHits custom landing pages are designed to leverage social media ROI by providing top of the page brand recognition and click-through,” Brian says. “In today’s fast-paced Twitter and Facebook world,” he adds, “brands need new ways to connect web content to their brand. Landing pages provide a unique opportunity to drive visitors to a company’s website sales or content pages – of course without violating the rights and the revenues of the site that is framed by that landing page.”

Marketing Hits has designed the landing pages of multiple companies.

Here, the agent tweets about a post from inman news.

When the user clicks on the link, he/she sees inman news but also has the opportunity to know more about the agency’s hot listings in the videos placed on the landing page.

It’s a win-win situation. A tweet brings traffic both on the site that is tweeted about and that of the messenger, who can increase his/her own traffic by 30%, and often much more.

Note: Traffic generated by an ObjectiveMarketer landing page is controlled by the user of ObjectiveMarketer, never by ObjectiveMarketer as a vendor – which makes OM’s landing pages completely different from the advertising banners implemented by technology vendors in exchange for free usage of their products. Disclosure: I am a board member of ObjectiveMarketer.

Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.

Not all books are equally valuable, though. Count Facebook Marketing an hour a day by Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) and Mari Smith (@MariSmith) among the great ones. Unpretentious and practical, it takes you by the hand and shows you how Facebook can work for you, as an individual with a personal practice, or as a social “editor-in-chief” for your company. Even if you believe that you already “know” a lot, read this book as it’s quite possible that you might not yet be taking full advantage of what you “know.” 

The first chapter is one of the simplest and best written short history of Internet Marketing I have seen in a while; it summarizes how customer targeting is quickly evolving towards building up coherent sets of motivated and intention-driven social commerce addressees, and takes you to the second chapter on what Facebook is: a platform that brings people to real or virtual places or stores based on who they are, what they like, or what they are looking for. In other words,  people who have described themselves in their own terms.  Based on this understanding of the potential of Facebook as a sales and marketing platform, you are able to define your “social media product,” because “the social media presence is, in effect, an interactive online product.” Promoting or positioning this “product” requires a structured view of your social media project, so start with the beginning: Create a campaign. Facebook Marketing is one of the few books reminding you of this simple, yet critical concept of “campaign”: it’s what kicks off the entire work process and your operational plan.

Chapters 4 to 7 take you through a month-by-month (as well as week-by-week and day-by-day) planning and execution plan. This is yet another real plus of this book: the authors are hands-on practitioners sincerely willing to transfer their own experience and turn you into empowered, rather than dogmatic, professionals. Because measurable success will not come overnight. It’s the result of an iterative process composed of a collection of adjustments, experiments, and reassessments. “Remember,” the authors warn, “these projects involve a lot of trials and errors.” So, generally speaking, no matter how convinced you may be that you are cutting edge, always temper your own expectations, don’t over-promise, and measure impact and results like crazy.

The last three chapters offer a variety of tips and advice – from leveraging Facebook apps to picking up the right people and vendors – and invite you to remain on the look out. Facebook has quickly become a marketing power-kingdom. Continued learning will be part of your continued success. Incidentally, keep abreast with the authors’ sites and wisdom.

Note: The authors mention a few software products at the end of the book, including ObjectiveMarketer, a company for which I am a Board Member. The platform specifically focuses on the end-to-end management of social media campaigns- from the planning stage across a team to the distribution across multiple media channels, all the way to the analytics evaluating the effectiveness of messages.

“Perhaps the biggest mistakes committed by businesses, personalities, and brands in social media occur when people jump into social networks blindly without establishing guidelines, a plan of action, a sense of what people are seeking and how and why they communicated, an understanding of where people are congregating, a definition of what they represent and how they will personify the brand online, and the goals, objectives, and metrics associated with participation.” Albeit fairly late in the book, this sentence sums up the purpose of Brian Solis in Engage! One more book about Social Media, sure; but this one is one of the best written. It’s almost reassuring to read sentences that exceed 140 characters (or twenty words), and, while you can find all the trendy buzzwords and expressions on virtually every page, the author authentically tries to assist social media managers as they transition from the broadcasting age to the intricacies of a new form of netcasting architecture where both users and corporations exchange “social objects.” How well or efficiently can they do so? This book provides social media managers with the background knowledge and practical notions that they can leverage to design a consistent strategy. 

