Presentation showing early results of 2009 Tribalization of Business Study

1. 2009 TRIBALIZATION OF BUSINESS
STUDY
EARLY OBSERVATIONS
04/28/09

2. UPDATES FROM THE QUANTITATIVE SURVEY
SOME EARLY OBSERVATIONS FROM QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
COMMUNITIES WILL CHANGE ALL ASPECTS OF YOUR BUSINESS
ON THE MENU TODAY (MAYBE)
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3. 430 COMPANIES TOOK THE SURVEY SPONSORED BY BEELINE LABS,
DELOITTE AND THE SOCIETY FOR NEW COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH
AT HTTP://WWW.TRIBALIZATIONOFBUSINESS.COM
(52% EXTERNAL COMMUNITIES, 32 HYBRID, AND 12 INTERNAL)
UPDATES TO THE QUANTITATIVE SURVEY
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4. Companies are getting more focused
• Top 5 purposes for online communities
(number after purpose refers to 2008 rank)
1. Market insights/Research (1)
2. Idea generation (3)
3. Customer/client loyalty (6)
4. Amplifying word of mouth (2)
5. Market Thought Leadership (4)
• Up and coming purposes
– Customer support (32% vs. 25%)
– Public relations (32% vs. 25%)
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5. Business objectives for the community
• Top 5 business objectives
1. Generate more word of mouth (1)
2. Increase customer loyalty (2)
3. Increase product/brand awareness (4)
4. Bring outside ideas into the organization (3)
5. Improve customer support quality (NA)
• Reduction of cost as an objective is on the rise
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6. Objectives most successful in achieving
• Top 5
1. Generate word of mouth (1)
2. Increase customer loyalty (3)
3. Bring outside ideas into the organization (4)
4. Increase product/brand awareness (2)
5. Improve customer support quality (NA)
• Surprising how few companies focus on sales
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7. Objectives least successful in achieving
• Top 5
1. Unsure (1)
2. Increase sales (NA)
3. Bring ideas inside organization (4)
4. Reduce customer acquisition cost (3)
5. Reduce customer support cost (7)
• Surprise – most people do not know what they were not able to
achieve
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8. Top business measures to measure progress and success
• Top 5 business measures
1. Greater awareness (1)
2. Word of mouth (NA)
3. Improved brand perception (6)
4. Buzz in mainstream media and blogosphere (NA)
5. Increased sales (3)
• Number of new ideas fell from 40% to 20%, number of adopted ideas
stayed the same
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9. Web analytics to measure progress and success
• Top 5
1. Number of active users (2)
2. Number of visitors (1)
3. How often people post/comment (3)
4. Number of registered users (4)
5. Number of repeat visitors (5)
• Page views and time spent on the site, classic advertising metrics, no
longer in the top
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10. Biggest obstacles to making communities work
• Top 5 obstacles
– Getting people to engage and participate (1)
– Attracting people to the community (3)
– Getting people to keep coming back (4)
– Finding enough time to manage the community (2)
– Getting people to populate their profile (NA)
• 18% of companies are starting to capture data on lurkers
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11. Community features most contributing to success
• Top 5
1. Ability to connect with like-minded people (1)
2. Ability to help others (2)
3. Community focused around hot topic (3)
4. Facilitation and moderation (6)
5. Ability for members to develop reputation (5)
• Most communities (75%) now have offline activities (offline
activities, webcasts, meetups, conference, time based activities, etc.)
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12. Other findings from the quantitative survey
• Most communities are still managed by marketing
• Most communities are small and in pilot mode
• Most communities are less than 1 year old
• Most communities are managed by internal
employees
• 32% of all communities still have no full time
employees assigned to them, 33% have between
2-5 full time people, up from 13% in 2008
• 11% of external communities have an ambassador
program, 13% of internal communities have an
ambassador program
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13. MOST COMMUNITIES ARE STILL DOA
EARLY OBSERVATIONS FROM THE
QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS
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14. Early observations from qualitative interviews
• Many community projects are being held up by legal
– Liability issues
– Labor law issues
– Regulatory issues
• Many community initiatives are disconnected from the
business process they support
• Many communities are not being measured the same
way as the business process they are intended to
support
• Most community initiatives still start with a technology
assessment
• Successful companies are seeing a fragmentation of
where conversations can take place – and a breakdown
of the firewall
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15. SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT A NEW MEDIA CHANNEL, IT’S
ABOUT THE SOCIAL TAKING ROOT IN ALL ASPECTS OF BUSINESS
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
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16. Communities – human 1.0 more so than web 2.0
• Social computing tools are taking hold in business –
whether you like it or not
– They are the platform that allows the social to scale
• To understand the changes afoot, you are better off
understanding human 1.0 than web 2.0
– Reciprocity reflex that causes people to want to
help one another
– Social framework vs. market framework
• Personal incentives and their effect on the
pleasure part of the brain
• Social goals and their effect on the altruistic
part of the brain
– Our affinity for other people, not organizations and
companies
– The role of fairness in assessing situations
(early research show that social behavior does not change when it scales)
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So to the extent that we
can basically be human
with what we know, and
share it as freely as we
possibly can, I think we’ll
go a long way towards
gaining a higher or
stronger level of trust with
the consumers.
Barry Judge, CMO Best Buy
http://www.cmotwo.com

