Community Instinct

As of today the TweetPR.com will be retiring. Bringing in a new decade will be a new blog at a new address – www.communityinstinct.com

So why the fresh start and the new handle?

Well, to be honest, TweetPR was too narrow.  Too Twitter focused and too PR focused.  I picked the name over two years ago when I was first getting into the social media scene.  I had just got on Twitter then and it fascinated me.  It still does but so does a lot more.  In fact, my biggest fascination is around the impending shift in how business organizes itself.  We are seeing the beginnings of a movement away from audience-centric thinking in marketing and towards community-centric.  The crazy part of it all though is that this “new” way of thinking is really the old way of thinking – before the boom of mass media.  And thus the new blog name – Community Instinct.  Indeed, all of us are social creatures and conversing, collaborating and connecting in communities should come natural to us – by instinct.

So it’s a journey back to our roots, back to the way it was, perhaps the way it always was – but we ignored it for a while.

TweetPR.com you were perfect for the recent journey – but now you get to rest.  Community Instinct has taken over for you.

See you all over at http://communityinstinct.com

December 31st, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 2 Comments

Community is a Mindset

Rachel Happe just wrote a great post Community is a Management Approach, not Just a Role.  It was partially based on some of the passionate discussion we had on the topic earlier in December when a bunch of us gottogether in Boston.  It’s something I’m very passionate about so I thought I would expand on the topic a bit further.  Please let me know what you think?

‘Community’ is a mindset that you either adopt or don’t when it comes to running a business.

Many successful businesses obviously understand and use the ‘customer’ mindset to drive everything they do.  The business, in that case, is focused solely on what the customer wants and needs and it drives the decision-making.  However, over the years this thinking has meant that everyone who’s not a customer gets a different approach.  Marketing has gradually moved their focus off of the ‘customer’ mindset and on to the ‘audience’ mindset.  And with the availability of mass media the approach of blasting one way messages to this ‘audience’ to try to convert them to ‘customers’ has been the predominant mode.  On the public relations side, we have the ‘media’ mindset and an approach to target them and so on.

In a non-interconnected world (or at least a manually connected one) all of these approaches seemed to work well enough.  But with the advent of social media the world began to change.  The ‘audience’ became aware of itself and everyone in it.  Customers became mixed in with the audience.  Media mixed with customers and the audience.  Everyone was conversing and learning from each other.  The walls came tumbling down.  Communities formed around subjects people were passionate about – including products, and including brands.

For me, this is the new world we live in.  Companies that continue to operate using the old mindsets are probably wondering why things just don’t seem to work like they used to.  It’s because they don’t.

And remember the new community principles where everyone communicates, learns, and shares with each other?  Well, companies need to adopt that approach as well.  This means living in the communities they serve, not visiting them when they want to or trying to buy their favor.  Companies need to adopt a ‘community’ mindset in how they approach everything they do.  It’s how the new world works and the old ways of doing things just don’t cut the mustard any longer.

What do you think?

December 18th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 3 Comments

Start-up culture and all that Jazz

I had an opportunity to explain start-up culture to a friend tonight.  And being one to never shy away from an analogy…

Joining a start-up is like joining a jazz trio for daily jam sessions.

(Image Credit – Fixed Image via Flickr)

So what’s a jazz jam session like?  I think of a bunch of deeply talented folks, each with their area of expertise, brought together in a room, playing off the energy of the community there and riffing off of each other.  They know their instruments well and often come to the table with years of jazz experience.  They improv and go with the flow.  The pace is snappy but confident.  There is potentially no rehearsal time.  Perfection is not the name of the game but instead, creating something cool together.  It’s about enjoying the time together and enjoying the imperfections that surface as signs of character.  I explain start-up culture like this because it’s often hard to convey to someone who’s not familiar with it.

If you come from a large enterprise culture then you might be more familiar with another musical style, more like a symphony orchestra.  Symphony orchestras are larger with many experts as well.  These experts practice and plan a lot because the idea of the symphony is playing in perfect sync, no mistakes, no improvising.  The beauty of a perfectly orchestrated symphony is simply music to our ears.  Symphony orchestras produce some amazing music, like jazz trios, but the processes to produce the music and the results are very, very different.