The first half of the book surveys the world of social media in general, describing all the aspects of social interactions and their impact on corporate marketing and communication, as well as customer service departments. Traditional marketing schemas have irreversibly imploded under the pressure of a crowd represented in a “conversation prism” that factors in behavioral guidelines implicitly or explicitly set by the multiple socialization channels. So marketers must listen. What can they do with so much information? “Instead of inhibiting the pace and breadth of information flow, we must channel relevant details and data,” a task that does not only require “attention” (nice reference to Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention), but also some understanding of applied social sciences or researchers’ and analysts’ categorizations (such as Charlene Li’s and Jeremiah Owyang’s Socialgraphics). Achieving a state of the art “unmarketing” to use a time-stamped word by Scott Stratten – i.e. rebuilding a marketing strategy from the bottom up – entails, for many companies, a serious reassessment of some entrenched marketing habits. Hence the resolutely didactic approach of the two parts of the book: “The New Reality of Marketing and Creating Customer Service” and “Forever Students of New Media.”

The second half of the book comprises four parts that detail the new responsibilities that come up with the potential of social media, and focuses more specifically on what a “new marketing” approach may look like. One of the most remarkable sections is related to “defining the rules of engagement.” It unambiguously shows to the skeptics that the social media revolution is not a passing phenomenon spurred on or controlled by influencers, but the reality of today’s computing, one of the incarnations of the social Web, and that it is set to transform every single company from the inside. The examples of IBM’s and Intel’s guide-lines (and its digital IQ Program) do not only demonstrate the forward-thinking intelligence of people like Bryan Rhoads or Ken Kaplan (also see my post about him earlier last year), but also the proactive approach of highly regarded companies as they define new roles and responsibilities to adapt to a new world. Digital intelligence is not simply the prerogative of a handful of gurus appointed to task forces or advisory boards, it will also be part of the job description of most employees in the close future if they want to be up to par with educated customers. The scope of the book stops here, but it’s clear that the social media revolution will lead to the reassessment of corporate cultures, employee empowerment methodologies, and linguistic and artistic skills. “Unmarketing” just like any vibrant “marketing” starts from within. Corporate stonewalling doesn’t have too much future.

End result: a serious book that gathers the Zeitgeist (and will bring many people up to speed with trends and idioms). Somewhat voluble, yet kindly extroverted and definitely useful if you want to create a social media plan.

 “Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter” – this statement referring a study published on Mashable intrigued me enough to write this article. This study was conducted by Weber Shandwick and presented a report on how well Fortune 100 companies use Twitter.  The stats led to conclude that a majority of these companies have yet to come up with a consistent methodology to leverage Twitter to its fullest. For example: Fortune 100 Twitter Accounts: 540; Fortune 100 companies on Twitter : 73; Followers:50% had less than 500; Activity / Frequency: 76% posted fewer than 500 tweets; Inactivity: 15% were placeholder / inactive accounts.

Twitter offers a clear opportunity for companies to convert their employees into evangelists. While this is true, there is huge amount of risk involved, if resources are not managed using systematic and coherent processes. This alone may explain why many companies still do not have an active Twitter account. 

To efficiently use Twitter, companies need a centralized platform that provides complete visibility and accountability into the performance, be it of individual resources, functions, or the strategies that have been adopted. At the same time, the platform must allow for easy collaboration, increased productivity and result-orientation in team settings. 

Twitter is a simple communication channel. And the strategies that making effective use of Twitter should be straightforward. Instead of jumping into execution, if companies adopt the simple framework of Plan -> Execute -> Learn -> Optimize, then not only can effectiveness be measured, but the knowledge gathered throughout the process can also be used for repeatable success. 

PLAN: Companies need to determine the purpose of being on Twitter, and define Campaigns that communicate this purpose to their followers.  There should be clear plan on:

1.     Campaign definitions;

2.     Start and end dates of a campaign;

3.     Goals and expected returns from each campaign.

If the purpose is to create brand awareness, a company can create campaigns to send out product updates, webinar announcements and industry news. A campaign should have a related goal that can be measured. In this example, for product updates campaigns, the goals could be to maximize exposure, which can be measured through retweet information. Or for a webinar announcement campaign, the goal could be to increase visits to the registration page, and this can be measured through click-through rates on the URLs that drive traffic to website.