17. THOSE PILLARS CREATE THE DYNAMICS OF INCREASING
RETURNS WHICH HELP COMMUNITIES DELIVER GAME
CHANGING RESULTS
Understanding the driving forces of communities
• The more CONTENT you have the more
MEMBERS you will get.
• The more MEMBERS you have the more
CONTENT you will get.
• The better you match CONTENT and MEMBERS
to MEMBER PROFILES the more MEMBERS and
CONTENT you will get.
• The easier it is to do TRANSACTIONS the more
MEMBERS you will attract.
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“The number of people
who are willing to start
something is smaller,
much smaller, than the
number of people who
are willing to
contribute once
someone else starts
something.”
Here Comes Everybody,
Clay Shirky

18. Guiding principles for consumer communities
• Think tribe – not market segment
– We need to find groups of people who have
something in common based on their
behavior, not their market characteristics
• Think network – not channel
– The most important conversations in
communities happen in networks of people,
not between the company and the
community.
• Think customer-centricity – not company-
centricity
– The customer has to be at the center of
everything you do, not the company
• Think emergent messiness – not hierarchical fixed
processes
– People will want to see responses to their
suggestions, even if it does not fit your
community goals – FAST
No matter how big
your advertising
spending, small
groups of
consumers on a tiny
budget might hijack
the conversation…
Simon Clift, CMO
Unilever

19. Behavioral tribes vs. demographic segments
Scrapbooking
Mothers
Scrapbookers Mothers

20. 20
Think network – not channel

21. Customer-centricity VS. product-centricity
Two communities for small businesses: Do you want to talk about finance, marketing,
management or office products?

22. Oops
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23. 23
Embrace messiness

24. Most successful communities are movements
you could not shut them down…

25. Unfortunately, many communities are DOA

26. Fortunately, the reasons for failure are well understood
• Build it and they will come
– You need professional content, moderation, events,
activities
• Community becomes part of an organizational silo
– People who digress from your stated purpose feel
unheard
• Community goals are not well defined
– Without clear goals it is hard to know which levers to
push (i.e., you can get insights from 300 people, but
not significant WOM)
• The not invented here syndrome
• The wrong company culture – channel vs. network, market
segment vs. tribe, etc.

27. YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE HYPER-SOCIAL – IS YOUR BUSINESS?
COMMUNITIES IMPACT ALL AREAS OF YOUR
BUSINESS
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28. Marketing & Sales
• People will increasingly buy products and service
based on information that does not come from your
company
You need to think differently about content,
content distribution, the way you get people’s
attention and the way you sell to them
• Content needs to be “social-mediafied” – findable,
sharable, re-tellable, compelling and valuable
• Stop interrupt marketing – it’s a waste of money!
You need to earn people’s attention, you can no
longer buy it.
• Sales will be consultative and happening where
people are. Sales will finally become social
networking, what it should have been all along
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Big budgets may be
more of a hindrance
than a help for many
package-goods brands
coming up with ideas
that resonate with
consumers…
Simon Clift, CMO
Unilever

29. Customer support
• People want to help one another – what happens if
they no longer call your call center?
You need to become social and develop
customer service as a strategic part of your
business
• Leverage the power of reciprocity to increase
customer service quality and decrease cost
• Develop customer service as a revenue source –
complementing (or replacing) sales and marketing
• Community based customer service is not the same
as crowd-sourcing
• You need to become social to succeed
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30. Any questions?
Francois Gossieaux
Partner, Beeline Labs
e. francois@beelinelabs.com
w. http://www.beelinelabs.com
b. http://www.emergencemarketing.com
c. http://www.marketingtwo.net
p. http://www.cmotwo.com
Ed Moran
Director of New Product Innovation, Deloitte
e. emoran@deloitte.com
w. http://www.deloitte.com
2009 Tribalization Site
http://www.tribalizationofbusiness.com
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