Let’s say you are joining a jazz trio (aka start-up) as a drummer or sax player.  The other jazz players generally don’t practice ahead for their nightly sessions.  They “be” the music and would look for the drummer to immediately pick up on this and just go with the flow.  Over the following week the new drummer would focus on fitting into the groove, the pace and the style of the existing players.  He or she may also start introducing new flavors of drumming to add their own feel and help the group grow in a new way.  Learning happens through doing and the doing starts day one because the group needs a drummer. If you were used to playing the drums in a symphony orchestra then this approach could completely throw you at first.

So imagine joining a symphony orchestra as the drum player instead.  You would practice lots in advance to get up to speed, perhaps getting recordings of the orchestra to play (plan out) on your own first.  You would also have lots of sheet music to go on for practicing.  Before you performed in front of the audience (community) you would invest a lot in planning/practice time, until you felt you met the requirements.

Both have require processes.  Both attract different types of musicians.  Some folks successfully cross over.  Some folks discover to their pleasure that they’ve been trapped in one style and when they try the other process/style they feel like they’ve truly come home.

So what type are you more aligned with?  Does the analogy work for you?

November 16th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 8 Comments

You can’t reach a kid on a CB Radio

Yeah, sounds silly that I would even say this doesn’t it?  But a million times a day older generations continue to try to communicate with younger generations on channels they feel comfortable with and wonder why they don’t get a response in a timely manner, if ever.  Let’s take a look at some recent channel shifts in the past couple of decades:

• Teletype messages to Fax messages
• Fax messages to email messages
• Phone messages (on paper) to Voicemail
• Email messages to IM
• IM to IM within Facebook or Gmail
• Phone calls to Cell Phone calls
• Cell phone calls to Text Messaging
• Text Messaging to Twitter
• Letters to Emails
• Emails to Status updates
• In person communications to Online communications
• In person friendships to Online friendships
• Real-time communications to non-real-time communications
• One week response time to Same Day response time
• Same Day response time to Instant Response Time
• Respond during work hours to respond 24-7

If you are part of the GenX generation like me think of your grandmother and look at this list.  Chances are most grandmothers are still writing letters, prefer in-person visits and get togethers and have somewhat embraced the phone for special occasions.  They are stuck in the 50’s-60’s and darn happy to stay there. Your parents would be the influencers to drive them to embrace new communications channels.  Chances are they are definitely not interested in any of the stuff you use or your kids use.

Look at your parents and this list.  Chances are they are they have a cell phone for safety reasons only, have email (finally), like weekly phone calls at least for news about your life, like to have visits once and awhile, and have a fax machine at home if they run a small business.  They are happy to be in the late 80’s to mid 90’s.  We were the ones who got them set up on a computer, email, and probably even Facebook (so they could see what’s up with the grandkids.)  We probably even got them a cell phone.  We drove their new channel adoption.

How about you and your spouse?  I’m sure you are starting to see the trend.  Each younger generation tries to get their previous generation to adopt some of the channels they use.  Extrapolate that to each generation away from you and the number of channels you have to communicate on diminishes.  And with each restriction on channels the younger generation spends less time communicating with the older generations.  And with this lack of communication the older generation gets frustrated and wonders why the younger generation “never calls or writes”.  Ah, you know the drill.

So what to do about it.  Well, I think the first thing is embracing this fact and getting it out in the open.  Landing on communications channels that work requires regular, you guessed it, communications but on channel selection.

I know that if I want to reach the kids I need to embrace texting and Facebook.  Forget the phone, voicemail, email, in-person communications, etc…  Yes, it’s possible to reach them on the older channels but if you want instant response and regular communications you better adopt it.  Think about it, don’t you wish you parents checked emails hourly?

At the same time it’s not just a one way street either where the older generations must adapt or whither.  The younger generations must explain the options available to reach them and leave in a few of the familiar ones.  And they should explain the priority and urgency settings on each one of those channels.  Send me a letter and give me no phone number or email in it communicate back to you on then don’t expect a reply any time soon.