Once, campaigns are identified and goals are set, a company is ready for an effective execution strategy.

EXECUTE: Companies should use solutions that allow them to execute strategies tied closely to the plan. Execution becomes focused and result-oriented, when there is a plan in place and goal in view.

A good execution strategy should allow for the creation of different variations of the messages that bring them close to their goals. For example, if the goal for a campaign is get more traffic to the website, then it is key to share your content with the URL to your website more frequently, and at times when there is more traffic.  Companies should use a solution that provides answers to the following questions before and after any execution:

1.     What channels to use?

2.     Should the message be tweaked for different channels?

3.     What is the right frequency of updates?

4.     Do day/time matter and differ depending on the channel?

5.     What is the right content?

Campaign-based execution should be flexible, and modifiable as there is new learning about the campaign.

LEARN: There are facts, and then there are insights. A good solution should not only provide good visibility into stats but, also actionable insights. For example, a solution should provide the following insights based of just the clicked-through data:

1.     Average click-through per post, for the campaign (so, you can compare two campaigns);

2.     Most and least popular posts in the campaign (so, you see why?);

3.     HeatMap of the best day and time of the day for a campaign (like, Monday 2-4 pm);

4.     Channel wise distribution, and demography information.

And, instead of returning a list when monitoring keywords about brand or a product, a good solution should provide the following insights:

1.     Who are the Influencers or Amplifiers?

2.     Who are the Promoters or Detractors?

3.     What is the Net Promoter Score?

4.     What is the context and sentiment?

Actionable insights are important as they allow for redefining the campaign goals, and also modify execution strategy.

OPTIMIZE:  The most important question that should get answered is “Is my twitter strategy working?” As a result of your campaigns, you may have received a large number of followers, or got significant exposure. But, you need to verify if these are relevant to your business. If they are, you have the winning strategy. If not, use the feedback to identify the gaps, tweak your campaigns and redefine your campaign goals.

With the right strategy and execution plan, companies can indeed brace themselves for a steady growth in their business via social media.  Companies should not be “Twueless”, a word that Guy Kawasaki coined in his take on the study, but rational (“objective”) using a simple strategy that works. And ask this question more often than not: “Is my company effectively using Twitter? “

Amita Paul

Amita is the founder/CEO of ObjectiveMarketer, which is an integrated platform with the above principles inherent in its design.  It is a centralized solution that allows enterprises to implement strategies via campaigns. The product features several innovative solutions for marketers to engage with their audience with elaborate landing pages, and polls integration with the tweets. The architecture of the product allows for multi-tenant participation, with the whole idea of “work less, work effective”. 

Amita can be contacted at info@objectivemarketer.com . To sign up for a 30 day free trial, visit http://objectivemarketer.com

Written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is for everybody, including folks who think that they have already achieved the status of being “trust agents,” and who believe they know all the ropes and tricks of the social media business. I say this from the start because a young entrepreneur was telling me that this book addresses people either looking for Trust Agents or hoping to become one. “Do you see yourself as a Trust Agent?” I asked. “Kind of,” he responded somewhat coquettishly, immediately mentioning that he had thousands of followers on Twitter for his company. He “had a reputation,” and he had “earned it.” As if any reputation were a “good” one by default (the internet version of “any publicity is good publicity”)! As if a “good” reputation at any given time entitled anybody or any company to be trusted in perpetuity. Madoff was a “Trust Agent” in his field, and remained so for a long time mainly because people are so scared at the idea of trusting people that they are even more scared at the idea of questioning the trust they have placed in them… All of this to say that this book addresses anybody: the perpetweeters who feel like inductees into the Web-pantheon — yet can be dismantled as easily as any statues – and, of course, those who wonder how to expand their influence.

The book is structured around the six main features of a Trust Agent:

1.     They make they own game. Nothing to do with ego packaging. They are the people who set new rules and provide a novel or interesting perspective on things.

2.     They are “one of us.” The expression “social media” maybe somewhat redundant, except that the Web can also be the playing ground of antisocial nerds and weirdos. Trust Agents are people we can relate to and care about others.

3.     They understand the principle of the lever – or the Archimedes effect (”Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the earth”) and empower others.

4.     They are marvel-ous connectors — they have the power of an “Agent Zero.” “No matter where they go, trust agents have a desire to connect good people together.” They are not mere networkers and are more like relationship facilitators.

5.     They are human artists. On the Web, we are deprived on 93 percent of all the human signals (38 percent vocal tones and 55 percent body movement), which exposes anybody to a number of blunders. They understand the subtle aesthetics and the etiquette of communication.

6.     They know how to “build an army.” You can’t do it alone. But how can you best convince thousands of ronin and lone rangers to join in and follow? The loyalty of people is first and foremost your loyalty, as a Trust Agent, to them. The Kmart incident (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/advertising-and-trust/) let the authors realize that “there are agreements, often implicit, between people and that these social contracts need to be clear and understood at all times.”

The chapter “Build an Army” ends with an interesting statement: “Most of the meat of the business isn’t in using these [social media] tools, but rather in how they are applied uniquely to your organization.” The how requires a new type of skill, and tellingly enough, the conclusion of the book starts with an interesting statement: “Business, it feels, is becoming an art,” the art of humanizing people that you may never see, and at looking at a random collection of people as real human beings emotionally connected by what the authors often call a “social contract.” Push marketers are doomed to belong to another age, and social media marketing, still kind of a sidekick in marketing organizations, will be the cornerstone of the next marketing age – one governed by a completely new understanding of the value of customer service. 

I like this book for many reasons. It’s pragmatic and offers actionable advice to individuals and business leaders. I like the underlying assumption of a good-natured, transparence-driven popular sovereignty of digital natives that trust agents must respect to remain trust agents – and not turn into a body of traders controlling the social media business. I was interested by the fact that it is written by two authors who end up complementing each other as they express the complexity of a social media scene, the strange confluence of behaviors that we have caught from living on the Internet for the last 15 years, playing computer and video games (from the first SimCity to MMO games), reading American comic-books while still breathing in the real world.

A little while ago, Julien Smith offered an interesting tweet: “if websites were people” with an image from http://imgur.com. Each individual may be all these personas at once — yes, building effective social marketing campaigns will require art and science.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com

http://www.inoveryourhead.net

http://imgur.com is an image sharer created by Alan Schaaf (www.alanschaaf.com), a computer science at Ohio University.

Part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign… While analog and digital tribes appeared independently at the same period, they converged about ten years ago, and are now increasingly hard to dissociate. Even though the expansion of digital tribes does not change the definition of what a tribe is, it certainly modifies the fabric of our social environment. When individuals seem to belong to one given urban tribe only, it is easier to categorize them. When they belong to several tribes, it is much harder. Which is the tribe or combination of tribes that best characterizes any given person? For example, what’s the best way to address that person as a voter?

Godin wrote before the election of Obama, and therefore only indicates that “in today’s world, Barack Obama can raise $50 million in twenty-eight days.”  In fact, Obama raised $500 million over his twenty-one month campaign. A record amount, for sure. How is it that Obama was so extraordinarily efficient, and that neither Hillary Clinton (during the Democrat primaries) nor John McCain (during the presidential campaign) could benefit from the Internet in similar proportions? Such a question is all the more worth asking as the Internet has long been an important tool for electoral campaigns: John McCain was the first candidate to raise $500,000 online in one day in 2000, and the 2004 Democrat candidate for the primaries, Howard Dean, already leveraged social networks – Meetup in particular. All these politicians being leaders in their own rights, we can’t simply assume that Internet miraculously served Obama: after all, Obama had to create his Internet presence for the 2008 elections, while Clinton and McCain already had one. To win a national election, Obama had a lot playing against him: his color, his age, his name, his short time as a senator, a limited influence within the Democrat apparatus, and his lack of funds. It is not because of the Internet in general that Obama was able to compensate for his shortcomings and shatter the political establishment, but because of the way he used Internet. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, ascribes the success of his candidate to the candidate himself, of course, but also and unambiguously, to the innovating management of three linked components: people, data, and technology.