And lastly the younger generation needs to explain that mixed channel communications is also preferred as a alternative.  Both generations can express themselves in the channel they feel comfortable in but they need to provide alternative channel options for replies and be cool getting responses that way.  Yeah, it’s not what either party wants but it keeps things at least moving and it’s better than no communications at all.

What other advice would you give for bridging the channel divide?

November 14th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 3 Comments

Becoming Brand Aware

Remember when you were a kid?  Remember how sounds seemed crisper, colors more vibrant, everything seemed new?  We were like a sponge, absorbing everything around us.  We had no missions and visions, goals and objectives, strategies and tactics.  We just were.  We were without “ego”.  So this got me thinking….

At the risk of getting all philosophical I wanted to take crack at why the discussion of social media and it’s adoption within companies is far beyond that of what most think.  I am often asked to speak on aspects of social media that approach social media more from the existing, predominant way of thinking about brand. I believe that social media is as much a new communications technology and two-way medium as it is a lightning rod for a massive shift in corporate culture.

I just finished a fascinating book by Eckhart Tolle that certainly made me stop and think about life.  I think many of the principles he touched on can be adapted to explain the transformative nature that social media possesses in today’s corporate world.  Heck, the line between work and life has been completely erased for many of us so why not apply some life thinking to the corporate world.

• Is how we think of Brand defined properly in context of social media and community?
• Has the definition become clouded, so much so that it has taken the majority of companies off on a path that perhaps no longer makes sense?
• What if we exploded the definition of Brand into multiple pieces and explored the meaning of each in a new context – with social media thrown into the mix?
• We are all certainly familiar with the term Brand Personality so what if we treated Brand as, well, a person and explored its essence as such?

So let me throw down a few definitions I’m playing with.  Will they make sense and can you think of others?  Let’s see.  Ok, here let’s kick it off with the lightning rod itself – social media:

Social Media – A new medium that interconnects the community in a powerful new way.  The interconnection abilities of this medium are so powerful that the strength of the Community has finally become stronger, in many cases, than many Brand Egos.  Corporate Bodies in touch with their Brand Soul are tapping into the Community by embracing Social Media.  By being connected to Community and Listening through the Social Media connection they are rediscovering who they really are – their Brand Soul, not their Brand Ego.  Sometimes this is quite the revelation.

The Brand Soul – This is the true essence of Brand.  Its interconnected through relationships with the Community and thus lives inside the Corporate Body as much as the Community.  Members of the Community are attracted or repelled by what they sense from the Brand Soul.  The Brand Ego thinks it can mask the Brand Soul and control what the Community (or what the Brand Soul prefers to call it – The Target Market) senses.  While this can work for a short time the Community is interconnected and eventually sees through this.

The Brand Ego – This is the mind of the Corporate Body.  In most companies the Brand Ego overshadows and dominates the Brand Soul, cluttering the essence of the Brand with lots of things it thinks up using strategies, plans, campaigns etc…  The Brand Ego thinks it controls the Brand and it can will what it thinks into existence.  The Brand Ego listens predominantly to itself for guidance because, after all, who would know more about the Brand than itself (or so it thinks).

The Corporate Body – often the Brand Ego thinks that the Corporate Body is indeed the brand because it is its physical representation.  Of course the Corporate Body is indeed just the body, not the brand.  The Corporate Body can cease to exist or completely change structurally but the Brand can live on embodied in the Community (this is of course determined by how interconnected the Brand was with the Community while it existed).

The Brand – The Brand is the id.  It is a mixture of the Brand Ego and the Brand Soul. The Brand always starts off as purely Brand Soul and very connected to the Community (even if the number of connections may be small at the time).  But as time goes on the Brand Ego develops inside the Corporate Body the Brand Ego tries to minimize the Brand Soul, often trying to think it right out of existence.  However some Corporate Bodies have come to realize this imbalance, often after connecting to the Community through Social Media, and have made changes to their Corporate Culture to attempt to become Brand Aware.