The Obama campaign proved successful at building up the levers that Seth Godin speaks about — and taking advantage of them. Until 2006, the Internet was primarily a medium whose function was to inform and reach masses, with the assumption that the larger the net, the better. With Obama, it operated as a platform to target differentiated networks of fans, micro-movements of activists, very dissimilar tribes, but, in the end, as the means to interconnect them all around one message. This message, expressed through real-time pieces of information, has worked as a sort of communication protocol establishing a common language. The Internet users addressed by the Obama campaign were not only millions of eye-balls, but a myriad of small tribes within each of the 50 states in the United States, each tribe having the ability to identify one way or another with the Obama global tribe.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in April 2009, Plouffe provides details about his methodology. During the primaries, and contrary to what had been customary in both parties for decades (”organizations that destroy the status quo win,” Godin says), the Obama campaign focused on one single state, Iowa for almost a year, in order to establish a technology strategy and an organizational model that could be replicated in all the other States. They didn’t try to reach everybody simply because the Internet is a universal platform: “What we did differently,” Plouffe says, “was based on the belief that it would allow people to organize on their own and that they could move a message [...] As we spent the entire year on Iowa, in the rest of the country, our supporters were organizing on their own. By the time we placed staff in the other states in the fall of 2007, these states were already working because these states, these people were already doing it through MyBarackObama.com. We empowered them in a way”. In other words, the Obama campaign implemented the key principles described by Godin to create and orchestrate micro-movements: “Our online organization,” Plouffe continues, “became a home for people. We gave them the tools to succeed, and hundreds of thousands people were spending hours on our site.” Tools of all kinds, ranging from the technology to register voters to the ability to forward a message to your entire address book in order to instantly address any attack coming from adversaries.

This approach, Plouffe adds, “unleashed the imagination and talent of millions of Americans to help shape the outcome.” These millions of Americans made the Obama message their own. The Internet was not simply a means to broadcast a directive to everybody, but a message for people to translate into their own words on the field, which is quite different. As Godin writes: “What leaders do: they give people stories that they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and change.” The Obama campaign addressed people as they are in their real world with their ideals, their prejudice, and their personal way of expressing their beliefs:  “We have a crisis of trust out there,” Plouffe says. “People don’t accept information like they used to, from their media, from their government, from their businesses; what they trust is what their neighbors and family members have to say. They live the same kind of life. And we put a huge premium on this in our campaign. Nothing is more important that Gary talking to the six or seven people he might talk to on any given day.” In the end, the Internet was not so much a net to catch millions of fish at once, but rather what I called in a conversation with a group of entrepreneurs, a Local Impact Positioning System (LIPS), enabling people to tell the right story to the right public at the right time. In short, the Internet is the ideal tool to scale traditional grassroots marketing.

Neither the Internet nor the social networks changed the American electoral map by themselves: it’s the people who leveraged these tools to get heard. By establishing a complementary relationship between the analog and digital realms, a geocentric Web, Obama was able to attract younger voters as well as older ones in a different way. As reminded by David Plouffe, had Obama addressed the same pool of voters in the same way – those who had participated in the Bush-Kerry duel in 2004 – he would have won over McCain by only one percent. Which means that Obama might not have won at all. This one percent might not have even existed, because the opponent to McCain would have most likely been Hillary Clinton.

What’s important may not so much be that a tribe is always a tribe, whether analog or digital; what matters may be the type of cooperation that a leader establishes between his/her tribe in the physical world on the one hand, and the Internet representation of that tribe on the other. The Internet side of a tribe is its organizational architecture, allowing everybody to know what to do and enabling immediate communication at all times: the Internet enables a type of dynamic responsiveness simply impossible to imagine off-line. As a result, it can drastically change the impact of any given tribe. The physical side of the tribe is where people execute, which, in turn, enables corrections and adaptations on the organizational side. In the end, and well apart from the current Web numbering efforts that primarily serve marketing purposes, this geocentric Web (a Web with its feet on the ground) made the Obama tribe the fastest profitable start-up ever. In any case, it was the most efficient fund-raising apparatus since the beginning of the Internet and drew the largest number of fully engaged users in the shortest timeframe – a level of performance that could inspire the business model of many entrepreneurs.