Corporate Culture – This is the approach to Business Life that all Corporate Bodies possess.  In most mature Corporate Bodies the Brand Ego has an iron grip on Corporate Culture.  The Brand Ego knows that Corporate Culture embodies many of the processes and belief systems of the Corporate Body and if it can maintain control of its destiny.  However, some Corporate Bodies have become Brand Aware and have begun to make changes to their Corporate Culture and to connect with the Community.  The step of becoming Brand Aware is the beginning of the end of Brand Ego.

Brand Aware – The dominance of Brand Ego thinking has shifted the definition of what being Brand Aware is.  Brand Egos talk about Brand Awareness instead and define it as the Target Market being aware that the Brand Ego exists.  Of course this feeds the ego of the Brand Ego especially when it compares itself with other Brand Egos.  However the true meaning of Brand Aware is when the Corporate Body is aware of Brand Soul’s existence and it’s interconnectedness with the Community. Corporate Bodies that are Brand Aware restructure their Corporate Cultures to focus on the Brand Soul and minimize and eventually eliminate the Brand Ego.

Ok, hopefully at this point you are starting to see the context of these definitions.  Anyone want to take a crack that the next definition?

The Community – How would you define Community in this context?

Can you think of any other definitions?

September 19th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 8 Comments

Do you feel like J.L. Gotrocks?

Ok, one of my favorite episodes of The Flintstones is where Fred fills in for look-alike and wealthy business tycoon, J.L. Gotrocks.  The episode has a famous scene where Fred is answering multiple phones frantically saying three lines – “Whose baby is that?”, “What’s your angle?” and “I’ll buy that.”  It was a classic scene that has been wonderously burned into my mind for more years than I care to state.

So why is that scene popping up in my head a lot more these days?  It’s certainly not because of “the answering of multiple phones” because I rarely use that device for communications.  What I am noticing these days is that my day is non-stop digital communications.  I probably send and receive close to 350+ emails, DM’s, tweets, FB emails, in a given day.  And I have a feeling that many of you are probably in the same boat.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the communication, networking, problem-solving, sharing, helping, brainstorming that it all brings.  It also brings the challenge of becoming all consuming in many ways.

I could look back on the early days of my career at the phone company when I used to go to “meetings” and spend an hour typing-printing-stuffing interoffice envelopes to send out a single message.  I remember 20 voicemails a day and actually having a phone on my desk that would ring.  Would I want to go back to that?  No way, but it often makes me wonder where we will be in 5 years extrapolating on the communication styles we have now.

Non-realtime communication messages do not stop when you sleep, go on vacation, attend a conference, or do one of those old fashion “meetings” – they just pool up behind the faucet waiting to spill out when you return.  I wonder where this will go.

• How will it scale when in many ways it doesn’t even scale now on an individual basis?
• What wonders will come along to change things yet again?
• Will we look back and laugh at this blog post in 5 years at the rediculously small number of 350+ as we brag about the 1000+ messages we consume and react to on a daily basis?

Do you feel like J.L. Gotrocks today?  What’s your plan for tomorrow?

July 17th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 9 Comments

Top 5 reasons online community building trumps old-skool-marketing

I don’t think I could ever go back to old-skool-marketing (OSM).  No dice.  So why would I say this?  Well, here are five reasons I can think of:

1) Relationships – Community building means connecting with people, be they customers, prospects, fans, advocates, partners, influencers, you name it.  Unlike OSM you don’t have a wall between you and the people you want to reach and you don’t lob messages over the wall and hope you hit a target.  You look people in the eye (or virtual eye) and you connect in a real way.  You create real friendships.

2) Visible Momentum – With the ability to monitor and measure social media you can literally see the momentum of your efforts building, with who and exactly why.  And here is the kicker (and I love this part) so does the community.  That’s right if you have momentum the community also can see it and it often helps them determine who they might like to work with.  Of course this can go the opposite way if you don’t have something remarkable to offer a community.  I saw an interesting saying once “advertising is the tax companies pay for not having a remarkable product.”  And the other cool part about this is that a community keeps itself in check on momentum, meaning if the momentum is manufactured and not based on reality then the community figures that out.

3) Heartbeat (constant feedback) – With social media you can actually listen to the heartbeat of a community.  You can hear what ticks, whether what you offer actually causes them to skip a beat and  whether there are issues or product blockages to investigate and better understand (sorry I got carried away on the heart analogies    Frankly, I’m addicted to listening to this heartbeat.  When I went on vacation during March Break I turned listening off and left it off for the few days after I returned.  I felt completely out of touch, flying blind, out of sync.  I don’t think I could ever go back to communicating with a community (aka – old skool language translation – “target market”) without the ability to hear the rhythm.

4)  Ambient Connections – I love how the use of so many social networking tools (my favorites being Twitter, Linkedin, various Ning Networks and Facebook, in that order) allow me say hello to people I should get to know in my community.  Twitter is the best for this because a simple “follow” is not a big commitment. What it does is it allows people to quickly check out who you are, what you do and whether they’d be interested in learning more in an ambient way (as opposed to full-on formal introductions, meetings etc…)  A seed is simply planted.  Whether or not it grows depends on need, desire, common interests etc…

5) Maps and Pathways – Social networks have the ability to be mapped helping you can figure out who knows who.  With OSM, people are lumped together into segments based on demographics, pyschographics etc…  They are grouped based on characteristics.  Unfortunately this type of thinking ignores the amazing power of social systems.  Messages and ideas travel in pathways naturally based on who people know and what interests they share.  And while that might mean two people who get classified in the same “segment” may talk to each other what of the conversations that happen regardless of segments.  With social media you can see these pathways and you can map out how an idea may travel.  And even more amazing is that you can track and measure the message to see if your assumptions were right.

So those are my top 5 reasons I love online community building over old-skool-marketing.  What are yours?

June 4th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 6 Comments

Marketers are farmers. Increasing yield is not just buying more land & spreading more seeds.

I’ve often wondered why marketing the social media way just feels so natural.  Maybe its rooted (sorry, no pun intended) in my growing up on a farm in New Brunswick.  Maybe it’s the garden I used to grow each year as a kid for a vegetable competition in the county fair in the Fall.  Or maybe it was the 10000 onions I grew, weeded, watered, harvested and sold as a 13 year old to make enough money to buy my C-64 (ah this is taking me back.)  Whatever it was, as a marketer I see myself as a farmer.

(photo credit – Cindy’s World - via flickr)

If you’ve ever planted and tended to a garden or crops you know that it’s a heck of a lot more than just planting the seeds in the spring and harvesting in the fall.  Yes, that’s the general idea but there is a lot more to it going on in between those two points.

Next week I’m presenting on a panel at eMetrics in Toronto.  The topic is social media and measuring from awareness to action (seeds to harvest). This analogy popped into my head when considering the approaches to many traditional marketing campaigns.  In general, increasing yield (actions) for traditional marketing can mean throwing more money at a campaign through more media buys (buying more land) and spreading the message wider (planting more seeds.)  More often than not it does result in improved results (increased harvests) but at what cost?  Is this really the most efficient way to grow business (crops)?  Is this approach really going to fly especially in today’s economic climate?

When approaching marketing from a social media centric view I see marketers considering of other ways to increase yield.  With a farmer, he/she would listen to a number of metrics and react accordingly before planting, during the growing season and at harvest time.

• Is the soil in need of nutrients?
• Which plot of land has the best soil mix for the seeds to flourish?
• Should I rotate the crops so as not to overtax a plot of land with the same crop year after year?
• Is the season predicted to be wet or dry and how will that effect what I plant?
• What crop can give me the best ROI with the land I have and the time I have to give it?
• Are there weeds growing that are smothering the plants enough that I need to remove them?
• Are the plants being attacked by pests and should I spray?
• Is there an early frost predicted and should I harvest now or risk the plants being killed if I don’t?

To me the best farmers know how to listen to the signs before, during and after the growing season.  They are always in tune with Mother Nature (community) and make an effort care and feed for each and every plant (relationships).