The Web –  a world of differences… The Web connects people. That’s a truism, yet a complex one. The Web connects people who, at a given time, and showing a given facet of their identity, agree to connect to others. The Internet connects people who belong to a same tribe. As much as it is a participative architecture, the Web is equally a differentiating platform, a place where myriad of tribes of all types and sizes want to affirm their uniqueness. In 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the browser that popularized the World Wide Web, Mosaic, the Web had only 200 sites. Today, the fragments – the tessellae as specialists call them – that constitute the Web mosaic are also an infinite and changing mirror of the extraordinary social and human complexity, of a galaxy of tribes that each wants to have a say, sometimes at expense of others. So, how is it possible to fill the space between compatible (or loosely compatible) tribes, and eventually give some of them a common purpose? That’s when leaders are needed, leaders that able to not only lead one tribe, but able to coordinate multiple tribes at once.

The diversity and heterogeneity of digital tribes may not necessarily lead to a new War of the Worlds. The simple fact that each of us is well aware that as individuals we are also a collection of characteristics that we can express by joining distinct digital tribes may also be the best way for us to prepare to join a complex tribe in the real world, even when it does not reflect us entirely. After all, gays in San Francisco massively voted for a president who never claimed he was in favor of gay marriage; African-Americans massively voted for a man who didn’t have their history, and for many American Christians “Barack” ended up meaning “blessed” and “Hussein,” ”elegant.” Ultimately, the digital tribalism detour that enables people to speak their mind may reveal itself to be more efficient than any direct democracy at reflecting the American diversity and multiculturalism, eventually dispelling many preconceived ideas about the Unites States and accelerating history. Who would have been able to seriously predict that the United States would have a black President only forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King? “It seems that we rarely get to see leadership in action. We tend to notice it after the fact or after it’s gathered steam. That’s because it starts where we least expect it,” Seth Godin notes in a section that he titles “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information about Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

French version of the book: http://www.diateino.com/livres.php?livre=120

Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist without digital support — and generally speaking the definition of a postmodern tribe is pretty close to definitions provided by anthropologists and historians. A tribe is first and foremost a connected group on a mission championed by a chief/leader. Therefore, the best technologies in the world are downright irrelevant if there is no leadership, and proficient facilitators that can be leveraged by a leader. This is where the Internet becomes such a powerful factor: “There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn’t exist a generation ago.”

Meanwhile, it so happened that postmodern tribes in music, cities, and fashion (I myself explored the non-aligned looks of the late seventies/early eighties in one of my books of the history of fashion), emerged at the same time as digital tribes, even though there is no correlation between them. In the eighties, tribes are obviously part of the Zeitgeist, and since then, we have all witnessed the growing tie between analog and digital tribes.

Digital tribes have their own history. In the early eighties, efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real digital tribes appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two American students from Duke University (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis). Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, or you could favor the Apple route via AppleLink, for example. Then, in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroup. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks: Friendster and Meetup created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, Tribe.net, Hot or Not, Yafro in 2003, Facebook in 2004. Dozens of others appeared at the same time and more later, from Advogato to Zoo.gr, including Ning, imeem, Last.fm, Classmates, Flixster Twitter, Ning, Odnoklassniki, Orkut, YouKu, Tudou, ou 56.com, Tagged.com, Plaxo, Habbo, BlackPlanet, MyHeritage… the list is nearly infinite.

These days, there are digital tribes for every possible domain of interest, addressing virtually all the aspects of who we are personally and professionally. As Michel Serres said in his lecture at Stanford (May 20, 2009), “our identity is the fuzzy intersection of all the places we belong,” and it is by no means a homogeneous reality – no more than we are an individual in the strict sense of the term, that is, an indivisible entity. Our “identity” is distributed across multiple environments, defined by multiple factors and scattered across multiple activities. The Latin word tribuere (of which the word “tribe” is derived) means to divide, share, assign, allocate (and the Latin “tribe” is the arrangement of people into groups). In short, each of us, to paraphrase Michel Serres, is the fuzzy intersection of tribes. This, by itself, is not new; what is new, though, is that each of us is now able to easily express this multiplicity via the Internet — to choose to belong to several tribes either as leaders or as followers. While it is true that tribes, as well as the motivations that lead us to create or join them do exist outside the digital world, the digital world has allowed people to express themselves more easily and freely (with the added bonus of pseudonyms) and to strengthen connections with peers in real time. Today, the Internet amplifies tribalism in huge proportions.

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us came out at the end of last year, the book has been reviewed extensively, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can only recommend that you do. I recently translated it into French and wrote a foreword for it — of which I made the English adaptation (three posts). 

Published in French by Diateino (http://www.diateino.com). Available for pre-order. Hardcover – Sept 1, 2009; eBook available at http://izibook.eyrolles.com (July 22, 2008).

Seth Godin’s Tribes has been an Amazon.com best-seller in the Leadership et Business & Investing categories since it came out (October 2008). This is not surprising. The book is short, easy to read and, like all of Seth Godin’s books, both entertaining and educational. 

A book that wakes you up… The book sounds like a motivational speech meant to shake up anyone who “would like” to start something – anything, a restaurant, a musical group, a company, a new product line, whatever – but who doesn’t feel up to the task, either afraid to jump in or terrorized at the idea of failing. Seth Godin passionately urges you to rid yourself of your fears and get going. To stimulate rather than reassure you (you are not allowed to do nothing), Godin slays a number of preconceived ideas regarding what constitutes an ideal leader. You don’t have to be a stud, a social butterfly, or a fashion plate. You can speak softly, even be somewhat reserved, like Meghan McDonald, a Team Rock coach in New Rochelle, NY; you can have a big ego like Steve Jobs if your creativity offsets its negative side effects; you can be low in a company’s totem pole, like Jim Deligatti, the third-tier McDonald franchisee who invented the Big Mac. Anybody can become a leader.

Leaders have no common traits, except for these: a constructive rejection of the status quo, the drive that enables them to change things, and optimism that provides a platform for people eager to go their way – to follow them. Because you won’t be a leader alone: you need a tribe, i.e. “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” So, create your tribe – or find a tribe that needs you. Opportunities are endless. Godin gives a multitude of examples as he writes, often randomly, in unstructured sections that flow in and out of each other. His message, however, remains unwavering: to stimulate his reader’s desire to get out of the business-as-usual mentality — when you pretend for days on end that everything is fine and dandy, yet are bored to tears.

You can read this book in several ways. At its simplest level, it sounds like an eloquent marketer’s declaration of faith sparklingly presenting the facets of two trendy words, “tribe” and “leadership.” Yet do not discount the value of the book by thinking “that’s sheer marketing” … or revise your opinions about marketing. If you have mixed feelings about public speakers paid to deliver motivational lectures, a pep talk of sorts, remember that the world that surrounds us is full of depressed masses who don’t know where to start to break free from the doldrums. So why not boost them a bit? “ Yes, you can,” was Obama’s slogan, sure, but also the 1972 rallying slogan popularized by César Chávez et Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, a California farm workers union: “Sí, se puede”. After all, fervor is contagious before being pestilential! But there is more.

Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon… More than a trendy phenomenon that can be grabbed to provide a book with a catchy title, tribes are a societal reality, most patently epitomized today by the popularity of social networks everywhere in the world, and of course, in France. Last February, a study performed by comScore, Inc. “showed that 22 million French Internet users visited at least one social networking site in December 2008, reaching 64 percent of the total French Internet audience.” This is up 45 percent from the previous year – even though the social media reach is still lower in France than in the UK (79.8 %) or Spain (74.6 %). Of all the social networks, Facebook is now the most visited, followed by Skyrock, and then Copains d’Avant, MySpace, FlickR, Trombi, hi5, Netlog, MySpace, Viadeo, and Badoo… to name a few.

Skyrock is a somewhat special case. Although apparently toppled from the top spot by Facebook as a social network, Skyrock is still ahead of Overblog and Blogger as a blog platform, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also because of the time spent by those visitors (54 minutes in average versus 10 minutes and 7 minutes for Overblog and Blogger respectively). Worth mentioning also is Skyrock’s unique position in the history of social networks in France. Created in 1986 by Pierre Bellanger (one of the most notorious contributors to the “free radio” movement who started Radio Paris 80, an early symbol of the media tribalism), Skyrock embraced the various forms on Urban Music in the 1990’s, then followed its audience to the Internet, created a blog platform in 2002, and positioned itself as a social network in 2007. In fact, Skyrock exemplary evolution illustrates both the diversity and the continuity of the notion of tribes since the 1980’s — that is, when the use of the word  “tribe” spread massively outside the sphere of anthropologists. 