Social media-grounded marketers do the same thing.  They listen to their community to assess needs and match that to what they have regarding resources to offer.  They plant seeds at the appropriate time and listen for signs as to how they are doing.  They provide care and feeding where appropriate and reacte to forces outside their control.  And they listen for the points of need when potential rewards are good for both the community and for their business, creating a win-win season.

And because they are “out in the field” in social media they have many metrics at hand to help them ascertain what to do next.  I’ve included some of these metrics in the draft of the presentation found here on Slideshare. Using this analogy, what are some of the metrics you would recommend?

March 27th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 12 Comments

Hats – a social media metric

Just back from SXSW and had a great time.  Met up with lots of friends and put real faces to the faces I already knew on Twitter and such.  During at least one of the discussions there the topic of social media metrics came up.  It’s a hot topic, especially with the folks with a traditional media background.  Many are used to standardized measures like click-throughs, eyeballs, GRPs and it’s occasionally said that social media doesn’t have metrics because it doesn’t have any standardized ones.  For me that’s completely the wrong conclusion to draw.  Social media has lots of different ways to measure success – and frankly that’s big advantage in my books.  It really depends on what you are doing in order to determine the measurement technique.

Take for instance my favorite event of SXSW this year – All hat, no cattle – organized by @richardatdell, the Dell gang, and @armano.  Yes, you could look at the ton of #allhat buzz on Twitter.  You could look at the real world attendance numbers and the smiles on the faces of those attending – and the compliments after.  But you could also look at the number of people now wearing hats with their avatars on Twitter (@shashib, @conniereece, @catchuplady, @jennfowler, @mackcollier, @geoffliving, @jasonfalls plus myself included – @davidalston. NOTE: I also see that @markdrosos has a hat now too.)

Update #1: Adding more that I missed…

Update #2: More folks I missed (you can see this success metric gets better and better)

I have to thank Geoff Livingston for pointing this out this obvious metric to me.

And it’s true.  Take a look at the hat’s being worn by a number of the folks who attended the event.  Richard Binhammer and David Armano were the original hat guys but the number has grown – and the stories behind why each one is wearing a hat as well.  That’s a pretty cool metric for success IMHO.

Did I miss anyone?

March 20th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 6 Comments

Slumdog Millionaire is a wonderful movie – but it could be a movement

I saw Slumdog Millionaire last night at the theatre and I loved it.  Not many movies move me but it did and I couldn’t wait to tweet praises for it.  And I did.

I had left the theatre with a new appreciation for the conditions people are living in in India – appalling conditions – in the slums of Mumbai.  I felt like I had taken part in an experience that, maybe if enough people saw it, something could change in the world. I wanted everyone to go see it.

Then I got a tweet from Mathew Ingram and it changed my whole mood. 

The BBC story told of how some of the child actors were paid small amounts of money and were still living in the slums that the movie was shot in.  Say what?  The movie had brought in over $140 million and while some funds had been set up in a trust for the kids when they turned 18, they were probably going to be stuck in extreme poverty until that point. 

Yes, film producers make movies to make money. Thankfully for them they did an amazing job and thus people are flocking to see it at the theatres.  But they know they’ve create a powerful message that’s being carried by the film.  This message is touching audiences in a way that makes them want change.  It’s a similar feeling that fueled the Obama campaign.  That campaign became a movement and we all know how this wonderful story ended. 

Slumdog Millionaire has opened up a new story line and, in reality, that story doesn’t have a great ending.  This movie has a chance to become a moment.  Wouldn’t more people see a movie that promises 10% to a fund that promises to help change the situation in this slum to start with, others after.   And that doesn’t mean just throwing money at the situation but finding resources to work with the inhabitants, to teach, to provide opportunities, to find ways to break the cycle they are stuck in. 

So the question is, with the odds in Slumdog’s favor for an Oscar win, what do you think we’d all want to hear from the director during his acceptance speech?  He can inspire a movement, but will he?

February 21st, 2009 - Posted in social media, twitter, viral | | 3 Comments