Why, though, did people revive a word – or maybe a metaphor – that evokes a social connection predating the industrial era? Because it symbolizes a type of emotional, social bond that is smothered by abstract political institutions and national and international economic organizations that frame our daily lives. It expresses a need that Michel Maffesoli analyzed in a landmark book in 1988, The Time of the Tribes, The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. At the time, Maffesoli described the emergence of what he called a “post-modern archaism,” showing how individuals were evolving from the position of being functional entities within contractual groups towards emotion-based communities, “affectual” tribes, where they could see themselves as persons with a meaningful, fundamental role. This trend was described by Maffesoli as a shift from a primarily mechanistic social order to a complex and predominantly organic structure, and was illustrated by a simple, yet forceful diagram:

What people are looking for is not participating in a democracy where they are asked to vote once in a while, but be part of an environment where they can have an active role as leaders or as followers, dynamically sharing goals and emotions with others.  As an alternative to an overly rationalized society, people are tempted to choose the empathic atmosphere of tribes.

            As Maffesoli noted in the very early 80’s, these micro-movements primarily started as urban tribes – and, since then, the notion has been discussed in a number of books, one of the most recent being Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (2003). While various factors have triggered the formation of these initial micro-movements, the influence of music has always been the most noteworthy. It’s no wonder, then, that Seth Godin mentions the Grateful Dead’s pioneering importance early in his book: “ Forty years ago, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead made some decisions that changed the music industry for ever. You might not be in the music business and you may never have been to a Dead concert, but the impact the Dead made affects almost every industry, including yours.” The Grateful Dead’s emblematic power encompasses multiple aspects. In the mid 60’s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. The Grateful Dead broke away from music styles for the masses supported by the media, but also from the cliquey structures of counter-cultural, underground, or bohemian circles – instead, they moved music into the street. Street parties and open-air park events enabled the Dead to connect with their fans as well as have their fans connect among themselves. They also removed the barriers between musical genres, and developed a composite style that associated psychedelic rock, progressive bluegrass, country, blues, classical music composition structures, traditional and electronic instrumentation, and improvisation. By the end of the 70’s, the Grateful Dead following had solidified as Deadheads, one of most loyal, yet most diverse, fan clubs that has ever existed on the musical scene. (Patrick Leahy, elected to the Senate at 34 in 1974, and the current Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was, and remains, a Deadhead!)

            The picture is clear: tribes, big and small, are among us. Twenty years ago, Maffesoli had to overcome the skepticism of a significant number of established European scholars when discussing the decline of individualism. He therefore burdened his analysis with rhetorical schemes that no longer sound relevant. Today, the collapse of ideologies and corporate organizations primarily worries those who are paid to maintain them, those who live off the status quo that Seth Godin slams throughout his book. The postmodern tribes that Godin addresses do not generate chaos; instead, they express creativity and entrepreneurial drive. His message is simple: stop getting hankered down with a factory mentality, waiting for a manager (who isn’t any more motivated than you are, but is merely following the motions) to give you orders. Stop wearing yourself away in a bureaucratic world where you are only meant to follow abstract instructions. Become a leader and win the support of others by creating your tribe, or find the leader capable of rekindling your enthusiasm. Be ready to turn into a “heretic” or to follow one, to initiate change, break rules, and question conventional wisdom. Outside companies, but also within. Tribal entrepreneurship is both a haven and a springboard for innovation, and grassroots initiatives do fuel change: “In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It takes too long and it lacks impact. The top isn’t the top anymore because the streets are where the action is.”

 However enthused he may be about the rejuvenating power of tribes, Godin still acknowledges the repressiveness of older tribes — tribes that have grown too big, become too bureaucratic, whose mission diluted over time. That’s what makes the difference, according to him, between the American Automobile Association (AAA), with its millions of members, and the much smaller National Rifle Association (NRA). The challenge for a tribe is to keep its focus, keep an active leadership capable of dynamically updating its purpose in a world that moves quickly –this differentiates the postmodern tribes that Godin describes from interest groups, feudalisms, cliques, and casts that mainly cater to maintaining their image or their statutory advantages. Yet, the latter are also tribes, like it or not. As true as it is that any tribe tries to foster a sense of brother/sisterhood, fraternity between tribes is a whole different story.

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign